wine

THE WOLFTRAP SYRAH MOURVEDRE VIOGNIER (2010)—Further proof of the Fluffy Problem

No matter what kinds of irresponsible shit I do, no matter how many hours I spend per day passed out or violating someone else’s personal space, my friends have my back.

I didn’t expect an outpouring of sympathy over my girlfriend Dolly’s defection to Fluffy, my deceased Granny’s teddy bear and probable golem. I failed Dolly in all sorts of ways—I even forgot about her for stretches. So I realize I deserved to get bounced.

But my friends rallied! Check it out, my fellow inebriates: my friend Scarybear, who doesn’t even really like me, had an idea.

OMG! Should I hit the “Like” button?

Except I really don’t hate Fluffy. He’s too out-to-lunch to warrant any antipathy. To give you an example of his coma state, the other night we were enjoying THE WOLFTRAP SYRAH/MOURVEDRE/VIOGNIER (2010), and I offered Fluffy some. He didn’t even move. What the hell?

A $15 Friday-night splurge, THE WOLFTRAP had caught my parents’ attention with its unusual blend of varietals, vinified separately and then combined as per South African winemaking law. Sixty-five percent syrah was the perfect answer to my fruit-forward jones, and the 32% mourvedre component promised to weigh in with earthy tannins and structure. And the bonus: 3% viognier for spice. The combo didn’t disappoint.

Although I never advocate cellaring anything unless you’re so made of money that you can afford other things to drink while your precious wines develop, I did find myself wondering what a year or two would do for THE WOLFTRAP. Yes, it was rich and heavy and leggy with generous black fruits, floral notes, spice, and it had a satisfying mellowness, but its oak ageing was quite conspicuous. I’d venture that—if one could handle waiting to crack this bottle—it would pay dividends in terms of maturity. Still, it didn’t lack for balance; it was an excellent casual sipper and a great find for the money.

If I were Fluffy and my new bear friend LB were offering me wine, I would have responded somehow—maybe nodded, advanced toward the glass, or something. But Fluffy was completely impassive.

AND YET. Since Fluffy arrived, Strange Things have been happening in the house. Noises. Cold spots. Girlfriend stealing.

I asked Dolly if it bothered her that Fluffy is probably possessed by Granny’s ghost. She said, “Isn’t he cuddly? He smells like Fleecy.” Punctuated with a giggle.

I think Dolly might be a sociopath. She is a known furvert (Type 4 furrie) whose fetish leads her to seek the sexual company of bears, but she nevertheless admires Toshiko Shek’s decapitated-bear purses. If there is a dichotomy here, Dolly is unaware of it.

Given Fluffy’s lack of response to Dolly’s affections and how undeterred she is, she might also be a necrophile. But I’ll stop right there because I don’t want to say anything bad about her.

I wish she’d come back. 😦

In the meantime, my friend Rachael had a tremendous idea:

I suggest trying a Ouija Board with Fluffy. Maybe you’ll be able to break through that catatonia and find the REAL reason that bear is so frighteningly quiet.

Would that work? We don’t have a Ouija board here at LBHQ; my mum has too much Catholic baggage to permit one in the house. So how can I get hold of one without her knowing???

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

WOODBRIDGE MERLOT by ROBERT MONDAVI (2010)—You don’t have to tell me to like it

My Fellow Inebriates,

The one time I watched The Big Bang Theory I ended up cowering under the table, finally done in by its relentless laughtrack, desperate to escape the canned exhortations to roar with uncontrollable mirth at see-it-from-a-mile-away comic set-ups that warranted a snicker at best.

I wanted to like The Big Bang Theory. Several respected (if not respectable) friends had recommended it. Multiple awards commend the show. The geek/physicist characters couldn’t be more lovable in concept. The Big Bang Theory doesn’t even seem to be a guilty pleasure for its following—fans openly and wholeheartedly recommend it to friends as one of television’s rare gems.

But instead of happily joining the bandwagon I found myself cringing, paws to ears, so distracted by frantic machine-generated pseudolaughter that I could barely follow the plot. True, I was drunk, and, also true, bears have very sensitive ears. But the laughtrack problem went beyond those issues. It made me want to run away.

Thing is, I didn’t mind the show. It was kind of quirky and fun, and I could imagine getting to know the characters. But I couldn’t stand the obnoxious cues to laugh. It was like having a jackboot on my larynx—Laugh! Laugh, you piece of shit! Laugh! Don’t you know it’s funny?!

I think it was actually less funny because of the laughtrack.

There are plenty of TV shows that fly without a laughtrack: The Office, 30 Rock, Entourage, Family Guy—you name it. They use musical cues to emphasize comic timing, plus they’re funny. They’re actually funny, and you can tell because you’re not being hammered into submission by that unceasing, slider-controlled background noise.

Being told to laugh is sort of like being told by a shelf talker that a wine is worth 88 points. Only it’s a screamingly loud shelf talker that doesn’t understand you’ve already decided to buy the wine and are prepared to enjoy it—it needs to keep yelling at you that it’s great, Robert Parker swilled it for five seconds and pronounced it worthy, it’s awesome, it’s great, it’s an 88, 88, 88, 88, eighty-eight, eighty-plus-eight, four-score-and-eight…arggghhhh!

I have no idea whether Robert Parker has reviewed ROBERT MONDAVI WOODBRIDGE MERLOT (2010), but that was the wine that got me drunk the night I watched Big Bang Theory. Shared among four glasses (each of which I visited repeatedly) rather than decanted, the dark ruby merlot sheeted smoothly on the Reidel stemless ware and then formed long legs. Cherries, plums and raisins were the frontline aromas, with a subtle hint of spice.

On the tongue the merlot delivered on its dried-fruit olfactory promise, supple and juicy yet dry. Not overly tannic, the wine boasted concentrated flavors and a decent finish. It was ideal for a social occasion featuring distracting conversation and pre-K kids under the dinner table—not so complex that it demanded undivided attention, but satisfying as a table wine and a meal accompaniment for those who like to eat solids.

MONDAVI WOODBRIDGE MERLOT certainly didn’t require any cheerleading to be enjoyed. At $13.99 and 13.5% alcohol it fit the evening nicely, and hey—a shelf talker didn’t tell us to buy it. Too bad for us we followed it with a bottle of MONT GRAS SOLEUS, but even that was a windfall for me, because I got to finish what others wouldn’t.

And that’s why I was drunk for Big Bang Theory.