Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
I will dig up that post later. At the time it was a quip more directed to me than to SB in general. Sometimes I'm wrong, but I am never mean.
Au contraire. I am far from mean. Hoople commented some weeks ago that all Sauvignon Blanc's taste like cat pee. I was just double checking.
I will mark that for a taste. Do you think its better than the Brancott?
I thought you were lost in the garage.
Is Kim's SB in the cat pee category?
That's not Brancott. Are you cheating?
I'm using Vietnamese chilli sauce with my sauteed shrimp. Threw on some pasta for balance.
I play in a jug band, accordion, and there's a party tonight. I cannot stay too much longer. This wine is warming me up real nice.
Hoople must have gone to the garage to find a pair of pliers.
Does the bottle have Marlborough printed above Sauvignon Blanc?
The trick with the soy sauce is to mix it with the wasabi into a muddy paste and use it as a dip for the sushi. I love the wasabi heat!
I love Sauvignon Blanc with seafood and the Brancott is a nice buy for the price. Is yours a 2004 Marlborough?
We usually put soy souce on sushi with some wasabi.
They don't put screw tops on sushi here in San Francisco.
Well now that you have the top off. How's the sushi?
Must be heavy traffic around the country. Nobody here yet!
Salut!
Nice sauteed shrimp in butter and garlic. Nice citrus bouquet on the wine. Excellent combination.
Will just have to wait until the company arrives.
10 steps in preparation for an I-Hub wine tasting:
1) Send letters a week in advance to business associates, friends and family members that you will be both physically and mentally incapacitated at the time and date of the tasting.
2) Send e-mails 2 days in advance to business associates, friend and family members, reiterating that you will be both physically and mentally incapacitated at the time and date of the tasting.
3) On the day of the tasting disconnect your telephone so that there can be no last minute interruptions.
4) Two hours before the tasting get rid of any kids, friends or relatives who might distract you from the upcoming event. Just tell them that you will be both physically and mentally incapacitated in the very near future.
5) One hour before the tasting brush your teeth and rinse well with water to ensure a fresh palate for the tasting.
6) If the event is causing some anticipation squeamishness, a little sex helps to calm things down and gives relief to anxiety.
7) A half hour before the event turn off the TV and create a quality atmosphere. Candles are nice. A nicely set table with the food of your choice will do wonders for the wine. Pop the selected wine.
8) In the last few minutes double check to make sure your broadband connection is on and that your browser is set to the I-Hub URL.
9) Read quickly the bombast of pre-tasting posts and then set yourself down at the table with your favorite glass and pour the selected wine. Have a small sip. Taste the food.
10) Zero hour. To your health! Now it is time to share your comments.
Time to put the Sauvignon Blanc into the fridge for Sunday's 3rd Internatiol I-Hub wine tasting extravaganza.
Don't forget the sea-food of your choice to accompany the festivities.
For a good Feng Shui experience, give a nod to the Bernoulli effect when you close the shower curtain in the morning. You might also want to read a little Thomas Paine, born on that day, and Jane Austin, who published Pride and Prejudice on that day.
After a sip or 2 consider a toast to King George III, better yet Edgar Allan Poe's "Raven."
http://timelines.ws/days/01_29.HTML
Hi Mat,
Just a little reminder that Jan 29th is our 3rd I-Hub wine tasting event. We are featuring the Brancott 2004 Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand to be accompanied by the sea food of your choice.
See you here.
I bet this reflects a little insider buying to establish a new share price level.
I do not mind screwtops. Am just surprised that they would mix the capping on that vintage. I recently used a foil cutter on a screw top and cut off the top without realizing it was a screw top.
Reading is good. Have your read Robert Musil "The Man without Qualities"?
Sipping is good too: "sip and learn"
http://cityguide.aol.com/stlouis/entertainment/event.adp?evid=2571288
I thought you were going on the wagon. Welcome back.
I've always found Columbia Crest to produce a quality product. Thanks for the 2 cents.
Pick up any New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc that you can find. We will do a blind taste and compare!
Consider this:
Call them and let them know that you are tied into a large group of wine afficionados. If they do not make good your purchase tell
them you will go public with their poor response.
Tell us where you bought it. Give us their e-mail address and phone number. I would be happy to call and express my disappointment in their services.
My 2004 Brancott Sauvignon Blanc has a cork.
Are you saying that your's has a screw top?
Time to get out the fishing pole and catch some seafood for the worldwide Sunday eve 3rd I-Hub wine tasting extravaganza. I myself plan to do a little shrimping.
Sunday Sunday Sunday
At the IHib Wineway
Grab your Brancott Sauvignon Blanc
And Taste Away
As we round IHub curves...
For the beer lover's on this board look around for the new import from Lithuania: Svyturys (Lighthouse) beer:
http://www.svyturys.lt/lt
And for those ready to try a new red look around for a Dolcetto from Italy. I found a 2001 Dolcetto de Dogliani for $16:
http://www.milioni.com/vini/ingd1/492.htm
That's funny. I myself weighed the Nobilo against the Brancott and chose the Brancott.
If with good effort anybody fails to find the New Zealand Brancott Sauvignon Blanc, by all means pick up any 2004 New Zealand SB in the $10-$15 range. We may then make some comparisons and perhaps discover something new.
The Brancott Sauvignon Blanc is a pretty major New Zealand brand. It is stocked in California at the major grocery stores and Beverages Plus, a major spirits retailer.
Try calling around. You should be able to find it.
Good luck.
Why just the cork? Give him back the whole bottle, or did you drink it all?
On Neuroesthetics:
Santa Cruz vintner Randall Grahm ventures far afield this weekend in his quest to unlock the secrets of great wine: He's traveling to UC Berkeley to meet with top international neuroscientists studying how the brain responds to taste and smell.
"There's a struggle right now in the land of wine," said Grahm, who owns Bonny Doon Vineyard, "for the soul of wine."
If soul seems an unlikely topic for a scientific gathering, there's nothing mystical about the public program unfolding Saturday at the UC's Berkeley Art Museum at "Flavors of Experience," the Fifth International Conference on Neuroesthetics.
Research in the relatively new field shows that the quality known as soul -- call it beauty, integrity, greatness, originality or something beyond words -- is embedded in biology. It seems a great wine -- or a meal, or a scent -- is one that fires up certain tissues in the pleasure-reward zone located in a region of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex.
What excites Grahm is the thought that if creative people knew more about how the brain responds to their work, their experiments could achieve greatness more often. In theory, while a wine with soul could never be designed with blueprints, knowledge of the brain's pleasure-response map could help guide the winemaker in his intuitive efforts.
At the same time, according to the researchers in neuroesthetics, scientists could learn much from artists about the role of memory, language, culture and emotion in the brain's response to pleasure -- factors traditionally considered rather squishy for laboratory study. What tastes good has a strong genetic basis, but pleasure ultimately is an individual experience colored by one's personality and background.
The sponsor of the conference, Elwin Marg, 87, a Cal professor emeritus of vision science and optometry, is driven by the belief that scientists and artists must overcome their historical split and compare notes to figure out how the brain works.
"One of the most important activities people can have is to understand how the brain works," Marg said. "It's a very fundamental question, and there's been a lot of progress in the last 50 to 100 years. But we have so much more to learn than we have learned."
In the past half-dozen years, Marg said, the field of neuroesthetics has emerged. Building on knowledge of brain structures gleaned from imaging technologies such as MRI, neuroesthetics deals with pinpointing how the brain responds to such emotional experiences as taste, empathy and -- the topic of next year's conference -- the many varieties of love.
"Why do we like things that give us pleasure?" asked Marg, who keeps on a shelf in his office a number of brains floating in formaldehyde in glass jars -- relics of a bygone research project. "When we hear music or have a favorite gastronomic dish, it must be in here," he said, putting a finger to his cranium, "and that's what we're getting at."
The top-billed scientist at the conference is Semir Zeki, a professor of neurobiology at University College London. Seki, who will be a visiting professor at Cal this spring, wrote the book on neuroesthetics in 1999 with "Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain," and two years later founded the Institute of Neuroesthetics, which combines with Marg's Berkeley-based Minerva Foundation to host yearly conferences and award "Golden Brain" trophies to investigators at the forefront of research on vision and the brain.
Art is an extension of the visual brain, Zeki wrote in his book, and artists are in a sense neurologists.
"We are gradually beginning to acquire a better understanding of the emotive power of art," Zeki said by e-mail last week. "One interesting result has been the demonstration that works of art that are judged to be beautiful by an individual engage a specific part of the pleasure-reward centers of the brain."
Most important, Zeki said, neuroscience is growing to embrace material long considered exclusive to the humanities. "All art and literature and music are products of the brain, and their study gives us important clues as to how the brain is organized," he said.
Also on the conference roster are scientists who have studied the brain's response to eating chocolate, the varied neurological responses to Pepsi and Coke, odor responses in the brain in response to sex and the electro-chemical action of taste in the mouth.
The artists attending plan their own set of challenges for their scientist peers. For example, Ed Epse Brown will conduct a ceremony around the eating of one potato chip.
"When you're not busy or watching TV or smoking or drinking and when you give your full attention to a potato chip, there's not much there," said Brown, a Zen priest and a former co-manager and wine buyer at Greens in San Francisco. "What it meant for me when I started eating things more carefully is that you learn from your experience rather than need some boss from within.
"It's literally that you experience things closely enough that you know from your experience what is really enjoyable and nourishing and what isn't," he said.
Grahm, the vintner, will continue his pursuit of wine with soul when he goes home. Among the things he's learning, two stand out: The job can't be rushed, and the answers aren't in some mystical realm but in the ground beneath his feet.
"The old Randall would say, 'This is all wrong, it all has to be changed.' The new one is like, 'Let's really look closely at what we have to try to discern if there's any real genius, excellence, specialness, in what we have -- learning how to look,' " he said. "I've got this funky vineyard, and I'm trying to find out what, if anything, is exquisite about it."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/01/20/BAGDSGQD1G1.DTL&hw=wine&sn=009&a...
On Neuroesthetics:
Santa Cruz vintner Randall Grahm ventures far afield this weekend in his quest to unlock the secrets of great wine: He's traveling to UC Berkeley to meet with top international neuroscientists studying how the brain responds to taste and smell.
"There's a struggle right now in the land of wine," said Grahm, who owns Bonny Doon Vineyard, "for the soul of wine."
If soul seems an unlikely topic for a scientific gathering, there's nothing mystical about the public program unfolding Saturday at the UC's Berkeley Art Museum at "Flavors of Experience," the Fifth International Conference on Neuroesthetics.
Research in the relatively new field shows that the quality known as soul -- call it beauty, integrity, greatness, originality or something beyond words -- is embedded in biology. It seems a great wine -- or a meal, or a scent -- is one that fires up certain tissues in the pleasure-reward zone located in a region of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex.
What excites Grahm is the thought that if creative people knew more about how the brain responds to their work, their experiments could achieve greatness more often. In theory, while a wine with soul could never be designed with blueprints, knowledge of the brain's pleasure-response map could help guide the winemaker in his intuitive efforts.
At the same time, according to the researchers in neuroesthetics, scientists could learn much from artists about the role of memory, language, culture and emotion in the brain's response to pleasure -- factors traditionally considered rather squishy for laboratory study. What tastes good has a strong genetic basis, but pleasure ultimately is an individual experience colored by one's personality and background.
The sponsor of the conference, Elwin Marg, 87, a Cal professor emeritus of vision science and optometry, is driven by the belief that scientists and artists must overcome their historical split and compare notes to figure out how the brain works.
"One of the most important activities people can have is to understand how the brain works," Marg said. "It's a very fundamental question, and there's been a lot of progress in the last 50 to 100 years. But we have so much more to learn than we have learned."
In the past half-dozen years, Marg said, the field of neuroesthetics has emerged. Building on knowledge of brain structures gleaned from imaging technologies such as MRI, neuroesthetics deals with pinpointing how the brain responds to such emotional experiences as taste, empathy and -- the topic of next year's conference -- the many varieties of love.
"Why do we like things that give us pleasure?" asked Marg, who keeps on a shelf in his office a number of brains floating in formaldehyde in glass jars -- relics of a bygone research project. "When we hear music or have a favorite gastronomic dish, it must be in here," he said, putting a finger to his cranium, "and that's what we're getting at."
The top-billed scientist at the conference is Semir Zeki, a professor of neurobiology at University College London. Seki, who will be a visiting professor at Cal this spring, wrote the book on neuroesthetics in 1999 with "Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain," and two years later founded the Institute of Neuroesthetics, which combines with Marg's Berkeley-based Minerva Foundation to host yearly conferences and award "Golden Brain" trophies to investigators at the forefront of research on vision and the brain.
Art is an extension of the visual brain, Zeki wrote in his book, and artists are in a sense neurologists.
"We are gradually beginning to acquire a better understanding of the emotive power of art," Zeki said by e-mail last week. "One interesting result has been the demonstration that works of art that are judged to be beautiful by an individual engage a specific part of the pleasure-reward centers of the brain."
Most important, Zeki said, neuroscience is growing to embrace material long considered exclusive to the humanities. "All art and literature and music are products of the brain, and their study gives us important clues as to how the brain is organized," he said.
Also on the conference roster are scientists who have studied the brain's response to eating chocolate, the varied neurological responses to Pepsi and Coke, odor responses in the brain in response to sex and the electro-chemical action of taste in the mouth.
The artists attending plan their own set of challenges for their scientist peers. For example, Ed Epse Brown will conduct a ceremony around the eating of one potato chip.
"When you're not busy or watching TV or smoking or drinking and when you give your full attention to a potato chip, there's not much there," said Brown, a Zen priest and a former co-manager and wine buyer at Greens in San Francisco. "What it meant for me when I started eating things more carefully is that you learn from your experience rather than need some boss from within.
"It's literally that you experience things closely enough that you know from your experience what is really enjoyable and nourishing and what isn't," he said.
Grahm, the vintner, will continue his pursuit of wine with soul when he goes home. Among the things he's learning, two stand out: The job can't be rushed, and the answers aren't in some mystical realm but in the ground beneath his feet.
"The old Randall would say, 'This is all wrong, it all has to be changed.' The new one is like, 'Let's really look closely at what we have to try to discern if there's any real genius, excellence, specialness, in what we have -- learning how to look,' " he said. "I've got this funky vineyard, and I'm trying to find out what, if anything, is exquisite about it."
www.sfgate.com
I always ask for the darkest of the dark.
That usually gets me Guiness.
See: http://timelines.ws/subjects/Beer_Spirits.HTML
I am going to ask Hoople to rent this board out as a sportsbar for that afternoon.
Count me out. I like dark beer in a pub with good company. Do not care for football.
Its locked on my calendar. As long as nature and PG&E cooperate I'll be there... (credit here to the Four Tops)
Now if you feel that you can't go on
Because all your hope is gone
And your life is filled with confusion
And happiness is just an illusion
And your world around is tumblin' down
Darling, reach out
Reach out, for me.
I'll be there to love and confort you...(Sauvignon Blanc baby)
I'll be there so you be there baby too...
We ned to talk it up in advance. I will post everyday during the week leading up to the tasting so as to encourage participants.
My selection for the next tasting is the Brancott 2004 Sauvignon Blanc, from New Zealand. It should be readily available and costs about $12.
This gives you all almost 2 weeks to find it and place it in the fridge. The date for the tasting is Sunday, January 29, a move up from the original Feb 12, and selected in consideration of SuperBowl on Feb 5. Hope everybody can make it.
Sorry to hear that. Maybe you can just stop by and watch the action.
Chicken will do just fine or even some sauteed vegetables.
Cheese is also good. Just something to nibble on with the wine.