review

GRAY MONK LATITUDE 50 (2009)—Safe from meteors, at least for now

My Fellow Inebriates,

You may be thankful that my friend Scarybear’s End of Days prognostications petered out after December 21, but the safe passing of that date threw him into a funk that’s been intolerable for everyone at LBHQ. For months he’d thought of nothing else. Despite his avowals that our annihilation would be tragic, he enjoyed the notion of Earthlings’ hubris biting them in the ass, with fireworks to boot.

Mayan calendar jokeThankfully no one will ever give Scarybear weapons or a job at a nuclear power plant. And that’s fine with him, as long as he has television. But the children’s programming that invariably knocks his shows off the schedule has contributed to his depression. He hasn’t even been able to generate any excitement about his own upcoming birthday.

So, with apologies to an entire city of Russians enduring sub-zero weather with no windows in their houses because of the sonic boom generated by yesterday’s meteor strike, the incident has given Scary a new lease on life.

“Dude, you have to see this!”

Holy crap, my fellow inebriates! And it seems Russians really dig these in-car cameras, because that meteor was captured by countless drivers as it hurtled 10-13 mps through the atmosphere with the shock-wave force of 30 Hiroshimas, setting off a sonic boom that shattered windows for miles. Over a thousand inhabitants were injured—mostly due to flying glass shards—in the most thunderous such event since the 1908 Tunguska Event.

In the aftermath, the biggest emergency is lack of windows. Chelyabinsk is on roughly the same latitude as Edmonton, with weather to match. Glaziers are being flown in for urgent repairs.

“Dude, that could have been us,” said Scary. “Or at least it could have been our Uncle J.”

Uncle J doesn’t know we call him that, but he does indeed live in Edmonton, meaning a mere lucky spin of the globe put him out of harm’s way. Which is still a vapid observation on Scary’s part.

“And dude,” Scary continued, “have you noticed these things always happen in Russia?”

Chelyabinsk impact areaWell, it is the largest freaking country on Earth. Still, Scary pointed out, by far most of the planet’s surface is not-Russia. The odds of a meteor blasting through not-Russia were much higher than the odds of the strike happening where it happened.

“So what does it mean, Scary?”

“I’m still thinking about that,” he said. “But dude, did you notice the time stamp on the video?”

I hadn’t noticed. (I was drunk on GRAY MONK ESTATE LATITUDE 50.)

Russian meteor time stamp big

“See?”

Russian meteor strike time stamp

“Whoa, Scary, either that guy’s camera clock is wrong or hundreds of Russian drivers are involved in a conspiracy to shock us with footage about a meteor strike that happened a month and a half ago instead of yesterday.”

“I know, right? Why would they do that? I have to think about it some more.” And Scary was happy for the first time since the Mayan calendar ended.

2009-gray-monk-estate-winery-latitude-50-white-20110606090751-285871Relieved that no loss of life had been reported, I continued drinking LATITUDE 50. This popular white wine blend is pleasantly off-dry with a pale lemon tint and richly layered tropical aromas. Yet another recommendation from our favorite liquor-store consultant, it coats the palate with substantial texture, letting loose mango, apricot, and sweet citrus notes. While delicious chilled, LATITUDE 50 really comes into its own once it rises a few degrees, and ends with a lingering finish. For fans of solid foods it would probably be an excellent accompaniment to light dishes such as poultry or even spicy cuisine, although those foods would of course soak up some of its 12.7% alcohol, leaving you less value for your $13.99.

“Dude!” said Scary.

“Leave me alone, I’m drinking.”

“Dude, if that wine were ‘Latitude 55’ you might not be enjoying it right now.”

“Scary, if I were enjoying a beverage from latitude 55, it would be vodka.”

Leaving aside Scary’s lack of empathy and even schadenfreude at yesterday’s meteor event, the impact is a grim reminder of the knife-edge on which our little planet exists. Just hours before, a small asteroid had squeaked by Earth with 17,000 miles to spare, and over 9,500 celestial bodies make regular near-Earth passes.

“The whole thing illustrates two things,” said Scary.

“What?”

“I don’t know yet, but one of them has to do with the time stamp on that video.” Scary scratched his ass. “Oh wait, I know the other thing: When a really killer asteroid’s about to hit, the government will never tell us.”

PHILLIPS SLIPSTREAM CREAM ALE—by the hundreds, please

My Fellow Inebriates,

Who knows whether all elementary schools celebrate “100 Day,” but it’s a huge deal here. V’s class is an all-out party with cupcakes, party hats, and prizes. Meanwhile, P and her classmates are dressing up as decagenarians and going apeshit with cupcakes, etc. With all this revelry, you may wonder if they do any work in kindergarten and/or grade 2.

They do. The grade twos had a math test, while kindergartner V was tasked with identifying 100 things she would like…

V loves marshmallows...

V loves marshmallows…

And 100 things she would not like…

But not, er...poo

But not, it seems, poo

Encouragingly, V’s teacher hasn’t called our parents in for a meeting to discuss why V was the only kid to identify excrement as something she wouldn’t like in quantities of 100. No doubt other kids chose items like broccoli and tuna casserole, but V marches to a different drummer.

So kudos go to P for declaring her math test “the best part of her day” (sarcasm?) and to V for being an original. She steals my heart the most when she says, “Do you want a beer, LB?” Then her eyes go zanily wide and she says, “HAVE A BEER!”

phillips slipstream creamaleA good idea, and continuing through the Phillips sampler pack, we next hit SLIPSTREAM CREAM ALE. Red-amber with a thick off-white foam that leaves a ring of lace around the glass, it exudes the “house aroma” we’ve been experiencing as we go through the pack—nothing offensive, just something unplaceable that ties all four Phillips offerings together. The overall scent is malty-nutty and a tad metallic, but otherwise not too differentiated from your typical cream ale—and yet, there is that Phillips redolence…

On the palate you get malt up front with some caramel and woodsy-fruity notes playing backup. The metallic quality amplifies on the tastebuds, but not obnoxiously. This is a decent beer, but with the sort of complexity that messes with your head; you wonder if that flavor is an exotic hop combination or…metal?

One thing Phillips gets right on the money is the mouthfeel. SLIPSTREAM CREAM ALE is creamy and smooth with a luxurious finish I wouldn’t have expected for all its punchy carbonation. It puts me in mind of an old-fashioned bar with peanut shells on the floor, and only an idiot bear would have a problem with that.

Of the four in the sampler pack, SLIPSTREAM CREAM ALE was close to being my favorite. That dubious honor goes, surprisingly, to ANALOGUE 78, the lightest of the bunch (although all four clocked in at 5% ABV).

I’d like a hundred bottles of SLIPSTREAM CREAM ALE. Or a hundred cases. Just not a hundred poos.

LUCKY COUNTRY SHIRAZ-GRENACHE (2009)—You deserve it, and so do my dad and Dan Ariely

My Fellow Inebriates,

By the end of his weekend bunkbed-building project, my dad was sweating. He totally deserved a beer. After all that effort, I thought he deserved something really extraordinary, but instead he chose a can of crappy (well, not crappy—at first I liked it, but then I had it again and I didn’t so much, expect that it’s good for getting gooned) beer. Seriously, if that’s what my dad gets for putting together a JYSK bunkbed set in under two hours, he has some self-esteem problems.

lucky country shiraz grenache 2009If it were up to me (and it never is) we’d at least shake the piggybank out for some LUCKY COUNTRY SHIRAZ GRENACHE (2009) from Australia’s famed Barossa Valley. Now, maybe the $17.99 price tag was a deterrent after my parents had shelled out $240 at JYSK. But how could it be? As financial ignoramuses (and they are), my parents should have been fully susceptible to the “anchoring” effect of just having spent a wad of cash. Spend $240 and suddenly $17.99 doesn’t seem like much. Ergo, there should be a bottle of LUCKY COUNTRY sitting at LBHQ right now, on its way to being empty.

It’s true—experiments have shown that consumers are highly suggestible when it comes to price points. Dan Ariely and Drazen Prelec did an experiment in 2006 in which they had MIT students bid auction-style on random items such as bottles of wine, computer accessories, and textbooks. But before they bid on a particular item, all students were asked to write down the last two digits of their social insurance numbers.  Then the auction took place and the students made their bids.

Dan Ariely obviously knows his stuff.

Dan Ariely obviously knows his stuff.

Weirdly, the students whose SINs ended in higher numbers (i.e., 97, 93, etc.), than students with lower-ending SINs (23, 16, etc.) ended up making higher bids for miscellaneous items. And not marginally higher—346 percent higher. Just writing those two SIN digits on a piece of paper had, the experimenters surmised, primed them to consider higher real-world numbers when it came time to spend actual money on an item at auction. Ariely and Prelec labeled these numbers anchors, and went on to point out that anchoring happens all the time, with all kinds of purchases. (These findings and plenty of other fascinating ones are detailed in Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions.)

For instance, if you ate groundhog stew for dinner tonight, prepared from a roadkill specimen you found by happenstance for zero dollars…well. When you found yourself pricing ribeye steak at Safeway a couple of days later you might choke at paying $5.99/lb, deal of the week or not. Your groundhog was free, which tethered your mind to the idea that all meat could be free, and now Safeway’s offerings don’t seem so hot.

But if you recently spent $100 on an organic non-medicated turkey and wasted basted it with sparkling wine for Christmas dinner, now a $19 package of steaks doesn’t seem like such a burn.

Leaving me to reiterate: Where is our bottle of LUCKY COUNTRY???? Ripe and plump with Barossa Valley fruit and considerable tannins, this 2009 Shiraz-Grenache blend is promiscuous with blackberry, chocolate, and earthy notes. Its loose structure makes it a little sloppy going down, but so lush with black fruit that…who cares? It has depth if not definition, and the finish is lingering.

BarossaValleymapBarossa Valley is one of my favorite wine regions, and in our ‘hood $17.99 is a steal for a decent red from that part of Australia. If there are nicer wines from that area, they tend to cost $4-10+ more—the land of diminishing returns for buyers with budgets like my parents’. And let’s face it, we bought our bunkbed at JYSK, not Pottery Barn. Its price tag can only have ratcheted Dad’s spending anchor so much.

Another plus for LUCKY COUNTRY: You won’t find a critter on the label, marsupial or otherwise. Producer Michael Twelftree doesn’t go in for the mass marketing typical of Aussie wines. His wines are made the old-fashioned way, blended in small batches and minimally filtered. Which is to say, even if my dad had bagged a groundhog the other day, LUCKY COUNTRY wouldn’t have sprung to mind as an accompaniment.

Who needs food, anyway, people? Just get your mitts on some of this awesome and affordable Barossa Valley wine, and drink it as is.