ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE EXISTENTIAL ROAD TRIPS IN MY HEAD: TOP 100 LISTS, MY HALLUCINOGENIC CAREER IN WINE, AND A FEW RANDOM MOMENTS FROM GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS

Finding myself in a place all too familiar, that place high above the valley floor, peering into the abyss with the kind of fear that’d make Freddy Krueger piss his pants, feeling the cold wind sheer of the unknown, waiting for the very moment that tiny pebble I stand on, my back velcro’d to the jagged Cliffside behind me, to give way in an unceremonious slave-to-gravity Nestea® plunge of doom.

Aw, the holiday season is beginning. Already.

I’ve been at this awhile now, celebrating 9 years at DFWS this past September, and the ironic beauty of it is that it has gotten progressively more chaotic with each passing year. Business is good, thankfully, in the midst of the Diarrhea bloodbath that is the global economy right now. And while I find myself squeezed in between of Mr. Spray Tan Miser and Grumpy Dwarf, I am preparing myself for all the impending Top 100 wine lists, with the big one coming from Wine Spectator in just a few weeks. I have railed against WS’s list for years, but more out of frustration than anything else. This list comes out, ad consumers believe they can roll into any wine store the day of or day after its release and get all the wines that are presented. Nope. This is a greatest hits compilation of wine reviews, compiled over the course of a year’s time, with many of these wines long gone from retailers’ shelves. True enough it is a big bump in sales, but only if you have some of these wines. At best, at least for me, I can luck out and score 10-15 of the wines and hope they sell out. I still have 5 wines from last year’s list – and 3 of them were (and still are) under $20!

Years ago, in my own myopic ranting phase, I’d bellow to the empty recesses of cyberspace all my wacky dissatisfactions at the press, including the 100-point scale and the convivial Top 100 lists, and at one point, I had even gotten comments from some of the folks at WS – though I had to swear not to reprint their comments in my blog. Interesting exchanges they were, and they made me wonder what the heck they had to prove to little ol’ me. I mean, I am just a fairly-used-up retail dog who uses his blog as a quiet self-therapy session, implementing a kind-of guerilla wine reviewing M.O. that I am always afraid will make my sales reps, my partners in this business, more reluctant to deal with me that I care to admit.

And of course, I have my own list I like to throw out there, to cater to the illusionary construct of what I suppose you could call my ego, though I may have to argue that my ego was left abandoned in the kindergarten playground when I was five, beaten up by the schoolyard bully, who happened to be the prettiest girl in my class.

Which finds me here, in this comfortable state of slight discomfort, born out of a combination of getting older, and perhaps growing a bit jaded. Government regulations, overtaxation here in Kentucky, increasing competition, and a sometime- sensation of insurmountable pressure, there are times I would like to pull up stakes, and move my wife and cats and I to that atoll in Tahiti, the one with the winery that harvests twice a year, offer up my services as a tasting room custodian, and live out my days in blissful sunshine and blue seas. Yet I know as much as anybody pressure is what we eat for breakfast around here. As said in the movie “Glengarry Glen Ross”, “coffee is for closers.” Nothing’ll stand in the way of me and my coffee, bitches!

So on November 9^th, I will present my Top 50 wines for the year. These wines will be carefully selected of course in my totally over-the-top, biased opinion. Yep, I said it, biased. These are the wines that really kicked my ass, and I can still think about and still recall how completely awesome they were. No use of complicated algorithms. No tabulations. Just me, and my eenie-meenie-meinie-moe selection process.

Let the fun begin, or in the immortal words of Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross, “Fuck you, that’s my name!”