I was in Germany last week for the Stage 2 Master Of Wine seminar. Sorry for not getting a Super Bowl column in, but as anyone that texted me will attest, I was on Kansas City +2. Winner. Anyway, let's get back to my little German Blitzkrieg. For most of you reading this, it would have been a brutally boring week of sitting in a small conference room in the morning after taking a 2 hour and 15 minute test of blind wines discussing your answers. Now this would bore the shit out of any rational human being, because most of the conversation isn't even about what you answered but how you answered it. There are other Stage 2 students taking the course in Napa this week, so I won't get into the particular wines, but here's an example of what the morning was like for four days. There's 12 wines in glasses in front of me. I get a question like "Discuss the relative quality of wines 3 and 4 in regards to context of origin" as part of the analysis. I think wine 3 is better than wine 4 and I spend about 100 words in my answer. Later, after the mock exam, I'm sitting there with 12 other people and we discuss our answers. My favorite part of the process is when we get bogged down for 20 minutes discussing the validity of a certain word choice.
Let's pretend that wine 3 is "Wooly Bully" by Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs. Wine 4 is "Desolation Row" by Bob Dylan. I say "Desolation Row" is higher "quality" than "Wooly Bully", but that doesn't mean that I like it more. It just means that I think it hits a higher level of ambition and has more depth of content, not that I necessarily don't want to crank up Sam the Sham driving around in my car. During the discussion period after the exam we get into our answers. I might write something like, "Desolation Row is the higher quality track. Wooly Bully has wild energy with the funky keyboard driving the song compared with Desolation Row which has tight dense lyrical content offering great complexity with the virtuoso uplifted Spanish guitar playing offering counterpoint to the solemn vocal delivery." We might spend 20 minutes talking about my use of "funky" in that answer, completely ignoring that I was correct overall. Imagine a posh English accent saying something like "Funky? Is that the best word choice here? I don't know what "funky" means."
Now this guy isn't wrong. He doesn't know what "funky" means, but that's because he is the product of British boarding schools and he has never been within 10 kilometers of anything remotely funky. Now I can agree that "funky" might not be the best word for describing Sam the Sham's organ in "Wooly Bully", but it's probably more widely understood than if I had used the phrase "garage punk". The problem is that phrase won't work for whoever is reading it as they probably have never seen Thee Headcoats and have a secret affinity for late Elton John recordings. So now the room bandies about different word choices to "fix" my answer. How about "frantic"? No, that's not quite it. Perhaps "primitive"? No, that's a negative connotation. "Energetic?" Yes, that's probably better the English advisor intones. We move on with me thinking "energetic" would be better used to describe one of those first two XTC records keyboards. Whatever... "Energetic" it is.
That's the tricky part. There's only a few minutes per wine and you have to capture the essence of the thing in a few lines that can be agreed upon regardless of your cultural background. I got lit up by a guy because I was scrambling at the end of a mock exam and wrote "Euro tourists make up an important market for this wine region and the entry level quality of this wine would have broad appeal to these consumers." The person that reviewed my paper said "Euro Tourists? Euro Tourists? What does that mean? Do Bulgarians come buy this wine?". Now I have no fucking idea if Bulgarians drive to Alsace France to buy affordable white wines, but I read that a shitload of tourists drive through and load up their little campers as they go. The guy reviewing my paper was adamant I missed the mark and killed me on points. It should be noted that three days later I was in Alsace and a producer there said to me "We get tourists from 17 countries, all over Europe mostly, and they all buy wine." It didn't matter that I was right. The person grading me didn't think I was, so that means I'm wrong. Had I put "An important market for this wine are primarily French, German and Belgian tourists that travel though the region on holiday and make purchases via the cellar door.". Am I saying the same thing? Yes, but now I'm saying it the way the reader wants to read it.
It can be very frustrating for me, and English is allegedly my primary language. My cultural shorthand doesn't work. Now if I'd used a phrase like "pear drop", that is completely acceptable because there is an English candy flavor called "pear drop" and most of these blokes are English and they write the rules. Americans dominate world culture, but not here. The Brits have planted their flag and will make their last stand extolling the glories of port and sherry, I try to remember to type out answers like I'm role playing being a British business middle manager for a consumer goods company. There are people there so gifted that they are doing this in their third or fourth language. I'm struggling to come up with the right word and some guy from Singapore is knocking it out in a language he barely knows. It can be disheartening to be a filthy ape like myself. Yet, I soldier on and sit in a conference room watching German chemists present reams of data regarding TDN formation in wild chemical fermentations as I pretend to grasp what he is saying. It's really a hell of a thing.
I made a quick day trip into Alsace with my associate Felix. There are these unbelievably charming little villages built in the 1400-1500s where at any moment it looks like a gnome is going to jump out and do a little jig. A winemaker we visited was the 14th generation winemaker and his family lived in a house built in the 1470s. Afterwards we hustled back to have dinner with Jochen/Evil and crew knocking back a half dozen regional wines and some local beer. I woke up early after going to bed late, my sleep schedule a complete disaster. My plan had been to escape to Frankfurt and spend the day regrouping, but as I watched costume clad young adults in their Fasching gear jumping on trains to whatever street party was happening I thought "I gotta get out of here". I booked a train to the airport from my phone and muscled my way into an open Premium Plus Business Class seat on the 530p back to Washington-Dulles. I caught the second half of the Super Bowl in the United Club lounge and had to hustle to my gate when it went into OT. I streamed the overtime on my phone as we readied for takeoff. Just as the Chiefs went to make the winning score, I lost the signal. I fell asleep in my seat secure in the knowledge that my KC +2 had hit. All and all, a successful trip.
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