This was definitely the highest-quality contest yet: all the wines were really good, and it was very hard to rank them. When Michelle wanted a simple guide to buying good wine in a wine store, I told her many years ago to just turn the bottle around and look for two men in a boat on the back label. And that turns out to have been pretty good advice. (Except, nowadays, not all Kermit Lynch wines have the two-men-in-a-boat etching on the back, sadly.)

I decided to change the scoring mechanism, this year, to the Borda Count. It’s the fairest way of ranking wines in a contest like this: when we were scoring the wines on a 20-point scale, people who gave some wines 2 points and other wines 20 points ended up having much more influence over the final outcome than people who ended up giving scores in a much narrower range.

We tasted nine wines in all: a small enough number that you could remember them all, go back and forth between them, and generally try to come up with a reasonably sophisticated and informed ranking. But it was hard: they were very good, and very different. Wine F, in particular, stood out: it was weird and funky, in a good way, and a lot of people ranked it as their favorite. But it was also quite heavy and rich, which made it hard for the lighter wines to compete.

We made sure that everybody was well fed: all these wines are designed to be drunk with food, rather than blind on their own. So we had a spectacular lamb stew, as well as great salad, bread, and cheese. The real star of the evening was not any of the wines but rather the chef, Baroness Michelle Von Salmon.

Everybody had to rank their wines from best to worst, on the understanding that even the worst wines were, in this contest, really good. Each wine then got a score: the top-ranking wine got 8 points, the next 7 points, and so on down to the lowest-ranking wine, which got zero points. Finally, when we worked out which wines were which, each person who brought a wine had the score they gave their own wine discarded.

There were ten people scoring the wines — Andrea didn’t bring a wine of her own — which means that each wine got nine scores. The minimum score was zero; the maximum was 9×8=72.

In the end, the scores ranged from 12 to 53. The lowest-scoring wine was a Beaujolais, a Cote de Brouilly from Thivin. It’s a lovely wine, but it was also a lower in alcohol than any of its competitors, and hot wines tend to win blind tastings.

There was a tie for first place, which went to the two wines from the Languedoc-Roussillon. One was a Faugères from Léon Barral; the other was my own entry, the Mas Champart. Both are quite big, at 14% alcohol, but then again so were most of the other wines: both Simon and Lock brought 14.5% wines from the southern Rhone (a Gigondas from Les Pallières and a Chateauneuf du Pape from Domaine la Roquète respectively), and those wines didn’t score nearly as well.

In the bang-for-the-buck stakes, my Mas Champart was the clear winner, with 3.8 points per dollar: not only was it the joint top-ranked wine overall, but it was also the cheapest wine in the contest at $14 per bottle. The most expensive wine, Glenda’s $85 “La Tourtine” Bandol from Tempier, managed just 0.3 points per dollar. That wine, annoyingly, just gives “11-14%” as its alcohol content, so it’s unclear whether its relatively low placement — it got 29 points, for 6th place — can be blamed at all on its ABV. But certainly some of the high-alcohol wines tasted much lighter than others: there’s much more to how heavy a wine drinks than just how hot it is.

As ever, I’ve uploaded the full results, in Excel format; I encourage you to download the file and play around with it. But one thing’s clear: once again, just as happened in the Pinot contest, if you plot price against quality, you end up with a negative correlation. (This time, the calculator spits out a correlation of -0.12.) In other words, if you buy a more expensive wine it’s not likely to be any better, and it might well in fact be worse than the cheaper alternative. At least in a highly-artificial blind-tasting context. Here’s the scatter plot:

G, here, is the Mas Champart; F is the Barral Faugères; H is the Thivin; and C is the Tempier Bandol.

And here are all the wines which got entered, in order A, H, C, I, E, D, B, G, F. The two winners are the two wines on the far right. But really, you can’t go wrong with any of these. Many thanks to everybody who entered, and many congratulations to Jay for winning again.

*Five Six contests in seven years counts as annual, right?

On Masafuera’s sister island — originally named Masatierra, or Closer to Land, and now called Robinson Crusoe — I had seen the damage wrought by a trio of mainland plant species, maquis and murtilla and blackberry, which have monotonously overrun entire hills and drainages.

[Here, Franzen goes on to a facile metaphor about how "the blackberry on Robinson Crusoe Island was like the conquering novel, yes, but it seemed to me no less like the Internet, that BlackBerry-borne invasive". Ugh. Anyway, back to Franzen's take on the island.]

I felt desperate to escape the islands. Before leaving for Masafuera, I’d already seen Robinson’s two endemic land-bird species, and the prospect of another week there, with no chance of seeing something new, seemed suffocatingly boring…

Although I no longer wanted it, or because I didn’t want it, I had the experience of being truly stranded on an island. I ate the same bad Chilean white bread at every meal, the same nondescript fish served without sauce or seasoning at every lunch and dinner… I hiked over the mountains to a grassland where the island’s annual cattle-branding festival was being held, and I watched the horseback riders drive the village’s herd into a corral. The setting was spectacular — sweeping hills, volcanic peaks, whitecapped ocean — but the hills were denuded and deeply gouged by erosion. Of the hundred-plus cattle, at least ninety were malnourished, the majority of them so skeletal it seemed remarkable that they could even stand up. The herd had historically been a reserve source of protein, and the villagers still enjoyed the ritual of roping and branding, but couldn’t they see what a sad travesty their ritual had become?

All of this is so callous and worthy of unalloyed hatred that I’m pretty sure I’m never going to read anything by Franzen again. According to something he says in the story about Super Bowl XLV, Franzen was on Robinson Crusoe Island on February 3, 2011. Which means he was there less than a year after Robinson Crusoe Island was all but destroyed by the tsunami which followed massive Chilean earthquake of 2010:

A wall of water – possibly nearly 5 metres high – ravaged everything in its way. Within a few minutes, the scene of the adventures of Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk – marooned on the island from 1704 to 1708, and immortalized in Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe – had been razed to the ground.

“Everything that had been along that three-kilometre stretch just disappeared,” said Fernando Avaria, the first pilot to fly over the area after the disaster. The cemetery, the churches, sports facilities and the area’s only school were reduced to planks of wood and broken glass. The buildings of the local authority simply disappeared. “It was devastating, really out of a horror film,” said Margot Salas, a local who toured the area with Chilean state television cameras almost 24 hours after the disaster. As the sea receded, Robinson Crusoe Island faced a new flood – one of despair. Mud covered everything within three kilometres of the coast.

Sixteen people died; the entire economy of the island was wiped out. If you’re interested in helping, or finding out more, there are good resources here.

It’s into the aftermath of this disaster that Franzen wanders, thinking in his Important Novelist way about how selfish David Foster Wallace turns out to have been. He reaches the island, and he sees the damage wrought — by blackberries. He sees the islanders trying to recover some semblance of their former lives, and sneers at the “sad travesty” of their ritual. He moans about how “nondescript” his food is and how “skeletal” the cattle are, while somehow failing to notice that the reason is that the islanders, recovering from a terrible natural disaster, have nothing left.

As for Franzen, he’s only on the island at all because he has a stupid dream of “running away and being alone” on Masafuera. “Like Selkirk”, he says. But he only manages to hack being alone for the grand total of one night. Like Selkirk, my arse.

Franzen attacks Wallace in this essay, criticizing “the extremes of his own narcissism” and his self-deception. Ha! The extremes of narcissism and self-deception needed to visit Robinson Crusoe Island 11 months after the tsunami and not even notice what had happened make Wallace look like an amateur in such fields. (And if Franzen did notice, but decided to ignore it, that’s even worse.)

I was obviously wrong to give Franzen any benefit of the doubt after the Oprah fiasco: he really is as boorish and narcissistic as he seemed back then. Clearly it’s long past time to ignore everything he does from here on in.

(Update: This seems to be getting a bit of traction, so let me clarify a couple of things. Franzen spent about two weeks on Robinson Crusoe Island — at least that’s how I read the line about him spending “another week there”. The island, pre-tsunami, had a population of just over 600. So Franzen lived for two weeks on a small island, being hosted by a traumatized population. And in the wake of that experience, felt happy to describe their cattle-branding festival as a “sad travesty”. I still can’t work out which would be worse: that he wrote such a thing in full knowledge of the tsunami, or that he somehow contrived to remain ignorant of the devastation despite living in its aftermath for two weeks.)

The bien-pensant consensus surrounding l’affaire Weigel is that it’s wrong he got kicked out of his position blogging for the Washington Post. And that of course is entirely correct. But even many of the people who are on #teamweigel will quickly add that he demonstrated poor judgment in writing what he wrote, and that this should be a lesson to us all.

I don’t think that’s true. Our wired and Twittered world is increasingly blurring the distinction between the personal and the professional, and in such a world honesty is a much greater virtue than mealy-mouthed meekness when it comes to expressing the truth as you see it. Especially in a blogger. People have opinions, and it’s kinda hilarious to see conservatives try to simultaneously complain that Weigel had erroneously been counted as one of their number while at the same time complaining that he wasn’t “objective”.

I do believe that Weigel resigned rather than was fired, and it’s easy to see why he’d want to do that after reading the absolutely horrendous column by their lame, sad toady of an ombudsman today. Weigel is a great talent, and he’ll land somewhere which will be positively encouraging to say in public what he was confined to saying in private while housed at WaPo. He’s a very funny guy, and he should be able to let rip as much as he likes, without then feeling the need to apologize for being who he is.

Meanwhile, a horrible little turd somewhere is gleefully if quietly celebrating his coup (I’m sure it’s a guy) in leaking Weigel’s private correspondence to Fishbowl DC and the Daily Caller. Maybe he’s genuinely disturbed in some way. But, to coin a phrase, this would be a vastly better world to live in if he decided to handle his emotional problems more responsibly, and set himself on fire.

Felix,

I teach “Credit Default Swaps 101″ at NYU, a strategist in the global debt markets and an early critic of structured finance and its spillover. Google me.

I published “Why Should Institutions Invest in CDOs, at All ?” In Euromoney in APRIL 2006. See 5 minute video link, done in March 2008.

So I’m surprised that academics at Princeton just now, October 2009, after some $3T + structured finance losses, belatedly argue “[it is not possible to price CDOs...].

As it stands, their work is INCOMPLETE. If it were a thesis, I’d say they failed.

A lot of the email made little sense to me, but there was enough there to pique my interest that I thought I’d look into Mr Grebeck.

As someone who wrote for Euromoney for many years, I have access to their archives: I looked all through the April 2006 issue and couldn’t find Grebeck’s article at all. Indeed, I searched the Euromoney website for him, and couldn’t find it anywhere: he turned up only once, quoted in a column by Edward Chancellor.

As I replied to his email asking him about this, I thought I’d look up his NYU credentials while I was at it. Turns out he’s one of two instructors on one course at NYU’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies — the continuing-education arm of NYU, not the university itself.

Meanwhile, I noticed that the “Euromoney article” was part of his email sig, along with that video:

Ed Grebeck is a global debt market strategist and author of “Why…Invest in CDOs, at All?” [Euromoney, April 2006], a prescient warning of Structured Finance illiquidity, conflicts of interest, flawed pricing models and today’s trillion dollar losses. http://fiscalclinic.com/2009/12/20/ed-grebeck-shared-with-you-his-video-interview-with-riskcenter.aspx?results=1#SurveyResultsChart

Grebeck replied to my email, attaching the article — which, I wasn’t surprised to find, was never published in Euromoney magazine. Instead, it was a chapter of something called the Structured Credit Products Handbook 2006/07, and it was published complete with Grebeck’s photograph, title, email address, and phone number.

I know enough about Euromoney to know how this kind of thing works: they use the power of the Euromoney brand name to sell chapters in these books to anybody willing to write one. Then they try to sell the finished product to the authors, who can try to use their status as a published author to burnish their credentials. None of this has any connection with Euromoney magazine, beyond the parent company.

But what about that article? Was it really prescient? Did it foresee “today’s trillion dollar losses”? Was it even called “Why…Invest in CDOs, at All?”

The actual title is “Why should institutions invest in CDOs, at all?”, and at heart it’s all about relative value: if you’re thinking about buying CDOs, says Grebeck, then maybe you’d get better value out of certain other investments instead, which carry less risk or higher returns.

Certainly Grebeck saw that the ratings on CDOs might be suspect, and that the investment banks structuring them were conflicted. But he nowhere talks about trillion-dollar losses, or any possible losses at all. And the main thesis of his article is that if you’re thinking of buying a CDO, you’d probably be better off — wait for it — buying equity in Ambac instead. Or maybe some other monoline:

Ambac is a relevant CDO comparable because its business model demonstrably works and it, like the other financial guarantors, is really a ‘giant CDO’. Ambac (symbol: ABK) is the best performing monoline financial guaranty insurer, generating a long-term return on equity for investors in excess of 15% per annum — up to May of 2005. Other established guarantors, in business since at least the 1980s, are MBIA (symbol: MBI), FSA and FGIC.

Financial Guarantor portfolios already have the diversification that today’s CDOs try to achieve… Their low risk portfolios permit high leverage, some 75 times, at least, their net worth…

Financial guarantors confront the same agency costs that CDO investors face… However, they have at least 300 dedicated staff, each learned in ‘credit culture’, to underwrite, document and monitor the risk over its term and so protect themselves as active market participants.

I really don’t think that an April 2006 article extolling the virtues of Ambac and MBIA counts as “prescient”. ABK was trading at about $70 back then; today, it’s less than a buck a share. MBIA has similarly fallen from $80 to $4. And the losses that did them in are exactly the losses that Grebeck claims to have so presciently foreseen. Yes, investors in CDOs lost a lot of money. But you would hardly have been better off investing in ABK instead.

After reading the article, it was pretty obvious that I wasn’t going to place much faith in what Grebeck has to say: he seems to be deliberately misleading when it comes to (a) his own credentials, (b) the place that his article was published, and (c) its contents. But then I realized that if he was emailing me, he was surely emailing lots of other journalists as well — people who might not be able to check up on the Euromoney article so easily, and/or people who under pressure of deadlines might be more willing to take him at face value. Should I not somehow give them a heads-up?

At the same time, Grebeck had caused me no harm, beyond the time I spent looking into his credentials: it would be cruel of me to splash his name all over Reuters as some kind of exemplar of spurious expertise. Indeed, Grebeck may indeed know a great deal about CDOs and CDSs and whatnot; I certainly hope that he does, for the sake of his clients. (His day job is running a Stamford consultancy providing “client-directed, confidential, research that extracts value from tomorrow’s opportunities as credit markets change, today”.) He’s just one of many financial professionals trying to make a living in these markets, looking for a bit of good press.

So on the grounds that no one much reads felixsalmon.com any more, I’m putting this note up here. I feel I owe it to myself, just to justify the amount of time I spent on Grebeck today.

The obvious question, of course, is what is the significance of those dates? The 1209 and 2009 dates are obvious. And to find out about the others, the obvious place to look is the website at the bottom of the banner, which has a handy timeline. The problem is that although the timeline includes no fewer than 80 different years between 1209 and 2009 (not including the ones at both ends), only one of them coincides with the seven in-between years on the banner: 1446, which marks the founding of King’s College. So what are the others?

Less than 24 hours after Felix returned from Shanghai we cycled over the B’Burg Bridge for more summer weekending in Brooklyn. This time 85 degrees with thunderstorms and tropical showers, but that didn’t keep us away from an anticipated pork feast. No way. We hit the 3rd Ward 2nd annual pork roast which included the entire population of Williamsburg hispters plus us, all packed into one building.

We waited in a very long line which did not move for almost one hour, and yet I was completely content drinking a beer patiently (generally not my greatest virtue) while arguing whether or not we were in East Williamsburg or Bushwick as a very loud garage punk band entertained the crowd.

Rockstar butcher Tom Mylan carved up the most gorgeous roasted pig while a team of folks assembled tacos for distribution. Felix and I watched the tacos roll out with small bits of pork as we frowned and looked at each other, “Forget THAT.” I was hardly about to wait in a one hour line for tacos. When it was finally our turn, I pushed Felix up to the counter and whispered in his ear, “No rice. No beans, no tortillas – just try and get us the pork”. Felix then asked, “Can we order pork only?” and the lady looked back at him with a glare, “That will be $12… EACH.” Like it was out of the question or something… Done.

She wrote on our paper plates: “Plate Of Pork” and passed them back to the taco team. They rolled their eyes and passed the plates back to the pig. Yay! Bring it on… large juicy mounds of pork wobbled around on the flimsy plates as we snatched the goods and found a corner to merrily eat in silence.

A wave of euphoria swept over us, like some crazy grease high. Showers came plummeting down from the sky and the crowd took cover, but never left the line. You don’t wait that long for Tom Mylan roast pork and leave just because there’s a monsoon. Thank you 3rd Ward, thank you Tom & crew. Happy Sunday in Brooklyn, Happy Dead Pig.

It was touch-and-go there, pretty much all the way. In the days leading up to today, Stefan was obsessively checking the forecasts and the satellite pictures, looking at an enormous thundercloud, at least 1,000km across, which was right in the way and which would make the eclipse a total wash.

But then, yesterday, the cloud broke up, and Moganshan — where we’re staying — was bathed in sunlight. The people operating the resort said that it’s always clear in the mornings, and when we climbed the hill to look east over the plain, we were excited to get a perfect eclipse at 9:33am.

When we woke up, however, it was overcast and drizzling, and by the time we were looking out over the plain, you could barely see it, let alone the sun. We were convinced it was going to be a complete washout, where we wouldn’t see anything but the sky getting dark and then light again.

Happily, we were wrong. Just as the eclipse was approaching totality, the sun started peeking out from between the clouds, and at one point there was an astonishing sight where you could even see what was left of the sun in the middle of a tiny swatch of blue sky, with sunbeams streaming down between almost-black clouds.

And then it arrived: the sun was blacked out, the corona appeared, and the eclipsed sun spent 5 minutes and 47 seconds peeking in and out behind the clouds. It wasn’t dead-of-night dark, but it was definitely late dusk. And decidedly cooler than the normally-sweltering temperatures, too.

We didn’t get the Full Eclipse Experience: the dark-indigo sky, the view of the orange horizon, the vision of the shadow of the moon rushing towards you and then away from you at 3,000 miles per hour. But we got something truly special all the same. It was my first total eclipse, I don’t know if I’ll ever see another. And I’m not in the slightest bit disappointed.

(The photo is by Stefan Geens. That’s exactly what we saw.)