Everyday Drinking

In certain circles of the wine world, it might not be enough to demonstrate that you know about wine; you have to show that you know the right wines. There’s pressure to recognize references, to zero in on the right bottles and be seen drinking them. Taken to the extreme, drinking wine because it tastes good is replaced by drinking wine that signals your own good taste. I thought about this when I read an essay, “The End of Taste as Currency,” by the art director Zoë Yasemin.

(Images: Wall Street Journal) I’m sending this special nebbiolo Sunday edition of Everyday Drinking to highlight my first wine piece for the Wall Street Journal (published this morning). It’s about my love of Langhe Nebbiolo, the ultimate “Goldilocks wine.’” Please click and read (there is a paywall, my apologies). People make a bigger deal out of wine-and-food pairings than they need to. My simple rule: Find a “Goldilocks wine”—not too heavy, not too light—and stick with it.

(Photo: Tim Graham/Getty Images) Certain things have come to pass and I find myself a 29-year-old divorcee living in a strange, millennial-grey rental house with my parents. It’s Monday night, my kids are with their dad, and I have four old Australian shiraz open before me. Only times as troubling as these would call someone to open a critical mass of 16-percent-alcohol bombs, alone, standing in her kitchen over a girl dinner of chips and salsa. But here we are, and frankly, I am glad we are.

I was definitely the worst-dressed person at the gala dinner for the Rioja Centennial earlier this year.

Did Benjamin Franklin really say, “In all your amours, prefer old women to young ones”? That’s what Stephen Vizinczey suggests in the opening of In Praise of Older Women, where he argues that “modern culture—American culture—glorifies the young; on the lost continent of old Europe it was the affair of the young man and his older mistress that had the glamour of perfection.” Substitute mistress with white wine, and you’ll have the point of this essay.

Big news over here at the Everyday Drinking headquarters: your humble correspondent has earned himself a major certification. Yes, some of you have been studying for years and years to gain advanced WSET certifications—and that’s great; I salute you. My certification is nothing like that. It took less than five minutes, but I am now a fully ordained minister. Yes, I am now officially among the clergy, a man of the cloth. No, I didn’t have a sudden come-to-Jesus moment.

A bite from the wine bug is exactly the type of infection that will drive an otherwise normal person to spend hours scouring the dusty, creaking old shelves of an eight-story used book store, hoping she might discover a new wine book. That’s where I was when I spotted Joyous Anarchy: The Search for Great American Wines, by William E. Massee. Joyous Anarchy, published in 1978, is a peculiar example of 20th-century wine writing that comes at a very particular time in American wine history.

(Photo: Philippe Desmazes/AFP/Getty Images) It’s been nine days since Caroline and I posted “The Sysco-ification of Wine,” our call-to-arms dealing with shady corporate distribution, wine culture’s lazy “drink what you like” ethos, and why it’s time to break out the pitchforks. Clearly, we struck a lil chord. The comments, both here and on social media, keep coming in hot. I’ve been called a “snob,” a “wanker,” an “asshole,” among other things.

On Monday, food writer Alicia Kennedy published an excellent essay on the dirty martini in her newsletter (definitely consider subscribing). Alicia herself is not a dirty martini lover. She takes her martini the same classic way I take mine: Beefeater gin and Dolin dry vermouth, stirred and garnished with an olive. When Alicia recently passed through Philadelphia on the book tour for her memoir, On Eating, we enjoyed a few martinis together.

(Photo: Ted Streshinsky/CORBIS/Getty Images) Of course, Jason was the jerk as usual, the “wine snob.” I was at my friend Rachel’s beach house for a happy hour, and I’d been tasked with uncorking the next wine. I opened the fridge to grab the Ampeleia ‘Unlitro Bianco’ I’d brought, and I saw it: the bottle of Chloe chardonnay with the cute bow on the label. Rachel and I have a long-standing joke about her love of buttery Josh chardonnay, and so I shouted to her: “Chloe? Wtf is this?