Best of lists, music and wine
There are some problems with best of lists (some rules). First there is the time frame. A best of list usually covers a time period, e.g. a year.
Trivium #1: You cannot make a serious best of list before the end of the period covered. Actually this is not as simple as it sounds. Speaking of records, release dates are different in different countries. Which one to choose? For the sake of simplicity you could take the release date in the home country of the artist. But this is maybe irrelevant to you as you discover the record later which brings us to the next point.
Trivium #2: You can only include items which you know. Seems to be really stupid, but this determines the contents of the best of list decisively. So actually you can only make a serious best of list when you know all let’s say records which have been released in the said year.
Therefore once you have established your best of list it is not definite. As it could be that you discover new albums you did not know before. Even subtler it could be that you have known a specific album but you did not recognise it as a great album, it is a grower and you did not have enough time to listen to it. Especially probable for albums which are released the 30th December.
But there is also the other way round. You put a record in your best of list but when you listen to it a couple of months later it has lost its charm. Happens quite frequently to me. Using wine terminology we could say the said record has exceeded its apogee. In the first case when you did not listen enough it has not yet reached its apogee (like the Mouton Rothschild 2000). This leads me to the idea of the perfect album which would be a record which reaches its apogee at the end of your life. It grows every time you listen to it. Does something like this exist? Maybe the soundtrack of nature, e.g. the birds singing!
Conclusion: Best of lists are never final. They should be revised regularly as Parker revises his wine notations every year. Having said that I will post my revised Best of 2000 list as from July, 11th 2001 tomorrow.

Parallels between wine and music: Wine has three main properties. Colour, bouquet (smell) and taste (on the tongue). These properties could be compared to genre (e.g. white=pop, rose=jazz and red=classical), introduction and melody in music. Even better analogies can be found for grape in the sense of cépage (=style, e.g. shoegazing within pop), winery (=artist) and certain vintage of one winery (=record). The grapes are the instruments. The wine dresser is the musician. The sommelier is the deejay. The wine consumers are the audience. The alcohol is the beat. A corky wine is like a false note. The structure (or maybe the body) of a wine could be compared to the musical rhythm. The water in the wine could be the air. The water transports the alcohol into our body, the air conveys the sound to our ears. A live concert is like a wine we drink in the region where it comes from. Talking when drinking socially is like dancing to music. The vintage year is not equal to the release year. It is the year when you heard a record for the first time. Etc. etc.
In giving notes to music we have the same problem as with wines. How can we compare techno with baroque on the same scale? This is why they only compare wines within an appellation (smaller than a region, geographical term which is purely wine derived) in the Guide Hachette. A wine with three stars is a representative wine of the appellation and nothing more. A coup de coeur Vin de Pays de l’Aude is not necessarily better than a two star Chateau Latour.

P.S. Calexico's tour CD Aerocalexico I mentioned yesterday is phantastic. No mariachi at all, quite experimental. Doug McCombs from Tortoise and Eleventh Dream Day participates and there are many very short but interesting slightly dissonant tracks. Definitely a grower. Calexico are following in Giant Sand's footsteps. Very DIY like Howe's recent album Confluence (amg). The record sounds like a homegrown cannabis (a strange crop anyway) plant. Actually Joey Burns almost looked like Howe on Sunday. He was wearing the same kind of baseball cap.