[Tribute Post]: Reserve Wine Notes: Aliens, Unicycles, Christmas, and Wine. Dear Friends, I know. The receipt of this email probably sent a chill through you the moment you eyed the subject line. There is a certain astral and ghostly quality to this message (read: dont be afraid!). Ill tell you why: See, after the store closed I was kidnapped by a gigantic extraterrestrial monster and pulled through a wormhole (where I met Matthew McConaughey...I didnt ask for an autograph because he was being torn apart by the gravitational variations in the wormhole at the time and appeared rather desperately out of sorts) and onto a planet where all alien abductees are used as mechanical parts in a kind of whacked out steampunk Swiftian nightmare. I have been and remain installed as the pendulum weight in an alien grandfather clock the size of Mars and I now spend my days swinging back and forth at half the speed of light through an arc whose angle is sufficiently oblique to swallow Earth whole. Yes, thats right: a grandfather clock: on an alien planet. My alien abductor, you see, is a Hipster. They are, officially, everywhere. By some miracle of physics Im still connected to my wi-fi network at home (Network ID: NSASKYNET) and I managed to type this message out on my iPhone and send it to all of you. Just kidding (but not about the dismal reality of Universal Hipsterdom). Though a mere seventy-five days have passed since Reserve Wines closed, when you count the time in minutes--over 100,000 of them--you sigh in a docile, bewildered daze with near-forgotten, dusty nostalgia and are obliged to dilate your memory range to its maximum diameter in order to recall that time so very long ago that each approaching Friday evening was presaged, prefaced, and introduced with a beautiful and lilting prelude by the reception in your inbox of a note from, among a small bevy of other past managers, me. Now that the store has permanently closed I must remonstrate upon and detour the inspiration of anyone who supposed this weekly missive was anything more than a wordy advertisement. It wasnt. We (and here Im employing a collective pronoun to refer, a tad creepily, only to myself) wanted you to read the document and find some prompting within its characters towards attendance at our Free Friday Tastings. Were these tastings merely sinister, puerile pseudoevents, solely promulgated for the purpose of impinging upon your collective sobriety to an extent sufficient to inhibit you all into making purchases? Yes. But was that the totality of their meaning? Was consumption of wine the end to which all these emails were means? To extend the conjecture to its grotesque conclusion, were these emails in some manner an attempt to lure each of you away from Virtue itself--to inspire through my questionable facility with words your baser natures--and cast upon you a bacchanalian spell in hopes of profiting from your overindulgence in the filtered and fined liquid byproduct of the convolution of decaying vine berries, yeast bacteria, and air? Im tempted to remain stolidly literal and answer the above question with a simple yes--and then to descend into rococo hyperbole by confessing that following each Friday Tasting I would tip-toe around the register, draw the store window shades, dim the lights, and ride circles around the store on a red unicycle, juggling wine bottles and cackling and shrieking with insane jollity while a wine crate full of all the cash earned any particular Friday night (a wine crate which I had previously and with great care set exactly upon its edge such that its center of gravity was in near-perfect concordance) slowly tipped further and further out of physical harmony, spilling thousands of fresh, mint-green bills into the airstream of a strong fan causing the money to flutter and billow throughout the store in an unmitigated ecstasy of hysteria and overabundance--but here my fashionably ironic nihilism and slightly over eager imagination meet rather discourteously with a brick wall of actual memory: our Friday Tastings were, apart from their obviously mercantile ulterior motives, quite humane, fondly awaited and legitimately enjoyable social recitations. Many regular attendees were forced by the arrival of a new shopper or strolling couple to tell the same stories over and over but they did so such that each retelling brought with it a finer polish to the tale, with new bits of witty sarcasm--oftentimes entire new subplots and characters previously unheard of--and the surety of timing only dedicated, practice and repetition can afford. I miss those stories and the people who told them. I was about to expel a full paragraph on who and what I miss and iterate with deliberation just how much I miss each of those things and/or people but for heavens sake let us not whimper sentimentally. The store is closed and hooey to my sobbing recollections. As a matter of fact, the entirety of the stores racks and coolers is now crammed into a north Dallas storage unit in hopes that some enterprising (and slightly lunatic) oenophile offers to buy them all in order to open his or her own wine boutique. (There is little sentiment to a storage unit: its just an expensive rented metal box.) I say slightly lunatic because it is a phrase I like (stolen borrowed, of course, and used here without attribution) but also because one need be, to word it as politely as Im able, at least temporarily lacking in the possession of all ones marbles in order to imagine one could make a profitable go of a wine-only boutique in the DFW metroplex given the current competitive milieu and blatantly obvious future market trends. I was bored by the latter half of that latest sentence too: See, what Im really driving at--the real aim of the matter (and here you can picture me hunkering down like the catcher in baseball game and perhaps you can further imagine me (to amplify the metaphor even further) tossing a chalk bag from hand to hand like a starting pitcher in a huddle as he prepares to verbally sketch out the team strategy [the chalk keeps your hands dry but it also looks cool and smells...somehow like baseball which along with the brine of a pickle and the salty, thirst-inducing residue of roasted sunflower seeds completes the sensual reminiscence of any Little League baseball game])--is that a person would have to be either very rich or very crazy to adventure into the sole-proprietor style wine shop. While many of my ex-girlfriends would eagerly suggest I am richly possessed of this latter quality I can assure you my insanity is not so superabundant and unchecked as to permit me to open my own wine store. A Digression on Big Box Capitalism: This apparent negative enthusiasm on my part suggests, of course, the tired canard of the anti-capitalist (or so those with a lack of understanding of capitalism [and what is implied by opposition to it] would have us suppose is the implication) that Big Box stores are the bad guys. Is it wrong for a major commercial enterprise like Total Wine, Whole Foods, or Costco to locate a store within some critical radius of a boutique, solely owned local business with the specific intent of capturing that businesss customers by duplicating its inventory and offering lower prices through its larger purchasing capacity? Well, no, as a matter of fact that is precisely what I would do if I were to find myself responsible for opening new Big Box stores. I do, however, perceive in this decision matrix a malignant centralizing tendency, the most debasing features of which are only dimly perceptible at the start, but which leads inexorably to less choice and higher prices for the consumer (or so monopoly theory would have us believe). The net effect is destructive; the local economy necessarily loses income; and by losing income the local economys economic multiplier is also necessarily reduced. A certain moral indignation permits the Big Box store owners to persist in their endeavors; a certain economic antinomianism which absolves the Big Box owner of all consequence by granting him a priori freedom to open a store wherever he chooses to employ his capital. And so far as my understanding and wits permit me, I cannot fault this tendency of business. I only weakly hope that it be not always the nature of business to centralize--that business be not always and forever a punishing, rapacious, savagely competitive zero sum game. But it is. Wine Discussion: Dornfelder for Christmastime I suppose I should palliate the palates of you patient readers by including some actual, pertinent, subject-specific discussion of wine in this Wine Email. Since it is approaching Christmas (I abjure the political correctness of Holiday Season) we shall examine what is perhaps the least recognizable but most often consumed Christmas wine grape: Dornfelder. Twas not always so. Dornfelder is an invention of the 20th century. It was created in Germany by crossing two grapes together whose grape ancestry includes Pinot Noir (which the Germans refer to confusingly as Spatburgunder). Dornfelder was created purely for economic reasons. Heres why: Its too cold in Germany to produce the deep, rich, velvety, chocolaty, hearty red wines that we uncouth and poorly-cultured but filthy rich Americans like to drink so an enterprising botanist invented a wine grape which ripens quickly enough and early enough that it can approach the tannic concentration of the red wine grapes from warmer climates. And he called it Dornfelder. Even though we Americans only experience Dornfelder in a highly degraded, cooked, spiced, and often sweetened formula especially created as a mulled wine for Christmas, the goodly German-folk drink it year-round as their answer to Cabernet Sauvignon in France or Garnacha in Spain. Its a distant third in terms of how big those latter two varieties can get if vinified after reaching peak ripeness, but the Germans wouldnt liken it to those two varieties anyway. They chiefly compare it to Gamay-the main wine grape of the farthest south wine region of Burgundy, Beaujolais-- since it shares a Pinot Noir ancestry with Gamay and also has a similar mouthfeel. In contrast to Gamay, which is very often noted for its peppery quality, Dornfelder is often vinified such that it tastes a bit sweet (owing to the halting of the vinification process before all the sugar has been fermented out of the wine-in the wine world they refer to this remaining sugar as residual sugar-this is different than sugar added to wine prior to fermentation: thats called chaptalization). But like I said, when we find Dornfelder here in the United States it is usually saturated with mulling spices, sweetened, and served warm (or even hot, like tea-brewing hot) and called Glühwein (yes, glue wine-sounds tasty, doesnt it?). Heck, last year when we served Dornfelder at the store, I heated it up by throwing a pitcher full of it into the microwave for 10 minutes. And you know what? It tasted great! Spiced Dornfelder might not impress the snobbery of the wine community (which in and of itself is a great reason to drink it) but its rich cinnamon-and-clove taste is undeniably pleasant. Its like drinking really rich cranberry-flavored Wassail. Did I mention its really cheap? You can very likely find a gallon of this swill for less than $15. Its most easily identified by its odd bottle shape (see picture above) and overtly-kitsch Christmas icons and graphics printed on the bottle label. And hey, instead of driving over to one of those horizon-blinding Big Box competitors, I suggest you patronize Las Colinas Beverage Company at the northeast corner of MacArthur and Northgate in the same shopping complex as the Tom Thumb (exact address: 4000 North McArthur Blvd, Irving, TX 75038; phone number (972) 650-0506). When youre there, tell Nick (the owner) or whoever is working there that youre an old customer of Reserve Wines and get at least 10% off your purchase! Merry Christmas, Michael Morelli Fmr. General Manager Reserve Wines
Posted on: Tue, 02 Dec 2014 22:35:52 +0000
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