Super Tuscans?

[stevebody]

Since you haven't become, Foodie, as far as I know, the arbiter of All Things Internet, I assume my options here still include responding to people as well as slinking off, properly chastened, and finding another website. And that stuff about the "germ of my thought" is as ingenuous as you seem to feel I'm rude. The tack of your remarks was evident in the first exchange on this topic, in which you described the wines in a tidy bag as "heavily extracted, over-oaked, that can be produced anywhere in the world". You mentioned, conveniently, the two culprits that everybody slags as prime purveyors of the dreaded "fruit bombs", CA and Australia. In the second exchange, the view was even clearer:

"In my opinion, Super Tuscans are among the most confusing, if not the least interesting, of wines produced in Italy. I form that opinion because, as I said, these styles of wines can be produced anywhere in the world--they say little about identity. Yep, I am one of those who laments the loss of local identity, in any country. I cannot think of anything more boring in wine than the concept of consistency from coast-to-coast or nation-to-nation."

I submit that, if you can taste any of the better Supers and NOT receive mountains of information about the climate, soil, minerals, vegetation and air quality of the growing area, jeez, look to your taste buds instead of the wines. They contain just exactly the same terroir characteristics as the indigenous varietals and trad wines, just applied to a different framework. And, NO, they cannot be produced "anywhere in the world". The "Tuscan" part of the label is applied because of the singular character of the wines and of Tuscany. The mere fact that the same grapes are used in CA, WA, Australia, France, and Spain hardly means all the wines will be alike. If you can't grasp that, well, I'm sorry. And, since I didn't invent the term "Super Tuscan" and it's not owned, as far as I know, by any growers' consortium, as CA Meritage supposedly is, it applies to any wine containing the requisite grapes, produced in Tuscany. The term is even misapplied to wines made elsewhere, if they follow a similar formula and no one has died of this slip-up yet. Banti makes Supers? Ask him. I'd sell his wines under the same criteria as the Summus, Campaccio, et al. Not all of the Supers are prohibitively expensive anyway.

I am sometimes, as people have described me on this site, an agitator. So what? If calling attention to obvious bias is agitating, fine with me. I can live with the label. We've adopted this frightening notion in modern America that we should be able to spout off at will and that no one should ever dare to say, "Wait, that's ridiculous". Well, someone asked a legit question on a type of wine and got TWO thinly-velied diatribes from you. You get two back. Democracy in action.