“You might say he was a gentleman thief.”

We’re big Anthony Wilson fans here at Riverside Green, or at least I am. Anthony has a new record out, entitled Frogtown. It features him singing as well as playing guitar in a variety of styles and it was produced by Mike Elizondo, who has worked with everybody from Dr. Dre to Fiona Apple. I bought the double LP and I think it’s brilliant.

The track “Arcadia”, posted above, was inspired by a fascinating tale of wine counterfeiting.

“Rudy Kurniawan” portrayed himself as a scion of a wealthy Indonesian family. The story of his rise and fall makes for fascinating reading because it touches on so many different aspects of nouveau riche society. There are celebrities, massive personal loans, monstrous prices paid for fake bottles of Burgundy, eighty-year-old table wine effortlessly passed off as hundred-thousand-dollar fine vintages, millions of dollars’ worth of entirely counterfeit product distributed around the world with no way to ever determine what’s fake and what’s real.

At this point, I should remind you that wine-tasting has been scientifically proven to be a complete sham, driven by nothing but confirmation bias, preconception, and external influences. Even the most “educated palates” can be easily fooled by food coloring, a fake label on the bottle, and different music played at the tastings. The hobby of wine-tasting only continues because people want it to be true. If you’ve ever watched two people sipping at their sodas trying to figure out “which one’s the Diet Coke” then I think you understand why this is so. The nose and tongue are remarkably good tools for discerning chemical composition, but the brain is not so great at sorting those signals. In that respect, smell is the opposite of vision, which is a series of low-quality photographs enhanced! by our brain.

This makes perfect sense because smell and taste are much older and better-developed senses than vision. Most animals are kept alive by their smell and taste but only really need vision to see blurry images of their general surroundings. You need to be able to smell a predator to escape it, or smell the prey to eat it; by the time vision gets involved, much of the uncertainty has been removed from the interaction. It’s just that human beings are visual creatures, so our brains have evolved relatively quickly to work with the imperfect material available from the eyes.

My friends know how picky I can be about vodka, which has even less variance than wine, so how can I be all high-and-mighty about clear alcohol when I’ve been so caustic about wine tasters? Well, for me it’s a matter of which vodkas give me hangovers and which don’t. I could drink a two-liter of Prairie and wake up totally fine. Ketel One and Grey Goose are also sorta-okay in that regard. Lime Smirnoff makes me feel like I’ve taken a deadblow hammer to the forehead.

A few years ago, a young lady and I decided to do a “Vodkathon”. I bought fifteen different kinds of vodka. We lined up the shot glasses. We’d drink three shots in a row, compare notes, then watch a bit of a Tom Petty documentary. She held up until the ninth shot, God bless her. It helps to be in your twenties. I outweighed her by maybe 110 pounds, so made it to #13 before spraying the sink. The last two bottles? They might still be in her freezer. After that night I had real doubts about whether I was a terrible person who was likely to ruin her life, so I let her go. This was probably the most moral thing I’ve ever done. Nota bene that I had to be utterly shitfaced to do it.