Ron's View

I don’t know much about wine. Our October exploration of the wine valleys of northern Sonoma County (discussed in assorted posts at the time, such as here and here) was great fun, and we continue to explore the wines we shipped up here from eleven different wineries. But I’m still suspicious of wine-tasting terminology and hesitant to take it seriously. One thing I learned from the trip is how to swirl my glass around while holding the base on the table before tasting, so I can get the wine high on the sides for better smelling. It’s changed my life.

Even before the trip, I had started to read and enjoy Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher’s wine column in the Saturday Wall Street Journal. Today, Gaiter and Brecher write about Washington Syrahs. You can find the column here, but you may need an online WSJ subscription for it to work. Alternatively, you can go to here, which I think is a link to their latest column, so if it works, it will take you to the Syrah article only temporarily. And if you get there, you’ll also find a link to an accompanying video. Whether you get there or not, I can tell you that they are crazy about Washington Syrahs, convinced that the Syrahs may just be the best American red wines available. This seems rather extreme, but really, it’s what they say: “As a group, these are the most exciting red wines being made in America today that you might actually find on a shelf.” I’m not going to argue. In a sidebar, they list their six favorites. One gets their highest (and rarely given) rating, “Delicious!”. It’s the Dunham Cellars 2004 from Columbia Valley, with a price of $44.99, and with the following description:
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John Kennedy and McGeorge Bundy

At the end of November, I wrote a post about two books I had to read, based on their reviews in the preceding two Sunday NYT book review sections. One, of course, is the Patrick French biography of V. S. Naipaul that I finished a week ago and have written about many times. The other is Gordon M. Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam. Having finished it just two nights ago, I’ll say a few words about it.
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As a follow up to my most recent post, which was written in honor of Ricardo Montalban and the “soft Corinthian leather” option on Chrysler Cordobas that he made famous, I bring you the video above on the making of books. (HT: Andrew Sullivan.) Just past the 2:22 mark, we learn that “the pages of a book are sourced exclusively at Italian forests.” This is a good reason not to get a Kindle.

The video doesn’t mention what kind of leather is available for the cover.