As a result, his Valpolicellas, a category of wine that can often be insipid, were benchmarks of what could be achieved with care: intense and structured yet light and graceful, with the ability to age.
"It's set a tone where being gay-friendly or pretty explicitly queer oriented is the benchmark of what's desirable, the kind of clubs people want to go to," he says.
Nick Cohen, who considers Islamism akin to modern day fascism, recently lambasted the liberal left for failing to engage with liberal Muslims and hailed ex-Islamists as the benchmark of what a liberal Muslim looks like.
Newham has pioneered a scheme to register landlords and lettings, which is raising standards and at least attempting to set a benchmark of what is acceptable in the UK today.
The argument is complicated by the fact that the standard resource is only indirectly related to the actual sums sent out to universities, or as Hefce puts it: "Standard resource is not, however, what we actually pay institutions, but instead can be thought of as a notional benchmark of what we think institutions' share of overall resources should be to reflect their teaching activities.
Now in its sixth year, it has become an essential, annual benchmark of what is thought to be the reasonable financial underpinnings of a modest life; not starvation rations, just sufficient to achieve a decent standard of living in the 21st century.
Structural biologist Gaetano Montelione of Rutgers University in New Jersey agrees: "The results are valuable as a benchmark of what's possible," he says.
Buyouts of publicly traded ISPs were virtually nonexistent between 1997 and early this year, because crazed investors, spurred by Wall Street carnival barkers, levitated the stocks far higher than the bedrock benchmark of what people in the business were willing to pay for the actual companies.
"These goals are not just development targets, but benchmarks of what can be achieved for children," Ms. Veneman said.
