The wine business
Jun. 30th, 2008 09:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snousleThis New Yorker article is really worth a read. It's so true. The accounts of the gruelling tastings especially brought a smile to my face, along with some reminiscences of my involvement in this world.
My late friend Rick was a rare wine trader, and had asked John to carbon date some wine leftovers and corks a few years back. Alas, it never got done. Not sure why. Anyway, it's too late now, and the wealthy stranger who had sent the bottles (post-drinking) didn't get them back as he had wanted.
(John's claim to fame, BTW, is to have invented the process that prepares organic samples for 14C dating in accelerator mass spectrometers. He's one of the founding fathers of this technique, and in fact just last night he hopped on his motorcycle and went off to Davis where he's involved with a startup applying the same technique to pharma research. Around 1990, this also provided my summer employment - I would guess that about 5 to 10% of all the 14C dates obtained in the past 15 years have been produced using software I created during our first few years together. )
Anyway... on New Year's Day, 2000, Rick held an epic lunch for about a dozen people, which went on for about nine hours. To mark the occasion, he opened a bottle of 1900 Chateau Lafite. And yeah, everyone was so shitfaced by that point that everything tasted FANTASTIC. Being the brash and intoxicated young thing I was, I not only poured myself a second helping, but spilled about a tablespoon of it on the tablecloth. The tablecloth was perhaps not ruined, but we all laughed because the spilled wine cost far more than the tablecloth anyway. He sold it for $5000 a bottle, so it was literally worth more than gold at the time. I wonder now if it was one of these many fakes. I sensed at the time that this was an industry so rich in fraud as to be more like a form of performance art than a business. He'd give you a taste of something wonderful, sell it to you, and somehow the very bottle you bought from him would end up getting served at his next dinner party, where you tasted a dozen more exquisite vintages. And you'd be too drunk to care!
In the end, I don't care what we drank, because it really was excellent and wonderful and grand. I could hardly do better than to match his marketing skills.
My late friend Rick was a rare wine trader, and had asked John to carbon date some wine leftovers and corks a few years back. Alas, it never got done. Not sure why. Anyway, it's too late now, and the wealthy stranger who had sent the bottles (post-drinking) didn't get them back as he had wanted.
(John's claim to fame, BTW, is to have invented the process that prepares organic samples for 14C dating in accelerator mass spectrometers. He's one of the founding fathers of this technique, and in fact just last night he hopped on his motorcycle and went off to Davis where he's involved with a startup applying the same technique to pharma research. Around 1990, this also provided my summer employment - I would guess that about 5 to 10% of all the 14C dates obtained in the past 15 years have been produced using software I created during our first few years together. )
Anyway... on New Year's Day, 2000, Rick held an epic lunch for about a dozen people, which went on for about nine hours. To mark the occasion, he opened a bottle of 1900 Chateau Lafite. And yeah, everyone was so shitfaced by that point that everything tasted FANTASTIC. Being the brash and intoxicated young thing I was, I not only poured myself a second helping, but spilled about a tablespoon of it on the tablecloth. The tablecloth was perhaps not ruined, but we all laughed because the spilled wine cost far more than the tablecloth anyway. He sold it for $5000 a bottle, so it was literally worth more than gold at the time. I wonder now if it was one of these many fakes. I sensed at the time that this was an industry so rich in fraud as to be more like a form of performance art than a business. He'd give you a taste of something wonderful, sell it to you, and somehow the very bottle you bought from him would end up getting served at his next dinner party, where you tasted a dozen more exquisite vintages. And you'd be too drunk to care!
In the end, I don't care what we drank, because it really was excellent and wonderful and grand. I could hardly do better than to match his marketing skills.
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no subject
Date: 2008-06-30 09:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-30 11:05 pm (UTC)'60: $490 (Magnum, so maybe $300/btl)
'61: $1649
'62: $425
'64: $290
It would have to have been stored in a uniform-temperature environment of about 55 degrees to be of value on the market today, but some wines survive a lot of abuse. An unheated, insulated, fully underground cellar would be OK, but if it spent much time at room temperature and/or got above 80 degrees at all, it is likely to be wrecked by now. Only way to know for sure is to drink it. ;-)
no subject
Date: 2008-06-30 11:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-01 03:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-01 07:23 am (UTC)I suppose one thing that *CAN* come out of all that drinking is....you guessed it...blowjobs.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-01 03:34 pm (UTC)...
Date: 2008-07-02 01:51 am (UTC)