Chronic Negress

It's getting better all the time

The Negress has been busy clearing her heart and her calendar.  She’s off to northern California for ball games, good food, good friends and some wine. Heck, probably as much wine as she can consume without injury or driving issues. She had been laying off the grape while sorting out some diagnostics that ended happily. To celebrate she went with an old reliable 2007 Trimbach Riesling, which tasted like summer and stone with a touch of fruit. With a lot of waiting rooms and sleepless nights in the mix, she also did some reading. The Negress polished off  “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” Theo Fleury’s “Playing with Fire” (learned a lot of Canadian expressions for being wasted and laughed out loud in some places where I probably shouldn’t have) and Alice Feiring‘s “The Battle for Wine and Love, or How I Saved the World from Parkerization.” I’m not a huge fan of the Bobster, mostly because he smokes cigars. The Negress suspects his preference for throbbing Frankenwines is due in large part to his cigar habit. A lot of the Bobster’s fave wines are great for drinking after you’ve burned your tongue on a hot beverage and if you don’t plan to eat with them.  Sometimes this is an experience I crave, though I could do without burning my tongue (I had to give up caffeine for some of this diagnostic work so I plowed through Starbuck’s and Tetley British Blend tea with a vengeance after the ban was lifted). Anyway there’s not much to add to the endless spew of verbiage about Parker, so let’s move on.

The Negress wanted to  like this Feiring woman’s book, but upon finding out she was a pescetarian who eschews various kosher no-nos, I was instantly bored.  She also seems like one of those “always” and “never” people.  She craves wines with terroir, which seem like the right things to crave but she’s so, well, evangelistic about it that my skin crawled. She likes Nicolas Joly’s wines, which are biodynamic. I’m fond of Joly’s wines too but they are above my pay grade right now. She also seems to think that “natural” wine making is always superior to any manipulation. The Negress’s limited sampling of a variety of wines doesn’t bear this out.

There’s a lot of arable land between Feiring and Parker’s countries. The Negress thinks she’s living there nicely, buying wines that are sometimes interesting, sometimes serviceable and sometimes devoutly to be avoided if she encounters them again. Her first stop in Cali will be Bonny Doon Vineyards in Santa Cruz. At the very least, that should be fun.

In the interests of full disclosure, the Negress is a medicated omnivore who takes about 25 prescriptions and supplements a day. She has not burned her tongue recently.