Literary Indignation, Post #5

FiveThirtyEight Edition

Read that headline again. Someone actually approved that headline, and it got onto the site.

William Koch — yes, one of those Kochs — is giving a tour of his wine cellar when he asks the obvious question: “Did you see the wine bathroom?” he asked. “Wanna see it?”

Obvious…? You should work on expressing sarcasm through writing.

The bathroom is, one can’t help but assume, where Koch and his guests unzip the flies of tailored Brioni suit pants and catch final glimpses of $1,000 bottles of Burgundy and Bordeaux, since metabolized and micturated.

You are an asshole.

I watched the sale’s final day unfold, fascinated — and a little dismayed — by the wines fetching these handsome sums, where they came from, and where they were going.

You seem to be blissfully unaware of how the Kochs make their real money.

Off I went in search of data, and I found it in the form of a juicy, dense spreadsheet containing 140,000 wines from 10,000 producers in 33 countries, and their prices.

https://www.google.com/search?q=trying+too+hard&tbm=isch

In 1855, in preparation for the Universal Exhibition in Paris, a group of French courtiers, at the behest of Napoleon III, ranked the region’s wines — a sort of viticultural, Second Empire version of the U.S. News & World Report college rankings. Five châteaux — Lafite, Latour, Margaux, Haut-Brion and Mouton — are designated premiers crus, or first growths, the Ivy League of the 19th-century wine world.

This is a very freshman-at-an-Ivy-League-school way of seeming dismissive of college rankings and Ivy League schools.

With age comes viticultural know-how, after all. “Over time, it starts getting harder and harder to screw up, because you’ve figured it out. You do it really well. You’ve built your reputation. You’ve built your reputation on the secondary market,” Hammer said.

Of course, we can trust the unbiased opinion of the Vinfolio director of cellar acquisitions.

Data is unlikely to settle any matters of oenological taste, but it can provide dueling summaries.

What

In this case, it reveals two wine regions that appear, quantitatively, quite similar: Ages and quantities sold at auction mirror each other closely, as does the price increase as the regions’ wines age.

But the psychophysiological effects are purported to be quite different. One region speaks to the super-ego, the other to the id. “Aspects of Bordeaux appeal to the aesthete, as Burgundy appeals to the sensualist,” Hugh Johnson wrote in “The World Atlas of Wine.”

What

By the way, that paragraph is how the section ends.

“It’s sort of secretive. Not secretive in a bad way,” Hammer said of Screaming Eagle. “You couldn’t walk into a wine store and get it off the shelf. You couldn’t drive to the winery and purchase it. The only way to get it was to be on this very small mailing list.” (Screaming Eagle declined to comment for this article.)

Yeah, that was a good use of a paragraph.

The near-infinite combinations of soil, climate, botany, culture and method produce near-infinite expressions of wine.

If my 12-year-old nephew wrote that in an essay I would make him rip up the page and start over.

Lo! Time, fruit and money around the world, over the past century:

Seriously, what

But wait a second. Isn’t this all bullshit?

What

More expensive wine may actually taste better, for literally no other reason than the price on its sticker.

This is a surprise to someone writing about economics?

Many, many wines are outside the database entirely. In eastern Iowa, for example, in a region now known as the Upper Mississippi River Valley Viticultural Area, just outside of Baldwin (population: 106), my uncle makes wine. Good wine. He makes it where my grandfather, and his grandfather before him, once farmed. Corn and cattle. The winemaking started as a hobby in the farmhouse basement — proto-homebrewers, my family. Grapes there aren’t the varietals with which most are likely familiar, your Cabernets and Pinots. They’re thicker-skinned, to withstand the harsh Midwest winters, and go by names like St. Croix, LaCrosse and Marechal Foch. My uncle’s bottles go for about $14. You won’t find it in any of the charts above. But we drink it. And we are happy.

I guess the editor just stopped reading halfway through?