I'm sorry, but this is just plain stupid.

The no politics rule is about to be broken, because I need to make it clear that I sympathize COMPLETELY with the sentiments expressed here, but come on, already! Just who exactly do these guys think they're hurting by pouring out the '86 Margaux and the '95 Dom Perignon?

In all, Tim Wright and Tommy Cortopassi, co-owners of the restaurant, unceremoniously dumped 12 bottles of vintage French wine worth about $1,000 into a white plastic bucket.

Wright and Cortopassi poured with gusto on the sidewalk outside their front door on South Virginia Street to protest the continued opposition of France in the United Nations to the U.S. campaign against Iraq.

I've tried to make this point before, elsewhere, and I'll try again here, so listen up, all 3 of you. Boycotts are stupid and usually end up hurting the wrong people. The people who make their living from growing grapes in France, many of whom can't afford to drink their own wines (although that certainly isn't true of, say, Corinne Mentzelopoulos) aren't the ones making foreign policy. But if you feel you need to punish them anyway, or to deprive the French government of the tax revenue from the wine you buy, don't buy it! "The French" have already been paid for the bottles that went down the drain in Reno last week. They couldn't care less if that wine passed through a human digestive system on its way to the sewer. And I'd bet some poor American shmuck is going to end up getting the cost of those wines added to his dinner tab. Let's get real here, folks!

Okay. Well. We now return you to our regularly scheduled blog.

The problem with allowing so much time to go by between posts here is that I get intimidated by the sheer volume of stuff I want to write about which, naturally, leads me to procrastinate further. So I'll just jump in here in no particular order and ramble a bit.

Well, speaking of Aussie Shiraz, our wine group had a blind tasting of 'em a few nights after I posted on the Charles Cimicky (immediately below, in case you didn't follow that link). You'd have thought I would have recognized them instantly, but I didn't. Which is to say, I guess I did but publicly rejected that intuition as being wrong because, well, the wines had no bacon fat, big, ripe cherries or spice. Which is to say that they all tasted a whole lot like the Shiraz I'd just noted had the same deficits a few days earlier. This is discouraging, because I've always liked the stuff and I'm now despairing of ever being able to find one I like again. This is especially disconcerting because I'd much rather be buying wine from Australia right now than wine from France. (Ooops, that's politics, let's move on.)

1996 Sanford Pinot Noir Barrel Select (Sanford & Benedict Vineyard). I had a few bad bottles of this a few months ago. Or perhaps they were asleep. This was was neither bad nor sleepy. It was quite nice, though I thought it got a little rough around the edges toward the bottom of the bottle. I'm noticing that California Pinots seem to go through a lot of ups and downs -- at least the ones I've been drinking. I thought the '96s were all goners. Not so.

Ah, here's a beaut. 1993 Arrowood Malbec. What a fabulous bottle of wine. And, frankly, nowhere near ready to drink. The first glass was heavenly but still more in-your-face than I usually like with food. It turned out to have a love affair with my nicely dry-aged NY Strip, though. The concentration and depth in this wine and the lushness of the fruit as it wends its way through its 10th year of life are very impressive. The rest of the bottle was still somewhat closed, though. Delicious anyway, but definitely asking for more time. I hope I live long enough to see these come into their full maturity, 'cause I only have one left but then it's time to start on the '94s. I'm likely to try one of them first, actually, because it's entirely possible they're not quite as massive.

A few briefs (it's been a while on these): 1990 Viader. Developing just beautifully, so tasty it's hard to stop drinking. The bottle was gone before we knew it. 1994 Flora Springs Trilogy. Following the Viader, there actually seemed to be more stuff here, but it was a touch on the premature side. Totally enjoyable now but obviously still holding something back. If you only have a few, try one now anyway to gauge your own schedule for the rest.

I'd just let this sit here while I go do some prep for dinner, but this is Blogger, and you never know. So I'll put it up, just in case someone comes along looking for something to read. More soon. Really.