Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 16 May 2023
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May 17, 2023
Texas Chili & The Chili Queens of San Antonio
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Posting will be variable for a little while …
“Flooded Basement” by Perfect Homes is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
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Specifically, our sump pump gave up the ghost overnight on Sunday and I didn’t discover this until I walked down the basement stairs on Monday morning and stepped into about a foot of cold water on the basement floor. Our basement is on a few different levels, so the foot or so I stepped into implied there were at least two feet of water in some other areas of the basement. We called the plumber and our insurance agent as soon as I was able to shut off the water main to the house and get back upstairs.
Once the plumbers were able to get the sump pump back online temporarily, the water level in the basement began to drop, just as the clean-up crew were arriving by way of the insurance agent. Things have been hectic around here since then, but especially once the insurance company notified us that our first claim in nearly 40 years was declined, and we had to scramble to find ways to scrape up money to pay for the plumber and the clean-up crew’s efforts. (Unlike normal people, we don’t have a ready reserve of several thousand dollars just sitting there waiting for a random emergency to pop up.)
I don’t know how long it will take to get back to normal, so if you see just the QotD and 2am video posts for a while, you can safely assume I’m still busy with domestic issues.
Fortunately, when Victor moved out, he took most of his valued possessions with him … although he’s bound to discover things he left behind that he now wishes he’d taken with him. I know I’ve lost a small bookcase full of wine books, as they were in the small room we’ve been using as a wine cellar and that’s at the lowest point in the basement. The top shelf might have been above the high-water line, but I haven’t been able to check yet. The wines themselves will be fine, although the labels may be a bit loose.
My moribund model train collection will be thinned out, as a lot of the books, magazines, plans, and other perishable items were also down close to floor level. Everything was neatly boxed up, but those boxes will have deformed or disintegrated in the water, so sorting through everything is going to be a huge pain in the ass.
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Swiss LMG25 light machine gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 23 Jul 2012This week, we will be featuring all Swiss weapons here at Forgotten Weapons. Kind of like Shark Week, but more land-locked. We’ll kick off today with a video showing you around a Swiss LMG-25 light machine gun we found for sale at Cornet & Company in Brussels (a better gun shop than any I’ve found here in the US, I must say). Like pretty much all Swiss arms, it’s a gorgeous example of precision machining — and like pretty much all Swiss arms it was too expensive for anyone else to adopt. On this, as with other Swiss weapons I’ve handled, you can just feel the quality in how smoothly the moving parts operate.
In case you’re wondering, this LMG25 is live and fully functional, and priced at 1950 Euros (about $2800) — mere pocket change compared to machine gun prices here. It’s not too difficult to get the permit to own it in Belgium, but sadly there is no legal way to bring it into the US.
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QotD: How do you say “Catch-22” en français?
Jean-François has two hectares of vines in our valley in South-West France: his family have been making wine here on this hard limestone soil for more than half a century. And yet, he would like nothing more than to grub up his vineyards. If you ask him why, he looks skywards, and then, with hands as gnarled as his vines, pulls out the lining of his coat-pocket. Vide. Empty.
The nectar of the gods, French wines have a reputation for being cultivated in a sun-kissed vineyard surrounding a honey-stoned chateau, owned by a Hollywood star like Leonardo DiCaprio, or a Gallic aristo whose family escaped the guillotine. Jean-François is neither. And he is not the only vigneron who is struggling. Things are far from rosé for France’s small winemakers, as two hundred militants made clear outside the Prefecture in Bordeaux one Thursday last month. They follow the thousand who protested in the city last December, when vignerons hung a human effigy outside the doors of the Bordeaux Wine Council, to raise awareness for grape-growers at risk of suicide. “Every day there is a suicide in agriculture,” Didier Cousiney, president of the Viti 33 collective informed the crowd.
In the Bordeaux area alone, 500 vignerons are looking in the bottom of the glass and seeing financial ruin. And you can add to these the growers nearing retirement who cannot find buyers for their vineyards. Like Jean-François. In the Medoc, land prices are actually sinking.
Jean-François would like to simply abandon his vines. He cannot, because it is illegal. Abandoned vines are vectors for disease, which can spread to other vineyards. Vines must be either cultivated or grubbed up. But grubbing costs €2,000 per hectare, money Jean-François does not have.
Crisis in the French wine industry affects more than viticulteurs. In France, wine is not merely a drink: it’s a national symbol, the liquid affirmation of l’Art de vivre à la française. If you opened the arteries of Marianne, you would find them coursing with a Bordeaux Appellations d’Origine Contrôlée, the official certification for wine grown in the geographical region and made with requisite skill. Until 1981, French children were allowed to drink wine in school. So, when the wine industry turns sour, France’s identity suffers a hangover.
As does its income. Wine is France’s second biggest export after aircraft, worth about €15 billion a year according to the Fédération des Exportateurs de Vins et Spiritueux de France (FEVS).
What’s going wrong in the vineyards of La Belle France? Jean-François’s eloquent gestures indicate some of the causes. Doubtless French winegrowers have been complaining about the weather since the Gauls planted the first native vines in the fifth century BC. But in the last five years, the weather has lurched from one Biblical extreme to another. We’ve had drought, which did for my own few vines last year; we’ve had flooding; we’ve had hailstorms. A late frost in April 2021 affected 80% of the nation’s vineyards.
Such was the desperation of viticulteurs then that vineyards were heated overnight with candles and paraffin heaters, to keep the frost off the delicate buds of the fruit. The sight of the vineyards of Bordeaux, the sacred centre of the French wine industry, lit by geometrically exact lines of candlelight was magnificent, but the image ultimately came to symbolise the powerlessness of humans in the face of Mother Nature. After le gel historique, there were few climate change deniers in Bordeaux’s vineyards. According to the European Environmental Agency, France is suffering the biggest economic losses caused by climate change of any country in the world. The Hexagon took a hit of €4.2 billion in 2020 due to climate change.
John Lewis-Stempel, “The bourgeois war on French wine”, UnHerd, 2023-02-01.
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