Don's Wine Blog

Two years ago I moved from a homely house with a tiny kitchen and a three car garage to a prettier house with a huge kitchen and a shared one car garage. My priorities are, sadly, never less than obvious. Needless to say I threw out a few things. The disposables included fifteen to thirty years of The Wine Advocate; The Wine Spectator; Connoisseur’s Guide; California Grapevine; and The Wine News. Time and the Internet had made them redundant.

I also abandoned collections of several defunct, but at one time significant publications. I was sure that these had never been electronically transcribed, but they had to go. I grieved a bit at the disposal of so much history. I should perhaps have kept and framed the Spectator edition that advised readers not to buy the 2002 Bordeaux (a vintage extraordinary for the cash it brought those who actually invested in it). I wish I had found time to locate and save the ’70s era issue of Vintage that exposed Heublein’s habit of misrepresenting the source of bottles sold at their annual rare wine auctions.

What I most regretted parting with were my copies of the early issues of Robert Finnigan’s Guide to Wines. I began that subscription in 1972 or 1973 and was an avid reader for several years. Finnigan’s early writings had an easy style and a good turn of phrase, yet pulled no punches if a wine was substandard. He ignored “average” bottlings, but wrote accurately and at length about those that were worthy, and briefly and harshly about bad ones. He wrote elegantly, before the idea of numerical wine scores and other crude shortcuts became the norm.

I was sad to read about his death this October and wished again that I could re-read some of his more memorable phrases. My all-time favorite, just a curt dismissal of a winemaking disaster, was:  “A wine bubbling with biological activity”. RIP Bob.

Don Gillette