Tuesday, May 27 2008
Reason #6,542,351 Why You Should Make Your Own Wine
Very low mileage, only drank by a little old lady on her way to church . . .
I had a joker in a discussion forum tell me the other day, 'I won't touch homemade wine. I only drink real wine.'
Oh really? Since consumer-produced wine is made from (wait for it) grapes, the same thing commercial wine is made from, I didn't understand his thesis. There's nothing that goes into the a Winexpert kit that isn't legally used in commercial wines for sale in your local bottle shop. And as an added bonus, you don't have to wonder if what you're getting is what you thought you were paying for, unlike the folks at the recent wine auction of Chateau Ponsot vintages.
It seems that Acker, Merral and Condit, the auctioning firm had a little problem with the wines they were trying to auction off. They were fakes. According to the Wine Speculator:
Ponsot's wines are certainly valuable–Christie's recently sold a bottle of the Clos de la Roche 1934 for $22,800. The withdrawn wines look real, but Laurent Ponsot is adamant that they cannot be. Six of the lots were various vintages of Clos St-Denis, ranging from 1945 (a single bottle estimated at $7,000 to $9,000) to 1971 (a full case estimated at $30,000 to $50,000). The problem, Ponsot said during an interview, is that, "My father, Jean-Marie, didn't begin to produce our Clos St-Denis until 1982. So how could the bottles say 1945, 1949, 1959, 1962, 1966 and 1971?"
Ponsot also pointed to a full-page photo in Acker's catalog of a quartet of Clos de la Roche bottles bearing the Domaine Ponsot label, including a 1929 (estimated at $14,000 to $19,000). "My grandfather, Hippolyte, would have made that wine," he said. "But he did not begin estate bottling until 1934. So a Clos de la Roche from 1929 from our domaine is impossible." The fact that Ponsot began estate bottling in 1934 is even stated in the catalog, in a history of the producer on the page opposite the photo.
Now I'm not a big fan of rare and collectible wines. I've tasted a few top chateaux and some good vintages, but only on the cheap. It's my contention that people who collect and pursue such wines are compensating for something lacking in their lives. Some very tiny little part of their life. Some minuscule part of themselves that they feel is inadequate, know what I mean? Maybe collecting rare wine helps with that.
In the meantime, as Cousin says over at Vulgar Little Monkey, Do The Math, noting that "more bottles of 1947 Lafleur sold in the last 5 years than were ever produced." It's wine auction houses and predatory counterfeiters relying on the ignorance and greed of collectors to keep the market for fakes active and happy. It's gotten so bad that there's now a website and business completely devoted to sussing out fakes. Wine Authentication Services claims to be 'devoted to helping the wine industry fight the war on counterfeiting.' Gee, I know a simpler way: don't compete at auction for stupidly overpriced examples of wine too rare to drink.
Anyone interested in a bottle of my homemade 1934 Domaine Luna Rossa? For having been made 50 years before the founding of Winexpert, it's pretty good--I guarantee it . . .
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