The Royal Tannin Bombs

The Bad Man (that’s me) coined the phrase “assaggio minoralus” to indicate a “lesser” tasting wine review.  This is to differentiate it from the official Royal Tannin Bomb more, err, “formal” tastings.  I came up with the term assaggio based on the loose translation from English to Italian of the word “tasting”, but when back-translating assaggio means “assay”, which means to evaluate and analyze, so that works.  It also works because it looks pretentious, and Bad Man is all about the pretension.  On two other levels it works as well – one is that the word harkens up mental conjurations of “Asiago”, an aged Italian cheese, and “arpeggio”, a musical motif most often found in classical music, especially (a period Bad Man is particularly fond of) the Baroque.  Once there, it is a somewhat simple mental hop to archipelago, the specific island cluster that comes to mind is the Galapagos Islands, the natural habitat of one of Bad Man’s favorite lizards, the Marine Iguana (Amblyrhynchus cristatus).  And of course once on the island your mind takes the easy slide to reach Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s tome, The Gulag Archipelago (and yes, I’ve waded through Solzhenitsyn’s shores to reach his rocky crags).

So that is from whence “assaggio minoralus” is derived, and why I (The Bad Man) find it so compelling and appropriate a nom de plume for The Royal Tannin Bombs personal wine tastings of the more lesser variety.

Of course it also works for the “real” tastings; just reform the Latin giving “assaggio majoralus”.

Note: In case your memory was begging the question – it turns out you’re right.  This was an old post from the beginning of this web site, but that post appeared to be corrupted as I couldn’t edit it, so I created this new one.

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