Angers, France – It’s quite a contrast; the university town of Angers and the countryside around it. From a tidy, nearly shiny, university town exuding white washed, business-like utility to rolling vineyards along wide and lazy rivers overseen by magnificent chateaux depicting a gilded age. These remarkable edifices, confidently bold, were once the seasonal homes for royalty and their treasurers. Today they might be held and maintained by the state; some still remain the possession of the uber-wealthy.

Red Newt Lahoma Vineyard Riesling 2009 is a surprising drink, not merely because this is a great American Riesling. “Great American Riesling” has, for much of our vinous history, been damnably faint praise. Moreover “surprising” isn’t a term I would likely apply to American Riesling. Satisfied (often)? Sated (frequently)? Surprised. Hmm.

Okay, I get the diatribe against high alcohol wines, and I often agree. Alcohol is nonetheless an integral part of wine's character: its weight, body, presence, mouth feel, part of what lifts its aromas, generates its flavors and keeps them all stable, at least for a time. And I like the buzz; I have no problem admitting that. On the other hand, I like wine too much to be satisfied with high alcohol wines; too much alcohol in a wine, and I won't be able to drink as much. And that's not good, dammit.

Damn, I'm slow. Here's the latest KC Star piece in which I claim temporary (okay, maybe twenty years worth) insanity about California Chardonnay. http://www.kansascity.com/2012/07/31/3732705/chardonnay-can-be-age-worth...

 In a recent article, I was asked to answer a few questions about how music and wine might interact. And I found myself unable to limit my words on the issue, even if I was primarily focused upon answering the questions. Here’s what I wrote to the author: 

Question 1 - Do you think that there exists a direct relation between music and the simultaneously consumption of wine?

I don't want to mislead anyone: Steve Pitcher and I were not famous friends, but I think we had a friendy and respectful relationship. We were wine judges who talked about the business of wine, of wine tasting, of wine judging, and of everything else that people talk about when sitting at a table with hundreds of glasses of wine and lots of time on our hands. Other than wine, I doubt that Steve and I had much in common though he would always surprise me with his breadth of knowledge about all things cultural, historical and, well, let's just say it right: Steve was very, very smart.

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.