Introduction and Review

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Kevin T. Neely 19 years ago

Hello alt.food.wine. I wanted to introduce myself. I have read and visited this forum off and on over the past 5 years, and even posted some. Everytime I try to get into it, something happens like losing access to USENET, or just not being able to keep up with this high-volume group (I may have also posted under my other e-mail address, oenophile AT gmail).

In any case, thank you, thank you, thank you for the great posts even if I am not able to keep up with them all. This is by far the best wine forum I have ever found online, and one of the top ten overall. I am going to try to post some reviews, probably using Dale's grading system as best as I can approximate it.

I got into wine when I lived in San Francisco from 2000-2003. I bought a lot of that wine and then went back to school (basically ceasing my wine purchases) and am just now starting to drink a lot of the wine i have from that era. Much of this wine has been kept at pretty good but not perfect temperatures. It moved with me from San Francisco to Cleveland, OH, and now to South Florida. I love wine from France (Chateuneuf) and Italy (Barolo, Barbera) but mostly own Cabs and Merlots from Napa and Sonoma. Pinot is great, but I have drunk all I own save one or two bottles from Robert Sinskey.

-=- Now to the wine -=-

Tonight I opened a 2002 Wilson Winery Merlot from Hale's Vineyard. The wine had a good bit of fruit from the get-go. Lots of cherry, a bit tart. The wine also exhibited some chocolate, after it had opened up and I had finished the food. The wine was best in the middle, getting a bit acidic as it continued to open up and mature in the glass and bottle. Fruit kind of disappeared at that point. Grade: B.

For the ears, the wine went better with the Morphine's _Cure for Pain_[1] album than Nina Simone. For our taste buds, I made some beef short ribs with chipotle peppers[2]. A pretty good match, with the sweetness of the fruit cutting through some of the fat. I think I'd rather have had a rich and fruity pinot, but I have no complaints with the match of this wine with the food.

[1]

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[2]

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DaleW 19 years ago

1) Welcome! 2) Thanks for notes 3) Appreciate the recipe, too. 4) Morphine was a great band.

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Lawrence Leichtman 19 years ago

Great to hear from a new poster. Welcome. Haven't had the Hale's vineyard so it sounds like a try. Since I make my short ribs with Syrah I usually drink the same.

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Max Hauser 19 years ago

"Kevin T. Neely" in news: snipped-for-privacy@piglet.astroturfgarden.com :

Welcome Kevin.

(I can see how this got a response from Dale! Echo his comments though I don't know if I ever heard that music.)

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Emery Davis 19 years ago

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Hi Kevin, welcome to afw. Thanks for the notes.

As someone who hung out with Mark Sandman a bit (we shared labels at Accurate and he was roomies with the Accurate founder) I can only relate how amused he'd be to hear us discussing the best wine with Morphine!

Anyway Mark's demise was a sad day, and we should raise a glass in his direction.

-E

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Hunt 19 years ago

Welcome, and thanks for the Google-advice above.

You might also want to look into

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and head to the "Wine Board." Some good discussion there. A lot of the material covered, has already been hashed out here, but it's worth a read. You do have to register to post, but it's free and no biggie.

From this NG, Midlife also posts to that particular board.

Either way, I would not miss this NG for good wine recs., banter, humo[u]r and community.

Hunt

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Max Hauser 19 years ago

"Hunt" writes: > ... I would not miss this NG for good wine recs., banter, humo[u]r and community.

To say nothing of time span. (No HTTP-derived forum comes close, all are

15-25 years younger.)

Example: Where else could you read, publicly on the Internet, consumer discussions about the style of then-emerging wine critic Robert Parker and other critics, years before P. himself went online (on a private paid service, separate from the Internet)? 1986 examples currently in Google's archive:

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Those are indicative, rather than representative. (Shortly after, a diligent archivist ran short of space, consequently some years of wine-newsgroup traffic, and many other newsgroups, are missing from Google.)

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Introduction and Review

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