Mock Exams and Super Bowl Week

 

I attended the Master of Wine seminar this week in Santa Rosa CA, a more budget minded stay than glamorous nearby Napa Valley on the other side of the mountains.  I prefer Sonoma to Napa these days as Napa is now in a doomsday spiral of “premiumization” where each winery and restaurant is trying to outdo each other on who can be the most focused on conspicuous spending.  While there are plenty of great wines and places to eat, after all, an unlimited budget can really help deliver results, it’s all a bit of overkill.  Sonoma, while hardly a cheap place to hang out, is very conscious of not becoming Napa.  Of course this means they sell $75 wines instead of $175 wines, so it’s sort of splitting hairs at that point.  Still, the people are nice and the weather is good, so it’s a good stay in February.

I did four consecutive mock exams on Tuesday through Friday.  What that means is I have 12 wines poured in front of me and I must identify them blind and write full page notes on why I came to conclusion I did.  That went first thing in the morning from 800a to 10:15a.  It sounds sort of easy until you have to fill up a 16-page test paper with writing on conclusions you arrived at moving very swiftly with the pressure of not looking like an asshole in front of your peers, some of the best blind wine tasters in the world.  The time is about two minutes per wine for identification, which is faster than it sounds, and then the writing is 9 minutes per wine.  

What has become the most challenging part for me now is the writing, which you wouldn’t think would be that big of an issue for a guy the writes as much as I do.  I find it difficult sometimes to write not only the basic facts of what they are looking for, but the way they want it written.  Like If the question was “what kind of bird is this?” and they showed you a photo of Daffy Duck, you’d immediately know it’s a duck because, well… you know what a duck looks like.  However, can you prove that Daffy is a duck in a series of logical statements?  It has to be written something like this:  “Evidence of feathers points to being a bird.  Lack of scales or fur confirms the creature is a bird.  Evidence of a billed mouth and ability to swim points to waterfowl.  Webbed feet confirms water based bird.  Considered duck and goose as identity.  Dark feathers and ringed patterned neck consistent with duck.  Orange tinted bill confirms duck as goose would have white feather and black elongated type bill.  Considered Looney Toons and Mallard type duck.  Black feathers and white patterned neck, 12 pound body weight confirms Looney Toons species.”  So, I did that for four days with a bunch of weird ass wines and then tried to defend my point in group settings for saying a late harvest Gruner Veltliner from Austria was a reasonable miss on something I painstakingly wrote an answer for that I thought was a warm vintage Vendage Tardives Riesling from Alsace.  It’s all sort of ridiculous as nobody but the people in this room really care, but that’s how I spent the week.

The great news was that I was able to avoid all the banal Super Bowl hype.  The worst part of that is the NFL threatening to sue anyone that even says “Super Bowl” out loud which is perhaps the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.  Maybe FIFA will come and knock down your door with a bunch of ICE goons if you say “World Cup” out loud but I don’t think they’ll do that.  They have the wherewithal to understand that all publicity is good publicity, and if a chicken wing bar wants to advertise a “World Cup Finals Party” it’s good for the brand.  The NFL is a bunch of fuckers though.  They don’t want most of the money on the table.  They want ALL of the money on the table.  

I was talking with Krusty about this year’s game and it seems odd that all the chatter from the sports gambling community is centered around props.  I haven’t heard anyone floating out speculation on who is going to win the game, with an even more muted level of conversation than when some of those Cowboys and Niners monster teams were clearly going to fucking destroy their second rate foes.  Gen Z dudes like betting props and parlays, so that’s where all the public money and interest is focused.  I don’t really understand that thinking as to me, the Seahawks are clearly the better of the two teams and at the Draft Kings opening line of -3.5 seem like a gift.  Nobody seems to give a shit though.  

The Seahawks metrics are really good.  They are top 8 for almost anything you want to rank a good football team on.  They won the #1 seed and beat the Rams twice (a team I still think is the better team BTW), and had to tangle with the 49ers twice.  The only real question is our national agreement on refusing to believe that Sam Darnold is not going to flame out in the bright lights despite putting up two 13+ win seasons in a row on two different teams as a Top 3 overall draft pick pedigree QB.  I think he just had to scrub the Jets off him and that takes time, but who knows what happened there?  All I know is that he’s been solid, but the real thing that sells me on Seattle is how good their defense has been.  If you have a tough defensive team in these big games, that’s usually who has the edge.

The other key to this game to me is the Patriots schedule.  Look, I know you can only beat who is on your schedule, but what are this team’s best wins?  Beating Buffalo on the road I guess?  The Playoffs were a dream scenario for them.  You had Stroud putting up maybe the single worst playoff game performance I have seen since Brian Hoyer flamed out as a Texan and threw like 5 INTS.  Stroud singlehandedly lost that game for Houston.  Brutal.  Then they get to play a Broncos team that had to run out a backup that hadn’t played a game in over two years.  That’s not exactly the same run as beating the Niners and Rams, is it?  At a certain point you’d want to look at the Patriots and think, “OK, these guys are a Top 5 NFL team”, and I just don’t think that’s possible with the data set we have in front of us.  I’m on the better team who played the much tougher schedule with who I think also has the better Xs and Os coach.  Seattle -3.5