Confessions of Self-Damaged, Ego-Centric Whore
Two sets of unsolicited wine samples showed up at my door yesterday. (Thank you, both!) They will get drunk, but they won’t get reviewed here at FERMENTATION.
I was looking back over some earlier posts of mine and one in which I offer some resolutions for a coming year noted my desire to find someone competent to review wines at Fermentation. I think when I wrote that I must have been thinking that this lack of wine reviews at Fermentation was holding back my blog from a larger readership.
I guess this desire wasn’t as strong as I thought it might be because I’ve never seriously looked for anyone to review wines here. And I’m not going to begin either.
Why not post wine reviews at this blog? There are many good reasons for this:
1. Because I find bad reviews of wines more interesting I’d end up writing more of those. This is not good for my business. Wark Communications can do a very good job representing wineries that produce wines that don’t appeal to me. But it’s unlikely that wineries that know in advance their wines don’t appeal to me will want me to represent them. I think that makes me one step down from a whore.
2. I have an extraordinarily prejudiced palate that narrows far too much the scope of wines that appeal to me.
3. I can’t review wines nearly as well as 30% or so of the folks already doing so on the net nor as well as 50% of the reviewers that have gigs with wine magazines and newsletters. Who wants to sit in the 2nd and 3rd quartile of anything?
4. I think I’ve diminished my palate over the years through too many cigars and cigarettes.
What this all boils down to is that I don’t review wines at FERMENTATION because I’m a self-damaged, ego-centric whore with a hint of integrity.
It also means that wineries should save their samples for wine bloggers that are better suited to reviewing wines.
Tremendous photo.
Those lips, that skin. The furtive semi-lucid gaze.
98 points. Drink now, then throw mamma from the train.
hey, yer not about reviewing wines and not only does no one mind, people think the better of you for it. Fermentation is about the business of wine, and that’s what you do better than anyone.
I wholeheartedly agree with Fredric! Kudos for being direct about your blog mission.
After looking at that picture, I’m running for my Oil of Olay…
Thanks for not reviewing wines.
I can get my neighbor to review my wines and he’ll give me 100 points every time.
Tom,
All the reasons you stated doesn’t seem to stop anyone else from reviewing wines 😉
I wish my husband did NOT have this rule. I would love to sit around and taste wines with him every day.
I liked the label review you wrote during the dash out the front of the house during the earthquake last year, Tom; maybe your reviews require the Extraordinary to produce the insight readers crave.
Speaking of the gustatory sensation, perhaps you have written on this before, but I will mention an acquaintance who said he worked in the same facility as famed Andre Tschelicheff, and the two used to have a cigarette break together. Times and sensibilities change, but that seemed to seal the case for me, that part of the red’s tannins must address whatever it is tobacco does to the tongue.