Actually, it’s too late to ask that question. It’s like asking, Does America need French fries?

Anyway, I received a bulletin yesterday, titled “Five Trends in Spanish Wines” — it’s that time of year — from Wines of Spain, the government supported agency that helps promote Spanish wines in the United States. The trends were assembled by Bruce Schoenfeld, wine editor for Travel + Leisure magazine.

Here are the proposed trends in Spanish wines for 2009 (slightly edited for length):

I. Exploring new wine regions and grape varieties

Spanish white wines have traditionally been perceived as inferior cousins to the country’s bold reds. Today, Spain’s whites are on the verge of stepping up to challenge the red for dominance – though perhaps not market share, as production of the best wines is destined to be limited.

Well, who could be against freshness and elegance — remember when Spanish reds tasted like ancient, dusty church pews? — or exploring new wine regions, or moving into the production of better quality white wines, though we’ve seen that occur in the last decade, especially with the albarino grape. Old vines, sure, why not, though I wasn’t aware that people went crazy at the mention of those words; what happens if you stand up and shout “Old vines!” in a crowded theater?

The trend that I find disturbing is the use of French oak barrels to age wines before bottling. It’s a trend that’s probably unstoppable, because many winemakers of all nationalities and regions see French oak as the only path to greatness and accessibility to the world wine markets, especially in America; the “American palate” supposedly loves new oak.

We have seen what French oak barrels did in Italy since Antinori introduced Tignanello in the 1970s. Granted, that great wines are produced in Italy now, under the influence of nontraditional grapes like cabernet sauvignon and merlot aged in French oak; Tignanello, Solaia, Ornellaia and other cult wines are among the best in the world. On the other hand, the use of French oak has also dumbed down the individuality of many Italian red wines, so that tasted blind they might as well have been made in Pauillac or Napa Valley. Some producers of Barolo and Brunello di Montalcino, enamored of French oak and seeing its use as progressive and “modern” (and fit for those legendary American palates), have robbed their wines of authenticity and sense of place.

Why should that happen in Spain? Think of a 10-year-old Rioja red, with the tempranillo grape’s characteristic tang of sour cherry and dried mulberry with a hint of slightly astringent allspice; why would you want to ruin those qualities with excessive oak?

I’ve been to events in the past few years at which Spanish producers proudly offered their newest wines, sleekly packaged and expensively priced, and all I could smell and taste was new oak. I don’t think that such wines are viable or necessary now. I think that American wine drinkers are sophisticated enough that they’re not searching for the latest blockbuster cult wine that could have been made anywhere.

The whole tenor of the wine world is toward smaller, more authentic, more real wines that embody a sense of their makers, their grapes and their regions. Consumers feel that way now about all sorts of products; we want to feel close to home, perhaps anybody’s home, and we want to feel as if by drinking a glass of wine we’re participating in a process that started with someone’s hands tending the vines. Oak is useful in shaping a wine, but it shouldn’t be the reason why we drink wine.

In case you were wondering, “The Next Grain” is — ta-dah! — buckwheat!

(Let’s see if next year it’s — ta-dah! — Spanky!)

Ha-ha, just kidding, but how do I know this amazing fact? Because of Food & Wine magazine’s “Special Trend Issue,” an exercise that F&W indulges in every January, the month during which many newspaper style sections and magazines that emphasize “lifestyle issues” make their predictions about what is going to be hip, cool and happening in the coming year. Doesn’t matter that in two months everyone will have forgotten what those trends were supposed to be and go back to their dark corners to eat what they always ate and drink what they always drank.

I mean, trends are so flawlessly trendy. For example, the movie Sideways pushed pinot noir consumption in this country to unprecedented heights, because the movie’s “hero” Miles — what a loser! — preferred pinot noir wines to all others. People who before they saw Sideways were saying, “I don’t understand pinot noir, I just don’t get it,” were drinking the stuff by the gallon. Now that the back-draft from that (deeply flawed) film has finally evaporated, everyone can go back to their dark corners and mutter, “I don’t understand pinot noir, I just don’t get it,” and leave the rest of us alone.

Anyway, right off the bat, my advice to the editors and writers of F&W is: Deep-six the term “über,” as in “über-chef Thomas Keller” and “über-restaurateur Danny Meyer.” In this Nietzschean carnival of hyperbole, I suppose Helen Turley would be an “über-winemaker” and a large blue potato would be an “über-blue-tuber.” Talk about a cold, dead slug of a cliché! (I’ll extend the hand of forgiveness if they want to write “über-blog BiggerThanYourHead.”)

You might like to know that, according to F&W, the “Menu Buzzwords” for 2009 will be Frosting Shot — “Cupcake frosting sold straight up in little paper cups”; Gibralter — ” Double espresso with frothy milk, served in a glass”; Gnocchi — “Made with whole wheat, rye, brioche, black olives, dill or bacon” (no buckwheat?); Mortadella — “On charcuterie plates; pistachio- or truffle-speckled”; Sablefish — “Flaky, buttery, sweet — and sustainable — black cod.”

Personally, I plan, for 2009, to boycott any menus that use any of those “buzzwords.” In fact, I would like the word “buzzword” not to come within 3,000 miles of my eyesight, lest I squash it like a gnat beneath my ink-well.

Other trends I will be wary of include restaurants where “customers order from touch screens that double as game consoles” — nobody has to talk to anybody! — and egg bars in gourmet grocery stores. That’s right, selected “Whole Foods locations in the Northeast and parts of Ohio” — parts of Ohio? — will stock ostrich eggs as well as the eggs of ducks, quail, pheasant and “deep-green emu eggs.” As if it’s not difficult enough standing in the grocery store in a dither trying to choose among organic eggs, free-range eggs and Omega-3 eggs from plain old hens.

O.K., here I’ll say that I actually enjoy Food & Wine magazine — but not the wine part so much because Lettie Teague is becoming the Gael Greene of wine-writers; “my friends” this and “my friends” that, sheesh — especially for the recipes, which we often use, but gee, when you combine the tendency toward archness and whimsy and aching cuteness and the almost unseemly yearning to be hip that F&W exudes, along with Bon Appetit and Gourmet, combined with the constant blurring of the line between editorial content and advertising, it’s a relief to turn to a publication like Cook’s Illustrated, which features no advertising, no color food-porno shots and no celebrity-chef-guest-contributors. It’s just a magazine for people who want to cook better. You have to love a publication that says, “We wanted to see what brand of oatmeal is really best, so we gathered 87 brands of oatmeal, including three from Bulgaria, and prepared them under precisely the same conditions in our test kitchens,” and then they tell you what the über-oatmeal is.

So, here’s this little bottle of framboise raspberry liqueur, called Chateau Monet. (This is a liqueur, not a traditional eau-de-vie.) There is, indeed, a depiction of a chateau on the label. The squat, bulbous bottle is satisfyingly old-fashioned looking, as if the producer went to some trouble to acquire bottles that resembled those used, say, in the 18th Century. “How quaint, how authentic, how French,” we think. Then we look at the back label and read: “Prepared and bottled in the USA by La Maison Coulombe, Lewiston, Me & Londonderry, NH.”

Yes, once again we have been victimized by what marketing people call “foreign branding.” Foreign branding grows from the idea, apparently inherent in American life and culture, that anything with a foreign name just has to be better than something made in America. Do you want to get a massage or a Swedish massage? Do you want some onion soup or some French onion soup? A pizza with a lot of cheese or a Tuscan Quattro Fromaggi Pizza?

The best-known example of foreign branding is Häagen-Dazs ice cream, which millions of Americans, including myself for many years, thought came from Sweden or Denmark: “Wow, no wonder it’s so good!” The company has been owned by General Mills since 1983, but Häagen-Dazs was founded in The Bronx in 1959 by Polish immigrants Reuben and Rose Mattus. The name, deliberately concocted to sound Scandinavian, is Duncan Hines spelled or spoken sort of inside-out and reinforced by some consonants and an umlaut. The first store opened in Brooklyn in 1975, and the rest is foreign branding history.

Another example, dear to the hearts of American folk and media culture, is the Ginsu Knife, heavily advertised on late-night television starting in 1978 in those unforgettable commercials that began, “In Japan, the hand can be used as a knife” and ending with a line that became embedded in common speech: “But wait, there’s more!” Far from being made in Japan, the knives, called Eversharp, were originally manufactured in Freemont, Ohio, where they were discovered by a pair of wily entrepreneurs who turned the brand into a raging success: “As Seen on TV!”

It’s no wonder that the 19th Century wine industry in American relied completely on European models and names to sell their wares to consumers more used to terms like “Burgundy,” “Chianti,” “Sauternes” and “Madeira” than a product called, simply, “California Red Wine.” Varietal labeling didn’t really develop in California until after the end of Prohibition, though of course many wines continued (and continue) to exploit the foreign branding concept. This idea applies not only to wineries called Chateau This and Clos du That but to brands like Hearty Burgundy and Chablis Blanc and the old (and actually tasty) Green Hungarian, made by Paul Masson; we drank gallons of these wines, back in the day.

The EU frowns on the use of European place names on American wine labels, and a series of trade agreements have been instituted to prevent producers in America from plastering the terms Sherry, Port and Champagne on labels while Europeans will not pretend that their wines were made in the Napa Valley. (I mean, did they ever? Was there a “Napa Valley Riesling” from Germany?) The trick is that some veteran manufacturers of sparkling wine in California — Korbel and Gallo –were permitted to retain the use of “champagne” on their sparkling wine labels, you know, for old-times’ sake. That loophole seems pretty egregious to me, and also to French trade groups, which have mounted advertising campaigns against it.

“St. Clair Burgundy” label (it says in tiny type that it was printed in St. Louis) is from labeltrader.com, a fascinating site for collectors of all sort of antique paper labels.

Hopeless Wines aren’t necessarily bad; they’re just blah or disappointing. They’re wines that should be better than they are. If you drop a five-spot on some merry little sauvignon blanc from a vast appellation and it tastes like slightly perfumed water, you think, “Oh, what the hell, what did I expect for five bucks?” You drop 50 big ones on some single vineyard sauvignon blanc from the Stags Leap District, however, or a white Graves from a celebrity chateau, and it tastes like slightly perfumed water, well, there’s a disappointment, if not outrage. Hopeless Wines may even be well-made, but in a certain predictable or narrow style, often emulating or parroting an accepted fashion, in the sense that so many California cabernet sauvignon and merlot wines seem much the same in their toasty, over-ripe, high alcohol copy-catness.

Wines of Hope, on the other hand, remind us that people exist who put the vineyards, the grapes and the ultimate wine above their egos. Wines of Hope wear their purity and integrity proudly but not arrogantly. They offer such a panoply of detail, dimension and individuality that they seem not just to embody but to transcend their price range and station in life. Wines of Hope, through their individuality, give us faith in the future of wine and our wine-drinking.

The wines mentioned today are all California, all red. That’s the way it worked out.
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An example of a Wine of Hope is the Smith-Madrone Cabernet Sauvignon 2000, Napa Valley. This is, let me say right now, a close to perfect cabernet. Just so you know, I’m not reaching into the past to write about this wine. It’s still available in some markets, and I tasted it a few weeks ago; the current release is the 2003. (I reviewed the ’03 on BTYH on Jan. 8, 2008.) The winery was founded in 1971 and is owned by the brothers Charles and Stu Smith, who maintain, as much as possible, a hands-off policy toward farming and winemaking. They produce annually about 1,000 cases each of riesling, chardonnay and cabernet sauvigon.

A blend of 90 percent cabernet sauvignon 8 percent merlot and 2 percent cabernet franc, the Smith-Madrone Cabernet Sauvignon 2000 offers deliriously seductive aromas of cassis and black cherry, lavender and leather, potpourri and sandalwood and a deep, heady mineral quality. Aged in new American oak for 25 months — 25 months! — the wine shows no trace of woodiness; rather, the fully developed, dry-farmed. mountainside grapes soaked up all the oak and put it to good use in building the wine’s beautifully balanced yet unassailable structure. Dry-farmed means no irrigation; the Smith brothers believe in letting the climate and the vineyard duke it out on their own. This is a wine of remarkable purity and intensity and superb integration of all elements. Still, it’s also a wine of rigorous intent and effect; it’s never heavy or overbearing, though grainy, chewy tannins and sinewy iron-like minerals come up like a tide, lending austerity to the finish. This would be best from 2009 or ’10 through 2018 or ’20. Exceptional. And get the price: About $39 a bottle.
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Here’s another Wine of Hope, the Foursight Wines Charles Vineyard Pinot Noir 2006, Anderson Valley, consumed with grilled chicken back in the summer. This is a lovely pinot noir, ripe and succulent, dense, intense and satiny, and fully framed by vibrant acid, polished oak (33 percent new French barrels) and tannins of moderate grip and power. Black and red current flavors are infused by dried spice and hints of cranberry and cola. The wine is pervasively layered with elements of moss and dried leaves, briers and brambles, clean earth and minerals; one senses the connection to the vineyard, the growing of the vine in the soil, a factor undiminished by the wine’s remarkable (for a pinot noir) alcohol level of 14.9 percent. Generally, I deplore pinots charged with this much alcohol — we’re not discussing zinfandel, after all — but careful winemaking turned out a wine completely satisfying for its balance and integration. Again, I celebrate a wine that eloquently expresses the character of its grape while maintaining faultless individuality. 425 cases, and definitely Worth a Search. Excellent. About $46.
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And a third example. Michael and David Phillips continue to produce one of California’s great eccentric wines in the Michael and David Petite Petit 2006, Lodi. Every time I try this blend of 85 percent petite sirah and 15 percent petit verdot, it makes me laugh at the sheer audacity of its creation. The wine is about as dark as a red wine can be before it becomes plummy-black. It’s smoky and funky in the nose, ripe and meaty — sounds like the locker room at a barbecue competition — bursting with scents of cassis and black cherry, mulberry and loganberry dredged with cedar, lavender and black olive. Petite Petit 2006 is incredibly spicy, mouth-filling with juicy and luscious black fruit flavors but given form and foundation by the firmness of oak and the tautness of slightly austere tannins. Open this with steak au poivre, pork chops marinated in chili powder, cumin and garlic or braised short ribs, and just have a great ol’ freakin’ time. Excellent. About $20, though I’ve seen it on the Internet as low as $15.
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Hopeless Wines? Sure, I’ll mention a couple of recent examples.

I have been impressed with previous vintages of the Obsidian Ridge “Obsidian Ridge Vineyard” Cabernet Sauvignon, from the Red Hills of Lake County, but I found the version for 2005 puzzling and disappointing. Before, I had noted the wine’s sturdy integrity, its glossy permeation of fruit, polished tannin and resolute acidity — a cabernet sauvignon for grown-ups — but the ’05 I tasted last weekend was as over-ripe, exaggerated and stridently spicy as an over-ripe, exaggerated and stridently spicy zinfandel, if you care for that sort of thing; as cabernet, it’s a travesty. Could 15.2 percent alcohol have anything to do with it? This gets no recommendation from me. About $25.

Tasted on the same occasion was the Buehler Cabernet Sauvignon 2005, Napa Valley, a wine so over-ripe and extracted that it’s close to raisiny. Even as a zinfandel, I wouldn’t drink it. About $28.

What are people thinking? The word “yuck” comes to mind.

Recently, in the Tre Bicchieri awards for 2009, given by Gambero Rosso, the Italian publishing house for food, wine and travel, only one producer of Brunello di Montalcino, the venerable Biondi-Santi, won top honors. This is a marked contrast from 2008, when 15 wines from Brunello di Montalcino received the award, and 2007, when 10 Brunello wines were honored. (Thanks to Terence Hughes of mondosapore for compiling these figures, posted on Nov. 8.)

Perhaps the inclusion of only one producer of Brunello di Montalcino — and the most rigorously classic — for 2009 was a rebuke to the scandal that has enveloped the region in southern Tuscany since early this year, a scandal that indicts a number of producers for blending minuscule amounts of unauthorized grapes into their wines from 2003. Brunello di Montalcino, first by custom and then codified by law, must be made only of sangiovese grapes; no other grapes are allowed. More than a million bottles of suspect Brunello di Montalcino and Rosso di Montalcino from 2003 were seized by authorities under order of the Siena Magistrate. The scandal coincides with calls from a handful of Brunello producers to change the 100 percent sangiovese rule officially to allow a little blending.

Brunello di Montalcino was created by Ferruccio Biondi-Santi and first bottled in 1888. The family was the only producer of Brunello di Montalcino until after World War II and had, in fact, released the wine only in 1888, 1891, 1925 and 1945. As the wine’s prestige grew after the war, the number of producers markedly increased, particularly in the 1980s and ’90s.

The original regimen of barrel-aging for Brunello di Montalcino was a long 42 months, a procedure that resulted — no surprise — in wines of great hauteur and austerity that demanded many years, if not decades, to mellow. That requirement was lowered to three years barrel aging in 1990 and two years in 1998, though Brunello di Montalcino must still age four years before release in a combination of barrel and bottle-aging; it’s the producer’s prerogative as to what that process will be.

The recent scandal has roiled not only the Brunello zone but the entire Italian wine industry as well as the Italian and the international wine press. Though news reports occasionally mention a number of incriminated properties up to 20, the ones consistently named are Argiano, Col d’Orcia, Castello Banfi, Antinori and Frescobaldi. It’s interesting and actually provocative that the last three of these Brunello producers are regarded as “outsiders” in the clannish zone. Banfi is owned by the American Mariani family, and though they have been in Montalcino for 30 years, their wealth, their willingness to shape the landscape and their extensive clonal research stirred discontent among their compatriots. Antinori and Frescobaldi are families and producers centered in the Chianti zone, and though Florence is only 67 miles north of Montalcino, it might as well be Upper Volta to the staid Brunello families.

In the meanwhile, the scandal rocks on, though Antinori was cleared of adulterating their 2003 Brunello di Montalcino wine (Pian delle Vigne) in June and the Castello Banfi wines were released on Oct. 20. So, readers, is this a moment for LOL, OMG or WTF? Big Oops! Results are waiting on the others so accused, though Argiano went on and declassified a great amount of its Brunello 2003 and Frescobaldi is fighting the accusation in court. And, in the meanwhile, in late October, the members of the Brunello producers group decided not to change the 100 percent sangiovese rule by a vote of 662 to 30. (The scandal and controversy and the vote on Oct. 27 were covered extensively by VinoWire.)

All right, let’s face it: Brunello di Montalcino is a rare and expensive wine for collectors, just as Grand Cru wines (and increasingly Premier Cru wines) from Burgundy are, and Bordeaux Classified Growths, and vintage Port, and California cult cabernets and Australian icon shiraz wines are. This is the elite, the rarefied level where money counts, and backing up the money are high-powered auctions and temperature-controlled cellars and the sort of wine dinners to which I never get invited. As a wine for collectors, as a representative of a place and philosophy and genre, Brunello di Montalcino should stay exactly as tradition and law say it should, a wine made from 100 percent sangiovese grapes grown in a restricted area, though it’s important to remember that prior to 1968, when Brunello di Montalcino received DOC status and the requirements, under the influence of the hallowed Biondi-Santi (advocates of the 100 percent rule), were set down, it was common for producers to add a bit of other grape varieties to their wine.

Other than that stipulation, who cares? Even Biondi-Santi has called for relaxing the rules regarding Brunello’s cadet version, Rosso di Montalcino, a DOC recognized in 1995 and intended to be less expensive and more accessible than its mentor. Why shouldn’t the Rosso have a little cabernet or merlot in it?

As far as top quality wines with the flexibility for blending are concerned, the DOC already exists. The Sant’Antimo designation was created in Montalcino in 1996 precisely to address this issue. There are no regulations; producers can make wine from whatever grapes they please. Castello Banfi, for example, has taken advantage of the Sant’Antimo designation to produce a full line of single-grape wines and blended wines. Among the latter are some of its now most famous labels: Summus (sangiovese, cabernet sauvignon and syrah); Excelsus (cabernet sauvignon and merlot); and Cum Laude (sangiovese, cabernet sauvignon, merlot and syrah). Who could ask for any more leeway in making blended wines or in fine-tuning combinations of grapes from year to year?

What can I do with this “press release” I received by email today except to reproduce it here the way it was sent to me? Perhaps no comment is necessary. Well, one comment: I promise that whoever wrote this “press release” really did spell “muddle” as “muttle.” And one more comment, actually a question: Can “Platinum Bruno’s Martini” actually cost $38? And notice that it’s no longer sufficient to be well-dressed; “chic attire” is requested.
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From: Katherine Rothman [mailto:info@kmrpr.com]
Sent: Friday, November 07, 2008 10:57 AM
To: undisclosed-recipients
Subject: three unique and sexy drinks from from Bruno Jamais Restaurant Club

For More Information
Please Contact:Katherine Rothman

At KMR Communications, Inc info@kmrpr.com

***If you would like to run this as a contest, we are happy to offer two readers one certificate for any of the drinks below.

Platinum Martini

BRUNO JAMAIS RESTAURANT CLUB

1)PLATINUM BRUNO’S MARTINI $38.00

muttle four slices of orange in a Boston shaker add two ounces patron platinum tequila

3/4 oz peach schnapps

shaken

served up op in a double martini glass (chilled)

2) This cocktail is collaboration between Bruno Jamais and Sommelier Benjamin Maury. Bruno wanted a signature cocktail using his favorite liquor, patron platinum. He wanted something strong yet smooth. Bruno liked the way orange flavor is often used to complement tequila using liqueurs such as Cointreau or triple sec but to refine the taste Maury suggested that they use fresh orange instead. The peach schnapps was then added, blending perfectly with the orange while adding a hint of sweetness. . Initially this drink was to be served in a rocks glass over crushed ice following the tradition of the caipirinia but in keeping true to New York style they decided serve it up. Thus, creating the “Platinum Bruno’s Martini.”

Crème Brûlée Martini, traps that seductive dessert in a glass and, when topped with that grid of caramel, gently set across the rim, makes a spectacular presentation that leads to an equally spectacular taste.

Then, there’s the Sexy Back, which Maury says was inspired by all the lovely ladies (and their backs) that walk up to his bar. In this one a mix of citrus vodka, creme de cassis and sour mix are topped with a little Champagne for a complex, effervescent cocktail. Stop by next time you’re on the Upper East Side and try one for yourself.

www.brunojamais.com

Ph: 212 396-3444

Bruno Jamais Restaurant Club brings the French Riviera to the upper east side. Where else can one dine in style until 3am with delectable cuisine such as chocolate soufflé and Foie Gras? The service and décor are equally impressive. The restaurant received the “Best Interior Design” award by Hospitality Design Magazine. There is also live entertainment on Monday nights with the best of jazz and soul. On a cold winter’s night, allow debonair owner Bruno Jamais to make you feel at home and beat the doldrums of winter. With Chef Hok Chin at the kitchen’s helm the cuisine is sure to delight even the most discerning palates. Bruno Jamais and Chef Hok Chin have created a unique menu that has an Asian influence without losing its French integrity. Bruno Jamais is also the perfect place to book your private party and can accommodate up to 200 diners for a buffet dinner or 70 people for a sit down dinner. For those upper east siders who are tired of trekking downtime for an evening of fun, this exclusive venue has it all. If you are looking to see stars, celebrity patrons have included: Billy Baldwin, Joan Rivers, Cindy Adams, Chazz Palminteri and even former President Bill Clinton. Reservations are suggested and chic attire is requested. BRUNO JAMAIS RESTAURANT CLUB — The restaurant received the “Best Restaurant Design” Award by Hospitality Design Magazine for 2004.

24 EAST 81 STREET NY NY www.brunojamais.com

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What’s interesting to me, or, you know, like tragic, is that websites like clubplanet.com and about.com mention these cocktails completely uncritically and even use the language of this “press release,” which has been making the rounds, I discovered, for at least a year. No wonder “journalists” get a bad name.

French culture has always been a charming and annoying nexus of elegance, arrogance and paranoia, but now the country has reached its nadir, and not all the other nadirs that came before but a new, even more significant one. In the nation that serves as a model for excellence in wine-making, many of whose wines are honored as exemplars for the rest of the world, where the integration of wine and food into daily life seems rational and essential, in this nation, I say, articles about wine in newspapers and magazines must carry health warnings. Notice that I didn’t say “advertisements about wine in newspapers and magazines,” but articles, journalism, in other words, stories that review wines or provide overviews of wines or wine regions and so on. The purpose of advertising is, of course, to sell wine, while the purpose of journalism is to inform and educate; the line between those functions, as far as a court in Paris is concerned, no longer exists. All public utterances about wine, apparently, may corrupt the young.

To further the sense of prohibition, the French government has proposed a law limiting advertising for wine, beer and spirits on the Internet to certain sites at limited hours, and the advertising could not be by a third-party, i.e., a public relations or marketing firm. Makes alcohol sounds like pornography, doesn’t it? One result of these measures is that Microsoft Adcenter removed all wine merchants from its client list in France. Google Adsense and Yahoo are expected to follow Microsoft’s lead.

Oh, and a proposal has been made by the government to raise taxes on wine as much as 16 percent.

Most of this news goes back to the summer or first of the year, but I mention it here because (as Eric Asimov pointed out in his blog The Pour), the General Association of Wine Production in France is calling for boycotts on October 30 to call attention to the situation. No mention has been made about what form this boycott would take, but the association represents 500,000 people in the wine business, according to decanter.com.

Sacre bleu, what a state the world is in when France, long the symbol of the sensible indulgence in the pleasures of the body and mind, becomes more puritanical and politically correct than America.

To Dr. Johnson’s pithy statement that there is no end to the making of books — little did he know! — I will add that there is no end to the making of lists.

Sent to me in an email message by My Foodservice News is this “Omnivore’s 100,” a list of foods that British writer Andrew Wheeler thinks every well-schooled gourmet or gourmand or diner or serious eater should try in his or her lifetime. Apparently, this list has been all over the Internet, but its recent appearance in my inbox marks the first time I saw it.

It’s an interesting, goofy and ultimately bizarre list, and you’ll see what I mean because, bless my little pointy head, I’m going to reproduce the whole thing for you. I mean, this is billed as a challenge, yet some of the items are no challenge at all (peanut butter and jelly sandwich) and others are if not impossible at least downright self-destructive (eating a whole Scotch bonnet pepper raw); some of the recommendations seem so obvious they shouldn’t be mentioned (gumbo) and others are plain dumb (will eating wasabi peas really broaden your culinary horizons?). Pistachio ice cream seems incredibly arbitrary; why not butter pecan or Rocky Road or rum raisin or Chunky Monkey? The problem is that anyone with some knowledge of world cuisine could probably make another list of 100 items and not repeat Wheeler’s list. In fact the whole enterprise smacks of pretension and sensationalism, as by including S’mores (#61) and Roadkill (#75) Wheeler tries for a Soccer Mom meets Anthony Bourdain effect.

So, here it is, the “Omnivore’s 100″:
1.Venison
2.Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwish
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth $60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephants ears or funnel cakes
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouilette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

It would take Claude Levi-Strauss to elucidate some organization or innate structure within this list. Scotch whisky and Scotch Bonnet pepper. Cheese fondue and head cheese. Root beer float and curried goat. How could Wheeler have resisted the binary opposition and resolution of Porterhouse steak and Toll House cookies? Of Hoppin’ John and johnnycakes and John Dory? Of peaches Melba, potatoes Anna and steak Diane? Of King crab claws, Queen Mother cake and Veal Prince Orloff?

Spam advertisement from nicktingle.com. Scotch Bonnet pepper from Wikipedia.

BTW, I said in the post above that Claude Levi-Strauss was deceased (now corrected), but alert reader Robert K. Bleckman pointed out that the pioneering structuralist and philosopher is alive and well and perhaps even kicking. Thanks, Robert.

… I won’t name the winery whose back-label I’m about to quote here and, frankly, hold up to ridicule. The wine is a merlot that costs $35 a bottle.

We have selected this classic Bordeaux varietal from vineyards nestled on the gentle slopes of Sonoma Valley to produce an exquisite wine that rivals the very best Pommerol chateaus.

This brief screed offends me on so many levels that I feel it way down in the murky pools of my Behavioral Sink, but then I’m a sensitive guy.

First, and most evident, is the misspelling of Pomerol. I mean, really, people writing copy for wine labels shouldn’t misspell the names of wine regions, especially a wine region that’s a world-famous avatar of its grape and style of wine. I mean, Pomerol is to merlot as La Tour d’Argent is to pressed duck, as Wagner is to mytho-poetic Teutonic selfhood, as Tarantino is to violence. Pomerol is, in several words, the cradle of merlot, the Promised Land, the ne plus ultra.

Second is the fact that “varietal” is an adjective, not a noun (“variety”), but I’ve fought this hopeless battle before.

And third, the claim that this “exquisite wine … rivals the very best of [Pomerol]” cuts such a huge swath of unrealistic hype that it’s breathtaking. Confidence is good, of course, but delusion is treatable, one hears. The very best of Pomerol includes some of the — let’s say it — very best and most expensive wines in the world. These include Petrus, Lafleur, Le Pin, La Conseillante, Trotanoy, Certan de May, La Fleur de Gay, L’Eglise-Clinet, Clinet, L’Evangile, Latour-a-Pomerol and Vieux-Chateau-Certan.

Does the wine of which I speak here measure up? In one word, No. It’s well-made, attractive, tasty, with moderate complexity and weight, a shoo-in for a Very Good+ rating from me. (Shouldn’t a wine that sells for $35 rate better?)

But come on, let’s show a little common sense about these matters. PR is PR, marketing is marketing, these things we know are true and take with typical heaps of salt, but let’s not be stupid about them.

So the Wine Spectator has egg all over its face, and the upscale lifestyle, oops, wine journal becomes even more the mag we love to hate.

This story was published in Wines & Vines magazine and picked up by Alder Yarrow at Vinography. Here’s what happened.

For years WS has offered Awards of Excellence for restaurant wine lists. Lists that receive the award multiple times are elevated to a Grand Awards level. The results of the competition are published annually in a hefty issue of the magazine, and I say hefty because Awards of Excellence go to restaurants all over the world, though mainly, of course, in the United States and Europe. “Wow,” you’re thinking, “how can the magazine’s staff or even hired free lancers visit all of those restaurants?” They don’t. The awards are based on wine lists submitted by the restaurants, along with a $250 application fee. Only the Grand Award winning restaurants actually get visits from the magazine.

This would seem to be a system ripe for corruption, if not simply ineptness. I know that in my hometown, Memphis, when I dine at a restaurant whose wine list has received an Award of Excellence from WS, my reaction is usually, “You have got to be kidding. This list is as standard as they come.”

So, iconoclast — and the problem with iconoclasts is that they are usually self-anointed — Robin Goldstein decided to test the Awards of Excellence program, and I have to admit that as a sting, this is pretty freaking sublime. Goldstein created a fake restaurant in Milan, concocted a website for this fake restaurant, compiled a wine list and submitted it, with the $250 application fee, to WS, which granted the fake restaurant an award. The real nub of the deception is that among the wines Goldstein chose for the wine list of the fake restaurant were Italian wines that had received mediocre scores from — can you guess? — WS’s own reviewing staff. That’s diabolical. He also obsessed about the details, providing a real street address so a Google search would pull up a map and posting reviews from diners on Chowhound (since deleted).

Does this elaborate stunt, rather like shooting a very large fish in a very small barrel with a gun you made yourself, prove that WS’s Awards of Excellence program is completely fraudulent? No, it simply proves that like any organization, WS is susceptible to fraud. Obviously WS makes scads of money from the application fee, a fact that in itself should raise eyebrows (“how else can be rake in some dough?”), but the fake restaurant and wine list incident doesn’t mean that all the awards are suspect; it does cast a pall, however, on the accomplishments of the (perhaps too few) restaurants that do deserve the award.

Here is WS’s reply, posted on the magazine’s website here.

While the response is measured, this is not the time for WS to be crying that it was sucker-punched. Founder and publisher Marvin Shanken and editor Thomas Matthews need to take this incident, ludicrous as it may be, to heart and order a thorough evaluation of the Award of Excellence system. It’s been my experience, visiting restaurants around the country with WS award wine lists, that the club has too many members.

And while we’re all indulging in chuckles and chortles at WS’s expense — I mean, it’s so easy — don’t forget that this fraud could not have been perpetuated without the nearly infinite resources provided by the Internet. That’s the same Internet that enabled the publicists for the movie Bottle Shock to send out fake responses to blogs that mentioned the words chardonnay or Chateau Montelena or the name of the movie, thereby adding to the film’s publicity blitz without revealing that the fake posts were a form of advertising.

That made us indignant; that made us mad. The nerve of those people! Trying to defraud us!

Baby, the Internet giveth and the Internet taketh away.