There is undoubtedly irony in Greece being known for wines for current drinking, and for being a country that rarely produces wines that will age. After all, this is the country that invented wine, and in ancient Homeric texts, aged wine is celebrated and seems almost commonplace. The rest of the world would take millennia to catch up. 

Plenty of wine competitions get ignored. Once I might have gotten my nose out of joint about the manner in which competitions such as Missouri's annual Wine Competition are completely invisible throughout the established media. Of course they ignore such competitions. For one, most of these wines aren't available nationally, and many of those in the Missouri Competition aren't found outside the state of Missouri. And the traditional wine media have always ignored the rest of winedom, the parts of it not found in the traditional areas. Why not?

Life is too short for the eternity of emotions, wrote Alexander Doeblin. And faced with a flashing cursor, it seems impossible to start explaining why certain works of art both wound me and sustain me.

After an arduously steamy summer, the weather has broken, though it seems to me that there is absolutely nothing broken about the weather; it's as right as it could be: cool, breezy, sunny. Amazing. Much of the lawn is dead; work is brain-snappingly crazy, everything's a mess. Yeah, sports shouldn't matter, but the Royals remain only a promise (next year, I swear, next year, it's gonna happen), the Chiefs are just plain gonna suck and the Big 12 is no longer imploding. Now it's exploding. This is big stuff to those of us in Kansas City. You don't have to pretend to understand.

Nafplio, Greece - No matter how many times you visit Greece, no matter how traditional some of its sleepy towns may seem, there is plenty of new here. Led by a coterie of (often) French educated, worldly and dedicated winemakers, Greece's historical varieties are undergoing a remarkable makeover.

At the bar sits a thin dreadlocked man; he is being gushed over by a succession of young women. He's the drummer with the Wailers, who have just left the stage on the grassy riverbank next to the hotel. In fact he's called Drummie Zeb. He's drummed for ten years with legendary bass player Family Man (Aston Barrett) who, if you don't know, would be really amazing to drum with, or scary, I'm not sure which.

I've been on a mad tear for three weeks, probably twenty cities, and hundreds more cocktails and wines (beers don't count, or at least I don't count them as they go down) and I've been waiting for today to try to write it down. In some form or other. Some sort of record, but then I always imagine that I will write these things down and time doesn't allow it.

It's almost impossible to imagine today, but a half-century ago sweet and dessert wines in the United States accounted for the majority of wines consumed.

Beaulieu Vineyards George de la Tour 2007 is the best version of this wine I've had in years. Some of the greatest California wines I've ever had were BV George de la Tour's, albeit the 1968, the 1970, the 1975 and such. The 1990's were not so kind; there were some issues with cellar taint and the wines just never seemed right. But all that has been fixed, and last night's bottle of 2007 had all the richness I expect from that vintage as well as an almost shockingly soft finish.

I'm giving a talk at UC Davis and the remarkable Darrell Corti is speaking as well. And as great as it is to hear his lucid views, the bigger feature for me was one of the lovely bottles that he brought along for the conference.