Category Archives: Wine

Another Great American Riesling (meaning what?)

Red Newt Lahoma Vineyard Riesling 2009 is a surprising drink, not merely because this is a great American Riesling. “Great American Riesling” has, for much of our vinous history, been damnably faint praise. Moreover “surprising” isn’t a term I would likely apply to American Riesling. Satisfied (often)? Sated (frequently)? Surprised. Hmm.

There are lots of beachheads for the grape here. While the Left Coast may have a significant head start, it’s back east that the many of the best are found. You have to like some delicacy in your Riesling, but if you do, you will find stunners in Michigan and particularly in New York. I know that there will be some fat but nonetheless fine examples from California, north to south. But nearly none have that rasp of acidity that gives Riesling its distinctive shape.  Oregon and Washington can do that. Sometimes they can get some soil notes in their Rieslings, but more often not, the wines don’t repay aging the way I wish they would.

Cross the border into BC, the odds might be even better and often are. Along the East Coast, things get uneven until you get to Long Island, head up the Hudson and drive over to the Finger Lakes.

Here, you are more likely to find excellent Riesling than not. In fact, you’ll have to work at it if you want to find something boring or bad (your time could be spent in more productive pursuits). The Rieslings that have some sugar to them are more piercing than lush, and that’s exciting. The drier wines are sometimes easy to overlook, like the quiet girl at a party. I pity the fool who doesn’t see her, but then I always figured my job was to look at them all. That’s how I approach my wines.

So each place has its style and for the most part that’s what you get. Or so I can convince myself for short stretches, and then something like this comes along. Yes, it has some sugar, and it has some bite. But it’s not only that it has considerable teeth to that bite, it that it’s unruly. That’s not the way of Finger Lakes Riesling. Indeed, that’s not what I expect of American Riesling. With a sort of peachy, even apricot, basso profundo, there is more fat than I get from any Riesling this tangy. It’s IRF rated as somewhere between Medium Sweet and Sweet, but that will not help you know how this wine tastes.

How does it taste? Like grapefruit pie. Yep, grapefruit pie (whatever that is, but go with me on this), especially if you threw white peach and mangos slices on top of it. The “bite” explains this wine, just as the best of all Rieslings are defined. But what makes the best Riesling so damned exciting is when, in spite of fulfilling these demanding but often achieved standards, it surprises. That this wine can be so robust and so delicate is a patent surprise. Thank you, Red Newt.

I Love Alcohol, Despite Reports to the Contrary

Okay, I get the diatribe against high alcohol wines, and I often agree. Alcohol is nonetheless an integral part of wine's character: its weight, body, presence, mouth feel, part of what lifts its aromas, generates its flavors and keeps them all stable, at least for a time. And I like the buzz; I have no problem admitting that. On the other hand, I like wine too much to be satisfied with high alcohol wines; too much alcohol in a wine, and I won't be able to drink as much. And that's not good, dammit.

I will defend Darrell Corti's right (or anyone else) to refuse to purchase wines above a certain alcohol limit, say, 14.5% alcohol. I will assert his intelligence in all things wine, but I don’t have to agree with him. I don't think an arbitrary number (such as 14.5%) is particularly illuminating or insightful; it's more or less random. Some 14.2% alcohol wines taste warm, or even hot. Some 15% alcohol wines taste just fine. I'll offer as evidence last night's delightful drop: Patz & Hall Pinot Noir Jenkins Ranch 2009. It's listed as 15.9%; I'm not even sure that's an honest number. But here's the thing: it was great.

Let me set the scene: I've been working from 6 am to 4 pm in New York City, running tastings and lecturing. I head to the airport in hopes of getting an early flight home (yeah, right, the day before 9/11, when some people are still scared to fly), since my ticket isn't getting me out till 9:45 pm. Eight hours later, I'm still waiting to get on my plane. I finally arrive at my house at 3:55 am; my wife is awake. Bizarre; she can't sleep. She wondered why I was many hours late; she wants a drink. I want a drink. We share that bottle of Patz & Hall and, like I say, it was delicious. It didn't taste like 16% or so alcohol; it didn't even occur to me to think about the alcohol level, other than to be thankful that alcohol was serving its calming purpose.

I'm still surprised about that alcohol level; I may be critical of high alcohol table wines, but I'm usually downright hateful about high alcohol Pinot Noir. Was it poor judgment at 4 am? Gratitude for a tasty sedative? Well, you can think as you like. I thought it just tasted great, I found the fruit to be exuberant but not obnoxious, the oak to be intriguing but not intense, and the alcohol level simply amped up the fruit, the weight and, for me, the pleasure.

 

Disclaimer: I was sent this bottle as a press sample. So on some level you can question my impartiality. But if you read me regularly, you know I have no trouble ignoring the mountains of dull samples that I receive and taste, and I only write about a wine I believe in.

Face the Music…

In a recent article, I was asked to answer a few questions about how music and wine might interact. And I found myself unable to limit my words on the issue, even if I was primarily focused upon answering the questions. Here’s what I wrote to the author:

Question 1 – Do you think that there exists a direct relation between music and the simultaneously consumption of wine?

I am obsessed with music, such that I have music playing in my head, playing in the car or at my computer almost continuously. It sounds a bit crazy but it’s my world. I don’t generally try to match music and wine together but they seem to be able to generate similar rhythms and similar moods even if music itself seems to me to be devoid of smell and taste. Wait, that’s not true.

But music is more universal an experience than smell and taste is to me; because smell and taste are very, very specific to some particular place and time. Some music will bring me back to a certain spot at a certain date, but the stuff that I love is far more transformative.

Wine is more temporal than music, but wine has rhythm; I honestly think it does or at least it can if you have music in your head nonstop as I do.

Question 2 – Did you make correspondent experiences [by that, I think the author wanted to know if I match them up] by yourself?

In general, no, but that’s because I appreciate counterpoint more than synchronicity. So I don’t want music and wine to match up; I want them to talk to each other. They may agree; they may argue. Sometimes they don’t speak at all; they just yell past each other. That’s cool too. I like the complexity. But I listen to a fair amount of pop music (in between the Japanese noise bands, the early country, the bebop, the garage bands, the postpunk, whatever), and there is no music that corresponds to pop for me. Everything else seems to have a correlation but not pop music.

Question 3 – Would you say (or would you say not) that specific grape varieties do accord with specific styles of music?

No, it’s more a matter of style of wine. What grape you use to make it is immaterial. Of course, styles are based upon certain grapes and certain regions, but the region and style play a lot more into what describes any particular kind of music than what grape you might have used to make that style of wine. California Merlot is very, very different than Merlot in Bordeaux. White Burgundy is a different sort of animal to California Chardonnay. One is incredibly complex and even wild (think Ornette Coleman); but big, buttery California Chardonnay is more like John Philips Sousa.

Question 4 – Which style of music (or exactly: which song) harmonize best to:

Riesling – think string quartets, Baroque to 20th century. Okay, sure, there’s more to consider but I think that string quartets are a remarkable art form.

Silvaner – – I have no idea. Okay, maybe, the Velvet Underground. Attitude, attitude, rhythm and more attitude. Great lyrics too. Oops. I’m off subject.

Chardonnay – as above; it depends upon where you grow it and hence what style it is

Rosé – again, which rose? But this is as close to a boy band as any wine I can imagine.

Pinot Noir – again, which Pinot Noir? Oregon is almost muscular; sure it’s fruity, but there is a certain muscle behind it so I think Texas blues or Southern rock (maybe there’s a Kings of Leon connection I’ve never considered before). New Zealand is so delicate that it can be like a bird song; like a happy Meredith Monk tune, although I’m more in love with Meredith Monk’s wounded, unhappy songs, but that’s off subject. As with white Burgundy, red Burgundy is a wine that makes me think of orchestral music. This time, it’s not a quartet but a chamber orchestra. Sometimes it’s Vivaldi; sometimes it’s a lot more aggressive.

Syrah or Shiraz – at my own peril, I’ll ignore California Syrah (can be lovely; can be boring), Washington Syrah (which is often damned special but it’s too soon to characterize it in the way the editors are requesting) and even those marvelous examples from New Zealand, South Africa, Spain or Italy. So let’s talk that herbal, peppery fruit leathery thing that is the northern Rhone. If Parker or Dizzy had played French bistro music (dream on, Jacques Brel), they might have made these wines.

Merlot – Sure I said that wine isn’t pop music. But Merlot, like Champagne or sparkling wine, can come damned close. Merlot can produce wine that is somewhat silly, maybe even vapid, but sure of itself nonetheless, sexy, or at least about sex, youthful, and if over-confident, demanding that you take it seriously too. Like pop music. But I can also imagine Merlot as soul music; which I think of as pop with blues shined up by funk.

Cabernet Sauvignon – this is a formal music though it can be any kind of formal. Of course, you think of Bach but you also think of Astor Piazolla, another formal music straining at its limitations. Without those limitations, it would be seem untethered, ill-defined.

Grenache – nothing but folk music, though folk music from anywhere, so it could be salsa, it could be Blind Willie McTell, it could be Iraqi love songs, hell, it could be Ladysmith Black Mambazo. It could be from Cuba, from Appalachia, from South Africa, from Latvia, from Nigeria, well, you get the idea.

Sweet wine – girl bands for some of them, Christmas carols, songs of simple joy.

But maybe it was just the Riesling talking…

Steve Pitcher RIP

I don't want to mislead anyone: Steve Pitcher and I were not famous friends, but I think we had a friendly and respectful relationship. We were wine judges who talked about the business of wine, of wine tasting, of wine judging, and of everything else that people talk about when sitting at a table with hundreds of glasses of wine and lots of time on our hands. Other than wine, I doubt that Steve and I had much in common though he would always surprise me with his breadth of knowledge about all things cultural, historical and, well, let's just say it right: Steve was very, very smart. There is no death that should pass without regret, and even if Steve was not necessarily a young man, he deserved a longer life. His behavior has been described in the many public remembrances as sober, and there's no question of that, but what I remember was his steadfast integrity, a nearly forgotten attribute in business today. I think his death should not go unspoken by anyone in the wine industry. His honesty, intelligence and integrity touched many of us in the business; I’m sure he had an impact in many other communities as well. Rest in Peace, Steve.

How well does Greek wine age?

There is undoubtedly irony in Greece being known for wines for current drinking, and for being a country that rarely produces wines that will age. After all, this is the country that invented wine, and in ancient Homeric texts, aged wine is celebrated and seems almost commonplace. The rest of the world would take millennia to catch up.

But from the days of the Roman conquest until just the last ten years, Greece has not been able to break into the international marketplace; ageworthy Greek wines had no international customers. Without a marketplace, where is the incentive to make these sorts of cellar ready wines? Even Vinsanto, the brilliant, traditional and nearly eternal sweet wine of Santorini, was quickly supplanted by Vino Santo, Italy’s pale imitator. Vinsanto remains less known than it should be, and even less known than Italian Vino Santo.

So with only a few years in which Greece’s winemakers have had any motivation to make ageworthy wines, which wines are in fact ageworthy? Amongst the white wines, the dessert wines stand out, and Vin Santo is one of the most stable wines that a cellar master will ever purchase; some people believe the wines last a century. But Santorini’s Assyrtiko based dry white wines are surprisingly long-lasting as well. These wines have already proven that they can last a decade or even more.

With red wines, the two best known indigenous grapes, Xynomavro and Agiorgitiko, have already shown their abilities, albeit from only a handful of producers. Agiorgitiko has been combined with other grapes such as Syrah to offer some newer blends that many of us believe are eminently ageable. Xynomavro seems not to need helpmates; it has already shown its cellaring abilities all by itself. Are there other grapes that can do as well? That remains to be seen, and we should hope to see soon, now that Greece’s great winemakers believe that there are international buyers who will reward them for making those sorts of wines.

Change at the Missouri Wine Competition

Plenty of wine competitions get ignored. Once I might have gotten my nose out of joint about the manner in which competitions such as Missouri’s annual Wine Competition are completely invisible throughout the established media. Of course they ignore such competitions. For one, most of these wines aren’t available nationally, and many of those in the Missouri Competition aren’t found outside the state of Missouri. And the traditional wine media have always ignored the rest of winedom, the parts of it not found in the traditional areas. Why not? They’re in the business of promoting their own view about wine. A wine competition is, in effect, providing competition to these magazines and websites. Except here’s the thing, they don’t EVER review these wines, so refusing to report on the results of a competition covers wines they’ve never tasted is, if not willful laziness, just plain ignorance about what’s happening in America today.

Wines are being made everywhere, and some of those wines are excellent. Moreover, some of those wines are IMPORTANT. But these media outlets ignore them because they’re not actually in the business of reporting about wine. They’re in the business of staying alive a few more months, desperately hanging on to their potentially obsolete business models. They’ve decided to report on things about which they’re already reporting. Missouri? Hell, they’re not even talking about New York’s state competition results and New York wine has become mainstream subject matter. And of course, few of the articles they publish provide any historical context. That would be like admitting that they’ve been asleep while all this stuff was happening, and they did promise to report about wine, I think.

So here I am bitching about the lack of attention towards regional wines. Big deal. Nothing new about it, but I regard it as a continued failure of the decimated journalism industry: no one can afford to report anymore. They can’t hire new people to report on new areas, so they don’t. And we’re to blame, those of us who don’t pay for magazines or newspapers. We say that we receive all the information we need from websites and bloggers. Really? Few of them ever speak about regional wines, and those that do, cover only a small subsection of those regions, usually the one in which they’re based.

It’s a crime with faceless victims. Regional wineries, while numerous, remain nameless; vague notes about Finger Lakes, or Virginia, or Texas, or Missouri only highlight the institutional ignorance. But in each individual region, things are changing regardless of media ignorance. How it’s happening is mysterious; even local media offer only superficial coverage. But something gets through, because success slowly presses upon the regional mindset, even success in competitions in those states with decades of experimentation. The local culture begins to notice that certain wineries, grapes and styles receive acclaim and maybe it’s not simply regional pride.

Indeed, with hundreds of wines in the running, the Missouri Governor’s Cup Wine Competition isn’t a pushover anymore, if it ever was. Judges no longer hail exclusively from Missouri (though sometimes we locals are the toughest among the judges); the competition now includes a slate of industry veterans from around the country. But here’s the thing: the wines are deserving of this kind of scrutiny. Vintners have clearly upped their game of late; growers are far more skilled at grapes like Norton or Chambourcin and some of the most exciting grapes, such as Traminette and Valvin Muscat, weren’t part of the mix even a few years ago.

Not long ago, there were heated arguments as to which wines would be awarded the coveted status as Best in Class (as in Best Dry White Wine, Best Dry Red Wine and so forth) and though it may sound odd, the arguments are a bit less personal now, because the wines are better across the board. In the past, some of the wines under consideration might have tasted good to some judges but to others they were unbalanced or even flawed. Faced with the prospect of handing a top award to a flawed wine, conversations in the judging room got pretty testy, if not downright insulting. Aside from questioning the morals of someone’s sister, it can be tough to get through to a recalcitrant fellow judge.

But times have changed: there are lots of good wines in play. So the disagreements about the wines are based upon style not quality, and that leads to fewer bruised feelings. Norton is a particularly good example: Stone Hill’s Estate Bottled Norton 2009 beat out all other Nortons for the C.V. Riley Award as the best in the state (and by extension, the best in the world?), though I thought that others such as Augusta’s 2008, Les Bourgeois’ Reserve 2008, Mt. Pleasant’s Estate 2008 and Stonehaus Strother Ridge’s 2009 Cynthiana had plenty of offer as well. But they were differently styled (more robust, toastier, or riper; each was its own man) and the outcome became a matter not of quality, but of preference.

So change happens, as the phrase goes, and it’s all to the good. And of all of the changes, the Governor’s Cup is the biggest of them: this year, instead of a super sweet dessert wine, instead of Port or Sherry styled wine, instead of one of the rich and powerful dry Nortons of years past, the winner was a Valvin Muscat. Don’t be alarmed if you haven’t heard of it; it’s new. But if things continue in this manner, you will hear a great deal more about it, not only from Missouri, but from the rest of the country as well. Blumenhof’s Valvin Muscat remains the best I have tasted from anywhere, and it was nothing short of delicious. It has the floral intensity of its parent Muscat, as well as citrus and tree fruit notes that give it a dry and tangy finish, despite the sweet nose.

There are other stars amongst the 38 Gold Medal winners at this year’s competition: particularly Stonehaus Strother Ridge Vignoles, but also 2010 Stone Hill Dry Vignoles, St James 2010 Vignoles, Pirtle’s Premium Port, Mt Pleasant’s Villagio, Montelle’s Seyval Blanc 2010, Chambourin 2009 or their Chardonel 2010, Les Bourgeois’s LaBelle, Cave Vineyard’s White Chambourcin, Blumenhof’s Traminette, Baltimore Bend’s Arrowhead Red, Augusta’s 2010 Vignoles or 2010 Chardonel and Adam Puchta’s Misty Valley Vignoles. But I’m collecting bottles of Blumenhof’s lovely Valvin Muscat just to show my friends from elsewhere that Missouri has it going on.

I don’t expect the mainstream wine media to notice. They’re just trying to stay alive. It’s up to all of us who read about wine to talk about it, write about it and read some more about it.

#Drink Local Wine, at least sometimes.

Ya gotta look for the good news

After an arduously steamy summer, the weather has broken, though it seems to me that there is absolutely nothing broken about the weather; it’s as right as it could be: cool, breezy, sunny. Amazing. Much of the lawn is dead; work is brain-snappingly crazy, everything’s a mess. Yeah, sports shouldn’t matter, but the Royals remain only a promise (next year, I swear, next year, it’s gonna happen), the Chiefs are just plain gonna suck and the Big 12 is no longer imploding. Now it’s exploding. This is big stuff to those of us in Kansas City. You don’t have to pretend to understand. But look at our sports landscape; the Big 12 is all we got. For as long as I have been here, it’s offered brilliant games and sometimes relentless rivalries. Border War? Lots of teams talk about a Border War but Kansas vs. Missouri was an actual war: it was one of the critical sparks that burst the country into the conflagration of our never Civil War. For some of us Kansans, there is an underlying (or perhaps more visible) sense that some of the folks on the Missouri side are still replaying that particularly ugly moment of American history. Now it seems, it all goes away courtesy of the massive egos of Texas. Thanks, Longhorns. I suppose your record will be better when you’re playing in your very own league against a handful of handpicked non-BCS teams.

K-State, my alma mater, will be even more irrelevant than it already is. KU, where my money (and my kids) go, will hie itself thither to the Big East, I suppose, but am I supposed to like that? Will MU, my wife’s alma mater go to the Big Ten as Missouri’s always triangulating governor had hoped? Or to the SEC? Who the hell knows and now, I guess I’m trying to say, who the hell cares?

My friend JK cracks open a JJ Pruem Wehlener Sonnenuhr Auslese 1983 and laughs. He only cares about Fantasy Baseball so he’s happy. The wine smells somewhat muted, but then it starts showing fruits that are still fresh and clean. Honey notes are everywhere; citrus, both dried and fresh, sweet pie apples; in the mouth, the sugars are starting to show more complexity than overt sweetness. There is something about these old sweet Rieslings that show less and less sweetness as they age and more and more complexity. What have thosee sugars become?

We watch the Royals give away another game (dammit, they still have a potent offense and they can field now; they don’t stupid mistakes, like they used to, so I care, I really do), and kick back, grinning at the wine. And then there’s something, a bit mushroomy, that pops up. Hmm. It takes another ten minutes or so, deep into the first glass before I state the obvious: uhm, this is corked. Yep, JK replies, since he’s already concluded the same. Hmm. Damn. It still tastes pretty good.

We watch some more baseball; pour a second glass and wait for the corkiness to get worse, like it always does, only it doesn’t. It just sits there, like a fat little annoying troll, but one that is a bit forgetful, a bit off task. That’s to say, you think it’s corked, and then it doesn’t seem so corked, and then it does, and there you go, it’s somewhere in between. Now, this is theoretically impossible: it’s either corked or it ain’t. But this one seems to be neither or both, I’m not sure how to call it. So here’s what I decide: it’s a beautiful day; the wine is cold. Let’s just drink it faster and enjoy it as much as we can. And we do.

In which Doug contentedly consumes Tsantali wines on Mount Athos

Nafplio, Greece – No matter how many times you visit Greece, no matter how traditional some of its sleepy towns may seem, there is plenty of new here. Led by a coterie of (often) French educated, worldly and dedicated winemakers, Greece's historical varieties are undergoing a remarkable makeover. Pleasant Assyrtiko is becoming rich and unctuous Assyrtiko. Pink Moschofilero has lost its color and gained floral intensity and tangy texture. Agiorgitiko has grown from soft and forgettable carafe wine to complex age-worthy vin de garde. Savatiano isn't just for Retsina anymore; Roditis isn't a throwaway pink wine either. Light, bitter and vegetal Xynomavro is becoming a powerful competitor to Italy's Nebbiolo, at least for some wine writers. I prefer to think of it as its own, very idiosyncratic man (think Ross Perot crossed with Russell Brand. Actually, don't think about that at all; that would be really weird).

But just as the culinary world has wakened up to octopus (it's popping up on menus around the country like calamari in the 1980's), the wine world is beginning to grasp that these wines are from grapes that we cannot link to any well-known grapes, and so these wines are indispensable. With continuing wine trends of higher acidity and lower alcohol as the stated goal of the industry (even if high alcohol fruit bombs still get all the press), Greece's red and white wines offer a wealth of novel tastes. And wine drinkers are nothing if not ADHD; they seem to want to try something new everyday and simply changing brands of Cabernet is no longer enough. Instead, Greece offers an entirely new set of grapes, flavors, aromas, histories and traditions of food and wine.

The new Greek wine revolution is only just now beginning and let's face it, this is the most exciting time for bona fide geeks; this time around, we get to play a role in the industry's rediscovery of the world's oldest wines. Case in point? Mount Athos, an ancient Orthodox enclave along the coast of Greece. I took a trip there a few weeks ago and returned hot, dusty, sticky and probably a little smelly. The road to Mount Athos isn't paved; the gate to the property through which we enter intended only for the vineyard workers; we've parked our cars behind the trees and scrambled through the brush. "Hurry, hurry", declares our host, " we need to hurry". I don't see anyone at all, no armed guards, but we slide through the gate and jump into a truck parked on the other side of the nearly hidden entry.

It's okay that we're here; I'm not sure why we're acting like border jumpers. You see, we're males, every one of us, so it's cool. We've left the women in our group behind in their surf and Champagne soaked misery. Gosset Rose. Some misery, huh? But Mount Athos, a religious retreat along the coast in northern Greece, is for men only. However good the wines are here, and they are good, there is one central notion that will never, ever leave the mind of the visitor: why no women?

And make no mistake, the wizened watchers over Mount Athos' traditions do not discriminate against humans only: female animals too are unwelcome here. I'm not making this stuff up; like many aspects of religion, certain ideas have taken root and no matter how bizarre the tree grows, nobody has the nerve to cut off the weirder branches. The only explanation that I'm given is that this area (no small stuff – it's about 400 square miles of someone's estrogen-free concept of heaven) was founded upon the worship of the Virgin Mary. Any whiff of womanhood, other than the two millennia old mother of god, is unwelcome and might distract from the primary focus. Nope. I couldn't make this up if I tried.

We climb a rutty blonde road; it's not paved and not in great shape. We have to maintain it ourselves, explain our hosts, the winemaking team for Tsantali Wines. The company entered a sort of marriage with one of the powers on Mount Athos in the 1970's, rescuing old vines, cleaning and organizing vineyards, planting new ones. These days they're cleaning an abandoned shell of a building; they'll build a winery inside, though it will take years.

They also built a little tasting room high atop their vineyards, with sweeping views down to the Aegean Sea. After our long drive, we take turns using the toilet, as well as making lame comments as to which toilet belongs to the women, or why have walls around the thing at all? Clearly we are not yet in the spirit of the thing.

The wind blows the smell of mastic, and lavender, and wild sage; it is persuasive rather than reproving. It's quiet here; no buzzing bugs, no machines or motors in the distance, just a few birds chirping (ah-hah! Female birds! So even this religion has a bit of real world flexibility). We trudge up to one monastery (there are twenty of them dotting this spit of land as it reaches up to the Mount of Athos itself. Hmm, Athos…ensues a series of mispronunciations of the name.

The Tsantali's have converted one building into a sort of wine museum and guesthouse. One religious pilgrim is staring at me from the balcony: I wave; he waves me away and disappears. Against the backside of the long four-story structure, there is a pen with three boars; two small ones and a full-grown, tusky and busily drooling male. I take pictures as quickly as I can; my compatriots talk to him and he paws the ground and rubs against the fence. More drooling and grunting. He's got to be at least three hundred pounds of muscle and musk (Sorry, Howlin' Wolf). The other two give way to Big Billy the Monk, as I rename him. Later he will feature in my absurd report to the women about the wild gay romp that I was offered on Mount Athos. In your dreams, Billy.

The story of Mount Athos gets odder: the residents pay no taxes and own variously reported portions of Greece's land mass – some say ten percent, some say it's closer to one third. Moreover the taxpayer covers their salaries. And you think you got financial challenges? This nearly thousand-year-old scam is admittedly one of only several systemic reasons for Greece's fiscal crisis, but these guys could make Bernie Madoff blush, I'd bet. Oh, no, that's right, it's all for god. I always forget cause I'm not a drinker of that kool-aid.

The crisis has caused more than a few folks to question the arrangement but in a court of law, ownership is ownership, no matter how poorly thought out the original deal might be. And I don’t see the surprisingly savvy moneyed monks handing all their well-gotten gain over anytime soon. Why should they?

For Tsantali, it's been a fair enough deal; Tsantali does all the work and shares its profits with the monks, sharecropper-like. They've replanted existing vineyards with new material and grapes, created new ones, and they seek to benefit form the place's isolation by hewing to organic viticulture. Think of it: most organic vineyards are uncomfortably close to someone who isn't organic at all. Sprays, pesticides, herbicides and such have a tendency to drift; they rarely respect boundaries.

The wines Tsantali fashions here are delicious if still little known in the U.S, but like all wines Greek that seems to be changing. The wine tasting proceeds at a Greek, languorous pace. The wines are seductive. All is quiet, the sea a languid blue liquid framing the greens and browns in a cold calm. The air is gentle; the mood is anything but dictatorial or judgmental or discriminatory. But soon enough we head down to slide through the little green gate, padlocked again behind us and the sounds are nearly raucous in comparison; buzzes, ringing, clangs, screeches, booming, shouts, yips, barks, caterwauls, for all I can tell. We drive back to the hotel and while we feel rather mellow, the women seemed even more relaxed. I count three dead bottles of Gosset.

Who put medicine in my wine?

I've been on a mad tear for three weeks, probably twenty cities, and hundreds more cocktails and wines (beers don't count, or at least I don't count them as they go down) and I've been waiting for today to try to write it down. In some form or other. Some sort of record, but then I always imagine that I will write these things down and time doesn't allow it.

That, and this morning I had to undergo one of those procedures that people of a certain age undergo. It involves 24 hours of gatorade, juice and, well, nothing else, and before the sun came up this morning, I was up and about to go down, at least as long as it took for them to take snapshots of my innerds. For some reason, they feel like it's a good thing to give you a few reproductions of your slimy (but very empty) insides. Thanks. Wait, now that you mention it, I see the resemblance. Wow, it looks just like me. 

But here's the part that was weird. I'm on the gurney, butt exposed to the not yet fully awakened medical team (that should do the trick), when the guy with the drugs gives me the shot. Things start to go fuzzy and wobbly and then there's the smell! What the hell is that? Nap.

When I wake up about thirty minutes later, I'm just been wheeled into the recovery area. The nurse is giving me the okay to sip water, but all I can think about is: what the hell was the smell? So I ask her. Oh, it was the oxygen tube under your nose. No, it wasn't. That was there for about five minutes and it was when he stuck the drugs into my IV that some totally weird, medicine meets plastic meets rubber hose meets artificial herbs or something got up all in me.

I explain to her and she does the, hunh, that's weird (but we've got like 300 more patients lined up so drink your water and go home), and, no, actually, she was quite nice but I got no answers.

That was sixteen hours ago and I can still smell it. Not much of it. I have to really sniff hard to get it, but (sniff) there it is again. Weird. There was more of it earlier today, and I was still a little hinky from that shot and it's lessening.

But now I'm trying to taste some wines, assess them, write about them and be, well, correct as to what's in them and what if that smell is still here? It's one of the many dubious matters of wine tasting: there are always influences, whether smoke, fatigue, the trash needs taking out, the cat box needs cleaning, the cat's butt needs cleaning (you don't know my cat. Couldn't they breed longhairs with shorthairs on their butts?). The list goes on.

We assessors of taste, we try to get it right. But the central issue of wine or any other drink that we hope to limn is: is it good to drink? That too is fraught with influence: mood, season, food, proximity (whether to aromas or just to the wine that came before) and we spend a lifetime trying to sort out a relative mean. Then along comes a new flavor (and somebody squirts it into your veins) and, damn! This shit is hard to do!

Having done this pretty much 24-7 for thirty five years or more, I haven't usually felt that I couldn't put together a reasonable explanation of a wine, even in the throes of a cold or such. But tonight, at least, I'm giving these wines a rest.