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Thursday, November 30, 2006
It really IS a small wine world, after all
Lest y’all think I was making up the whole thing about Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo wine-tasting competition a couple weeks back, check out this Houston Chronicle story on the event headlined “The life of a wine judge is all in good taste.”
My stint as a wine judge in Houston produced a “Whoa — small world” moment that still boggles my half-fermented brain. First, y’all should remember the blog posting from back in June entitled “What was the best wine purchase YOU ever made — of a mispriced bottle?” In it, I describe how I practically stole two bottles of 1983 Ch. Guiraud from a long-defunct wine shop in the Crosse Point Shopping Center, paying the clearly mistakenly marked price of $7.99 for a wine that should have cost three or four times as much, or more.
Fast forward, then, two decades, to this Houston wine-judging gig, where I find myself chatting with one of my fellow out-of-town judges who had traveled the farthest to join the tasting panels: Wendy Narby, a British-born wine and food consultant who has spent the last two-decades plus in France leading wine tours for various entities and teaching English to Bordeaux winemakers.
I asked Wendy an innocent question along the lines of, “Why did you leave England for France?” (We print journalists ask those hard-hitting questions, don’tchaknow). Well, because she married a man whose family owned a chateau in Bordeaux, she explained, but the familiy just sold it recently after owning it for 25 years.
Really, I said. Which one? Now keep in mind, there are many, many hundreds, maybe thousands, of winemaking properties small and large scattered throughout the countryside in Bordeaux, making the robust reds, delicate whites, and delicious dessert wines that flow from the region. And I haven’t heard of 90 percent of them. Or maybe 99 percent.
But of course, Wendy replied, “”Chateau Guiraud.” Catching a glimpse of my look of astonishment, she asked: “Have you heard of it?”
Um, why yes, I stammer, as a matter of fact I have.
My friends, I am here to testify: It’s a small, small world.
Now lean in close, because this is just between you and me: Later, back in my hotel room, I imagined for a moment what my reaction would have been if — back in 1987 or thereabouts when I bought those two mispriced bottles of Sauternes, before I had kids, before I began writing a wine column for the Dayton Daily News, before I had even THOUGHT about writing on wine — you had walked up to me and told me, “Dude, someday you’ll fly to Texas to judge a wine competition and meet a member of the family that made the wine you’re holding in your hand, and you’ll tell her the story of the misprices bottles, and you’ll have one of those ‘Whoa, small world’ moments deep in the heart of Texas” — well, I don’t know what I would have thought. Probably that you were hallucinating.
Life’s funny that way, I guess. Kinda calls for further rumination — over a glass of old Sauternes.
Cheers!
Mark Fisher
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