Wednesday, July 2, 2008

The wine blog I read most consistently is Eric Asimov’s on the New York Times Dining and Wine page. This section is under the larger heading, Style, and I find it fits neatly into the Times well-honed penchant for bringing the fringes and edges of art and culture into the (somewhat) mainstream. Something is out there on the periphery—it’s backyard orchards or steampunk or roaming dinner parties—and then it builds in some hip neighborhood and finally an astute Time’s reporter gets the go ahead to publish and from there it’s only a matter of months or even days ‘til it pops up on MSN’s homepage or the Today Show. The latest post on The Pour (http://thepour.blogs.nytimes.com/) discusses chilled reds and although my wine shop in Brooklyn has been on this train for a couple years (we keep a selection of reds in a fridge) we will no doubt have customers coming in to tell us about what they just read and have we ever heard of such a thing or do we have the wines mentioned. So? Do I want some sort of cultural elite badge for maybe helping to push a trend into the mainstream? The short answer is yes. I really do want a badge that says look I’ve been saying this all along: chill your goddamned reds and now it’s in the NYT and so you should just assume that whatever I tell you from here on out is at the least prophetic. But really you should serve your reds cooler than you do unless you’re like me and you laughed when steampunk graced the cover of NYT’s Style section because you saw it coming all along and in the meantime you’ve been drinking Lapierre’s Morgon at 55 degrees Fahrenheit for at least a year and a half. Ha ha ha.

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