Alice Feiring sent me this by e-mail. It is from Cheryl Lins, the woman featured in that article talking about why she gave up wine and went into distilation:
"I figured you knew all about Wine Expo.
Back when I lived in New Mexico and trying to make a living as an artist, I got the chance to show some work at a West Hollywood gallery. Of course I had to attend the opening, and I missed seeing the ocean and all that. So I found a cheap cheap hotel to stay in (not by the hour) for a week. Near the end of my visit I decided to say at the edge of Santa Monica for a couple days. The hotel, a Days Inn, was right next door to a wine shop, Wine Expo. I thought, well I can get some wine to take back to NM with me.
So I went and bought some wine. One bottle was from Sardinia. OMG! It was a revelation. For $15-18 I got a great wine. Back in NM I discovered that not any $15-18 bottle of wine would do anymore. They just weren’t very interesting. That was 2001 I think. It pretty much ended my wine drinking days.
And I’ve been on their mailing list ever since. Not that I actually order wine from them anymore, but to me this is what all spirits are about. Whether it’s beer, wines, whiskies, absinthe.
After all of the hubbub about absinthe recently, I shelled out for a very highly-touted bottle and a proper “serving” kit. Stuff was absolutely vile, you could not make me drink it at gunpoint. The fact that it began life as an 18th-century quack medicinal elixir should have been an indication…
That reminds me, I need to pawn this $150 serving kit onto some trendy hipster with Craigslist…
Nick, my standard line re Absinth is “Back when that was all the rage the competition in mind altering drugs were coffee and tobacco. You’ve smoked pot and done ecstacy, you are gonna be sorely disappointed…”
Though laudanum and other potent items were trendy amongst the hipsters of that era. When I was in grad school (my line for the day it seems), it was super-cool to bring back even more awful “absinthe” from Prague. Yes, I did it too.
Yes, but the point of my initial post is: A $15 Cannonau di Sardegna was so good it ruined this woman for LIFE on finding similar values? WOW, big props to the Soletta family!
The scare tactics used against absinthe came from the French wine industry, when they were trying to regain market share after recovering from the phylloxera epidemic.
I’ve been disappointed by the commercial ones I’ve tried, ranging from bleh to pretty good. But one a friend made back in the '90s was an amazing rollercoaster of taste and tactile sensations, wave after wave, that lasted about 90 seconds.
