PERSONAL TRAVAILS IN WINE COLLECTING
A recent addition to my living room, the picture you see on the left, brings a new chapter to my wine collecting saga. It is a 920 bottle indoor storage unit, a monster. But a pretty one.I started collecting in 1996 and soon found the need for a storage unit. Stockton being located in a delta with a high water table, there are almost no houses with basements here (with the exception of the Miracle Mile neighborhood north of Downtown). Thus all wine storage occurs above ground, either in dedicated cellar rooms or, as in my case in storage units[...]
FOOLISH WINE SNOBS; HEY I AM ONE OF THEM!
The wine snob that I am, I particularly take pride in my disregard of well known wine pundits, names such as Robert Parker, and my own opinion of the subject acquired by my own tastings. It is thus with much humility that I will announce an episode of recent gullibility which deflated my baloon of hauteur, at least temporarily. It happened after I discovered Gary Veynerchuck.For those of you who have not heard of him, Veynerchuck has become, arguably the second most popular wine pundit after Parker. His is a wine shop owner in New Jersey who has become an[...]
COPPOLA WINES: A STRAINED RELATIONSHIP
The esteemed movie director Francis Ford Coppola, of "Godfather" and "Apocalypse Now" fame, nowadays is more a winemaker than an artist, presiding over an ever enlarging wine conglomerate in Napa and Sonoma. As much as I have loved his great movies, I have intensely disliked his wines either for their quality or their price. I have not come near any Coppola wines in several years, until last night when Bobby, my wife Julie's son, opened a "top of the line" label from his Sonoma outfit called "Archimedes". I approached the bottle with much trepidation and reluctance.Coppola got into the wine[...]
TURKISH HYGIENE
Growing up in the Istanbul of the 60’s, we were accustomed to shortages of basic necessities as a way of life. Included among these was running water and electricity. These services were not continuous. The city was rapidly growing beyond its capability to provide infrastructure. The country was relatively poor, still reeling from its turn of the century wars, and the deprivations of the Second World War it had deftly avoided. Modernization was along the way, but in fits and spurts. The European side of Istanbul was the most modern; still utilities were a constant headache.. As a child, I[...]
THE TIC
In the late 1960’s, while a student in Ortaokul (middle school) at the English High School for Boys of Istanbul I developed a tic. It was a peculiar contortion of my upper lip, raised high up, and draping the underside of my nostrils. By necessity my entire lower face distorted during the act, and my mouth took on a strange, puckered, rounded appearance. In the decades to come I was to study neurology and learn the precise definition of a tic: a sudden, repetitive, non-rhythmic, stereotyped motor movement. Classified as a variant under the heading of “movement disorders” (such conditions[...]
TURKEY AND WINE
Greetings from Turkey. Travelling in my original home country for two weeks I have found myself in a wine desert. While I am quite sure of the existence of a fine wine culture in the country, especially in Istanbul, I am not on a kind of trip that allows any exploration of it. My Turkish friend Selim Hacisalihzade, who has lived in Zurich most of his adult life and knows French wine in particular, met me on our first night in Istanbul. He now divides his time between Switzerland and Istanbul. One of his first admonishments to me was that[...]