All posts by Doug Frost

Doug Frost is a Kansas City author who is one of only four people in the world to have achieved the remarkable distinctions of Master Sommelier and Master of Wine. He has written three books: Uncorking Wine (1996), On Wine (2001), and the Far From Ordinary Spanish Wine Buying Guide in its third edition (2011); is the global wine and spirits consultant for United Airlines; and writes about wine and spirits for many publications, including the Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails (due in 2020). Frost is the director of the Jefferson Cup Invitational Wine Competition, the Mid-American Wine Competition, the host of the Emmy Award winning PBS-TV show FermentNation, and is a founding partner of Beverage Alcohol Resource, an educational and consulting company whose other partners include Dale DeGroff, Steve Olson, Paul Pacult and David Wondrich.
Hospitality

the last part of 2007

An unnamed Boston hotel: a long and sleepless night. It begins with a late arrival; I know that I have to get up early but though it’s nearly midnight, I could use a few minutes of ESPN.

But the TV controls are smarter than me. That sort of thing happens sometimes but this time I have little patience. I hammer on buttons in the manner that people talk louder when they think someone doesn’t understand English. No response.

So I call downstairs. “How do I get the TV to work?” I ask. “Have you read the instruction booklet”, says the voice at the other end. “No,” I explain, “I don’t really think I need to read a book to turn on a TV.” I can tell that the voice at the other end is thinking about saying, “well, how’s that working for you?” He doesn’t. Instead, it’s a loooooonnng sigh. “Do you need me to come upstairs and show you how?” he says. “I wasn’t really looking for that,” I respond, “I just need to know how to turn on the TV.”

Another long sigh. “”Is the TV power light on?”

“Yes, that part I got done.”

“Did you turn on the receiver?”

That slows me a down a bit, but I look and yes, I’ve got the receiver on. His voice is getting edgy. “You have to turn the receiver on first, before you turn on the TV.”

“Oh, that’s interesting,” I note, “ but I did that”. I really did, after about three previous tries.

Sigh. “I’ll be up in a minute.”

About ten minutes later Steve shows up. He looks at the TV, the receiver and the three different remotes helpfully included with my tiny Boston hotel room.

After about two minutes, he turns to me and points to the third receiver, “I told you to turn on the satellite remote. You didn’t turn it on.”

“You told me to turn that on…really…uh…okay.” It’s not really time to pick a fight, since ESPN is now within reach. I turn the channels; Steve leaves.

I’m ready to hop in bed, but I’m still in my suit. Undress. Unpack. Toothbrush. As I pull it out of the side pouch, it catches a tux stud, which bounces down the sink. Of course, there’s no trap. Just a piece of soap wedged down about three inches prevents it from disappearing altogether.

Fifteen minutes later, after I’ve grabbed everything I can find to grasp the stud before it drops into the dark waste, it’s gone. Crap.

Back to ESPN, which is focused upon a game I don’t care about and Chris You-know-who is twisting names into ham-fisted puns with all the dexterity of Arnold Schwarznegger in a tutu. Yeech. I turn off the TV and try to sleep.

About five minutes goes by when the smoke alarm over my bed begins whooping. Whoop. Whoop. Whoop. It’s not loud enough to bring the cops, but it’s loud. It’s like a stab every thirty seconds or so. I chuckle. Steve hates me apparently. So I call him again and I say, “uh, my smoke alarm is making loud noises.”

Sigh. Loooonnng sigh. “I’ll be right there.”

Of course, it stops whooping before he gets to my room.

“Hi, Steve!” I’m now trying to have some fun with this, at least for a second. He says nothing. Comes into my room, looks up, stares at the smoke alarm. “so it stopped.”

“Yeah, it stopped a couple of seconds ago.”

“Okay.” He leaves. You know what happens next. I turn out the lights, tuck into bed, it starts whooping. I cover my head with the extra pillow. That’s not working.

I call Steve. He shows up about five minutes later and now, strangely, it’s only whooping about every forty-five seconds. He comes in and looks at it. Then he turns to me, accusatory, and says, “Did you change the thermostat?”

“What…the thermostat? Yes.”

“That’s why, “he explains.

Now my sarcasm drips out of my mouth and pools onto the floor where it begins swirling like a flushed toilet. “Ohhhh, the thermostat.”

“Yes,” he explicates, “if you change the thermostat, the alarm will go off.”

“Okay, okay, you’re bullshitting me now.”

He’s visibly angry. “No, this detector will go off if the temperature goes up by more than five degrees.”

“You’re kidding me, right?” [Full disclosure: apparently Steve was not completely informed but close to correct. This was indeed a heat detector and it was only slightly malfunctioning in its response to a changed thermostat. But I gotta say, this was weird.]

“Well,” I argue, “ I can’t sleep like this. Either you put me in another room or let’s take the batteries out this damn thing.”

“Sir! That is extremely illegal in Boston!”

“Apparently, sleeping in your hotel room is illegal too.”

It stops whooping. Steve gives me a fifth grade teacher look (I had trouble that grade) and leaves.

I go back to bed. About five minutes goes by when it starts whooping again. I call Steve and ask if he’s had any luck finding another room. They’re sold out. Then move me to another hotel, I demand. He mumbles something and hangs up.

It’s like my own Gitmo Boston. At that moment, I leap up on the bed and yank the sonofabitch right out of the ceiling (it was bolted there) and pull the batteries out of it. It’s quiet.

I laid it down and thought of all the horror movies in which it would lie glowering until, in the dark, just as I drifted into sleep, it would begin chirping, only louder and faster, louder and faster, louder and faster, screeeeeeeccch!!

It’s 2:45 am. It’s finally quiet in my room. All I need to do now is get up in a few hours. The phone rings. It’s Steve. He’s found me another hotel. “No, I’m good.”

Wine

summer 2007

The rest of summer – I neglected to mention many, many tastings, but I can’t keep up. I just drink them and everyone thinks it’s a fabulous life, drinking all these great wines. But more and more, I feel like skipping the wine if I can’t sit quietly and enjoy it. Or if I can’t muse about it with friends.

There’s an all too constant creature in wine circles that opens famed wines, takes one sip and then proclaims it the greatest wine. And instead of talking about the wine, or the place or the person who made it or grew it, the conversation inevitably hinges on if you’ve had one that was either older and rarer, or more expensive. I’m bored.

Perhaps that’s the unkindest segue for an absurdly ambitious tasting that I enjoyed, courtesy of Mark and Lynne O’Connell. I’ll say from the outset that some of the loutish behavior I’ve complained about above was in display.

But the best part was just enjoying some rare wines with a bunch of people who like to taste rare (and hopefully great) wines. For some, these wines were reason enough to consider how Burgundy has changed since World War Two, and how many fraudulent bottles there are, and how some of those frauds might still be decent drinks.

The purpose of the tasting was to celebrate one of Mark and Lynne’s friend’s birthday. 1947 was the year. Pretty auspicious year to choose for your birthday. Dave Dunlap should thank his parents profusely. I was along to open and decant wines, but as a former server, I’d rather work than sit at the table with the grownups anyway.

Three Champagnes: 1947 Pommery, 1947 Louis Roederer and 1947 Dom Perignon. The Pommery had a remarkably fresh mouth, sweet green apple and lime juice with roasted almonds and some cherry notes a half hour later.

The Roederer was acting its age; both the nose and the mouth were tired though there was some nutty, aldehydic length. The Dom started with fresh cut flowers, oranges and butterscotch. We had cured, seared and smoked salmon and the Dom lost its edge with the food. But by itself, it was soft and creamy.

Then we launched into the Burgundies. A Seguin Manuel Charmes Chambertin 1947 that had been re-corked in the 80’s. Floral notes, roses, honey, rocks, red currants and 2 hours later, it still showed rocks and roses. Fascinating. Some in the group thought it tasted more like Grenache and Syrah than Pinot Noir. I don’t agree, though I’m not completely certain what we were drinking.

The next 1947 was Chandesais a Fontaines Clos Saint Denis – this had rich, youthful red fruits and a delicate end of earth and blueberry. Blinded, I would have called it a 1982, as soft delicate as it was. It seemed acid-adjusted and most thought it had a Rhone or southern French wine adjustment as well. I think it simply must have been refreshed.

Clos des Lambrays 1947 was showing its age, red currants and raspberries were quickly overwhelmed by dirt and earth. It had a very sweet end. “Over-chaptalized”, said one (and I can see why); “real terroir” said another, and that seems optimistic at best.

1947 Nuits St Georges les Porets St Georges from Faiveley (or was it Paul Ponel?) had plum and roast nuts, honey, earth, black walnuts, red currants and roses and a peppery finish.

DRC Grands Echezeaux 1947 was slightly overripe and gamey, showing caramel, nuts and was both delicate and drying out. The mouth finished with truffles and oranges, but it’s a short distance from truffles to, umm, ass.

1947 La Romanee was very earthy and yeasty (!), with vanilla, cherry, lots of velvety texture and some tannic chunkiness too. Long cherry – orange – pepper in the almost delicate and decidedly long finish. Hmm. And I thought La Romanee was supposed to be the stepchild among the Grands Crus.

There was a general grumbling in the room that the Burgundies hadn’t shown all we had hoped and that some adulteration had been in effect as well.

Mark determinedly set off for the cellar and gave me a 1947 Beaune Greves from Mathouillet to open. It’s good to have some extra 1947’s around, you know, in case your friends drop by and ask. The nose was exciting (though not everyone shared my excitement): crushed red fruits, delicacy, spiced nuts. This was soft, delicate, liqueur-like in a way that only old wine can be. I found this to be genuine and lovely. Forty-five minutes later, it still showed cooked currants and red cherries.

Then we saw some Nebbioli. Giacomo Conterno’s Barolo Riserva 1947 Monfortino had some heat and cooked strawberries, green tobacco, strawberry soda and cotton candy (sweet vanilla). The mouth was dry and clean with raisins, strawberries and earth (though cheese notes kept popping through) with old tea leaves at the finish.

Marchesi di Barolo 1947 Barolo Riserva della Castellana showed heat and caramel with cooked black cherry and plenty of overripe notes. The mouth is dusty and nutty with some dried strawberries, dirt clods and fresh asphalt. A walnut and orange note finished it later.

A few Sauternes (I would miss the Yquem, which was slated for the next day, along with a sinful group of Bordeaux), including 1947 Rayne Vigneau, Suduiraut and Coutet: the Rayne Vigneau showed intense botrytis in its crème brulee nose with cherry, orange, raisins and marzipan. The nose was wild and full of raisins; perhaps it was a bit short and warm but it had definitely retained freshness.

The Suduiraut was even more botrytised, with wildflower honey, honey-dipped nuts, dusty cherries and very sweet, high sugar middle, and a finish of lime leaf, more sugar and a brilliant filigree. The Coutet was corked. Is it the cynic in me that wonders if it was free of TCA until it was re-corked?

June 2007 – one of my summer ambitions is cleared off the checklist. I got in this morning to see Richard Serra’s fantastic show of gargantuan hulking iron beasts (Oh, I mean, sculptures) at the MOMA in New York. It may seem like I’m in New York ever other week but I wasn’t scheduled to return to New York until late September and Serra’s show closes September 10th (hope you made it).

Scupture? Yes, certainly, it’s that. But these are environments, more than sculptures, even the smallest of them could function as deconstructed or reconsidered living spaces.

BY now, you’ve probably seen the ribbon-like structures of these new Serra pieces in some magazine or other. The most likely response is to be overawed by the scale, the massive weight and ponderousness of the works

Heaven and earth, says the Voice’s Leslie Camhi, depicted as you enter the retrospective, with two massive plates. The family in front of me walk over the plate on the floor, in fact, the wife trips over it, and they all laugh as they only partly realize that was, uhm, some art…

“Guy art” she also calls it. There are a lot of gender issues in this guy’s work and that’s a large part of why this is a great show. But as she notes, a bit shocked, these sculptures are “rusting”. She’s right; they are. That’s part of why they’re beautiful; they have texture. They have time embedded in them.

Suddenly I’m humming the Art Brut song “Rusted Guns of Milan”. That song, if you don’t know it, is about impotence.

No such problem here, you say, with these massive, manly, powerful chunks of iron. Perhaps the gentleman protests too much, as Willy Shakespeare wrote.

But to view Serra as merely gender art would invite attack from many quarters, though every time a woman artists uses fabric or sewing, then term is applied without repercussions.

Still, the rest of the show, especially the older work, offers Serra at once physical and conceptual. Physical acts of sculpturing become the sculpture: rolling, folding, propping, bending, creasing, even falling. The big new works are big and even if they invite mockery for their museum-shattering egotism, they offer an endless array of responses to human issues: temporality, intimidation, destruction, power, impotence, insignificance, touch, fear and awe. Size, dammit, doesn’t matter. Much.

Good movie? Czech!

I love the Czech cinema of the 1960’s and 1970’s. But having said this, I admit that I had never seen one of the seminal movies that began the Czech Wave, The Shop on Main Street. It’s a brilliant film. The opening sequence is as powerful as Fellini’s 8½. A courtyard shot high above, from the perspective of a stork’s nest, with men in uniform dancing, rather marching, in a circle. Closer. They are soldiers, or at least wanna-be soldiers. Within seconds, the simple cutaways have established the town’s meek Jews half-hidden in doorways, and that they are watching, or more correctly, have always been watching, like the storks, part of the place. Of course the story that forms the spine of this unhappy comedy of sorts, is that they will soon no longer be watching. They will be gone.

With greed and ethnic covetousness motivating the scum, er, citizenry, the Jews are sold down the river, or at least the train tracks.

There is something that is Schweik-like to Toni Brtko, the buffoon/hero of the film. The film hasn’t aged a bit, unlike some of the films of the 70’s. Perhaps it’s forgotten now but the 60’s didn’t always suffer from a deficit of realism and a surfeit of idealism. And there’s nothing like the murder of Jews to shake the pretty hopes out of your head.

From the window of the shop on Main Street, you can hear the Jews called by family name. Name after name.

Even workaholics take vacation

For my week in Hawaii with my wife and brother and his wife, Germans were the theme. Lots of JJ, some Fritz and a bit of Hanno. I mean Zilliken. It’s ideal to be on a first name basis with the Germans, especially with the friendly ones.

We had a few other wines too, from other places.

Jardin de la Fruitiere 2004 Vin de Pays Loire Atlantique, whatever the hell that is (I thought it was Vin de Pays de Jardin de la France, which is far more evocative but, hmm, that must be where Jon-David Headrick, the man behind this and other even better wines, got the name.

Clean, showing its age in a good way. It has some depth in other words; it’s not all light and airy. The blend is Chardonnay (45%), Melon (45%), Folle Blanche (5%) and Sauvignon Gris (5%). At first all I see is the chunk of Chard noted on the label; I misread the 45% for 85%. And I am preparing to write, “despite the lack of all but a jot of Melon, it tastes more like Muscadet with extra weight. Green apple and lemon meat, other unripe fruits, unripe as in cool climate Chardonnay, while merely typical for Melon” when I spot the true percentages and, well, now you have some idea how it tastes.

We have one of those wonderful dinners at Pah Ke, the kind that owner/chef Raymond Siu can produce. The opening course is his best; I’ve had this dish before. We begin with martini glasses filled with a different kind of poke. Instead of the usual vinegary and sweet stuff, Raymond uses soy sauce and ginger, lime rind and other spices, with only mirin for sweetness. It’s completely unlike any other poke, but completely apt.

This first course is poke like no other. The marinade is dry, lime zest and diluted soy, a few ginger and garlic pieces and a sprinkle with fried udon noodles. Crisp, tangy, very clean and refreshing.

To finish he gives us each a Pire mango, a truly remarkable fruit; it turns to liquid in your mouth. It seems to contain both the absurd lush sweetness of tropical fruits and tart citrus.

As if to add insult to normal drinking habits, after I taste three unnamed Spanish reds, and a Vin de Pays Loire Atlantique or two (wherever the hell that is), I start to open a 1987 Zind Humbrecht Gewrz Turckheim when I realize that I have to head to the airport in a few hours, and I have a JJ Prum 2004 Wehlener Spatlese that probably needs drinking.

It does. Sobriety can wait. Sleep is my only ambition on the plane.

Wine

Albariño podcasts

Doug has been drinking Albariño in New York City and talking about it. Check out these video podcasts to see him under the influence.

X marks the spot - Where to Find Albariño Wines
X marks the spot – Where to Find Albariño Wines

Albariño - Exceptional with Everything or Nothing
Albariño – Exceptional with Everything or Nothing
Albariño - Follow That Grape from Spain to the States
Albariño – Follow That Grape from Spain to the States
Wine

Que Syrah or Shiraz, which is it?

It seems to pretty much depend upon who you are or what your marketing team prefers. If, for instance, you are Daryl Groom and Mick Schroeter at Geyser Peak, the fact that you’re Australian seems to demand that your winery will call the grape Shiraz. The Aussies have been calling the Syrah grape “Shiraz” for well over a century, naming it after the town from which the grape ostensibly originated.

I’ve actually been to the town of Shiraz in south central Iran; not a lot of winemaking going on there now. In fact, no winemaking at all. But I digress. Historians are now of the opinion that the grape did not originate in Iran at all, more likely it was France. But some insecure Frenchman (or perhaps the Romans, since they seemed to have propagated the grape) started the Iranian rumor centuries ago and it’s stuck.

While there are a kazillion Aussie Shiraz wines in the marketplace, some Aussie labels have used the “Syrah” on occasion, in an attempt to differentiate their wine from their brethren. That’s even more common in the U.S., where producers have been known to bottle one wine as Shiraz (read less expensive) and another as Syrah (more expensive).

Conversely, a few French-owned wine companies sell Shiraz made in Australia from Aussie grapes. These are not French wines; French laws require that producers adhere to the use of the French name for the grape, Syrah. But the name says far less about the style of the wine than it ought to. Instead, we have to dig a bit deeper to uncover that important issue.

One clue is to see if the bottle describes the origin of the oak used to mature the wine. If it’s American oak, it’s more likely the wine came from a warm climate and is the warm, peppery and gooey version made famous as Aussie Shiraz. If the oak in use is French oak, the producer might likely be using grapes from a cooler site.

American oak tends to overshadow cooler climate Syrah aromas, so most prefer it for their warm climate wines. Cool climate Syrah, with French instead of American oak, is likely to show more white pepper than black pepper, more red fruit than black fruit and more herbal notes than jammy, gooey notes. Needless to say, one is not necessarily better than the other. That remains up to the taster.

Entertainment

Six Feet Under

Six Feet Under cast
Six Feet Under cast
I decided to watch Six Feet Under, one episode after another. I had never seen any of the series but my friends had told me it was great.

So I gave it a try and sixty-five some hours later, I had seen them all. It was quite an experience, needless to say, but before someone accuses me of wasting my life on TV, hear me out.

Long scale cinematic endeavors have always attracted me. I proudly own a copy of Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. I saw “Our Hitler” in its theatrical release. I’ve seen Max Ophuls life-changing film, The Sorrow and the Pity, three times, which equals, what, twelve hours? I’d give twelve hours to have my life changed, again. I’ve whiled away lifetimes in front of the screen. I look good in green, I decided years ago, so a pallor gained from years of indoor activities seems almost a mark of honor to me.

It took me four seasons of Six Feet Under before I realized that having conversations with dead people is the best way to keep them among in the living. For that alone, I am grateful, and I’m trying to put it to use.

Six Feet Under devolves into nothing more than a melodrama, but one populated by fascinating actors. At times, it’s a comforting as a Lars von Trier movie (if you find having your kneecap broken to be comforting) but Bernard Shaw said that melodrama is “a realistic picture of our dreams”. Fraught with sadness and sin, the show embodies the tenet for which I continue to struggle: It is forgiveness that eases our suffering.

Wine

Any Port in a storm?

Hardly. Where once people couldn’t afford to be picky about the quality of their Port, things have improved drastically in the last twenty years or so. Until 1987, existing Port producers effectively kept the industry locked up, and any new producers were locked out.

Since that time, producers such as Dirk Niepoort have nudging (if not shoving) the industry forward. Where once very little table wine of quality was made in Portugal’s Douro Valley (where real Port is made), today over half of the wine in the Douro is table wine. Again, led by Niepoort, most of it is great value stuff, and some of it is fantastic.

When Niepoort’s Redoma was first released back in 1991, it pretty much set the standard. With subsequent wines, such as Batuta and Charme, Dirk has only added to his bad boy image, with wines that are as idiosyncratic as they are delicious.

Even before Dirk took over from his father some years ago, the Niepoort name was associated with high quality Port. The vintage Ports were ripe and tasty, and the LBV’s and tawnies were viewed by many as benchmarks. They still are today.

While Port is supposed to have been invented centuries ago, it’s only been in the last half century that it has been of the quality we see today. The great old vintages, in this writer’s opinion, are no better than the best of the new vintages, such as 2000 and 2003. The tawnies being offered today are far better than those of twenty years ago.

With Niepoort as one of the young leaders, Port’s best days are ahead.

Hospitality

Why does service suck at some restaurants?

In an unidentified city in Southwestern US, I’m back in a familiar haunt. Now it seemed unfamiliar. A server who suggested one customer should “arrive home safe”, whatever that means, and accompanied that with some weird chuckle. He spotted my Dayrunner and wisecracked that he hadn’t seen one of those in a long time.

The owner ambles through the restaurant. He doesn’t recognize me, and makes no eye contact with any customer, though I’ve asked one of the other servers if he is around. She makes no attempt to let him know he’s been asked after. But at least she is there to help out when the offending serve brings me the wrong wines, drops them and ignores me when I try to inform him of his error.

She apologizes. He observes the whole thing and says nothing. The owner ambles past again.

Why does service suck at some restaurants? Because the owners don’t care enough. They’re too busy counting their stacks of money (though that’s rare enough), or trying to get through the day before the dishwasher is taken away by the INS or something blows up and they simply hope they can get out the door before tee time.

I expect that, at some point, it catches up with them. But the damage has been done. Customers figure that service is non-existent in America. Some servers learn to be rude or even hateful to (or at least about) their customers. Worst of all, the other servers see that good service and attitude doesn’t really matter enough to the management and owners to take action.

Before long, nobody cares. Bad service and bad attitude, like theft, is a cancer.

Wine

Organic or Just Stinky?

So you want organic wine, hunh? Well, since the federal government definition of organic food still is in flux, the wine business can hardly be blamed for being wobbly on its definition too.

But there are three broad categories to consider in talking about organic wine. First, many vineyards in America and elsewhere are organic; that is to say, no pesticides or herbicides are used in the vineyards. Secondly, there are a few American wineries are organic in that they make “organic” wine. In the U.S. that means they don’t use any sulfur or other preservatives in their production practices.

But in Europe, there is another definition; “organic” identified wines CAN use sulfur. Why? Because you can dig sulfur right out of the ground. It’s not some laboratory chemical, and it’s been in use in wine for two thousand or so years.

Sulfur’s purpose is to bond with the oxygen in a bottle of wine before the oxygen can bond with the wine, and destroy the wine’s fruitiness. Most wines that have no sulfur added are not particularly stable, and they don’t seem to last very well in the cellar.

Of course, American wine buyers are familiar with the warning on the wine back labels, “CONTAINS SULFITES”. That warning got shoved down the wine industry’s collective throats a few decades back, ostensibly to protect severe asthmatics from a reaction to the miniscule amounts of sulfur in the bottle.

In truth, the ideologues who pushed the regulation were uninterested in protecting a tiny percentage of those with severe asthma. If they were concerned about asthmatics’ reactions to sulfur, they would have placed a similar but bigger warning sign over every salad bar in American. Salad bars typically have three to five times the amount of sulfur found in a bottle of wine. Indeed, America’s produce sections have more sulfur than that found in wine.

Those ideologues are just anti-alcohol. They hate it when somebody’s having fun. And they give organic a bad name in wine circles.

Organic wine production (as long as it allows some sulfur, say, 35 parts per million) is a very good thing. Organic grape production is a great thing. As wine buyers and purveyors, Winestores is very focused upon seeking wines from organic vineyards, or vineyards with sustainable practices, or even vineyards that are farmed bio-dynamically.

For those of us who have spent a great deal of our lives in the vineyards, it seems obvious that a living vineyard, devoid of chemicals and rich with natural flora and fauna, is a place that makes better wine, with more character, flavors and aromas.

Theatre/Dance

Owen/Cox Dance Group

Okay, let’s start with the premise that I have no free time. NO FREAKING FREE TIME, whatsoever. So, when I take the time to go to a dance performance (and this is coming from a former modern dancer, however brief was my career) and I don’t know anything about any of the dancers, no reviews, nothing, well, something’s up.

What’s up? Brad Cox, one of Kansas City’s greatest assets, one of the more exciting young musicians in the da U. S. of A. (imho) is married to the woman who is dancing and choreographing, and Brad is playing, along with some of the most brilliant musicians I am lucky enough to know, and yeah I’m there. Okay?

But two nights in a row? Yeah, I did that. I saw the Owen/Cox Dance Group on Thursday night — dragging my wife, who is dragging her ass, she’s the mother of two teenagers, works and is grad school and, hell, she’s married to ME for chrissakes, so like she’s already done for the day, and I drag her out to this show.

The next night I bring my mom and my eldest daughter, just so someone can sit there next to me as I grin from ear to ear or nearly start sobbing midway through various dances.

Jennifer Owen has some wonderful things to show us. For one, she’s a wonderful dancer, as are many in her troupe of nine. For another, she is an inspired choreographer, at least at times, and every time she is at least intelligent and imaginative. How many dances have you seen that make you laugh? In a good way.

Brad and some of the brilliant musicians he is fortunate enough to assemble have offered me, without question, some of the most engaging musical moments I have experienced in the last decade.

And, at the risk of seeming to ignore other moments, there are two dances back to back to I must regard as simply diabolical. The first is terrifying: “When Jesus Wept”, a rather typical Brad Cox haunt comprised of two songs intertwined, threads woven together like the rope that forms the device of “Strange Fruit”, the heart-stopping Billie Holliday tale of torture and lynching.

Brad, as I said, has great musicians in tow. Nathan Granner and Valery Price handle “When Jesus Wept” with heart and soul. When Krystle Warren adds her warm, almost other-worldly voice to Strange Fruit in the midst of it all, and as Jerome Stigler demonstrates suffering and death, I defy any person with eyes and ears to save their own heart from bursting.

“When Jesus Wept” is followed by a solo, Jennifer dancing to another song with gospel roots, The River is Wide, and it seems that the song and dance will act to heal the wound exposed by the trauma preceding it. No such.

The song’s opening affirmation of love winds to its inevitable loss, the song and lights fading as love dies away. No solace here but plenty of truth. If art can rip away the curtains by which the quotidian hides reality, then these two dances are still changing the way I look around me days later.

Btw, to those annoying snobs who somehow believe that I’m speaking from a relative position, that is to say, that I’m saying these musicians are exciting for Kansas City, I’d look forward to a brief conversation about what is good and great around the world. I travel a lot and I see a lot of music and dance. This is the real shit, people.

Count yourselves unlucky to live elsewhere.

Wine

Stop Peeking!

Why do we taste blind? Because, otherwise, we would cheat. Not just you, not just me and not only some of us. It’s just human nature to cheat, when it comes to blind tasting.

The great wine educator Kevin Zraly used to explain his methodology in blind tasting as this: either he would sneak into the kitchen to find the empty bottle from which the blind wine was poured or, if he couldn’t do that, he would decline participating, saying, “Oh, I already went into the kitchen and found the empty bottle.” Kevin’s stories are always funny, because they do more than ring of truth.

Why do we taste wine blind? Because it’s hard to taste wine blind and to be honest in doing so. Only by tasting blind can we be certain that we are honestly describing what’s in the glass. Otherwise, we’re describing what we THINK should be in the glass.

I can think of one really good example in my own recent past. I was tasting about thirty-five wines from the heralded 1987 vintage of California Cabernet with some friends. One friend knew that I had written something not too far removed from the following: “Clearly, I mean, clearly, anyone with a palate knows that Montelena produced the best Cabernet in 1987, I mean, that’s obvious!” Or some such blather.

In this tasting, I think it was wine number seventeen, though I didn’t know it at the time. I was saying rather unkind things about this particular wine, so my friend who had actually bagged and numbered the wines decided to offer me a length of rope. “Frost,” he said, “tell us what you think of wine seventeen.”

“Well, it’s typical of a tendency with California Cabernet, you know, green tannins, harsh, hard, the kind of wine that’s over-praised early in its life and doesn’t age well,” and as my friend began to pull Montelena out of the bag, I’m doing the moonwalk backwards. “BUT,” I attempt to interject, “clearly, the tannins are just covering great fruit. I mean, the fruit is overwhelmed NOW, but with a few more years, this wine will show its true greatness.” Blah blah blah.

We taste wine blind, because that’s the ONLY way to taste wine honestly. Even the so-called experts (I’m not sure you’ll buy into my inclusion in that group now), are simply hoping to be right more often that they’re wrong.

The process of blind tasting isn’t all risk and no reward. In fact, if you’re looking for bargains, blind tasting is the only way to go. Instead of expecting the most expensive wines to taste the best, a blind tasting will often reveal pleasant surprises.

Taste everything and pay attention to the wines you fall in love with; at least one or two of them is going to be a surprise. It doesn’t matter if the critics don’t agree. Who cares? They don’t have your palate, and they usually don’t have your budget either. Finding bargains is far more interesting for the rest of us than for those critics who receive more free samples in a month than their entire city block could consume in a year.

The rules are simple; if you like it, and you like the price, it’s a discovery.