'Tis the season for regifting: Presenting a cautionary tale

by Ken

My goodness, can it really be coming up on 19 years since the classic Seinfeld "regifting" episode first aired? You can find the script for "The Label Maker" here, on the SeinfeldScripts website.

Again, the script of "The Label Maker" can be found here.

I don't know that Mssrs Berg and Schaffer, who wrote the script for "The Label Maker" (Season 6, Episode 11), invented the term "regifting," but I'm pretty sure I'd never heard it before, and even Widipedia acknowledges, "The term was popularized by an episode of the NBC sitcom Seinfeld ('The Label Maker')," but feels obliged to add that "the practice pre-dates the term substantially" (with three footnotes). Well, of course the practice is older. I'm guessing that people have been re-gifting almost as long as they've been gifting.

The first recorded regifter, however, was that snooty, sly, occasionally treacherous dentist Tim Whatley. (I see from IMDb that "The Label Maker" was the second of the five Seinfeld episodes in which Tim Whatley appeared.) Which reminds us too that before Bryan Cranston was Breaking Bad's villainous Walter White, before even he was Hal, the hirsute father of Malcolm in the Middle, he was the ur-regifter, so called by Elaine when she is outraged to find that he has regifted the label-maker that she gave him to Jerry.

Elaine confronts the ur-regifter, shifty dentist Tim Whatley.
(Note all that hair on Bryan Cranston's head in 1995.)

ALL OF WHICH IS BROUGHT TO MIND . . .

. . . by Food Network Magazine Editor in Chief Maile Carpenter's "Editor's Letter" in the December holiday issue. "While we were putting together a story for this issue about fun ways to wrap up wine (page 47)," she writes, "I was relieved to learn that my compulsion to regift wine is totally normal: According to one survey, 69 percent of us have regifted a bottle in the past, and I'm as guilty as anyone."

Now I don't know who exactly was included in this survey. It must have targeted some very different demographic from mine, one where the gifting of wine is common enough, not to mention the parties at which such gifting apparently most often occurs, to give rise to all that regifting of the stuff. Nevertheless, Maile has a swell story to share, which I think we might elevate to the status of a "regifting cautionary tale."

I live in fear, particularly at this time of year, that I'm going to hand a bottle right back to the person who gave it to me.

I almost got caught last December. In a mad rush to get to a party, I scanned our wine fridge [Um, "our wine fridge"? Let me just check what I've got in my wine fridge -- Ed.] and grabbed a Brunello that a friend had given me a few years ago. In the cab, I noticed that the friend had signed the back of the bottle -- with a Sharpie. Smart idea: If we would all just start writing personal notes on the bottles we give, we could end wine regifting for all time. That night I was forced to carry the Brunello around in my purse (fair punishment), then bring it back home and do what the original giver intended: Drink it.

Ah, well, so the regifting close shave had a happy ending!

If you're still thinking about that wine fridge (I know I am; I wonder if there's been a survey to find out what percentage of Food Network Magazine readers have wine fridges), Maile has more to share.

I have to hand it to my husband. He never regifts his wine. He gets so many nice bottles from friends in the restaurant business, and while I sit there Googling the price of them and thinking about how many points we'd score if we brought them to the school auction, Wylie just thinks about which one we should try next. He'll break open a $30 bottle of rosé to drink with Thai takeout, and he'll dust off something he's been saving for 20 years just because my parents are over for dinner. The holidays with him are even better -- the good stuff flows nonstop.

I aspire to be that relaxed about fancy wine someday. The only time I came close was by accident, when I opened a bottle of white to share with my mom and sister one Sunday afternoon. For some reason, Wylie hadn't put this bottle in the special DO-NOT-DRINK area of the fridge, and as a result, we polished off $250 worth of white burgundy while we were sitting around doing a ballerina puzzle with the kids. The wine was delicious, but had I known, I'd have opened one of my favorite $12 bottles and wrapped up the $250 one for my boss -- with a message in Sharpie on the back: "Happy Holidays. This is yours to keep."

And you thought you had problems?

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Too Long For Twitter... Foreign Stuff

Everyone is wondering what Mitt Romney is trying to hide in the only foreign policy he's ever been involved with other than the time when he lived in a Parisian palace for several years working to persuade French people to convert to Mormonism. It's not all that complicated though. $3 million dollars in a Swiss bank account? That's just chump change for Romney. $30 million in the Caymans is scarier and something voters have to think about more seriously. Over the weekend, the BBC's Business Section reminded everyone that Romney is part of a "global super-rich elite had at least $21 trillion hidden in secret tax havens by the end of 2010" and that the size of their dubious stash "is equivalent to the size of the US and Japanese economies combined!"

The Price of Offshore Revisited was written by James Henry, a former chief economist at the consultancy McKinsey, for the Tax Justice Network.

...Mr Henry said that the super-rich move money around the globe through an "industrious bevy of professional enablers in private banking, legal, accounting and investment industries.

"The lost tax revenues implied by our estimates is huge. It is large enough to make a significant difference to the finances of many countries.

"From another angle, this study is really good news. The world has just located a huge pile of financial wealth that might be called upon to contribute to the solution of our most pressing global problems," he said.

The report highlights the impact on the balance sheets of 139 developing countries of money held in tax havens that is put beyond the reach of local tax authorities.

Mr Henry estimates that since the 1970s, the richest citizens of these 139 countries had amassed $7.3tn to $9.3tn of "unrecorded offshore wealth" by 2010.

Private wealth held offshore represents "a huge black hole in the world economy," Mr Henry said.

So what should we do? Confiscate the whole lot of it... or elect one of the crooks president of the United States?

Global warming and climate change may have "winners and losers," as the political right likes phrasing it when people are impacted by their policies anchored in short-term greed and selfishness. In England, for example, vintners are already benefiting-- even to the point of competing with classic French winemakers-- and winning! It's not just because southern England (West Sussex, Kent and Cornwall in particular) share almost identical geology with the Champagne region of France. Global warming in England has resulted in lower annual rainfall and the kinds of milder winters wine grapes love. Next time you're in London, try a bottle of locally produced Nyetimber Classic Cuvee or the Camel Valley Brut.

Joseph Stiglitz: "The consequences of Austerity will depress our economy"... depress like in Depression. But that's not slowing Mitt Romney or his supporters down. They are hell-bent on another Great Depression. A sensible Stimulus program, he says, "will create jobs now and it will promote growth in the future."



A few weeks ago the whole nation watched in disgust as opportunistic teabagger Joe Walsh tried demonizing his Democratic opponent, Tammy Duckworth, not despite her military service (in which she lost both legs) but because of it. Long ago, when it became public that Walsh was a deadbeat dad, living high on the hog while refusing to pay any child support for his children, most Americans had learned that the loudmouthed lout was one of the most repulsive members of Congress.

When he first ran for Congress in 1996 he "positioned himself as a socially liberal Republican who favored abortion rights and gun control measures-- sharp contrasts to the staunchly conservative stances he now holds. "I think I'm the kind of Republican who can win because I'm open and tolerant," Walsh told the Tribune at the time. "I'm not some right-wing conservative." In 2010 he won because he ran against a hated corporate Democrat and Chamber of Commerce shill, Melissa Bean, a victim of that years' Great Blue Dog Apocalypse." Having taken expensive acting lessons at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in both NYC and L.A., he decided to play the role of teabagger next. It fit him well and now he's using the fate of Israel as a prop in his latest-- and hopefully last-- vile election campaign.



And the last thing's not foreign. Blue America supporters voted and decided that the Republican we should target in our campaign against those who have been trying to kick 18-26 year olds off their parents' health insurance policies is none other than... Paul Ryan. Seems fair to me. Ryan got 60 votes and second place was a tie (at 50 votes each) between Nick Ruiz (D-FL) and Carol Shea-Porter (D-NH). There have been nearly 4 million Facebook impressions already-- in just one week that these ads have been running. The ads will continue running in Racine, Janesville, Kenosha, the southern Milwaukee suburbs and the rest of Wisconsin's first congressional district where progressive Ron Zerban is challenging Ryan. If you'd like to help us pay for the ads, or help Zerban fight back against the millions Wall Street is pouring into Ryan's coffers, here's where you can do both.

Looks Like Obama's Moment Of Truth Has Arrived... And It Isn't About Evolution

I have no idea if wine drinkers or beer drinkers-- or non-drinkers-- are more or less likely to favor marriage equality. But the new issue of Out has a cute survey by the World Wine Guys Mike DeSimone and Jeff Jenssen, "The Ethical Wine List," about which wine-producing countries' products should be served at same-sex weddings. They base their findings on which wine-producing countries legalized same-sex unions. Alas, Napa wine is still out-- although, gloriously, the fantastic wines from NY's Finger Lakes area and Suffolk County are now fine. Turns out France legalized the pacte civil de solidarité in 1999. Other wine-producing countries which legalized same-sex unions while President Obama was evolving include Canada, New Zealand and Spain, all in 2005, South Africa in 2006, and Argentina last year. (I might add that non-wine-producing countries that have recognized marriage equality include Belgium, Holland, Iceland, Sweden, Portugal, Norway, Mexico, Israel, Brazil, Ecuador, Denmark, Hungary, Ireland, Uruguay, England, Germany, Finland and... Nepal.)

I'm sad to say that my mistrust for our president has grown so rapidly that Tuesday, when he announced he would be supporting Dianne Feinstein's and Jerry Nadler's legislation to repeal DOMA, my first reaction was to look for shady motives. I mean, did he suddenly evolve in one leap and bound? The White House blog:

President Obama is proud to support the Respect for Marriage Act, which has been introduced by Senator Dianne Feinstein and Congressman Jerrold Nadler. This legislation would uphold the principle that the federal government should not deny gay and lesbian couples the same rights and legal protections as straight couples.

The President has long called for a legislative repeal of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which continues to have a real impact on the lives of real people-- our families, friends and neighbors.

Why the caution? Well, it just happened to be the day that the media reported that Obama was supporting the efforts of the Gang of Six's conservative consensus plan to redefine "shared sacrifice" as meaning more sacrifice from working families and more tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires.

With the deadline for raising the nation’s debt ceiling just 14 days away, Mr. Warner and the other five senators-- three Republicans and three Democrats in all-- appear to have given new life to a grand bargain with President Obama that could reduce the nation’s deficit by about $4 trillion over the next decade.

In an early afternoon news briefing, Mr. Obama called the proposals unveiled by the senators on Tuesday morning “good news” and a “very significant step.”

Senators from both parties appeared optimistic as well. Forty-nine of them, from both parties, attended a briefing by Mr. Warner and his group’s members on Tuesday morning. Mr. Warner said the reaction had been positive.

“You could almost feel a sigh of relief as people said, ‘Oh my gosh, here’s something that we could be for,’” Mr. Warner said.

...Republicans in the House, who have stated their opposition to any tax increases, could continue to balk at the proposals, which raise nearly $1 trillion in new revenue by lowering rates while closing tax loopholes.

Republican members of the “gang” are trying to persuade House members to support the plan, he said. “There are a number of our Republican colleagues who are working hard on this,” Mr. Warner said.

Democrats, too, will need to be brought along to support the idea that entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security can be modified without sacrificing their basic nature. A deal could be scuttled if Democratic opposition to some of those proposals develops.

My worry was that Obama would toss the idiotic same-sex marriage bone to hysterical and obsessed gays clamoring for the right to imitate unhappy heterosexuals while slipping in the long-cherished conservative dream to open the doors to the dismantling of Social Security and Medicare. Opposing marriage equality is horrifyingly reactionary and unreasonable. No one opposing marriage equality is fit for public office. But using it as a trade-off to wreck Social Security and Medicare is far worse... far, far, far worse.

Bernie Sanders, addressing Vermont wine growers (and others in the nation's most forward-thinking state) on Ed Schultz's show Tuesday night:



Can we trust Obama on the cuts? I'm not sure. Everyone I know says "no." A usually reliable source of mine in the administration asked me to hold my fire and swore that the president will never do anything to harm Social Security. We should know soon enough. Meanwhile, DeSimone and Jenssen have recommended Ruca Malen Kinien cabernet sauvignon 2007 (an Argentine red) that they describe as "Raspberry and dried-fig flavors with just a hint of spice." For a white, he suggests a South Africa Raats Family Wines Cabernet Franc, 2008, which they describe as "black cherry, plum, and earth tones... super with red meat or game." And for bubbly they're in France: Taittinger Brut La Française champagne-- "granny smith apple and brioche flavors," which they say is "ideal on its own or with caviar." If My White House source is correct and Bernie Sanders and Donna Edwards (and Ed Schultz) are wrong, we're all going to need something a lot stronger than the wines. Bernie-- if you need to read it and not just hear it:

In my view, this Gang of Six proposal is a disaster. iI lowers the tax rate very substantially for the wealthy, and it will make devastating-- this is not modification-- devastating cuts in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education, nutrition... you name the program that are struggling, working class in this country desperately needs, it is going to be cut. I would estimate if the Gang of Six proposal were ever to pass-- I will do my best to see that doesn't happen-- it would be absolutely devastating to working families. We have to do everything we can to rally the American people to prevent it. You're giving the Republicans about 90% of what they ever dreamed of.

90%. Is that hyperbole? Exaggeration? Bernie doesn't think so. Speaking about reactionary gang members Tom Coburn (R-OK), Mike Crapo (R-ID) and Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), he maintained that “while I am sure that they did not get everything that they wanted, I think it’s fair to say they won about 80 percent to 90 percent of what they fought for. Despite President Obama’s campaign promise not to cut Social Security benefits, the Gang of Six plan, which he apparently embraced, calls for massive cuts in that vitally important program... Under the Social Security proposal, a new formula for calculating cost-of-living adjustments would cut a typical 75-year-old’s yearly benefits in 10 years by $560. The average 85-year-old would see a $1,000 a year cut in 20 years. Furthermore, the proposal demands that Social Security be solvent for a 75-year period, which could include additional cuts. The proposal also cuts Medicare by $298 billion over 10 years and makes massive cuts to Medicaid."

Sanders said that the president "apparently embraced" this. My source denies it-- 38-dimensional chess, I'm guessing-- and we'll be finding out pretty soon. I'm guessing Obama's reelection bid depends on it. If he doesn't stand up for working families this time, and takes the part of Wall Street and Big Business again, he's toast... one-termer, no matter what kind of walking freak show the GOP puts up against him.

Lawrence O'Donnell doesn't agree. It looks like my friend in the White House has been talking to him too. And he seems pretty sure it's for real. Listen carefully:

Rich, Conservative Scammers Destroy The Auction Market For Collectible Wines

When I was president of Reprise Records, my favorite of our foreign subsidiaries was our German company-- and not just because they sold the most records of any company outside the U.S., and not just because they helped me shove Green Day down the unbelieving U.K. company's throats, and not just because I used to love visiting them in beautiful Hamburg. They were my faves because they were, easily, the sharpest record execs in Europe and they had this powerful neurosis about winning. A #2 charting record was not winning. Once, though, they asked me if I would be interested in signing a popular German Schlager band; thats where I drew the line. What's Schlager music, you ask? You know what schlock is? Schlager is the musical version and it seems to never quite die out in northern and central Europe. They insisted they had a schlager group managed by a major German music impresario that would be a guaranteed hit. It sounded lovely, but not for Reprise, even if we could probably sell a few copies in Minnesota.

OK, fast-forward a decade. Yesterday I was listening to Splendid Table, an NPR food show, when I was on way to pick up a splendid table I had ordered from a mosaic furniture maker. And who are they talking about but Hardy Rodenstock (fake name), the Schlager music impresario! Hardy's given up Schlager and is now a famous seller of fake fancy wines to wealthy imbeciles... and he got caught. Benjamin Wallace, author of The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine, was a guest on the show. He told an hilarious story about how a bunch of American billionaires-- huge Republican Party donors-- got ripped off by the Schlagermeister.

In 1985, at a heated auction by Christie’s of London, a 1787 bottle of Château Lafite Bordeaux-- one of a cache of bottles unearthed in a bricked-up Paris cellar and supposedly owned by Thomas Jefferson-- went for $156,000 to a member of the Forbes family. The discoverer of the bottle was pop-band manager turned wine collector Hardy Rodenstock, who had a knack for finding extremely old and exquisite wines. But rumors about the bottle soon arose. Why wouldn’t Rodenstock reveal the exact location where it had been found? Was it part of a smuggled Nazi hoard? Or did his reticence conceal an even darker secret?

Christopher Forbes' problem didn't stop another obscenely rich and undertaxed billionaire. William Koch, from buying 4 more bottles of "Thomas Jefferson's mysterious Château Lafite Bordeaux," for half a million dollars, from the same huckster who also was selling stuff like the Czar's last case of wine and the rarest Château d'Yquem ever-- from 1784. One of Rodenstock's problems is that the bottles were etched with Jefferson's initials, using a technology that was invented a couple centuries after the wines were supposedly bottled.

Michael Broadbent, a sleazy Rodenstock associate and apologist, with a huge reputation in the wine world as well as the head of Christie’s wine department, which auctioned the fake wine, tried a bottle and declared it was “perfect in every sense: colour, bouquet, taste.” He comes off in this like the worst kind of self-serving shill imaginable. (Sotheby's wine department, a more reputable bunch, refused to do any business with the obviously fake bottles Rodenstock and Braodbent were foisting on clueless collectors.) Eventual carbon dating showed that the wine was, in fact, from the early 1960s, not the mid 1780s.

Anyway, furious legal battles over this mess continue. (I don't think Republicans would ever call these frivolous lawsuits though.) I'm just happy that all this money is tied up in bottles of pisswater with rat droppings and that it isn't going into Republican campaign spending. (Christopher Forbes is the sugar daddy of the New Jersey Republican Party.) Koch is a litigious kind of guy and he's already spent well over a million dollars on private investigators and in court trying to get some kind of rich people justice.

The son of Fred Koch, who founded Koch Industries, he lived in Dover, Massachusetts, and ran his own highly profitable energy company, the Oxbow Corporation. Koch purchased a 1787 Branne Mouton from the Chicago Wine Company in November, 1988. The next month, he bought a 1784 Branne Mouton, a 1784 Lafitte, and a 1787 Lafitte from Farr Vintners, a British retailer.
Altogether, Koch spent half a million dollars on the bottles. He installed them in his capacious, climate-controlled wine cellar, and took them out occasionally over the next fifteen years to show them off to friends.

Koch’s collection of art and antiques is valued at several hundred million dollars, and in 2005 the Boston Museum of Fine Arts prepared an exhibition of many of his possessions. Koch’s staff began tracking down the provenance of the four Jefferson bottles, and found that, apart from Broadbent’s authentication of the Forbes bottle, they had nothing on file. Seeking historical corroboration, they approached the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, at Monticello, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Several days later, Monticello’s curator, Susan Stein, telephoned. “We don’t believe those bottles ever belonged to Thomas Jefferson,” she said.

Koch (pronounced “coke”) lives with his third wife, Bridget Rooney, and six children, from this and previous marriages, in a thirty-five-thousand-square-foot Anglo-Caribbean-style house in Palm Beach,

He's the stepfather of one of the lamest and richest members of Congress, the far right Republican kook who replaced sex predator and Blue Dog Tim Mahoney (who had replaced GOP sex predator Mark Foley), Tom Rooney, another worthless Republican who never worked a day in his miserable life. Aside from Thomas Jefferson's fake wine, Koch also impresses his fat cat friends with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of art-- works by Modigliani, Picasso, Renoir, Rodin, Degas, Chagall, Cézanne, Monet, Miró, Dali, Léger, and Botero that belong in public museums, not the homes of rich scumbags. (He also purports to have General Custer's rifle and Sitting Bull's pistol.) He brags about owning wine that he has no intention of ever drinking. He collects bottles from certain vineyards almost as if they were baseball cards, aiming to complete a set. 'I just want a hundred and fifty years of Lafite on the wall,' he said."

“When I went crazy is when I sold my stock in Koch Industries,” he said. That was 1983; he made a reported five hundred and fifty million dollars on the sale. At that point, he decided he would build a world-class wine collection. When I asked why, he looked at me as if I’d failed to grasp the obvious. “Because it’s the best-tasting form of alcohol in the world,” he said. “That’s why.”

Koch may be as compulsive about filing lawsuits as he is about collecting. He waged a twenty-year legal battle against two of his brothers relating to the family business. (The matter was settled in 2001.) He sued the state of Massachusetts over an improperly taxed stock transaction and won a forty-six-million-dollar abatement. When a former girlfriend whom he had installed at a condo in Boston’s Four Seasons hotel refused to leave, Koch took her to housing court and had her evicted. He talks about “dropping a subpoena” on people as if he were lobbing a grenade.

Fine-wine fraud was almost unheard of when Koch bought his four bottles of Th.J. Bordeaux, and the only assurance he demanded was that they came from the same collection that Broadbent had authenticated. He was angry to find out that Monticello believed his bottles were fake. “I’ve bought so much art, so many guns, so many other things, that if somebody’s out to cheat me I want the son of a bitch to pay for it,” he told me, his color rising. “Also,” he said, smiling, “it’s a fun detective story.”

Koch was determined to see Rodenstock-- real name Meinhard Goerke-- in prison and filed a first complaint against him, as a con artist, in 2006 in New York City.

NNo one knows how many bottles of wine-- real or fake-- Hardy Rodenstock has sold over the years. His deals were often in cash. (“If you pay in cash, then people don’t have to declare the sale for tax purposes,” he once told an interviewer. “Two hundred thousand dollars in cash can sometimes be better than a million-dollar check.”) Protective of both his suppliers and his buyers, he did not volunteer information about particular sales. Jim Elroy thinks that, at ten thousand dollars a bottle or more, Rodenstock could have sold ten bottles a month and made more than a million dollars a year. As Koch was launching his suit against Rodenstock, a Massachusetts software entrepreneur named Russell Frye filed a lawsuit against the Wine Library, a distributor in Petaluma, California, alleging that it had sold him nineteenth-century Lafite and Yquem, along with dozens of other rare old wines, that were counterfeit. Frye’s complaint notes that one of the defendants in the case “has recently informed plaintiff that many of the bottles that plaintiff alleges are counterfeit or questionable were ultimately obtained from Hardy Rodenstock.

The best Lafleur around was from 1947. Only 5 magnums were bottled-- although, somehow, these crooked auction houses managed to sell 19 magnums since 1998. And the laughable Koch owns two of them. Koch says he's going to sue everyone. Rodenstock claims all the buyers of his junk wines are trying to frame him. There are two movies being made about the whole thing now!