If your workplace has Slack, you know that it is designed to make remote office communications easier and more convivial, which is all well and good as long as you don't actually use it. The wise Slack user will have the discipline to read rather than contribute, and understand that their contributions are optional at best, a work-creation scam at worst, and that the middle ground is mostly sighs and eyerolls. The truth is that anything you say on there can, will, and should be held against you, possibly by someone with the power to assign stories. A case in point is a recent conversation that led to your itinerant typist drinking James Harden's J Harden-label red wine, watching a terrible game which featured the J. Harden in question, and thinking about the NBA commissioner's first truly forceful act of the season, which was to come out against the Atlanta Hawks entering a promotional partnership with a local strip club.
Let us begin at the beginning, though, which in this case is last Wednesday. One of our number found an image of a promotional flyer of James Harden holding an autograph session in suburban Cleveland (he is a Cavalier for the moment) at which the one rule was that he would only sign bottles of his wine. Why this was important to our enterprise's news gathering process is a matter between that comrade and their version of God, so we won't speculate. Since few people walk around carrying wine bottles (they normally are found sitting in a park, with the bottle in a bag), this was clearly a work designed to get people to buy his stuff. Harden had gotten into wine several years earlier as part of sizable number of players dabbling in oenology, a movement that was almost certainly inspired by longtime San Antonio coach Gregg Popovich, whose affinity for the grape was devout and refined, and who would always select the wine at any dinner as long as it met three criteria—devotion to craft, taste, and a cost per glass equivalent to a mid-size car payment.
Harden joined with an Australian company called J Shed and lent his name to three varieties—two reds and a prosecco which, like most proseccos, is kidding itself by even worming its way into a bottle. Your author knew a deeply committed Harden apologist and decided to buy a bottle of each to gift to said friend at an appropriate future date, but when that date came, said friend declined because he was "celebrating" Dry January, the sap. We were stuck with three bottles that we couldn't give away, didn't have any burning desire to open ourselves or the impetus to find another Hardenophile upon which to foist the goods.
So far, you can see, what we have here is an anecdote without a single interesting thing in it. But wait, it gets far more tedious.
Three years after this ill-considered purchase, this James Harden autograph show flyer popped up in Slack, and like three idiots in search of a leaky boat on a stormy day, we mentioned that, actually, funny story, we owned a bit of the Harden. This swiftly proved a mistake of incalculable proportions because one of our number (the name has been omitted pending legal action) immediately blurted, "You should review it for the site." A consensus immediately formed to this effect, because all the other comrades are cruel and vicious curs who devour discomfort the way normal people do breath mints. This is why why we try to post just enough to not be fired.
The perfectly seamless rebuttal, "Why on this flaming planet of impending doom would we want to do that?" was dismissed out of hand, because such dismissals are what editors are for. Suddenly, horribly an assignment had been born. The "why" was never answered, perhaps because there was no answer that would satisfy. But we did resist the other suggestion, which was "Rate different basketball wines." Sorry, but we couldn't find any Luguentz Dort 2022 Montepulciano Reserva, and Wine Spectator had few kind words for Kelly Olynyk's foray into the natural wine space. It would have to be the Harden.
The next task, once hasty emigration to Malta was ruled impractical, was to find an appropriate pairing. There were some intriguing choices on the menu. One was the Cavaliers' next game against Boston, a fine opportunity with only one caveat, which is that was scheduled for Sunday at 10 a.m. PT; not even Popovich drinks that early. The sommelier also suggested a Monday night against Philadelphia, which was a much less interesting game on the merits but one that had the advantage of starting at 4 p.m. (7 in the East), a more commodious time for shame-free drinking. That game was not likely to be good, but maybe the blurred vision would help with that.
To justify all this, or just to excuse it, your old-fashioned correspondent cast about in vain for a news hook. There is more elsewhere on the site about the NBA's belated decision to cancel the Atlanta Hawks' retrospectively ill-considered Magic City promotion for next Monday, but we settled on Harden's status as a strip club legend—he is frequently cited as having spent up to a million dollars at one place in particular and has a banner hanging from the rafters of a Houston club in his honor for years—as an excuse, and opened the bottle at the appointed time.
The experience that followed was not the cruel prank that the Slackmeisters demanded, but at least it wasn't a whimsical history of athletes dabbling in wine just in time for the market to hit its current downturn. There was absolutely no reason to bounce between wine outlets to see what Carmelo Anthony was doing with Bordeaux varietals, especially when armed with a suspicion that receipts from multiple liquor stores were unlikely to be honored by the company. Thus, we were stuck with research-drinking our way through a deadly dull floor show. It's not much of an excuse, but it would have to do. It at least made the awful Sixers-Cavs game—Harden led all scorers with 21 in a 115-101 snoozer; the Sixers played the game without their four leading scorers—slightly less intolerable. But only slightly.
In conclusion, we bring you our tasting notes.
Color: Properly dark, which separates it from whites, rosés and Windex.
Drinkability: It fit in the glass, if that's what you're after.
Body: Not very chewy, and so forced its way down the gullet with minimal resistance.
Rating: The wine cost twelve bucks. If you rate your wines differently, then good for you, you insufferable snot. Maybe Gregg Popovich will take you out for a burrito and a Chateau Margaux. We will reserve our highest rating here for the concept of "interoffice silence."
