Fat Bastard 2003
Fat Bastard 2003
Hosted on Flickr!. Click to enlarge. The French have a new word: parkerise, which means loosely "something the Americans would like." Or, to be more specific, something one American man likes, that man being Robert Parker, the wine taster and judge for The Wine Advocate. For twenty years, Parker has been judging wines and awarding them an arbitrary score on a 100-point chart. At first, his scores corresponded to wines that sold well in America; now, they drive those same buying patterns. Parker likes wines that are full, have lots of fruity flavors, tend to have a powerful but pleasant smell, have a touch of complexity but are not too challenging, and are just as good, if not better, standing alone as they are with a meal.
So I was somewhat surprised when I saw this week's wine, Fat Bastard Shiraz 2003, which was made from picked harvests of grapes grown in different vinyards in France. Shiraz is generally the province of the Australians and the American West; the French do not generally indulge in this extravagent kind of cheap, parkerise wine, although there must be somewhere in France where the Shiraz variety of grape is grown. But French wines are generally very territorial: the idea that a wine is made by a vitner not directly associated with the farmer is considered anathema to most French producers.
And so it is with Fat Bastard Shiraz. It doesn't taste like a Shiraz. It tastes more like an ordinary, if somewhat better than average, variety of dinner red. Like the last wine I reviewed, its pleasant astringency ends a meal much better than it starts, which only emphasizes its role at the dinner table rather than in front of the fireplace. It has little nose to speak of. It leaves no aftertaste, but fades away almost instantly leaving none of the oak or shiraz complexity that I favor in other wines.
I picked it up because the label amused me. It will get finished over the course of the week, but I probably will be moving on to other wines. Still, if you're politically motivated by such things, do note that Fat Bastard gives 5% of their profits to breast cancer research, so maybe you have a reason to try it out anyway.