Larry Stein
Larry Stein
Read that yesterday. Nice, indeed. He mentioned this bored, but I've never seen him post here.
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Rest well, Joe Dressner
- Thread starter Mr. Doghead
- Start date
Read that yesterday. Nice, indeed. He mentioned this bored, but I've never seen him post here.
Vincent Fritzsche
Vincent Fritzsche
Anthony Wilson's piece is remarkably good.
Jeff Connell
Jeff Connell
But you wouldn't say that about Joe. He gladly suffered fools. I can attest. Perhaps you too? Brad will; and many others on Wine Disorder, I have no doubt.originally posted by Levi Dalton:
In the old days they would just say "He didn't suffer fools gladly" and leave it at that. Now everyone is worried about libel...
Jeff Grossman
Jeff Grossman
He was unique. He changed the world.
He was very funny, if you knew how to look at it.
Farewell, Joe. Buster's waiting for his walk.
He was very funny, if you knew how to look at it.
Farewell, Joe. Buster's waiting for his walk.
Luis Gutierrez
Luis Gutierrez
Jeff Grossman
Jeff Grossman
Lou Kessler
Lou Kessler
Hey, Joe only chewed me out a few times and I sold his wines in my store. He made no allowances for personal commerce. Damn the man had integrity.originally posted by Jeff Connell:
But you wouldn't say that about Joe. He gladly suffered fools. I can attest. Perhaps you too? Brad will; and many others on Wine Disorder, I have no doubt.originally posted by Levi Dalton:
In the old days they would just say "He didn't suffer fools gladly" and leave it at that. Now everyone is worried about libel...
Mr. Doghead
Robert Callahan
I was just saying to Carolyn yesterday that I keep thinking of things I'm going to tell Joe, and seeing things in the paper I expect Joe to call to bark about. I have all these wines I was saving to have with him. Future trips to the growers that I've had on hold since I had to go home early in February 2002 have been on my mind, with places I wanted to go and things I planned to discuss with Joe. Without Joe, I have no one to talk about all the latest portable-computing gadgets and the design of their software or the quality of their typefaces. Bicycles, schnooks (do people know I was the original schnook, so dubbed by Max Abramsky?), health, New York politics.
While I can talk with other people about wine, I can't imagine finding a comparable symbiot. I was already a megageek generalist when I met Joe. I never much cared about the ins and outs of regional personalities and relationships among growers and gossip about producers and the trade came my way but never seemed worth storing for later use. My relationship to wine didn't require it. Joe had developed a deep insight into the workings of the distribution channel already when I met him, and his regional knowledge was solid in the areas LD (pre-LDM) had growers. This competency grew dramatically over the years. Joe was master at picking the brains of growers and "enologues", as he would say in his preferred Franglish, on vitiviniculture, regulators, shippers, weather, networks of old college friends among the growers, business relationships, personal relationships, and more, even when he did not work with a given grower. We would drive around tasting and touring operations, and if the people receiving us would talk at all - on occasion we met extremely unforthcoming proprietors - between us we would suck every bit of knowledge from the people we visited.
The facility Joe had in French, particularly as we got into the later '90s, allowed him to use his basic shameless inquisitiveness to develop vast regional and interpersonal knowledge. Meanwhile, I was doing my own thing, drawing in comprehensive technical, comparative, and factual on wines, vines, vineyards, climates, cellars, regional references and oddities, geography, historical performance, retail trends and uptake, aging, closures, sensation, economics, blah blah in a crazy attempt to make the field itself a specialty. Generally, it worked. I used to know more abokut wine than anyone. But that changes every year.
And no one can know everything. All those things I said I did not store, I could rely on Joe to know and to supply. All the latest grower and business doings - wine business, not just Joe business - I might want or need to know to refresh my capacitors and to append my ROM and to feed my spirit, I could get from him. And when he ventured into unfamiliar territory or wanted help on a technique or a grower or some background on prior vintages of a given wine or whatever, Joe would walk his dog, get out his phone, and talk it over with me. We had a very complementary approach to the subject, in spite a lots of overlap.
All of which I say, over several interruptions and from a tiny keyboard, so please excuse me for my errors, by way of noting the foul hole I find in my life. Having had a couple of weeks to try this no-Dressner thing, I vote that we put a stop to the experiment.
Thanks for this thread to all of you.
Oh, and Victor, as I've said, I loved that trip to Spain, largely thanks to you. Indeed, the France leg was amazing too, before I even got there. What memories. I think of these sorts of things daily, given that I have not even attempted such a trip since my snowed-out January 2005 no-go. I stay home a lot. But that winter-2000 trip was something. No, they cannot take away that one, and the trip to your then-new place was my honor.
While I can talk with other people about wine, I can't imagine finding a comparable symbiot. I was already a megageek generalist when I met Joe. I never much cared about the ins and outs of regional personalities and relationships among growers and gossip about producers and the trade came my way but never seemed worth storing for later use. My relationship to wine didn't require it. Joe had developed a deep insight into the workings of the distribution channel already when I met him, and his regional knowledge was solid in the areas LD (pre-LDM) had growers. This competency grew dramatically over the years. Joe was master at picking the brains of growers and "enologues", as he would say in his preferred Franglish, on vitiviniculture, regulators, shippers, weather, networks of old college friends among the growers, business relationships, personal relationships, and more, even when he did not work with a given grower. We would drive around tasting and touring operations, and if the people receiving us would talk at all - on occasion we met extremely unforthcoming proprietors - between us we would suck every bit of knowledge from the people we visited.
The facility Joe had in French, particularly as we got into the later '90s, allowed him to use his basic shameless inquisitiveness to develop vast regional and interpersonal knowledge. Meanwhile, I was doing my own thing, drawing in comprehensive technical, comparative, and factual on wines, vines, vineyards, climates, cellars, regional references and oddities, geography, historical performance, retail trends and uptake, aging, closures, sensation, economics, blah blah in a crazy attempt to make the field itself a specialty. Generally, it worked. I used to know more abokut wine than anyone. But that changes every year.
And no one can know everything. All those things I said I did not store, I could rely on Joe to know and to supply. All the latest grower and business doings - wine business, not just Joe business - I might want or need to know to refresh my capacitors and to append my ROM and to feed my spirit, I could get from him. And when he ventured into unfamiliar territory or wanted help on a technique or a grower or some background on prior vintages of a given wine or whatever, Joe would walk his dog, get out his phone, and talk it over with me. We had a very complementary approach to the subject, in spite a lots of overlap.
All of which I say, over several interruptions and from a tiny keyboard, so please excuse me for my errors, by way of noting the foul hole I find in my life. Having had a couple of weeks to try this no-Dressner thing, I vote that we put a stop to the experiment.
Thanks for this thread to all of you.
Oh, and Victor, as I've said, I loved that trip to Spain, largely thanks to you. Indeed, the France leg was amazing too, before I even got there. What memories. I think of these sorts of things daily, given that I have not even attempted such a trip since my snowed-out January 2005 no-go. I stay home a lot. But that winter-2000 trip was something. No, they cannot take away that one, and the trip to your then-new place was my honor.