Annals of Public Relations
A TYPICAL MEDIA PITCH (Sorta)
By Alan Goldfarb
August 7, 323 AD
On behalf of my client – the Speyer Oenotria Company, (Very) Ltd. – you are invited to a very, very, very special tasting and dinner debauchery at the sumptuous palatial home of Biggus The Sixth, on the 8th of August, 320AD. The occasion? To taste the recently released Speyer – the youngest wine in the world.
(If one will be so kind as to Oogle ( https://a-z-animals.com/blog/the-oldest-unopened-bottle-of-wine/ ), and follow the link to the 21st century, 1,700 hundred years of yore.)
Removed from its encasement (later it’ll be called a sarcophagus) this special wine (all of SOC(V)L’s (see first line) wines are special), you’ll be among the first in creation to taste it.
(Full disclosure and transparency, we want you to taste it because we hope that you’ll give it at least a XCVI and then tell your tablet readers how it tastes of the volcanic soils of Vesuvius, which blew its top only 244 years before and is still smoldering; which, through carbon tracing, still tastes smoky with some body and fleshiness (sorry about the last tasteless adjectives).
To further entice you to come to the Speyer Sampling as we’ve So Slickly Shown our Iteration Skills, in attendance tomorrow (so sorry for such short solicitation), we’ve invited several scions (we’ll stop if you shout) in the wine industry to tell us where they were in 320 AD when the wine was made. This part will ensure to charm the pants off of you.
These daughters and sons of wine industry royalty are not, of course, nearly as seasoned as our Speyer, but they and their families have been around the business a long time; thus giving them the bona fides to be invited to our very limited affair. Robin Lail, for one, might regale us with tales of the times during that year when she frolicked amongst the big casks in the cellar room of her father’s Inglenook (in the times before Mr. Coppola took over the property).
Then we’re hoping against hope that Steve Mirassou, whose Mirassou Winery was one of the first in the modern era of California wine, will come to our soiree. Zelma Long may be at the degustation, too. She might tell us what it was like being one of the first women to make wine in California (although there just may have been some others who preceded her during the 17 centuries when our Speyer was first born.
We hope your interest is piqued. Oh, I almost forgot – the repast will be presented by Speyer’s very own inhouse chef -- you’ll spot him because he’ll be the one who’ll be wearing a four-foot-high toque, which we think is the tallest in the world – Chef Boarium. Boarium, quite naturally (he only does natural) will be serving heaps upon heaps of saddles upon racks of chingale, which the lovely modern Italians came to call it, Millenia later.
Oh, and we also almost forgot, some of your media colleagues, who have RSVP’d in the positive thus far are the writers Cato, Columella, Horace, Catullus, Palladius, Varro and Virgil. Pliny the Younger has penciled us in due to his involvement in formulating a beer, of all things, can you imagine? Pliny wrote back, telling us he’s taking brew lessons earlier that day, from his father, who’s really the brains behind the operation.
So, we hope you an make it, and please let us know in a very timely fashion (which I know is not your wont), so that we can fill the seats with others of your ilk, which will make my client the Speyers, happy; and in turn will make me look like some kind of a Roman god.