DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

We hosted our soon-to-be-annual House Wine Tasting today. This is a double-blind tasting event in which every wine meets these criteria:
a) it’s red
b) a bottle costs less than five bucks

As you know, in a traditional blind tasting, the tasters do not know which wine they’re tasting. What makes this tasting “double blind,” you ask? For an accurate answer you’d have to pose that question to my ophthalmologist: his prescriptions for my contact lenses continue onto a second page.

The goal was to find an inexpensive wine that is not so vile that we couldn’t stand to drink it 3-4 nights a week.

Testing methodology
Each participant was given 3 glasses and a scoring sheet, and whatever encouragement seemed necessary at the time (“Drink faster, damnit!”) Tasters assigned points to each wine, with higher scores indicating better wines.

Spit buckets were provided and indeed saw some use — there was one merlot in particular that was absolutely foul.

After each flight, scores were tallied. Final scores appear below.

Final Scores
Cabs

1. 1st place (13 pts; tied)
   • 1998 Canelo Estate, Chile: $2.99
   • 1997 Viña Santa Carolina Reserva, Estate Bottled, Maipo Valley, Chile: $4.99

2. 3rd place (7 pts)
   1996 Canyon Ridge Central Coast, California: $2.99

Merlots

1. 1st place (16 pts / 13 pts second round)
   1997 Viña Santa Carolina Reserva, Maule Valley, Chile: $4.99
2. 2nd place (16 pts / 11 pts second round):
   1998 San Lucas, Maipo Valley, Chile: $3.99
3. 3rd place (7 pts / 2 pts second round):
   1999 San Andrés, Loneué Valley, Chile: $2.99

Zins

1. 1st place (13 pts)
   non-vintage “Barefoot Zin”, California: $3.99
2. 2nd place (11 pts)
   1998 Black Mountain, Cramer Ridge, California: $4.99
3. 3rd place (9 pts)
   1995 Beaulieu Vineyards (BV) “Beautour”, California: $5

I’d bet most domain owners fantasize about the altavista.com guy or the business.com guy… folks who made a lot of money selling high-exposure domain names. For a short time I thought I’d be one of those guys.

I got an email in the Fall of 1998 from an unremarkable aol.com address, inquiring whether my domain name was for sale. Picturing an adolescent at the other end with a terrible garage band called Debris, I sent back a terse refusal and quickly resumed with my life.

Three or four months later, I received another email from the same address. Unlike before, this message was remarkable, because it mentioned a dollar figure: $3000.

Time passed, emails were exchanged, and ultimately I was offered about $7500. I believe I countered at $12000, figuring to finance a drum studio I wanted to build, but ultimately I decided that I’d rather have the domain for personal use than see it used for some commercial enterprise.

The folks who wanted the domain are still in business, although I can’t say I understand the model.

P.S. I ended up building the drum studio anyway.

This site is an experiment in open-source PHP development.

The software is open-source. My journal is not!