Yes. And Berry’s scale describes my path thus far quite well.
As hinted to by some others, many wine drinkers are distributed in the 2-3 range while few cluster in the 10-11 zone–call it a parabolic distribution centered on 2.5?
I’m straddling 7 & 8 right now but regret to admit that, for the first time ever, I did a little Burg research today. Resisting stage 9 like the plague.
Jeez Berry, have you been reading my diary? I have certainly taken every one of your 11 steps. Your steps 4,6,9, and, 11 especially stand out to me. I am down to 8 cases of wines that fall into step 7. As for step 11, in January I had none in my cellar and only around 5 consumed lifetime. As of today 37 consumed, 31 in stock, and 131 pending! And cheap to as you quote.
What a great list
Stage 12: ‘Comfortable in your skin’ stage. You know what you like and you know how to enjoy it. Once in a while you venture (usually to stage 9), but home’s light shines bright.
![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
Hi mom! I love you!
Well done Berry. I’m happy to be at Step 11… not sure if there’s a 12th step. And I have to say I didn’t “jump” any steps, I went (sometimes painfully) through all of them. Fortunately enough steps 6 & 7 were not as painful as they could have been, since I didn’t really have the money to go very long on wines I ultimately didn’t like. But I’ve made my mistakes and learned from them.
I knew there was a 12th step in there somewhere, though I expected it to be about a ‘higher power.’
Who says it’s not?
This is great stuff as it is so true! For myself, I discovered CellarTracker and bulletin boards just as I was approaching Stage 3 so I didn’t (luckily) hitch my cellar to a particular palate which meant Stages 4-6 were minimized. Garagiste has been an enormous enabler during Stage 8 but has also been the primary source of wines for Stage 7. Listening to the wisdom of others I have stocked up in preparation for Stage 11 but just haven’t arrived there yet (still at Stage 8).
Step 11 is where one becomes one with a higher power. This power manifests as avatars on earth. One such avatar is Helmut Dönnhoff.
I love it! Though let’s not forget Austrian Riesling.
Electra on Azalea Path, Sylvia Plath
The day you died I went into the dirt,
Into the lightless hibernaculum
Where bees, striped black and gold, sleep out the blizzard
Like hieratic stones, and the ground is hard.
It was good for twenty years, that wintering -
As if you never existed, as if I came
God-fathered into the world from my mother’s belly:
Her wide bed wore the stain of divinity.
I had nothing to do with guilt or anything
When I wormed back under my mother’s heart.
Small as a doll in my dress of innocence
I lay dreaming your epic, image by image.
Nobody died or withered on that stage.
Everything took place in a durable whiteness.
The day I woke, I woke on Churchyard Hill.
I found your name, I found your bones and all
Enlisted in a cramped stone askew by an iron fence.
In this charity ward, this poorhouse, where the dead
Crowd foot to foot, head to head, no flower
Breaks the soil. This is Azalea path.
A field of burdock opens to the south.
Six feet of yellow gravel cover you.
The artificial red sage does not stir
In the basket of plastic evergreens they put
At the headstone next to yours, nor does it rot,
Although the rains dissolve a bloody dye:
The ersatz petals drip, and they drip red.
Another kind of redness bothers me:
The day your slack sail drank my sister’s breath
The flat sea purpled like that evil cloth
My mother unrolled at your last homecoming.
I borrow the silts of an old tragedy.
The truth is, one late October, at my birth-cry
A scorpion stung its head, an ill-starred thing;
My mother dreamed you face down in the sea.
The stony actors poise and pause for breath.
I brought my love to bear, and then you died.
It was the gangrene ate you to the bone
My mother said: you died like any man.
How shall I age into that state of mind?
I am the ghost of an infamous suicide,
My own blue razor rusting at my throat.
O pardon the one who knocks for pardon at
Your gate, father - your hound-bitch, daughter, friend.
It was my love that did us both to death.
Are you hanging out with Puff the Magic Dragon again?
I practically cut my teeth at Stage 11.
Needless to say, it’s been quite a ride trying to outdo my epiphany.
I’d be hard-pressed to criticize Michael Broadbent for nurturing my wine development. On the flip side, I’m not downplaying the influence that RP had on my wine education.
I think that anyone who dismisses critics, mentors, etc., is being delusional. You end up who you are for your influences, not in spite of them. Learning is a process, including learning to fend for yourself. And learning that critics are not demigods.
I mashed up Berry’s list with “the” 12 step program, threw in some wine oriented spice and came up with the following.
1 'Genesis" - Have an epiphany that you are powerless over wine.
2 “Confusion” - Realize that there are so many bewildering choices, a power greater than ourselves, like Bob(1), could restore us to sanity.
3 “Discipleship” - Start following the ratings of a respected wine critic and make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of Bob (1) as we understood Him.
4 “Cognitive Dissonance” - Do your best to tell yourself that you made a searching and fearless inventory of yourself and your wine through CT, our Lord, Amen.
5 “Awakening” - Realize that taste in wine is subjective and you need to admit to yourself and to another wine enabler the exact nature of your wrongs.
6 “Rage” - What the f*ck am I going to do with all this wine I bought? Use Bob as a red herring to gloss over all the defects, and move to step 7.
7 “Rationalize” Unload fruit bomb wine on friends at non-wine-geek dinner parties. Humbly ask the newbs to enjoy these highly rated gems. They will appreciate the high scores.
8 “The Quest” - Taste, taste and taste, and then make a list of all persons you excessively cherry picked from, and become willing to make amends to them all.
9 “Enlightenment” - Burgundy(2). Make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others (e.g., by telling them their prized, pricy wine really tastes like corked dirt).
10. “Dark Night of the Soul” Continue to take personal inventory, through CT, our Lord, Amen, and where you were wrong, promptly admit it.
11 “Inner Peace” Seek through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God(1) as we understood Him, and seek solace in German Riesling and frugality here on earth.
12 Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, resolve to carry this message to bulletin boards and offlines and practice these principles in all our daily affairs.
(1) Insert your own personal savior or mystic adviser, as appropriate. Agnostics may substitute with CT, as appropriate.
(2) Insert your own “Aha” wine region, as appropriate.
PS: Alternating references around note (1) were intentional
I think a wino’s evolution will always include an epiphany (as an aside, wineries that allow for side-by-side tasting of different price points really do the entire industry a huge service), and will always include some pure and outright score chasing thereafter. The only difference is that there are more sources of scores to chase now.
I think that people my age and younger, the end of Gen X and millennials, are a little less likely to differ to any authority as to things like wine. It’s not always out and out rebellion, but sometimes more a belief that expert opinions on subjective things are truly only one person’s opinion.
I also think that given media changes, the subjective nature of tasting, and cognitive dissonance/emperor’s clothes issues (among other factors), making a go as a wine critic will have to start with getting noticed and having a unique point of view than being able to evaluate flavor profiles and set drinking windows. The barriers to entry are gone, and especially in the US, having some official qualification is not always even helpful.
I’m not sure this will make it easier for people to drink better wine as they develop their own tastes (actually I think it won’t), but they will feel good while doing it.
Seeing as how I’m about to hit the ripe old age of 30, I’ll take a stab at the younger viewpoint on this one. I’ve been wine bit for almost the entirety of my legal drinking age. My enlightened (so to speak) stage has been entirely in a new media world. I have never had a subscription to WA and have only casually read Spectator or Tanzer, etc. I have however been a religious reader of various wine blogs, grape radio, etc. Its interesting to note that despite being at stage 8, and having gone through 1,2, some form of combined 3/4/5, I skipped right past 6 and 7. I think that’s partly because the collective voice of new media is my discipleship de jour. I’ve been lead to the promised land by a different kind of leader, one that preached subjectivity from the beginning. I won’t say that I’m not influenced by points, but I look at a wine with scores where the ad goes something like WS:89, RP:95, ST:91, and I think, whats the point of that? I guess my point is that it really is possible to avoid the big letdown of realizing you have all this crap wine you don’t want, but its possible I’m still at stage 3 and don’t know it, which I guess would put me back in denial. 
My question is, Have the wine lovers of Germany (the ones ghat live there) been cursed or blessed? It’s kind of like being born with the silver wine rabbit?
I am sure most on this board have been exposed through literature, the classics or psychology to the “Electra Complex” and the “Oedipus Complex.”
The Silvia Plath poem, above, is about her emotions when she visited her Father’s grave. The title suggests part of the poem’s message/content. Some of the recent comments about wine criticism/critics reminded me of this poem. Yes, I love to read poetry.
Berry’s list is probably my single most favorite post of all time on any BB. It should be canonized or incorporated into my manifesto (of sorts), if I ever write one.
Bernard, your post #34 was particularly well received be me. Well said.
Zee Berserker Complex?