Word: plonks
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...that I was fond of jelly babies and had written about it in his column. That night we were absolutely pelted...Imagine waves of rock-hard little bullets raining down on you from the sky. Every now and then one would hit a string on my guitar and plonk off a bad note as I was trying to play. From then on, everywhere we went it was exactly the same...
...Aniane lies 25 km northwest of Montpellier in the heart of the Languedoc region, known throughout the 20th century for producing oceans of undistinguished plonk. When that market dried up in the 1980s, a new generation of growers showed that the Languedoc could also produce smaller quantities of high-quality wine. It didn't take long for the news to reach California's Napa Valley, where Robert G. Mondavi, now 88, and his family have been making premium wines for decades. In early 1998, Mondavi dispatched a team to the Languedoc to find a vineyard where the winemaker could produce...
Barich, a journalist who has written memorably about horse racing (Laughing in the Hills) and the Golden State (Big Dreams), produces a lot of heat as he cuts across generations and cultures. But Carson Valley is not just another brand of romantic plonk. Barich is a social realist with a fine feel for the similarities between agriculture and love. Both require risk and constant cultivation with no guarantee of success. That is not lost on Arthur and Anna Torelli, who have gone through divorces and are skittish about new commitments. Added to the mix are elements of lonely-guy touchiness...
...much as a bottle of Perrier-Jouet brut, many wine lovers will consider the new (third) edition of Parker's Wine Buyer's Guide (Simon & Schuster; $40) an indispensable purchase. The nation's pre-eminent guru of grape, Robert M. Parker Jr., is writer-publisher of a plain-as-plonk (no ads, no pictures) bimonthly newsletter, The Wine Advocate. His trenchant opinions, as well as his still debated ratings of wine on a 100- point scale, are recycled into columns for the Prodigy computer network and Wine Enthusiast and Food & Wine magazines. They also feed his awesomely detailed Guide, which...
...long ago, the ditsy wits of the Monty Python shows could get a quick laugh by disparaging some plonk from Australia as "a wine for laying down and leaving there." No longer. The wines from Down Under are moving steadily up in quality, and they are enjoying a new popularity in the U.S. Riding a trend for Aussie chic that has made household names of Qantas, Pat Cash and "Crocodile" Dundee, U.S. sales of Australian wines topped 1 million gallons last year, more than triple the volume of 1986. "People who have experimented with Australian wines have been very happy...