Ah Ha! A Newbie’s Wine List or: How I Managed to Post Twice in One Day
In March of this year, Josh Galliano and I dined at the Niche bar together. Throughout our meal customers of Niche, who were also customers of Monarch’s, regularly came up to say hello. To my great fortune, a particularly generous customer added to his hello a bottle of 2004 Williams Selyem Westside Road Neighbors Pinot Noir and with that, my Ah Ha wine moment had happened, and a new chapter of my life began. Thanks Jeff L.
Certainly I’d had good wine before, and I definitely preferred it as my libation of choice with a meal. Outside of restaurants, however, I’d been primarily a beer drinker because I could not only wrap my head around beer, I could afford it. I had no idea what Williams Selyem was that night and, if the wallop of flavor were any indicator, I was pretty damn sure it was a winery producing a product well outside my price range. Arriving home and doing a bit of googling, however, I found a bottle at Brown Derby, in Springfield, MO, for $55. While I realize that’s not cheap by any means, it was significantly less than I’d anticipated, and I immediately purchased it and two other bottles of Williams Selyem Zinfandel to tuck away into my cellar (AKA the cool/dark corner of my basement).
The slippery slope of oenophilia had landed and, where once I was a guy that simply knew he liked wine more than beer but felt he couldn’t afford it, I quickly became a guy that reads a dozen wine blogs a day and voraciously clamors for information. Which brings us, windingly, to my poorly written point: One of those posts was written by Stephen Schenkenberg on stlmag.com about his favorite wine books and websites. It’s a good list but, as a newcomer to this world of wine, I thought I’d offer up a newbie’s perspective (which you can read here in it’s shiny-new polite form, or as an stlmag comment in it’s original, several glasses in, grammatically incorrect–but possibly more entertaining–form)
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Tags: blog, books, cellartracker.com, drvino.com, erobertparker.com, Hugh Johnson, Jancis Robinson, Jay Miller, Josh Galliano, Kevin Zraly, Mark Oldman, Niche, Robert Parker, Tom Stevenson, Tyler Colman, vinography.com, websites, Williams Selyem, winespectator.com
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