Daddy Winebucks

One of my (many) regrets in life is not going to a big time sports college where I can now carry on my drunk, carefree days of youth long into adulthood.  Because really, is there a sadder sight than some balding, inhebriated guy in a USC sweatshirt several sizes too small, tailgating with the actual students eleven hours before game time?

Okay, maybe that wasn’t the best illustration of what I missed.

What I meant to say was that I really do wish I went to a school where sports was an integral part of the collegiate experience. Where I could sleep in a tent for three weeks waiting for tickets to an Ohio State/Michigan football game or be able to share a fight song with 80,000 fellow disciples.

Alas, for me, the only sport I could become a fan of at my alma mater, The School of Visual Arts was the Ultimate Frisbee team who played their games in Central Park, or didn’t, if the Poetry Slam went too long the previous night.  There was no fight song to sing, unless you count something by Kate Bush or (insert punk anthem here) and instead of hanging around campus in logo wear, we all simply wore black – to show of course, how artistic we all were.

So it’s with great fanfare that I annouce what I hope will become an annual rite of passage each Spring, something conceived with the help of three other great bloggers, Jason from Jason’s Wine Blog,  Marc from Marc’s Muse and RJ from RJ’s Wine Blog, a race to the Final Four with wine:

Grape Madness

Here’s how it works…

Each of the four bloggers was assigned a store – Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Cost Plus and Bevmo – and a mission to pick out 8 wines (32 wines in total – cut in half from the NCAA 64, but we’re starting this with humble roots). The 8 wines are then divided into two brackets of 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th seeds. Each seed level is governed by the retail price of the wine:

• 1st seed: $12 – $20
• 2nd seed: $8 – 12
• 3rd seed: $5 – $8
• 4th seed: $5 and under

For Round 1, we will each blind taste our brackets (8 bottles of wines) and narrow the field to, first, the best four bottles, then, finally, the best two bottles from each store. These two bottles will then move forward to Round 2.

In Round 2, the bloggers will pair up locally (Jason and RJ in San Francisco and Marc and I here in LA) and taste the eight remaining top wines together, eventually narrowing it to the best wine of each blogger’s grouping, thus creating the Final Four. The Final Four will then be tasted by each blogger and together we will anoint the first annual champion of Grape Madness.

Wines will be all reds, tasted blind and scored on the 100 point scale. In cases when multiple bloggers are scoring a wine, the scores will be aggregated. The winner of each match-up will be the wine with the maximum composite score. Should a tie result, even after totalling up the points, the winner will be determined based on, first, lower prices, then, a coin flip.

Personally, my first round scoring will be a twist on the 100 point scale.  I’ll judge them using basketball scores as end results but wind up in the same place for the later rounds.

This is already shaping up to be a fun event that I hope you loyal readers will follow.

More details in the coming days…let the madness begin.