alcohol

ESCORIHUELA 1884 RESERVADO MALBEC (2009)

My Fellow Inebriates,

I’ve been really caught up with ebay since I decided to bid on a painting yesterday. It’s easy to set up an ebay account, but let’s face it, I’m a bear, so I have no idea how to conduct myself in an auction.

I put my bid in yesterday, and it immediately went up 50 cents. OMG! So I raised my bid by 50 cents. Again! Another 50 cents! And again! Somebody wants the same painting I do, and very badly.

A new Barack Obama & Penelope the Unicorn painting, celebrating this most special season. This unique piece of art also features Baby Jesus in a manger, who is visibly overwhelmed by the unexpected display of reverence. This original painting is certain to become a family heirloom for the lucky bidder; unpacked with reverence each holiday season and displayed in a position of honor. - Artist Dan Lacey

Just then my dad walked by and yanked me off the computer. He told me somebody has an automatic bid in there, and that if I sit with my paw on the bid button, five days before the auction closes, I will just drive up the price unnecessarily, because no matter what I enter, my opponent will automatically raise me 50 cents (up to whatever his/her max is, which I can’t possibly know). Whoa! I had no idea.

Maybe this is what comes of art shopping while sky-high drunk.

But isn’t that what all art connoisseurs do? Don’t they stagger around art galleries whisking champagne glasses off omnipresent waiters’ trays, ready to splurge on objets d’art? Isn’t that what wealthy, cultivated people do?

My mum said yes, it is what they do. However, she added, the terms “wealthy” and “cultivated” have never before turned up in the same sentence as “Liquorstore Bear,” so it’s sort of moot.

I was bored out of my furry head and anxious to boot about whether I would ever possess this painting. So I figured I’d drink a bottle of malbec.

My last tango with an Argentine wine was the Escorihuela 1884 Reservado Syrah, a thoroughly enchanting wine. I’ve been wanting to try S.A.E.V. Eschorihuela’s other varietals, starting with the malbec, but for ages I couldn’t get my mum to buy it. That’s because she once had a bad malbec experience with some Marcus James back before she became middle-aged, and has ever since associated malbec with gouda and feet.

I love exotic aromas and tasting notes, so this just intrigued me all the more, and finally we bought the ESCORIHUELA 1884 RESERVADO MALBEC. Would it smell like feet, I wondered?

Malbec is a pissy varietal, prone to rot and basically the sort of grape that drives vintners to consider setting the whole vineyard on fire. A good malbec is hard-won,  full in the mouth, plummy and purple, bursting with fruit.

We pulled the cork and poured the wine into Reidel stemless glasses. I think we should have decanted it, but we were too lazy. “Breaking Bad” was at a season-end cliffhanger and we wanted to start drinking right away. “Breaking Bad” has some seriously nasty scenes in it, and I wanted to get good and drunk before I saw anybody get waxed with a shotgun.

My dad has this client who often skips the decanting stage too; he just puts his wine in the blender. If I weren’t scared of the Cuisinart I would have done that with this wine, because it benefited by opening up, and probably needed more time than I was willing to give it.

Fresh cherries hit me with the first sniff, an earthy chorus of purple fruit playing back-up. The wine had a parching dryness and fierce tannins  from eight months’ ageing in American and French oak barrels. The mouthfeel was big and concentrated. And the good news: I couldn’t detect either feet or cheese.

At 13.7% I didn’t expect this malbec to be such a creeper, but it got me really loaded—so much so that I almost returned to the computer to make another bid on my painting. Luckily I passed out instead.

CUERVO, or my liver? Why not both?

My friend Stevie mentioned today that he needs a new liver. I do as well, along with a raft of other organs that don’t come stock with furry little bears, so I thought I’d check the Internet to see what our chances are.

Research makes me thirsty, so I asked my mum to buy some tequila while she was out picking the five-year-old up from school. She said (in addition to “no”) that my site was becoming a big misadventure and that our family is lucky I have so little influence, otherwise we’d be getting hate mail.

I told her about the afternoon’s research angle: cultivating replacement organs for people who desperately need them. It seemed to me that the whole subject area really suggested José Cuervo.

She said, repetitively, that she was going to shitcan my whole enterprise if I made fun of people with incurably degenerated livers.

I said I was figuring out how to fix people with bum livers, and even if I didn’t learn how, the 13 healing skulls I learned about after drinking a bottle of CRYSTAL HEAD VODKA would be convening about a year from now to heal everybody. Ergo, my research was just for fun, just like all longevity research. Why strive to prolong our lives when the Apocalypse is just a year away or so?

But as soon as a subject of discussion becomes a little technical, my parents tune out. I really had a jones for CUERVO GOLD. There’s something so appealing about its artificial golden-amber color and slight wood-ash aroma. People disparage this tequila for being a mainstream market bully, and it probably is, but it makes the most bad-ass margarita ever. Why is that?

Well, it’s honestly not very good tequila. So you don’t feel guilty throwing copious amounts of it into your blender and pureeing the hell out of it. There’s nothing delicate about it that’s going to get ruined by throwing limes, strawberries and any other random things into it. If it were more of a subtle sipper you’d feel profligate for camouflaging such precious liquid underneath a fruit orgy. But it’s definitely not subtle.

So CUERVO GOLD is great for margaritas because it’s not a sipping tequila, but you have to use it for something because you can’t have it burning a hole in your liquor cabinet, and margarita mix hides it admirably. The other excellent use for CUERVO GOLD is the body shot—again, because that by definition involves all sorts of other distracting flavors and sensations that render the actual taste of the product relatively unnoticeable.

OMG, WTF is that?

If you have margaritas and body shots constantly for many years, you will probably need a new liver. That’s okay, because scientists are making a lot of progress. They can take a donated liver that nobody’s using any more, bathe it in detergent to remove its own cells, then use what remains as a scaffold to seed a patient’s own cells, grow it a while, take out the patient’s malfunctioning liver and stuff the new one in. Voila!

This is a great reason to drink more CUERVO. The first sip is overwhelmingly fragrant, with a petroleum mouthfeel—an impression that recedes to secondary status as the agave elixir burns the throat. This is one of my very favorite forms of liquid pollution.

So what chance do Stevie and I stand of getting new livers? No one from Wake Forest University, where they’ve taken testing to the animal stage, was available to take my call, so I asked my mum. She said any doctor considering implanting a patient with a new liver would screen that patient to make sure he/she didn’t plan to poison it with alcohol. Snap!

So I guess that’s that. Stevie and I will have to get out our haloes and practice looking angelic if we want to be candidates for new livers. I know he can do it. As for me, my mum says I’m fucked sure to be rejected for a liver, but she’ll sew me a new one full of lentils if needed.

If you’re reading this, Santa…

I don’t enjoy getting hosed by retailers at any time of year, but the festive season seems the most predatory. When I heard on the radio this morning that one-sixth of all gift cards go unredeemed, I was jolted into sobriety. One-sixth! That’s a lot of languishing gift cards—between 8 and 10% of all gift cards purchased.

Across North America, that’s over $8 billion dollars that’s been paid to retailers and never exchanged for goods. Talk about money for nothing!

Gift cards were on my mind because my mum was reading my list for Santa, and she said: “Why don’t you just ask Santa for a gift card so he doesn’t have to waste his time hunting for bizarre alcoholic products?”

Well, I would never want to put Santa out or embarrass him by asking him to wheel a cart full of Malibu around his local booze shop, so I thought my mum had a pretty good idea there. But then this radio report made me paranoid! What if… What if Santa brought me my card, but it got lost in the wrapping paper on Xmas morning and thrown away? OMG. What if somebody else picked it up by mistake and took it away with them? OMG! What if my parents, in their parental way, put away my gift card for safekeeping and forgot about it? OMG!!

According to statistics, there are about $300 worth of forgotten gift cards lying around in the average North American’s sock drawers. What do retailers think about this?

Capable of forgetting to use a gift card? I'd say so.

Well, when gift cards first became popular, retailers did worry about cards going unredeemed—but strictly from an accounting perspective. So they programmed them with expiry dates. If you forgot to clean your sock drawer for too long, then tried to buy a toaster at Sears with an old card, you were out of luck. Finally regulations were introduced prohibiting retailers from selling these suicide gift cards. And retailers weren’t too sad because they realized they were raking it in regardless of whether they programmed the cards to expire or not.

But how do retailers feel about their customers spending money but getting nothing in return?

Yo, they totally love it!! This has become an industry unto itself. Take Best Buy, a place that specializes in hosing customers by placing loud price tags on things so they look like they’re on sale when in fact they’re not. In 2006 they profited $43 million dollars from unredeemed gift cards.

All of this worried me. But my mum said she was sure I’d pester her so hard to use the card that it wouldn’t get forgotten. I guess that’s true.

So Santa, if you’re reading this, you can send a gift card if you like, so I can buy my own Goldschlager, Bacardi white rum, Bacardi 151, blackberry brandy, strawberry liqueur, banana liqueur, Hypnotiq, Malibu, Pernod, champagne, melon liqueur, Bailey’s, Crown Royal, Frangelico, peppermint schnapps, Kokanee, Capistro and Domaine D’or. But please bring some Broker’s Gin because we don’t have any at our liquor stores in BC, and Julia Gale of Broker’s didn’t offer to send me any. Oh yes—and that tequila that comes in a gun-shaped bottle. I want to try that.

Yours truly,

Liquorstore Bear