The customer is always right -- or, folks be lyin'

Or, folks be young and in love, therefore not listening, or folks have bad memories (which is very possible, mine falters too), or folks are being lied to. Although this last seems unlikely, when the lie we're annoyed about is so easy to check and to refute. We were annoyed enough, on coming home and settling in and fixing a little drinky, to fill the ice cube tray with fresh water and then proceed to open the basement door, rather than the freezer dooor, to put it away. Time to vent.

A young couple ask for help in the store. Fine. Happy to oblige. Convo turns to what they want, namely something from Stag('s) (s') Leap. This could be either the district -- they didn't absorb that information at all -- or either of two wineries, Stag's Leap [Wine Cellars], or Stags' Leap [Winery].

"Yes, we know," the pretty young woman breathed excitedly. (I'm turning fifty soon so I'm annoyed by pretty young women with long, effortlessly glossy brown hair.) "We just got back from a visit to Napa and Sonoma" -- "how nice!" I hiss -- "and we visited Stags' Leap, with the apostrophe outside the s. That's the original one."

"Oh, but I've not heard that," I answer carefully, the wine professional who nevertheless wants to keep the customer happy and spending money on the big 15-percent-off Saturday sale. "There are two Stag ('s)(s') Leaps, you know, plus there's the district -- "

"Yes, the one with the apostrophe inside the s and the one with the apostrophe outside the s. We visited that one."

I squint appraisingly. "Yes, now there is the Stag's Leap whose wines won the famous 'Judgement of Paris' wine tasting back in the '70s,"  I begin to explain. "That's the Stag's Leap with the apostrophe inside the s. Stag's Leap Wine Cellars."

"No, it's the other way around," the pretty young woman with the effortlessly glossy brown hair tells me. "They told us so. And there were all kinds of problems and lawsuits and everything, but now they're all friends again. The way to remember it is, Stags' Leap with the apostrophe outside the s, they're on 'the right side of the s.' That's what they told us. They're the ones who won that tasting."

My squint turns to pop-eyed pleasure, so glad to be taught something new. "Really. And all this time I thought it was the other way."

"No, we visited, and they told us so."

"My goodness."

Then after they pick a good red wine, we venture into the humidor and they choose a cigar, and I muse aloud over who it was who led me wrong about the whole Stag('s) (s') Leap thing. The young couple laugh kindly.

And of course I google the question as soon as I have a free moment, and of course I learn they're wrong. It was Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, apostrophe inside the s, whose wines were famously judged so marvelous at Stephen Spurrier's 'Judgement of Paris' wine tasting in 1976. After all these years, it is still not a minor point because the reputation sells a lot of wine and is obviously worth lawsuits. And lies? But it's a simple fact which can be checked in historical sources of the time; today, Stag's Leap calmly claims its history, while Stags' Leap does not. I consider that telling.

So, why are the young couple so wrong and so confident? Just misheard someone, but don't think they did? It happens. Honeymooners too busy thinking about dinner and sex to pay attention to a lecture in a Napa tasting room? Heard what they wanted to hear (but why would they want so carefully to hear incorrect information about one winery over another)? Or, are they being brazenly lied to by the staff at Stags' Leap-on-the-right-side-of-the-s? But why should it be that, when it can all be so easily checked and refuted?

Luckily, the customer is always right. Nothing to do but look pleased and surprised at this sudden access of good information, and thank them for their business. "Well, I'm glad, as you say, they're all friends again." They laugh, and move happily to the checkout lanes.

Forget the fruit basket metaphor -- it's time for "Video Game" tasting notes

2006 Tinto Pesquera; current vintage, retail, about $32.

My fatheads know that I carry on a sort of perpetual border war with the Fruit Basket Metaphor. I get tired of, and I question the efficacy of, the endless comparisons of wine to cherries or lychees or things (when was the last time you tasted a lychee?) -- but I also use the fruit basket m., as Wodehouse might call it, myself. Sometimes it's appropriate. One day recently I savored a Spanish garnacha which smelled, not like a fruit, but exactly like lilacs. It was remarkable.

The trouble with fruit and flower basket metaphors is twofold. First, often wine does not smell or taste like anything except itself. It can be a whole, intact product, "just wine." Second, even though detecting fruit scents is meant to help train the palate and encourage reflection and enjoyment, it has all become a sort of impenetrable snob code by now. (It should be a parlor game at most, with little prizes.) Even at professional tastings, a group of thirty people might all swirl and sniff their glasses of good wine, and then be asked by a moderator, "What are you smelling?" -- and greet him with an uneasy silence. No one wants to say the wrong fruit, and no one most especially wants to say, "You know what? Not much." Chances are you'll be joshed that you must have a sinus infection. I think somebody shouted out "roses and tar" to get it over with. In trade magazines, the same dozen words have exhausted their meanings. Now we're on to "red peach" or "white raspberry." And isn't it telling that, in the same decades that we notice the arrival of the global red, all tasting notes sound in an echo chamber? Meantime all this doesn't begin to express my annoyance with marketers who put fruit basket metaphors on wine labels, thus confusing consumers who think there is pear juice in the wine, and are disappointed not to taste it ....

By way of exploring new answers, I've tried my share of very short, grudging "tasting note haiku." I also agree with Hugh Johnson's idea that a story should accompany the wine. He means a story about the wine maker or the estate, but I don't know any winemakers, so my stories have been, oh, about a cabernet and a hardwood floor, for example. Karen MacNeil in The Wine Bible recalls once challenging a wine shop staff member to help her pick "a wine like Robin Williams." I liked that thought, and found I was able to associate serene, pricey merlots with Hollywood movie queens. The defunct blog Chateau Petrogasm ran with the notion of "tasting note" images only. It was the dernier cri for a while. I contributed a few pictures.   

How might we talk about wine, then, if we're sick of overused cherries and lychees? Shall we turn to movies? Books, or characters in books? Prima donnas? Why not video game characters, or the games themselves? Pinot grigio as the calm and endless Journey; a gigantic shiraz as GTAV; a pioneering and classic California cabernet as Mario. A firmly constructed Bordeaux is Minecraft; a moscato is Sims. A big and haughty and silky Barolo is Assassin's Creed. A grand cru white Burgundy is Tomb Raider. In this metaphor world, what is Pong? Remember Pong? Sutter Home white zinfandel, perhaps. We could even end up with winemakers learning to roll their eyes about using old-fashioned GameCube technology in the chai, or about a vintage being disappointingly SkyRim. 

Now all that is needed is to get the young people driving the video game industry to start drinking more wine, and get the older people drinking wine to start understanding video games, so that we will all  speak a common language of connoisseurship. It is going to be so much more interesting than what we've put up with till now. 

Paul Dolan cabernet, 2010; retail, about $22 if still available.

Rediscovering Colette

As luck would have it, I spent part of the winter afternoon reading Colette's story "Bella Vista," in the collection The Tender Shoot (tr. Antonia White, 1958), on the same day that actor Louis Jourdan of Gigi movie fame (1958) died. That, the movie I mean, is fifty-seven years ago. Even twenty-five years ago, my local library still had all five of the Claudine novels on its fiction shelves, and I do believe I read at least three of them. I remember two things about them: one, that I was impressed with Colette's imaginative integrity: at the end of the saga, the stock, older, safe Prince Charming type whom you would think the teenaged Claudine has no hope of attracting, actually does marry her (do I remember aright?); and two, that I was confused by the image of the two lady schoolteachers espied in a second-story schoolroom window, "kissing like hotcakes." I thought there must have been some mistake. Like Queen Victoria, I shrugged that Women did not Do That.  

"Bella Vista" gives us another couple of lesbians, this time running a remote hotel in the Midi where Colette, as herself, comes to stay while her little house nearby is being renovated. Again the author builds a story, slow and sensuous bit by bit, and closes it with -- I won't spoil it for you -- a rational and proud and unexpected dose of imaginative integrity.   

I like reading Colette for lots of other reasons. I like the way she simply goes on about anything -- about the way characters physically sling suitcases into the back of a car, or about how a dog puts its paws on the table and reaches up to sniff the sleeve of a man who turns out to hate birds. She likes to write about the look of a place, about weather and old stones in the walls and the "powdery" feel of a light spring rain. Of course she likes to write about food, too, but food is always simply a part of the plot of the day, it comes at mealtimes, it is not (at least in "Bella Vista") something to gourmandize over. It occurred to me this afternoon that perhaps Colette is the food writer M.F. K. Fisher would have liked to be, if only M.F.K. wasn't so angry and so anxious to be great and honorary-French. Colette's prose is filled simply with life, including eating, about which she simply natters on. She wrote a book called Barks and Purrs which I once downloaded, in French, onto an old model Kindle that died an inexplicable electronic death. I never got to it, though I plan to, in translation. I'm guessing it's entirely about dogs and cats.

I'd like to be able to read her in French, but at this point I would rather enjoy her for her productivity than struggle through her with my high school French-English dictionary at my side, cramming vocab. Her biographer, Judith Thurman, whose Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (1999) I also own and which I opened up today too, records that "in half a century she produced eighty volumes of fiction, memoirs, journalism, and drama of the highest quality," plus another seven volumes of published correspondence. (Woe to us moderns who don't write letters! What a feast is lost, what a feast is not even cooked and served! If email takes up the slack, I'll be surprised and maybe pleased, but emails seem so tinny already, don't they? Cold and canned, suitable to be read by millions and by no one.) ... I can't help but think part of the reason Colette churned out so much was because she did natter on about anything. I'll bet when I come to it I'll find Barks and Purrs is not least about the actual physical-ness of animals' barking and purring. Did Colette ever cross anything out, start again, or put draft upon draft of something painful into box after box, afternoon upon afternoon wasted, finally to shrug and reason that it was no good, but that this project was at least a kind of practice and that it's much better for garbage to be in a box, or even actually thrown out, than anywhere else? 

And there is not only the aesthetic wisdom of life observed but flashes of more basic insight, too. In "Bella Vista" she writes of the state of mind we sloppily call vacation mode.

...a peculiar pleasure blunts the sharp edge of my longing for my friends, my home, and my real life. Yet is there anyone who is not deluded about the setting of their 'real' life? Was I not breathing here and now, among these three strangers, what I call the very oxygen of travel? My thoughts could wander as lazily as they pleased; I was free of any burden of love; I was immersed in that holiday emptiness in which morning brings a light hearted intoxication and evening a compulsion to waste one's time and to suffer. Everything you love strips you of a part of yourself; the Madame Suzannes [the landlady] strip you of nothing.

To judge by the first few pages of Secrets of the Flesh, it seems Colette got a leg up (as it were) on a prolific career as a writer by having been only one generation removed from an eerily gamy, primeval French past, in which country virgins are married off to the insane sot of a village lordling, quite in droit du seigneur style; so that when the sot dies, the young widow is left with the crumbling stone house and the overgrown gardens which the author-daughter will remember to such trained effect in eighty volumes of fiction, etc. At least, I think that is where we are going with this. In the Introduction, we are also being asked to believe that Colette had to face the question how to be a person and a woman, a problem unheard of in human history before 1900. This seems a bit overdone, but who knows? Perhaps as we pair Colette with her biographer and go on to the next story and chapter ("Gribiche," and Chapter One), we'll find they agree.

   

Okay, so I may have been wrong about Alice

Some years ago, back in the days when At First Glass was well known enough for nice people to send me free stuff, I got a copy of Alice Feiring's latest book. It was Naked Wine: Letting Grapes Do What Comes Naturally. I thought the book was a pretentious mess -- who quotes French winemakers who quote Japanese biodynamic "farming masters," and why do New York editors lap this up? -- and I tiptoed around the effrontery of saying so. My little review was kind of a pretentious mess also.

However, I must say that lately I have been reconsidering Alice Feiring. Her whole professional life in wine writing can be summed up, I think, in the subtitle of her first book. This was The Battle for Wine and Love, -- or How I Saved the World from Parkerization. She may be on to something. In saving the world from "Parkerization," she is talking about standing athwart, so to speak, the railroad track of the business of wine reviews, facing the successive oncoming locomotives which are the 90-and-above point scoring system, and yelling to anyone who will listen stop!

Before standing and yelling alongside her, we must delve back into history a bit. Robert Parker launched the 90 point system, really it's a 100 point system but only ratings in the 90s matter much because they're (oddly) so common, and so of course it reflects his taste in wine, especially reds. He likes them New World style -- a cognomen that has had to be invented, precisely and circularly, because of what he likes -- a style reflective of the hot climate ripeness possible in California: dense, inky-black, loaded with blackberry/"cassis"/plum compote/fill in the blank pie-filling fruit flavors, and maybe topped off with a generous drizzle of caramel-butter-licorice-chocolate, which tends to come from wines' fermenting and/or aging in oak barrels. Yeast choices can also do it, along with permitted bacterial growths that change a wine's acids from harsh (malic) to soft (lactic, milky). All of this contributes to the unnatural manipulation that Alice objects to. Which is why she wants her wines "naked," in other words made from grapes crushed, allowed to ferment, and the juice bottled.

"If he pours it into his glass and then can't see through it, he gives it 100 points," groused a former colleague of mine. The main objection to Parker's influence can be summed up in the word, well, Parkerization. He is said to have changed the way all red wines are made, especially in cool-climate, difficult-to-ripen Europe. Winemakers want those 90 point scores, and the sales resulting, the way writers want a New York editor. The way to get them is to make wine Parker likes: Chiantis with no traditional sour horsiness; inky-black Bordeaux with tannins soft enough to make them "drinkable now;" newly thick and jam-red, as opposed to gleaming clear and tawny-delicate, Spanish Riojas. Yeast and bacterial tinkerings in the cellar, mentioned above, will help accomplish this, along with the planting of muscular, "international" grape varieties in unlikely places and the hauling in of ripe grapes from anywhere in a country, regardless of old traditions of terroir or place. Consult Alice, here. What's being objected to as a result is the erasing of memories, choices, variety, history. I suspect that legendary Michael Broadbent had these overmanipulated, over-"extracted" wines in mind when he wrote, in Vintage Wine, briefly about "the global red."  

We'll pause just for a minute to take a look at Robert Parker's biography, and to note that, after all, the bigger the target, the easier it is to take aim at. (This is a general statement, not meant to imply that our last-mentioned personality, Mr. Broadbent, would take aim at anybody.) If Parker did start out basically as a consumer advocate, and if his work tasting, writing, and scoring in Wine Advocate has caused winemakers all over the world to haul up their shorts and produce oceans of consistently high quality product that makes people feel they are getting their money's worth, then he is a giant in the wine world for a reason. Goodness knows how many jobs he has created, too, in his role as bellows to the furnace you might say.

Still, after forty years of his influence, we return to the problem of "one man's palate," as another former colleague of mine groused in a different lifetime. Yesterday I tasted half a dozen red wines. We started with a good, fresh, fruity but correctly-barnyard-y (in my opinion) pinot noir, followed by a reserve Oregon pinot noir, a Spanish garnacha, and an Australian shiraz. The first pinot noir was the best of the bunch, but the next three pours were all mortarlike and without flavor. All, more to the point, interchangeable. They all had 90 and better reviews, from Parker I recollect.

In sum, they were global reds. And they were fawned over by almost all the colleagues present. Nobody liked the first, inexpensive, light pinot noir. That's another problem with the Parkerization of the world. If you are in the industry you don't dare disagree with him, or else you're a rube, and so much of this business is about fragile egos. Everyone wants to be perceived as instinctively appreciating the best, but also as already knowing enough to agree with trained minds. And Parker trains all minds.

Which leads me back to Alice. May I call her Alice? Her books have a crazy-aunt-in-a-feather-boa feel, and of course she's a dutifully lefty global-warmer -- that's how you get a New York editor --  but at least she is out there searching for wines that are not red mortar in a glass, "92 in Spectator, Parker gave it a 93. Absolutely beautiful." And everyone nods. "Beeaauu-ti-ful."

Here is something that should be different. Item, 2003 Chateau Barde-Haut, Saint Emilion Grand Cru, i.e., a Bordeaux heavy on the merlot grape. Retail, on sale, about $22. Like Bordeaux in general, it seems to have an interior core that you almost eat, as opposed to the sprawling blackberry-and-caramel-fudge, Parkerized bonbons which coat the tongue and go away. I do think, though, that it is nearing the end of its active life. It was closing in on vinegar status even the very next day after opening.

But I could be wrong -- about the interior core, not-a-bonbon thing. We have already said Parkerization has made great inroads in forty years. Who is to know what, now, is or is not a global red? Parker gave this one an 88; Wine Spectator a 90.

What would Alice say? More importantly, what is Alice finding and drinking now? You may consult her Feiring Line, provided you come straight back home.   

Seeking

Every day brings us a new photo of a new atrocity. A man thrown from a roof; a man caged and burned.

What do we seek? We seek a way for human beings to pass over a terrible cusp in our history; a way to accept and testify that God is good, not merely "compassionate" or "merciful" but good. A good God who presides over a good and lawful world does not command atrocities.

Any human being can understand this. It doesn't require prophecy. Any prophet who did not understand it was wrong, or did not hear God, or both. The nice parts of a religion -- holidays, prayers, small, inculcated decencies -- no longer matter when its core shows itself to be nothing but hammer blows of violence and degradation. Forever. Unless the people trapped in it cross the cusp.  

And, one learns that they are doing so; by the thousands, even millions. 

Here. 

And here.

Also here.

And even here.



(By the way, it's "The Seeker" riesling, Mosel, 2012. Retail, about $13.)

Oatmeal cookies! Opera! Margaret Thatcher!

Dear things, my fatheads, we have discussed rather serious topics lately and it has been ages since we simply baked some cookies. Let's do that. If you combine two recipes from Betty Crocker's Ultimate Cookie Book  (1992), namely "Ultimate Oatmeal Cookies" and "Old-fashioned Rum Raisin Cookies," you very cleverly get Oatmeal Cookies with Rum-Soaked Raisins. Start by simmering 1 cup raisins in a combination of 1/4 cup rum and 1/2 cup water for 20 minutes, until they absorb all liquid. As they simmer, you may prepare everything else.

And by the way, just one thing. You know how I have the greatest fascination with, and respect for, sopranos. A few nights ago I discovered another, Edita Gruberova, whom you may see in the documentary The Art of Belcanto. (This is not the same documentary from the mid '80s about June Anderson, called The Passion of BelCanto.) Watch the sixty-two-year-old, swathed in blue veils and crowned with a blue crown, climb the steps up to the stage to deliver herself of "Casta diva" from Norma. Then, toward the end of the program, watch her in a business suit and pearls sing some role -- the subtitles did not make this clear, though a bit of research turns up Donizetti's Roberto Devereux  -- which the director says he wanted her to interpret as though "she were a sort of Margaret Thatcher character." I understood the words "Margaret Thatcher" even without subtitles. The suit, pearls, and titian-blonde wig did the rest.

In one scene, probably at the opera's climax, the diva in mid-aria reaches up and peels off her wig while keeping a ghastly expression on her face. Another maestro, in his interview, exults on how masterful and shocking the scene is. I don't doubt it, and I salute the diva. My question is this: "a Margaret Thatcher-like" character? No, I should say the character is Margaret Thatcher: if this is just one scene, then I think we can be sure that for the rest of the opera also, by gesture and word and deed, this character is understood to be all evil, corruption, danger, and viciousness, and yet all inner sickness, terror, and failure too. Why Thatcher? Assuming for the Donizetti we must keep to an "English court" setting, why not, oh -- the Vogue offices of Anna Wintour?  Imaginative opera directors could do something sacredly provocative with that, don't you think?

But no. Margaret Thatcher is a much plumper target. Even though she died at the age of 87 in 2013 and had been out of office for almost a quarter-century by then. All right, be fair. When this opera was staged in 2005, she was only 79 and had only been out of office for fifteen years. Why does it so deeply satisfy artistic orthodoxy to portray her, still, as something the knowing can shudder at, and yet happily pity? For how many more European generations will the costume of business suit, pearls, and backswept titian wig signify moral nightmare?

"The left hates her -- because she thrashed them," one of our sources says.

Continue with recipe.

Betty Crocker's Ultimate Oatmeal Cookie with Rum-Soaked Raisins

Have your rum-soaked raisins ready.
Preheat the oven to 375 F. In a large bowl, mix:

2/3 cup sugar
2/3 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup vegetable shortening
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 eggs

Stir in

3 cups quick-cooking or old fashioned oats
1 cup flour
the rum-soaked raisins

Drop dough by rounded tablespoonfuls about 2 inches apart onto an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 9 to 11 minutes. Remove immediately from sheet and cool on racks.

Yard sign riposte, and Antica cabernet

I was wondering when some bright soul would think up a riposte to the yard signs you see around the neighborhood, announcing in red and blue, "Proud Union Home." These cropped up, it seems to me, around the time of the 2012 presidential election, and they seemed to be a way of saying "I vote Democrat" or "Yay Obama" without actually saying so. (Perfectly fine attitudes, why not say so?)

As I drove past I used to idly think what a good riposte would be. "Proud Free Home" perhaps? But that would not be fair, since our neighbors with their union signs are also fellow citizens who are free -- well, as free as any of us. "Proud Right-to-Work Home"? Too much text for a two-foot-by-two-foot placard, and anyway "right to work" has a political definition, a backstory as it's called, that also won't fit. What was needed was some sort of three-word slogan to convey the idea, "We respect your right to put up a union-friendly yard sign, and we are glad that years ago labor unions agitated for things like the 40 hour week and paid sick days, but experience is teaching us that in the long run, unions sink the ship. They demand that businesses try to stay in business while paying money to men who no longer work and to their survivors as well, sometimes for decades. It can't be done. Public sector, government-job unions are even worse. Survivors' paychecks must come from the tax payers, which means that if you in that Proud Union Home are a former schoolteacher perhaps, then I in the home without a yard sign am supporting you. You're welcome."

It did occur to me that a yard sign simply saying "You're Welcome" in red and blue might be pithy enough, but it would also be too cryptic, even if it was placed directly next door to the proud signs in question. And we can't have a square of cardstock big enough to go on musing, "You know, half the reason unions even got their start was through government largesse. The good old Sherman Anti-Trust Act should have included labor unions as 'criminal conspiracies in restraint of trade,' exactly as the evil robber barons' businesses were, but organized labor was specifically exempt from that. And then the Wagner Act imposed federally established labor unions on business, did you know that? (See Hughes and Cain, American Economic History, sixth edition, Chapter 18, 'Big Business and Government Intervention'). It's not all about how solitary and martyred you are." No, TLDNR -- too long, did not read, as the young people text nowadays.

But somebody has thought of something. A yard-sign riposte. Driving around doing errands yesterday, I saw more than one large white square, planted in a bare, wintry garden bed or in front of a picture window, proclaiming: "Blessed Christian Home."

There you go. It does everything the Proud Union Home sign does. It states a fact about a private family, but also in three simple words it arrogates to itself a hundred virtues and an entire heroic past, a backstory, which it seems to deny to all neighbors who haven't got the sign. I would think that many PUH families looking at the BCH signs would pause as they fetched their mail or carried their groceries from the car and say, "But wait a minute. We're blessed, too. And besides ...."

Now there is no reason after all this why you may not have some wine. This time, it's from California. 2009 Antinori Family Estate Antica cabernet sauvignon. Retail, about $35.

WXRT's cowbell "dog whistle," plus more French wine

Slice of life: I am at work, and the radio station playing all over the store is Chicago's own hoary, too cool for words "classic rock" WXRT. I distinctly remember being confused, as a child of seven, about what "classic rock" meant. (The station went live in 1972.) I thought that " 'XRT" was going to play both classical music and rock, which struck me as a strange but good idea: imagine hearing something of Mozart or Beethoven, followed by the Rolling Stones or Iggy Pop's "Real Wild Child" from the same station. Nobody seemed able to elucidate matters for me, back in the Nixon era. And 'XRT never played any Mozart.

Fast forward to 2015. The same staff are on the payroll. The pushing-seventy-year-old Terri Hemmert was in her glory, two days ago, remembering Doctor Martin Luther King Junior, and how she was in college at the time, and those were dark days, my friends. Then she played John Lennon's "Imagine."

Yesterday, a different host played a brief sound bite of Senator Ted Cruz reacting to the previous night's State of the Union speech. The senator from Texas said that the President's tax-and-spend proposals reminded him of an old skit from Saturday Night Live starring Christopher Walken, "where, if you remember, there is a band playing and his solution to every problem is ‘more cowbell,’ ‘more cowbell.’ Well, for President Obama, ‘more cowbell,’ is ‘more taxes, more government,’ ‘more taxes, more government.'”

After playing this bit, 'XRT seguéd immediately into the Rolling Stones' "Honky Tonk Women" (1969), a song which begins with a cowbell. And that, my fatheads, was all the comment our own hoary, too cool for words classic rock station needed to make, to reassure its listeners that Ted Cruz, conservative, is an uncool moron trying to prove his chops by quoting the always-cool Saturday Night Live -- with Christopher Walken, icon of The Deer Hunter Russian roulette scene, thrown in! -- and therefore failing miserably. That Cruz looks like a young Bill Murray playing a dopey senator from Texas only hilariously closes the circle of uncoolness.

Anyone who has pointed out in the last few years that Republicans have a branding problem, at least with the cool people if not with voters, hasn't gone far enough. Republicans and conservatives together have a "branding problem" with the cool people in the way the Jews of 1930s Germany had a branding problem with Nazis. Another political minority, as it happened. At the heart of it, know this. Dear Senator: and others: you are never going to be allowed to define yourself with this aggressive and beatifically smug minority; they will define you. That's brand failure, surely. You'll recall that the brand of the European Jew only recovered, a little, after considerable violence.

Anyway all this is no reason we can't have a glass of wine. You'll recall also that we have decided to drink more French wines in the new year. Such as 2010 Château des Arnauds (the producer), Cuvée des Capucins (the blend in this bottle); from Lalande de Pomerol, the A.O.C. or, is it now the A.O.P. (the region of Bordeaux the wine comes from)? In sum, a four-year-old merlot blend, inexpensive, good. Retail, about $13, possibly half that on sale.

(Pictures of) things forbidden by Islam

Pluot likes to think it has a reason to pay attention to the serious things of this world, even though a wine, food, and cocktail blog maybe shouldn't. It seems frivolous and disrespectful to the dead to do so; but it seems ignorant and disrespectful to the dead not to do so.
  

The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were murdered because they drew unflattering pictures of Mohammed. (Although to say even that is to degrade their memory. They were murdered because their murderers were evil men who "made the personal decision to end their lives." Years ago when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, I remember a rabbi at a memorial service used exactly those words to describe the crime -- the Prime Minister was killed not "because of" his political acts but because one man made the personal decision that Yitzhak Rabin should not go on living. The responsibility is the killers', no one else's.) Molly Norris is still in hiding -- incredibly -- because she drew lots of little pictures of ordinary things , each one cartoonishly announcing "I'm the real Mohammed!" -- a cup and saucer, a spool of thread. No kidding.

Only there are so many things forbidden in Islam. To draw or post pictures of any or all of them is barely to begin to inventory Western civilization. Andrew McCarthy offers a partial list: Islam forbids:

• musical instruments
• "pictures of animate life" -- people, animals, plants; so, oddly enough I suppose you could draw a picture of a harp or a violin, but not have one or play one
• singing, unless unaccompanied by instruments and based on Muslim texts encouraging obedience to Allah. Go here for a taste of the former Cat Stevens expressing his longing for "victory over the kuffar" in one of these "nasheeds."
• drinking alcohol   
• women leaving their homes without male permission and/or uncovered

And so on. Therefore the wine bottle label shown above, Orin Swift's Abstract (retail, about $30), is offensive to Islam on several points. We are looking at pictures of animate life, pictures of uncovered women, we are looking at alcohol. Just think what else, not on this label but in general, is not merely "offensive" to display, but not permitted in life.

A harpsichord, decorated with pictures of animate life.

A harp. Pink! And ...

...if musical instruments are forbidden, then so is Mozart. 

And so is she. Maria Callas. Woman, uncovered, outside the home without male permission. Singer. Triple, or is it quadruple? whammy.

Animate life, woman, uncovered, etc. 

You get the idea, above, as Bacchus offers you a glass of wine, and below, as you admire animate life. And there is a woman in the sun, rather well-covered actually.  But still.

Let's have more wine. Appropriately, almost all those pictured here today are rich, opulent, port-like reds. Good for winter sipping and winter meals, good for symbolizing our rich, opulent civilization. Don't take it for granted.

The Cuttings, from The Prisoner wine company. Retail, about $50.

Fog Head pinot noir. Not as port-like as the previous two wines, but a pinot noir also not, I daresay, made in the spare or earthy Burgundian style. And delicious, too. Retail, about $20.

Quinta do Noval Late Bottled Vintage port, 2005. Retail (if available) about $30. Port-like, because it's, well -- port. Note the tart, clean juiciness that sprawling, lush California jam-bombs tend not to have.

Now I have uploaded quite a few images that are not mine, so it is possible that in a few weeks or months, the interwebs' copyright patrol might find them and take them down, even though I have been careful to link to all their sources. So here are a few others, all my own. I call them Animate Life.

(You can barely tell, but a heron keeps pace with a speedboat here. Or, as Ayatollah Khomeini once said, "there is no fun in Islam.")

2013 Domaine Laroque, from the land of the Cathars

Enclosed please find a tasty French bargain, a southern Rhône-type blend. Looks more daunting than it is. We love the romantic sounding appellation, Cité de Carcassonne. Although, really, Cité de Carcassonne is not an appellation, it is legally a lower-tier Indication Géographique Protégée. This means the wine's sourcing and making has proceeded under less stringent controls than an AOP (Appellation d'Origine Protégée) wine. You may remember that today's AOP wines are the AOCs (Appellation d'Origine Controlée) of yesteryear. Go here for a neat summary of "recent changes to French wine law," and for a sensible assessment of Why They Did It. Declining sales seems to sum it up. We know a little about that. 

We say the IGP of Cité de Carcassonne sounds romantic, but we don't know the half of it. Carcassonne is a medieval walled city in the south of France, "painstakingly restored" as TripAdvisor tells us, not too far from the Mediterranean to the east and the Spanish border to the south. To look at tourist photos of the site, to look at course upon course of jagged gray stone battlements capped by small conical towers (that's the painstakingly restored part, apparently none too authentic), all surrounded by greenery and all gleaming in the summer sun, is to transport oneself back eight hundred years or more. We are peasants tramping this road by the apple trees below the walls. We are tending the grapevines in a July or August heat. We are standing on the narrow high ramparts -- or we are worried about our sons manning those ramparts -- gazing anxiously across the tumbled green rocky landscape towards some fresh army, commanded by some besieging Raymond VI or Roger IV. Romantic, yes maybe, but a ghost from that time might like to come forward and smack us full in the face for saying so, because it is also romantic in the way Iraq ruled by the Islamic State today is romantic. In other words, not at all. 

Eight hundred years ago, it seems Carcassonne and its neighbor towns, Toulouse, Béziers, Albi, were the centers not only of the part of modern France called variously the Midi, Occitania, Aquitaine, or the Languedoc, but of a strange, thriving half-Christian religion, Catharism, which the French monarchy and the Catholic church required almost the whole of the 13th century to put down. This war, done in two phases lasting nine years (1209-1218) and then forty-six years (1225-1271), is called the Albigensian Crusade. Its pretext had been the assassination of a papal legate in the south; for a generation before that, worried church General Councils had failed to cope with the heresy, the Cathars ignoring even the powerhouse preaching of Dominic Guzman, St. Dominic himself. The wars' worst moment came in the year 1244, when the Cathar stronghold of Montségur fell to thousands-strong royal and papal armies, and several hundred defeated men, women, and children were dragged down the mountain and thrown alive into one pyre. Think ISIS.

I am not the one to tease out all the right details of a terrible story. What interests me more, since the poor souls in question have been at rest for eight centuries, is the way modern people tell and re-tell it, even inhabit it, now. Today's Catholic Encyclopedia online shows us a scholarly article from 1907 going into calm detail about the Cathars' doctrinal links to other neo-Manichean sects, but saying little about any violence except to acknowledge that the death penalty was "inflicted on them too readily." In his survey The Divine Order, Henry Bamford Parkes (1969) chronicles ghastly European centuries in which European feudalism itself takes the blame: even though the arrangement of society into small fiefs worked by peasants and ruled by armed men made sense when that was the only answer to the Mad Max-ian chaos of barbarian invasion, that same arrangement fed upon itself when Goths and Vikings were gone. Bad enough that younger sons had no way to get land but to conquer it from their fathers' neighbor over the hill or beyond. Add the Church's assurance that looters could also earn forgiveness of sin and centuries exempt from Purgatory by killing heretics (Parkes claims), and you have a workable recipe for another army at the gates of Carcassonne -- or Béziers or Albi -- decade after decade after decade. "The sacking of a city," he says, "was an orgiastic performance, the most pleasurable available to medieval man, offering a release from all moral inhibitions that was quite as complete as the most savage of primitive fertility rituals and much more bloody and destructive." Think ISIS.

This is where other voices re-telling the story, even inhabiting it, come in. The Cathars had a bizarre and grim faith, but in some ways it was very much after our soft modern hearts. They believed that the universe was subject to two divinities, one good and one evil, and that everything in the visible world had been created by the evil one. Therefore the body, food, animals, sex, procreation -- essentially all life was bad. The soul, created by the good principle, longed only for escape and reunion with heavenly good. Suicide was thus commendable, preferably by starvation (endura), and concubinage outranked marriage because it was less permanent. Homosexuality was better than sex between man and wife, precisely because it did not lead to the evil of more children. They also believed that Jesus, "very perfect" but a mere creature, had not lived on earth as a man -- since as the Redeemer and the epitome of good he could not take on flesh -- but had only appeared to do so. We begin to see why the Cathars caught the attention of the still struggling-to-grow Church.

Where their beliefs most please our soft modern hearts is in their pacifism, egalitarianism, vegetarianism, and their rejection (poignantly enough) of capital punishment. We hear also that they were tolerant, wealthy, cultured -- the troubadour songs, the medical school in Toulouse -- leisured, democratic, but nobly defiant of the medieval Church's blowhard corruption, and so on. Although they had rules of their own, too. "The necessity of absolute fidelity to the sect was strongly inculcated."

We love this. It's easy to get romantic about a sunny land that seems to have been populated with sunny people, especially if we moderns in our reading and research strike gold in that sunny word, tolerance. Surf the net and you will find modern people who want to inhabit this story. They fancy themselves Cathars, guided by spirits from the thirteenth century and signing their PDF reports, deliciously, by the title Parfaite. The Cathars' egalitarian priestly hierarchy -- celibate, mind you -- were called this, men being parfaits and women parfaites. Modern people also can be bewitched, it seems to me, simply by the musical names of the old Occitan language: there are martyred heroes called Belisenne and Caraman, heroines called Esclaramonde and Aude, there are beautiful place names like Pamiers, Fanjeaux, Foix and Pereilha. Go here for a long and impossibly tender tale of the orphaned young female knight/sorceress/animal whisperer, another Esclaramonde, illegitimate daughter of the ravishing and tender fallen abbess Na Ermengarda, who had returned to her lands in Telho to give birth when her position in the convent became impossible. I should say so. We don't hear what sort of convent it was, Catholic or Cathar. 

I love this. I am always interested in modern people who try to bring, not just the spiritual but the supernatural into their lives in at least a somewhat serious way, and I am interested in the effort of imagination it takes to believe you are a part of a past group. I was a convert myself but at least I joined a present group. If you wish to inhabit this particular, dreamy story, there's no risk in being "a Cathar," but also no real comfort. No northern baron, no Sir Boeuf will drag you down from Montségur and throw you into a fire -- although if you are a Christian in Iraq, ISIS will -- nor can any fellow worshiper give you the Consolamentum, or stand tenderly impressed if you choose to die by the endura. Owing to both these facts, the stresses on one's true, religious enthusiasm must be immense and also ridiculous. What then is the appeal? I can only think it's really the enjoyment of a rich fantasy life, combined with a feeling of safe, retroactive superiority to Christianity and maybe the West in general, as deservedly defanged institutions. This is why I take the glowing information about the Cathars with a large grain of salt. It's not that the Catholic church's and the French state's violence against them was not horrific; it's just that when a group of people are so very congenial to the most fashionable modern attitudes that we begin to see them as tender knight/sorceress/animal whisperers, as people possessed of a perfect worldview ("paratge,") lost to human understanding forever, I begin to wonder. Were they not also human beings? With flaws and pettinesses? What did they do to you if you questioned them? "Fidelity to the sect strictly inculcated." Again, we consult the Catholic Encyclopedia. 

Moreover these sects were in the highest degree aggressive, hostile to Christianity itself, to the Mass, the sacraments, the ecclesiastical hierarchy and organization; hostile also to feudal government by their attitude towards oaths, which they declared under no circumstances allowable. Nor were their views less fatal to the continuance of human society, for on the one hand they forbade marriage and the propagation of the human race, and on the other hand they made a duty of suicide through the institution of the Endura (see CATHARI). It has been said that more perished through the Endura (the Catharist suicide code) than through the Inquisition.

Admittedly this is a "hostile" source, but as far as I can see the hostile sources also tell us of the Cathars' sophistication, leisure, vegetarianism, and tolerance. In the middle ages they "poured all over Western Europe," the Encyclopedia says. This is startling. Invaders pour. We have visions not of Joan Sutherland as Esclaramonde in white veils, but of the garbage-strewn rape camps and the well-to-do, chanting, young, malicious ignoramus-protesters of Occupy Wall Street. We forget how much of Europe then was young, young, painfully and stupidly and ferociously young. Thirty Cathars had already reached England in the 1160s. Henry II had them branded on their foreheads with hot irons, whipped, and then turned out ... to starve. (It was forbidden to aid them.) Why? Again it's not that we are looking for ways to "blame the victim," or that we don't acknowledge completely innocent suffering. Have you ever known people who kept a copy of Mein Kampf in their homes, because "they wanted to find out Hitler's side of the story"? Sometimes when it comes to innocent suffering there isn't another side to the story. There is only suffering. The troubadours fleeing Montségur wrote bitter songs on the triumph of evil.

No, anyway it's just to look for the truth about an old, unhappy, far off thing. And to note that today's morning-dew "Cathars" or even their sympathizers would fit perfectly into Mapp and Lucia, or some other mid-1920s English social-comedy novel stuffed with harmless lorgnette-carrying London eccentrics. Perhaps that's very lucky for us, I mean the harmless part. As to the wine, the Cité de Carcassonne IGP which we opened ages ago -- remember? -- the wine which the parfaits would have considered just a part of this evil world; it retails for about $10. Enjoy it.      

Pluot turns seven! (in a way) and --

 -- I was going to say, " -- and fights climate change," sarcastically, because I just had a (let us say) communication from a (let us say, extremely distant) colleague to warn that the taste of wine as we know it may soon vanish as our planet warms, and vineyards of olden time are ruined from the heat.

It's absurd, of course, but polite people are trained not to question another's religion, and this is what this is. (Then again, why are the left-wing religious allowed to trumpet their beliefs at all times and places?) Merely to start with, my colleague either has never heard of, or doesn't care about, the East Anglia emails, about the fraud of the Hockey-Stick graph, about no warming having taken place for going on twenty years, about robustly expanding Arctic ice caps and thriving polar bears. Nor can he or his fellows I think ever have questioned how the Earth could have been a hothouse jungle in the age of the dinosaurs, when there were no evil humans to drive cars or pollute the atmosphere, nor again how it could have endured Ice Age upon Ice Age geologically very recently, recovering in between -- passim climate change, no? -- again without evil humans doing much about it. 

For no, that is not what global warming climate change is about. For all the believers it is about man's depravity, and about the need of a faithful elite to absolve him of his sin and guide him to a clean utopia, sometime in the future. Never mind those clanking chains you hear, and the doors being shut and bolted all around. It is all for everyone's good, and we shall all be happy soon. Meanwhile the struggle gives life-purpose to all kinds of people, especially those who were born to be high priests, or inquisitors or maybe just village bullies.

I am convinced "within myself," as characters in Jane Austen novels used elegantly to put it, of three things: one, that our descendants will one day laugh delightedly at the image of us, worrying about climate change ruining all our wines (incidentally, don't utopian left-wingers scoff wisely at "First World problems"?); two, that some portion of Western humanity still has not come to grips with the Industrial Revolution, and yearns wild-eyed to go back to the days of rural quiet and Jane Austen novels -- before "the fatal knowledge of machinery," as a character mourns in a far different novel, the once-blockbuster Lost Horizon; and three, that we should all thank God Western man has at least made moral progress enough to spare us our frustrated utopians' coming after us with fire and the stake, as their spiritual precursors once did. When a high priest or a simple bully has no argument for his plans except "shut up," violence must be horribly tempting.

So here at Pluot we fight climate change by laughing at it, remembering the proverb [the devil hates to be laughed at]. We believe that no man has the right to make another human being say that what is false is true, and vice versa; no one has the right to insist a whole society agree dementia is sanity, and vice versa. And we raise a nice glass of Champagne to Pluot's seventh anniversary -- well, in a way. My dear fatheads know the tale of the blog At First Glass going along swimmingly for six whole years, from one New Year's Eve to the next, at its own address, atfirstglass.com. Then despite best efforts to renew it, I lost access to the domain name, and in a slight panic rebooted here. Six years of At First Glass and one of Pluot equals seven for Pluot, right? The Champagne is Laurent Perrier's Cuvée Rosé brut. 

I've decided I can't really explain the goodness of champagne or fine sparkling wines adequately. Really knowledgeable people talk about feminine and masculine styles; I was told years ago that the classic signs of great champagne are the aroma of biscuit or toast, plus the smallest and longest-lasting bubbles -- and you start your champagne knowledge from there. In time you may notice cheaply made sparkling wines have a strange taste and mouthfeel in comparison, not at all like biscuit and bubbles, but somehow like sour pickle juice and syrupiness. What good champagnes are, I thought as I sipped last night and tried to analyze delicacy and fruit and so on, are addictive in the way chocolate chip cookie dough is addictive. Chocolate chip cookie dough is marvelously unlike real cookies, as sparkling wine is unlike other wine. Yet you just keep fingering it up from the bowl in fascination.   

  
 Retail, about $60.