The full text of my review is available for free (PDF; begins on p. 209). I also encourage you to subscribe to the JWE to get the full text of all other JWE articles.

Here’s an excerpt from my piece:

…Even if the exaggerated style of winemaking championed by the critic Robert M. Parker, Jr., has fallen out of fashion amongst wine geeks these days, there are a hundred legacies that will endure for generations beyond the particulars of the man’s palate: his points.

Robert Parker was not the first wine critic to employ a 100-point scale, but it was he that etched the paradigm of attaching numbers to wine into the collective consciousness of the gustatory media. Parker’s leading competitors in America—Stephen Tanzer, Wine Spectator, Wine & Spirits, Wine Enthusiast—all currently use 100-point rating scales. Even the divergent foreign competition now gravitates toward other functionally numerical forms of secondary-school-test-mark mimicry: letter grades from A to F, points out of 10 or 20, glasses out of three, stars out of five.

If attaching numbers to wine turns out to be Parker’s main legacy, it’s a major one. A few decades ago, the wine writer’s primary role was merely to describe wines. But the purpose of the wine writer after Parker is to quantify their quality. The few prominent modern wine critics whose reviews don’t revolve around numerical ratings are in the minority, and they tend to be interpreted by some observers as an anti-Parker faction—even when they have no intention to be. You know that a framework has become canonical when anything in the field that doesn’t adopt it is understood as an attempt to refute it.

Canonization can have a stifling effect on the developing talent in the enterprise of writing. The literary scholar Harold Bloom has suggested that the canon can be a paralyzing force in the lives of up-and-coming poets, who struggle with the task of differentiating themselves from the same voices that inspired them to pursue poetry. Read too much, in other words, and you might convince yourself that there’s nothing new to write. The novelist Benjamin Kunkel, asked by London’s Observer whether he was influenced by the more famous novelist Dave Eggers, expressed that tension in a way that will be familiar to many writers: “Everyone I know has read him, but I don’t read very much contemporary fiction. I wanted very much to create my own sound, and I didn’t want to feel that I was either running to meet him or deliberately running away from him.”

Not reading Eggers is a choice that any fiction writer can make. But not reading Parker is hardly an option for the modern wine writer: the shelves of most upmarket wine stores are strewn with past and present Wine Advocate shelf-talkers, which function like permanent retrospective installations of Parker’s work. So we have no choice but to engage, and in so doing, we often divide: into those who run to meet Parker, perhaps with deference to Jacques Chirac and decades’ worth of popular wisdom from industry veterans; and the increasing numbers that run away from him, perhaps with complaints of global convergence on a big, oaky, high-alcohol style of winemaking, the marginalization of terroir, and maybe just a tinge of jealousy toward the man who made millions tasting wine.

If contemporary critics are split on the merits of Parker’s exaggerated palate, though, their revealed behavior of replication shows there to be supermajority support for his points methodology. Parker points were first imagined, in the spirit of Ralph Nader, as the guerilla ammunition for the consumers camping out in the vineyards, their last line of defense against wine bullshit. The funny thing is that the vision of independence from producers that originally inspired Wine Advocate seems to have been completely lost on the modern copycat magazines, many of which display full-page ads from the same producers whose wines are rated. Some even solicit application fees to be considered for wine awards. (Ashenfelter et al., 2010). Decanter, for instance, charges up to £103.70 or US$156 per bottle.

Meanwhile, to his great credit, Parker has more or less maintained his independence. He still doesn’t accept ads from wineries, and he still makes his money by selling subscriptions and books. Although, inexplicably, he doesn’t always taste blind—and although he was recently embarrassed by a lavish junket bestowed by the Argentine wine industry lobby (later documented by wine writer Tyler Colman) upon his right-hand man, Jay Miller—Parker’s core principles appear to be almost as unique in the industry as they were when first introduced 30 years ago.

Why, then, has he left behind his points system in his newest book and first foray into the world of inexpensive wine authorship, Parker’s Wine Bargains, a 512-page tome whose mission is to reveal “the world’s best wine values under $25”?…

[skipping forward to later in the review...]

“Three-quarters of wine produced in Provence is rosé, so that chapter, written by David Schildknecht, might seem a natural place to start. But Provençal rosé is dismissed wholesale by Schildknecht as an “ocean of pink plonk,” whose “existence” is blamed largely on the “uncritical comportment” of the “tourists who flock there” (although the “natives” share some blame as well). As a result, only the “small upper echelon” of rosés is “interesting.” How ignorant, those vacationers on the seaside who gaze out at the waves and simply enjoy the refreshing local wine with their grilled seafood instead of complaining about how uninteresting it is!

Of the more than 1,000 French wines under $25 recommended in the book, just seven are rosés from Provence, and even these seem chosen for their un-rosé-like qualities: one displays a “white-wine-like personality”; one has “carnal undertones…impressively concentrated”; another is “meaty.” One wonders whether Schildknecht has sworn off bread and salad as “plonk,” too, and eats only boar and venison, even at the beach. It would behoove Parker to assign Provence to a critic who actually enjoys the region’s archetypal style: not “carnal” rosé, but rather crisp, thirst-quenching, rosé-like rosé, the savior of many a summer afternoon for the fishermen of Marseille, for the billionaires of Antibes, for the vacationing winemakers of Bordeaux and Burgundy. To everything, there is a season…

…[In the South Africa chapter,] Schildknecht surpasses [Mark] Squires’ chapter-long specific-adjective count in a single review, his fourth of the chapter, which describes Backsberg’s Klein Babylons Toren as having a “rich, polished, barrel-enhanced mélange of tobacco, sealing wax, plum, blackberry, humus, iodine, underbrush, and sweetly floral notes, all suggesting a Bordeaux wine that would cost at least three times its price.” Ah yes, that unmistakable sealing wax-underbrush-iodine profile of Bordeaux costing at least $63. Maybe that’s what those ignorant tourists in Provence should be yearning for.

By the end of Schildknecht’s eighth South Africa review—we’re still only on the second page of the chapter—he has also mentioned quince, wet wool, lime zest, mulberries, sage, fresh green beans, apple, nuts, lemon, rose hip, more flowers, saddle leather, licorice, “smoky black tea,” vanilla, “lightly cooked blackberry and blueberry,” mint (twice), tobacco (twice), black pepper, sap, “dried black currants,” tar, (just plain) tea, baking spices, black olives, acacia, peach, cress, and white pepper. Later in the chapter, he identifies such pomposities as “salted grapefruit,” grapefruit rind, winter pear, “restrained gooseberry,” milk chocolate, roasted red peppers, “smoky Latakia tobacco,” beef jerky, soy, baked apple, tangerine zest, “salt-tinged nuts and grains,” and “tomato foliage.”

If the small size, friendly cover, and omission of vintages and point scores in Parker’s Wine Bargains invites in a new audience of everyday wine drinkers, then adjectives like that cast them right back out again. This spotty but persistent out-of-touchness with the mainstream audience is the central tension of Parker’s Wine Bargains. Consider, for instance, how little attention is paid to dry sparkling wine, a category much sought out by American consumers, whether as a dinner-party apéritif or for one of the “special occasions” mentioned on the book’s back cover. The past few years have seen an explosion of widely available méthode traditionelle wines under $25 from Spain, California, and Washington State. Yet of the 3,000 bottles listed in Parker’ s Wine Bargains, only 19 (0.6%) are dry sparkling wines, of which only three are Spanish Cavas and none are American…

…[B]ut the biggest flaw in Parker’s Wine Bargains lies not in its poor organization or arbitrary adjectives, but rather in the fact that many of the wines reviewed in the book are unavailable in the marketplace. It’s not clear whether or not there’s a production or breadth-of-distribution minimum for inclusion—none is mentioned in the introduction—but a good portion of the recommendations turn out to be practically useless, even to the savviest of Internet-ordering readers. Take, for instance, the listing of Veldenzer Grafschafter-Sonnenberg feinherb, a Riesling from a Mosel producer named Günther Steinmetz. If this wine is currently available for sale at any store in the United States, this reader, at least, was unable to locate it after an exhaustive search, which included a lot of time on Google and an inquiry with Mosel Wine Merchant, Steinmetz’s importer, who told me that 2007 was its last imported vintage, of which only 21 cases were distributed, all of them in Oregon and Washington State.

Some of the 100-point cult wines in Parker’s Wine Buyer’s Guide No. 7 may be famously elusive, but if wines recommended in Parker’s Wine Bargains, whose stated mission is to recommend bargain wines for “everyday drinking,” are impossible to find, even in America’s largest cities, it brings the book’s central function into question. What is Parker’s purpose, exactly?

Certainly his longstanding success does not derive from his ability to catalog the current inventory of your local supermarket, nor does it derive his ability to pick out blackberry or tobacco from a wine’s bouquet. It does not derive from the consistency of his observations, from his stated purpose of sorting out the good wine from the bad, or from any other of kind consumer advocacy. It comes, rather, from Parker’s talent for escapism, from his confident use of superlatives to capture the sensory imagination.

For most readers, flipping through an issue of Wine Advocate and reading about 100-point wines is like flipping through an issue of Motor Trend and looking at pictures of a Lamborghini: it’s an act somewhere between aspiration and entertainment. You’re not really considering whether the Diablo’s 5992 cc of displacement would be sufficient to get you where you’re going quickly and comfortably. You’re not even looking to buy a car. You’re reading the magazine because imagining yourself behind the wheel of a Lamborghini recreates the seventh-grade psyche of perfect possibility that is still buried somewhere in your weary folds of cortical memory.

Teenagers feel immortal, people always say. They think the finish really lasts forever.

It is the mix of idolatry and attainability that make Parker’s prose so compelling: these wines that win 100 points are described as Platonic forms, yet they’re also physical objects with real molecular structures; they’re liquids that can, at least in theory, come into contact with your mouth. Your local wine store doesn’t have the object of worship, and you couldn’t afford it anyway, but that’s hardly the point. It’s the ontology that matters: the idea that some wines really do win 100, that it is concretely possible to taste perfection, is irresistible. The very thing that invalidates Parker’s writing as nonfiction is what redeems it as fiction: his topic isn’t wine. It’s human contact with the divine.

Many of the people within the wine world that have become increasingly disgusted with so-called “Parkerization”—the tinkering with a style of winemaking to bring out more fruit, more oak, and more alcohol in hopes of improving a Parker score—would paint the celebrated critic as a power-hungry dictator with designs on reshaping the wine world just to please his palate and fortify his wealth. But to adopt that view is to misunderstand the fundamental human mechanics of Parker’s vast appeal. Winemakers may feel obliged to please him, but consumers are under no obligation to follow him. If you want to understand
Parker, look in the mirror.

Robert Parker is no dictator. He is a storyteller. The magnetism of his prose is that of J.K. Rowling’s, too: you’re first presented with a set of familiar facts and situations, and then, slowly, you’re seduced into suspending reason and believing in the perfectly impossible. Escape into a Parker review, and for a few sentences, there you are, back in junior high, the great critic’s palate—and yours, too—cured of its nagging mortality. In this counterfactual place, there is no perceptual bias, just perception. There is no confidence interval, just confidence. Parker’s 100-point wine is Gatsby’s green light, the orgiastic ghost of taste’s future, the tongue a sudden lattice of infinite resolution, the nose a sudden instrument of preternatural whiff.

Take away the Parker points—a slight disturbance that might at some point have seemed merely cosmetic to the book’s editors, like a font change—and that alternate reality suddenly slips away, like the memory of a dream in the seconds after you awaken. All that’s left in the sober morning light is an iterating network of fruit-adjective configurations in black and red type violating 512 sheets of white paper.

It’s not easy to be a wine writer after Parker. This fact, even Parker must face.

The U.S. has less than 5% of the world’s population, yet we have a quarter of the world’s prisoners. Since the declaration of the “War on Drugs” in the 1970s, the U.S. prison population has more than quadrupled. More than 1.5 million Americans are now arrested each year for nonviolent drug offenses, and more than 500,000 of them are imprisoned.

To date, the War on Drugs has killed more than 30,000 Mexicans, made our borders less safe, ruined the lives of millions of American families, wasted hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money, and created the world’s largest prison population. The marijuana prohibition alone costs (by one estimate) more than $40 billion per year—yet it hasn’t achieved its stated goals of reducing marijuana use. Instead, it has created a black market that has turned the pot trade into a lucrative, tax-free industry dominated by organized crime (especially in Mexico, where half the trade is in marijuana) and plagued by the dangers of impure, unregulated drugs. And it stuffs our crowded, enormously expensive prisons with nonviolent pot offenders that don’t belong there.

Since 1990, the U.S. has arrested and prosecuted more than 10 million people, disproportionately African-American, for smoking pot in private—something that brings happiness to many that use it, and causes no harm to those that do not. Yes, it is possible to smoke too much pot, and there can be adverse health consequences of doing so. But those consequences are less than what can result from using too much alcohol, tobacco, junk food, or many over-the-counter medications. Smoking pot is a personal choice that more than four in 10 Americans have made, including the past three presidents, and while it may be a public health issue of interest, it is not a crime against society or against another citizen.

Throwing nonviolent drug offenders in prison puts them in a place where they often can’t easily get treatment for addiction. It crowds out many murderers, rapists, and thieves who do deserve to be there. It numbs society to the seriousness of violence by implying that drug use is just as bad. It undermines imprisonment’s effectiveness as a deterrent to violent crime by cheapening the punishment, turning it into something commonplace. And it blurs the distinctions between moral innocence and moral culpability.

The effects of imprisonment on individuals are far-reaching. Taking people out of society and the workforce ruins not just their own lives, but also the lives of the people that care for them, the people for whom they care, the people whose livelihoods depend on their own. When we use the state’s power of violence to break apart families, to separate husbands from wives, sons from daughters, lovers from lovers, friends from friends, when we replace nature’s most fundamental bonds with gun towers and concrete, we create wounds that take far longer to heal than the inmates’ sentences. The state that uses its power of violence to wound citizens that do not wound others, the state that takes children from their parents when neither poses a threat to the other or to society, has breached its social contract with those that have honored it. The state that harms the harmless is a failed state.

Prop 19 is not a perfect law, and it doesn’t have to be. If it passes, it will quickly change and evolve. What really matters is the message that passing Prop 19 will send: that we need to have a new conversation about drug policy in America. Passing Prop 19 will send our lawmakers, the Obama administration, and the rest of the world the message that American taxpayers are sick of paying tens of billions of dollars every year to throw nonviolent pot smokers in prison, sick of subsidizing criminal gangs by rewarding their activities with a black-market premium, and sick of treating drug addicts—the sick, the tired, the poor, huddled masses, the people who need society’s help most—with violence instead of compassion. It will tell them that we demand an end to the failed War on Drugs, an end to the murders in Mexico, an end to the most expensive waste of law enforcement resources in human history, and a new approach to drug policy and in America and the rest of the world.

The Sun article, which was sent my way by the illustrious wine-counterfeiting scholar/economist Günter Schamel (whose work I’ve previously discussed here), has the amusing title “You Plonkers” and an equally amusing photo of a nonplussed McGowan.

The most unusual thing about this story is that while has been much discussion of counterfeit wine in the high-end rare and fine wine market—Jefferson bottles and first-growth Bordeaux and such—there hasn’t been nearly as much talk about counterfeiting in the low-to-midrange wine market.

In that market, the trick might be a lot easier to get away with, for at least three reasons: first of all, evidence from psychology and neuroscience indicates that the end consumers of inexpensive or midpriced wines aren’t probably paying as much attention to the wine’s sensory qualities as they would if it were expensive. Second of all, consumers’ quality expectations are clearly lower when they pay less, so they’re less likely to complain even if the wine doesn’t meet those expectations. Third, and perhaps most importantly, there’s little incentive for any individual to sue for fraud. Unlike, say, wine collector Bill Koch, who alleges millions of dollars in counterfeit damages related to his collection alone—and thus has incentive to sue on his own behalf—even the theoretical smattering of consumers that are more or less certain the wine is counterfeit probably can’t be bothered to raise a big stink over a potential refund (barring punitive damages) of £5 per bottle.

This last phenomenon is the same sort of collective action dilemma that mobile phone companies, credit-card companies, and the like have been trading on for years: they upcharge customers a few cents here and there—rounding the length of a dropped call up to the nearest minute, for instance, or playing with the spread on exchange rates on foreign transactions—but it’s below the radar screen of anyone but the most obsessively litigious or penny-pinching customer. It adds up to a lot of money for the company, but not enough is taken from any individual to incite a lawsuit. It’s thus a highly effective form of fraud.

When there are enough instances of such a scam, plaintiff firms sometimes come after the perpetrators with class-action suits, because contingency fees allow the firms to collect a percentage of the entire settlement even when the payout to any individual member of the class is small. The amalgamated damages then function as incentives for the plaintiff firms that look more like Koch’s and less like McGowan’s, even as many of the plaintiffs themselves probably don’t even go to the trouble to deposit their miniscule winnings (have you ever received one of those 40-cent settlement checks in the mail?).

It might seem, then, that the optimal opportunity for fraud is where (1) the damages to each individual are relatively low; (2) the number of instances is fewer than would make the case worth a plaintiff firm’s time; and yet (3) the business is large enough to make good money for the counterfeiter.

If low-end wine counterfeiting fits into this magical middle ground, then it’s here, perhaps, that sensationalist tabloids like the Sun can serve serve a critical role in the information marketplace and substitute for the plaintiff firm in solving this collective action problem. The tabloid punishes the supermarket chain with a public shaming while also rewarding the whistleblower with fifteen minutes of fame, which may not be worth millions, but whose cocktail-party value, plus perhaps a few pounds for the story, creates enough incentive for a consumer somewhere to tell all. If the story catches on, the extra ad impressions justify the tabloid’s effort. And all of this happens at little cost compared with that of preparing a fraud suit.

Unless, that is, you figure in the Sun’s liability risk if the facts turn out not to be true. This can be a serious matter in Britain, whose libel laws are so friendly to plaintiffs that the jurisdiction is said to attract so-called “libel tourists” from other countries. At least in Britain, then, this sort of middle-ground fraud might have to be particularly brazen and verifiable to be reported in a tabloid. (This one was probably reviewed by the Sun’s legal staff before publication and certified as such, in keeping with the age-old adage that the lawyers get paid no matter what.)

On its face, the Jadot fraud does look unusually brazen, from the apparently not-very-believable label to the fact that, according to McGowan, the wine tasted like Liebfraumilch—an off-dry German wine—when it was supposed to be white Burgundy. Even wine novices are pretty good at differentiating sugar levels, and passing off a sweet wine as dry—if that is indeed what happened here—would be an unusually challenging feat to attempt. But in the world of wine counterfeiting these days, maybe brazenness is no drawback, and the challenge is the game.

We could answer merely that under blind tasting conditions, the panel didn’t like this beer, or that the beer was boring or flawed. But that would be the boring, flawed answer. All the fun lies in the more substantive defense of each of these ratings and the dialogue that ensues—a dialogue that could well lead to new blind tastings and have a material effect on future editions. What exactly should we be searching for in an ideal European pale lager? Supremely refreshing bitterness, or balanced hop character and greater complexity? (Seamus and I debated this one a lot; the answer, I think, might be connected to how many beers you plan to drink.) That’s why, as Seamus has said, we also really hope you look past the ratings and read the text of the reviews.

It is the more interesting conversation about what constitutes a “good” or “bad” beer, about what it even is to rate beer, and ultimately about the basic philosophical problem of intersubjectivity—that we’re hoping to stimulate. That’s also part of why we chose not just to review the cult beers, but also the everyday beers that are most available around the country. We wanted parts of the book to be familiar to anyone who had ever tasted beer; we wanted to include benchmarks, points of reference, for everyone.

I was happy to see this review of The Beer Trials by Rob Rutledge discuss this engagement with mainstream beers. Rutledge writes: “along with Chimay Blue, they actually DO rate Natural Light! And Bud Light, for that matter, and MGD, and Busch, and every other cheap beer under the sun.” We wanted to see how these beers would hold up in blind tastings. We wanted to praise the ones like Steel Reserve, which outperformed expectations, while calling out the beers like Corona and Heineken, whose premium positioning (compared with entry-level domestic lagers) isn’t supported by much going on in the bottle.

Above all, to start a broad conversation about beer in America while ignoring the country’s most popular beers would be to lose sight of the conversation’s purpose.

I’m looking forward to reading Seamus for the rest of the week at the Powell’s blog. In the meantime, here’s a previously posted preview of the book (including all beer ratings), which is now in stock at, appropriately enough, Powells.com (Portland indy pride!) along with Amazon.

The book, due out on April 15 from Fearless Critic Media (distributed by Workman Publishing), rates and reviews 250 of the world’s most prominent beers (craft brews, macro-lagers, and everything in between), based on blind tastings by a panel of brewers and experts in the beer mecca of Portland, Oregon—Seamus’ hometown. We also include a broad and (hopefully) accessible reference guide to the world’s major beer styles, flavors, and regions.

The collaboration was, I must admit, a bit lopsided: Seamus (who is a brewer and one of the world’s 96 Certified Cicerones) did the lion’s share of the work. I contributed the “Trials” concept (building on the ideas set forth in The Wine Trials) and co-wrote the first few chapters, which discuss the effects of behavioral marketing, perceptual bias, and the placebo effect on the beer industry.

In Portland, Seamus and I also conducted a beer experiment together in which we tested people’s ability (or, um, lack thereof) to discriminate between major European brands of mass-market lager beer. Johan Almenberg and Anna Dreber, the Swedish economists with whom we collaborated on much of the experimental research behind The Wine Trials, helped us analyze the data.

Seamus, along with his partner (and my old high school friend) Laurel Hoyt, assembled an excellent blind-tasting panel of brewers and beer experts in Portland. Seamus and Laurel tirelessly ran the blind tastings, procuring beer samples from all over the world, storing them in climate-controlled conditions, and running up to five tastings per week for months on end—all the while keeping the tasting panel happy and well-fed.

Seamus also crafted the reference guide to styles, flavors, and region, which more or less boils his brain’s enormous body of esoteric beer knowledge down to what’s most useful to readers and beer drinkers. The project was a blast, and I hope the book turns out to be helpful both to beer enthusiasts and to everyday beer drinkers.

This sneak preview PDF includes a press release about The Beer Trials; the book’s full preface; the book’s full beer ratings list; and 11 sample beer reviews.

The Beer Trials hits stores nationwide in the third week of April. It can be ordered online from Amazon.com.

For media requests, please contact Fearless Critic Media.

People have sometimes (often, maybe) misinterpreted The Wine Trials (and The Wine Trials 2010) as making the claim that no expensive wines are worth the money, or that cheap wine is generally “better” than expensive wine. In fact, I make neither one of those claims in the book.

Rather, my basic points are these:

(1) Evidence has shown that most everyday wine drinkers (not wine professionals) don’t prefer more expensive wines to cheaper wines in blind tastings. This is separate from the question of whether the properties of expensive wines are aesthetically superior in the minds of experts.

(2) Many (but certainly not all) expensive wines, such as the luxury brands from LVMH—which are advertised much like the group’s TAG Heuer watches, De Beers diamonds, Guerlain perfume, or Louis Vuitton handbags—are overpriced because such a large portion of their cost base is spent on marketing. This doesn’t just go for superpremium wines like LVMH’s Château d’Yquem, Krug, and Dom Pérignon; it also goes for brands like Cloudy Bay, a straightforward New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc whose price—without any apparent change in the production method—rose from about $15 per bottle to about $30 per bottle after LVMH acquired the brand in 2003 and began marketing Cloudy Bay as a luxury product.  To me, when the consumer dollar is going more toward advertising than toward materials or production, it’s a paradigm case of overpricing. It bothers me that the mainstream wine media doesn’t take brands to task for this.

(3) There are also wines that are overpriced for reasons other than marketing—reasons like an irrational premium Bordeaux bubble that’s being inflated by indiscriminate demand from rich, unsophisticated consumers in emerging markets like China and Russia. Even if Pétrus spends no money on marketing, $5,000 is an irrational price for a bottle, and this is a demand-side phenomenon.

(4) Then there are the producers who model themselves after Pétrus in an effort to capitalize on that same demand-side phenomenon. These producers make “high-end” wine (with the characteristics typically associated with the 95-and-higher-point wines in wine magazines, e.g. aging in new French oak, high alcohol, extreme concentration) and price it as such. Here, there aren’t necessarily the extreme marketing expenditures of LVMH; rather, there’s simply a price-signalling play: the hope that positioning the product at the top end of the market will speak for itself, and that consumers in search of a luxury good will buy into that notion. In this case, the consumer dollar isn’t paying for lots of advertising and marketing—it’s just sustaining unconscionably high profit margins for the producer.

What situations (2), (3), and (4) have in common is that the cost of production of each of these premium wines is virtually unrelated to the street price.

One might divide wine pricing theory into two rough schools of thought. There is the camp that believes wine should be priced from a supply-side/cost-plus perspective–you take the cost of production of the wine, you add reasonable costs and a modest profit for the producer, you factor in markups for distribution and retail, and you arrive at more or less what the wine should cost. The other camp believes that wine should be priced from a demand-side perspective–that a wine is worth whatever the market is willing to pay for it.

The reason I’m in the first camp, and not the second, is that I don’t subscribe to the neoclassical model of consumer rationality upon which the demand-side pricing theory is built, a counterfactual universe of stingily hypersensitive, quality-sniffing consumers. My sense is that, especially when it comes to hazy markets like wine, real human beings—within certain constraints—generally anchor themselves to market prices that are imposed upon them, and generally pay for things what they’re told those things are worth.

One attempt to justify superpremium wines with modest costs of production is an opportunity-cost-of-land argument—that wine in the Champagne appellation is so expensive that the opportunity cost of that land can justify higher prices. I’m unsympathetic to that argument, because real estate prices track market wine prices, so the price of land is not an independent factor.

So when are premium prices justified in my camp?

When the cost of production is high. The fact that Matthews and Briand mention 1er Cru Burgundy and German whites as examples of expensive wines worth the money suggests that they might be in my camp too, because these are particular examples of wine regions in which grapes are often harvested from small plots with very low yields. In the case of German TBA, for instance, the harvesting is often done on steeply terraced slopes that are extremely difficult to work. Ice wines and botrytized wines—the priciest of German whites—are indisputably more difficult and expensive to produce than almost any other type of wine.

In short, while spending $50 or $75 or even $100 on a good Sauternes, TBA, or top red Burgundy might not always make economic sense for the buyer—particularly if it’s a buyer without much experience in wine—it’s at least justifiable from a supply-side pricing perspective. The $150 you’ll pay for a bottle of Opus One or Krug, meanwhile—never mind the $5,000 you’ll pay for a bottle of 2005 Pétrus—has little to do with the cost of production.

And in the index, there are two successive entries for the winery: “Casa Lapostolle (Argentina), 14; Casa Lapostolle (Chile), 84.”

I figured this was just an editing/database mistake. It happens.

But things got stranger when I actually compared the reviews of the exact same wines in the two chapters. Aside from the words “black currant” and “black fruits,” their descriptions turned out to be totally different from each other. Here they are:

(From Argentina chapter) “Casa Lapostolle Merlot Cuvée Alexandre Apalta Vineyard. This Merlot has an attractive nose of black currant, blueberry, vanilla, and clove. The wine has good weight on the palate with layers of black fruits and a firm structure. Drink it during its first 6 years of life.”

(From Chile chapter) “Casa Lapostolle Merlot Apalta Vineyard Cuvée Alexandre. The Merlot Apalta Vineyard Cuvée Alexandra [sic] has aromas of cedar, spice box, black cherry, and black currant followed by a smooth-textured, ripe Merlot with ample savory black fruits, good depth, and a moderately long finish.”

Blueberry, vanilla, and clove have been replaced by cedar, spice box, and black cherry. Is there a wine-adjective dartboard in the house?

Moving on to the second double…

(From Argentina chapter) “Casa Lapostolle Cabernet Sauvignon Cuvée Alexandre Apalta Vineyard. Similarly styled but with the focus on black currants. It has enough structure to evolve for 2–3 years in the bottle and will drink well during its first 8 years of life.”

(From Chile chapter) “Casa Lapostolle Cabernet Sauvignon Apalta Vineyard Cuvée Alexandre. The Cabernet Sauvignon Apalta Vineyard Cuvée Alexandre has an expressive bouquet of smoke, pencil lead, spice box, black cherry, and black currant. The wine’s black fruit flavors linger into a medium-long finish.”

At least the black currants travel well.

Mistakes like this do happen. They don’t discredit the critics behind them; we all have slightly different experiences when we taste the same wine twice. And in this case, although the tasting notes are totally different, they’re not quite mutually exclusive, nor do they render dramatically divergent judgments/opinions about the wine (Parker ratings are not included in the under-$25 book). But I see it as yet another reminder of the arbitrariness of these fruit/spice adjectives, even in the hands of the world’s highest-end wine critics—which is particularly troubling when these opinions turn out to be so powerful in the marketplace.

This from the abstract:

“In markets for experience goods, publications exist to help consumers decide which products to purchase. However, in most cases these publications accept advertising from the very firms whose products they review, raising the possibility that they bias product reviews to favor advertisers…Although the average Wine Spectator ratings earned by advertisers and non-advertisers are similar, I find that advertisers earn just less than one point higher Wine Spectator ratings than non-advertisers when I use Wine Advocate ratings to adjust for differences in quality.”

These are wine ratings, not the restaurant Awards of Excellence, which I’ve written about in the past; the applicants for those awards are advertisers by definition (having submitted a $250 fee to be considered).

Karl Storchmann has also posted an interesting blog entry about Reuter’s paper on the AAWE website.

Reuter later retreats to a statement that he “finds little consistent evidence of bias…at worst, the tests for biased ratings suggest that Wine Spectator rates wines from advertisers almost one point higher than wines from non-advertisers. However, selective retastings can explain at most half of this bias and then only within the set of U.S. wines rated by both Wine Spectator and Wine Advocate. Given Wine Spectator’s claim that it rates wines blind, the remaining difference in ratings may simply reflect consistent differences in how the two publications rate quality, which leads to predictable differences in advertising. This interpretation is consistent with the fact that tests for biased awards provide no additional evidence of bias. Therefore, despite the fact that Wine Spectator is dependent on advertising revenue, the long-run value of producing credible reviews appears to minimize bias.”

I think this conclusion is softer than it need be. Even if selective retastings explain only half of the one-point bias, that’s still pretty damning; it means that if you advertise in Wine Spectator, you might well get the benefit of a selective retasting that gets you, on average, an additional half-point. Translation: advertising influences ratings.

With respect to the other half-point, if there are indeed “consistent differences in how the two publications rate quality, which leads to predictable differences in advertising,” then you should try leafing through a copy of Wine Spectator and seeing if you’d trust critics who favor the types of wines that tend to advertise in the magazine. I think the roster of advertisers speaks for itself.

The more important issue, perhaps—especially if you’re a small wine producer—is how difficult it is to get magazines like Wine Spectator to even review your wines at all. And this is where, anecdotally, bias might play an even larger role. “Unsolicited samples,” states the Wine Spectator website, “may not be tasted.” Advertise in the magazine, and that problem seems to go away.

And then there’s the matter of the selection of a wine (Columbia Crest Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve) from a Wine Spectator advertiser (Chateau Ste. Michelle) as this year’s Wine Spectator wine of the year.

Although proving bias in every such case is a complicated, difficult point, the obvious conclusion of all such research is the simplest:

We should be skeptical of criticism whose publication is financially supported by the producers of the products being criticized.

Wine critics should not accept advertisements from wineries.

Period.

Check out my posts there:

Monday, November 30: “Have you heard of the two best Chinese restaurants in Portland?”

Tuesday, December 1: “These, in my opinion, are the five best comfort-food dishes in Portland. Let the flame-wars begin.”

(Tuesday, December 1, 7:30pm: Fearless Critic Portland Restaurant Guide release event/Q&A/discussion/debate, Powell’s on Burnside. Thanks to all those who came and made the event a success.)

Wednesday, December 2: “Which trendy restaurants and bars are guilty of conduct unbecoming Portland, and which ones live up to the hype”

Thursday, December 3: “From soondae to seolleongtang, the hidden wonders of Beaverton”

Friday, December 4: Coming soon…

As she should.

But with “brine turkey” at #12 on Google Trends today, it’s clear that the turkey-brining craze has hit new levels this year. Is the Food Network driving this bus? Alton Brown (who comes up in the first page of hits) preaches it. Sara Moulton swears by it. Just like roasting your turkey with a wine-soaked piece of cheesecloth was last year, or basting your turkey with orange juice was a few years earlier, it seems as if every Thanksgiving seems to come out with a new line of tools, gadgets, and fool-proof plans for housewives all across America to jump all over like the fall fashion line so they don’t serve the notorious dry piece of poultry to their in-laws. This year, there was an entire section of my local grocery store dedicated to brining needles, brining bags, and other brining accessories.

Don’t get me wrong: brining works. (On why it works, I’m sure the Food Network is running Good Eats Turkey episodes left and right, but Serious Eats really nails it here.) But brining can’t save an overcooked bird. It also takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of space, and there are more important things to be worrying about before Thanksgiving Day (like making sure your fantasy football team is set for the shortened week).

In my case, brining the 28¼-pound turkey that I acquired from Andrea would have required, at the least: (1) a bathtub; (2) a time machine, to go back another day; and (3) cruelty to animals (it’s considered really bad form to brine a turkey while it’s still alive).

If you haven’t brined, don’t worry about it. Forget brining. Get rid of your brining guilt. Just don’t overcook the thing. The trends come and go, but in reality, your turkey is dry because it’s very lean meat, and more often than not, you, your mom, and your great aunt cook it too long, perhaps because you follow some misguided FDA directive, a recipe from cookbook from too long ago, or (wince) the directions on the turkey wrapper or supermarket pamphlet about minutes per pound.

So instead of buying another gadget that will inevitably sit in your kitchen drawer for the rest of eternity, I suggest buying a temperature-alarm thermometer that will let you know to pull the turkey at around 160 degrees Fahrenheit. Unlike whatever trend may hit next year, this kitchen tool will be your friend year after year. Or you could go the old-school route and separate the legs from the rest of the body and roast them separately, as the breast cooks a bit faster. Either way, you don’t need to be scouring the web for the next big answer when the answer is pretty simple—plus it makes gravy all the more viable.

Let’s just hope, for humor’s sake, that home sous-vide-ing is next year’s trend.

Housewives with immersion circulators fretting over sealing numbers?

Oh hell yes.

[Guest post by chef Justin Yu]

Among the binge drinkers who might have participated in the study would be anyone who routinely orders the tasting menus with wine pairings at Le Bernardin, Jean-Georges, Daniel, or Per Se, four of New York’s top restaurants. Each of these restaurants pairs its tasting menu with seven wines, according to John Brecher and Dorothy Gaiter’s excellent article last year on wine pairings.

If the federal government wanted to seek real ways of reducing traffic accidents, instead of vilifying people who enjoy multiple glasses of wine with dinner, it would take more of an urban-planning approach and subsidize programs like Denver’s Night Riders, which seems to have gone out of business. You would call the service like a taxi, and somebody would pick you up at a bar or restaurant, fold up his or her scooter, put it in your trunk, and drive you home in your own car.

It was the only overtly political phrase of an otherwise carefully apolitical speech—the only Obama talking point, perhaps. The thing is, politics as “joy and nobility” (carefully chosen words, really) isn’t just about bridging partisanship. That’s what Obama turned it into, because that’s Obama’s shtick. He wanted to say—and it’s a debatable point, really, if you consider McCarthy—that there was a time when reasonable policy proposals wouldn’t lead to comparisons with Hitler, a time when politicians were understood to be philosopher-kings, and above such garbage.

But politics as “joy and nobility”—the joy and nobility (amidst tragedy and suffering) that the Kennedys embodied—isn’t really about that at all. It’s more about being born into an aristocracy, and about the notion that when you’re not just elected but actually one of the Elect, it’s understood that you have sex and drink and party and get STDs from Mexican prostitutes—that you do all of the other things that common people do, only more so.

It’s understood that you’re conducting yourself in the way that a real human being might conduct him- or herself if he or she were born into your position: spending your free time sailing and boozing and getting laid. That’s both natural and aristocratic. Going on a stilted date to Blue Hill, a meal enjoyed in the intimate company of hundreds of photographers and washed down with only one alcoholic beverage? Not natural and not aristocratic.

That’s not a problem for Obama, because he’s perfect and mannerist and comes off like the kind of guy who doesn’t mind having just one drink. Even his imperfections, his cocaine use or whatever, are perfect because they taught him a lesson. That’s why it’s so strange that he’s been dubbed an elitist. He is the furthest thing from a nobleman. The nobility have sex and do drugs and crash cars and sail and have secret parties in their free time. Obama has scarcely spent a minute of his free time in the past decade not behaving in a certain way to please somebody else, not flawlessly emulating the personality traits of the upper-middle-class family-movie protagonist.

Ted Kennedy was a nobleman, and it was his nobility that set him free. If he was above the law for that reason, he was also above pandering for that reason, and it freed him to do real work in the Senate.

I watched Ted Kennedy’s funeral today with my parents in Massachusetts. “He might have been a murderer,” said my father, “and I voted for him in the 1980 presidential primary anyway.” So divine was his status in the Massachusetts of my childhood that there was nothing, not even manslaughter, that would prevent his reelection to the senate. We cried not for the loss of a friend—we had each met him only a few times, and briefly—but for the loss of someone whose face, whose mannerisms, whose handshake, whose accent, had made two totally different generations totally proud of our state in totally different ways.

The fact of not worrying about being reelected set Ted Kennedy free, and decades of civil rights legislation resulted from that carefree status, that noblesse-oblige freedom, the fact of a political future being indicative and not subjunctive. Ted Kennedy reminded us that if the perfect form of government wasn’t Camelot—as England knows, the divine right of kings can yield idiot child rulers, too—maybe it wasn’t modern capitalist democracy, either.

“We can still hear his voice bellowing through the Senate chamber,” said Obama, “face reddened, fist pounding the podium, a veritable force of nature.” He was of nature; he was natural; he did things that politicians can’t do anymore, except maybe Barney Frank, another member of Kennedy’s Massachusetts Congressional delegation, whose recent outburst at a town-hall meeting (“on what planet do you spend most of your time?”)—using language that was in everybody’s mind but is considered untoward for politicians these days—was a very un-modern moment, a moment that was about red-faced, fist-pounding Ted Kennedy, too.

Frank is another politician whose displays of raw humanity—like Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick—probably prevented him from rising further in the political world, yet whose colleagues probably respect him for it, in a way, respect him more than a lot of his more perfect colleagues.

It’s not that a politician today couldn’t transcend partisan divisions the way Ted Kennedy did. In that, Obama might be his equal. It’s that a politician today would no longer be able to survive Chappaquiddick. Politicians are no longer larger than life in that particular way. The forces of modern democracy, as perfected by the media, don’t allow it.

Ted Kennedy was a Democrat, but his rule was not democratic. It was aristocratic. And when we look at what’s gone wrong in American politics, the unfashionable truth might be that as the imperfect aristocrats have been replaced by the perfect politicians, the sorts of policies both unpopular and correct that might arise from a life’s work are being replaced by the sorts of policies both popular and incorrect that might arise from a term’s work.

I wonder if one of the reasons that America waxes so nostalgically about the Kennedys is that it occurs to us, on some level, that there are some benefits to the rule of a hereditary aristocracy; that elections, even conducted fairly and openly, create incentives we’re not quite comfortable with; that what we want, really, is something somewhere between this and Camelot; that maybe we’re a little bit less sold on democracy than we were in elementary school.

Many have written to corroborate my claim that used bikes are unusually expensive in Portland, while many others have disputed it, citing evidence of cheap bike-swap shops and some inexpensive bikes on Craigslist. On that point, it is important to note that I was measuring median prices, from a sample of 50 data points in each city, in order to offer a rudimentary hypothesis about trends in the market as a whole. To cite as a counter-example the mere fact that there are some cheap bikes for sale is to miss my more general observation of the relative medians and of the car-bike relationship in various cities.

This relationship, as supported by my extremely preliminary evidence, seems to suggest that in bike-friendly cities like Portland—cities in which a higher proportion of bikes are being used for commuting and transportation, and not just for leisure—bikes and cars are functioning more like substitute goods than they are in other cities; there may be, in such cities, an upward pressure on bike prices and a downward pressure on car prices. This is hardly a ground-breaking idea, but it’s a phenomenon that could merit further investigation as we consider ways of reducing emissions and gasoline consumption.

Last time I was in Copenhagen—one of Europe’s most bike-friendly cities—free one-speed public bikes were available to all; you’d insert a coin into the bike when you removed it from a rack, and you’d get your coin back when you redeposited the bike elsewhere in the city. (A while ago, I’d heard that the bikes were being manufactured by inmates in local prisons, although I don’t know if this is still the case.) This system has been employed in other cities, too, with some success. I’m sure that such free public bikes are of the very lowest quality, yet their existence creates a biking opportunity to those that cannot afford more expensive bikes. In that case, bikes are probably functioning less as a substitute for cars and more as a substitute for buses or other public transportation, so the benefit of that trade-off might be questioned. However, it is well established that—as far as health care costs borne by the public are concerned—it is in society’s best interest for its citizenry to get more exercise.

Perhaps the most interesting debate, though, has been over my use of the term “moral/aesthetic” to describe the social norm in Portland that pushes bike prices higher. That statement has been criticized by some commenters as (in Mr. Rose’s words) “skidding away from Economics 101,” a notion that’s fueled, presumably, by the idea that I’ve strayed from the assumption that in equilibrium, goods with higher market prices are understood to be of higher quality—and that it’s because of a better understanding of quality, not a moral choice, that people in Portland are spending more on better bikes.

First, it is important to note that I acknowledged that the Schwinn at Costco was a technically inferior bike—an acknowledgment that Mr. Rose noticed, but some others seemed not to. I wrote: “I don’t doubt that the Schwinn Midtown is a far inferior bike, from the point of view of a bike connoisseur, to whatever’s being sold used in Portland.”

But it’s also true, in another sense, that I have skidded away from Economics 101: it is becoming increasingly clear, from evidence in neuroscience and elsewhere, that more complicated our economy becomes, the less accurately that page of the introductory Economics textbook describes the average consumer’s ability to perceive the quality difference between the Schwinn and the Trek. In an experiment I conducted last year, about two-thirds of 62 consumers preferred an $11 Domaine Ste. Michelle Brut sparkling wine to a $150 bottle of Dom Perignon.

The more we look at the marketing strategies adopted by the modern manufacturers of luxury goods like wine, automobiles, and even five-bladed razors, the more we see the manipulation of social norms substituting for real product development, and the more we see companies’ cost bases shift toward advertising and away from R&D. The more we look at the information intermediaries on which we are supposed to rely for the unbiased expert judgment of those goods, the more we see pay-to-play “ratings” schemes like this and junketeering like this substituting for real judgment, propping up the prices of luxury goods whose counterfeits consumers often can’t distinguish from the originals.

The central element of the debate, then, might be boiled down to the question of how comfortable we are with the notion that market prices are so heavily influenced—not just at the top end, but at the bottom, too—by the minority of connoisseurs that probably can tell the difference between the $500 bike and the $1,000 bike than by the unsophisticated evaluations of everyday consumers that probably can’t. Freakonomics poster Andromeda writes:

[W]e’re not just talking about moral/aesthetic differences here (although some bikes *are* sexy). There are big differences in the feel, comfort, and speed of different bikes, and if you’re biking as much as people in Portland apparently are, it becomes seriously worth it in terms of quality of life to shell out extra money for a lighter frame (the big expense), more ergonomic and/or durable shifters, more energy-efficient pedals, a more comfortable saddle, et cetera. The price range of bikes I’m interested in considering has crept up as I’ve become more serious and knowledgeable about my biking, and yeah, part of that is drooling at the sexy, but most of it is knowing how I use my bike and what will maximize my happiness and efficiency given those uses. (And most of these are things that were *not* apparent to me before I’d put a few thousand miles on my bike.)

Sexy—or sex, at least—is something real. We can all tell the difference between when we’re having sex and when we’re not. It’s easy to detect sex appeal, our at least our individual versions of it. I’m confident that when it comes to brakes and pedals, the bike aficionados who commented on my article can tell the difference between a great used Trek and a crappy new Schwinn. But I’m also confident that there are a lot of people that can’t. That’s not to say that the fragile egos of the unsophisticated consumers don’t also figure into the social norm that we should buy better bikes, as they figure into the social norm that we should buy better wines. People are insecure about their preferences, and for the wine collectors that really can’t tell the difference in blind tastings, buying Château Lafite isn’t a mere act of self-delusion; it’s a social act, a way to fit in with the better bikers, a way to feel a part of it all—and evidence indicates that they get placebo pleasure from the act, too. But placebo pleasure seems to come from the relative price of a good, not its absolute price.

And there are also those that don’t fit that placebo profile. Mr. Rose writes that “[to] buy a shiny new $200 Schwinn over a used ride with solid bones and newer components is like buying a $60 Costco guitar expecting it to stay in tune and sound like a Martin.” But where does he get the idea that they’re expecting it to sound like a Martin? Where does he get the idea that they even know what a Martin is supposed to sound like?

If there is a place for the Costco guitar, isn’t there also a place for the $50 used bike, which seems to have all but vanished from Portland? The bike that you know isn’t in tune, but you don’t mind? The bike that someone who can barely afford a bike is buying not as an alternative to a more serious commuter bike, but as an alternative to nothing at all?

When I arrived in Portland last month, the first thing I wanted to do was buy a bike and get around the way the locals do. Since I wouldn’t be in town for too long, and it wasn’t clear that I’d be able to take the bike with me when I left, I wanted something extremely cheap.

There were bike shops on every other corner in Southeast Portland, the sort of Brooklyn-ish neighborhood where I was staying. I walked into what looked like the grungiest of them—a store that sold mostly used bikes. There was one employee, and he was heavily tattooed and seemed pretty cool. I completely leveled with him: I didn’t know anything about bikes, really; I could barely change a tire; I was only going to be in town for a little while, and I wondered if he had something cheap that I could use for puttering around town.

I know this is sort of quaint, but the last time I bought a bike, I think I spent $35, and it wasn’t hot. It was a road bike; it had 18 speeds, I think; it squeaked; and it served my needs (biking from my house to school every day) perfectly well. (The bike later died a peaceful death at Burning Man, but that was due to maltreatment, not poor quality.) I was looking for something like that.

The guy in the store asked me how much I wanted to spend.

I sort of stuttered my way and ultimately refused to answer the question because I was embarrassed to say something like “less than a hundred dollars,” for fear of coming off like Borat inspecting the Hummer before buying the ice-cream truck.

Yeah, the bike guy answered, he had something super-cheap for me, an old road bike that they’d fixed up. It wasn’t exactly my size, but it would do. It was a 1991 model, a Trek, I think; it was in good working condition, it had some newer components, and it came with a warranty. I could have it, he said, for $475.

So I went to another store. Same deal, more or less. There was one bike for $275, but it was a girl’s Raleigh from the 1960s with a wicker basket.

I started looking around the Web. At the down-to-earth-sounding Recyclery, another Portland used bike shop—and probably a great one—there are currently 59 used bikes on offer. But 34 of them cost more than $1,000, only eight are priced under $500, and there are none under $300. Even to rent a bike for one week from the Recyclery costs $175—more than I paid for my weekly rental car the previous time I was in Portland.

At Portland’s Costco, meanwhile—on the outskirts of the city—you can buy a brand-new Schwinn Midtown city bike with Shimano shifters for two hundred something dollars. But, according to the clerk there, those Schwinns aren’t moving.

I don’t doubt that the Schwinn Midtown is a far inferior bike, from the point of view of a bike connoisseur, to whatever’s being sold used in Portland. But you’ve got to love a city whose citizens put a set of moral/aesthetic principles—whether it’s riding a bike with proper disc brakes or refusing to support the Big Box stores—this far above their own financial well-being. And although every city has its bike aficionados, I think that in Portland, most people just buy rebuilt bikes locally because it feels right to do so, not because all these everyday bike riders can really tell the difference between Shimano TX-30 derailleurs and M-970 XTRs.

Still, what’s up with this bike micro-inflation? Why does there seem to be no market in Portland for used bikes that are actually cheap? Portland is otherwise a pretty cheap city. Beer is cheap. Used clothing is cheap. By major urban standards, housing is cheap, too, unless you compare it to the strip-mall-type cities. And certainly there are plenty of people in town who can’t afford to spend $475—never mind $1,000—on a bike.

I asked a few people in town about this, and got some general sense of agreement and common frustration: cheap bikes were impossible to find around here. The word on the street was that so many people were selling their cars (or taking their cars off the road) and using bikes to commute to work that there just weren’t enough bikes to go around. I also heard about a guy who was actually in the business of bicycle arbitrage—he would immediately snap up the few cheap bikes that would come up on Craigslist, fix them up a bit, put them back up on Craigslist, and make a good profit.

So I started looking at Craigslist—not just in Portland, but in other cities too, and not just at bike prices, but also at car and truck prices. I looked at a wide range of midsized-to-large cities that I thought represented a diversity of urban layouts, bike prevalence, wealth, and so on: Austin, Miami, New York City, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle.

From each of these cities I collected an extremely basic data set: the asking prices for the 50 most recent cars/trucks and bikes advertised. I excluded children’s bikes, frame-only bikes, and non-working bikes; I excluded non-working cars and cars that were being sold for parts. I also excluded obvious dealer spam from each. Then, I looked at the medians. Here’s what happened:

Median price, first 50 items for sale on Craigslist, 8pm PDT, 8/13/09

I didn’t run any serious statistical tests on the data set. This is because there are a few fundamental problems—the largest being that we’re not comparing apples to apples in terms of what’s being sold. That is, we don’t know if the same types of bikes are being sold for more in Seattle than in Phoenix, or if there are different types of bikes being sold in the two markets. The ads also change so frequently that replicating these results might be difficult; and 50 data points might be too small a sample.

Still, whether it’s over/underpricing or just selective selling, what struck me about this informal little analysis was that not one city fell out of line in the inverse order. Where cars were selling for the most, bikes were selling for the least; where cars were selling for the least, bikes were selling for the most; and so on, inversely, in between.

So, it looks like even though there are tons of bikes and bike shops in Portland, there still aren’t enough sellers in town to satisfy the strong demand in this biker’s paradise. Perhaps, in the long run, when enough arbitrageurs start shuffling bikes around the country (and enough arbitrageurs start underpricing each other to drive down their margins), more cheap used bikes will become available in the bike-friendly cities.

In the meantime, if you’re a Portland or Seattle resident thinking of selling your car and going green, maybe you should drive down to Phoenix and ride a bike back. You’d leverage both sides of the inverse relationship—plus there’d be some beautiful scenery along the way.

Although state laws that make consensual gay sex illegal were ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 in Lawrence v. Texas, they remain on the books in many states. In some of those states, people who were convicted under state sodomy laws are still required to register as sex offenders, and are flagged by “Offender Locator.”

For example, a Ridgeland, Mississippi man that “Offender Locator” warns you about was convicted in 1994 of “Unnatural Intercourse” under Mississippi Code § 97-29-59, that state’s anti-sodomy law, which still stands and has been held to prohibit both consensual gay sex and consensual heterosexual oral sex. And under § 45-33-23, that man is still required to register as a sex offender. According to a website published by the state of Mississippi listing registered sex offenders, the man’s information was current as of June 24, 2009.

In spite of the Lawrence decision, some states have not just left anti-sodomy laws on the books but even used them as the basis for arrests. In 2008, two men in Raleigh, North Carolina, were charged with a “Crime Against Nature” in connection with a domestic dispute. Although the charges were later dropped, one of the men lost his $450 bail bond fee. Three years earlier, North Carolina state senator Ellie Kinnaird (D-Orange) had introduced legislation to eliminate the “Crime Against Nature” law on the grounds that anti-sodomy laws are now unconstitutional under Lawrence, but her bill died in the state legislature.

Among other people required to register as sex offenders, and would thus also be subject to listing in the iPhone app, would be teenagers convicted of statutory rape—for example, in Massachusetts, where I went to high school, that might include a 17-year-old high school senior that had sex with his 15-1/2-year-old girlfriend, a fellow senior. That’s not a thought experiment—it’s a real case, and a motion to dismiss it was denied; if convicted, this boy will wind up on “Offender Locator,” too.

The imperfections in our rule of criminal law have resulted in many wrongs through the years. Gay and lesbian people have suffered more than most. Yet decisions like Lawrence give us hope that as a society awakens to the possibility of tolerance, our rule of law can, in time, become less imperfect.

Perhaps ThinAir Wireless would plead neutrality—that it aims simply to make public information more accessible. Yes, these sex offender registries were already online, and, in theory, already public. But the app’s menacing logo and the way it conveys information—representing people convicted of being gay as GPS dots flashing across your map, like obstacles in a video game—tell a different, more public, more accessible story. “Offender Locator” is not just one more cruel punishment for people that have already been maltreated by centuries of codified intolerance; it is, in its novel use of technology, unusual in its cruelty.

Florence Fabricant, in a recent article, embodies a common attitude amongst American food writers when she reveals the results of an exhaustive search for the true recipe for bucatini all’amatriciana, one of Italy’s most beloved pasta dishes: “After half a dozen plates of it during a recent trip to Italy, one detail became clear: for any pasta all’amatriciana to be authentic, it must be made with guanciale—cured, unsmoked pig jowl.”

Although it would be a difficult hypothesis to test empirically, Andrea and I had the same immediate reaction to this statement—his from growing up in Italy, mine from living there for a while: in Italy, almost nobody would care in the least bit whether pasta all’amatriciana were “authentic.” People would care whether it tasted good.

Now, just because people in Italy wouldn’t care whether amatriciana were authentic doesn’t mean we shouldn’t. The preservation of culinary history, lest old recipes be lost in time, is a noble endeavor. But historical documentation doesn’t seem to be the purpose of the food writers who go around enforcing amatriciana’s authenticity. It’s more the idea that there’s one, and only one, way to make this dish—a blend of I’ve-been-there-and-you-haven’t self-righteousness with cultural/culinary naïveté.

To wit: “Italians take guanciale for granted, but it’s fairly new to American kitchens. Almost all the recipes in American cookbooks,” continues Fabricant, “call for ordinary bacon—which is too smoky—or Italian pancetta, which is too lean…‘Good guanciale makes all the difference,’ said the actor Michael Tucker, an accomplished cook, who, with his wife, the actress Jill Eikenberry, has a house in Umbria. In his book, ‘Living in a Foreign Language’ (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007), he describes buying guanciale from Ugo Mazzoli, the butcher in Campello sul Clitunno, near his house.”

Guanciale is lovely in amatriciana; few would dispute that. But Simone, the Genoese guy who taught me to make amatriciana, does it with pancetta—like his mother did. Would Simone love a well-made amatriciana with smoky American bacon, too? Of course he would. He’s not a lever-pulling lab rat. He’s just a dude who, like many other Italians, likes good food.

Is amatriciana made with guanciale? Yes.

Is it made with pancetta? Yes.

Is it made with Tyrolean speck? With French lardons? Probably, somewhere in Italy, yes.

To illustrate the absurdity of Fabricant’s point of view, Andrea offers the following hypothetical: imagine an Italian food critic undertaking a careful investigative journey through the American pastoral hinterland in search of the authentic hamburger. She tries a half-dozen burgers, reads a few cookbooks, and concludes, in her article in Corriere della Sera, that “for a hamburger to be authentically American, it must be made only with Wisconsin cheddar cheese, lettuce, and tomato, and it must be served with french fries.”

Fabricant is not wrong, exactly, about how to make a good plate of bucatini. But she, like too many food writers, constructs a counterfactual Italy of culinary dogmatism, a population of finger-wagging guanciale zealots, a nation full of Ugo Mazzolis harrumphing around about how the world is going to shit now that people are making amatriciana with pancetta.

People and recipes aren’t anthropological tokens. They’re living things, the products of neural assemblies and proteins and chemicals bouncing across the ages. Narrow your gaze and squint your eyes too tightly in the search for authenticity, and you might miss that whole, beautiful landscape.

Worth a thousand words?

With taste and smell—the so-called “chemical” senses, which are more complex (humans have about 400 different types of olfactory receptors) and less well understood than the others, we don’t have the luxury of those points of reference. That’s why we so often resort to loose analogies—“tastes like chicken”—and it’s also why reproducing tastes and smells is so difficult (grape soda doesn’t taste much like grapes, and nobody’s yet synthesized a bottle of 1945 Pétrus—an activity that would surely yield tremendous profit).

To challenge this barrier, we resort to analogy. Coffee tastes like nuts and chocolate; Sauvignon Blanc smells like grapefruit and cat pee. In a Sauternes, you might sense the brine of the first green olive you tasted in Italy; in a Pedro Ximénez sherry, the viscous maple syrup that your grandmother once drizzled on your pancakes.

But how carefully are we really choosing these adjectives and analogies? How often do they correspond to real chemical commonalities? Does that matter? Do the analogies more frequently serve a more poetic (or at least suggestive) purpose, forging new neural assemblies that connect relatively arbitrary taste and smell memories with each other—connections that, reinforced over time, turn into sensory reality?

Two papers at last month’s meeting of the American Association of Wine Economists in Reims (this is my second of two articles about the conference) investigated this question with respect to the wine industry, which is, if not a microcosm of all consumer-products industries, at least an increasingly apt caricature of them. While creative adjectivism has long characterized in the wine world, the practice in other taste industries—chocolaty coffee, metallic fish, grassy honey, peaty whiskey—is now ascendant.

The canonical work in the wine-adjective field is Princeton economist Richard Quandt’s “On Wine Bullshit” (a riff on his fellow Princetonian Harry Frankfurt’s “On Bullshit”). Writes Quandt:

Two things have to be true before wine ratings can become useful for the average wine drinker. Since there are many wine writers, and there is a substantial overlap in the wines they write about (particularly Bordeaux wines), it is important that there be substantial agreement among them. And secondly, what they write must actually convey information; that is to say, it must be free of bullshit. Regrettably, wine evaluations fail on both counts.

At the AAWE meeting, Coco Krumme of M.I.T., who is also a Fearless Critic food writer, studied data from critical descriptions of more than 3,500 wines from recent vintage years, ranging from $4.99 to $137.99 in retail price, and employed a Bayesian filter to “find those words that best predict the price category of a bottle” (abstract here). She found that “about 65% of commonly occurring words are non-overlapping.” Words like “old,” “elegant,” “intense,” “supple,” “velvety,” “smoky,” “tobacco,” and “chocolate” predict expensive wines; “pleasing,” “refreshing,” “value,” “enjoy,” “bright,” “light,” “fresh, “tropical,” “pink,” “fruity,” “good,” “clean,” “tasty,” and “juicy” predict cheap wines. As for suggested pairings, “steak” and “shellfish” predict expensive wines; “chicken” predicts cheap wines.

Perhaps most amusingly, Krumme reports that “words with the same meaning are preferentially used for expensive over cheap wines: for example, ‘vintage’ is six times more likely to describe an expensive wine; ‘harvest’ is used for cheap wines.”

Economist Carlos Ramirez of George Mason University, meanwhile, ran a regression (abstract here) on a data set of 800 Wine Spectator descriptions of Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon wines from for wines from the 2004, 2005, and 2006 vintages, and found a length-of-review effect—that is, “longer wine descriptions are associated with higher prices—a 10 percent increase in the length of a wine description (adding about 23 characters) is associated with a statistically significant increase of 4 to 13 percent to the price of the bottle.” Like Krumme, Ramirez also found some particular wine descriptors (about 20 of the 208 he looked at) that, controlling for other variables, signal higher wine prices.

If you’re familiar with wine ratings and reviews, neither of these results might surprise you. But the interesting, unanswered question is: which way does the causality go?

Here are three potential theories:

(1) Expensive wines are generally fairly similar to each other, and their particular properties lead critics to refer more frequently to certain flavors (e.g. chocolate) and to write longer reviews of these wines. That is, there’s just a specific expensiveness to expensive wines that explains these differences. (Quandt would likely doubt this, and the empirical evidence, as described in The Wine Trials, would be against it, too.)

(2) Tasting is not done blind, and thus critics are influenced to write more and refer to certain flavors when they taste expensive wines.

(3) Tasting is done blind, but the sensory reviews of expensive wines are edited after the fact by editors who know what the wines are.

Regardless of which of these theories is correct, what’s highly likely is that the descriptors are self-fulfilling—reading an expensive wine description primes the drinker to have a more typically expensive wine experience. That is, the adjectives and analogies we read in wine reviews fuse with our experience of drinking the wine in such a complete way that the liquid’s intrinsic and extrinsic properties become inseperable.

Is this why it’s so difficult to undermine the conventional wisdom that very expensive wine is worth the money?

Maybe we just synthesize whatever we seek, creating value as we go: search for chocolate, and it will magically appear.

Not empty for long?

Schamel’s study, which is still in progress, has thus far looked at a data set of 260 eBay auctions of empty wine bottles. In his model, the most powerful predictive variable—explaining both the incidence of sale and the final auction price of an empty bottle—is “the price a full and presumably authentic bottle could potentially fetch in the marketplace.”

Schamel argues that this is “powerful evidence that the empty bottles might go on to be refilled. Why otherwise would someone want to pay more than 100 euros for an empty bottle of 1982 Chateau Lafite-Rothschild rated with 100 Parker points? Presumably, because it is worth a lot more once it is filled up again.”

Certainly, notwithstanding a recent incident in which a customer at a London restaurant sent back a £18,000 magnum of 1961 Château Pétrus claiming that it was counterfeit, our wine experiments and others’ predict that few consumers—even wine experts—would be able to identify a plausible fake of ’82 Lafite.

In my mind, the strongest piece of evidence in favor of Schamel’s theory is that his model shows no price effect for the most intuitively collectible of all wine bottles—Château Mouton-Rothschild bottles with artist labels. These are designed by a different prominent artist for each vintage. One might assume that these bottles, when empty—since they’re limited-edition works of art—would have higher value than others if they were being collected for legitimate purposes.

On the other hand, if collecting empty wine bottles is less like art collecting and more like straightforward conspicuous-consumption plumage—that is, if, say, a collector’s display of a row of empty bottles in his or her dining room or wine cellar is functioning as a mere social display of the total value of all the expensive wines that he or she has consumed—then he or she would have an interest in buying the most expensive possible bottles, which would explain the model’s results without the need for counterfeiting. It would be interesting to survey empty-bottle collectors to see, at least anecdotally, what qualities they claim to value most.

It was also brought up in the Q&A session that, to complete his or her work, a counterfeiter would also need an appropriate cork. As few corks are available on eBay, Schamel has not yet investigated a potential cork effect. However—and this is speculation—I would imagine there to still be a robust market amongst counterfeiters for empty bottles without corks, primarily because I’d assume that there is also a separate black market for counterfeit corks (or real corks without bottles) that could complete the sets, so to speak.

I’d also assume that one of the main categories of counterfeit-wine buyers would be conniving restaurateurs in regions where there’s a lot of demand for prestige bottles but relatively little wine tradition or wine education—China and Russia come to mind. I’ve seen a table full of businessmen in Hong Kong order a bottle of 1970 Haut-Brion and mix it with Coca-Cola. Restaurant customers in such situations would be easily duped—and they also might be less vigilant about looking at the cork. Such restaurateurs might take steps, for instance, to avoid presentation of the cork when the bottle is opened.

I’ll leave it at this: if I were going to go into the wine counterfeiting business, eBay would certainly be one place I’d start…

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? My intuition (and that of the economists I’ve been speaking with here in Stockholm) is the latter—first and foremost, as in Quebec, it’s a major headache for wine producers, whose distribution chances hang on the (often arbitrary) whims of just one decisionmaker. Opening hours of stores are criminally short. Pricing is screwy, in part because per-unit (rather than per-krona) taxation results in cheap wine being overpriced and expensive wine underpriced. As ever, monopolies throw everybody’s incentives out of whack.

But here’s one definite consumer-oriented boon that results: in an of-the-people move, Systembolaget wine stores—that is, all wine stores in Sweden—are organized first by color, second by price. There’s the 69-kronor-(US$8.71)-and-under red wine section; there’s the 70-kronor-(US$8.84)-to-99-kronor (US$12.50) red wine section; and then there’s the 100-kronor (US$12.63)-and-up red wine section.

Although I’ve seen US wine stores with special $10-and-under sections and such, I’ve never seen an entire store organized this way. Intuitively, at least, it seems to be more aligned with consumers’ game plans as organization by region, grape, and so forth.

Why don’t non-monopoly stores organize this way?

My guess would be that profit-minded stores, for understandable reasons, don’t want to lose the chance to upsell—they want people to walk away with a wine more expensive than the one they came looking for.

It’s one thing for a food writer to opine about which pizza style is his or her favorite—everybody seems to do it, whether in New York, New Haven, or Naples.

But it’s a breathtaking mistake for a seasoned food writer like Alan Richman, in his widely read new GQ evaluation of the top 25 pizzerias in America, first to completely misstate the definition of Italian DOC pizza; then to imply, without evidence, that the whole Italian population supports that misstated definition; and, finally, to use that misstated definition as the basis for a condemnation of the entire pizza culture in Italy. He writes:

“ITALIANS ARE WRONG. Not about cars or suits. About pizza, and they’re not entirely mistaken about that, only about crusts and buffalo-milk mozzarella…the Italians are proudest when they can substitute fresh mozzarella from the milk of buffaloes and label their pies Margherita DOC…In my opinion, buffalo mozzarella is pizza’s second-worst topping, exceeded only by whole anchovies… All that excess liquid has to go somewhere, which is why the bottom crust turns to mush, not that it was ever particularly crispy…this is why Italians need a knife and fork. This is why our pizzas are better than theirs.”

“The Italians are proudest” when they can substitute in buffalo-milk mozzarella and “label their pies Margherita DOC”?

The Italians aren’t wrong—Mr. Richman is, about just about everything. First of all, Margherita DOC doesn’t require buffalo-milk mozzarella. The rules set out by the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana allow for either (1) mozzarella di bufala from Campania (water-buffalo-milk mozzarella); (2) mozzarella STG fior di latte appennino meridionale DOP, (a regular cow’s-milk mozzarella that can come from Campania, Molise, Basilicata, Calabria, Puglia, or Lazio); or (3) another cow’s-milk fior di latte. This from the statutory definition:

“Mozzarella: mozzarella di bufala campana D.O.P., mozzarella S.T.G. fior di latte dell’appennino meridionale D.O.P. o altro fiordilatte certificato.”

Ditto for the rules for pizza Margherita as set out by the Italian Ministry of Agriculture, which not only states that either bufala or fior di latte is acceptable, but even gives a different name to a bufala pizza. Under the Italian Ministry’s definition, the regular “Napoletana Margherita” has fior di latte, not bufala; then there’s “Napoletana Margherita Extra,” which calls for bufala:

“Agli ingredienti base devono essere aggiunti, per la «pizza Napoletana Marinara», l’aglio e l’origano; per la «pizza Napoletana Margherita Extra», mozzarella di bufala campana DOP, basilico fresco e pomodoro fresco; per la «pizza Napoletana Margherita», la mozzarella STG o fior di latte Appennino meridionale e basilico fresco.”

But Mr. Richman doesn’t stop at getting the definition wrong; he also suggests that all Italians, if offered the choice, would choose bufala—implying that they embrace, or somehow aren’t bothered by, the sogginess of the crust. Is Mr. Richman—who has “traveled 20,000 miles” in researching this extensive set of pizza rankings—unaware that the fior di latte-vs.-bufala crust-moisture debate is a raging, unsettled controversy in Italian gastronomical circles, both inside and outside of Naples? This is one of the world’s great food cultures we’re talking about, and its culinary community deserves better than the naïve assumption that they all just like their crusts soggy.

“I’ve eaten in Naples,” explains Mr. Richman. But he must not have eaten at (arguably) the city’s most famous pizzeria, Da Michele, which uses only fior de latte d’Agerola, and never mozzarella di bufala; they don’t like the excessive liquid that drips from bufala. And although there are many pizzerias in Naples that do put bufala on pizza, just about all of them also offer fior di latte, and customers are divided between the two options. In other regions of Italy, in my experience, the use of bufala is even less common.

To misunderstand the cultural norms of a foreign country is forgivable; we’ve all been guilty of that at some point or other. But to flippantly trash another country’s food culture on the basis of a set of statutory rules that one hasn’t even looked up is irresponsible journalism.

I think a retraction should be in order.

Fresher wine, or just a pretty face?

I’m not sure which of the following two myths is more ridiculous: the myth that you can re-cork a half-drunk bottle of wine and keep it around for a week and have it “still be good,” or the mutually exclusive, but equally misguided, myth that you can keep wine from going bad with commercial “wine preserver” devices. The media is largely responsible for both of these myths—the first because of ignorance, and the second, perhaps, because of advertorial content and the power of suggestion.

What’s amazing is that almost nowhere in the media do I see discussed the magic solution to keeping leftover wine fresh—the solution that winemakers already know about—which I’ll discuss below. First, though, about the media myths:

Myth 1. You can re-cork wine and keep it around. I’m usually a fan of Consumer Reports, but their wine coverage has long been weak, and they got it embarrassingly wrong (and did the wine world a disservice) when they suggested that re-corking a partly consumed bottle of wine and keeping it in the fridge for a week was just fine (the piece has since been removed from their website—I don’t know why—but it’s reposted by a commenter here).

It’s a chemical fact that wine, when trapped in a bottle with a significant quantity of air above it, reacts quickly with the oxygen, and the wine’s sensory properties change in a matter of hours. The size of the effect depends on the proportion of wine to air in the bottle (if only a glass’s worth of wine has been poured out of the bottle, the reaction is slower; if there’s only a glass left in the bottle, the reaction is faster).

I am generally a contrarian with respect to people’s (even critics’) abilities to identify the characteristics of wine in blind tastings, but the difference between a newly opened wine and the same wine after a week is a really easy one for most people to pick up. It’s an ability that most wine critics—suggestible or not—really do have. If Consumer Reports’ critics don’t have that ability, then they need to get some new critics.

Myth 2. You can buy a device that stops wine from going bad. There are several commercial devices on the market that claim to mitigate the effects of oxygen on wine in a partially consumed bottle, and they have been written about in numerous advertorial pieces in the media. The devices fall into two basic categories: systems for pumping out oxygen (e.g. Vacu Vin , Houdini, V-Gauge) and systems for pumping in inert gas (e.g. Private Preserve, Preservino, or the top-of-the-line Vino Vault).

I haven’t done a blind, scientific study of the effectiveness of any of these devices, but anecdotally, none of them seems to me to have more than a minor, incremental effect. Larger-scale devices, which use some combination of the above two methods, are used in certain wine bars—Enomatic, for instance—and seem intuitively to have a better chance of working well, albeit with side effects (a shoe-polish smell, for instance, that many people notice in Enomatic pours). But where’s the experimental evidence? I’ve never seen a scientific test, controlled against placebos, indicating that any of these devices is effective. Why does the industry take for granted that these $10,000 machines are actually keeping the wine from changing?

The good news is that you don’t have to wait to find out if any of these gadgets work, because the best solution is almost free.

The solution: you pour the unused portion of the wine, as soon as possible after opening the bottle, into one (or more) smaller containers, and close it (or them) up as quickly as possible with very little oxygen inside the bottle. This can be done after you’ve had the wine open for a bit, but it’s best done immediately after opening. You can transfer wine into a 375mL split (half-bottle), a 187mL half-split (usually used for Champagne or sparkling wine), or even a plastic water bottle.

The size of the smaller bottle doesn’t matter; what matters is (1) to match the size of the second, smaller container to the amount of leftover wine you plan to keep; (2) to fill the splits to the absolute top before corking (or screw-topping) them, leaving as little air-space as possible between the wine and the wall(s) of the container, and thus minimizing the oxygen contact; and (3) to do this as soon as possible after you open the main bottle.

If you’re not sure how much you want to drink, but you know that you want to drink at least half a bottle, then dump out half the bottle into two 187-mL half-splits. If you wind up wanting to drink three-quarters of the bottle, just pop back open one of the splits. The other one might well be good for weeks.

What’s the proof that this method works?

The wineries do it themselves—not exactly, but the functional equivalent—during so-called “racking” and wine transfer. That is, there are several times during the winemaking and aging process, both before and after the wine is bottled, when wine is typically moved from one container to another, and fully exposed to oxygen at some point in between. Wine is transferred from one set of barrels to another, or from one set of bottles to another. Wineries sometimes change out the corks on older bottles. Do these things ruin the wines?

No. It’s all a matter of degree. Not only is it okay (it’s actually beneficial for aging) that corks and barrels naturally let in tiny amounts of oxygen over time, wine can even survive full frontal exposure to oxygen for a little while—here and there, the less the better—as long as it’s promptly re-enclosed in a container where the amount of air is minimized.

That’s the point being missed by all these devices: why try to pump in so much nitrogen or argon, or pump out so much air, when the problem could be solved merely by changing the shape of the container? This is the solution employed by box wines, which is why they keep for so long.

So, as it turns out, there is a magic device that helps leftover wine keep, and it’s cheaper than anything else: a little empty bottle. The solution is so simple, yet as is so often the case, the media throws out many convoluted suggestions—most of which are directly or indirectly connected to money-making ploys—to confuse us.

“Short-ish history of American wine with relatively few small growers, recent industry consolidation, the soil and/or climate, high land prices, producer greed/pride, the three tier distribution system, or the consumer as chump.”

Beautiful place, for a placebo

Eric Asimov at the New York Times has also recently commented on the difficulty in finding good, cheap American wines on his blog and in print. In the print article, he seems to gravitate toward the “shortish history” explanation, together with a discussion of a dominant social/consumer norm in the US wine market that leads producers to gravitate toward a single, uninteresting style (a style that I think has been promoted by many wine magazines). Asimov writes:

“In modern American wine history — post-1960 — the selection of grapes is monochromatic…In effect, then, California produces a small amount of top-flight wine along with an ocean of generic wine that seeks to imitate the top echelon, often through artifice like oak substitutes and additives. All too often, the choices are expensive cabernet or chardonnay, and imitation expensive cabernet or chardonnay.”

A similar perspective on Asimov’s blog:

“Very little wine is flawed in this day and age, now that we understand the science of winemaking and the importance of hygiene and temperature control in the mass-production of wines. But it is insipid…I think many inexpensive reds are made to imitate more expensive bottles and end up tasting artificial. Ambition is laudable and this country is full of winemakers who want to make world-class cabernet sauvignons and pinot noirs. But doesn’t anybody want to make the great equivalent of a Beaujolais or Montepulciano d’Abruzzo?”

I couldn’t agree more on the point that many inexpensive American reds try to imitate more expensive ones, and wind up uninteresting (I’d go so far as to say disgusting, a lot of the time) as a result.

Everyday consumers, even if they have different preferences than experts, seem to agree: in the blind tastings that formed the basis for The Wine Trials, US wines did proportionately much less well than foreign wines in blind tastings. Although Spain and France had fewer entries in our tastings (the universe of wines with which we started was the under-$15 mass market, which is dominated by US producers), a much higher percentage of them made it into the top 100 that were recommended in the book.

But I think there are two questions in this debate getting jumbled into one, and I want to try to separate them here. First, there is the issue of style. Second, there is the issue of pricing. My economic instinct is that these two issues have little to do with each other.

On the question of style, my hypothesis is that wine consumers are more suggestible than anyone wants to admit, and even if Asimov is “not really addressing [him]self to people who drink wine occasionally and uncritically,” those people’s suggestibility is determining the direction of the wine market, and thus impacting the critical drinkers, too.

Wine is a business, businesses pursue profit, and mainstream consumers are the drivers of that profit. If consumers are highly susceptible to the placebo effect, and if numerical wine ratings and glowing reviews are the engines of that effect, then the industry of wine writers and critics—the placebo effect’s caretakers—are endowed with extraordinary power, as a group, in determining the stylistic direction of wine.

Certainly there are unexpected blips in this directionality—Sideways, the collapsing economy—but it’s clear to me, at least, that mainstream wine magazines are promoting precisely the style that Mr. Asimov complains about, and we have them to thank for these wines’ popularity in the marketplace. It’s worth noting, too, that these magazines accept advertising from wineries, and that the vast majority of advertisers are mass-market American wineries.

On the separate issue of pricing, I believe that the three-tier system is largely to blame. My recent post entitled “The Boston Wine Party” explains why. The short version of my argument is:

1. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives imposes unconscionable duties and idiotic labeling and testing rules on imported wine, legislating sham laboratory-rubber-stamp outfits into existence, forcing foreign producers to spend thousands of dollars in farcical chemical analysis, creating extortionist barriers to entry and driving up the price of imported wine.

2. Archaic blue laws, which were enacted after Prohibition for the sole purpose of limiting how much Americans drink, still mandate the existence of middlemen that must take a cut to stay in business, further driving up the price of both imported and domestic wines.

3. As a result, domestic producers don’t learn to compete globally on price. This wine is made by the US market for the US market. It exists in a bubble.

But that system is not the only culprit. The second factor at play is that many wineries are simply choosing to overcharge for extrinsic attributes, and that practice is culturally accepted in this country. We must not forget that wine prices are not a mere function of the costs of wine production. Wineries, like all businesses, choose their pricing strategies based on sales forecasts. It is an exercise in guesswork, of course: how many more units might you ship if you lower the price $1? How many fewer if you raise the price $1? Who knows?

Wineries also have a lot of control over their cost structures—for example, they choose whether or not to spend money on advertising, on extortion fees paid to wine magazines, or on land in a prestigious appellation. The winery could always choose to sell its land and move, or to buy less expensive grapes from elsewhere.

It’s often taken for granted that charging more money for wines from prestigious appellations is justified. But consider the following: I work out of the New York offices of Workman Publishing, on Varick Street in the West Village. The opportunity cost of this office space is very high. Does Workman have no choice but to charge more for its books than an equivalent publisher on the outskirts of Houston?

No: Workman undercharges for its books. There are business reasons for locating in an advantageous place—reasons that make it worthwhile, sometimes, to spend more on fixed costs—but those costs do not necessarily need to be passed along to consumers. The point of this is that businesses ultimately choose how much to charge for their products. Price is not a natural inevitability of location.

Of course, terroir doesn’t figure into book publishing (or maybe it does, but that’s a conversation for another day…). Napa Valley does have an advantageous terroir. But so do many less expensive areas than Napa and Sonoma: Walla Walla, Washington, for instance, or the Hudson River Valley.

The real reason that many US wine producers buy land in, or grapes from, Napa Valley isn’t because it enables them to make inherently better wine; as we’ve discussed, the same style of cheap wine is being made everywhere. Rather, the investment pays off because mainstream wine magazines perpetuate the myth that Napa Valley wine is worth paying extra for. And when the placebo effect kicks in, it’s a myth that becomes reality.

Am I just five times more likely to cut myself?

This Gopnik explains with what he calls the “Devil’s Theory of Innovation”: briefly, that “cutthroat…competition produces stasis,” and that “we are born to be inherently frivolous aesthetes, who like change for change’s sake.”

I am deeply sympathetic to this point of view. In fact, Gopnik’s piece reminded me of a long law-and-economics argument that I had seven or eight years ago with Yale Law professor (and erstwhile Microsoft consultant) George Priest on the same topic: Gillette’s farcical march of purported technological progress toward ever more blades. The argument happened over a lovely dinner of Connecticut River shad with roe that Professor Priest and his wife kindly hosted at their house for the Yale Law and Technology Society, a student organization that I was running at the time. (I don’t know if the organization’s still active, but the journal we started seems to still be running.)

My position was that the Mach 3 (which was the cutting edge—so to speak—at the time) was a classic case of a widespread and growing problem in consumer products industries: that companies were increasingly competing less on the merits, and more on their ability to capture a certain sort of emotional space in consumers’ brains—a limited quantity of space, I argued, and thus a zero-sum game. I claimed, among other things, that this state of things undermined the stated constitutional purpose of trademark law—to encourage innovation by protecting society’s signals of historical quality—and, along with the (already known) effects of price signaling, undermined most of then-current consumer behavior theory, too.

Professor Priest argued that no, three blades really were better than two, and if they weren’t, the new product wouldn’t gain traction, and my idea that consumers were just a bunch of idiotic copycats that had no idea how to judge substantive quality was condescending, deeply wrong, even offensive.

By the time the argument was over, Professor Priest had told me that he was planning on voting against my degree at the spring faculty meeting (I was a third-year at the time). I think he was only joking, but I’m not certain.

I’d like to think that what’s happened in consumer products industries in the past half-decade has illustrated my point more elegantly than I probably did: for instance, what’s happened with the luxury wine industry (e.g. Louis Vuïtton Moet Hennessy), which I discuss in The Wine Trials (in blind tastings of more than 500 consumers, we proved that people actually preferred cheaper wines to more expensive wines).

I’d submit that more categories of consumer products than we want to admit are now functioning like fashion or cosmetics goods, succeeding or failing on the virtue of good or bad buzz, a good or bad aesthetic of change, rather than on the underlying merits of the product.

Professor Priest, if you’re reading this, I invite you to comment: do you still stick to your guns?

For my part, what I believed then, I believe doubly now: that the marketing and advertising departments of companies—and companies to which those functions are outsourced—are no longer involved (if they ever were) in their purported business: to disseminate information to consumers. Rather, they’re just participating in a social/emotional arms race at the expense of consumers, spending more and more money on creating the same exact sorts of good feelings that we would have once got from, say, merely owning a razor. Marketing and advertising are deadweight losses. I would go so far as to suggest that the federal government limit corporate tax deductions for marketing expenditures.

What’s missing, perhaps, from Gopnik’s article is a discussion of the placebo effect—the notion that the Fusion might actually feel better on our skin on a sensory level merely because we’re told it’s more advanced, more expensive, or whatever. This is what my research in wine indicates, anyway. But the upshot is the same: if the way a product feels, or tastes, has increasingly little to do with how it’s actually made, that, too, undermines classical consumer behavior theory: if innovation were suddenly frozen, would consumers be any worse off?

Gopnik continues with a few other luddite’s lessons—e.g. candlelight is better than any booklight—and winds up discussing the stable starfish (as opposed to the showy peacock, the Gillette analogy), which hasn’t evolved in hundreds of millions of years:

The variations of abundance die at the moment of crisis, and the old stable dull solutions come to life again. The peacock years are over, and the starfish years begin. The grand lek is over and the big empty is here. The peacock with its tail and buzzing batteries is dying. The starfish, by candlelight, inherits the earth.

I don’t want to spoil Gopnik’s magnificent ending—go buy a copy of the New Yorker (which could certainly use our support) and read it yourself—but I’ll say that he finishes on an uplifting, even moving note. Only the limitless lyrical talent of one of our greatest essayists, perhaps, can bring such misty-eyed depth to what’s really a technical/polemic point: when merits-based competition ends, and companies—wineries, razor-makers—stop innovating on any axis other than the sophisticated technology of persuasion, microeconomics as we know it is doomed.

Wine is still the thing to accompany a family dinner or elaborate restaurant meal in southern Europe, which is why their per-capita wine consumption remains higher than ours. But because Americans increasingly tend to order wine at bars, and Europeans generally don’t, this gap is closing rapidly. The US now beats Italy in total wine consumption.

In Italy, amongst young professionals, a far more popular nighttime endeavor than going to the sort of upmarket (or so-called “gastronomic”) restaurant where you’d order wine is getting a big group together at a pizzeria. And contrary to US stereotypes, the Italians actually almost never drink wine with pizza—it’s strictly beer (or Coca-Cola).

In most of Spain, it’s the cervecería—not the wine bar—that defines the nighttime casual-eating-with-groups culture, and there, draft beer (“caña,” typically poured in tiny glasses) is beautifully paired with what’s often eaten: raciones of fatty jamón iberico and sweet pan con tomate; marinated fish, garlicky shellfish, and vinegary vegetables; boiled octopus drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with paprika; or pinxtos/canapés (bites of food served on slices of baguette), which often come free with each round of drinks.

When Spanish or Italian beer comes fresh from the tap, its elegant taste profile can yield extraordinary pleasure. Mahou, Nastro Azzurro, Estrella Damm, Forst, and Cruzcampo may not be dissimilar from each other, but they’re all models of balance, clean, bright, and refreshingly bitter. They’re usually poured properly—allowing the head to collect into something creamy and dense—and, like dry Basque sidra, they’re well suited to the occasion, which is precisely what seems to have been lost in translation in America’s rapid adoption of wine as a cocktail.

Even at Spain’s expensive restaurants, beer is often offered as an apéritif—an alternative to dry Manzanilla or Oloroso sherry, before you start with the wine—something I’ve rarely seen elsewhere.

Because Spanish and Italian beer doesn’t have the sort of hopped-up, boozed-out complexity that caters to critics—it’s not trying to be Belgian or Oregonian—you won’t see them much at, say, New York’s beer bars, and there’s a popular misconception that these countries just don’t do beer well. (That misconception is backed up by the fact that when you order, say, Peroni by the bottle at a bar in the US, it almost always turns out to be something skunky and/or honeyed and legitimately disgusting. Don’t ever order Italian beer when it’s imported in bottles. But that’s an article for another day.)

Yes, the wine bar concept is spreading through southern Europe, and that might be applying a gentle upward pressure on wine consumption amongst the trendsters there.

But the wine bar is still really an American thing, and it hasn’t really yet permeated mainstream yuppie culture anywhere across the Atlantic. Generally speaking, in Europe, the words “wine bar” signal a New York fetish nightclub, or a restaurant with terrible pan-Asian cuisine and an overpriced list of Champagne magnums and Grey Goose bottle service. These places typically serve crappy imported beer, and often don’t even run a tap—the ultimate fuck you to the country’s authentic beer culture.

Why must hot bodies and a well-conceived drink program so rarely overlap?

On culinary televangelism and the Parkerization of cuisine

In the introduction to his book La Cocina al Desnudo (roughly “The Kitchen Laid Bare”), the chef Santi Santamaría writes: “one of the greatest challenges faced by today’s chefs is to avoid becoming the court jesters of the snobs and the posh.”

One of the highlights of FENAVIN, Spain’s national wine fair, was a spirited hour-long debate on the status of Spanish cuisine between Mr. Santamaría (Santceloni, Racò de Can Fabes, EVO, Tierra; on the right end in the photo), one of Spain’s great culinary traditionalists, and José Carlos Capel (on the left end), a well-regarded food critic for El País who, generally speaking, embraces the avant-garde.

It was a debate to which Ferran Adrià, one of the pioneers of molecular gastronomy (the culinary movement to which Santamaría alternately refers as “cocina de la vanguardia,” “tecnoemocional,” and “cocina del laboratorio”), was surely invited—and didn’t come.

Perhaps Mr. Adrià felt no need to defend himself. In late April 2009, his restaurant, elBulli, was named the best in the world for the fourth year in a row in the annual survey of the World’s Top 50 restaurants, by the British Restaurant Magazine, while Santamaría is absent from the list entirely. Fellow molecular gastronomy houses The Fat Duck (UK), Noma (Denmark), Mugaritz (Spain), and El Celler de Can Roca (Spain) round out the rest of the top five. (The chefs of Noma and Mugaritz studied with Adrià.)

Santamaría, without being so immodest as to suggest that he, too, deserved at least some ranking in the top 50, hinted at the absurdity—and it really is an absurdity—that food critics and publications from the US and UK, regions mostly devoid of complex food traditions of their own, should be the judges of whether fideua, bollito misto, and blanquette de veau are now hopelessly passé, and whether a kitchen need be outfitted with a centrifuge, liquid nitrogen tanks, and stockpiles of sodium alginate and calcium chloride in order to be considered one of the world’s best.

That question is at the crux of a crisis in modern cuisine—a culture war. Although these men that have learned to make human beings breathe like dragons have been anointed as philosopher-kings by America’s culinary televangelists and food bloggers, what exactly is the composition of this jury? Does it represent any depth of food education? Any geographical breadth?

Restaurant’s top 50 list, which is determined by more than 800 food critics from around the world and sponsored by S. Pellegrino, is clearly influential—influential enough, at least, to come up in the discussion between Messrs. Santamaría and Capel.

But what are we to make of the fact that, the entire continent of Asia, home to the world’s greatest culinary bounty, has only two restaurants in the top 50—Les Creations de Narisawa in Tokyo (#20) and Iggy’s in Singapore (#45)—and they’re both French? Even more preposterously, the list tells us that the three best actual Asian restaurants in the world are in Sydney (Tetsuya’s, #17), New York (Masa, #27), and London (Nobu, #34).

As the wine guru Jancis Robinson has indirectly asked, what does it say about the composition and wisdom of the food media elite if this is their jury verdict?

Is this the Parkerization of the food world?

Yes, chemical pyrotechnics and scattered plating make for good food porn in magazines. And yes, it is interesting, at least intellectually, to watch the arcs of cuisine and modern art intersect in molecular gastronomy. Yet the notion that one must be a molecular gastronomist to be truly great restaurant—and that is, increasingly, the consensus view—is poisonous. It devalues both subtlety and directness. It devalues terroirs of all different sorts. It devalues the commitment to any one culinary tradition. It devalues the multi-generational emotional and even theoretical structures that define many great restaurants. And above all, it devalues pure deliciousness.

Are the world’s greatest chefs and restaurants—as many of its greatest winemakers and wineries have irreversibly done—being forced to reinvent themselves as pretentious pleasure pumps for the adolescent palates of an army of camera-wielding tourists who write for food blogs and lifestyle magazines?

Court jesters, indeed.

Apparently Stephen Colbert was amused by our paper investigating whether people could taste the difference between pâté and dog food.

His conclusion was pretty funny.

Spain’s Felix Solís Avantis is probably the biggest wine producer you’ve never heard of, pumping out more than 200 million liters per year. The company’s industrial facility in Valdepeñas (in La Mancha, near Ciudad Real) is more or less the Death Star of wine factories. The warehouse alone is the size of an airplane hangar, and it’s so mechanized that there is not a human being inside it: giant, sliding robots whisk the cases from place to place, storing and retrieving vast quantities of wine.

The most interesting thing about Solís, though, is that, according to Ana Escamilla González, the director of marketing, the company actually produces only 10 wines in Valdepeñas, but they’re bottled and labeled under 400 different brands around Spain and the rest of the world. On average, then, each wine gets about 40 different labels, different looks, and different prices. Ms. González told me that the international “presentations,” as she calls them, are created in consultation with local marketing specialists. The Russian bottle, for example, has a warrior surrounded by lots of gold flourishes, while the Japanese bottle, she says, has “the same warrior, but without the gold.”

“Versioning” a product—varying it slightly and selling it under different brand names—is a well-known technique in marketing courses at business schools; among other things, it’s often a way of getting around laws that ban price discrimination. A classic example in the IT literature is the adoption of a device that intentionally slows the page-per-minute speed of a laser printer, so that the company can then sell a so-called “crippled” version of the same printer at a lower price and reach an additional market segment. Tim Harford reports in Slate that IBM did the same thing with the 486 processor: “the cheaper version was the expensive version with some extra work done on the chip to reduce its speed.”

I can’t decide if it’s less brazen or more brazen to employ the technique when the product inside the package doesn’t vary at all. Clearly, this marketing department is familiar with the wine placebo effect. Maybe they have their own name for it. In any case, they probably don’t sit around discussing it—instead, they trade on it.

Should we stage a Boston Wine Party, and throw our wine into the Atlantic?

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the bewilderingly diverse wines on display at this week’s FENAVIN, Spain’s national wine fair, is the price range: 2€–5€ is most common, trailed slightly by <2€ (a significant category, with strong representation from La Mancha, the wine fair’s home region) and 5€–10€.

In the 2€–3€ range are a vast assortment of sometimes steely, often aromatic, almost always appropriately acidic whites from Castilla-La Mancha and other lesser-known regions. If you want a 1994 or 1995 Gran Reserva from La Mancha—an eminently mature Tempranillo, Cabernet Sauvignon, or Tempranillo-Cabernet blend—it might cost you up to 6€.

All of this is a prescient reminder of the three-tined gouging of the American wallet—and, by extension, of the American palate—that defines our wine industry.

The first tine is regulatory: the unconscionable customs duties imposed at our borders, and, worse still, the preposterous bureaucratic labeling and testing rules that are imposed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. (Is there anything that more clearly reveals our government’s still-Puritanical view of wine drinking as a vice than this agency’s name?)

The irony of these idiotic rules, at least as concerns the importation of Spanish wine, is that the EU’s own regulation of so-called “quality wine” (i.e. non-table wine) is actually far more restrictive than our own domestic wine laws, which allow all sorts of preservatives and additives that would be illegal in Europe.

Yet we force Spanish wine producers to spend thousands of dollars in farcical chemical analysis (a boondoggle for sham chem-lab outfits that have been legislated into existence) and an onerous label-approval process. These arbitrary, extortionist barriers to entry function like a medieval wax seal, blocking much of Europe’s best-value wine from ever showing up in America.

This protectionist regime reminds me of the brief rule of Abdalá Bucaram in Ecuador. Before President Bucaram was removed from office after six months for “mental incapacity,” he famously (okay, famously in Ecuador, anyway) imposed a 1000% “luxury tax” on imported wines and liquors. The toxic effects of the luxury tax on consumers were a principal reason for his ouster. (The silver lining was that Ecuador got its first woman president, Rosalía Arteaga, who had been Bucaram’s vice-president—before the legislature got rid of her, too, two days later.)

US wine policy doesn’t just rob consumers blind—it also takes away pressure on our own producers to compete globally on price, which ultimately works against them. Ever wonder why the US exports so little wine?

The second tine is legislative: the extraordinary markups that importers and distributors still take are protected by a state-by-state three-tier system (importer–distributor–retailer/restaurant) that was set up at the repeal of Prohibition for the sole purpose of limiting how much Americans drink.

In the civilized modern world, wine stores are allowed to buy wine from wine producers, and sell it at a reasonable markup. In our bizzarro world, a middleman is legislatively mandated.

These archaic blue laws and the industry that they have engendered—artifacts of an era in which the religious fervor that brought about Prohibition was still a very real cultural norm—continue to rob consumers of billions of dollars, year after year.

The third tine is what happens in restaurants: wine multiples of 2.5x, 3x, or even 4x. When US consumers are being asked to pay $40 at retail for a wine that sells in Spain for 3€, we’re exactly matching Bucaram’s 1000% markup.

In short, if we were to do a Spanish version of The Wine Trials—Fearless Critic’s guide to inexpensive wines—its price cut-off wouldn’t be anywhere near the $15 per bottle that it is in the US.  would probably be limited to wines under 5€, or US$6.65—or perhaps even under 3€, or US$2.25.

The Spanish wine industry, of course, deserves a lot of credit for pricing so reasonably. Congress should be deeply ashamed of its consistent record of preventing our own country’s industry from doing so.

At a recent beer-tasting event held at the Workman headquarters, Randy told me that, generally speaking, bottled beer should be poured straight into the dead center of the glass, not into a glass tilted at a 45-degree angle, as is popularly believed. When beer is poured into a tilted glass, Randy argues, the head never fully forms, and you miss out on the beer’s creamy introduction.

True to his word, in Tasting Beer, Randy describes how beer should be poured for judging at a competition: “Pour the beer right down the middle of the glass, wait for the foam to settle, and if needed, pour 

a little more.”

The late beer critic Michael Jackson seemed to agree with this generally, although he dissented in the case of ales, which he preferred without too creamy a head. In Ultimate Beer, Jackson writes (of pouring ales): “A gentle, steady pour down the side of the tilted glass will stop the beer from foaming excessively. Steepen the angle and pour more directly to avoid the beer being too flat. Aim for one ‘finger’ of foam. Too much creaminess will rob the beer of its appetizingly bitter character. The hop oils will migrate from the beer itself and hide in the head.”

Mosher and Jackson agree that German-style weizens (wheat beers), which have high levels of carbonation, are an exception to any pouring rule. Writes Mosher: “The traditional method of pouring will amaze and astound your friends. First, rinse a very clean glass with clean water. With the glass in one hand and the bottle in the other, invert both at a steep diagonal angle. As the glass fills, keep the neck of the bottle just above the level of liquid in the glass. If you do it right, you’ll get a full glass with foam right up to the rim. If you do it wrong, well, you may find yourself mopping beer off the table. The final step is to take the near-empty bottle and roll it back and forth on the table, then pick it up and dribble the yeast in a circular motion on top of the foam, where it will melt through and create a cascade of cloudiness through the beer.”

The article has just been posted as a working paper (pdf) with the American Association of Wine Economists.

The relationship between tourists and the places that they like to go has been ambivalent since tourism—travel as entertainment—became a real global industry in the early 1900s. Sometimes cities become caricatures of themselves, molded into their own exaggerated and inauthentic images abroad. Other times, they just become ugly high-rise beach resorts or overcrowded, overpriced wastelands.

But then there are some places where something completely different happens—where the intersection of tourists and locals has spun off, across the years, into something newer and stranger than could ever have been contemplated by either party to begin with.

To say that Amsterdam, where pot, mushrooms, and hallucinogenic substances of all sorts are legal, is only about the drugs would be to adopt a narrow perspective on the city. But Amsterdam is about the drugs, and one of the funniest things about the middle-aged American tourists that visit Amsterdam in droves, most for the first time, many with their children, 

is that a lot of them seem to have had absolutely no clue what they were getting into.

They weren’t exactly lied to, these unsuspecting families. They were truthfully told—by the tourist board or the travel guide, perhaps—about the inescapable romance of the canals. And these canals, like the ones in Venice and Bruges, really are that romantic. In Amsterdam—unlike in Venice—you can get everywhere in a car or on a bike, and the bridges are so low, there’s little in the way of actual transport along the waterways, aside from the occasional floating dining room full of tourists. These boats, which can actually fit under the bridges, are like little pieces of a cruise ship that has just been flattened by the accidental foot of a giant.

The problem might really be that the middle-aged families spent too much time reading the travel guides. Amsterdam’s “stunning juxtaposition of old and new,” waxes Time Out Amsterdam—perhaps in an attempt to fit as many guidebook clichés into one sentence as possible—“still has to be seen to be believed.”

The travel writers rave on about Anne Frank, Van Dyck, Van Gogh, bicycles, tulips, windmills, wooden shoes; about how it’s so different but so European, the consummate stop along the Grand Tour; about the lovely (but not unsafe) lean of the old merchants’ houses on the Prinsengracht and the Herengracht; about the friendliness of the Dutch populace and the “impossibly welcoming corner cafés.”

It is that same publication, Time Out, that includes the most prominent guide to the coffeeshops—the places in Amsterdam where marijuana is sold legally—that is available on the mainstream commercial market. The section covers only four of the book’s more than 300 pages, but it is still an uncommon dose of realism among the major chains of travel guides, praising certain coffeeshops for their “wide range of imported grass,” or their “top-quality 80% organically grown weed.”

Perhaps purposefully or perhaps not, that section of Time Out Amsterdam is buried after Bars, before Shops and Services, and between pages 147 and 153 of a 316-page book. There is also a five-page essay entitled “Sex and Drugs” at the end of the “In context” section, after “History,” “Amsterdam Today,” “Art,” and “Architecture.” But we former travel writers know that this is the section of a travel guide that nobody ever reads.

Certainly my friend’s mother, a high-level executive at a multinational company, didn’t have time to read it. She, probably one of the most cosmopolitan 50-something women in the world, was shocked when she walked into a “coffeeshop,” asked for the menu, and was handed a list of ten kinds of marijuana with prices by the gram. How could it possibly be that nobody had ever told her?

Well, one of the interesting aspect of the decriminalization of marijuana and mushrooms in Amsterdam is that it happened in the late 1970s, after the hippie generation had pretty much grown up. So even if the executive wasn’t a reformed hippie, a lot of the reformed hippies themselves have no idea what they’re missing. A lot of them probably wouldn’t care anymore anyway, at least any more than intellectually.

Still, how could the drug culture of Amsterdam could be such a taboo subject among the media outlets that cover the city as if it is just another beautiful European capital? Travel writers, as a lot, are fairly observant—but who is writing these books?

As you navigate the city’s bewildering network of twisting, dead-end streets and gently bending canals, one of the first things that strikes you is how many of the offerings seem meant to be experienced—only meant to be experienced—under the influence of marijuana or mushrooms. There is a store that sells only holograms. There is a café with stalactites and stalagmites. There are restaurants with life-sized dolphins made from plaster, restaurants where you eat in the dark, restaurants where you eat on a La-Z-Boy, and what must be more than a thousand purveyors of Belgian fries with mayonnaise (the first time you try them stoned, you realize that even if the fries are for everybody, they’re most especially for the stoners). It is like an open network of sensory pleasures and communicative understandings built into the rest of the city that suddenly illuminates before your eyes at the moment that you get high.

Out of respect for my colleagues, I don’t want to believe that the travel writers haven’t actually visited the city. So my only explanation is that many of the writers have never actually tried the drugs, and thus don’t understand how deeply the drugs filter through the culture and how incomplete an account of Amsterdam really is that doesn’t talk a lot about them. (It never ceases to amaze me how much more often people who have never tried drugs like to talk about drugs than people who have tried drugs.)

In any case, this lack of information leads to a lot of strange moments of contact between culture and subculture, like the executive in the coffeeshop looking for a cup of coffee, or the lost British couple with the young child wandering into an alley of the red light district and getting directions to Amsterdam’s most famous tourist attraction from a heroin dealer to whom they’re later compelled to give an involuntarily large tip.

They’ll get there in the end. Like the fairytale castles of Bavaria, the Anne Frank House is one of the few educational tourist attractions in Europe that holds the interest of children. Her story is their story; it speaks to them. But it is one of the few places in the city where the two cultures of tourism—the chaste and the profane—do not collide. Maybe there is something decadent and disturbing about visiting a monument to the Holocaust under the influence of a mind-altering substance.

There must be something right about that. Or, at least, I feel it too, even if it’s just an American cultural norm—the idea that the choice to smoke pot is a selfish one, or the idea that pot cannot be used to enhance other things in our lives, especially not emotional and serious ones—sex, for instance, or mourning. Even the college kids seem to sober up to pay their respects to Anne Frank.

It is quite a different story at the Van Gogh museum, a space that carefully straddles the intersection of the two cultures—conventional and altered states of mind. For Van Gogh, of all people, to have come from Amsterdam is almost too perfect to be true. The fight between conventional and altered states of mind is something that the painter himself frequently confronted—first with absinthe, and later with depression and epilepsy.

Could the form that these paintings’ immortalization takes possibly be any more appropriate to the artist? In front of “Wheat Field with Crows,” you might see a stuffy German couple with a deep knowledge of post-Impressionist history next to two American college girls that are truly, madly, and deeply high for the first time in their lives. And all four of them, each extracting his or her own experiences of color and categories of meaning, can barely handle how fucking good the painting is.

Those are the castles of Bavaria for a young adult. There is education the emotional way, the reason for the Van Gogh poster on the dorm room wall. But these kids’ experience in Amsterdam is also inescapably about America. Because one of the most curious, if understandable, aspects of the drug culture in the city is the extent to which if it’s legal at home, it’s not worth trying.

There is one store in the old city center that sells probably five hundred kinds of psychoactive and physiologically active substances—from a package of dried and shredded wormwood, the active ingredient in absinthe, to a potted San Pedro cactus, which makes you trip for eighteen hours and grows only in the area around Vilcabamba, Ecuador’s Valley of Eternal Youth. What is the question that the clerks hear most at this store? “How safe is this?” “Are you sure I won’t flip out?” “How much does this cost?”

No: “Is this legal in the USA?”

If it is, they’re not interested. You hear it more often from the Americans, and the younger they are, the more you hear it: There might be nothing that damns the approach taken by Reagan’s War on Drugs and its progeny more visually, more empirically, than to watch a steady parade of America’s youth combing this little store for something—anything—that they’re not allowed to eat at home. And that too is part of what Amsterdam is about. Their drug subculture is very much about us.

The Dutch really went out on a limb when they made this courageous choice in the late 1970s. However you feel about it, you have to admit that legalization was pretty ballsy. So what did they do to deserve the US drug tourists? Us? And now that they have us, what can they do with us? The problem for all the visiting pot smokers—American or otherwise—who arrive hoping to have some cultural contact with a city that is indisputably an object lesson in tolerance is that in Amsterdam, unlike in other Dutch cities, they, the visitors, make up most of the customers in most of the coffeeshops.

That is no trivial matter. Because if you came to Amsterdam to smoke pot, you immediately realize that for the Dutch people it’s just something else to do, like drinking wine with dinner, not some holy grail of open-mindedness. In the US, you feel like one of the cool kids for smoking pot. In Amsterdam, you’re one of the losers, at least in the eyes of the locals (and for me, at least, those are the eyes that matter when you travel, however condescending they might be). It’s hard, thus, once you’re in Amsterdam, to distance yourself from your fellow smokers or to think of yourself as anything other than a drug tourist. And so you accept your place in the city’s moral hierarchy.

That said, there’s a lot more sketchy shit going on in the city than whatever’s happening in the coffeeshops, and the locals’ reaction is eminently understandable when you look at what else the pot and mushrooms attract like magnets. But when people point to Amsterdam and say, look at all the druggies on the street, this is what would happen if we legalized pot, what they’re missing is that this is only what would happen if we legalized pot in just one country. The casual pot smokers might or might not come for the pot, but the people were really into pot would flock there from all over the world to the best city in that country, and they would create such a strong subculture there that it would come to envelop much of the city’s social life. And that’s what happened.

The locals, and the critics, are right that Amsterdam is now full of drug addicts. And they’re basically right that nobody wants to live in a city full of drug addicts. The pot smokers certainly don’t want to live in a city of drug addicts; most pot smokers are not drug addicts, and what a buzz kill it is to have your ephemeral mental state ruined by an angry guy shooting up in an alley. Not even the drug addicts probably want to live in a city full of drug addicts. But there are certainly a lot of true drug addicts among the people who think it’s worth traveling all the way to Amsterdam where strong hydroponic weed and peyote and mushrooms are sold legally and cheaply, over the counter.

And so among the people in Amsterdam who abuse drugs, very few of them are Dutch. You can say this is a failure for the city itself, but you can also say that the Dutch experiment is a success: Dutch levels of hard drug abuse and addiction are low by international standards. And if you’re constructing a behavioral economics argument about whether or not drugs should be legal in other places, that’s the only thing that should matter, because if everyone legalized pot and mushrooms, the drug tourists wouldn’t have to come to Amsterdam anymore, and it would become a lot more like the city the locals want it to be. We owe it to Amsterdam to be courageous too.

In the meantime, though, it’s a curiosity, and I love a good curiosity. Because even among the aspects of life in Amsterdam that do not clearly or directly derive from the drug culture, there is always the vague sense that they might, and that’s what makes it all so curious. The thing that separates the city’s famed red light district from others around the world is how visual it is. This is not just, it is not even mainly, a marketplace for sex. It is a show, women displaying themselves with bravado, sometimes playful, other times heartbreaking, for an audience so varied that it even includes, from time to time, the British family with the little child, lost on the way to the Anne Frank museum. In any other city, the little kid wouldn’t even know that he was in the red light district. And the red light district, and Amsterdam, is very much about those interactions too.

Perhaps this is part of why nowhere in town—not even its red light district—is there anything truly seedy or truly scary. It feels more like yet another urban thing that is, like the Van Gogh Museum, just designed to be seen—and perhaps this one is even designed while under, or designed to be seen under, the influence of something. Only, one might argue, a city planner in the intense visual depths of a mushroom trip would think to decorate a red-light district by illuminating its prostitutes (and the beds and sink in the background of their rooms) with real red lights that reflect off the canals and iterate beneath troupes of tourists whose moods span every possible point on the axis between sensory detatchment and urgent genital need.

The omnipotent haze of the drug culture, though, also has its subtler forms, and these are some of the most memorable. At some point, the question of whether or not the experience is about the drugs melts away, and the collective memory of your time in Amsterdam melts into one long trip: travel as escapist entertainment. One day my friends and I were meandering between an out-of-the-way coffeeshop and a third-floor pancake house, and we noticed rows and rows of people stopped along the sidewalks around the bicycle fisherman in the secondary canal below. We, too, stopped to watch.

The bicycle fisherman was a waterproof man, dressed from head to toe in municipal orange, sitting atop a long trawler that glided along the still water at an almost imperceptibly slow speed. He looked calm, practically sleepy, as he reclined in a spinning chair in the winter sun, his hand on the classic joystick of heavy machinery, lowering the forklift into the water and retrieving some of the hundreds of bicycles that sat at the bottom of the shallow canals. Every dip of the tongs into the mess of olive goo that flows beneath the city’s gently arching bridges would yield four or five partially crushed bikes and toss them into the heap of others, like a junkyard growing in the middle of the long boat.

Are these just the realities of living in a city of canals? Do that many people really throw their bikes, or ride their bikes, into the water? Or was the bicycle fishing a show by the stoners and for the stoners, a work of interactive performance art in which the city’s department of public works was involuntarily chosen to play the lead role?

Or did we just imagine it all?

You can pre-order the book on amazon.com, which should receive stock within the week. The book will soon arrive at DC area stores, including Politics & Prose, Kramerbooks, B&N, Borders, and Books a Million.

In putting together the book, I worked with a team of critics and editors that included Alexis Herschkowitsch, Erin McReynolds, Rebecca Markovits, Justine Chiou, Coco Krumme, Sandra Di Capua, and Christina Dahlman.

1. Are most wine critics impartial judges of quality, or are they really serving as public-relations advocates on behalf of producers? With evidence from my own empirical work, expository journalism, and a survey of the industry, I argue that most wine critics are really in the business of advertising wine, not judging it impartially. Critics are for sale.

2. My exposé of Wine Spectator’s “Award of Excellence” program.

3. My research indicating that wine experts don’t prefer expensive wine to cheap wine by a significant margin in blind tastings: In a year-long series of blind tastings that I conducted with wine experts and non-experts from the US, France, and other countries, my colleagues and I poured more than 6,000 glasses of wine from brown-bagged bottles that cost from $1.50 to $150. On the whole, our tasters actually preferred the cheaper wines to the more expensive wines—by a statistically significant margin. Even among the wine experts alone, there was only a weakly positive correlation between price and preference—one that didn’t rise to the level of statistical significance.

4. Blind tasting and what I call the “wine placebo effect”: No scientific blind-tasting study of wine experts has ever shown expensive wines to do consistently well, or cheap wines to do consistently poorly.

5. “The taste of money”: I believe that the sensory experience itself that changes when you know the wine is expensive. 

6. “The honest wine movement”: the way forward. I advocate for a new approach to quantitative wine evaluation that’s based only on double-blind tasting. So-called “single-blind tasting,” in which tasters know the vintage and/or region (and thus general price range) but not the exact producer, is not enough.

The Fearless Critic Austin Restaurant Guide, Second Edition (Fearless Critic Media, 592 pages, paperback, $15.95, distributed by Workman) has been released. The book’s scope has been vastly increased, from 390 to 480 restaurants in the greater Austin, Texas area, including Round Rock and the Hill Country. It’s now available on amazon.com, and here’s a list of the Austin-area bookstores and retail stores that sell the book.

My devoted and patient team of editors and critics includes Rebecca Markovits and Monika Powe Nelson—the co-authors of the First Edition (released in 2006)—along with Alexis Herschkowitsch, Erin McReynolds, and Nat Davis.

About the book:

Here’s the article we published showing that most wine drinkers prefer cheaper wines to more expensive wines:

Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better? Evidence from a Large Sample of Blind Tastings (Journal of Wine Economics, Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 2008). Robin Goldstein, Johan Almenberg, Anna Dreber, John W. Emerson, Alexis Herschkowitsch, and Jacob Katz.

Abstract: Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. In a sample of more than 6,000 blind tastings, we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less. For individuals with wine training, however, we find indications of a non-negative relationship between price and enjoyment. Our results are robust to the inclusion of individual fixed effects, and are not driven by outliers: when omitting the top and bottom deciles of the price distribution, our qualitative results are strengthened, and the statistical significance is improved further. These findings suggest that non-expert wine consumers should not anticipate greater enjoyment of the intrinsic qualities of a wine simply because it is expensive or is appreciated by experts.