end of days

EMILIANA NOVAS GRAN RESERVA CARMENERE-CABERNET SAUVIGNON (2010)—A fruit supernova of the best kind

My Fellow Inebriates,

There’s no way to know if Fluffy has finally settled down. You may remember, for several weeks after he came to live with us he made a whole bunch of crazy paranormal shit happen—noises, cold spots, clogged toilets, falling toys, leaving the lids off markers. He was totally freaking me out, people, obviously channeling the ghost of his old owner, my deceased granny.

But the creepiest thing about Fluffy is his weird resemblance to my friend Scarybear, who is himself a sociopath, albeit more of the snack-obsessed, openly violent kind. I usually avoid Scary so he can’t fill my furry head with apocalyptic ideas, but every weekend the household bears watch Fringe with my parents, which both feeds Scary’s Armageddon preoccupation and allows him to convey it to me. And because the weekend Fringe ritual is usually accompanied by a glass of wine, whatever End of Days scenario Scary decides to propound that evening gets pumped into my brain cells while they’re flooded with alcohol.

The wine was just finished when Scary mentioned rogue black holes. When you’ve just consumed the last drops of an organic Chilean Carmenere-Cabernet Sauvignon like EMILIANA NOVAS GRAN RESERVA (2010), you may well be feeling bereft of something precious and therefore, because nature abhors a vacuum (which my head usually is), susceptible to screwball ideas. Suddenly the 10 million black holes astronomers estimate exist within the Milky Way seemed exceedingly threatening.

Fluffy remained impassive as Scary went on about black holes, the corpses of stars gone supernova, hurtling through our galaxy and pulling everything, even light, into their city-size (that’s minuscule!) maws. Holy crap, I didn’t know which was more terrifying—realizing we’d have no warning if one of these tiny monstrosities caromed through our solar system, or observing a weird-ass golem like Fluffy staring into space while mass destruction was being contemplated.

Not even Scarybear stares into space! As dumb as he is, his eyes register something—some hint of thought if not intelligence. Not Fluffy, though. Look into Fluffy’s eyes and you see nothing—a vast depth of nothing.

So at least we didn’t have to share any wine with him. Intensely dark and substantial, EMILIANA NOVAS GRAN RESERVA Carmenere-Cabernet Sauvignon immediately hits the nose with ripe berries and spice, released from your swirled glass with a heady rush. My mum and I found it a glorious olfactory assault, but my dad was more reserved; it took the wine 20 minutes to seduce him, and by the time it did, we had a fair head start on him.

NOVAS GRAN RESERVA does change markedly over 20 minutes, developing from a fruit orgy to a very structured, sophisticated wine. On the palate it shows firm tannins, excellent balance, and a mouth-filling intensity that lingers well beyond the sip.

EMILIANA has forged a good reputation for sustainable winemaking and a solid belief that organically grown grapes simply make better wine.

But can one drink a wine called NOVAS without thinking of supernovas and their dark legacies? Scary thought not, and weighed in on this unwelcomely, not feeling the least disqualified by his wine abstention to comment. No, indeed, if a rogue black hole headed our way it wouldn’t even need to enter our solar system to perturb the earth’s orbit, stretching it into an extreme ellipse or even detaching us from orbit and whipping it out into cold space. All this could happen very quickly, although there would be some time dilation close to the event horizon.

Scary seemed to relish this idea, Fluffy was completely indifferent to it, and I was freaking scared out of my wits. There was nothing for it but to attempt opening my grandparents’ homemade bottle so I could get thoroughly pissed. But I couldn’t manage it (as usual) and my parents refused to help. One of them said “There, there” and noted that at least the Milky Way’s black holes are mostly in orbit rather than pinging around the galaxy randomly, which was reassuring enough to quell my immediate worry and replace it with the persistent, ongoing one about Fluffy and his eerie agenda.

BIG ROCK DUNKELWEIZEN—Drink it quickly, even if the ball won’t drop again

Score another point for the Mayan calendar: With the End of Days imminent and presumably no more Times Square big-ball drops remaining, there was no longer any earthly use for the famously well-preserved Dick Clark. Dead of a heart attack at 82, Clark leaves our little blue planet hurtling toward the apocalypse without his squeaky-clean morals to guide us.

Even though Dick Clark mainstreamed the devil’s music, he drew the line at Elvis’s public thrusts, requiring the King to be filmed from the waist up during his American Bandstand gig, and thus rescuing American teenagers from thinking about bumping, grinding, or sex. Clark’s death is a sad blow for the American right wing with which he was so proudly aligned.

James Brown is dead.
He looks happy, though. —AP Photo

Celebrity open-casket shots are rare, and if the news is correct, Clark has already been cremated, leaving the world to wonder what he must have looked like in repose. Doubtless he looked charmingly waxen, if not happy, the way James Brown did.

Caskets really creep me out. After searching in vain for a picture of Dick Clark dead or in a coffin and finding all kinds of other freaky things instead (a child’s Hello Kitty coffin, OMG), I needed a drink. Lucky for me there was one beer left: BIG ROCK DUNKELWEIZEN DARK WHEAT ALE.

As you know, my fellow inebriates, if a beer is the last beer in the house I am absolutely going to drink it, and this was the case with DUNKELWEIZEN, even if I wasn’t crazy about it being a wheat ale. I’ve never found a hefeweizen I loved, mainly because of their light citrusiness, but I thought a dark wheat beer might be different. And it was.

DUNKELWEIZEN is a lovely dark color with a garnet tinge and a fizzy white head. Billed as a blend of five distinctive malts, its aroma is rich and toffee-like with espresso predominating. Malty sweetness hits the tongue first, then unmistakable coffee, chocolate, and vanilla notes. These flavors are none too subtle, mind you; they tend to redouble with each sip and stick to the palate, making the beer less refreshing than it could be.

That having been said, DUNKELWEIZEN is drinkable. I could pound six of them if I needed to—say, if the Canucks were getting reamed and I felt sad. The mouthfeel isn’t terribly heavy, the alcohol percentage is an acceptable 5%, and the flavors are harmonious, even if they do suggest a Big Rock–Starbucks collaboration.

Like a lot of beers that aren’t perfectly right, low temperature is essential to enjoyment of DUNKELWEISEN. Give it ten minutes in the freezer prior to opening, drink it quickly, and you’ll probably love it—the deeper flavors won’t have a fighting chance to punch through the icy cold. But if this beer is allowed to sit, those heavy flavors get a bit rowdy and start behaving like coffee instead of beer.

A beer that needs to be slammed back quickly is not a bad thing. I feel a bit guilty pounding a really sublime beer fast so I can get loaded, but DUNKELWEIZEN lends itself to chugging. So I did pound the bottle, forgetting that it was the last beer in the house, which made me melancholy and prompted me to look at coffin pictures again.

Check it out, it's Elvis.

This one doesn't have anybody in it, but it is decorated with a bacon motif.

This one has Kim Jong-Il in it.

A wine-themed casket. Way to show people you loved life.

There goes Whitney Houston.

Would Dick Clark have liked this gay-themed coffin?

Going out in style, Michael Jackson.

MOLSON CANADIAN—Drink if you’re hot, thirsty, or wearing a mullet

My Fellow Inebriates,

Ever since an old derelict outside Superstore tried to bless the kids and then damned the whole family to hell when my mum wouldn’t let him, the Langley township itself has been on her shitlist, as though its very geography is a magnet for religious mania, something she suspects abounds at the local elementary school.

So when Miss V’s teacher started waving packets of Kool-Aid around this morning, my mother wasn’t impressed. She didn’t have the energy to thwart a Canadian Jonestown so early in the morning, nor did she want her stupid-looking hair to end up on TV.

But before you could say “Hallelujah,” Miss V’s teacher was mixing that Kool-Aid (not even cherry, but lemon) into a batch of homemade play dough. Yes indeed, if you’re tired of shelling out for actual Play-Doh, you can make your own with just a few ingredients:

KOOL-AID PLAYDOUGH

    • 1 cup flour
    • ½ cup salt
    • 2 tsp cream of tartar
    • 1 package unsweetened Kool-Aid, any flavor
    • 1 tbsp cooking oil
    • 1 cup boiling water

Combine dry ingredients. Add oil and boiling water. Mix with a spoon. As soon as the mixture is cool enough, knead together with your non-furry, opposably thumbed hands. Store in airtight container.

Fifteen minutes later the kids were sculpting lemon-scented masterpieces, including this handsome sculpture of yours truly.

OMG, what the hell is that little piece over there supposed to be?

Not content with mere verisimilitude, Miss V insisted on adding a long braid to the bear. She was thinking Rapunzel, although you might think mullet.

If she’d meant mullet she would have been reading my mind, because while she and Mum were sculpting, I was waking to memories of MOLSON CANADIAN.

The MOLSON CANADIAN bottle had come from next door (not the next-door neighbors who hate us, but the normal people on the other side). They don’t wear mullets, but last night they were going to wall-mount some speakers with the wires dangling visibly down the wall, which is pretty much the same thing. When they tried to borrow a tool from my dad, he rushed over to help them hide their unsightly wires and returned with a MOLSON CANADIAN.

The neighbors hadn’t asked for my dad’s help, but he is obsessive about visible wires in other people’s houses. (Our own house, which is festooned with wires and littered with teeny tiny bolts/screws/unidentifiables, is another matter and does not fall within my dad’s OCD radar.) Having recently shut down his home theater business, which had involved a lot of hands-on installation, my dad must have been itching to make holes in the neighbors’ wall, because he practically bounded next door to help. And lucky for him, they were breaking out the MOLSON CANADIAN.

This is a lager that reminds me of hockey and parking lots and camping. It’s a nostalgic brew for a lot of Canadians who started drinking beer before macrobreweries came into force. Wan and straw-colored with a quickly dissipating head, CANADIAN gives off a signature macro-brew graininess—corn, white bread, no-name toaster waffles and minimal malt. The first taste is crisp, thin, and refreshingly fizzy if cold, but the beer grows less charming as it warms.

The clock is a real enemy to MOLSON CANADIAN; with each half-degree the beer rises, it becomes less palatable and more metallic. But—importantly—this beer is inoffensive when cold. If you’re really thirsty, a CANADIAN from an ice-filled cooler is like liquid manna in the dessert, replete with the requisite breadiness. My dad didn’t turn it down after he’d finished fixing up the neighbors’ system, and he didn’t bitch about it either.

And needless to say, MOLSON CANADIAN beats the crap out of lemon Kool-Aid.