My personal favorite is “forest floor,” a description of earthy wines that is the double toe-loop of wine writing — once a bring-them-to-their-feet crowd pleaser, now so commonplace the only people who bother with it are 50-year old has-beens cutting it up on the Mall of America ice rink.

Though I accept as a matter of philosophy that wine writers need to write something to justify their daily UPS shipments of free wine, I’ve always thought taste descriptors say more about the person doing the describing than the wine being described. Wine writers who use “forest floor,” for example, assume that people know what forest floor tastes like. That assumption is based on the fact that most wine writers were nerdy children set upon by bullies, who pushed the future wine writers down and rubbed dirt into their faces before taking their lunch money.  By assuming everyone has had similar experiences, wine writers can delude themselves that they’re not nerdy, but in fact just like everyone else.

To stay competitive, wine writers have to invent increasingly difficult and impressive taste descriptors. I overheard one critic recently describe a wine as tasting of “sunbaked sandstone,” an impressive feat that will no doubt be commonplace a decade from now. (There are rumors that China has begun selecting promising three year olds, removing them from their families to isolated wine-writing training facilities where they’re fed a special diet and train 14 hours a day.)

Given the increasing cultural, economic, and even geopolitical importance of wine writing, it’s not surprising that a few unscrupulous marketers are attempting to corrupt the system to their own advantage. (“Money is the root of all marketing plans,” wrote marketer Michael Brenner.) This is not the familiar corruption of wineries giving special treatment to writers who don’t write for print publications, but a new form of corruption in which wines are manufactured with world-class taste descriptors built right in — as if someone had brewed a Cabernet with actual pieces of forest floor in the bottle in order to prompt wine writers to promote the wine.

The breakthrough product on this front is Meteorito wine (obvious advertising tag line: “It’s out of this world!”) which is made by Ian Hutcheon’s Tremonte Vineyard in Chile’s Cachapoal Valley. Meteorito’s secret ingredient is a three-inch meteorite that steeps in the wine as it ages.

“When you drink this wine, you are drinking elements from the birth of the solar system,” (Hutcheon) added. “The idea behind submerging it in wine was to give everybody the opportunity to touch something from space; the very history of the solar system, and feel it via a grand wine.”

Leaving aside, for the moment, that molecular migration means you ingest with every breath elements from the birth of the solar system, Hutcheon insists the presence of microscopic quantities of meteorite give the wine a “livelier” taste.

Like Dick Fosbury, who forever changed high jumping by going over the bar backwards, Hutcheon has set in motion events that will inevitably — pardon the mixture of metaphors — raise the bar on wine writing in the future. From this moment forward, in their repertoire of wine descriptors, wine writers who aspire to Olympian greatness will have to include vocabulary familiar to viewers of The Jetsons. Wine that has, in the past, been sufficiently described using terrestrial terms (you don’t get more terrestrial than “forest floor”) will have to be described as intergalactic, planetary, even asteroidal. And as more and more cosmological terminology is assimilated into wine writing, those who read wine reviews will have to make sense out of something like this:

In the glass, a pleasing range of the electromagnetic spectrum with hints of dark matter in the nose and redshift on the mid-palate. Plasma mouthfeel, and a 47-dimensional finish with good supersymmetry.

I, personally, am already nostalgic for forest floor.

But since I’m not a different kind of wine blogger, I will simply note that a whole generation grew up on crap like this and they’re the same population cohort that makes up the spine of the Tea Party.

My theory: the bilious anger caused by being served a dinner of Spam and lima beans on a Formica tabletop by parents who smoked at the dinner table has never quite dissipated, and they’re going to make damned sure you don’t enjoy your arugula.

Source: Mitch O’Connell.

In wine writing, the topic of crusade is the 100-point scoring system, sure to get a rise out of…well, people like me. If you search “100-point wine scoring,” Google returns more than 85-million references. Narrow the search to blogs-only and you’ll still get 4.3-million postings, each of them no doubt a cri de coeur in which people serious about wine lament the benighted masses who drink without the benefit of neurosis and access to free portfolio tastings.

Who doesn’t get tired of endlessly debating the value of 100-point scoring systems? Well, for one, David Duman of  The Huffington Post — which sounds a lot like it might be the newspaper Mr. Wilson read in the old Dennis the Menace cartoon strip, which is just another detail reinforcing the old-fartiness of the whole discussion. So by all means, Mr. Duman, we need another 500 words on the subject. And it would be particularly helpful if you used your latest Huffington posting to remind us all that you were on the record against 100-point scales from Day One. Through the breach, as it were, with bayonet fixed to slash away on behalf of conventional wisdom.

Well and good, Mr. Duman, but not in itself a telethon-class achievement. That’s going to require a dead-before-the-needle-left-the-arm overdose of deeply felt overstatement about the fundamental goodness of those with whom one is disagreeing — in this case, the wine intelligentsia’s equivalent of Mel Torme, Steve Heimoff.

So, this (emphasis added):

In the ensuing months, my opinion hasn’t changed but I thought the debate was worth another look…

Let me just break in here to remind you that wine bloggers have decided this debate was “worth another look” 4.3 million times.

In the ensuing months, my opinion hasn’t changed but I thought the debate was worth another look because of a couple of somewhat recent high profile defenses of the system from writers whose work I otherwise admire, including San Francisco Chronicle wine editor Jon Bonné and freelance writer and Wine Enthusiast west coast editor Steve Heimoff. Both of these men I consider among the most thoughtful and cosmopolitan journalists writing about wine today, so it was discouraging to see their defenses of the system utilizing those same tired arguments used by lesser critics.

Leaving John Bonné out of this, consider Steve Heimoff as “thoughtful and cosmopolitan” while viewing this video, in which a refrigerated and totally professional Heimoff discusses the endlessly-fascinating topic of rating wine.  This is a video I’ve kept secret for years because, like Jerry Lewis Himself, it’s so awesomely bad that it qualifies as a national treasure. I was afraid if I mentioned it out loud Heimoff might come to his senses and get it the hell off the Internet.

Hat tip on this to the Wine Curmudgeon, who retains his respectable position in society in part by convincing me to write about stuff like this so he doesn’t have to.

UPDATE: After watching the video for about the thousandth time, I note that there are roughly a half-dozen jump-cuts, implying that there were parts of the “show” that were edited out because, presumably, they were less interesting than what was left in. My question is: How is that possible?

For those of us who spill wine rather more grandly than that — while gesticulating wildly at the dinner table, for example, and splatting wine over a roughly six-foot-by-six-foot  area — the glass seems like it would be ineffective.

Still, you can buy four of them here for $150.

The direct shipping reform was just one part of a busy day for the legislature, which apparently frittered away most of its term taking under-the-table campaign contributions and practicing writing “Mrs. Chris Christie” on pending legislation while staring dreamily out the window. On the last day of the session, more than 150 bills needed to be considered.

To simplify the process, the legislature decided to just give up and turn the state into a basic cable reality show.

“For years we argued that Jersey Shore was not what the state was all about,” said made-up state representative Steven “Guido” Singletary. “After a while, we just decided WTF.”

On the same day the legislature passed direct wine shipping, it also created a pilot program to allow parimutuel betting in bars, exempted beach bars from noise restrictions, and dropped the previously required three-day waiting period to get married.

“Whoo-hoo!” shouted fictional state Senator Angela “Guido” Brancusi, pictured above on the floor of the legislature. “I’m gonna get creepyyyyyyy!”

Every time I turn around, another 2007 Barolo is getting 96 points or higher. Sales sheets have been coming my way with loads of offerings and the points are nearly always the same. 96 points…96 points…97 points, and then, perish the thought, they try to sell me a 94 pointer! I mean really. Who is buying 94 point wine these days? 94 points is for chumps…losers…people that don’t really love Barolo. Because if you love Barolo, you are buying 96 points and up…

Leave the 94 pointers for the people that like Napa Cabs…

I, personally, am totally on-board both with the considerable evidence that wine scores are floating upwards. I also believe that people with more money than sense use their dedication to highly rated wines as a substitute for the actual enjoyment of wine for its own sake.

Partly because of that, and partly because we are in the nearly hopeless time of year between Christmas and the opening of spring training, I am formulating my “Theory of All Things Picky.” The theory, not fully developed but regularly expressed over drinks with anyone unfortunate enough to make eye contact with me, is thus:

Everything is getting too complicated. Not every human activity requires connoisseurship. Just shut up and drink your freakin’ wine already.

Only I don’t actually say “freakin’”.

If it passes, New Jersey will be the 39th state to allow direct shipping.

 With ‘nano wine’, in order to achieve different varietals, users activate their selection of the millions of molecule-sized flavour capsules in the drink, which is by default a kind of merlot. tastes may range from vanilla– to mimic the taste of australian wines– and truffle to oak and pepper (to recreate a syrah, for example). the particles are activated by different wattages and duration of exposure to microwave, so by microwaving the wine accordingly, users can completely alter and tweak its taste. inactivated nano-capsules are drunk with no adverse affects, while the opened capsules alter the taste, smell, and even colour of the wine.

Above is a chart explaining how long and what setting one might cook the wine to achieve a certain varietal.

Nanowine is a real product that you can buy, but it’s mostly art. No matter how much you cook it, it remains run-of-the-mill Merlot.

You can buy Nanowine here.

Can’t you just feel the joy?

Thanks to all who inquired. I’ll start posting again regularly.

Happy New Year.