parenting

BESO DE VINO (2009)—Worth drinking but not saving

Get this, my fellow inebriates: My parents are so disorganized that they actually had to call the movers and ask them to come a day later. Luckily they picked an odd time of month to move, or we’d have been S.O.L.

Why could they not get their shit together in time? What is wrong with them?

In addition to being video-game addicts and procrastinators, over the last six years I’ve come to suspect they possess a gene or gene combination responsible for hoarding behaviour. Tell me, who has 14 non-working stereos? Who hangs on to books that are embarrassing (The Yeast Syndrome, How to Write Erotica)? Who has just been forced to work backwards through four years of unopened mail?

There is indeed a genetic marker associated with hoarding, located on chromosome 14. Hoarding is a subtype of OCD that tends to run in families. But my parents can’t blame any familial line for their propensities, although you don’t have to delve too far into the family tree to find moderate insanity (and—as summer’s open windows bear our conversations aloft—our neighbours probably suspect my mother of another chromosome-14 disorder, Tourette’s).

In all likelihood my parents are just disorganized, which might explain why, without managing to pack all the stuff we’re not using, they’ve packed our few meager alcoholic items along with all the wine glasses. They won’t find that stuff for days, even weeks, which leaves us without glassware to christen the new LBHQ. Hell, it leaves us without glassware when we feel overwhelmed and desperate later today. And it means no one will be buying new wine until we find the glasses—OMG!

In fact, we’re all caught up on wine reviews, except for one bottle.

Wine Advocate gave BESO DE VINO (2009) 90 points, a too-good-to-be-true score for a $13 wine. Not that we haven’t had awesome $13 wines, and for all we know, reviewer Jay Miller was taking into consideration the low price. But this ain’t no 90-point wine.

Antonio the Bull, amorous animal with low-swinging balls, is the frontman for this Spanish Syrah/Garnacha blend. Usually my mum knows better than to purchase wines whose labels feature livestock, but  the pricetag talked her into it—especially since it had a blue-and-black label rather than a yellow-and-red one (avoid!). BESO DE VINO seemed safe, and we’ve been having good luck with Spanish wines lately, so she plunked down the $13.

It’s hard not to like this goofy little bull and his mondo testicles, but you can’t rely on his tasting notes. Sure, the wine is a lush and opaque purple, but it doesn’t serve up the promised aromas of “roasted coffee, baked berry, chocolate covered espresso bean…” It serves up a grape-juice fragrance—pleasant, fruity, and full, but juvenile somehow, even though I couldn’t detect any nuts. Now, maybe we were primed for an impression of immaturity by the bull’s jouncing teabags, but honestly, there isn’t much on the nose.

Does Antonio realize bulls don’t often live past 15 years old?

On the palate BESO DE VINO comes through with full-bodied dark fruit and a generous mouthfeel along with some modest tannins, but it still suggests a kid’s juice box rather than the Reidel glasses we’ve prematurely stowed. Although I could pick out some of the suggested coffee notes, some earthiness, and some spice, BESO DE VINO isn’t much more than a half-decent table wine. It would taste just fine, for instance, with some cheese strings or Lunchables.

Still, you can’t argue with $13, and there’s nothing offensive about BESO DE VINO, except maybe Antonio the Bull’s dangling yarbles. It’s worth drinking once, but not worth hoarding a supply (really, parents).

Your liquor cabinets are awesome, people

Yesterday’s call for liquor-cabinet pictures was a huge success. Not only did I receive detailed inventories of your booze collections, my fellow inebriates, but my inbox contained these awesome pics.

Said Emily: “Our alcohol collection gives yours a run for its money.” Yes, it does—we have no vodka in our house at all, never mind a bottle dedicated specifically to mixing with baby formula. With a KitchenAid mixer to break up the resultant curds! Lucky baby!

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Next up: A fantastic inventory from beerbecue with suggestions of wine and beer not depicted but also present in the house. (Note the family-friendly “Disney Princess hair salon comb.”)

Damn, this is what I’m talking about—a decent booze collection. I was going to tape this picture to my dad’s head after he went to bed, but…I passed out first.

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Sadly, Miss R’s camera was stolen in Las Vegas last year, but she described an inventory that easily eclipses LBHQ’s with its third- and quarter-bottles of Tanqueray and Bacardi respectively plus tonic, limes, and “cheap-ass beer.” Like ours, the collection resides in a bottom kitchen shelf. Thinking I would find a proxy photograph, I googled everything Miss R described and got this:

Can you believe it? It’s a cake. Which has little to do with Miss R’s liquor cabinet and—if cooking gin and thereby burning off its alcohol is involved—is something of a heresy. Still, it’s pretty cool-looking. It just so happens that my Nana—the one with the bionic knee—is a professional cake decorator who blows our minds with an amazing cake every time P or V has a birthday.

Maybe, when V turns 5 this September, Nana will make her a Tanqueray cake.

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Keep sending those liquor-cabinet pics here, my fellow inebriates!

FISGARD 150 BAVARIAN LAGER—No secret, this is a weird beer

My Fellow Inebriates,

Yesterday our next-door neighbor (the nice one, on the right) said, “So, I heard you’re moving.” Her four-year-old, informed by our four-year-old, had told her, and she was clearly wondering why we hadn’t.

Meanwhile, the nasty neighbors on the left had started shuffling round their yard, overregulating their children’s water-play, effectively wringing any possible fun out of it and raising the general neighborhood stress level.

We wanted to say, “We haven’t told anybody, because of people like that.” But instead my mum shrugged and said something idiotic like, “Yeah, we’ve never really fit into this whole townhouse thing.”

For numerous reasons this may be true:

  • the excessive clutter in the yard, including a dirt-encrusted water table, discarded bubble-soap containers, and irreparably punctured “spraying beach ball” beneath which a wood-beetle colony is thriving, plus a Frisbee for anyone interested in hurling such a thing five meters
  • enough bikes, strollers, and scooters for seven children, slung all over the yard
  • the buckled-beyond-repair garage door with the gaping hole, plus spare parts (described as “scrap metal” in a recent Strata Council warning letter)
  • my mother’s proven inability to limit her blue language in a community where even a whisper travels the distance of several units

Our mean neighbors to the left, whose children must tiptoe around their little show home (“don’t touch the walls!”), will undoubtedly do a happy dance when we move. But we’ll miss the nice neighbors on the right with their friendly clutter-rivalry (they have a double stroller sunning itself in the rhododendron bed). We’ll also miss their fearless little four-year-old and the way she tears into our home sopping wet, whipping a spray of hose-water over the laminate and wondering about a snack.

But the new LBHQ is a better fit. It’s an older house in a quiet neighborhood near the kids’ school, with a large, cedar-enclosed back yard plus a capacious deck—the perfect place to pound a case of beer or prance around in a thong audience-free. My dad is really excited about the deck.

Still, the (nice) neighbors very pointedly asked yesterday what we were doing. Why hadn’t my parents mentioned our upcoming change of digs?

We do like these neighbors. We plan to keep in touch with them. But sheer childish perversity prevented my mother from enlightening them. Presumably they were wondering when and if we could have possibly sold the current LBHQ with its astonishing mess and lack of realtor staging—its lack of a realtor, in fact. If anything, this just demonstrates the fishbowl aspect of townhouse living. Everyone, no matter how nice, is in your business.

Scary liked having a BBQ, but he likes having secret satellite more.

But my parents have a secretive side. (For years they’ve concealed inside a gutted barbecue a forbidden satellite dish, through the cover of which our favorite shows happily penetrate. If anyone wonders why we don’t barbecue anything, that’s why, people. We’ve derived inordinate delight from pulling the BBQ cover over the Strata Council’s eyes all these years, although occasionally my dad wishes he could have a steak.) My parents grew up in a time when people didn’t talk about money and pay scales and what your house sold for in the shitty market du jour.

Fact is, my parents haven’t done anything with the townhouse yet. But they’re moving, and once they’ve moved, they’ll sort it out. That’s what they told me, at least. Far easier to tidy up a house when the kids aren’t living in it. Easier than impossible, that is.

So the packing starts this week. Books first, then second-string kitchen crap. Who knows, maybe we’ll actually junk some of it this time.

Watching my parents mobilize for the move is exciting. Not just because we’ll be in novel surroundings, but because when people move, they buy beer. They buy cases of it. And then they buy pizza, which makes them thirsty for more beer. And that makes moving awesome.

As long as nobody buys another Premium Pack from Lighthouse Brewing. OMG, I can’t tell you what a slog it’s been getting through it. When my mum declared it undrinkable, my dad and I had to step up and finish it, otherwise we couldn’t create the fridge vacuum that nature would abhor. Seriously, if my dad and I didn’t finish those Lighthouse beers, we’d never be able to buy more beer!

The most tolerable of the lot was FISGARD 150 BAVARIAN LAGER. Straw-colored and fizzy, it offers a basic aroma profile—grass, corn, and leafy hops—with an exception: that persistent, cloying overripe fruit note that predominates in its three Premium Pack casemates. Only the note is much subtler in FISGARD 150.

On the palate the lager is mild with some background orchardiness and a slightly sour endnote. Even when ice-cold, FISGARD 150 somehow doesn’t achieve refreshment; it tastes uncharacteristically musty for a lager, while noncommittally fruity. It’s a weird-tasting beer, but the weird taste doesn’t redeem it in any way. There’s nothing entertaining about an odd compost odor lurking in, of all things, a Bavarian lager.

So this one’s off our list for the move.