There’s a lot for me to say about buffalo, and I love the word for its flexible application. You get opportunities to diddle with parts of speech at almost every turn but the magic happens when you can find a personal application with each. In my world, it goes like this:
- Buffalo as a proper noun is where I was born.
- Buffalo as a common noun is an interesting animal. I once had an unspoken conversation with a buffalo, and that’s just some information for another type of blog. As an erstwhile Denverite, I was introduced to buffalo as a dish – I enjoyed the occasional buffalo burger – but then, that was prior to the conversation. The American buffalo is once again facing extinction, so it is a topic of responsible conversation nowadays. But again, not in this blog.
- Buffalo’s Shipping is a long-time wine shipping company in Napa populated by some bright, helpful and cheery folks. About 2 weeks ago, I popped over to drop some samples in the mail for a friend and learned that just that morning they’d received an ugly little memo from the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. The hammer dropped, coated with seasonings such as cease and desist, which invariably spoil one’s dinner plans if one is to pair the wrong wines with their cheese sandwich waffles and shoofly pies. You know what I mean if you’re reading from the relevant geography.
- Buffalo as an adjective – or, here: buffaloed as a past participle – is my state of being when I consider the numerous driving forces in life that collude to make me who I am, chiefly a person so influenced by food, wine and culture. From the standpoint of psychology and matter-oriented (hard) science, I’m a product of my environment. Aren’t we all? Doesn’t the idea just subdue you by inspiring awe? Does it stymie, perplex, bewilder or befuddle you? You, then, have been buffaloed.
One additional thing that buffaloes me (verb tense, there – we have such flexibility in our language!) is that, as fun as this act of writing about wine is for me, we’re losing wine writers all over the place, in one sense. Not only has there been an outlandish number of newspaper closures and bankruptcy filings from Chicago to Karachi, with the incumbent industries (packaging/fulfillment/transportation) suffering alongside the press, but writers are losing their jobs as well. To make things worse, I’m referring to wine writers. Yikes. New York and Los Angeles newspaper readers can now say farewell to viniferous prose, not to mention the fun and practical guidance of venerable writers such as Dorothy Gaiter, who taught me and thousands of other people how to make an occasion out of the average Tuesday night in order to justify opening the ’92 premier cru before it turned to swill. So the idea is Twitterization? That’s like replacing cork with silly putty in order to cut costs and frame wine closures in a publicly accessible format.
I’m not in the business of instigating, so there’s no call to action embedded herein. What I will say, though, is that if losing your wine writers to ten-word regurgitations (see the Silly Tasting Notes Generator ) ticks you off, make your voice heard. Do the writing yourself, send a letter or email, or lodge a voicemail with the editor of your local newspaper that dropped the wine journalist you revere. A colleague once said to me (when selling wine): “In selling cabernet, smoke and olives will get you all the traction you need.”
Untrue.
