"Wine-blogging used to be fun" & other comic laments

Thursday evening and the week should have ended already.  What's taking it so long?  Oh, right, the rotation of the earth, etc.

Well, anyway.  If you're as discerning as I think you are -- you read mondosapore, don't you?  -- you'll discern that it's been a less than stellar week. Not a truly bad one, just frustrating and less productive than one would like.  "Less productive" -- that tags me as 100% American, doesn't it?  An Italian would frame it in, say, terms of philosophy or politics (Berlusconi, they say, is a dynamo of productivity when it comes to picking up teenagers).

I was going to a blind tasting of Beaujolais at the new Snooth office on Madison Ave. (ladeeda), but I couldn't pry myself away from a stream of legally significant emails to do so.  Dealing with expensive lawyers and grasping State agencies.  A bit of comfortable numbness is in order.  

Pictured above:  Angelo Peretti

Some good things have happened -- new accounts, the ordering of a Kindle, the overdraft at CitiBank (God knows they can ill afford it, ha ha ha) -- where was I?  Oh, some of that will be found soon on Muddy Boots.  Or, as Angelo Peretti wrote on his blog, "Moody Boots."  I got a chuckle out of that one.  My reply in italiano was that it's not Moody Boots, although I am moody despite the high dosage of Lexapro, though my boots are joyous when they tramp around in Italian mud.  It sounded better in Italian. Really.

Like many of you, I've been sucked more and more into the world of Twitter.  

It's at once amusing, boring, informative (un poco) and once in a blue moon revelatory.  I'm following some famous personages now - Ana Marie Cox (the ubiquitous TV commentator and the founder of Wonkette), Rachel Maddow, James Suckling, etc.  Only Ana Marie's tweets sound like the real thing. They're so full of Washington insider allusions that they elude me, unfortunately.  She's doin' a heckuva job, sticking the voodoo pins of ridicule into every waxen appendage and orifice of our undead political culture.

Here's Ana Marie...in low res!

It seems that my recent advice to Italian wine producers has caused reflection and even a sea change among at least a few of my target audience.  I received an email from a Veneto producer that he has taken my advice to heart.  I had earlier this very day received an email from Lucia Raimondi of Villa Monteleone of her concrete steps to reduce costs for herself, us and you, gentle tippler.  I'll write it up on Muddy Boots soon.  Really. It's done:  here's that link.

Rachel, looking a bit less butch these days: network TV glamour treatment

James Suckling, looking a lot more butch

 

Finally, there was a long thread on Twitter this week in which Lenn Thompson (chronicler of Long Island and other New York state wine happenings) lamented that "wine-blogging used to be fun."  Naturally he wants to return to those early days when no one thought about ethics (Q: Should I accept junkets to Spain or California?  A: Don't be a moron!) and before a notoriously disturbed wine producer upstate began his disinformatsya campaign against said Lenn. The man in question has already been booted off any number of wine forums, on which he posted an endless flow of information and opinions, beginning genially and veering into the belligerent and unhinged.  Even the tolerant Jancis Robinson expelled him after a while.  

Lenn, old boy.  You've worked hard for recognition.  You too have done a heckuva job.   As Lily Tomlin's father told her at the beginning of her career, "Babe, you gotta learn to be popular."  Cranks like "Don Giovanni" go with the territory. 

 

 

    

Comments

[fredric koeppel]

If the device is Twitter, why do they call the action "tweet"? because if they called it "twit," everybody would have to realize what twits they are. You know Klee's painting "Twittering Machine"? he pegged it right 80 years ago: brittle, superfluous and nonsensical. Life is too short.

[TH]

You're right. Yet some are using it as an apparently effective marketing tool. I follow it to see where they go with it.

But mostly it is pretty twittish.

[michele colline]

"I buried Paul..."