Monday, November 24, 2008

Now *That's* Investigative Journalism!

Village Voice writer Robert Sietsema clearly has the coolest job ever. Taking as a starting point the general tone of Fountains of Wayne's "Mexican Wine," he explores why Mexican wine.
Why Mexican wine specifically? I set out to see if I could discover the reason, but first I had to find some actual Mexican wine. I’d been hearing for years that the wines of Baja, California were getting better and better, but when I scoured local liquor stores to find examples, I came up empty. Chalk it up to New York’s liquor stores being so small, or maybe Baja wines are still too obscure.

Eventually, I stumbled on a bottle at LaNell’s in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a place that specializes in organic wines, female-made wines, and New York State bourbons. The wine was a Jubileo 2005, made in Guadalupe, Baja, Mexico, a desiccated valley with 20 wineries, 40 miles southeast of Tijuana. The wine is a Meritage, which means that it’s a Bordeaux-style red made with a combination of grapes (usually including cabernet sauvignon and merlot, among others) permitted by California, U.S.A.’s Meritage Association. The winemaker is Laura Zamora, who qualifies as something of a Mexican winemaking superstar, and some of her vines – which require no irrigation, a big plus in Baja’s arid climate – are 60 years old, making them Mexico’s oldest.

He even kinda/sorta comes up with a plausible read of the tune!

3 comments:

Kid Charlemagne said...

Any word yet on the significance of the pillow fighting cuties in the video?

Anonymous said...

I think we need to research Katrina and the Wave's "Red Wine and Whiskey" which has always seemed to me to have a certain South of the Border quality to it.

Anonymous said...

I hope the conclusion we're supposed to reach isn't that Adam Schlesinger some kind of elitist oenophile.

Or god forbid a Chardonnay swiller like that other guy who writes here.