I am on a Greyhound Bus bound for NYC this morning. I was invited to attend a trade tasting of Michael Skurnik wines at the Tribeca Grill. I had to take a day off my ‘real job’ to go, but I figured it was well worth it since I will be tasting through Skurnik’s portfolio of grower Champagnes. I initially planned on taking the train, but the bus was only ten bucks and promised a new vehicle with free WiFi, power outlets, increased leg room and a two hour trip. No brainer.

Waiting for the bus….

Well, The bus was new.

My Bus.

Leg room? Um, no.

WiFi? Um, no.

Two hours? We’ll see.

Oh, and the heat is cranked up to about 93º. Add the heat of the laptop and I am planning to shed about 13 pounds on this two hour cruise.

Enough of my misery (although if you read this blog a lot, you are no doubt into schedenfreude, but exploring that would require a degree in psychology, psychiatry, or TV talk show hosting).

Given that it is ‘Wine Trivia Wednesday’ I guess I should revisit last week’s quiz.

[Editors’s note: some old guy in the back just stood up, and as he was about to pass out, asked for the driver to turn off the heat. Luckily, she obliged. Maybe I should stand up and complain about the WiFi.]

Last week, I gave you a list of four different vineyards in France and asked which of them was considered ‘gargantuan’. I thought the quotes would indicate that there was something a bit tricky about the question. A couple of you (eventually) picked up on it and came up with the right connection. ‘Gargantuan’ is derived from the story Gargantua et Pantagruel written by François Rabelais in the 16^th Century. Rabelais was from Chinon, and it is believed that his family owned and farmed the Clos de l’Echo, the most famous vineyard in Chinon.

For this week’s quiz, I was trying to come up with some equally pseudo-sophisticated question, but I think I used up all my literary references with last week’s ‘gem’. So today I thought I would change it up a bit and ask you something that I have been contemplating all week.

When I started this blog, I really did not envision that at some point I would get invited to tastings or that people would send me wine to try so that I would write about it here. Neither is happening with great regularity, but it has happened enough to get me thinking. I spent the weekend with another blogger driving across the state to go to a football game in Pittsburgh. This guy has been blogging for quite some time and is very well established and respected (putting me in the same category is laughable). He gets a ton of wine sent to him all the time to review. I did not ask him, since we were far too busy trading barbs on the potential outcome of the game (his team won, by the way, on a last second field goal because the quarterback of my team is an incompetent boob), but I would venture to guess that he has not purchased a bottle of wine for several years. He brought along a few bottles for us to taste the night before the game and one thing struck me instantly: if I had bought any of these bottles, I would not have thought about opening any of them in the next 3-10 years.

Now, I admit, I like my wines with some age on them. More, I suspect, than most people. I would guess that 90% of the wine I buy I hold onto for at least 5-10 years before I drink it (we just had a bottle the other night that I bought in the late 90’s—before I even met my wife!). I know it is on the verge of cliché, but many wines do improve with age.

How should the wine buying public view the wine ‘critic’ then? For the most part, their assessments are based on how the wine shows on release when tasted with 50 other wines at 11:00 on some morning. Sure, you could try to make the argument that they are assessing the wine now for future consumption, but we both know that is largely a bunch of crap. I can’t count how many times I have read this:

“Drinking great now, but could easily be cellared for 10 years or more.”

Talk about covering all the bases. I doubt any of them hold onto wines much less buyany, so what does that mean for consumers? What does that mean for you?

One of the 30+ tables at the tasting.