The X Games is an all-American take on the Olympics, hosted by US cable sports channel ESPN.
"X" is for extreme and the sports are picked purely on viewer appeal, so instead of synchronised swimming you get motocross and BMX.
Mike Veseth, an American economics professor and wine blogger, found himself an unlikely fan. "It was kind of addictive," he told me, "but it got me thinking of a book built around the idea of exploring the extremes to see if they commented on something happening in the mainstream."
The result is Extreme Wine: Searching The World For The Best, The Worst, The Outrageously Cheap, The Insanely Overpriced And The Undiscovered. Despite its mouth-filling title, it is the most engaging wine book I have read in a long time.
The pace is fast as you lurch from "two buck chuck" - America's cheapest plonk sold by Trader Joe's, the US cousin of Aldi - to the record-breaking £105,000 Chateau Lafite 1787 sold by Christie's. The Lafite was claimed to be Thomas Jefferson's, but the initials engraved on the glass were almost certainly done by a modern drill.
"The Jefferson bottles were probably just the tip of the iceberg," writes Veseth. "Who knows how many faked bottles sit quietly gathering dust?" Only last month an Indonesian fraudster, Rudy Kurniawan, was jailed for 10 years for selling an estimated $100 million worth of fake wine.
The book also covers booms and busts, from Bordeaux to Australia, and explains how the time-lag between decisions in the vineyard and the bottles hitting the shelf make it worse for wine than other agricultural products.
As for fizz, Veseth believes "the key to champagne's glory is marketing" and wonders whether, economically, it "isn't made in the vineyard or the cellar, but rather the advertising agency". "Champagne is famous," he says, "because it isn't really just wine. It is really fame (and luxury) itself."
So what's his advice for finding a bargain? Look at what everyone else is drinking and try something else, so "you'll never pay a popularity tax to drink it".
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