MaxH

What is it that we now have? I've now seen several press reports that are small variations on these statements: -- No comment about the other US-France taste tests before and after, which Bob Thompson cited (upthread). This may allude to particular "critic's" (does anyone happen to know which?) but it doesn't say. (I haven't run into many serious European critics who say that.) Also it doesn't mention (nor does any of the reports I've seen) that solid California Cabernets have a very long record of aging well, they were famous for it in the 1960s, Ridge wines well before the 1971 are known for it; who exactly was disputing that well-known history??? It is possible that what we now have is another mythos in formation. (To be solemnly repeated, but never examined.)

For what it's worth, I've noticed more pithy ones in some eras. -------- "Perhaps Fernand Point did indeed consume a magnum [of Champagne] while shaving and dressing for the day, but few of us could afford such a regimen either economically or physically -- and after all, Point died, undoubtedly a happy man, at a comparatively early age." -- Robert Finigan, Finigan's Private Guide to Wines, 1982.

Which of course you don't, though you can always get one of those too. How about (once again) the book that was the dominant US cookbook in the 19th century and that some people consider the best classic cookbook the US has produced (Eliza Leslie's book). Though shorter than today's comprehensive US books, it shows a depth of taste and perception. It's not just useful itself, but also it reveals some things in US cooking to be older than folks now suppose. (It's on display at the Copia museum too, along with Mary Randolph's book and the early editions of FF and JoC.) Eliza Leslie, Directions for Cookery, 1837. Easily cheaply available new or used in the Dover reprint edition by ISBN number search (ISBN 0486406148). It's in the Dover online catalog too.

Not necessarily. Numerical systems are a shorthand for seeing where a given wine falls on a reviewer's own global scale of evaluation. If in fact the reviewer has a global scale of evaluation. Not to argue balex's own point, I am coming from a perspective of reading (and having available for reference) much US wine-critic writing from before the "100-point" scales appeared. The critical landscape in those days was vigorous (for the umpteenth time, you can see a survey of it in the 1984 UC-Press book cited above) and a concrete single scale was just not part of it. The 20-point Davis scale had been tried and it didn't "take" with the public; numerical scales as of the early 1980s were a tested, and failed, idea. US critics wrote appraisals as they do now, but the absolute "quality" summaries were coarse (prime - choice - good - utility - pet). The side effect of the 100-point scales (though people brought up with them or bought into them tend to accept them implicitly and defend them, and may lack real reference points outside that model) is precisely that they create the horse race mentioned above.

Wait a minute. First Kim (and Susan), please mention edition and size of AHD you have. That's important, more below. I've got a shelf of anglophone dictionaries handy (not counting the foreigners). For years, many US word fans have prized the full-size 3rd ed. of the AHD. (1992, not quite 12 inches [30 cm] high, often black paper cover). Just months ago I was told (by a literary scholar) that lexicographers and linguists dislike the AHD for being too prescriptive, exactly opposite of complaints above. To name just one example (probably distracting, because it's outside many people's universe), for 25 years I've seen complaints in print about a US pronunciation shift in a word I don't use much but some people do, especially if they are being "fancy." As one essayist put it in the 1980s, the "correct" or traditional way to say this word, patina, stresses the first syllable (like STAMina), but that newbies, so to speak, shifted it to paTEENa and don't realize this. My point: AHD fullsize 3rd supports that essayist (PAT-uh-na as the leading pronunciation example) and gives the story behind the word. (It comes from paten, if you're curious.) The AHD originally stood out via pictures (now more common) and advice from a diverse Usage Panel. (Which split evenly, in 3rd ed., on US syllable stress for harrass, in which "Curiously, ... each side regards itself as an embattled minority.") Between the 3rd and the 4th editions though, the photos went to color, unfortunately in some cases (to see why, compare beret, derby, and fedora in fullsize 3rd vs. 4th). It also simplified or omitted many diverting, even brilliant little articles about strange word histories and dilemmas. For instance, at aggravate, Comstockery, dinner (apropos this forum!), Frankenstein, kludge ("not `etymologist-friendly' " -- AHD), and Melba toast. May have made other changes too, and it is in process of revision, current 4th to be replaced by "new" 4th this summer. My defense of AHD therefore reflects only 3rd and earlier.

A sports-match approach not only sells copy (at least in the US), but satisfies expectations visible in casual US discussion of "France vs. California" lately. I've seen fewer US efforts to put the 1976 event into real context. (Of course, many people now writing weren't following wine 30 years ago; yet people 30 years ago were following wine, of course, and they wrote.) Here for your possible interest is a micro-book-review, re-recommending the landmark University of California Book of California Wine (1984, ISBN 0520050851), which did some context-setting at the time. First, Bob Thompson (one of the editors and even in the 1970s, a dean of popular writers on California wine): "It was not so much that somebody staged an international tasting, or that expert tasters placed some California [wines] on an equal footing with some of their French counterparts. That had been happening for several years. The Spurrier tasting became important because Time reported it. When Gault-Millau staged their much more informative Wine Olympiad a few years later, the news magazines had already spent their interest in the comparative tasting story. The Gault-Millau results went ignored by all but special interest wine publications and a few newspapers." [i think that's the 1979 tasting I cited upthread. -- MH] Another author, John Bender, elsewhere in the same book put the event into the context of local tastings of wines from many places, which are a long-time tradition among wine lovers in California, as elsewhere. The 1976 tasting "shook the wine world and provoked the first commercial attention to California wines in Europe since the nineteenth century. ... The ratings in Paris came as no surprise to the many groups in California that regularly stage comparative blind tastings of varietal wines from different regions of the world."

This sort of question comes up from time to time on the Internet. Because of the birthday connection, I'll cite something I posted in 1992 about Morrison Wood's cookbooks. (It was posted to what was for many years the sole wine forum on the Internet, though more of them now exist.) The book titled With a Jug of Wine actually continues to get use in my house despite its age (Morrison Wood was a sort of cult eclectic US food writer in the 1940s and 1950s, and this particular book stayed in print for a good thirty years. Today you can get it easily on the used market, because it was so popular.) I got it as a birthday gift once from a stepmother who was a cooking professional. It also represents a useful corner of US cookbook history. With A Jug of Wine

First the flat gasket is of some very carefully chosen transparent synthetic plastic. (It was named specifically, I think, by the person who introduced it at the tasting I attended in 04 but at this point I forget.) I know that such materials today are highly developed (for instance, you can select them to pass or block this or that wavelength of light, pass or block alpha particles, for thermal expansion properties of choice, etc.). So I don't doubt that fully flavor-neutral materials are available. Second the "extraction" is very convenient. You just pull it off. The plastic gasket and the close-fitting stopper and bottle (in samples I've handled) stick securely together when the capsule first is unwrapped. Then you remove the stopper and can replace it securely when ready. My first impression when handling these things was that they are heavier than corks; the second was that they are convenient to open and even better for re-corking a partially used bottle. Lastly that they seemed to be rather fine and durable pieces of work to be used up after the bottle is empty. That may reflect the prejudice of seeing cork for many years, and also, of course they and the bottle are made of the same stuff (German: Stoff). Anyone who didn't see it already will want to review the related Corked-Wines Thread active recently. Including Bleudauvergne's eloquent testimonial on the cruel let-down of carefully stored, magnificent wines that prove to be ruined by cork taint. That's a frustration shared by many wine enthusiasts as you can also gather from the thread.

Assuming we're referring to the same thing, German firms have used such a glass stopper for a while, though it is still novel. (Of course, it has an exact specification in the DIN, the deutsche Industrie Normen, and fits into the bottle with impressive precision.) It resembles the traditional laboratory ground-glass bottle stopper but smooth-sided. The sealling ring is a thin, clear, flat plastic ring, providing a soft air-tight interface between the stopper flange (mushroom top) and bottle glass. I first saw it at a US tasting of German wines circa 2004, and have encountered it occasionally since. It's one sure way to avoid biochemical problems with cork, TCA mainly. As you know if you know this subject well, industry acknowledges some 4-8% of premium cork-closed wines routinely spoiled by these faults. (My own blind-tasting statistics in recent years, a few thousand bottles, support those percentages by the way.) [Edited to restore a missing "t"]

Largely maybe, Paul Stanley: not exclusively. Some people actually drink things for flavor, because they're interested in things like flavor. Exempli gratia, younger co-worker asks my opinion on malt whiskeys, having acquired a basic Macallan 12-year (widely available in large US shops for USD $35 or so). I said one can do worse, flavorwise, for $35; and if you consider a bigger budget for something fancy, like twice as much, already you cover a big chunk of the malt-whisky world. (Also, they last longer than wines, if you cork them back up.) Sadly the bustling malt-whisky shops formerly greeting travelers in the Heathrow airport have faded. No more barrel head covered with bottles for sampling. Instead a sharp-eyed dour Scotsman. ("We canna have the whole airport using us as a free bar, young man" -- I'm not that young -- "it woon't doooo!")

Thank you for reminding me of this small winery--and that they have Cabernet Franc. Don't know if all this will be useful for the Original Poster in Austin, Texas; but it's useful to me, thanks. I didn't know that the Santa Cruz Mountains AVA was such a source of Cabernet Franc wines and I visit some of those wineries periodically. The Ahlgren family's winery, also in Santa Cruz Mtns, has made a Cab Franc too if I remember. (Such a small business was it that on a visit to buy some Cabernet Sauvignon, maybe 10 years ago, Mr. Ahlgren, senior, had to spin labels onto blank Cabernet bottles at hand, to sell them. I told him I'm buying for contents, not the label. Must label it anyhow, he said: It's the law. Then he realized I'd distracted him into reaching for the wrong labels, which were Cabernet Franc as I recall. He pulled them off (glue still wet) -- I knew by this time not to ask him not to, as It's The Law -- and he ran them back through the machine with the correct labeling for the lot. Cooper-Garrod is a remarkable operation (large family including former NASA test pilot turned winemaker -- the barn I've seen used for tasting was decorated with unusual photos of aircraft, occasionally crashed). These and the other 50 or so wineries in the Santa Cruz Mountains are laid out very differently from, say, the Napa Valley. (The ground goes up and down, so you must drive around hills and ridges to get from one winery to another.)

Yes, Internet user numbers have grown, along with applications, and public awareness. (It's remarkable that text-based fora like this one were very early online capabilities, preceding graphics, commerce, etc. Some early food-wine fora actually had considerable traffic, because there also were far fewer fora competing for the existing users.) Moreover, Prodigy fora cited above were still separate from the mainstream Internet. As late as the middle 1990s, Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy, and GEnie did not yet provide direct Internet access to their subscribers, and most restricted even email access. (The list server was Internet email.) Those early efforts at private proprietary online services, separate from each other and from the existing Internet, had the effect also of isolating their user communities for some years.(Google's newsgroup archive has 1.2 million forum messages from the year 1990 for instance, and those don't even include the food and wine traffic, essentially, because such postings fell into a large "recreational" category that was excluded from a major archive for some years, storage space being limited.)

Hi Brad, actually the wine newsgroup started early 1982 and you can find some of its archives easily. For example its first message is Here. (It changed names later.) Newsgroups are extensions of Internet email (which came in the 1970s); they diffuse messages to servers rather than keeping them in one place. Otherwise they're like current text-based fora (eGullet). Actually they're the basis for these fora, and of conventions like smileys and FAQs. Informed Internet histories such as Salus's (ISBN 0201876744) have many more details. Yes that was one of the large private firms with fora for paid subscribers, separate from the Internet. Salus described that isolation when it was in the process of disappearing (1995). Sounds like eGullet! -- M

Related to this, a theme in the Hesses' 1977 book The Taste of America is that much of the history of cooking was housewives contriving something interesting from ingredients the "gentry" wouldn't touch.

Also Mary, who are you calling bad boys?

Here's public Internet access "at a glance," going backwards, to put the answer in context.* Major Web browsing dates to the middle 1990s, the era also when large private US dial-up services firms (some of which had their own wine fora) ceased competing with the Internet and opened its services fully to their subscribers. (Salus's Internet-history book documents this.) Mosaic, the first browser I used, came earlier, 1993 (US National Science Foundation celebrated its decade in 2003). These tools used the HTTP and HTML protocols whose inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, announced them to the existing Internet in 1991 in This message, including the new term "Web" (now widely misunderstood). The public could use Internet-connected email and forum services from the middle 1980s in North America via dial-up "public-access" computer services whose impact shows in archives; other Net nodes were at universities, technical firms, and government offices. Online Internet-connected fora were called newsgroups or "news" (dating to 1979). A famous 1989 history snapshot was by a well-known participant.** Food and wine newsgroups began winter 1981-82 as I detailed on eGullet last July, and became popular among the tens of thousands of users then. These fora survive (though unmoderated, and needing user self-education on protocol, for instance RFC1855). The Internet itself (a name replacing the earlier "ARPAnet" in 1980) began 1969 with four sites (three in California and one in Utah). Recently I pointed this out, and someone responded that the Internet of 1969 was very different from 2006's. That understates the situation: the Internet even in 2003 was much different from today's, and on back to 1969, continuously. It wasn't obvious to most folks using these facilities in the 1980s or even 1990s what directions growth would take. (Just as, for instance, you can talk up a good Cabernet for 25 years and be surprised then by sudden interest. Which also happened recently.) -------- *I witnessed much of what's mentioned here and in Brad Templeton's history, though I didn't see the Internet in action before 76. **Some Net jargon reflects Unix, a favored software platform for DARPA-funded Internet development in the 1980s. (A novel side effect was family reactions if you casually mentioned that you worked all day with Unix.)

Yes congrats Brad. I have mixed memories of SLV. In the 1970s you could get it (like a lot of interesting California Cabs, Clos du Val, Jordan, etc.) for a few dollars a bottle. (Late in that decade there was anxiety by some US wine writers about a trend to "double-digit Cabernets," I could quote if necessary.) Good stuff. But the 1992 you've mentioned was for me a case of lost opportunity. A weekend tasting drive to that region 10 years ago, in very good company, found a quantity of the 1992 that the winery had unearthed and was selling off, but it was very hot weather and we didn't want to put it in the car. Instead of buying it anyway, I followed up a day later and it was all gone. (Maybe you enjoyed it instead. :-) Cheers -- M

If ever on earth (by the way) proof were wanted that a little wine knowledge is the consumer's friend -- a truer friend than advertising, or ratings followed blindly -- then the recent Bordeaux market should furnish this proof. (Wine knowledge in that case could be as simple as reading the Bordeaux chapter in an introductory wine book and some information about past vintages, or tasting some of them, or asking a good merchant about good wines not on the current trophy list.)

Good point. I agree about 18th-century material though there may be some in the Dover catalog which is impressive anyway. Many 19th century classic books are available, cheap, in Dover or other facsimile editions and you can find the originals on the used market if you look for them. US classics like Eliza Leslie's books and The Virginia Housewife and UK's Mrs Beeton issued in many editions (58 for Leslie if I remember), in vast quantities, and were often printed on low-acid cloth-based paper and well bound as was the custom of the time, for working books meant to last, like tools. Some 60- to 150-year-old books I have, though well used, hold up better now than modern books 20 years old (printed on acid wood-pulp paper). Current Dover reprint cookbooks are routinely paperback but acid-free. Link to related posting upthread.

Don't overlook, Daniel, that with the frenzy lately for futures (Brad B is being cynical of course, not more than one Bordeaux vintage in three is now labeled Vintage of the Century) we have the peculiar situation that older inventory from respectable years routinely sells for less, sometimes much less, then the latest newborn wines. I've seen excellent deals in recent years from the 1980s and 1990s. Not only are they cheaper, you can drink them sooner.

Whatever you say, JohnL. One more thing, a friendly tip. God made paragraphs, organization, concision, editing, Preview-Post buttons, patience, and writing tips.* While we can't know all His purposes, for these gifts it's tolerably plain. They aid readers, they show the writer's regard for both the reader and the matter. Please learn them. For God's sake. Cheers -- Max * Some sources of such tips have achieved classic status. In modern times, Strunk and White, the Fowler brothers, Mary-Claire van Leunen. In the 1600s Blaise Pascal famously regretted lacking time to write a short letter, sending a long one instead. Voltaire added: Il faudrait penser pour ecrir Il vaut encore mieux effacer Les auteurs quelquefois ont écrit sans penser Comme on parle souvent sans avoir rien à dire. [it is necessary to think in order to write It's even better to erase Authors sometimes have written without thinking As one often speaks without having anything to say.]

You're much too kind, JohnL. Please keep that comment in mind below. ??! (See above.) Sure enough, I remember that too. But good-bad wasn't the distinction in my posting.Now I'm a fifth-gen. northern-California native happily following California wines since becoming interested in wine (middle 1970s). Fellow tasters older than I did so since the 1950s. Posting above is my view of the evolution of the premium California wine scene. When I observe, as carefully as I recovered the Boston quotation, that today's "cult" Cabernets differ from those in the Spurrier era, and that I've seen them appeal to newer wine fans, not to people who bought California wines in the Spurrier era, I get consensus about this from everyone I know (recently I asked a roomful), yet get dispute from you and Squires (who both acknowledge hanging around one particular critic). I'm lectured that "Heitz and BV Reserve were cult wines in their time" yet I paid $50-$70 (2006 dollars) in their time, to ordinary merchants, for wines with track records. I distinguish this only from ultra-allocated labels today that sell for hundreds, or have existed only a few years so no one has seen them age, or that generate clamors unseen in 1976 (by this attentive witness anyway). That's a distinction, in many eyes.

That does describe most US mainstream wine critics of recent decades whose reviews I've seen and retained (never mind WS and WA): Olken and Singer, Asher, Blue, Bespaloff who is discussed elsewhere in this forum, the contributors to Vintage, etc etc etc. It might be a basic definition of good food-and-wine criticism: useful evaluation plus context.

Certainly, and it's a good point. (Examples come to mind.) But johnL's point is good too, I think: Self-publication is free to hold forth gloriously untroubled by reality checks. In this it surpasses even niche publications (aka "buff books"). Here's one for you: As recently as last year a mainstream newspaper resurrected the cherished myth of the Austrian "anti-freeze" wine-adulteration scandal of 1985. (It was a true scandal, but mostly a journalistic one, because anti-freeze was never involved. Only some instances of a similar-sounding glycol, considerably less toxic than alcohol. Writers and editors careless of chemistry killed an entire country's wine exports for years, and yet after all this was clarified thoroughly, the error repeats.)You do need to lift a finger sometimes to do reality checks, but failures by major media don't change the issue of self publications that haven't even heard of reality checks.

It was ever so. (This was an observation on Internet fora even in the 1980s.) I think you are on to something.