humor

VALDEPEÑAS ANCIANO GRAN RESERVA TEMPRANILLO (2005)—Because someone needs to mellow out

My Fellow Inebriates,

On Friday my mum told me to go away and make myself “useful.” When I offered to drink the bottle of ANCIANO GRAN RESERVA TEMPRANILLO on the counter and come back with useful tasting notes, she looked at her watch (9:00 am) and said, “No, I meant you could help Dad wash the car. He could probably use something small and absorbent.”

This seemed abusive, so I determined that I would drink that bottle at the first opportunity. I’d show her “absorbent”! Watch me absorb a bottle of wine!

058

They were sneaky, though, and poured it into a bearproof decanter. Tempranillo is a varietal that benefits hugely from decanting, often changing character entirely from one hour to the next if it’s allowed to aerate sufficiently.

By law, a Spanish wine can be called “Gran Reserva” only after being barrel-aged at least five years. This particular bottle has seven years under its belt, and we’ve previously tried another by the same vintner that boasted ten years’ ageing. The ten-year wine was delicious, striking very typical Tempranillo chords: leather, vanilla, tannins, plus raisins, plums, and vegetal notes. I didn’t expect the seven-year wine to stack up, especially at $3 cheaper. How did it fare?

Well, once I got my furry face into a glass of seven-year ANCIANO, it delivered a surprisingly easy-drinking experience. Lush and full on the palate, inky in the glass, ANCIANO served up a diversity of flavors, headlined by ripe raspberries/currants with some vanilla and cedar for back-up. It was smooth and mellow—not challenging the way a Tempranillo often is—the sort of bottle you could open with your breakfast omelet, then sip all day (okay, you’d need several bottles). I loved it, people, and I’d buy it again. It’s a mellow sipper, and goodness knows we could stand to mellow out at LBHQ. Especially my mother.

 

V Day and still alone!

OMG, my fellow inebriates, I’m still alone! Another V Day, and  Dolly says she can’t even remember us being together. So, once again, some consolation pics for me and everyone in the same boat…

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HENDRICK’S GIN—confusing as always

I’m thinking maybe this should be…

Hendrick's Atheism Remedy

“Hendrick’s Theism Remedy”?

No matter. HENDRICK’S GIN has always confused me. The first time I tried it, I paired it with lime and tonic. I didn’t bother reading labels back then; I saw the word “gin,” and that said G&T to me. How strange it was to notice a weird, incongruous flavor intermingling with my citrusy mixture. What the hell was it? I struggled for several minutes, my fellow inebriates, not for a moment suspecting this novel taste to be…cucumber.

Yes, cucumber. The very things P and V eat voraciously during the summer—one of few vegetables they tolerate without complaint. In my gin. However did this come about?

Hendrick's gin

I do not know who David Stewart is—Annie Lennox’s Eurythmics partner, perhaps?—but one day he lurched into a rose garden looking for cucumber sandwiches and had a dubious stroke of genius: cucumber-flavoured gin. Thus HENDRICK’S came to market in the year 2000, boasting 11 botanicals (coriander seeds, angelica, chamomile, yarrow, lemon peel, orange peel, orris root, elderflower, caraway seeds and cubeb berries), and subjected after distillation to lashings of cucumber and rose essence.

If you enjoy sacrilege and you generally like weird things, HENDRICK’S may be for you. I like both, and I also like 41.4 percent alcohol, but goodness knows I have to find a better mixer if any more HENDRICK’S comes into the house. Perhaps, if I pray hard enough, my parents will think of something.