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FROM OUR DESK TO YOURS
A Random Princeton Wine Group:
Some people have book clubs, some people have dinner clubs. Famed Princeton economist, Burton G. Malkiel, whose book A Random Walk Down Wall Street is one of the most influential investing books ever written and sparked the index investing revolution, has a nearly 40 year-old wine club.
Professor Malkiel, now 91, published “Tasting at Tea Time: The Princeton Wine Group” in the latest issue of Journal of Wine Economics, about a group of eight oenophiles all in their 80s and 90s included astrophysicists, econometricians, business executives and former chieftains, who “all agree that wine improves with age: The older they get, the better they like it.”
Over the course of nearly 40 years, the group did 244 blind tastings involving 1,708 different wines (yes they created an econometric model.)
The club redoes the famed “Judgement of Paris” tasting, when California wines beat the French in a blind tasting in 1976 and put Napa on the map (read George Taber’s Judgement of Paris), and a tasting comparing Bordeaux first growths and wines from New Jersey (they couldn’t tell the difference).
“Now we Princetonians can dismiss the stigma of the Sopranos and the Jersey Turnpike, confident in the realization that the best from the Garden State can compete with the first growths of Bordeaux,” he wrote.
Quaffing the best of the best was not the point, though they did plenty of that. The most valuable lesson is their decades of bonding, friendship and conversation, since eating great food with good wine and good friends “is one of life’s most civilized pleasures,” Malkiel wrote.
“We have grown old together around a shared passion that has kindled enduring friendships well beyond the bonhomie of tasting superb wines and food. And who knows? Perhaps the myth that drinking wine is good for your health and longevity might actually be true.”
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