DISQUS

Ryan and Gabriella,

Thanks for all of your shout-outs this year! I love your site. Chock full of little nuggets of insight, Catavino is honest, easy to navigate, and, perhaps most important, clearly a labor of love: required on-line reading for all lovers of Spanish (and Portuguese) wines. I'm honored that you are regular visitors to blameitonrioja.

Keep up the great work.

Adrian

What was it that the U.S. government called suspected communists back in the 1940s and 1950s? Wasn't it something like "prematurely anti-fascist"?

I wish I could think up a similarly clever euphemism for my "affliction" since, like you, I have been passionate about all things Spanish for most of my adult life, long before the present craze, reaching back to the early 1990s, when I studied Spanish in Madrid, and, also like you, it is impossible or me to separate out a wine from its logical and beautifully compatible companions: food, people, and place.

As I have written elsewhere, it is clear to me that fawning praise for Spanish wines in the American critical wine press has been a great boon for Spain, even if the context of its appraisal is devoid of those things we both cherish and you so eloquently enumerate:

"Wine is alive! Wine is people. Wine is culture. Wine is amusing. Wine is for wooing. I’ve never reached the bottom of a 100 pt wine and felt differently unless I shared it with my wife or friend."

So it is incumbent upon us to devise not a rival but a complementary critical strategy that takes all of these things into account, especially food, to focus particularly a wine's pairability over its supposed ageability.

Maybe I was prematurely anti-uncontextually monocritical.