Another rockin'
wine from the
cellars of
Bonny Doon Vineyards in
California (altho the wine is a
Washingtonian). It's nice on the
tongue - a neat little
lemon-and-
wood sammich with a slightly
bitter zing to it. It's not done in the sweet
Germanic style, so don't expect a
mouthful of
syrup when you drink it. Only
problem is that it's
similar to
Bonny Doon's cheaper
riesling, the
Pacific Rim, so what you're doing is buying a wine for the
packaging.
Yeah, but who cares? The winemaker for Bonny Doon, Randall Grahm, lets Ralph Steadman come over anytime and get totally blotto in exchange for crazy, Jackson-Pollock-veering-off-the-road inkblot label designs, and the name will set any intellectual snob's tongue wagging. And the backside of the bottle? Well, Mr. Grahm gets to exercise that ill-gotten philosophy degree there. Here's what he wrote.
"The taste of a wine does not belong to the objective determinations of the wine, not even if by the wine as an object, we mean the wine as appearance, but to the special constitution of sense in the subject that tastes it."
--I.K.
The 1998 Critique is the most opulent expression of Riesling’s transcendental aesthetic we have produced to date. By means of outer sense, a property of our mind and some very clever marketing, we represent this vintage as an a priori ideality of richness whilst remaining as sharp as a Heidelberg dueling saber with a bracing lime/citrus acidity. Here in the magical sensorium of the apprehending subject one can discern the concrete manifestation of white peach, tropical mango and fragrant suggestion (dear to any Teutonic scoutmaster) of alpine strawberries. Highly disciplined yields and a little tempus in quercus rounds out the idealized form of a wine that defies traditional notions of space and time. Logic would dictate that the cool nights and long days of northerly sun found in Yakima Valley of Eastern Washington (the selfsame climatic regime of Alsace) might well constitute the Platonic ideal for righteous Riesling.
IT IS A CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE THAT YOU BUY THIS WINE.
Couldn't-a said it any better myself, Mr. G.
Y'all post lyrics and poetry? I post wine labels.