Down with big pinots!

It’s time to say it as clearly as possible: big pinot noirs must be eradicated from the earth.

No longer is it enough to embrace them as some sort of “alternative expression” of wine. No longer will their misguided individuality be tolerated. No longer will the excuse that they are “representative of their place” be permitted. No longer can wine lovers everywhere sit idly by while something they’ve paid a lot of money for is rendered utterly useless by the misdirected dabblings of their producers.

Why have we reached this point of conflict? It’s simple: the super-sized pinot has infected the home soil, the motherland, the cradle of civilization. Outsized pinots have now worked their insidious evil in Burgundy itself. Burgundy! Imagine!

Oh, sure, I hear what you winemakers are thinking. “Who are you to say what I should do with my pinot?” Well, Mr. Arrogant Winemaker Dude (or Chick), I am the representative of wine lovers everywhere, who will no longer tolerate these abusive horrors of modern technology that waste our time and our money. We have had enough, and we demand change! Smaller pinots, now!!

Why, just last night, I took one of these monstrosities from a box. Try as I might, I could not encompass its fat-bellied girth. No food, no apéritif, no amount of mitigating technology could reduce its size. I pushed, and wiggled, and bent…but it simply would not fit in any part of the cellar.

Wait, you thought I was talking about the wine? No, no…

It’s the bottle size. Damn it, these things are way too big. What are we supposed to do with these keg-shaped monstrosities, anyway? They don’t fit in wine racks…or if they do, they tilt and slide into precarious positions, their flabby midsections intruding into nearby slots and rendering them equally unusable. They don’t stack, because there’s not a flat surface anywhere on the bottle. And lifting a dozen of them is all it takes to give your average oenophile a permanent wrist injury. What are they made of, lead crystal instead of glass?

Sure, there are occasional producers elsewhere who use oversized bottles. Huet. Turley. Others. But in the world of pinot noir, the disease has grown beyond spot infections into a full-blown plague. Next thing you know, we’ll have 750ml wines in 1.5L bottles, with a solid half of the total volume made up of hand-crafted stained glass studded with lead weights; $30 for the wine, $125 for the bottle, 75 pounds each and in the shape of a llama. People will need forklifts to move a case from their car to their cellar, and retailers everywhere will be nursing spinal injuries. Cellars will start to resemble glass topiary. And Wine Spectator will have a whole new thing to photograph.

It has to end, I tell you! Join me now in eradicating the scourge that is destroying a grape we love.

Down with big pinots!