Cowan Pinot

I

Ian Fitzsimmons

Ian Fitzsimmons
Latest emailer from disorderer Florida Jim announces two Pinots, among other wines:

"A pinot noir from the Sonoma Coast is a lithe, translucent thing with 13.9% alcohol and ample acidity. Somehow, the coast seemed to miss the worst of the heat spikes and hence, we didn’t lose as much acid from our grapes as many did inland.

"And yet, another pinot we sourced from Bennett Valley, while considerably darker in appearance, is showing well balanced and carries 13.4% alcohol so perhaps it was just certain spots inland that got cooked."

Notes on his other wines are worth reading, but I'm posting these as an interesting new development. I don't see these notes on Jim's site yet; presumably they will trickle down there eventually.

So, fatboy: does this count as a handjob?
 
I'm on this mailing list, too, and I'm enjoying the descriptions of wines. But I note that he still won't sell me any of the damn wines. It's starting to seem like postmodern meta-wine making to me. He just describes a wine that might be the case if it existed. What winemaking would be if Jorge Luis Borges were the winemaker.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
I'm on this mailing list, too, and I'm enjoying the descriptions of wines. But I note that he still won't sell me any of the damn wines.
Click to expand...
Maybe the wine doesn't exist.

Maybe FL Jim doesn't exist anymore, either.

The internet is a tricksy place.
 
FL Jim has none of the characteristics of one of Joe Dressner's alter egos, which does argue for his existence (although the evidence is less than determinative). With regard to the wine, returns are not yet in, clearly.
 
A long time ago a colleague of mine, now retired and I, having commiserated with each other on how few people read academic books in general and, of course, ours in particular, and having speculated that people only write such books to get tenured and promoted and that the university administration doesn't really care that anyone read the books, only that they are vetted for quality by the publication process, cooked up a scheme to start the university meta press for prestigious publication. We would scrupulously send all manuscripts out for review by the only best scholarly experts in the field, who would accept and reject only based on the very highest standards of intellectual excellence and broad significance of the argument. Those books that received a positive review, as with real presses, we would accept. We would not publish those books, however, since that would be a needless waste of money. Instead we would provide a letter saying, that our meta press, which operated only according to the highest and most rigorous standards, affirmed that we would publish this book, if only we actually published any book and that if this manuscript were to become a book, which it would not, it would be one of the very best books of its type. If we did this only according to the highest standards, we could become a vary prestigious publisher of meta books, which really were the only kinds of books universities needed to demand. By asking for only a small subvention for each manuscript considered, we could probably make a bundle and everybody would be happy. Unfortunately, this wasn't a real idea, it turned out, but only a meta idea.

The application of this scheme to the newsletter of Cowan Cellars, if only the newsletter were written in the subjunctive, is clear.
 
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