originally posted by Eden Mylunsch:
originally posted by MLipton:
Even after an hour or more since opening, it bore little to no resemblance to any other Spätburgunder of my acquaintance.
You say this like that's a bad thing. I see it as an opportunity to expand horizons and deal with different planes of existence, seen through the lens of a wine bottle. I mean, maybe if you bought the Ziereisen specifically to drink a Spätburgunder from Schulen, it wouldn't be optimal, but if you were in the mood for a really good pinot, it'd still be okay, no? What if you'd shelled out $50 for a Mofi pressing of say, a Brad Mehldau record, only this time he'd headed off onto a Thelonious Monk tangent and his normal smoothly dissonant improvs were way more edgy and sharp-elbowed than usual, not uninteresting but also not necessarily Mehldauian (again, potentially not such a bad thing if maybe you prefer Keith Jarrett or Fats Waller to begin with). And suppose this 180 gram+, half-speed mastered maybe/kinda with a digital transfer somewhere in the reproductive chain wasn't chock full of Beatles covers like he often does, but maybe this time he's channeling Monk while improvising his way through say, Abba's greatest hits? It's Mehldau alright, it's kind of modal (but not dirge-like modal,) and it's Monkish and Mehldauian and Abba-like all at the same time (Downbeat would give it 3.5 stars and say that it's a "transition album" while Stereophile would give the music four stars and the recording only three stars because Bootsy Collins played bass on the record and his signal was run through four distortion pedals and two envelope filters before hitting the board where they compressed the hell out of it). But the bottom line is that it's still jazz, and it's pretty good jazz, but straddles categories like they was channeling Frank Zappa or Danny Gatton. What the heck, maybe it's Frank and Danny playing Abba tunes the way Thelonious Monk woulda played from the hereafter along with Brad and Bootsy. Hell, I'd probably give that concept six stars (out of five) and crank that sucker right up, even if it wasn't what I'd expected when I laid my money down for the record.
I see this as kind of like that Ziereisen's rendition of the Schulen in 2015 may not be a stellar example of the vineyard, but it's dang good pinot noir. Or maybe the weather just combined with Ziereisen's skills to make dang good Côte de Beaune, but for less money? And maybe it's not what one would expect, but where does it fall on the Spätburgunder scale? Here I am, listening to Ahmad Jamal's recording of songs from "Renaissance" (that's Beyoncé's "Renaissance", not "the" Renaissance, which happened way long before he signed to Argo) and drinking a 2016 Levantine Hill Syrah that tastes like a St. Joseph with a view from the hillside and wondering whether this is what all Yarra Valley syrahs should taste like or is it just this one and does it matter anyway?(and I'm also wondering what inspired Ahmad Jamal to make this record on a Fender Rhodes played through quadrophonic Leslies?) Nothing is what it's supposed to be, but it's still good and I'm having a blast trying to backwards-engineer everything. And that's what I like about wine. (well, it's at least one of the things I like about it. You should see my thoughts when I'm microdosing on Chartreuse!)
Or, as Muddy Waters put it:
I ain't foolin', you need Schulen
Baby, you know you need coolin'
Woman, way down inside
Woman you need love, you've got to have some love
Ooh, you gotta have some love
-Eden (And I do feel your pain about not being able to locate that 2013 Ziereisen. I haven't inventoried my cellar since maybe 1983 so I long ago gave up on finding a specific wine. The upside is that I'm always surprised to find things I thought I drank a long time ago, presuming I even remembered I'd bought the wine in the first place)(this is probably what it'll be like when I get dementia, right?)
