Levi Reiss asked:
Some of you may know me from my wine article series “I Love Italian Wine and Food,” similar French and German series, and travel articles that always manage to discuss local wine and food. It’s true; I really do love wine and food from Italy, France, Germany, and other countries as well. But I also **** wine and many aspects of the wine scene. Let me explain my top ten reasons for this love-hate relationship.
The unconscionable expense. Don’t let anybody kid you. Good wine is expensive. Great wine is of course even more expensive. There are surely bargains out there, but finding them is like kissing scads of frogs to find a prince. You have to kiss a lot of frogs (yechh) before you get to kiss a prince. Believe it or not, I have absolutely no desire whatsoever to kiss any princes.
I do, however, want to drink fine wine. And I find that the more fine wine I drink, the more fine wine I want to drink. Before I started writing wine reviews, twenty dollars was more or less my limit for a bottle; now I almost feel like apologizing when I spend less than twenty. Having tasted some excellent wines in the forty-dollar range, I am dying to know how sixty-dollar wines taste. Needless to say, some of them will be disappointing. But in some ways it is worse to find an excellent sixty-dollar wine. As much as I want to, I can’t spend sixty dollars a bottle on a regular basis.
My wife gave me her generous permission to buy a single one hundred dollar bottle of wine per year. Such a bottle will cost me at least two hundred dollars; my wife is not a wine lover, and in all fairness she will want a one hundred dollar item for herself. But that’s not the end of my wine expense problems. One of the most wine-savvy people I know recently described the pleasures of a $600 bottle of Chateau Petrus; a top of the line French red wine. I asked him if it was worth the money. His response was short and sweet, absolutely. I am still far from that stratospheric price point, but…
Here are the other reasons:
The embarrassing lack of knowledge
No wine cellar
I can’t get the … bottle opened
The insomnia
Food problems
Wine snobs
Those smells and those tastes
Those colors
Home brew
One more problem and yes
The Solution
Konrad
Some of you may know me from my wine article series “I Love Italian Wine and Food,” similar French and German series, and travel articles that always manage to discuss local wine and food. It’s true; I really do love wine and food from Italy, France, Germany, and other countries as well. But I also **** wine and many aspects of the wine scene. Let me explain my top ten reasons for this love-hate relationship.
The unconscionable expense. Don’t let anybody kid you. Good wine is expensive. Great wine is of course even more expensive. There are surely bargains out there, but finding them is like kissing scads of frogs to find a prince. You have to kiss a lot of frogs (yechh) before you get to kiss a prince. Believe it or not, I have absolutely no desire whatsoever to kiss any princes.
I do, however, want to drink fine wine. And I find that the more fine wine I drink, the more fine wine I want to drink. Before I started writing wine reviews, twenty dollars was more or less my limit for a bottle; now I almost feel like apologizing when I spend less than twenty. Having tasted some excellent wines in the forty-dollar range, I am dying to know how sixty-dollar wines taste. Needless to say, some of them will be disappointing. But in some ways it is worse to find an excellent sixty-dollar wine. As much as I want to, I can’t spend sixty dollars a bottle on a regular basis.
My wife gave me her generous permission to buy a single one hundred dollar bottle of wine per year. Such a bottle will cost me at least two hundred dollars; my wife is not a wine lover, and in all fairness she will want a one hundred dollar item for herself. But that’s not the end of my wine expense problems. One of the most wine-savvy people I know recently described the pleasures of a $600 bottle of Chateau Petrus; a top of the line French red wine. I asked him if it was worth the money. His response was short and sweet, absolutely. I am still far from that stratospheric price point, but…
Here are the other reasons:
The embarrassing lack of knowledge
No wine cellar
I can’t get the … bottle opened
The insomnia
Food problems
Wine snobs
Those smells and those tastes
Those colors
Home brew
One more problem and yes
The Solution
Konrad
