alcohol

BOWMORE 12—The cure for post-traumatic stress

Who on earth would make a handbag out of a bear’s head?

OMG, have you SEEN this? This designer DECAPITATES innocent bears, discards their bodies, removes their grey matter and then brazenly parades around with several bear-head purses at a time, people, with not even a wisp of moral dilemma about it.

Here’s what Toshiko Shek has to say about her creations:

I never knew beheading teddy bears can be so satisfying! Heh. Basically, I behead a teddy bear, take out the stuffing, sew in a lining, re-sew the bear head, put eyelets/rivets in the ears, chain it up and there you have a teddy bear purse! I feel like I need a clever name for them and right now the only thing I can think of is “bear with me”, too cheesy? What do you think?

WHAT DO I THINK????!!

Holy shit, I think it’s time to get out the BOWMORE 12. It’s hard to absorb, so early in the morning, the sight of so many fuzzy compatriots guillotined in the name of fashion.

You may have been wondering about the BOWMORE 12 review. I just needed a trigger to start drinking scotch in the morning again, and these ghoulish handbags fit the bill.

One of the oldest in Scotland, Bowmore Distillery sits on the Inner Hebridean Isle of Islay, from which all the peatiest whiskies hail. Of all the Islay malts, BOWMORE 12 is reputed to be the most balanced, so I was eager to taste it for myself.

Of course I did get into it last week when our friend Robert brought the bottle over, but by the time it got opened I’d already consumed several beers and a bottle of Spanish red wine, meaning my tastebuds were as compromised as my judgment. All I remember of the BOWMORE 12 is that it was smmmmoooooooth going down. (But not coming back up, and not the next day.)

"I have only made 4 so far because it’s really hard to find decent looking big bears. But today I got lucky and found 3 more and one of them is really big!" – Toshiko Shek

So I thought I could do a more attentive tasting this morning. Still shaking from Toshiko Shek’s bear slaughter, I needed the distraction.

Ahhhhh! BOWMORE 12 is delicate gold with a honey shimmer. The nose is evocative—a cold, damp evening, low-hanging mist, iodine washing in on the nearby tide, and of course peat smoke.

The mouthfeel is heavy and rich, almost creamy and certainly oily. BOWMORE 12 coats the glass as you swirl, then makes a lingering descent down the sides. The sip? Smoooooooooooth. Honey, a vague brininess, a hint of a hint of candied orange peel encased in toffee—but far away behind the peat. As you sip, the flavors commingle, starting sweet then modulating into a deep, smoky finish. Mild tannins bring the honey and fruit into satisfying balance, making BOWMORE 12 an ideal calming drink when the soul is in morbid turmoil.

I don’t know if it’s such a bright idea to lose control drinking BOWMORE 12 when scissors-wielding fashionistas are out bear-hunting.

But I guess I’ll take my chances.

The Alcoholic Hierarchy of Needs

Move aside, Maslow. We inebriates have a different Hierarchy.

BODEGAS CASTANO MONASTRELL (2010)—worth keeping on hand for the End of Days

My Fellow Inebriates,

The four-year-old recently took the scissors to Glen Bear, who ended up with a surprisingly restrained fur trim, which nevertheless prompted my mum to put the scissors in a high-up cupboard until the “paper only” rule is better internalized by the kids.

Thankfully not Glen or any of us

Glen has fewer brain cells than I do, which puts him into the negative numbers, but now he also looks like a dork. And even though he doesn’t care or really realize what happened, I’m shaking in my fur. It could have been any of us! And who knows? If the kid had been feeling especially demonic, Glen could have been decapitated.

Rattled by this incident, I started thinking about how illusory our sense of safety is. If you’re enjoying computer access and have the leisure to read an alcoholic bear’s ruminations, it’s a good guess that your basic physiological needs—food, water, air—are taken care of, as well as security concerns such as shelter and privacy too. But as my friend Scarybear likes to remind me constantly, we are just one semi-apocalyptic event away from chaos.

For me that event might consist of scissors-wielding kindergartners, but Scarybear is thinking about much larger destabilizing events. We talked about asteroids (and hemorrhoids) recently, but Scary finds the asteroid scenario, in all its preventability, boring. He’s thinking a gamma-ray burst will do us in this year.

Of course gamma-ray bursts occur all the time. They’re invisible to our eyes, which means we’re blissfully unaware of the daily gamma flashbulb that goes off, bathing our little blue marble in gamma radiation and then winking out. These bursts are 10 quadrillion times stronger than the sun. They don’t even come from our own galaxy—they come from other, distant galaxies (a long time ago, hitting us now) and are thought to be caused by collapsed stars merging. Wow!

So, Scary says in the brief pause he takes from snarfing an entire container of ice cream, what if two collapsed stars in OUR galaxy merged? OMG!

Uncertainty is frightening. I feel exactly the sort of trepidation Scary does about gamma-ray bursts when I’m considering buying a new bottle of wine. Like lots of wine drinkers, I have “go-to” wines that are always reliable; they hit the sweet spot between price and quality that allows you to feel good about dropping $15 to $20 in your local booze shop and pounding your purchase in front of the TV. It sucks to go out on a limb and come home with some barnyardy vinegar and have to drink it knowing you could and should have bought one of your old reliables.

So when our friend Robert came over with one of his old reliables, I took notice. BODEGAS CASTANO MONASTRELL (2010) certainly hits the sweet spot on price ($11.97) and boasts a reasonable alcohol content (13.5%). Made from 30-year-old monastrell (mourvedre) vines, this Spanish table wine is opaque and violet with a fresh berry nose. In the glass it sports generous legs and likewise coats the mouth with a plush, hearty mouthfeel. Stone-fruit top-notes and structured tannins make for a satisfying palate pleaser with a moderate to long finish.

BODEGAS CASTANO MONASTRELL is striking for being unassuming. The flavors are balanced without jockeying among themselves for prominence, which makes the wine undistracting—an excellent choice for a party, an involving conversation, or a really gripping episode of Breaking Bad. And if you’re fretting about the End of Days, BODEGAS CASTANO MONASTRELL can help you relax.

Not Scarybear, though. He was freaked out by Glen’s dorky haircut and worried about his little humans getting ideas about performing ursine surgery, so he transferred all this worry to thoughts of Armageddon—gamma rays especially.

He has a point. The Milky Way is pretty big and pretty old, and collapsed stars aren’t so easy to detect, never mind two of them spiraling into one another. Even if it happened a thousand light years away it would look like a second sun on our horizon, and our atmosphere would get cooked. With our ozone layer fried off, we’d all get skin cancer, but even if we hid indoors, the burst would annihilate all the ocean plankton, destroying the basis of our food chain.

Scarybear figures this could happen any time, meaning that it has already happened in our galaxy and the deadly burst is racing toward us at light speed, ETA Mayan End of Days.

Which means we have just 306 days left to stock up on some reliable wine.

What’s your “old reliable” at the liquor store? Are you stocked up?

In case you were wondering what happened to those decapitated bears