Blind Muscat's Cellarbook

Free the Homies!

Blind Muscat hates it when he has so much paying work to do that he can’t get around to giving it away for free on his blog. Quel bummer.

But here’s a story worth ripping out of the wine world headlines: the fight to make sure home winemakers can deliver a bottle or two of their hard-won products to an off-premise (away from their garages) location and put them into competitions. Without, that is, running afoul of The Law.

Food and Wine Follies

Last night, I moderated a panel I had put together for the San Francisco Professional Food Society on the “Pleasures and Pitfalls of Food and Wine Pairing.” I’d been working on this for several months, trying to get my dream team panel in one place the same night, and so, on April Fool’s Day (a good date to take up such a topic), we descended on the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco.

Speakers included, alphabetically, Jon Bonné, editor of the SF Chronicle Wine section; Tim Hanni, one of the first American Masters of Wine and now a renegade who pokes well-researched fun at the wine education establishment; Dr. Hildegarde Heymann, the sensory analyst in the UC Davis Department of Viticulture and Enology and a leading researcher on this pairing business; and Burke Owens, formerly of COPIA and now doing marketing for Bonny Doon. The setting—Victor’s Palace on the 32^nd floor of the St. Francis, overlooking the city as night descended—was spectacular; the food and wine for the hands-on pairing part was excellent stuff; and the panel was in fine form.

Guns, Wine and Liability

Sunday I spent my afternoon at the annual Rhone Rangers tasting at Fort Mason in San Francisco. There was a lot of good wine (especially among the whites), the usual overdone wines (especially the Syrahs), and I had an OK time.

But it wasn’t the same—because I couldn’t pour my own wine this year.

The Perils of Pairing

What put me into rant mode was the cover of the current (October) issue of Food & Wine, but it could have been anything. The issue promises “7 easy rules for pairing, plus 67 wine-friendly recipes,” all under the page-wide banner, “wine made simple.”

Where do I start? What exactly is a “wine-friendly” recipe,” and how does it differ from a “normal” recipe, and are we to presume that previous issues have offered “wine-hostile” recipes? If you need to follow at least seven rules before putting wine and food in your mouth at the same sitting, how “simple” is this stuff, really? And for that matter, who decided that wine should be “simple”?

Wine: It Gets You Wrecked

Hard to think of any more appropriate way to christen this blog than by celebrating one of wine’s noblest yet least praised attributes: it gets you drunk. Or, depending on how well you regulate your self-medication, it can get you relaxed, tipsy, silly, carefree, invigorated, romantic, horny, philosophical, rapturous, or into any one of numerous other states. If it wasn’t for the alcohol, wine would just be grape juice; and how many newspapers have a grape juice columnist, or restaurants a grape juice list that comes with the menu?

Our ancestors discovered that wine could get you sideways before they discovered how to make it taste good. The first proto-wines, concocted when juice at the bottom of a vessel full of grapes caught some free-floating yeast and fermented, weren’t all that toothsome—but they packed a magical punch. Alcohol is what makes wine wine; it’s not an afterthought.

From the beginning of written commentary about wine a few thousand years back, its role as a doorway to the ecstatic has been a constant theme. These days, the intoxicant value of this intoxicating beverage only gets mentioned in low-life contexts, like hillbilly songs where the writers need something to rhyme with “shine” or “fine.” In the drawing room prose that dominates fine wine circles, wine is promoted as “convivial,” or as an “ice breaker,” or a “social lubricant,” or as something that “makes food more enjoyable.” All of which is true, but what all these euphemisms boil down to is that wine gets you buzzed.