Morning with the new bear:

Noon with the new bear:

Dinner with the new bear:

Bedtime with the new bear:

It doesn’t stop. The kid is on all the time. Where he keeps his stash I hate to think, but he is electric, nonstop a-go-go. We’re ignoring his “Mr Bean” nametag and calling him “Speedy.” He is a total freak.

Not even a bottle of MONTES CLASSIC SERIES CABERNET SAUVIGNON (2011) slowed Speedy down. You’d think, at 14% alcohol, that it might have subdued him slightly, but no.

The wine turned out to be another example of a wine that really should be decanted. Moreover, our bottle was over 25°C when we uncorked it, which unfairly rendered our first sips flabby and unappealing. So we let it breathe and put it in the fridge for an hour. If this bothered Speedy he didn’t let on; he was arcing like a Tesla coil; who knows what electric things he’d smuggled over from the UK in his ass—obviously Nana and Papa had forgotten to scoop them out before presenting him to my mum.

An hour is a really long time to wait, especially without a television show to love, and so we decided to join another party in progress and start watching Mad Men, Season 1, Episode 1. My parents and I were immediately hooked; Mad Men is an alcohol fest, and only Scary felt angered by our TV choice. He hated Mad Men; it did not feature one space ship or pirate or cop or time traveler or drug addict or convict. Scary spent most of the hour farting and trying to provoke Speedy.

By Episode 2 the wine was ready and it had settled down nicely. MONTES is from Chile’s Colchagua Valley, oaked in American barrels and wafting a chorus of interesting aromas ranging from peppercorn to mint to plum. On the palate it is dry if not parching with oak predominating and the tannins noticeably firm. The finish is boozy and warm, echoing strong oak and some of the stand-out tasting notes, coffee among them. If anything, MONTES’s flavor profile seems a bit crowded—intriguing but somewhat chaotic. Before we cooled the wine to a more drinkable 18°C, these notes seemed offputtingly discordant, but at the lower temperature they played together quite acceptably, especially as the wine continued to open up. MONTES might even be better on the second day, however slim the chance of any wine making it to a second day at LBHQ.

The bottle notes also suggest MONTES as a candidate for mid-term cellaring (another slim chance at LBHQ where the booze dollars are spoken for in the here and now, thank you very much). But it would be intriguing to see what another year or two would do for MONTES.

As for Speedy, who knows what a year or two at LBHQ will do. I expect him to still look like this:

But at least we might get used to him by then.