Nurse the Hate: Super Bowl and MW Seminar Week

 

I spent the entire week in Seattle at a Master of Wine seminar parked in a conference room listening to people talk about wine and wine related topics like chemistry and farming.  These are some of the most highly respected people in the wine industry talking in granular detail about wine topics to an audience of wine professionals all anxiously studying to pass an exam that is purposely almost impossible to pass.  It's all professionals at the highest level.  Oh yeah, I'm sitting there too.  There have been more people that have gone to space than have passed the Master of Wine exams.  More people have climbed Mount Everist.  And here I am, some fucking guy, thinking he can show up in a different profession and pass their highest qualification.  It's insane.  

Here's the thing.  I tasted very well this week.  The whole wine tasting thing is very much like golf.  It's you versus yourself.  Sometimes you are hitting the ball straight and seeing the breaks of the green.  Sometimes you aren't.  When I was at this seminar last year I had full-on imposter syndrome. It was intimidating to be in a room with people who were "head winemaker of this famous property" and "Third generation Champagne maker" when my resume is "some fucking guy".  Everyone, and I mean everyone, knows more about technical winemaking than I do, as well they should because it's their fucking job.  Meanwhile I'm trying to glean a lifetime of experience from books and YouTube videos.  I started far behind the pack and continue to huff and puff in pursuit.

I have put the work in.  For 2-3 hours every single day I have been grinding, and it is starting to pay off.  I work a full day, eat and then study.  When you are watching something on the cartoon network, I am trying to figure out what vineyard owners do when their vines get powdery mildew.  I can barely keep my lawn alive, but I am making progress on this grape stuff.  I actually understand shit like maceration techniques, canopy management, bulk wine shipping best practices, and filtration protocols now.  I am by no means an expert, but I can blabber about the topic just long enough to give the impression that I know what I am talking about.  I'm now past "freak out" into "continually unsettled" in regards to my test preparation. 

Each morning at this seminar you start with a mock tasting exam at 830am.  They pour 12 random wines into glasses and then you need to be able to identify their place of origin as closely as possible, the type of grapes used, nail the quality level (like it's a $12 wine, a premier cru Burgundy from Pommard, a second growth Bordeaux, whatever) and be able to deduce exactly the way the wine was made (fermented in steel, left on the lees, aged in new or old oak barrels, etc) all from the way the wine looks, smells and tastes. It's really just paying attention to details and rationally applying what you know about how they make wine on different places on the planet.  Italy uses a lot of old oak barrels that let in oxygen.  New Zealand and Australia use low oxygen steel tanks.  It's like if you hear a kind of guitar tone and know that Jimmy Page played on something, or because of how the drums sound on a record that Mutt Lange was involved.

On four of the five days, I easily identified (or got really close) on 75% of the wines.  Sure, one day was an unmitigated disaster, but like I mentioned before in the golf analogy, sometimes you hit the green, and sometimes you go into the lumberyard.  After the exam, there's a quick coffee break where all the students go out into the lounge area and say shit like "Did you get Barolo on wine 5?  That was definitely Barolo." and then you freak out because you had confidently written that it was something totally different.  It was this week when it hit me that though these are some of the best tasters in the world, I can hang with them.  After the coffee break we head back into the class room and someone has to read their answer back in front of the class and the three Masters of Wine on the panel.  I found myself at one point successfully reading back an extensive 45 point question answer in front of the class to an author of the most prominent wine tasting manual in the field.  It was like if you had to break down game film and justify your conclusions to Peyton Manning.  In this case, Manning said I gave a good answer.  I'll tell you what...  I don't know if I am going to pass this exam, but I'm certainly a live dog.

Speaking of live dogs, I'm on Kansas City today.  The Chiefs have been the best team all year.  They had to beat Cincinnati to get here, a team I think was Top 3 at the end of the year, and a hot Jacksonville.  The AFC has all the top NFL teams in it but two, and KC ran the gauntlet to win the #1 seed.  The Chiefs have been the best team all season.  The Eagles might have had the easiest road to the Super Bowl of all time.  They had to beat an average Giants team and a 49ers team without a professional QB.  I'm not saying the Eagles aren't good, but I think they're at an inflated price.  Why are they with a still injured Hurts favored over Kansas City?  Because they kicked the crap out of the Giants?  There's also a certain pleasure I would see in all those obnoxious Eagles fans getting their hearts broken, so I do have an emotional investment too.  It boils down to this.  I am having a hard time figuring out why I wouldn't take the best QB in football with points coached by Andy Reid after a bye week.  This is by no means a lock, but gimme the Kansas City Chiefs +1.5.

I will probably bet a bunch of weird prop bets with all these sign up bonuses I'm being pummeled with by Ohio Sportsbooks.  The way to enjoy the Super Bowl as a middle aged man is to have a lot of pointless action going on things like "longest field goal" and "over 11 yards rushing" on a running back you haven't heard of before this morning.  Then I like to nestle into the always terrible and overblown Super Bowl halftime show where I won't know any of the songs and the entire thing seems like a Simpson's parody.  This is followed by high calorie intake of food and then hopefully a white knuckle fourth quarter where the Chiefs and Mahomes pull it out of their ass.  Let's go Chiefs.

Season Record 40-21-1