Dernier Cri: A Glass of Whine

Our resident curmudgeon vents his spleen.

Randy Sheahan

We all have pet peeves. I have several where wine is concerned. Here are my top (or should I say “bottom”) five...

The Fall-Out from Numerical Ratings

It’s a grim state of affairs when a retailer won’t carry a wine unless it has a score attached to it. Yet this is increasingly the case. Fewer and fewer wine merchants today have the courage of their convictions. They’ve become slaves to numbers and are afraid to handle a wine unless it has a 90-point blessing from Robert Parker or the like. So they shelve their own judgment and let ratings tell them what to buy. But by so doing, they deprive themselves — and of course, their customers — of a lot of good wine.

Gimmicky Wines Promoted by Hotel Heiresses

Would you buy anything from Paris Hilton, let alone a bottle — er, can — of wine? Well, I opened a magazine recently and, lo and behold, there she was painted head-to-toe in gold and flogging a canned Prosecco from — of all places! — Australia. When I worked retail years ago we had a term for such wines: We called them “instant close-outs.”

California Cult Wines

Why these monuments to elitism receive all the attention they do is beyond me. Impossible to find and priced to the heavens, they’re not really wines but toys for millionaires. It’s all about self-aggrandizement. But no Screaming Ego for me. I prefer, instead, the hundreds of hardworking California wineries who make good, honest, affordable wines all of us can buy.

Cutesy Wine Names

Whenever I see a wine with a monicker like Fat Bastard or Marilyn Merlot or Kick Ass Red, I assume that most of the producer’s cleverness has gone into branding and that the wine itself is secondary, as in “not especially good.” I am rarely proved wrong.

Wine Collectors

You see them at wine auctions, avidly buying and buying. They don’t really drink wine; they hoard it, amassing quantities they could never consume in a dozen lifetimes. But for them it’s a game; it’s about owning the best labels and finest vintages, and then being able to say, “I have this and this and this — and you don’t.” Sad, sad creatures ...