No Resolve

I'm not big on resolutions. They seem so small and trivial compared to other things you can declare, like... Independence. I'd rather spend my time on manifestos and social contracts.

That said, I do want to highlight a few things we'd like to get around to doing during the Lab's 2009 Research Calendar.

1. We hope to finally get our, old/new mini-vertical program off the ground; where we taste the same wine from two different vintages, side by side. We have "Ten Splits" to indicate two wines separated by a decade; "Wide-gaps" when one wine is really old and the other really young. There's "Tight-knits" when the vintages are just a few years apart. And "Three-fers" where we have a vertical featuring more than two wines. I think this sort of thing can be very educational, but mostly we do it because it's fun to name the pairs.

2. We thought it would be interesting to recreate the Lab's inaugural experiment but this time with a rigorous control in place. We'll pit the crazy-funky and long lingering wines of Nicolas Joly against a wine that doesn't come with instructions "to decant vigorously" and drink after several days standing on the counter. Which leaves a lot of wines to consider as the control.

3. And of course we'll continue our tireless search for dirt, weigh in on topics we know almost nothing about, train our palates, and extend our pointless investigation into time travel, voyaging to ancient Rome, fin de siècle France, mid-century Paris, amongst other fanciful destinations.

And just maybe, we might even get around to that manifesto about ungrafted wines we keep threatening to write.


(image: © Janpietruszka | Dreamstime.com)