DISQUS

Billy B. · 2 years ago

Your points are well-taken and articulated. Wine is best enjoyed with people. Can one truly differentiate between a 95 point wine and a 100 point wine? The debate rages on. Although this is not speicifically what you are getting at, I like the way you have framed the 100 point question. People and food (and swallowing) should be part of the wine drinking experience whenever possible.

Adrian · 2 years ago

What was it that the U.S. government called suspected communists back in the 1940s and 1950s? Wasn't it something like "prematurely anti-fascist"?


I wish I could think up a similarly clever euphemism for my "affliction" since, like you, I have been passionate about all things Spanish for most of my adult life, long before the present craze, reaching back to the early 1990s, when I studied Spanish in Madrid, and, also like you, it is impossible or me to separate out a wine from its logical and beautifully compatible companions: food, people, and place.



As I have written elsewhere, it is clear to me that fawning praise for Spanish wines in the American critical wine press has been a great boon for Spain, even if the context of its appraisal is devoid of those things we both cherish and you so eloquently enumerate:



"Wine is alive! Wine is people. Wine is culture. Wine is amusing. Wine is for wooing. I’ve never reached the bottom of a 100 pt wine and felt differently unless I shared it with my wife or friend."



So it is incumbent upon us to devise not a rival but a complementary critical strategy that takes all of these things into account, especially food, to focus particularly a wine's pairability over its supposed ageability.



Maybe I was prematurely anti-uncontextually monocritical.

Adrian · 2 years ago

What was it that the U.S. government called suspected communists back in the 1940s and 1950s? Wasn't it something like "prematurely anti-fascist"?

I wish I could think up a similarly clever euphemism for my "affliction" since, like you, I have been passionate about all things Spanish for most of my adult life, long before the present craze, reaching back to the early 1990s, when I studied Spanish in Madrid, and, also like you, it is impossible or me to separate out a wine from its logical and beautifully compatible companions: food, people, and place.

As I have written elsewhere, it is clear to me that fawning praise for Spanish wines in the American critical wine press has been a great boon for Spain, even if the context of its appraisal is devoid of those things we both cherish and you so eloquently enumerate:

"Wine is alive! Wine is people. Wine is culture. Wine is amusing. Wine is for wooing. I’ve never reached the bottom of a 100 pt wine and felt differently unless I shared it with my wife or friend."

So it is incumbent upon us to devise not a rival but a complementary critical strategy that takes all of these things into account, especially food, to focus particularly a wine's pairability over its supposed ageability.

Maybe I was prematurely anti-uncontextually monocritical.