Stained Teeth; or, a blog tangential to wine

My Friends. I just don’t want my blog to look dead, although all evidence points in that direction. I have been sort-of feverishly working on a large project that will be unveiled soon and which might change the way the internet works FOREVER.

BY WHICH I MEAN: it is made of wire and twine and resembles a duck made of paper maché.

I have said too much, but I will say more; the project is called: You Will Not Believe. I will tell you when it is made to go alive.

OK BUT REALLY, I was prompted to write this post because my good friend from Hampshire College alerted me to his new foray into the blog writing. It is called Casket, Shroud, and Grave. And by the looks of it, 1. Tom’s writing is as good as it was in college; and 2. He has magically gotten better-looking. AND LET ME SAY THIS: He was already a handsome man.

Check it out as they say when they want you to check things out.

ALSO: I had this wine recently: K Vintner’s Ovide And holy crap was it good. It’s been a pretty terrible winter for my friends and I; a winter we have dubbed Our Winter of What the Fuck (as in, “Oh yes, I remember when that happened, in this Our Winter of What the Fuck“); and without getting into details, this wine was brought out for a pretty special toast.

Everyone needs to have that bottle, the bottle that is brought out for the pretty special toasts. And you can’t buy it in the moment, cause you’re thinking about other stuff; you need to buy that bottle now, that bottle is insurance, that bottle is your IRA - buy it now.

This has recently come to my attention:

Cooking With Booze. The author, Mr. George Harvey Bone writes well and offers many recipes through his website, including many with wine. And might I suggest you use this method while following the recipes: “One for recipe, one for me.”

As for the spirit of the thing, an example from the Introduction (to the original edition):

“My grandfather on my father’s side was also a disciple of the finer things. After an unfortunate incident in the Sudan, when his regiment lost an entire Christmas’ beer supply to a freak sandstorm, he swore never to go without again, and was heard to remark on his 90th birthday that he would consider putting more tonic than gin into his daily G&T, but the suggestion was unlikely to meet with much support.”

Huzzah.

I have mentioned Jessica Hagy’s blog Inedexed before, but she posted one yesterday that actually made my heart hurt it was so perfect and blow your mind smart. This is for anyone with a child in the house; or anyone who read Discipline and Punish in the college, for which reference I apologize.

Note to helicopters:: “

“

Who is this person that she is so brilliant?

(Via indexed.)

NOTE: This is a reprint of an article I wrote for the venerable Local Buzz - an excellent newspaper that is finally ridding itself of its corporeal form and ascending to internet nirvana. Good luck Buzz.

Here’s the thing: boxes might be the most sensible way to serve wine. How many of you have that bottle of Italian red wine that you opened five days ago sitting next to your toaster? Unlike that bottle, box wine (with some notable exceptions) will not go bad. It’s like space wine, packaged in a collapsing plastic bag that keeps out the air. No, it is not necessarily romantic, but then neither is sitting in your sweats watching American Idol. WHICH IS TO SAY: pair like with like.

And unlike wine bottle labels, box wine design begs to look modern and almost cheap. There might be a way to class up a cardboard box holding a plastic bag of wine, but I don’t really see the need. Here are four examples that W.A.G. and I recently opened (or tapped) with friends.

WINE BLOCK
Producer: Wine Block
Region: Santa Rosa, CA
Grape: Cabernet Sauvignon

The label: You can almost hear the marketing team bouncing ideas around for this one: “Hey guys, what’s another word for Box?” The nifty typography, the gauzy squares of color, the perfect cube shape – this is as close to conceptual box wine as you can get. It sort of validates one’s hipness, this does, combining cheap irony with the obvious I-went-to-art-school-and-own-an-Apple-laptop graphic design. AND: as a friend pointed out while drinking the Block, when finished, this doubles nicely as a Kleenex box.

This box is an example of: the hipster box wine. It actually might be the sole example of this particular style.

Wine/Box Connection Rating: 8 out of 10 – my goodness, if a wine can actually taste like a cube, this one is it.

FRENCH RABBIT:
Producer: René Clément
Region: France – Vin de Pays d’Oc
Grapes: Pinot Noir

The label: Who cares about the rabbit? Look at that shape! It’s a hexagon! Even though one friend commented that this box looked almost exactly like an energy/malt liquor beverage currently on the market, I think this box evokes something traditional and European enough to actually be classy. It manages to be box wine without referencing what your parents drank in the 70s; and that is huge.

This label is an example of: the Classy box; or, this-is-how-we-buy-wine-in-Italy-you-stuffy-Americans box

Wine/Box Connection Rating: 7 out of 10 – The orange is distracting, but other than that, this light, acidic wine somehow made the packaging make even more sense.

THREE THIEVES BANDIT
Producer: Rebel Wine
Region: Grapes for CA, but boxed up in OR
Grape: Merlot

The label: Oh bandit. Maybe other countries package wine this way, but the resemblance to either soymilk or a Minute Maid juice box just throws me off. (That being said: how rad would it be if this wine came with a plastic bendy straw glued to the back? OR OHMIGOSH EVEN BETTER: If it actually came as a six-pack of individual serving boxes, each with a straw glued to the back! Okay. I’m going to write them. That’s a fabulous idea.) Also, it looks as if the graphic designer was working in Print Shop in 1991.

This label is an example of: I don’t know. This is just a train wreck. And one thing you can’t see, but which is written on the side and which is even worse than it sounds: a fake personal ad written from the perspective of the wine.

Wine/Box Connection Rating: 8 out of 10 – wine also train wreck. (One friend commented on its ‘gaggy finish’).

CORBETT CANYON
Producer: Corbett Canyon
Region: Ripon, CA
Grapes: The Zinfandel grape subjected to some shadowy wine-making ritual

The label: From the pink color to the picture of a bottle on the side, this is the platonic ideal of box wine. This is what you’re parents drank in the 70s, god bless ‘em. Though I like really nothing about this box, or perhaps because I like nothing about it, I love it wholeheartedly. This box contains the equivalent of four bottles of wine – four bottles – and it cost $9. Up near the top, it reads in wavy text: “Enjoy a Glass a Day” as if it were an advertisement for tomato juice. And though you can’t see it in this picture, you should go buy this box of wine just to see the small photo of the winemaker on the side – mustachioed, smirking, shirt unbuttoned. It fits with the 70s swinging thing so well you wonder if ol’ Corbett Canyon is the work of geniuses.

This label is an example of: The Classic Box – blurry photos of wine bottles, bad pink wine, no indication of irony.

Wine/Label Connection Meter: 10 out of 10 – Perfect! Perfect! Oh, this stuff is horrible: horrible like a fox.

Some folks have written me recently asking to hear the second part of my Boston Wine Expo story, which second part I promised in this story on McSweeney’s.

NOW: while I will not go so far as to apologize for this story, I will say this - please pretend that I am like that college kid who really, really wants to impress you with how much they know about bell hooks or david foster wallace or something.

WHICH IS TO SAY:

Hello.

I have not posted anything in quite some time. And if you translate that time into blog time, I have not posted anything since before your grandparent’s grandparents were learning their first words and inventing steam power.

THIS IS BECAUSE: I am on hiatus.

AND THAT IS BECAUSE: I am currently working on some other projects that require my time and energy, into which projects I will be rolling Stained Teeth in the first few months of 2008. The truth is that while I enjoy writing about wine periodically, I enjoy doing other things as well, and I want to integrate them into one gigantic uber site of which Stained Teeth will only be a small part.

AND SO: I am working on designs for this new site. I will keep you posted. I may post the odd wine adventure in between now and then. BUT: I am not promising anything.

I am still writing monthly on mcsweeneys.net. And I am still showering at least twice a week.

I have stopped shaving.

Thank you, and Persevere.

LATER THERE WILL BE DIAGRAMS, BUT FIRST THERE ARE WORDS:

His name is Justin and I have known him since elementary school. He lives in Chicago now. I am in Chicago. The only other time I have been to Chicago, oddly, was to visit him, visit Justin, but that is just a coincidence. He didn’t live there then. He was there performing in a play, Lost in Yonkers by Neil Simon. A couple years later, we would perform that play together in high school in Houston.

Justin lives in Chicago and I am visiting, here on a business trip, my first ever business trip. I am attending the Seed Conference, about which there is much to say, but to which I will limit myself three hyperlinks: Jim Coudal, Carlos Seguro, and Jason Fried.

Justin takes me to a place called Webster’s Wine Bar. It is neat and looks out over smokestacks, everything outside tinted the yellow of highway lights. The music surprises me, delights me. It is not jazz. When you find a wine bar not playing jazz, you hold that wine bar close and you love it and you never let it go. This wine bar is playing Destroyer, and to them I say this: you had me at destroy.

We both order flights of wine, and when they arrive, the server lays out a placemat with four circles on it, one circle for each of the wines. It is a simple diagram, and while it could be way more geeky (and thus way more cool), it is way better than the wine menus I’ve received at other wine bars, menus with jack-ass descriptions.

Here is my theory, and Justin is a good test case. And it isn’t really my theory - it is one of the classic American stories, as classic as the cowboy in the white hat; as the soldier reading the love letter; as the teenager dancing. The theory/classic story is this: the people who were the most cool in high school never adapt to be cool beyond high school, while those who were the most geeky hit their cool stride as they near 30. (Nerds kind of remain nerds, though often become wealthy; and dorks retain their subservient position, always trying just a little too hard to be cool.) This is the theory and it can be applied to most American public schools. (Click on the image below for a larger, more readable view.)

Justin and I were geeks, though I narrowly escaped being a dork, the result of my early career as a cool kid, a career from which I was fired in the ninth grade. Justin was a child actor, knew how to work computers, had access to the internet before I think it really existed, directed movies before iMovie made every kid in the world a friggin’ auteur (about which, you should see the stuff my stepson and his friends make - it is ridiculous and I want to stuff him inside a trashcan for making it). Justin was the kid who received ridiculing nicknames and adopted them with pride. IN PARTICULAR: we called him Smokin’ J.

AND NOW: Justin writes television pilots, Justin runs a production company, Justin races bicycles, Justin might move to LA, Justin maintains a blog, Justin feels excitement. For Justin and for geeks, life is all about potential simply because life is all about really liking stuff.

ALL OF WHICH IS TO SAY:

P.S. While I love diagrams and use them to explain things to myself all the time, there is no way to deny the inspiration these diagrams take from Jessica Hagy at the amazing and maddeningly good Indexed. A true diagram lover’s dream.

This is to tell you that if you would please, I would like it, thank you, if you read this thing, my newest column at Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

Savvy readers will notice that it is a more in depth version of an earlier post in this very weblog.

And if this is your very first time here, because you read the Stained Teeth column on mcsweeneys.net, and thought, “Hey, as long as I’m on the internet, I may as well navigate my browser to this weblog,” may I suggest you start off by reading the right column “Here’s How it Works”, and then scroll the page looking for the longest title. Why the longest? BECAUSE IT WILL GIVE YOU SOMETHING TO DO.

Thank you.

While this has nothing to do directly with wine, I promise you that it goes well with just about all wine.

This is a trailer for a film our friends at FOUND Magazine have been working on with a gentleman by the name of David Meiklejohn. Davy and David make a great team apparently, because the trailer is kind of incredible. It has cameos, the trailer does, by Eli Horowitz of McSweeney’s as well as Ira Glass.

ENJOY, and pass it along:

AND: a big thank you to Alex Steed over at Trace Magazine for bringing this to the attention of Stained Teeth.

I HAVE A RULE, AND THE RULE IS THIS: if the place you are at serves wine by the carafe, then that is how you must order it. If you are lucky, they will serve it by the half-carafe, but if a full carafe is all you can get, you got to commit and order the whole bazooka.

The Wok, as it turns out, serves wine by the half carafe.

WHICH IS GOOD BECAUSE: on the back of the menu there is a cocktail list, the reading of which list is like entering an exotic candy store. There are so many drinks, the bulk of which you maybe have heard of but never actually tried. The Harvey Wallbanger, the Zombie, the Lime Rickey, the Salty Dog; and some you have never heard of such as: My Fair Lady. The list also distinguishes between a Martini and a Martini (Dry). The parenthetical dryness will cost you an extra quarter, but even with the extra quarter it still comes in at under $3. I ordered a gin and tonic here once; there might have been tonic in the restaurant at one point, but none of it made it into my drink. The Wok is one of those few restaurants that will make you a drink stronger than you make at home.

Wine Allergic Girlfriend and I are here with Jamie, owner of our neighborhood bar The Rendezvous, and Anja, Jamie’s bride-to-be and my arch-nemesis. Arch-nemesis Anja designs nice things which you may like, but which are really just missiles she lobs my way in our ongoing graphic design war.

AND LET ME SAY THIS: she is winning.

Drinks are ordered, food is discussed. Arch-Nemesis orders a Ward Eight, one of those drinks you have never heard of. It must not be ordered often, because even the server asks what’s in it. “I’m not sure, it’s just on the menu.” I get a carafe of ‘Burgundy’. There is the usual chinese restaurant multi-lateral food discussion and treaty: “What are you getting?” “Well, that depends on what you’re getting?” “Are we sharing?” “We probably don’t need to each order a seperate dish…” “Are you going to share?” “I’m ordering meat, will you get a vegetable?”. Drinks are brought and drunk and reordered. We converse, get stories about the Rendezvous. At one point, Zane, W.A.G.’s son calls to ask if a boy we’ve never met can sleep over. He is always coming up with these trick questions for us.

“Sarah (i.e. Wine Allergic Girlfiend, Ed.), you were an only child too, right?” Jamie asks after W.A.G. and I make a random guess and decide that yes the boy can sleep over.

“Yeah.”

“Did you ever want Zane to have siblings?”

And so: a conversation about siblings. Arch-Nemesis has a sister, I have a brother and a sister, Jamie and W.A.G. are both only children. Both Arch-Nemesis and I agree that our siblings somehow fill out our missing parts, or fill in the parts we don’t have. Arch-Nemesis’s sister was a bookworm; Arch-Nemesis didn’t really care about school growing up. Arch-Nemesis cares about design and aesthetics; her sister’s taste is more bland. And yet, because they are our siblings, these other “parts we don’t have” are really integral to us.

And only children? What about only children?

“Yeah, we’re not so messed up like that.” This from Jamie.

AND YOU: crazy Chinese restaurant cocktail list stories? The parts of you that are really not yours, but your siblings? Only-child reflections? GO.