Check out HJH–which actually means His Joseon Highness–on Jim Holt on Jonathan Nossiter on, to a large extent, the disaster wrought by Robert Parker and his pretentious and pox-palated epigones:
Here is what [Nossiter] hates: rich, fat, sweet, super-concentrated, overripe, jam-dense, high-alcohol, oaky, inky-colored, vanilla-y wines with no sense of place or identity.
And Californian customs have spread. Just as I happen to know the best midday meal you’ll get in Barcelona costs 10€ and is in a bar no one has ever heard of behind a police station about four miles from the nearest tourist, I think it’s true that if you chart quality against price for the 2-15€/bottle range of Spanish wines (I’m talking supermarket prices) you get something approaching a normal distribution, with quality increasing up to about 8€/bottle and then dropping quite sharply as you reach the segment occupied by new, fancy-labelled, undrinkable Somotano and Priorat and whatever product (this stuff may be sippable-and-spitoutable for all I know, but that’s not what wine is about).
My favourite wine clocks in at 10% (so you can have a decent drink at lunch without getting shrewish or even shirrhoshish) and costs 0.75 a litre from the supplier, who brings it down the Ebro in something resembling a Soviet muckspreader and leaves it in any large receptacle you have to hand.
El Primo c/o the commental asylum tells me that Don Simón is good stuff, but you don’t necessarily want to trust anything he says either.
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The vanilla-y merlot and the smoked tempranillo (but the merlot especially, oh and shiraz too) – make me sick. Sometimes they just make the skin on my lips peel off (as happened after a couple of glasses of Mallorcan Murder a few weeks back). But don’t you dare go after grenache fuelled Priorats of my heart. Granted, every week there’s a new one and I’ve tried most of them and stick to what I know. Scala Dei (€9-10) and Les Terrasses (€20) are both very drinkable with a meal.
But you’re right: you can quite easily pay a lot less than that for perfectly acceptable wine.
By the way, tried a ‘gold medal’ Toro on Saturday night. Now that was a wine made for spitting out.
Thanks, Trevor, for the link . . . even if this means that I’m now casting my lot with the anti-Americans and am thus a fellow-travelor of anti-American wine terroirists!
By the way, did you happen to see my entry on “José Ortega y Gasset: “Europa es el único continente que tiene un contenido.”
That could also be construed as anti-American!
At least I’m doing well in Korea as “His Joseon Highness” . . . but that might just be the third anti-American strike against me.
I guess I’m out.
Jeffery Hodges
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