Fruit Bombs With Screw Caps

“Here you go, sir. Over here!” the slender, attractive, 35-ish woman waved to me. This enthusiastic sort of greeting is not the kind of thing I’m used to in the context of slender, attractive 35-ish women, even when they are check-out clerks at the Wine and Beer Superstore. So I asked her what’s up.

“I’m covered with poison ivy” she says. “Whenever things get slow here, I hear all these voices telling me to scratch, scratch, scratch. So I’m trying to get all the customers I can so I don’t shred myself bloody.” The enthusiasm makes more sense in THIS context.

I suggest cortisone cream. She says she’s got cortisone cream, antihistamine cream, benadryl tablets, calamine lotion, ice, epsom salts, prayer beads, and a statue of St. Christopher in her car. Her plan is to drink heavily when she gets off work.

Anyway. Robert M. Parker is my hero. Started his career as a hard-working staff attorney, killing himself with long hours, low pay, and mind-numbingly trivial tasks.  Realized he had to find a way out. Invested in a couple dozen bottles of first-rate wine, tasted them all, scribbled out some notes, self-published, sold subscriptions to a regular series of wine tasting notes, and never looked back.

Parker has championed a signature style of wine for his entire career. Concentrated, dense, aromatic, rich, powerfully balanced between syrup and tongue-tingling tannin and other acids. Parker’s preferences have been called “fruit bombs” by other critics, and often ridiculed. Oz Clark, otherwise egalitarian and down-to-earth wine writer, carps constantly about Parker’s influence and claims that viticultural practices designed to meet Parker’s specs are destroying a tradition of wine that tastes of its geography, or “terroir”.

I don’t know about that. It seems to me that there is likely to be as much bullshit in Clark’s claiming that specific combinations of soil, slope, aspect, precipitation, temperature, humidity, and other vinicultural (uh oh. I just realized that in the paragraph immediately above, I used the term “viticultural”. In this paragraph, I used “vinicultural”. And I’m not sure that either is actually incorrect. I just yanked Parker’s first book, a 1985 guide to Bordeaux off the shelf. He uses “viticulture”. Although it would take a lot more digging than I can do at the moment to be certain he doesn’t also use “vini” somewhere.) parameters yield some kind of consistently recognizable wine flavor as Parker’s default preferences for concentration and fruit.

But here’s the thing. Parker’s kind of wine is absolutely phenomenally unquestionably delicious. Addictive. Tongue-coating, mouth-warming, sweet-scented. Boston, say, or The Temptations, vs. The Velvet Underground or Pere Ubu.

For a long time, for almost all the time wine has been made, in fact, the concentrated fruit syrups Parker favors were hard to make, harder to come by, and really really hard to afford. When vinicultural technology was more primitive, Fruit Bombs came along once-in-a-decade if you were lucky, when rainy spring and sunny summer and dry autumn combined to yield grapes of massive sugar, massive acid, and massive complexity. This was why Chateau Lafite Rothschild or Chateau Petrus in Bordeaux could sell for $150 a bottle in some years and $750 in others. Because “years” really mattered, and there were only a few, very few, spots on the surface of the earth that could produce these wines even every once in a while.

Now? Well, among the many reasons that living in the present is a wonderful thing is the fact that wine-making technology has advanced. To the point where Robert M. Parker fruit bombs are now available in the $10 to $20 range. And, as I challenge the staff of my local “wine and beer superstore” weekend after weekend, “fruit bombs for $20 with screw caps” are abundant if you can sort ‘em out.

That’s right, screw caps. The ONLY rational wine closure technology. Corks are an artifact of times long gone. And were, even then, imperfect and compromised. I believe they replaced the Grecco-Roman methods, which involved rags, wax, and adulteration of the wine itself with preservatives.

If you need to convince yourself of the wisdom of technological advancement, you can put together an interesting little tasting. Hit your local shop and grab a couple of bottles of Retsina--Greek wine with terpentine-like preservatives added in continuation of the ancient tradition. Retsinas are getting harder and harder to find. Mostly because modern winemaking and wine-closing techniques allow even the Macedonian hinterlands to yield credible, storable wines without the need for terps. And, it turns out, people generally prefer quality wines without added solvents. Go figure.

Next, get yourself a couple bottles of sweet red wines from California and/or France. The latter may be called something like “Vin Doux Naturel”, although for most it’s marketing gloss--sweet red wines are generally produced artificially.

Finally, get a couple of cheap sherry-style wines, say one from California and one from New York State. The oxidized flavor that is the first, and possibly least, impairment of ineffectively stored wines is perfectly represented here. Nothing wrong with sherry, of course, even cheap sherry-like wines. It’s just that if all wine tastes like that, it’ll be a real bummer.

And that, my friends, is why you want screw caps on ALL your wine. Solvents, sugar, and aerobic degradation are just the start of the vinicultural contortions needed to make outmoded closure technologies viable. So do YOUR part to advance wine into the 2010s (at least as far as the 2010s last. cf the Mayan Long Count Calendar and the End O’ The World™ presently scheduled for the 21 December 2012). Buy wines with screw cap closures. Even Robert M. Parker Fruit Bombs™. I’ll be in line just ahead of you.