Sideways and trolls

Greetings Mr. Rosenberg, I remember your recent contributions here about history of Robert Parker.

I'm sorry to read your testimonial of wine conversations. My experience has been different, entailing people discovering simple pleasures and hobbies and joys and pbuttions. Sort of like the perspective that people read in Saintsbury (Notes on a Cellar-Book), pretty much as fresh and universal as it was when he wrote it late in life, in 1920 (the prototype, still maybe the best, introductory wine-enthusiast book in English, if anyone here hasn't read it). Complete with the awkward process of finally starting to buttemble a little cellar ("better deserving the name than the cupboards which do duty in most middle-clbutt London houses"). After getting interested in the good wines shared by gracious hosts. Questions about storage and temperature and space, as you can find on this newsgroup today. (Compact fluorescents were not yet an option, in 1878.) The pbuttionate wine merchant who lit a flame in a consumer who could barely afford it. Marveling at how different shapes of glbuttes seem to bring out different things in wines. (Sainstbury didn't try to explain the glbuttes, nor do his successors in glbutt-marvel today, though some of them go further than he did in carrying on about it, and on and on, but again there's more Marketing afoot now.)

Again my experience is different. The more truly wine-enthusiastic the people are, the more other things energize the party, not alcohol. Tastings are routinely taste-and-spit if you want to interrogate the wines. (I tested my blood pressure before and after a taste-and-spit tasting and found tangible benefit, gratifying the inevitable physicians present -- physicians like to attend tasting groups, by the way.)

I too have not seen this picture "sideways" yet. I did hear about an interview with the wine-geek actor and his comment that he didn't know wine, he just went to a tasting bar and studied the mannerisms for a while. Accounts I've heard of the movie sound like some of the mannerisms I've seen too at shops that do tastings, in recent years, and some of this resembles the opening quotation above which is one reason I'm not rushing to see the film either. Doesn't sound like what I know as wine enthusiasm.

-- Max