1989 La Chapelle Hermitage - Thirty-Seven Years After

There is another story I really want to tell, but this one comes first. Last week I had a few fellows over for a birthday meal — they were all (or had already turned) 50, and I was 25 years ahead of them. Good for them: they still have more time than I do to do whatever they need to do in this life. For my part, I have spent years doing things I wanted to do and had to do. One of them was collecting wine. For this evening, I pulled out one of four remaining bottles of 1989 La Chapelle Hermitage from Paul Jaboulet.

In the last century, I obtained three cases of this wine — one case of the 1985 and two cases of the 1989 — intending to enjoy them for special occasions over the years: holidays mainly, but special birthdays too. Over time I got to know this wine well; it became something like a member of the family. I tried both vintages as the years passed, but found the 1985 was developing faster than the 1989 — which was fortunate, since I only had one case of the 1985. That vintage is long gone, but the 1989s carried me forward to this point. Three bottles remain.

Annotations from a Life in Wine, Writing, and Photography

...my 6 bits worth

There is something about a birthday that both excites and terrorizes me. Of course, the excitement comes from an early age, with the anticipation of a celebration and all the ensuing detritus that is attached to it. Fun, maybe a party, gifts, and being the center of attention are the upsides. The downside is the inevitable march towards oblivion that we all are making. Yeah, I know, I think about that, especially now that I have many more days behind me than before me.

That said, it's time to take inventory. What do I need to sell, what do I need to keep, what do I need to cast off, what do I need to drink, what do I need?

For those still hanging on to an identification that no longer fits?

(homage to Gianni Di Venanzo)

Terry Theise has a new piece up wrangling for the defense of "fine wine" as a category. His method is to sort wine into three tiers — schlock, good, fine — not by how it tastes but by why it was made, and whether the wine respected the person drinking it. It's an idiosyncratic approach, but I’ve learned that tangling with wine writers over their semantic intentions is, as we say in these parts, like pissing in a dust storm in West Texas — everybody gets soiled and no one goes home happy.

While Terry has been busy developing his taxonomy, I've been wondering about something else: what happens to the person who built an identity on that taxonomy, once the taxonomy stops organizing their days?

Vinitaly Books Passage on a Propagandist's Ship

There's a press release sitting in my inbox announcing that the Amerigo Vespucci — Italy's training ship, the so-called most beautiful ship in the world — is sailing into New York Harbor for the Fourth of July. It'll anchor off New Jersey, join fifty-some tall ships in a parade up the Hudson, dock at Pier 86, and spend a week hosting Italy's defense minister, its navy chief, the Carabinieri commander-general, the ambassador to the U.S., the mayor of Genoa, and a delegation that reads like the guest list for a state funeral. The America's Cup trophy is flying in from New Zealand to sit on the deck for a photo. The UN's Chiefs of Police Summit is convening below decks. It is, by any measure, a genuinely big deal — 250 years of American independence, a navy turning out its flagship to mark it, real history happening on real water.

And somewhere in the middle of all that pageantry, on Sunday afternoon at 3 p.m., Veronafiere is giving a PowerPoint about Vinitaly.USA. Woo-hoo!