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Edited on Sun Jul-27-03 11:04 PM by Fenris
A few weeks ago, I was offered a small job. In exchange for a rather generous by-the-hour sum of money, I (along with an accomplice) was to inventory and organize a lawyer's wine collection. Being the listless, jobless type, I decided that the offer was just too good to pass up and I immediately agreed to the terms. As I was barely employeed with his associate, my girlfriends mother, cleaning out bookshelves full of outdated, worthless law books and doing research and analyzation, so it was clear I could use the money. And besides, how difficult could this job be?
Well, as it turned out, this particular lawyer had a refridgerator-sized wine cooler in his dining room which held around 220 bottles of wine. After I took all of the bottles out it became clear that I was going to have a rough time taking inventory because over half of the bottles were in French and despite being from Cajun stock, I spoke not a word of the language (I took Advanced Placement German...why the Hell couldn't he drink German wine?:D). The California wines were knocked out in very little time, since most of the wines came from the same private vinyard. Then there were three bottles of Italian wine - easy enough. Then came the French. I remembered him saying that he wanted all the bottles marked Grand Cru to be put in the back so "guests" in his home would not easily find them. Done and done. But then came the others. Some were marked 1er Cru or Premier Cru, most were marked with a series of confusing names. Using my inferior intellect, I wrote down whatever I thought was necessary. I had no idea what any of these names meant, but dammit, they looked useful. After taking stock, I organized the wines in the cooler from youngest on the bottom to oldest at the top. I was done for the day. All I had to do was type up a list of what he had.
The next day I show up and he has a shopping bag full of documents. Some are loose, some are stapled, some are catalogs, and there are several copies of the Wine Advocate. He tells me that I am to go through all of these papers and find the descriptions of the wines he owns. Then I am to write them down on a spreadsheet along with all of this information from the wine bottles (much of which, I found out, was, ahem, overlooked). So I started searching catalog after catalog looking for the wines. But when I do find them, I realize I don't have enough information to tell what they are, because the wine makers produce multiple versions of similarly-named wine. I am shit out of luck.
So here I am, searching through back catalogs of North Berkely Wine in hopes of finding what I am looking for. And I hate wine. I mean with a passion. This is so tedious and difficult, much harder than it should be. And I assume that's why he pays kids to do it: it sucks.
C'est la vie
;-)
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