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Must be paradise. I'd love it for myself.
My dog is going to be the death of me. He's 16.5 yrs old and is incontinent. Just had to go deal with that. Ugh. But he's a sweetie. He obviously can't help it. I just can't deal with it much longer.
Take it easy Lugan. See you tomorrow maybe. More to do here.
I see what you are saying, totally. I've been the director of a few galleries and I always, ALWAYS pay for the food and wine, etc. I'm an artist (my head is falling over from all these flimsy hats I wear). Anyway, I understand.
Nice to hear about your wife. Very nice. Thanks for telling me that.
How to provoke him... hmmmmmmmm.
Where I live it's the same thing. Wineries charge more. It's the ambiance you're paying for, and the salary of the person behind the bar, I guess.
I went to an art exhibit at one of the local wineries once and THEY CHARGED FOR THE WINE!!! My friend, the artist, was furious. Can you imagine? You go to an art opening and they're charging you for wine? No conscience.
Leave it to Low, right?
I want to do a California wine country tour.
There's an old style of Belgian beer called Lambic that is often made with fruit but it's fermented in an organic way where it isn't controlled that well and some of them are terrific, more like wines in some way. But my friend once decided that he was going to just fool around with this way of making beer and he unveiled his masterpiece one night at a party. He opened the jug and poured an inch of this stuff into a pitcher and we could not get it to stop foaming, it was like the thing, had to sit it in the sink for what seemed like an eternity. We were all laughing so hard it was well worth his red face. There was a foot of foam and an inch of beer, but had the pitcher been taller, there is no telling how tall that beer would have been. We were playing games with how to get at the beer. He has not heard the end of that.
Anyway, one of the ways they say you can learn to detect flavors in wine is to buy a fruit or spice and drop it in an inexpensive wine. I intend to do that with slate and gunmetal.
Hey! That's a terrific idea, actually. Of course, those that can make it... great. But if you can't, just buy the wine posted in ibox and post your own notes. Will come up with a system, maybe like the brain teaser thing. Put: Tasting 1 in post so people know in retrospect what the post refers to. Good?
I'll go shopping tomorrow for some possible wines. Wrote Lugan that I've been really busy with end of semester but I'm really looking forward to this tasting. I'll post a few prospects tomorrow night and we can discuss. You can do same, same for anyone else.
Should it be complex or pretty straight forward for the first tasting? What say you :)
Nice ban.
Motorcycle Diaries: 4 out of 5
DERF!!! Tell me anything you have to say about the wines she brought home and info she brought back.
They are doing VERY creative things. The most abused grape in the world is Merlot, too - especially in California. Suddenly everyone hates it since that goofball in Sideways, who I adored, bashed it. I heard Merlot sales went down 30% since but I could be spreading bull. Merlot is a good grape, can be awesome, but too easy so few people treat it right. It's a mainstay of Bordeaux, some of the greatest wines ever made... and suddenly it sucks.
I'd LOVE to hear anything Spouse_Derf had to report.
That Aborigine in the lead was incredible. Loved that movie.
I meant gooood silly, of course. Silly, if done well, is the best. I give it 4.5 out of 5 for sure.
Ordering a number at a fine restaurant, regardless of the fact that I truly thought it was a gimmick, was perhaps the most humiliating dating moment EVER!
Well, come to think about it.......
Monsters, Inc is good but Nemo is great. I don't like Goodman in anything. He is wooden to me. I've liked movies he's been in, like his segment of Storytelling (which was mint) but he is not my favorite actor by a long shot.
TX on Aviatoror.
Unfortunately, I agree with you.
Oh, that shriek. Took a few seconds for the potato to find its target... like slow motion. I looked like that Munch painting, The Scream.
It was SUCH a silly movie - I loved it to pieces!!! That and the 1978 La Cage aux folles.... classics! Gods made me cry from laughing at times, as did Cage.
The scientist, such a well intentioned soul who turns into a buffoon around women. Can I ever relate to THAT trait. I once was on a first date and slapped my hand on the table while laughing, and catapulted, with my fork, a potato that hit some woman in the head across the room. Never saw that bore again. I was laughing like MAD to myself but was embarrassed as hell, too.
Then there was the time I was taken to this very elegant restaurant by a suave guy I met at the gym. He picked me up in a big, fat BMW (not that I cared, actually, but he loved his car more than anything in the world - weird - and you get some idea of his priorities). The restaurant had a strange name (I will not write here) that lead me to believe it was going for a theme kind of thing so I was geared for a twist. All the appetizers had prices listed and they just so happened to be in ascending order, at least for the brief moment I looked at them: 11, 12, 13, 14 ...17... so I made one of my mind boggling, flying leaps of logic and ordered #16. The minute I saw the waitress's face, that big buzzer in the sky told me I would never get a call back from this guy (I didn't like him much anyway but this is not how I wanted to not go out with him again). The harder I tried to explain, the more bizarre it all seemed, even to me. Again, was laughing like crazy to myself, stroke material. Months later I ran into him again at the gym and had the good fortune of not even having to fake it when I could not, for the life of me, remember his name as he approached me and this hunk of a bodybuilder I just happened (oh, thank you universe) to be speaking with. While sincerely scrambling around in my mind for a way to introduce everyone it became obvious I was drawing a blank. He asked me out again right there and I said with hollow enthusiasm, "maybe sometime". Life should always be so satisfying.
Gods: Totally charming film. Glad you liked it.
I saw Monsters Inc the other night. I needed warm and fuzzy, so rented it! It was no Incredibles, Shrek or Nemo yet it was awfully good. 3.25 out of 5. I have Aviator and Unforgiven on the counter. Thinking about which I want to watch, if any tonight. Loooooooooong day here.
Hey! Very clever! I was in a hurry when I first read this... glad I revisited.
I've been in a time crunch lately but will be pretty freed up in a few weeks. Will try to make incremental progress here. I'm in no hurry, anyway. I don't get the feeling you are, either. End of semester squeeze. 30 more pages of reading, 50 tests to grade and a test to make up for tomorrow before I can even think about relaxing tonight.
I like Malbec a lot too, btw. A friend wants to go in on a vineyard in Argentina - with a small group of investors and myself - we would use my friend who is the winemaker for my current, very modest enterprise... but I don't think I want to do it. What a mess that place is and I might need to catch my breath after this absurd, unbelievably trying season, taxing on many fronts, actually. I'm so depressed... I need a glass of wine!
Hope to see you around.
My interest in boxed wine has been eclipsed by the appearance of this unsolicited addition to things I would never have known I wanted to know, which arrived via PM today:
When A Margaux Just Won't Do (from the Wine Board's Roving Correspondent)
When selecting a fine wine from the Medoc, Hugh Johnson is a source to consider. Alas, to the outdoor wine enthusiast, Mr. Johnson is merely a useless snot with affectations. When one's studio apartment is corrugated and says Maytag on the side, stemware and decanting are not considerations, and concessions must be made to one's purse.
Together with the renown experts at bumwine.com, your intrepid correspondent sought to identify and rank our country's foremost street wines, those grand cruds most guzzled and beloved by America's alleyway denizens.
After a truly wrenching testing process, a mere five of these alcohol fortified wines were deemed sufficiently horrid to be included on our final list. They are (drumroll, please): Cisco, Mad Dog 20/20, Night Train Express, Thunderbird, and Wild Irish Rose. Now, borrowing liberally (plagiarizing) from bumwine.com, I invite you to:
Meet the Cruds
Cisco: Said to be favored by those with hankerings for Robitussin, tales of Cisco-induced, semi-psychotic fits are common. Often, people on a Cisco binge end up curled into a fetal ball, shuddering and muttering paranoid rants. Nudity and violence may well be involved too.
MD 20/20: Avaliable in various nauseating tropical flavors that coat your whole system like bathtub scum, but only the full "Red Grape Wine" flavor packs the 18% wallop.
Night Train Express: Some of our researchers indicated that it gave them a NyQuil-like drowsiness, and perhaps this is why the put "night" in the name.
Thunderbird: If you are a person who likes to smell your hand after pumping gas, look no further than Thunderbird.
Wild Irish Rose: There are those who consider this foul beverage to be a conspiracy by the Republicans to kill the homeless.
All of these gems have an alcohol content of a mind numbing 17.5 percent minimum, and surprise of surprises, two of them are products of Ernie and Julio Gallo.
A votre sante!
I'm not sure I ever did buy Denzel as a semi-retired cold blooded killer. Even in the beginning when they had him looking pretty scruffy, you could tell he wasn't an alcoholic just by looking at him. I know, I know, it's Hollywood, but all of the ways they tried to indicate that he had once been a killing machine and was now a drunk did not work. However, I enjoyed his performance regardless and the scenes of cold rage were fun. My favorite was when the people at the rave were cheering at the place blowing up. Too funny.
It was entertainment, a diversion from ones own reality and as such it worked fine. It was not art, though. It was simply a movie with which one could sympathise, root conflict free for and against characters, and for which one was willing to suspend disbelief. That's all I'm saying. The camera work and graphics were an arbitrary affect, a heavy handed travesty of art. If they hadn't done that I'd have accepted the movie for what it was and loved it. Dakota still being alive was a stretch. But, for what it was, even that worked out okay. And the fact that Denzel died of the gunshot wound and not at the hand of the kidnapper was a relief. Nice cathartic movie. Redemption. Go St. Jude!
Post that here and find out:
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/board.asp?board_id=4730
Chu will be sorry to hear that.
You think I can't hang? Oh, I can hang - hahahaha, and I don't mean dangle.
If I really had courage and a sense of humor with conviction, I'd vanish now and forever, right?
I have a pretty highly developed sense of when to run.
Is quinze the French spelling of quince :)
Yeah, there are a bunch of aromas/flavors that I haven't been able to identify. I get when there's a general mineral or mushroomy kind of smell/taste, or barn (which is caused by contamination and not a good thing, you'll be happy to know, except in a few French wines - one in particular my friend mentioned - that, if there's a tad of it they are simply happy for the extra layer of complexity). But to come up with Moose nest? Please! Regardless, am really anxious to get this down as best we/I can, if I even can. I'd actually like to find a wine in which slate or flint or something like that is upfront so at least I'd KNOW it was there and all I'd have to do is isolate it.
Glad you've never tasted a gun. Good to know.
Hey! That's "moose", btw.
EDIT!!!
Let me put it this way, if someone here says, "smells and tastes like mouse nest".... my eyebrows WILL go up.
Saw Man On Fire. Can't believe how much Dakota grew in one year! She was in that horrible, 2005 Hide and Seek but she seemed so much older - at least in my memory.
Anyway, Denzel and Dakota were amazing. I liked the story very much but the camera work and graphics irritated the hell out of me. I kept feeling that it was trying to be Traffic, which I liked a lot except for the very end. The journalistic edge added substantially to a feeling of gritty immediacy. 3.5 out of 5 on Man On Fire, though. It could have easily been a 4 but there was absolutely no reason to film and edit it that way. It added nothing (detracted even and surely distracted) and was hokey very often - like putting drop shadows on clunky fonts. Had they done that ten years ago it MIGHT have been acceptable. This really could have been a terrific movie with no compromises had they not tried so hard to be 'hip'. There was so much that was great about this movie that I was angry about that.
Come on, disagree :)
What if I throw in a box of Fanzia.
That looks so nice in there. Thanks Raz. Can't wait to get mine. There are many flavors I just can't isolate yet. Slate is one of them. And flint... FLINT?!!! Gunmetal?!!! Oh come on. And I will tell you in my next post something about the taste of slate in German wines... a misperception I had.
I remember spending half an hour on the beach with friends trying to figure out what it was I was tasting in this wine we were drinking. Everyone was having fun and I had to go off by myself because they were telling me to shut up already and enjoy myself. I WAS ENJOYING MYSELF! Suddenly, after paging through the mental inventory of aromas and flavors stored in my brain, I made it back to childhood. VOILA! It was the taste of these candies I loved as a kid, violets. Tasted EXACTLY like them. I think it's the scent and flavor of lavender, which is relatively common in some varietals but this was somehow SO intense it was like having a brick building so close to your face all you see is something resembling the surface of Mars. Once I got it and came back and told them, everyone was like "OH YEAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! EXACTLY!"
So, I could really use that wheel. So much I just don't get yet. So, we start where we are and move forward.
Thanks again.
Lugan, a friend wrote and PMd this to me this AM - I thought it was hilariuos so am sharing:
Franzia Box White Chablis
On Monday evening, my humble abode was the site of an impromptu wine tasting. (Read: We ran out of beer.) After some deliberation, I chose for our tasting a Franzia Box White Chablis, a five liter carton that was (a)taking up room in my refrigerator and (b)all I had.
Torn between juice glasses and styrofoam cups, I soon settled on the latter, reasoning that smelling and tasting it would be bad enough, so why look at it too?
I explained to the assembled that we couldn't simply guzzle down the wine. We had to sniff it first, thereby revealing our couth and expanding our wine experience. This disappointed them greatly, but I controlled the carton, so they reluctantly went along with it.
We swirled. We twirled. We snorted. Many of the responses would violate the TOU of this site for Franzia has not so much an aroma as a stench. In what is printable here, it was variously characterized as being evocative of:
A Nursing Home
Low Tide
An Elderly Dog
Newark
They were now daunted but unbowed. Together, we put cups to our lips and sipped. My notes from the night include the following:
"I'm really sorry. Got any paper towel?"
"Who wants the rest of mine?"
"Maybe you're supposed to add something to it."
"Use the rest to disinfect the bidet."
"Wow. The Steelers are getting their asses kicked." (I sensed a loss of focus here.)
Clearly, my tyro testers missed the essence of this most pedestrian of wines. Franzio Box White Chablis is reminiscent of a Montrachet in that it is wet and contains alcohol. Moreover, it is a celebration of the mediocrity that lurks within all of us. It instantly lowers one's expectations of everything. I, for one, began to hum "Dust in the Wind."
With each sip, the wine gently whispers "Loser." It cascades over your tongue, instantly reaching a climactic nadir then quickly petering out.
Tasting Notes:
One taster claimed that he detected undertones of grape, but no one else did. He was probably just showing off.
Another taster made the excellent point that this is probably a good wine to select when you're already quite drunk.
This is the perfect wine to serve to a vagrant. Or an in-law. Or a hooker.
I think that it would match up well with boiled potatoes. Or Wonder Bread. Or cardboard.
A final note on storage: Once opened, this wine will "keep" in your refrigerator for an extended time. Franzia has designed the carton and spout so ingeniously that the wine will retain every bit of its crappiness.
A votre sante!
I just ordered one, too. Am going to go to a local wine store and buy some nice, affordable reds to consider for our tasting here, which we'll plan in the not too distant future. I'd like, as would you, to stay away from pricey. I only get to have those at tastings when everyone chips in and each person gets one glass. It's amazing how different a truly fine wine truly tastes but who has that kind of money. We'll work at finding the affordable gems.
Do you have a suggestion? Hadn't you made one?
It's that Gummo thing again. Totally different movies but they both rely on the freak factor for effect. Gummo is more creepy, of course, the freakishness distilled by the premise, and Dynamite is supposed to be humorous. But both left me feeling icky, like I'd watched a Howard Stern marathon.
His dance scene was pretty cool, though. Perfect balance of physical agility and awkwardness combined with dorky heroics.
Anyway, I think I have way too many sense memories of people I've met who come frighteningly close to some of those characters, none of whom I've appreciated much. I wanted them to go away, much how I felt during the movie.
I only fall for that one twice.