As you may or may not have noticed.

Hello.

I have not posted anything in quite some time. And if you translate that time into blog time, I have not posted anything since before your grandparent's grandparents were learning their first words and inventing steam power.

THIS IS BECAUSE: I am on hiatus.

AND THAT IS BECAUSE: I am currently working on some other projects that require my time and energy, into which projects I will be rolling Stained Teeth in the first few months of 2008. The truth is that while I enjoy writing about wine periodically, I enjoy doing other things as well, and I want to integrate them into one gigantic uber site of which Stained Teeth will only be a small part.

AND SO: I am working on designs for this new site. I will keep you posted. I may post the odd wine adventure in between now and then. BUT: I am not promising anything.

I am still writing monthly on mcsweeneys.net. And I am still showering at least twice a week.

I have stopped shaving.

Thank you, and Persevere.

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Wine Adventure 22; or, what it really means to be a wine geek

LATER THERE WILL BE DIAGRAMS, BUT FIRST THERE ARE WORDS:

His name is Justin and I have known him since elementary school. He lives in Chicago now. I am in Chicago. The only other time I have been to Chicago, oddly, was to visit him, visit Justin, but that is just a coincidence. He didn’t live there then. He was there performing in a play, Lost in Yonkers by Neil Simon. A couple years later, we would perform that play together in high school in Houston.

Justin lives in Chicago and I am visiting, here on a business trip, my first ever business trip. I am attending the Seed Conference, about which there is much to say, but to which I will limit myself three hyperlinks: Jim Coudal, Carlos Seguro, and Jason Fried.

Justin takes me to a place called Webster's Wine Bar. It is neat and looks out over smokestacks, everything outside tinted the yellow of highway lights. The music surprises me, delights me. It is not jazz. When you find a wine bar not playing jazz, you hold that wine bar close and you love it and you never let it go. This wine bar is playing Destroyer, and to them I say this: you had me at destroy.

We both order flights of wine, and when they arrive, the server lays out a placemat with four circles on it, one circle for each of the wines. It is a simple diagram, and while it could be way more geeky (and thus way more cool), it is way better than the wine menus I’ve received at other wine bars, menus with jack-ass descriptions.

Here is my theory, and Justin is a good test case. And it isn’t really my theory - it is one of the classic American stories, as classic as the cowboy in the white hat; as the soldier reading the love letter; as the teenager dancing. The theory/classic story is this: the people who were the most cool in high school never adapt to be cool beyond high school, while those who were the most geeky hit their cool stride as they near 30. (Nerds kind of remain nerds, though often become wealthy; and dorks retain their subservient position, always trying just a little too hard to be cool.) This is the theory and it can be applied to most American public schools. (Click on the image below for a larger, more readable view.)

Justin and I were geeks, though I narrowly escaped being a dork, the result of my early career as a cool kid, a career from which I was fired in the ninth grade. Justin was a child actor, knew how to work computers, had access to the internet before I think it really existed, directed movies before iMovie made every kid in the world a friggin’ auteur (about which, you should see the stuff my stepson and his friends make - it is ridiculous and I want to stuff him inside a trashcan for making it). Justin was the kid who received ridiculing nicknames and adopted them with pride. IN PARTICULAR: we called him Smokin’ J.

AND NOW: Justin writes television pilots, Justin runs a production company, Justin races bicycles, Justin might move to LA, Justin maintains a blog, Justin feels excitement. For Justin and for geeks, life is all about potential simply because life is all about really liking stuff.

ALL OF WHICH IS TO SAY:

P.S. While I love diagrams and use them to explain things to myself all the time, there is no way to deny the inspiration these diagrams take from Jessica Hagy at the amazing and maddeningly good Indexed. A true diagram lover’s dream.

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Friday, November 2, 2007 at 11:25 AM

The wine hour is free, just like breakfast, or at least it is included in the price of the room. On the banquet table, where this morning a festive group of juices, coffees and champagne (for mimosas) greeted the bustling brunchers, on this banquet table now, there are two double sized bottles of Barefoot Wine, one a Chardonnay, the other a Cabernet Sauvignon, a few glasses, a supermarket collection of cheeses and crackers, an incongruous steam basket of undefined dumplings. I have seen this before. If I forget about the ocean just over the horizon, I am at a bad art opening, I am at a bad faculty welcoming party, I am at a really bad company goodbye party.

Wine Allergic Girlfiend and I have brought her son and her son’s friend to Block Island for a long weekend. I have never been to Block Island, or any of the islands that are a part of this weird New England island thing. I have never been, and yet, I recognized it immediately: these are yacht people, these are the blue button down, sunglasses secured with fancy neoprene, four generations at the family reunion, mimosas at brunch, sweaters for every season people. And then there is the subset of these people who come to free wine hour.

Free wine hour is awesome because it is free wine hour; free wine hour is also depressing because it is free wine hour. I pick up the huge bottle of Barefoot wine and with two hands try to pour myself a glass without spilling. The dark wet spot in the table cloth shows me that I am not the only one having trouble. Wine hour is on the patio of the main hotel, and this patio looks out over some very tall grass that goes and goes until the ocean.
There are not many people here, and unlike breakfast, everyone seems muted, even in their laughter. Two older women in matching pistachio ice cream green shirts are the only other ones on the patio when I arrive, but others soon follow. There is the guy who talks too loudly and too theatrically to his wife, a couple with a backgammon board, an older man, alone like myself, and eventually some kids as well. (I will later here two of the kids have this conversation: “Oooh, look a swing set!” “Not now, I’m eating my dumpling.”) Conversations are struck up in that vacation way: “Oh wait, you are on vacation!? I am also on vacation! Let’s talk for two minutes about where to get the best seafood!” I actually hear someone say this: “We wanted to keep it simple, you know, just do it at the yacht club.”

But these conversations can’t mask that we are all here at this too early hour for free wine. When I catch someone’s eye, I feel something that I recognize as shame. I am here alone, which probably exacerbates the feeling, but seeing these people highlights where I am and what I’m doing. It’s got to be like this for pornographic theatre-goers. We all know why we are here, and we are not exactly proud of the motivation it takes to leave the beaches long before it cools down for the day, to shower and change our clothes, to show up here on time, all to make sure we get the free, low quality wine.

AND YET: when a woman passes my table with wine and cheese in hand, and says to her companion, “This is so great!” I can’t help but agree with her.

AND OF COURSE: if you have ever consumed aforementioned Barefoot Wine, or participated in free wine hour, let us know about it. Click the thing that says comments below and then scroll to the bottom of the page.

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New Stained Teeth column on McSweeney's

This is to tell you that if you would please, I would like it, thank you, if you read this thing, my newest column at Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

Savvy readers will notice that it is a more in depth version of an earlier post in this very weblog.

And if this is your very first time here, because you read the Stained Teeth column on mcsweeneys.net, and thought, "Hey, as long as I'm on the internet, I may as well navigate my browser to this weblog," may I suggest you start off by reading the right column "Here's How it Works", and then scroll the page looking for the longest title. Why the longest? BECAUSE IT WILL GIVE YOU SOMETHING TO DO.

Thank you.

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Cool Things that friends are doing, No. 1

While this has nothing to do directly with wine, I promise you that it goes well with just about all wine.

This is a trailer for a film our friends at FOUND Magazine have been working on with a gentleman by the name of David Meiklejohn. Davy and David make a great team apparently, because the trailer is kind of incredible. It has cameos, the trailer does, by Eli Horowitz of McSweeney's as well as Ira Glass.

ENJOY, and pass it along:

AND: a big thank you to Alex Steed over at Trace Magazine for bringing this to the attention of Stained Teeth.

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Wine Adventure 22; or, how to order wine when the cocktail list is HUGE.

I HAVE A RULE, AND THE RULE IS THIS: if the place you are at serves wine by the carafe, then that is how you must order it. If you are lucky, they will serve it by the half-carafe, but if a full carafe is all you can get, you got to commit and order the whole bazooka.

The Wok, as it turns out, serves wine by the half carafe.

WHICH IS GOOD BECAUSE: on the back of the menu there is a cocktail list, the reading of which list is like entering an exotic candy store. There are so many drinks, the bulk of which you maybe have heard of but never actually tried. The Harvey Wallbanger, the Zombie, the Lime Rickey, the Salty Dog; and some you have never heard of such as: My Fair Lady. The list also distinguishes between a Martini and a Martini (Dry). The parenthetical dryness will cost you an extra quarter, but even with the extra quarter it still comes in at under $3. I ordered a gin and tonic here once; there might have been tonic in the restaurant at one point, but none of it made it into my drink. The Wok is one of those few restaurants that will make you a drink stronger than you make at home.

Wine Allergic Girlfriend and I are here with Jamie, owner of our neighborhood bar The Rendezvous, and Anja, Jamie's bride-to-be and my arch-nemesis. Arch-nemesis Anja designs nice things which you may like, but which are really just missiles she lobs my way in our ongoing graphic design war.

AND LET ME SAY THIS: she is winning.

Drinks are ordered, food is discussed. Arch-Nemesis orders a Ward Eight, one of those drinks you have never heard of. It must not be ordered often, because even the server asks what's in it. "I'm not sure, it's just on the menu." I get a carafe of 'Burgundy'. There is the usual chinese restaurant multi-lateral food discussion and treaty: "What are you getting?" "Well, that depends on what you're getting?" "Are we sharing?" "We probably don't need to each order a seperate dish…" "Are you going to share?" "I'm ordering meat, will you get a vegetable?". Drinks are brought and drunk and reordered. We converse, get stories about the Rendezvous. At one point, Zane, W.A.G.'s son calls to ask if a boy we've never met can sleep over. He is always coming up with these trick questions for us.

"Sarah (i.e. Wine Allergic Girlfiend, Ed.), you were an only child too, right?" Jamie asks after W.A.G. and I make a random guess and decide that yes the boy can sleep over.

"Yeah."

"Did you ever want Zane to have siblings?"

And so: a conversation about siblings. Arch-Nemesis has a sister, I have a brother and a sister, Jamie and W.A.G. are both only children. Both Arch-Nemesis and I agree that our siblings somehow fill out our missing parts, or fill in the parts we don't have. Arch-Nemesis's sister was a bookworm; Arch-Nemesis didn't really care about school growing up. Arch-Nemesis cares about design and aesthetics; her sister's taste is more bland. And yet, because they are our siblings, these other "parts we don't have" are really integral to us.

And only children? What about only children?

"Yeah, we're not so messed up like that." This from Jamie.

AND YOU: crazy Chinese restaurant cocktail list stories? The parts of you that are really not yours, but your siblings? Only-child reflections? GO.

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Wine Adventure 21; or, a New Restaurant Prepares itself for Battle

Please Note: this is not the restaurant bar, DO NOT WORRY: this is just an employee space upstairs where we did the tasting.

THE WINE I AM DRINKING IS: well there are many, many wines. I am at a wine-tasting for a recently opened restaurant near where I live, a restaurant called Hope & Olive in Greenfield, MA. At the time of the wine-tasting, the restuarant had not yet opened, it was on the verge of opening. Wine Allergic Girlfriend and I were invited to hang out with the owners and their staff while they did a final run through of their wine list. This was not to figure out what wines to serve; this was figure out what to say about the wines WHEN THEY WERE INEVITABLY ASKED THIS QUESTION: which is your driest wine? OR PERHAPS WHEN THEY ARE ASKED THIS: can you describe your house wine?

Before we sat down to taste wine with these folks, W.A.G. and I toured their soon-to-be-open, extremely large space. The owners purchased the building from the Polish American Club, who were looking to sell after many years in the space. It is huge, beautiful and old, with an extensive and incredibly varied collection of wood-paneling. When we arrived, a whole crew was painting downstairs; some people were banging nails; boomboxes on opposite sides of the room played the radio in wonderful boombox surround sound; upstairs, one heroic woman worked in what used to be the ballroom, individually sewing new, beautiful seat covers for all the booth cushions. They were working some elbow grease magic on the space. It was like one of those home renovations shows, but with real people on a real budget.

WHEN RESTAURANT PEOPLE TASTE WINE, THEY DO NOT ASK, “What do I taste here?” THEY WANT TO KNOW: “What can I say about this to my customers?”

W.A.G. and I once ran a restaurant-like space many, many years ago. (We actually sold our cafe, The Lady Killigrew Cafe, in November of last year.) And many years ago, when we ran that cafe, we struggled mightily with how to talk about wine with customers.

BECAUSE, AND I AM TELLING YOU THE TRUTH: it is a charade. Customers don’t want to know what the wine actually tastes like - they want to believe that you know what the wine tastes like. Because if they believe you, then they will feel good about what they have ordered; they will feel like what they have ordered is in line with the wine laws they have read in magazines: dry is better than sweet, light-bodied is better with food, Californian cabernet is the greatest thing ever in the history of the world. If they don’t believe you, if you fumble and mumble your way through some description, they will come over the top at you, insisting that they only drink ‘Dry, fruit forward wines, light in body!” and you will be defeated, hanging your head in shame at the dexterity with which they wielded their wine lingo.

AND SO: the folks at Hope & Olive were arming themselves against the soon-to-come customer wine-question attack.

BUT EVENTUALLY, AS ALWAYS HAPPENS: their defenses fell and, except for the odd, slightly inappropriate wine description - “This one here is Big Dick Zin!” - it was just restaurant people drinking wine.

“While I don’t envy you,” I was telling Jim, one of the owners, “I definitely miss the feeling of being in trenches. It’s one of the things I feel jealous about, like not being in that club anymore.”

AND SO I ASK YOU: have you been in the restaurant club? Are you in the restaurant club currently? What’s your most awful/awesome/annoying customer-wine story?

AND: if you are anywhere near the Greenfield, MA, go NOW to Hope & Olive. And when you are there: order the Earth, Zin, & Fire wine - it really is The Big Dick zin. And it might be the greatest or the worst designed bottle of all time. I SIMPLY CANNOT TELL.

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