Wine Pairing: Brigaldara Amarone della Valpolicella “Classico”, 2017 – Italy
Another bin find from the resale shop here. Buying wine from resellers is inherently risky because wine is far more sensitive than whisk(e)y. Heat is especially a problem, but dried-out corks from extended upright storage is a worry too. All you can do is go by the ullage (fill level) and hope for the best. On the other hand, the chance to gamble on an Amarone with decent age from a respected producer for a few dollars is hard to find any other way. Amarone has a mixed reputation among wine snobs but when done right (this is), it’s a complex and powerful wine. The floral notes here are especially mesmerizing.
The elephant in the room with Kami no Shizuku is impossible to ignore. We spent an episode here with no progress on the Eighth Apostle, and we have two episodes left. What’s the plan, Stan? It’s hard for me to imagine you’d do an adaptation of a long-finished manga, presumably knowing exactly how many eps you had, and just stop in the middle. But it likewise seems very unlikely that this adaptation is going to see any sort of continuation, so what we’re left with is puzzling to say the least.
On the other hand, it’s always nice to see the brothers working together. Turns out Mary rebelled against her dad (an old friend of Yutaka’s) because he refused to let her into the business for fear she’d treat wine as nothing but a commodity like her mother did. She fell in with the wrong crowd (though Issei correctly guesses that these are small-time grifters and not real mafioso) and gets her father to buy a bunch of wine at 10% off. The problem? One-third of the bottles are counterfeit – and there’s no way to know until the bottles are uncorked. Or so you’d think, until Shizuku comes along.
It’s an interesting scam. The bottles are all supposedly Latours from 2000, widely regarded as a great vintage (though not the best ever, as the ep purports). With Bordeaux vintage is hugely important in terms of price, and the “fakes” are in fact often real Latour but from lesser years (which are much cheaper to find and purchase). And the bottles are all real and re-labeled, making the smell of counterfeits harder to suss out. This fools Shizuku at first, but eventually – with Issei’s expertise to guide him – he’s able to sniff out which sealed bottles are legit 2000’s and which are fake-a-roonies.
The point here, of course, is that the skill sets of the two half-brothers complement each other perfectly. Issei is not so vain that he denies Shizuku’s superior palate – one that his father was slyly training from a very young age. But without Issei’s encyclopedic knowledge and vintage and terroir, Shizuku would never have been able to conclusively identify the fakes. Surely their destiny is to eventually be partners – the only way for either of them to surpass their father. But whether we’ll get to see how that plays out in anime form is very much an open question.
