Hi, I am Dave Winn, and I promised Winston a while ago that I would write another guest blog for his web page. Here goes. Damon Runyon (check him out on Wikipedia) was a famous short story writer of the 1930’s. The stories are written (always in the present tense) from the perspective of a small-time low-life character on Broadway, who hangs around with a bunch of similar low-life thieves, hustlers and gamblers. The stories and the characters are very colorful, and many have been made into movies over the years.
One story relates how our hero, having just won some money on a crap game, goes to the horse races the next day to see if his luck is still holding. Now a racetrack tout known as Hot Horse Herbie has observed our hero winning on the tables, and thus corners him to shake out some of this loot.
Racetrack touts give advice on where to place one’s bets on upcoming races (for a fee of course, and with no guarantees, rather like present-day stockbrokers). Our hero declines to participate. “Now wait a minute” Herbie says. “A story goes with it”, upon which our hero, like all of us under similar circumstances, cannot resist. The rest of the tale concerns this story, and the horse “Never Despair”, which is indeed very interesting and worth some money.
I am reminded of this in telling you about a couple of wines I sampled lately, both of which have a story that goes with them. I recently took up an invitation from my dear English friends Dave and Margaret to visit them. They are very much lovers of good food and wine, and so being an out and out hedonist myself, I enjoyed the trip very much. Some years ago, they had bought a bottle of wine for me as a birthday present, but things being the way they are with the airlines these days, it was hard for them to bring the bottle (a magnum, and in a wooden box to boot) over here, so they had been guarding it in England, waiting for me to visit. The wine is labeled “David Wynn” (yes, me), and is called “The Patriarch”. The wine maker, Adam Wynn, is the son of the late David Wynn, and this wine is in his father’s honor. It is a 1995 Australian Shiraz from Eden Valley, and costs about $90 for the magnum. (It is a better deal if you buy the 750 ml size). Five of us shared this bottle over dinner in a beautiful part of Scotland. We decanted it and let it sit for a while, and it opened up beautifully. I was amazed how fresh and young it tasted, lots of fruit, but very smooth and mature in texture, with a long finish.
Winston pointed me to a new video by Harvey Steiman of the Wine Spectator, in which by coincidence Harvey talks about old Australian Shirazes. This is how he characterized some of his favorite Shirazes from 1996. He summarized them as having a freshness and full fruit flavor, yet with a silky smooth texture, great structure and great length. I’d venture to say the David Wynn would elicit the same critique were Harvey to have tasted it. As a strange coincidental postscript: David Wynn’s father was called Samuel, and so was mine. I’m not kidding.
The second story concerns a wine called Ironstone. A winery in Australia had been calling their Shiraz/Grenache wines “Ironstone”, without checking (I guess) to find if the name had already been taken. It has. Ironstone is a winery in the Sierra foothills of California and has been around for a long time. So I guess they were told to cease and desist using that name. However, it seems they’d already shipped a bunch of bottles to England (at least: maybe there was some already shipped to the States too, I don’t know). Anyhow, it was too expensive I assume to return all the shipped wine back to Australia to change the label, so they must have negotiated some time limit to get rid of all shipped bottles. Hence they were sold off really cheaply (like $8 a bottle). Dave bought a bunch of it. It is an excellent wine, a beautiful blend, with some age on it (2002), smooth and full of flavor, and worth a lot more than $8. Just now and then, one gets a truly great deal. Then Dave got out the 1928 Madeira. Yummy! But that is another story.
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