Each year truly ridiculous gifts have been pressed upon me by members of the He Likes Wines, So I’ll Get Him a Wine Thingy crowd, who are victimized evil retail clerks looking for quick sales and dubious if not grossly inaccurate online descriptions. OK, I play the game: I smile and say thanks; I accept them with aplomb while regarding them with qualms [or maybe it’s the other way round; I keep forgetting]. But now the Time of Nice is over and I’ve held a  January Clearance of gadgets that are silly, unworkable, pretentious or all of the above; that are embarrassing to own save by that stunted generation whose role models are event planners, deejays and nightclub doormen. I invited the neighbors and threw a party. And now I’m going public.

Your correspondent opened the festivities with a gift called the Corkcicle, a plastic ‘icicle’ filled with clear gel coolant that, when frozen solid, is supposed to shoved into a bottle to maintain pre-chilled wine at serving temperature. And it does, sort of, but mostly it annoys you. First you must needs pour a couple of ounces of wine out in order to get the Corkcicle in. Then you needs must remove the things every time you pour: it’s wet and a foot long, so where do you put it? And as you pour more wine, there’s less and less of the Corkcicle actually cooling the remaining wine.  And, of course, the three inches that are in the neck of the bottle don’t really do much to keep the wine cool. 

It costs $20-$25 and it poses vexed questions. For example, why should you have to uncork the wine every time you pour? Could the gel leak into the wine? And what is so hard about using an ice bucket? Still, an oaf at foodbeast.com was over the moon about it. ‘There’s been plenty of genius ways to keep wine chilled without letting watery residue dilute the taste, but The Corkcicle is one of the most epic we’ve seen in quite some time,’ he said subliterately. What is it that suggests he’s never seen one in his life?

Another loser was The Wine Enthusiast’s 2-piece wine-chilling carafe, contributed by Ho’ Chi Minh, a long-time North Vietnamese pole-dancer who was Haiphong’s ‘Slut of the Year’ for most of the 1990s. Now legit [she’s a Girl Scout troop leader, no less!] Ho’ has several beefs, noting that it’s much like the Corkcicle writ large. It too works only with pre-chilled wine [it will not cool room-temp wine to serving temp] and its coolant, a big glass tube full of ice [and water, please] has to be removed from the carafe for every pour. The tube is bigger and heavier and clumsier by a long chalk than the Corkcicle, which attributes combine poorly with fragile. The only thing I like about it is the rave review it got from Jill Martin, who is the Shopping Ditz of the Today Show. Artfully blending her primitive vocabulary with her shaky grasp of physics, she said that it ‘will stop your wine-serving case from getting sweaty.’

 Mulligan, Stu was the wrong choice to receive whiskey stones. A punctilious Hibernian librarian and renowned pedant [he once fought a duel over the mis-cataloguing of ‘Lafcadi O’Hearn’], he was enraged that ‘my eejit cousin spent sixty bucks on a bunch of rocks when the same money would have bought three bottles of Clontarf!’ Or two bottles of Black Bush or one of the Redbreast 15-year-old, for that matter. But no. What he got was nine dice-sized rocks and two ineptly designed glasses.

You freeze the stones to chill your whiskey with no melting and no dilution. So far, so good. But sixty bucks for rocks? Even if they are, according to the online poetry of their numerous e-tailers, ‘all-natural soapstones that are proudly handcrafted of soapstone by the great soapstone workers of Perkinsville, Vermont, home to some of the USA’s oldest soapstone workshops.’ And they’re made of soapstone!

I can picture them now, those legendary artisans, strutting about the streets of Perkinsville with their chests all puffed out, or bent artisanally over their ancient and time-stained workbenches, can’t you? You sure? Oh.

These things have been around for a while now. A decade ago someone seeking free ink in Hemispheres sent me the first of their kind, and so I saw them in the original dusk of their being, as it were. Made [proudly, by hand, etc.] of Scotch granite, they cost $80 for two. They came in a wee velveteen drawstring pouch inside a varnished wooden cabinet, which suggested they should be prayed over, like holy relics. Now they are no longer alone. Williams-Sonoma has the same sort of thing in stainless steel and others offer versions in marble and crystal. All are hilariously priced, considering that Jack’s sells aquarium stones for 99¢ a sack.

Homer Nods, classical scholar and dolt, rarely gets to cock a snook at anyone, but battery-operated corkscrews are a legitimate target for what Brits used to call Queen Anne’s fan. ‘In a word’ says Homer, stu pid. Severe arthritis might be an excuse for the thing, but not for 11 brands offering at least 18 models. There’s even a website that claims to review them, although seldom is heard a discouraging word’ from that quarter, which seems mainly interested in getting you to buy one at prices ranging from $20 to $60. Some have sleek looks and various fancy doodads [built-in thermometer, ‘calming blue indicator lights,’ enough power to pull 40, 60 even 80 corks]; others have cheesy looks suggestive of manufacture in Chinese prisons. In all cases, the whine of the electric motor will add a dental quality to the most romantic of dinners. Bring on the electric candles!

 We went on to deal with wine aerators, but when it comes to decanting and aerating, the sea of ignorance is so vast [and my boat is so small, as the Breton fisherman reminded God] that the light of wisdom must be deferred to another day, when the purple dusk of twilight time is not stealing across the meadows of my heart. As it is just now. 

For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison’d by their wives: some sleeping kill’d
–Richard II

To which I iambically add:

And ‘mongst those Princes number now by dint
Of sword-like pow’r and grandeur lordly Print!
Undone, laid low by electronic strife,
Like Python’s parrot, ‘tis bereft of life!
Look you! See in ev’ry Nook and Kindle
Fell triumph of ‘Please don’t fold or spindle.’
Punchcards were once meant for bills and wages,
Now they’re bytes that gobble up our pages!
I needs must warn sans buts or ands or ifs:
Beware thee alway of Geeks bearing gifts.
–found in Old Saint Paul’s Church, Baltimore

So before going placidly amid the noise and haste to my New Year’s list of recent drinks books, I’ll add mine own lament for print. It’s a little sad, I know, so I’ll just sit here and rant for a bit and then shut up.

I grew up in print. I have set type by hand using only a California job case and a brass ‘stick,’ things that are now found mostly in flea markets. Each stick represented a paragraph or so*.It was then ‘proofed’ on ‘wheatstraw paper’. Letterpress printing, voila! I’d do it for hours at a time for the pure pleasure of it.

  The California Job Case: the ‘lay of the case’—the compartmentalized letters, punctuation marks and other bits of lead—were in effect the typesetter’s keyboard. Image courtesy of briarpress.org.

My first job was proofreading for three cynical trade rags** whose office was in two parts. One, so dreary that cubicles would have been an upgrade, held me, four editors and a few war-surplus linoleum-topped desks for the seldom-seen ad staff. Beyond was the Dickensian composing room, into whose sweaty depths I delivered page-proofs for correction.

Hot, noisy and intermittently dangerous, this hell-hole enshrined four towering Linotype machines. Ugly, infernally complicated and about 8 feet tall, the Linotype was a high-speed electro-mechanical type-setter. It used the ETAOIN SHRDLU keyboard, which took full advantage of fast fingers. [The QWERTY keyboard dates to the 1870s, when typists had to be as slow as their typewriters.]

A Linotype in sales-catalogue dress. Multiply this too-clean image several times, add terrific heat, crowding, noise, dirt and the smell of hot lead and printer’s ink to get an idea of an over-worked, under-pressure composing room of 50 years ago.

Invented in the early 1880s by a German immigrant named Ottmar Mergenthaler, the Linotype soon conquered book and newspaper  publishing. Almost as fast as an operator could type it clamped brass letter-molds called matrices in a vise, filled them with molten lead and produced a one-piece ‘slug’—a line o’ type—then spit it out to be composed into paragraphs and pages for proofing. This paragraph, for example, would represent 10 slugs.[See Linotype machines in action in the upcoming film Linotype. There’s a link to the trailer at the bottom of this column.]

It was incredible then [who could imagine its 10,000 parts casting hot lead inches from its nonchalant operator?] and is more so now [who can believe the world’s press once depended entirely on this 19th Century contraption?].

For all its Goldbergian grandeur the Linotype was in the end no more than another T. Rex, an apotheosis, yes, but of a primitive and doomed technology. Like the Clipper ship, the piston-engine Lockheed Super Constellation and the Hudson 4-6-4 steam locomotive, it was the mighty apex of an ingenious age, born born the cusp of a Great Extinction.

Perhaps all is not lost, not yet. Publishers as a rule prefer to improve the shining hour by cheating authors, but of have of late begun making books more physically attractive—more pleasing to hold and behold—according to The New York Times.  What a concept. Must have struck ‘em like a thunderbolt. Meanwhile, your conventional booksellers*** say printed books suddenly regained some of their lost ground over the Christmas holidays. Maybe it’s because there’s not much warmth in a card reading:

Print, my dear, is old hat, so outmoded!
Hence your Christmas book must be downloaded!

And so at long last to the list.

Mixology, bartendering, bar-cheffery—by any name, it’s pouring books as well as drinks. A.J. Rathbun has a quartet: Luscious Liqueurs, Wine Cocktails, then Champagne Cocktails and finally Ginger Bliss and the Violet Fizz: A Cocktail Lover’s Guide to Mixing Drinks Using New and Classic Liqueurs. All useful, but I fear A. J.’s prose style has declined since his splendid Good Spirits debut. Blind pigs have gone from illegal to, say publicists, exclusive, upscale, even celebrated. Hence Speakeasy: The Employees Only Guide to Classic Cocktails Reimagined, by Jason Kosmas and Dushan Zaric, and The PDT Cocktail Book, by Jim Meehan and Chris Call. Backward glances: Brian Van Flandern and Laziz Hamani’s Vintage Cocktails and a brace by the bracing Dave Wondrich, Imbibe! From Absinthe Cocktail to Whiskey Smash and Punch: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl. Not to forget, please, James Waller’s revised, updated and often witty Drinkology and, for those who plan ahead, Anthony Giglio and Jim Meehan’s Mr. Boston Summer Cocktails.

Long before wine writing descended into the murk of scores and tasting notes there was the pleasure of Gerald Asher’s monthly essays in Gourmet—until a new editor reduced him to recommending pairings. Was Gourmet otherwise dumbed-down, as in the issue devoted to recipes from TV sitcoms? The mag’s shut-down in 2009 was laid to cable-TV shows and other for ads competition, but maybe the editor was distracted by writing three books, editing two recipe collections, giving lectures and doing a TV series. Fortunately, the man Frank Prial once called a poet hasn’t disappeared for good, as evidenced by his latest book, A Vineyard in My Glass. Buy it.

Crime is the star of Max Watman’s nifty Chasing the White Dog: An Amateur Outlaw’s Adventures in Moonshine and Daniel Okrent’s even niftier Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. Watman blows the whistle on the romance of moonshining and pretty much blows up his kitchen, too. Both are well-written, especially Okrent’s: I think it’s the best book on temperance lunacy since The Life and Times of the Late Demon Rum by J.C. Furnas. [Furnas’s other great accomplishment was to expose Lillian Hellman’s Julia fraud.]

The how-to and self-help stocking is well-stuffed as ever, what with Drink This: Wine Made Simple, by Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl; The Everyday Guide to Wine [2 paperback books and a DVD], by MW Jennifer Simonetti-Bryan; the expansively titled  The Sommelier Prep Course: An Introduction to the Wines, Beers, and Spirits of the World, by Michael Gibson; 100 Perfect Pairings, by Jill Silverman Hough; The Food Lover’s Guide to Wine, by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg;
 
Jennifer Simonetti-Bryan, Julia della Croce

Making Sense of Wine Tasting: Your Essential Guide to Enjoying Wine [5th edition], by Alan Young; Secrets of the Sommeliers: How to Think and Drink Like the World’s Top Wine Professionals, by Rajat Parr, Jordan Mackay and Ed Anderson; Authentic Wine: Toward Natural and Sustainable Winemaking, by Jamie Goode and Sam Harrop MW; and for reinvention purposes, How to Import Wine, by Deborah M. Gray.

Liquid-specific entries include The Bartender’s GIN Compendium, by master cocktailian Gary Regan; Grandi Vini: An Opinionated Tour of Italy’s 89 Finest Wines, by Joe Bastianich; Real Men Drink Port—and Ladies Do Too!, by Ben Howkins; The Craft of Stone Brewing Co.: Liquid Lore, Epic Recipes, and Unabashed Arrogance, by Greg Koch, Steve Wagner and Randy Clemens; Madeira, the Island Vineyard [2nd edition], by Noel Cossart and Emanuel Berk; and The Finest Wines of California: A Regional Guide to the Best Producers and Their Wines. It’s part of a series that includes individual volumes on Chianti, the Côte d’Or, Tuscany, Champagne, Rioja and Bordeaux. And it pairs well, as they say, with Paul Strang’s South-West France. MW Benjamin Lewin, knight-challenger of wisdom received and conventional, does so twice, in In Search of Pinot Noir and in Wine Myths and Reality.

While impatiently awaiting the 4th edition of Jancis Robinson’s The Oxford Companion to Wine you can profitably adopt the CIA’s 3rd of Exploring Wine, by Steven Kolpan, Brian H. Smith and Michael A. Weiss; and Opus Vino, by Jim Gordon.

And when you’re ready to dig in, try The Kentucky Bourbon Cookbook, by Albert W.A. Schmid and Dean Fearing, and Italian Home Cooking, by the award-winning Julia della Croce. In my kitchen Italian cooking is home cooking, but that never stopped me from adding more Italian cookbooks to my shelf before and it isn’t about to stop me now. And don’t forget The Winemaker Cooks, by Christine Hanna (see below) , cook, looker and president of Sonoma’s Hanna Winery & Vineyards.

As soon as I can I’ll make something to go with the following recipe, kindly provided by Chef Schmid: It’s called The English Professor’s Kentucky Bourbon Marinade, and it goes like this: Mix equal parts of bourbon, soy sauce and pineapple juice. Add a few [or a few more] Szechuan peppers, if you like. In it marinate chicken [up to 1 hour], pork [2-3 hours] or beef [at least 4 hours]. Pan-fry or grill. You’ll still have 364 days to cook Italian.

Now then, lest I appear to have gone soft-centered on you, I will here cite the two worst books I’ve read in a coon’s age or donkey’s years, whichever is longer. They are, for your edification and dismay Boozehound: On the Trail of the Rare, the Obscure, and the Overrated in Spirits, by Jason Wilson, and The Wild Vine, by Todd Kliman, You have been warned.

If you right-click on any of the above titles you’ll be able to ‘open’ Amazon and order directly.

For lagniappe here are a few of my own reviewer’s tips. For example, if the flap copy says anything like ‘ . . . teaches writing at . . . ‘ and/or mentions an author’s work with NPR, odds are it’s best to am-scray whilst still thou canst. In the Acknowledgments, danger signs include fulsome praise for the editor, who probably did nothing more than praise and grin [editors don’t have jobs—they have lunch] and the copy editor, who has likely missed author errors by the long ton while [if really on the ball]—adding factual errors of her own devising. Also, Amazon’s reader reviews have gained importance as professional reviewers, to quote the poet-pugilist Mike Tyson, ‘fade to Bolivian’. But be sceptical. Many of its 5-star reviews seem to be mere empty raves by enthusiasts and the ignoranti. The few-star reviews more often show knowledge and critical perspective.

And a Happy New Year to All!

©2012 Bill Marsano

Linotype the movie is expected to arrive in theaters some time next month. See the trailer below:

"Linotype: The Film" Official Trailer from Linotype: The Film on Vimeo

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*Hence ‘two sticks on  page 12,’ journalese for a story that is insignificant or being downplayed.
**One of them, U.S. Tobacco Journal, supposedly founded by Oscar Hammerstein I.
***Societal outcasts; pariahs who own actual, you know, like stores, yo?

Christine Hanna photo: Sheri Giblin Photography, S.F.

The Posse is my shifting and largely shiftless band of ne’er-do-wells, lowlifes and public nuisances, i.e., wine scribblers. For Pat and John’s edification and dismay a pod of us gathered at Ben & Jack’s Steak House. Zagat calls B&J ‘contenders in the Peter Luger clone wars,’ but surely means only the beef and bacon, for B&J, owned by two ex-Luger waiters, outdoes Luger’s décor and service by a country mile and a London stone.

Maître d’ Nick Velic saw us as a ravening mob, but was too suave to say so [he’d likely have preferred troupe des gloutons sauvages]. He chummed us with in-your-life bacon and a vast platter of shrimps and split lobsters while platters of sliced Porterhouse  were done to glory, as was a plate of grilled salmon. With these we poured Concannon’s 
new Conservancy line of varietals: Petite Sirah, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. To all of the above our little troupe did full justice or even a little more, the wines in particular, while our host whistled the patter.

John Concannon, known as John,* likewise said all the right things. He recognizes consumers’ value-driven values [i.e., bargain-lust] and courts the thrifty with the Conservancy line, for which his mantra is ’50-30-15,’ by which me means that from packaging to palate they look like $50 wines and taste like $30 wines but cost a mere $15. [His other lines are the Reserve and Heritage, which run from $25 to $60, and the bottom-dollar Glen Ellen. It sounds as if it should be a Speyside single malt but is actually named for his great-grandmother.

Concannon Vineyard, which was founded by John’s great-grandfather James Concannon in 1883, is east but not far enough east of San Francisco and Oakland. Although the Livermore Valley had once been known for its fine wines, John says it has been plagued down the years by surpluses, Prohibition and that great evil, phylloxera. And so from its 50 wineries and 5000 acres of vines of the early 1900s it had shrunk to six and 1500 by the late 1960s. Then, having missed the California wine renaissance, it was left ripe for unrestricted urban expansion, a.k.a. development a.k.a. blight.

On the other hand, not so fast: far-sighted Valley residents forestalled the threat by banding together to protect the land with what is now called the Tri-Valley Conservancy, a conservation easement that fosters agriculture and walls out strip malls, big-box stores, high-rise condos, tract housing and other offenses. The Concannons are proud that theirs was the first winery to join it, and so have named the Conservancy line in its honor. [Napa’s vineyards are similarly protected, but it took some 20 years of bitter and divisive wrangling—and for some there the acrimony still lingers. See two excellent books by James Conaway: The Far Side of Eden: New Money, Old Land, and the Battle for Napa Valley and Napa: The Story of an American Eden. Both books are splendidly written, as well as occasionally and grimly funny.]

John says his ancestors were a resourceful lot. In 1865, James left Ireland at 18 and ricocheted off Maine and Oregon before putting down roots and rootstock in the Livermore Valley. His son, ‘Captain Joe,’ served under Pershing and Patton, and pulled the winery through Prohibition by making altar wine for church use. [Beaulieu’s Georges de Latour did likewise. The National Piety Index was never so high as under Prohibition.] Jim, or ‘Mr. C,’ John’s father, took over in the 1960s. In 1964 Mr. C made history by releasing the first varietally labeled Petite Sirah [left]. John grew up at the winery but wasn’t pushed to follow his  dad. ‘He said ‘Make your own name, follow your own dreams . . . and if you think it’s right for you, come back”.’ After some 22 years in medical sales, he did.

We heard more—about developing the Concannon Clones [Cabernet 7, 8 and 11, now widely planted], the winery’s new solar array, and the renovation of the old tasting room­—before talk shifted to the Deal of the Hour: Wappo Hill may be sold for a fire-sale price. The 56-acre estate of Robert and Margrit Mondavi was put on the market in May and priced at a rarefied $25 million. Finding no takers, it will be auctioned in November for rather less. Indeed, the minimum bid is $13.9 million, or 44 percent below the asking price. The house was designed by Cliff May, who designed the Mondavi winery, which it resembles with its low-sloped roof and viewing tower. It runs to more than 11,000 square feet on three levels, sits in an oak grove atop a hill south of Yountville, and has 360-degree views, two bedrooms and a large indoor pool whose roof opens to the sky.

That set off a skein of rich reminiscences by Posse member Hoop de Jour, the oft-disappointed New York Knicks devotee.

‘The first time I visited the place,’ Hoop said, ‘I was impressed but mystified. The place is enormous, so I asked Bob why it has only two bedrooms. He said “So the kids and grandchildren can’t stay over”.’ Hoop also recalled a failed luncheon invitation: ‘During another visit he invited me to lunch, and I had to say I had only a half hour before my next appointment. As I was leaving one of the staff came up to hand me a package. It contained a sandwich, a half-bottle of Opus One and a note that said Robert Mondavi doesn’t do half-hour lunches.’

Then there was a tasting at the winery, a legendary tasting that Hoop stopped before it was fairly begun. Mondavi was about to pour when Hoop sniffed his glass and said ‘Excuse me, but I smell soap in my glass.’ Sniffing the glass for himself, Mondavi agreed. ‘Yes, there is,’ he said. ‘But which brand?’

Legend has it that Hoop, always quick on his feet despite the cane he leans on [and which he recently used to break the nose of a would-be mugger], shot back ‘I can’t name the brand, but it’s definitely a Procter & Gamble product.’

As for the house, the hammer goes down Nov. 16, so if you want to live like a god in Napa, hurry your bid off to the auctioneers, Sheldon Good & Co.

Love What You’ve Done with Your Hair

Joy Sterling is what Dr. Johnson would have called a woman of parts, for she writes books, runs rapids, scales mountains, celebrates Earth Day and, ever since 2006, has been both CEO and queen regnant of Sonoma County’s Iron Horse**. She is naturally smitten with your tottering correspondent and has flirtatiously sent this Halloween billet-doux. I now share it with you, Thirsty Reader, from largeness of soul and a desire to show off.  So pop a few corks with me, why don’t you?

Wait—that isn’t Joy. This is:
 

 ©2011 Bill Marsano
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*I just threw this in as an excuse to pass along H.L. Mencken’s nifty barb: ‘A Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.’

**Moreover, she walks in beauty like the night and is never, ever sick at sea.

Pop’s is at 256 Long Beach Rd. in Island Park, a village at the ragged and watery south end of Nassau County—you’ll find it just above the middle of the island of Long Beach, more or less between JFK and Jones Beach. In short, it’s out of the way, but it compensates with year-round aggressive pricing [often 20% lower than elsewhere] on a routinely staggering array of wines and spirits. The sale, however, goes beyond aggressive: 30% off the normally low prices on almost everything in stock—and no limit on how much or how many.

Out of the way? It soitenly is, as the great Durante used to say. Pop’s is, moreover, rather an unprepossessing institution from the outside. Indeed, one might write it off as just another strip-mall liquor store. One would be wrong.

There are other NOs: no holds, no deliveries, no rainchecks, no exceptions. After that, the loading dock is open. Anyone wanting to deplete his bank account by depleting Pop’s stock need only show up with his garish postcard and a front-end loader or forklift. And if you haven’t been, so to speak, carded? Well, as the artiste-philosophe Flavor Flav has said, ‘One monkey don’t stop no show,’ which is to say that if you sign into www.popswine.com for the regular e-mail bulletins, the general manager, Victor Doyle, will give you the discount anyway.

Pop’s online and e-mail offerings are thirst-making. Most entries begin with a bottle shot and a red-ink screamer like They say $28 (Wine Advocate), we say $13+, when bought by the case!! This is customarily followed by somebody’s point score, for those who believe in such, and a dose of folderol about the wine’s eager tannins, crocus-cloth mouthfeel and cutest little button nose, for those who believe in that. Sometimes it’s a big dose, as some of Pop’s in-house poets incline toward the epic form.

Then comes the pricing, which goes like this: the ‘Good Wine Stores’ price [i.e., others’ retail], Pop’s Single-Bottle Price, Pop’s Mixed-Case Price [for even one bottle so long as you buy 11 more of something else] and Pop’s Case Price. You can usually tell at a glance that you’re getting a deal or a steal, but if you’re addicted to decimal points grab a pencil and knock yourself out.

Note: Some limited wines are net-priced and not subject to the 30% discount. They’re the ones whose retail price and single-bottle price identical.

Time now for specific examples.

Here’s one now: 2009 Château Haut-Plantey, Haut-Medoc: ‘Stellar Red Bordeaux Super Value… $11+!!! "Great Inky dark-red color with’ yada yada . . . . It retails elsewhere for $15.69 but Pop’s 30% discount drops that to $10.98. Kendall-Jackson’s new-style Chardonnay, Avant [2009] plummets from $17.50 to $12.25. Rodney Strong 2009 Russian River Valley Pinot Noir falls from $21.75 to $15.22.

Paolo Panerai’s 2009 Le Sughere di Frassinello, an oak-aged SuperTuscan from the Maremma goes from $33 to just over $23 and change. And at the higher end is the 2007 Silver Oak Alexander Valley Cabernet. The retail price of $78.19 drops to $54.73 after the 30% discount, making it almost affordable without the need for government loan guaranties.

Of course you’ll do your homework, checking various online outlets: some may have the same item for less, or perhaps not less but close enough that, even with shipping charges applied, you’d prefer to wait by your door instead of going out to Pop’s [which is, by the way, now open Sundays]. Still, many will find this sale something of a bonanza. But if you’re out of town or out of funds you’re out of luck: It’s your misfortune, as the cowpoke said to the dogie, and none of my own. Compose your minds toward peace and wait patiently for Pop’s next sale, which begins Jan. 2 through President’s Day [Feb. 20], 2012.

©2011 Bill Marsano

Early in the last century Amy Lowell [1874-1925] was a leading figure among the poets known as Imagists [Ezra Pound skanced them as Amygists]. She was a richly flamboyant figure, a cigar-smoking lesbian who at her readings didn’t so much read her poetry as declaim and perform it. She employed sound and lighting effects, theatrical gesticulation, even, now and then, bullying [she once told a baffled audience ‘Well? Clap or hiss, I don’t care which, but for Christ’s sake, do something!’]. Lucius Beebe said admiringly that she ‘expertly handled a full-size, all-Havana smoke,‘ and added ‘reading a volume of Keats while the smoke rolled around her in clouds, Miss Lowell was one of the inspiring sights of her time and place.’
Late honors: In 1925 Lowell was the first poet on the cover of TIME. She died a few weeks later and won the Pulitzer Prize the next year. Her family’s later poets are Robert and James Russell Lowell. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an image in which Amy is, as they say, smokin’. FYI, this and other TIME covers are available at timecoverstore.com.

In short, she was a force of nature, and at a reported five-feet-oh and 200 lbs, almost a Rock of Gibraltar, too. She was also a snob. If you’ve heard the wheeze about the Yankee Brahmins of

. . . dear old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots,
And the Cabots talk only to God

know you that this Lowell spoke to no Cabots, none. Spoke to none, supped not where they dined, refused invitations they accepted. Once, bound for Europe on the old S.S. Devonian, she chanced to clap eyes on the passenger list before boarding and recoiled en horreur. Immediately ordering her dunnage put ashore she fled as if in fear of her life, explaining to a pierside reporter ‘There are sixteen Cabots aboard the Devonian this trip, and God isn’t going to miss such an opportunity.’

 Toff travel, from Boston, anyway, a century ago. The Devonian was but a mere plodder; no ocean greyhound she! Sedately riding the foaming wave at 15 knots, she could get across ‘the Pond’ in a restful eight days or so.

For that; for enlivening American poetry; for her heroic and entertaining presence Madam Lowell gets a pass on her snobbery. Wine snobs, on the other hand? No way, Gamay.

Wine snobs are a species of vermin; they should be hunted for sport. They are Enemies of Wine whose delight is to damage the innocent pleasure of others; to humiliate the neophyte; to preen themselves on superior knowledge at the expense of those who know less or dare to disagree. They are the chief support of the soft-drinks trade, to whose products they drive customers in millions. They summon to my mind the shade of Ambrose Bierce and his remark ‘their immunity from a swift and awful death is proof of God’s love for those that hate him.’

Two such creatures, Gerry and John, bodied forth recently during an online discussion ignited by Unlucky Pierre, an importer who had the temerity to ask whether French wines would sell better in the U.S. if producers noted the grape varieties or blends on their front or back labels.

Gerry, a public-relations executive, stuffily said that it wouldn’t be of much help because ‘Consumers who don’t know which grape is used to make bourgogne rouge probably wouldn’t buy it, anyway.’ The logic has a certain leaden brilliance: if you don’t buy it not knowing what it’s made of, you won’t buy it if you do. Got that? No one who chanced to start with Oregon Pinots and then tried a few from California and then even New Zealand would, upon seeing the words Pinot noir on a French label, decide to give it a try. Truly. Take Gerry’s word for it. Please.

‘And,’ Gerry added, nose aloft, ‘those who do know would be disappointed in the producer for playing to the lowest common denominator by naming the varietal on the label. Personally, I would see it as a lack of integrity and selling out.’

Heavens to Betsy, Thirsty Reader! It had never occurred to oblivious me that informing consumers would be so foul a deed, such that Camille Pissarro would have included it in his series of Turpitudes Sociales. Under that title Pissarro drew images of ‘social disgraces’ to instruct his nieces on the horrors of contemporary society. That was in 1889, but the series may still have some relevance today, as the following pictures suggest.

”Capital” is the first of the series. Other ‘social disgraces’ include the likes of “Texting at the Dinner Table,” “Rejected by Dalton,” “Bad Break-up,”
“Refused at the Velvet Rope,“
“Trolling for Hookups on Craigslist,” “Stiffing the
Waiter” and “Awkward!”

 
Of the 28 memorable images in the series, surely the most painful is this one, the stark and haunting “De-friended on Facebook.”

Still, I wonder whether righteous Gerry realizes he’s hoist with his own petard. For example, should one of his Burgundies suddenly appear with the notation ‘100% Pinot Noir Grapes’ on the label, Gerry has but two courses of action open to him, neither especially attractive: He can stop drinking that wine and be a fool or continue drinking it and be a hypocrite.

The situation is so clear it would be obvious to even such obtuse folks as The New York Times’s ethics columnist—the old one, who admitted he had absolutely no training in ethics, not even a college course, and was in fact a former gagwriter for TV sitcoms. [As was too often self-evident.]

Next came John, owner of a winery in Washington, who lamented that ‘wine neophytes in the USA have been so conditioned to think that grape variety(ies) is the most important thing to know about a wine [and most of them are] ‘entirely unaware of the concept of terroir and its huge influence on a wine.’ He added, heart all a-flutter ‘And let’s not even venture into the perhaps more subtle influences of variety clones.’

Oh whyever not, John?

John’s logic is surreal. Knowing the variety, he says, is ‘probably of only secondary importance to the region of origin and the pedigree (classification) of the wine, because knowledgeable wine aficionados already know the grape varieties . . . . ‘ Think about that for just a minute, please: if they already know the varieties, that’s because the varieties are of primary importance.

Despite all, John finally agrees that ‘the lower or middle tiers of French wine that generally are of more appeal to the un-knowledgeable USA wine consumers would probably sell better if the grape variety(ies) were listed on the label.’ Still, desperate for an out, he finally concludes that ‘there is very little room available for such stuff on labels.’

Growing more choleric by the syllable, he rambles on: ‘Ideally, [grape variety] would be placed so that little or no extra effort would be required to access it,  meaning that the [front] label should have this information. But [this] label is usually the work of paper art dearly paid for by the winery to entice buyers to purchase their liquid art. For my winery, I insist on having a clean, distinctive display label. I place all blending and other information on the [back] label for that reason . . . ‘ Really? Damned if I know whose labels he’s been looking at, but they can’t possibly include his own.

 Ooops!
This is one of John’s front labels. The name of a grape variety seems to have crept onto it, in plain sight, but doubtless without his knowing.

John rambles on: ‘were I pandering to the masses, then concentrating my efforts on the [label] might prove beneficial. But I’m focusing sales on people who know wines and do not place label interest paramountly [sic]. Makers of low-priced wines or wines intended for relatively non-knowledgeable wine drinkers might benefit from significant focus on labels. . . . And how does a serious winery maintain brand identity with labels that in no way look like [its] mainstream offerings? Do you think neophyte consumers are really going to read the bottling statements on labels? Heck, no! And these labels (or the next "big thing" label) are already passé, and people are getting tired of them. Now what? No, I’ll do an intensive job up front on my labels, and then I’ll make them ALL such that there’s no question that they are from my winery.’

This one-man shouting match suggests that John has become just a little unhinged, and it obscures Pierre’s simple question, which was: Might French wines sell better with varietal labeling? Got that? Seems like a plain yes-or-no question to me. Brand identity was never in question and multiple label styles were not mooted, Thirsty Reader. “Big thing” labels? What the hell is he talking about? In any event, he’s certain ‘people are getting tired of them,’ whatever they may be, and he won’t put details on his label because he knows people won’t read them. Smugness to such a degree almost rises to the status of an achievement.

Who benefits from such self-important nonsense? Is it truly pandering, or selling out, or dishonorable to announce what grape or grapes a wine is made of? Are they who ask for such basic information mere masses, presumably unwashed? The lowest common denominator? Would you like to sit down to dinner with Gerry and John?

Should you chance upon them, or they upon you, I earnestly propose that you heed the wisdom of my nextdoor neighbor Hoo-Chee Ma [Yo-Yo’s pole-dancing sister], who got it from Brave Sir Robin: 

Run away!

In sum, snobbery is cheap, easy, vulgar. It is unworthy. It brings to my mind The Baseball Codes, a book of etiquette. These are the unwritten rules of the game and though they be informal and handed-down they are violated at peril. Buy the book by all means, fans, but for now consider the neat summary of it by the ex-major leaguer Bob Brenly: “I can break it down into three simple things,” he told Jason Turbow and Michael Duca, the authors. Respect your teammates, respect your opponents, respect the game.” Wine snobs take note; members of the U.S. Congress, likewise.

And Pissaro? What of him? Well, he is the focus of the exhibition Pissaro’s People at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., through Oct. 2. It isn’t nearly so gloomy as the drawings here suggest.

© 2011 Bill Marsano

 What the fuss is all about: Pinot Noir grapes. Photo courtesy of Laurel Ridge Winery.

You could run across some taka mavens, such as Jancis Robinson, say, or Ray Isle of Food & Wine, or famous winemakers like Pete Rosé, the switch-hitting infielder and saignée specialist. You could visit some vineyards and dine very well and drink a goodly quantity of excellent Pinot Noir, the local likes of Eyrie and Erath,Chehalem, Sokol Blosser, Ponzi, the 5 A’s [Adelsheim, Argyle, Amity, Archery Summit and Anne Amie], Domaine Drouhin, Bethel Heights and Brick House, Cristom, Rex Hill and WillaKenzie. And other Willamette Wonders, plus more from hither and yon: California and New Zealand, and French Burgundies. Winery visits? But of course. Most important, the famous Salmon Bake. Of which more anon.

I attended the IPNC [pronounced ipnick] a few years ago owing to the event’s Amy Wesselman, who gently but persistently nagged over several months. I resisted; having been to such fests before I viewed them with a warm rush of loathing. They seemed always to be either ‘laid back’ to the point of chaos or rigid with Teutonic regimentation—and to boot were always grossly overcrowded. In the end, Amy won and I’m glad she did.

Not to say there weren’t some shocks. First, the temperature. Had the previous summer had been a hot one? If so, Oregon was taking no chances. The airport was so cold you could hang meat in it, and while folks elsewhere craved tans, the locals favored a palette of ACB [air-conditioning blue].

Then there was the air itself—almost unbreathably clean stuff, devoid of any taste or texture. Here in Manhattan, which bards in fealty to Apollo hold, we are used to air that’s full-bodied, with a long, diesel-nuanced finish and an abrasive texture. Terroir air, in short, to which Oregon’s was but kids’ stuff. Still, there was compensation in IPNC’s calm and serene organization. La Wesselman had been in command back in the day when Gen. William Booth entered Heaven, apparently, and that event went off with celestial perfection. So here she was equally skilled. No long lines of guests grown mutinous because of missing guides and transport, just seats aplenty and no one clinging to the roof racks.

The tasting tables were swaybacked with Pinot and  eagerly attended but without attracting that taster’s curse, the pesky little knots of two or three oblivious dolts who insistently park or plant themselves and refuse to move. Dinners on the campus meant fine food and wine to match, both in abundance. There were lines, but they didn’t stand still. The carvers hewed with an alacrity worthy of their kin at Katz’s; the commissary staff was likewise up to the mark. Guests were no sooner seated than Pinot was poured restoratively.

  IPNC commissary staff: ain’t no flies on them. 

The evening’s centerpiece, long and fiery Salmon Bake, deserved a four-color full-bleed magazine spread, assuming that anyone still remembers what magazines are. Or were.

The Salmon Bake is the IPNC’s annual highpoint and signature. It can’t be made too much of; indeed it has achieved sufficient fame that last year Jason Stoller Smith, an IPNC board member and eternal guest chef, was invited by the First Lady to bring the Salmon Bake to D.C. for a picnic for 2000 on the White House lawn. [Smith will stage a salmon bake for you, too, on some special and doubtless expensive occasion: he is now executive chef of Timberline Lodge, a hundred-odd miles east of McMinnville.]

The event is no mere cookout, and its importance lies in being not just a ‘traditional’ Native American affair but a genuine one, devoid of Disney-hokery. It is not what was done once but that still is today: this is the way wild salmon is cooked by the Indian tribes of the Pacific Northwest.

 
For the first couple of hours, preparations for the Salmon Bake resemble lawn vandalism. 

A rectangle of Linfield’s lawn is marked off and denuded of sod by Smith’s team of 12; then down the center of it they neatly cut a long narrow trench. This they fill with a little newspaper kindling and a deal of hardwood, whole logs and splits.

The ground is clear and the fire is laid. Short lengths of pipe [background] serve as sockets for the salmon-bearing alder saplings.

The whole is set alight in the afternoon, and while waiting for the flames to subside, the team lashes  split salmon to the green alder saplings that will suspend them above the pulsing heat of the embers.

 
Mid-afternoon: the flames are banking down and several dozen salmon go to glory.
 
It is, Thirsty Reader, not the sort of thing you see every day, which is why the photos here give pride of place to the Salmon Bake. Pictures of wine bottles surrounded by schmoozers and schnorrers are two-a- penny on a good day.

 
A last look before these salmon are served.

I must say a word too about the breakfasts—what I think of as the Semi-Sportive Breakfasts because of their non-competitive athleticism. As for the food, remember that 1950s anecdote about Mr. and Mrs. DiMaggio entertaning our troops in Korea, with Marilyn returning to their hotel after one of her deafeningly successful appearances and naively saying  ‘Joe, you never heard such cheering!’ And he evenly replies ’Yes I have’? Well do but substitute seen/bacon for heard/cheering and you’ll get the picture. Then repeat, with waffles.

Starting the day with a volleyball breakfast. 

The athleticism centered on wading pools ringed by blissed-out munchers dunking their dogs and kicking, heading or batting beach balls about with no particular end in view. No scores were kept, so it was no-net-tennis, so to speak, and Robert Frost wouldn’t’ve approved. What mattered was nothing less than players’ proper etiquette, which held that anyone could return any ball that came his way to any other pool in any way but without leaving his seat or significantly interrupting his meal.

Somehow I managed not to catch up with David Lett, whom I’d had several good phone interviews with but had never met. And I regret it, for he died too young two years later. He was Pinot’s pioneer in the Willamette Valley; naturally some [t]wit dubbed him Papa Pinot. He had an earthier sense of humor. Recalling his neighbors’ horror as he ripped up acres of profitable prunes, he called himself the First Fool; called his assistant ‘my caseworker’; scorned the fad aspect of organics. He said to me during one of our phone talks ‘I’ve been organic since I planted my first grapes 35 years ago, but I’m not certified because I won’t have anything to do with another regulatory agency. And I wouldn’t put it on the label in any case. I’m about eco, not ego.’

David Lett in the 1960s with a double armload of Pinot Noir. Photo courtesy of Diana Lett.

Next year’s IPNC will be held July 27-29, and it will be the part of wisdom to request event and ticket information pronto from info@ipnc.com.

Post-IPNC I discovered the town’s Historic District [both blocks!] as well as its farmers’ market, which compensate for the poison of Rt. 99W. McMinnville’s share of 99W is its main drag [in both senses]: a fluorescent glare of strip-mall marts, car dealerships and gimcrack road-front businesses decorated with parking lots, hideous and apparently endless. Did I really see a sign reading ‘Last Strip Mall for 50 Yards’ or was I [please!] hallucinating? The Historic District may be small but it convinced me that just about nothing built in the last half century is worth a second glance.

The surprise or even shock of McMinnville was the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum.

 
Airplanes galore: The EASM is large and well-organized, with superb restorations.

With its IMAX theater and dozens of professionally restored airplanes, among them Howard Hughes’ infamous  Spruce Goose, combat airplanes from WWI to the present, and many more, this museum is a must. Its wide array of well-documented, well-organized exhibits would do the Smithsonian proud, let alone a town with a population of 32,000.

 
This ex-United Airlines DC-3 is one of several airplanes that crouch comfortably beneath the wings of the enormous Spruce Goose. 

Then it was back to the airport for me. There I realized I’d got used to the air-conditioning as well as the air and was told that I look good in blue.

©2011 Bill Marsano

The New York Mets, a circus masquerading as a professional baseball team, has more and better fans than it deserves and has routinely driven them to drink. Now it’s upgrading the drinks available at Citi Field. I’ll spill more beans but only in good time or due course or both. I’ll have no truck with those who’d try to hassle and harry a frail white-haired old man.

Vino Solo in all its  Tripartite Glory: the Mets’ newest phenom.

Mets fans know suffering. Lately the team is mostly in the mud room when not in the cellar. Key players are routinely sick or injured or were or will be, and when the lame and the stringhalt finally do recover it’s seldom for long. Its high-priced stars don’t shine; front-office redeemers [Steve Phillips, Omar Minaya anyone?] redeem them not. Now stir in two tablespoons of alleged links to Bernie Madoff and a long ugly history of bad signings going back to Bobby Bonilla* and beyond and what have you got but the Flying Dutchman of Major League Baseball?

  Mets fans in torment for  their heroes: As it turned out, they couldn’t do it and they didn’t go all the way. Photo courtesy of A.J. Daulerio.

Fred Wilpon, the owner, belittles the Mets [‘shitty team,’ he told The New Yorker] and scorns their fans. Since he took over the team in 1979 the Mets have performed adequately enough all in all; they’ve finished no worse the second in their division 14 times; got to the World Series twice, winning once; become rooted in New York City folklore. But Wilpon hardly cares. He’s besotted instead with his boyhood heroes, the Brooklyn Dodgers. He even had the Mets’ new stadium, Citi Field, designed as a copy of the Dodgers’ old Ebbets Field, thus shutting the Mets out of their own ballpark. ‘How about that!’ as Mordechai ben Yehuda Aliah used to say in regard to a team from The Bronx.

  Combining glass and closure takes screwcaps to, as they say, ‘the next level.’ Be thankful no one’s calling it screwcap technology.

All is not Spiral Darkness, however. It seems certain that Wilpon will lose control of the team soon and on top of that there’s that big breakthrough at the concession stands, which now sell Napa-made Vino Solo Merlot and Chardonnay. Their 6-ounce bottles are unique: unscrew the cap and it becomes a glass. Plastic, of course and hardly the product of decades of experimentation by Old World craftsmen. It would give Georg Riedel the dry fantods and Max the blue creevies, but it’s a big improvement for ballparks, theaters and such. It would be perfect for airlines, too, but airline execs prefer to saddle cabin staff with the clumsy, time-consuming chore of serving from Tetra-Paks. It’s cheaper. They won’t adopt Vin Solo until they can charge extra for it.

The thing isn’t new, Thirsty Reader. Australia’s Hardys launched it a few years ago and, for reasons mysterious and obscure, called it the Shuttle (was it aimed at commuters?). I’d call it the Uni-Pak, but who listens to me? Anyway, it sank for some reason and it didn’t re-appear until Jon Gelula rang me up last month to crow that Mets fans can now sip in style. [Lifted pinkies optional, of course.]

Gelula, the president of KDM Global Partners and SinglzKDM North America, has the Shuttle in his talons and is hawking it as Vino Solo. He may even add more varieties and a Reserve. He’s also placed his product at the Seattle Mariners’ Safeco Field and the Tampa Bay Rays’ Tropicana Field, and says he’ll have added a dozen NFL stadiums by this fall, on condition the NFL has a fall. He’s dishing up retail 3-packs for summer partying.

Did I say the Shuttle isn’t new? Criminentlies! It may be actually be centuries old. The decades-long restoration of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling frescoes, which were painted by Michelangelo between 1508 and 1512 at the bullying insistence of Pope Julius II, gave rise among the work crew to a steady flow of feverish rumors [nowadays called buzz] about the possible presence of a navetta in the soffitto. 

  With their casual and even dismissive glances, theologians and scholars saw nothing amiss.

Bats in the belfry is more like it, said the assembled theologians and art experts of Christendom [and Jewendom, too]. Grudgingly they shot some hasty and dismissive glances ceilingward, then scoffed and skanced reflexively and en masse [as it were]. What, they demanded to know, would mere laborers know about art? But later close inspections by one of the work crew, the excessively mere A. Gino Moto, an msg-addicted fusion-food sushi chef who was assigned to cleaning brushes on a work-release detail, made the mucky-mucks eat their words [zen hatsugen wo tekkai suru]. See below and see why.

Heavens to Betsy, as my mother used to say. Is it a miracle? You make the call! The Vatican usually blows a lot of smoke [sometimes white, sometimes black] when asked about such sensitive topics, but this time it is, uncharacteristically, keeping mum. Strictly acqua in bocca! as they say at the Holy See.

  A. Gino Moto’s closer look showed the rumors were based in fact!  

Oh–so how’s the wine, anyway and by the way? I gave the tasting job to my new nextdoor neighbor Taco Belle, the nacho-loving carhop and femme tamale, and sent her off to Citi Field on the 7 train. Girl’s been a tortured fan since 1962, the Mets’ record-setting [120 losses] debut year. For morale support she dragooned a couple of BFFs: Bimbo Baggins, the Hobbiton Hottie, and Blasé Starr, a lackadaisical strip-tease artist celebrated for her on-stage apathy. [Blasé didn’t so much strip, says her Wikipedia entry, as ’allow her diaphanous garments to slide languidly to the floor.’]

Post-game, Taco said the Merlot was pretty good: ‘even in the first inning, before I needed it [that was in the second inning, when star Carlos Beltran fouled one off his right leg and had to leave the game]. I ixnayed the Chardonnay, but Blasé and Bimbo were all over it. Long story short, the wine was good and the bullpen not. They put two men on and gave up a three-run homer in the ninth, but somehow failed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Otherwise we would have been like Lakers fans: needing a whole lot more than 13.8% ABV.’

————————————————————————-

*In 1991 the Mets made Bonilla baseball’s highest-paid player with a free-agent contract for five years at $29 million per. Bonilla turned out to be no saviour and the Mets traded him to the Orioles in July ’95. Astonishingly, the Mets signed him again [why, O Lord?] for 1999 and 2000. He played in all of 60 games, clashed with his manager and wasn’t even on the bench when the Mets lost the deciding game of the NLCS: he was in the clubhouse, playing cards with Rickey Henderson. The Mets released him, agreeing to deferred payment of his final-year salary [$5.9 million] plus 8% interest, in annual installments beginning this year.

So this July the Mets will pay Bonilla $1.19 million and they’ll pay him that sum every year until 2035, when Bonilla will be 72 and will have collected just shy of $30 million—$5,000,000 a game—some of which he might well have spent on a shrine to Steve Phillips, who, in baseball lingo, ‘inked the pact.’

Groveling thanks to the peerless [not to mention unpaid] Darren Tuozzoli, who created both of the splendid Sistine Chapel montages.

N.B.: Translations by the equally peerless [and unpaid] Maria Galetta and Akiko Katayama.

©2011 Bill Marsano

My personal Derby pick is Stay Thirsty [above, with Ramon Dominguez up], whose cheerful name recalls not only my devoted Thirsty Reader but Dos Equis beer’s Most Interesting Man in the World TV and radio commercials, memorably taglined ‘Stay thirsty, my friends.’ The MIMW’s sophistication, worldliness and craggy good looks blend Marlboro Man, Fidel Castro, Ernest Hemingway and Ricardo Montalban [in his Rich Corinthian Leather Period]; finding a face for that was a tall order*. That plus the patended deadpan narration of Will Lyman and good copywriting makes ads that are funny, witty and imaginative; unlike, for example, most wine commercials. So funny and witty they inspire the same from viewers: quite an accomplishment, considering that as a rule YouTubers’ comments are usually moronic when not worse.

Of the 15 spots in the series so far my favorite opens deceptively with an idyll in the Italian countryside but goes wild very quickly. Most can be seen online: start with Google and YouTube, then check out www.facebook.com/dosequis; it has more spots, plus details of the upcoming ‘League of the Most Interesting’ contest. Unfortunately, the contest doesn’t involve overhand bowling or being thrown out of an airplane in a kayak [perhaps due to some PR-side fretting over ‘liability’].

My backup is Pants On Fire [Rosie Napravnik in irons], again for the name. Both names, in fact. Just imagine the track announcer excitedly shouting ‘Napravnik’s taking Pants On Fire to the rail!’? Not quite the same if it’s Mucho Macho Man, say, or Archarcharch? To say nothing of Comma to the Top, a horse unreliably reported to be owned by a renegade international copy-editing cartel.

When last in Louisville [say Looville, never Loo-ey-ville] I was not on the rail or in the infield or at the clubhouse turn but was immersed in whiskey and baseball at two of the city’s finest wood-working institutions. One is the Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory, which got a magnificent makeover, renovation and general glorification in 2009. You know the drill: immerse thyself in the National Pastime; see trees become bats; soak up the wisdom of Ruth, Aaron, Williams and other great hitters; and learn about women and minorities in the game. Then play with the many interactive displays and achieve photo immortality while clutching an immortal’s bat. That’s me [below] with the Model B220 warclub of the great No. 7**]. It’s the real thing, hence the white cotton gloves.

Then came the Brown-Forman Cooperage [née Blue Grass] which makes 1500 barrels a day for Woodford Reserve, Old Forester, Jack Daniel’s, Early Times, Canadian Mist, El Jimador and Herradura. Among spirits companies only B-F has its own cooperage, and despite the addition of modern equipment and constant updating, the plant still has a 1940s look and feel—and smell: the air is rich with the aroma of furnace-charred American white oak.
 

Chris Morris, B-F’s master distiller, guided me safely through and warned me about the perils of the barrel railway, while saying the aromas are his favorite part. Mine was the hand-work. The hand tools of the cooper’s mystery—the sun plane and the croze, the long joiner [a plane about 6 feet long], the bung auger, the chince or chincing iron [‘used for driving the flag into the groove’] and such—were vanished even by the time the plant opened in 1945. Even so, barrels are still raised by hand [N.B.: not made, assembled, built, erected or slung together; the term of art is raised]. An expert can raise a couple of hundred per shift, and there are hushed whispers of veritable Stave Gods known to have raised 350 and even more. The cooperage has since opened to the public; it’s a treat for kids and factory-tour fans who delight in seeing raw material become parts become products, also for fossils like your correspondent, who is so old he can remember a time when American workers actually made things. See www.mintjuleptours.com or call 502 583-1433 and seek ye the peerless Joanie. And just watch your step anywhere near the barrel railway.

                                      
This is no drill, as they said at Pearl Harbor. Barrels come down the rails without warning, swiftly and silently; they weigh more than 100 pounds apiece and will flatten anything and anyone that gets in their way.

It’s thirsty work watching so much barrel-raising, and it called for a drink or few, which Chris elected to lay on at the Woodford Reserve Distillery, down the road a piece near Versailles, which you’ll want to pronounce Ver-sales. You don’t want anyone thinking you’re French. The building, a handsome limestone structure dating to 1838 and added to on several occasions since, sits serenely in a bosky dell beside Glenn’s Creek.

The setting inspires romantics to dream of colorful artisan moonshiners, but Chuck Cowdery, author of the superb Bourbon, Straight: The Uncut and Unfiltered Story of American Whiskey, has said that modern ‘shiners, who merely cook bulk sugar into crude booze, deserve not folkloric halos but sojourns in the Waddy-Petrona Correctional Facility and Dental School. Max Watman, whose delightful Chasing the White Dog : An Amateur Outlaw’s Adventures in Moonshine, would no doubt agree.

Brown-Forman has restored the distillery to a thing of rural-industrial beauty, and visitors are welcome to stop in and see Woodford Reserve being made. It’s awful-looking, awful-smelling stuff you see pumped into the big wooden fermenters, but then chemistry takes over the ancient practices of pot distillation

and oak-aging work their miracles, first in the three big Scotch-built copper stills, then in the barrels stacked for six or seven years in the rickhouse.

Tours of varying length are but $5 and $10 [call 859 879 1812] and there are spaces available to rent for festive events, but weddings and wedding receptions are excluded, most likely for reasons of self-defense. Wedding-rehearsal dinners? They’re another story because they’re reliably less boisterous events [859 879 1934]. Whatever the reason for your visit it will be the part of wisdom to call the tour office first, for precise directions are required. The taped message warns that ‘due to our distinct location’ [i.e., the 19th Century], ‘using GPS is not advisable.’

The distillery is a landmark partly for its beauty [it’s considerable; this is Thoroughbred country, after all] but mainly for its importance in bourbon history. It was here under Oscar Pepper [son of the distillery’s founder, Elijah] that Edinburgh-born Dr. James C. Crow pretty much created modern bourbon by innovation and experiment. He created the sour-mash process and maintained rigorous cleanliness in thesearch for product consistency, and he was the first, so far as is known, to sell exclusively whiskey that had been aged in new charred oak barrels. Before the Good Doctor made bourbon, most of what Kentucky made was mere whiskey, and often very mere whiskey at that.

Our farewell drinks that afternoon came from a barrel in the rickhouse: Chris tapped it with an electric drill and I came thirstily to the rescue when the bit jammed in the dense wood. All those hours of This Old House turned out to be useful after all. Imagine that.

Stay thirsty, my friends.

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*well filled by the actor Jonathan Goldsmith. You were expecting maybe Ludwig Stössel?

**Mickey Mantle. You had to ask?

BAR-BET TRIVIA

The distillery became a National Historic Landmark in 2000. Dr. Crow did indeed practice medicine, and he gave his services, according to Chuck Cowdery, ‘mostly without charge.’ Cowdery adds that he ‘was fond of reciting the poems of Robert Burns’ and that after his death his name became part of one of America’s first brands, Old Crow. Once famous, it is now no more than a bottom-shelf ‘value brand.’

© Bill Marsano

Born during the Depression, Jackson pitched in early to help his family, starting as a paper boy at five and going on to work at many other jobs— cop, teamster, stevedore and ambulance driver, among them—to put himself through law school.

After success as a lawyer he stepped away from the bar and in 1974 proceeded, with his first wife, Jane Kendall, to buy and replant, 80 acres of pear and walnut trees. He was a grower until a late-cancelled order left him lumbered with a crop, so he began making wine himself. Kendall-Jackson’s first Chardonnay was the 1982 vintage [below]. It was successful, attracting many new recruits to wine largely because of its evident sweetness [which was, some say, a happy accident resulting from a slip-up during fermentation].

Many more successes followed. Although devoted to Thoroughbred racing, as Rachel Alexandra fans well know, Jackson also reinvested in the company that would become Jackson Family Wines. Perhaps heeding the wisdom of Will Rogers [“Buy land. They ain't making any more of the stuff”] he bought land in California to the extent of needing a helicopter to tour it all: 14,000 acres under vine and just as many not. The company’s portfolio in the U.S. includes K-J [and Kendall-Jackson Extra Virgin Olive Oil], La Crema, Cardinale, Vérité, Murphy-Goode, Robert Pecota Winery, Edmeades, Matanzas Creek, Stonestreet, Arrowood, Lajota, Cardinale, Atalon, Lokoya, Carmel Road, Cambria, Hartford Family Wines, Vérité, Archipel, Chateau Potelle, Freemark Abbey and Byron Winery [which just introduced two new Santa Barbara County wines, the 2009 Chardonnay and 2009 Pinot Noir. Abroad are Château Lassègue in Bordeaux, Tenuta di Arceno in Tuscany, Viña Calina in Chile and Yangarra in Australia’s McLaren Vale

His wine to a large degree established Chardonnay as America’s favorite wine and K-J as its favorite Chardonnay. Snobs never forgave Jackson for that: as Americans have grown what some like to think of as more ‘sophisticated’ about wine a coterie of snobs and geeks has bred and inbred apparently for the sole purpose of scorning success. As so it follows as the night the day that such folk amuse their self-important selves by heaping scorn upon K-J. they are, they think, far too good for a wine produced in such quantities that ‘bottles’ and ‘cases’ have no real meaning and the only graspable unit of measure is probably metric tons. K-J Chardonnay may not be the artisanal or ultra-natural or bio-confragable stuff so beloved of the snooty but showed and still shows showed thousands and even hundreds of thousands of people that there is life moistened only by Coke, Fanta and Mountain Dew.

In 2009 Jackson was inducted into the Vintner’s Hall of Fame in a ‘class’ that included Warren Winiarski of Stag’s Leap; Jack & Jamie Davies, revitalizers of the old Schramsberg estate; the legendary Beringer Brothers, Frederick and Jacob; and wine writer Gerald Asher. At the time Jackson said ‘Wine is a part of our cultural heritage. . . . Wine celebrates friends, family, and love—all of the best things in life. . . . From day one we have been a family-owned and family-run business. It is a distinction that is rapidly becoming a rarity in our industry. Our family culture is built on the time-honored principles of hard work, integrity, and uncompromising desire for quality and the long-term stewardship of the land.’

Jackson is survived by his wife, Barbara Banke, and five children. All are active in Jackson Family Wines, something of which Jess was extremely proud. The Family will welcome anecdotes and recollections sent to jacksontribute@kjmail.com.

Come the 29th the Prince and the Commoner will be wed, and in a mood of unaccustomed generosity I pledge to forgive all related clichés [tying the knot, getting hitched, connubial bliss, etc.]—except the nonsense about leading her down the aisle. Aisles come in pairs and are at a church’s sides, parallel to the nave, which is where, with weddings, the action is. Only inadequate ecclesiastical vocabulary can account for this aisles error, so let’s hear no more of it. Anyway, Bill ‘n’ Kate seem to be decent kids who’ve kept themselves mostly out of the tabloids. Good cess to ‘em, says I, but with none of those Colonial yearnings that make too many Americans go all caramel-centered over Team Windsor. [My favorite example: the Sensitive Soul who reacted to 1997’s tragedy crying ‘Diana? Dead? But if she could die, what hope is there for the rest of us?’] Still, I suffer something of a frisson when I think of Kate wearing that ring: surely it’s cursed?

 The sapphire alone in Kate’s engagement ring would retail for about $300,000; pikers can buy Amazon’s replica for $19.99 + shipping. Similar fauxnies are going like coldcakes for as much as a grand apiece. 

Sick to death of what is rapidly becoming a tawdry business? A young English artist of wit and originality has made her protest plain with her line of souvenir airsickness bags in four colors: about $1.65 from lydialeith.com. Royal condoms are also helping the monarchy morph steadily from institution to horselaugh.

The breakthrough for this wedding is that the royal family is no longer obsessed with virginity. Kate is allegedly a maidenhead short of maidenhood but ‘No biggie,’ says Prince Philip, reports Nigel Dumpster, dirt-dishing star reporter-hallucinator of Britain’s gutter press. [Back in the day—Diana’s, specifically —the royals got the blue creevies at the prospect of ‘some bloke going round saying he’s had the Queen of England.’] Kate’s fans, re-styling her deficit, say that makes her a modern bride. Shocked, shocked is my nextdoor neighbor H*Y*M*E*N K*A*P*L*A*N, Jewish virgin and proselytizer for purity. (‘Invest in your future—save it for marriage’ is her mantra). Never mind: the latest nonsense is the rumor that Kate may be in whole or in part Jewish [her mom’s a Goldsmith]. H*Y*M*E*N e-mails me a definitive denial: ‘MOT? IMNSHO, NFW! FO-MCL.’ [I have no idea what that means.] ‘Yeah, sure’ she says, revert-ing to actual words and scoring a rare double positive. ‘Goldsmith’s as Jewish as Fort Smith!’

  Fort Smith, Ark.: Jewish? You make the call

Yet there is or was one royal who won me over: the Queen Mum [1900-2002], whom Helena Bonham Carter played so splendidly in The King’s Speech. Born Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon, she was successively Duchess of York, Queen Consort,
and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mum. Her family was Scottish, mere minor nobility [not even Triple-A], but that didn’t matter: she married the Duke of York, who as second in line to the throne was pretty mere himself. In short [he stood a semi-kingly 5’9”], he didn’t matter either. Until.

The Duchess of York, by Philip de László, 1925.

Until Wallis Simpson did Britain the great but rarely recognized favor of sweeping the king off his feet and his throne to boot. Edward VIII and Wallis went on to a life of global freeloading as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor; York became King George VI with the Duchess as his Queen Consort, and they became, with Winston Churchill, the great pillars of British wartime morale. That was especially so in 1940 London, during the Blitz: 76 consecutive nights of Luftwaffe air raids that leveled large parts of the city. The city’s East End, whose docks were critical to the shipping of food and arms, took a beating far worse than anything seen in movies.

  The London Blitz: St. Paul’s survives, Edward R. Murrow broadcasts live from the rooftops [‘This . . . is London. . .’] and the Queen says she is glad that Buckingham Palace took a hit.

When finally Buckingham Palace itself was hit the Queen said she was glad: ‘It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.’ Would she evacuate her children to safety in the countryside? No: ‘The children won’t leave without me. I won’t leave without the King, and the King won’t leave.’

Official portrait as Queen
by Sir Gerald Kelly

She was a trooper all her life. Aged 101 she broke her pelvis but still stood for the anthem at her late husband’s memorial service; injured again later she attended Princess Margaret’s funeral. The family fretted over the long trip involved but she did not. She asked only to be spared the press, so as to avoid being photographed in a wheelchair. She had wit. She was keen on horse racing and fishing. In hospital for a fishbone stuck in her throat, she said dryly ‘The salmon have got their own back.’ My relentless colleague J.T.D. Keyes tells me this: Aware that her staff included many elderly gay men, she once rang down from her bedroom to ask ‘How would one of you old queens like to bring this old queen a large gin and tonic?’

Speaking of which . . . It’s time to make one, because the G&T is a British classic, probably created in Injah during the Raj and an American favorite; and it was the go-to drink of the Queen Mum. To be sure of getting it made right, I’m calling in my Huckleberry friend Bruce Ramsay, who serves as
PouredWithPleasure’s miscelatore dei tutti miscelatori, for wisdom and counsel.

GIN and TONIC

Let the gin be Gordon’s London Dry if, like the QM, you prefer traditional taste (no rose petals or lemon-grass here!) and outstanding value. Otherwise, Beefeater is a wonderful, respected alternative. Be sure that your ice cubes are fresh ones, not antiques that have been hanging around since the Ice Age. The tonic must be chilled and must be top drawer, too. Q Tonic and Fever-Tree are the best; stuff that comes in a plastic jug the size of a HEAT round is not. As for limes, those dull in color and hard as golf balls are too old; don’t stir without fresh ones.

 The highly regarded Q poses with a G&T that can be fairly called excessively responsible. Why not Schweppes, the old stand-by? Because it’s fallen, nay plummeted from favor because of high-fructose corn syrup and too many calories. It’s suspected of using synthetic quinine, too.
Now for the assembly. This is a built drink, that is, it’s built in the same glass in which it’s served. Fill a Tom Collins glass (or other 10-12 ounce glass) to the rim with ice. Add 1-1/2 to 2 ounces of Gordon’s gin. Carefully pour your tonic down the side of the glass, not over the ice. (This, says Japanese master mixologist Kazuo Uyeda, ensures that the tonic’s refreshing carbonation will be preserved.)

Gently pull a long spoon upward through the drink to stir. Add a straw for decorous sipping and your choice of lime garnish: wedge on the rim or wheel slid down inside the glass. The wheel is a bit more decorative but the wedge is more practical for those who wants a squeeze of juice to adjust the flavor.

You have heard from the Master, Thirsty Reader. Now, let us stand and toast the Queen Mother’s memory. Cheers! Three cheers, in fact.

©2011 Bill Marsano