BEAR FLAG DARK RED BLEND—Freaky label for a freaky day

My Fellow Inebriates,

The head-lice notice came home from school AGAIN today. This time a kid in Miss V’s class has bugs, so my dad spent 15 minutes this evening combing through both girls’ hair to make sure LBHQ hadn’t been infested.

Despite her habit of bestowing hugs upon and sharing hats with every friend she has, P was relaxed during the inspection. V was freaking, though. Every few weeks one classmate or another has been positive for lice, and V is a natural pessimist, so she was probably thinking her number had come up.

Phew. No lice.

And that’s how the kids felt. Read this (from HealthLinkBC) and you’ll get a sense of how I felt.

Anything that can’t be washed (i.e., Blankets, coats, headwear, stuffed toys [italics mine]) can be treated by: placing in a closed plastic bag for 10 days or putting in a hot dryer for 20 minutes or putting in the freezer for 48 hours or ironing it.

OMFG!!!!

The choices, again:

  • Asphyxiation
  • Cooking/suffocation with motion sickness as a side bonus
  • Cryonic stasis (beside meat, probably)
  • Flattening and hot-branding

I repeat, OMFG, people. I need a drink stat. And the kids need to shave their heads. But FIRST I NEED A DRINK.

BEAR FLAG DARK RED BLEND to the rescue. Christine left this $13 bottle of unpretentious California vino when she visited last week, along with a sweater I’ve been using as a blanket. You should never really share sweaters if you’re concerned about lice, but we had no idea we’d be on Yellow Alert about lice, and I don’t think Christine meant to leave her sweater, especially since she could have predicted that I’d fetishize it. She did mean to leave the wine, because Christine is wonderful and genuinely cares about my alcohol supply.

bear flag wine

BEAR FLAG DARK RED BLEND bills itself as a “big, bold blend” of dark varietals (Zinfandel, Petite Sirah, Alicante Bouschet, Petit Verdot, and Tempranillo—a veritable Heinz-57 mixture). Compare the “DARK RED” with BEAR FLAG’s three other products (SMOOTH RED, SOFT WHITE, and BRIGHT WHITE) and you can see this outfit is all about sloshing as much into the vat as possible and seeing what comes out. Slap a hideous label on it and voila! Low expectations.

bear flag art 2

Promised tasting notes include chocolate, coffee, and blueberries accompanied by low tannins—an easy-drinker you could stuff under your arm and take to a casual barbeque. Let’s pour it.

Yes, it is a dark red wine, but not to the point of opacity. If anything it’s ruby-garnet and very agreeable to contemplate as it opens up. First aromas: earth, tobacco, stone fruit, and a slight 28-day wine kit–like backnote. First sips are pleasant, although I beg to differ with BEAR FLAG’s own marketing copy on boldness. This is a medium-bodied, fruit-forward wine with some sharp notes that mosh a little roughly with the rest of their tasting-note compadres.

BEAR FLAG reminds me a lot of Granny (my dead Granny, that is) because she probably would have liked it. Granny wasn’t an asshole about wine the way my parents are; she didn’t require a jammy explosion, and she probably would have enjoyed BEAR FLAG for what it is: an uncomplicated and totally drinkable blend. And if Granny hadn’t been too nice to say so, perhaps she would have told my parents off for being wine dickheads. Perhaps she would have told them they need to actually know something about wine to diss it credibly. And then she and I would have taken the bottle outside and downed it while she had a smoke.

bear flag artWhich is to say, I like BEAR FLAG. It’s not my favorite $13 wine, nor is it the most interesting wine in its price range. But it has a wacky, freaky label, especially if you like weird art, and—for you solid food fans—it probably would go pretty well with, um, what’s a solid food you would barbeque? How about a hamburger? I bet solid-food eaters would love BEAR FLAG with a hamburger. But they’d probably be freaked out when they opened the freezer to take the meat out and there was this frozen alcoholic bear beside it staring at them accusingly.

Luckily that won’t happen because the kids don’t have lice. This time.

Deputy PM? Consider this my application…

My Fellow Inebriates,

I was prepared to be outraged when my mother casually mentioned that Canada doesn’t currently have a deputy prime minister. The subject came up because Miss P had come home from Grade 2 enthusing about Alberta (Oil! Dinosaur bones!) and asking when we could go there. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is from there and has made a career of exploiting that province’s oil reserves, ripping up boreal forest with abandon and draining rivers to supply an unsustainably water-intensive dirty-oil industry that’s quickly rendering much of Alberta more like a Martian landscape than the pristine Canadian wilderness where fur traders and settlers once tromped. O Canada.

Stephen Harper with a kitten

Just the mention of Alberta was enough to get us hatin’ on the Harper Government.* Only the beady-eyed Harper, who has kiboshed no less than 3,000 environmental impact assessments, loosened regulations to allow corporate food producers to conduct their own safety inspections, fired a whistleblower for reporting weaknesses in the Chalk River nuclear facility, refused to sign a UN declaration citing water as a human right, cut science funding, issued generous tax cuts to frackers, repeatedly attempted to institute comprehensive Internet surveillance, and removed historical pictures of past prime ministers from the House of Commons and instead festooned it with at least 25 pictures of himself, could be such a colossal dickhead as to fly without a deputy, right?

stephen harper with a bear

When you walk in the door, all you see are pictures of Stephen Harper … I’d say between every window, in every available space of the wall, at eye level, every available space has a photo of Stephen Harper … You’ve got photos of Stephen Harper, but not of previous prime ministers … Photos of Stephen Harper in different costumes, in different settings, dressed as a fireman, in Hudson Bay looking for polar bears, meeting the Dalai Lama, even the portrait of the Queen had to have Stephen Harper, but in a candid, behind her. — Elizabeth May, Green Party of Canada

So when Mum said we had no deputy prime minister, I thought WTF? and looked it up, only to discover my outrage wasn’t legitimate. Turns out the position is fairly modern (1977), fairly nebulous and often ceremonial. Unlike the American Vice President, the Canadian Deputy Prime Minister does not expect to ascend to leadership in the event of the PM’s untimely death. In fact, only one deputy prime minister, Jean Chretien, has ever gone on to become prime minister.

Harper is all about letting the fox mind the henhouse.

Harper is all about letting the fox mind the henhouse.

Still, the Deputy Prime Minister’s does have the job of answering policy questions during Question Period. But Stephen Harper isn’t big on his government answering questions. Still… You’d think he’d at least install some toothless moppet to sit in Parliament and nod its head.

And once again I found myself writing a political letter….

letter to Stephen Harper

Dear Prime Minister Harper,

I just noticed today that you don’t have a deputy prime minister. While I understand you probably wouldn’t want some outspoken, informed person at Question Period, perhaps you could use a head-nodding imbecile such as myself.

I could even help out with duties such as watering your plants or stroking your cat (that’s not a metaphor). Let me know, dude.

stephen harper with wormy thing

I don’t know, my fellow inebriates… Will another of my political rants go into the cyber void?

 

 *Only a total dickhead with dictatorial aims would actually rechristen “the Canadian Government” officially with his own surname.

VINA ESMERALDA TORRES (2011)—Yummy wine, but it can’t get you drunk enough

Miss P left this sitting on a chair in the living room this morning.

P picture

Totally freaky, right? Only two things immediately occurred to me as more frightening:

  • Fluffy Bear (currently on hiatus from paranormal activities, but he may just be gathering up steam)
  • Being forced to eat asparagus (a recent study supports the long-suspected notion that it cures hangovers—but wouldn’t you rather have a hangover?)

So what the hell is going on with this picture? For quite a while P has been drawing females with flat heads, giant puckery lips, and grim expressions. Perhaps it’s a developmental phase; one of Dad’s colleagues says his own daughters are drawing flat-headed, big-lipped evil princesses too. Whatever the reason, such images are totally scary and therefore good reason to drink a bottle of wine.

Global Image Projects S.L.Beckoning from the fridge: VINA ESMERALDA TORRES (2011). Billed by our favorite booze-shop consultant as “the best turkey wine” he’s had in the last 20 years, this Spanish offering retails for $13.99 and consists of Moscatel d’Alexandrie (85%) and Gewurztraminer (15%). I am too drunk to put the little diacritics on those varietals, but you know what I mean. Nor do I care whether this wine pairs with turkey, which gets served maybe once or twice a year at LBHQ and invariably demands the sacrifice of a full bottle of sparkling wine to the cooking process—a sickening travesty compounded by the asparagus that may or may not accompany the cooked bird.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Ackkkk!!

At 11.5% alcohol, VINA ESMERALDA isn’t really up to the brain-cell bludgeoning required to erase scary images, bear-directed trauma at the hands of young children, or terrifying paranormal episodes. It won’t erase shit—you really can drink the whole bottle without incident. And you should. Delicate floral aromas waft from the glass as the wine glass starts to sweat, releasing some spice and tropical fruit as it warms slightly. This is a gentle and refreshing wine with almost a hint of effervescence—nothing obnoxious, though, just a suggestion. Off-dry and easy-drinking, VINA ESMERALDA is virtually impossible to keep in your glass.

Needless to say, our bottle is all gone, and sobriety is around the corner again. And OMFG, my fellow inebriates, this freaky picture is still here, staring at me.

P picture 2

P picture 3