review

SHOOFLY SHIRAZ (2010)—Call that koala off!

My Fellow Inebriates,

Today the whole family’s out looking at our new headquarters, so naturally I’m wondering what I can get up to.

But without thumbs it’s hard to get up to much.

My fur hurts.

And then there’s this raging, fur-blasting headache. Did my parents offer me a painkiller for it before they left? Noooo. They helped themselves to 400mg ibuprofen each, then stowed the bearproof container on an upper shelf.

So why do we all (minus the kiddies) have this thwacking great headache? Reluctant as I am to blame SHOOFLY SHIRAZ (2010), the evidence is pretty solid. Two glasses of red wine shouldn’t do such a number on the old brain pan.

Red wine, along with Scotch, bourbon and anything dark, is famous for causing headaches. But the evidence tends to be anecdotal and fraught with variables. How many drinks? At what level of hydration? With or without carbonation? Consumed exclusively or mixed with different alcohol types?

It’s red wine that gets the worst rap. Why do some wines inflict more next-day head pain that others?

Nobody really knows.

According to Winegeeks, from which I swiped much of my information, the cause of red-wine headaches hasn’t been precisely determined. But here are some suspects:

  • Sulfites—natural byproducts of yeast added to ensure clean fermentation. But white wine typically contains more sulfites than red.
  • Histamines—plant and animal substances that spur allergic reactions. While they are more common in red wine than white, the data are inconclusive. For one thing, histamine occurrences are very low. For another, a study from the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology showed no difference between the side effects suffered by drinkers of low- and high-histamine wines.
  • Tannins—substances that give plants a bitter taste and produce that saliva-drying sensation you get from dry wine, tea, coffee, and nuts. They have healthful antioxidants but (one theory goes) may bind to starches, preventing their uptake and use in the brain’s manufacture of serotonin. Serotonin deficiency, in turn, causes vasoconstriction, which leads to migraines.
  • Congeners—chemicals produced during fermentation that contribute to the flavor of non-distilled drinks. These include acetone, acetaldehyde, esters, glycols (the list goes on), none of which sound too brain-friendly, although one congener in particular, fusel oil, contributes to red wine’s complexity. Dark drinks are generally more congener-rich than clear drinks. In a bourbon-vs-vodka study, subjects who drank bourbon suffered disturbed sleep and diminished performance compared to subjects who consumed vodka.

It’s all you. Or is it?

Individual susceptibility is also a factor. We all know people who avoid red wine because of headaches; likewise, plenty of people/bears enjoy a glass or three without ill effect. Our little tasting crew falls into this latter category, so when we find ourselves reeling around gripping our heads the morning after splitting one 750mL bottle of SHOOFLY between us, something’s up with that wine.

What about that SHOOFLY?

The 2010 vintage may be a little young. Even after we let it breathe a good 45 minutes, it exuded fresh yeast along with a rush of ripe berries and black fruit. Vinified from super-ripe grapes harvested from old vines around Adelaide, SHOOFLY is fruit-lush yet parchingly tannic—not massive but large and reasonably well structured. The finish is perhaps a little clipped.

Like many an Aussie Shiraz it packs a 14.5% wallop. It’s less a symphony than a kick-ass rock concert. Damn, I liked it last night. It even made my parents’ conversation about moving and finance a bit less boring.

Still, SHOOFLY isn’t tame. Maybe a year in the bottle would help it—but will the headache genie still come out with it? It’s a wild animal all right. I woke up with it clawing my melon from the inside like some scrofulous koala yammering sweet nothings at my two brain cells. I barely got through today.

What’s important, though, is that SHOOFLY is yummy booze for $18. And if someone will just open the Advil bottle for me, I’ll forgive it anything. Hell, if we had a second bottle I’d drink it right now. But I’d need help opening it.

SIBARIS RESERVA ESPECIAL CARMENERE (2010)

My Fellow Inebriates,

When the water hose came out today, we bears hid. I don’t know where the other animals went, but I’m currently hanging out beside an empty wine bottle of SIBARIS RESERVA ESPECIAL CARMENERE (2010). Named for the ancient Sybarites who sought pleasure to the highest heights, this wine was my parents’ contribution to our weekend tastings. Sandwiched that evening between a glorious cask-aged beer and a brown ale that hit all the right notes, SIBARIS had a tough go. One of its only advantages was that, being wine rather than beer, it would not have to endure apples-to-apples comparison.

Another assist came from a palate-bashing meal my mother inflicted on everyone just as we switched from grain to grape. This effectively reset everyone’s tastebuds, giving SIBARIS a chance to shine. How did it fare?

We were all in the mood for a big, mouth-filling wine. Carmenere, the signature grape of Chile, is often used as a blending grape because, while it’s full and lush, it lacks the tannic profile of Cabernet and has low acidity. But with careful vinification this varietal can rock a wine bottle all by itself, and that’s what we’ve been seeing increasingly at our neighborhood booze shop.

Perhaps my dad had an inkling that SIBARIS would only just live up to its $16 price tag. “We’re gonna let this one breathe in the glass,” he said, dumping it into Reidel stemless ware. Immediately the wine released juicy black plum and spice aromas. Despite not having decanted it, my dad let it sit awhile before tasting, but you know how alcoholics are—I dived in at once. Medium-bodied and plump on the palate, SIBARIS delivered flavor to the palate exactly as promised to the nose: intense yet accessible, easy to drink and yet not perfectly behaved. “Spunky,” said my mother, and Christine confirmed it was a “little barnyardy.”

Now, the barnyard is not always a negative, and this case SIBARIS walks a fine tightrope, albeit not entirely smoothly. SIBARIS is more than earthy; somewhere in its fruity, berry background is a persistent hint of gaminess. But just a hint. A terribly slight hint. In fact, if no one ever mentioned spunk or barnyardiness or caca, SIBARIS might have come and went without a hiccup. But once the suggestion was out, it was out, and we all detected a faint whiff of copros in the distance.

Still, for fifteen bucks this is a very decent wine. No one’s glass was left half-finished—despite the beckoning of a Shiraz Christine brought over in her canvas bag, which, an hour later, would completely trounce SIBARIS. But there are a lot of very nice $16 wines out there, so this one probably won’t be a repeat purchase at LBHQ.

Five days after drinking it, the empty bottle smells pretty darn good. Let’s just hope the empty patch is a good hiding place from the kids.

HARVIESTOUN OLA DUBH—ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

My Fellow Inebriates,

I was shattered when Christine left our house this morning. By which I mean, when I woke up hours after she’d gone and realized the fact, I felt betrayed. Not by Christine, who can do no wrong. (Christine arrived at our house yesterday afternoon with her special canvas bag containing two fine whiskies, two unique craft beers, and an outstanding Shiraz she’d been cellaring since 2003.) Christine is beyond reproach.

But I felt sort of let down by my parents, who didn’t bother to shake me awake to say good-bye. I actually meant to stow away with Christine this morning in the canvas bag. Although it was still occupied by two bottles of Scotch, it had a compartment I could have slipped into if I weren’t comatose at the time of her departure. Evidently my parents couldn’t entertain Christine until I finished sleeping off last night’s alcohol; I didn’t even get a chance to pant after her booze or press my nose against the window.

Why are my parents so boring? I can’t imagine why anyone visits them at all. What a testament to their dullness that any visitors they do get must bring alcohol to make the visit tolerable. (Come to think of it…well, it’s kind of a wash. If my parents were more interesting they would get more visitors, but the visitors wouldn’t need to get hammered to endure their company.) But still, last night was pretty cool.

First out of the canvas bag was HARVIESTOUN OLA DUBH SPECIAL RESERVE (18). Translated as “black oil,” OLA DUBH is so named for its “gloopy and viscous” mouthfeel. It is “the first ale to be aged in malt whisky casks from a named distillery and, with traceable casks and numbered bottles, the first with genuine provenance.” Christine found this 8% brew at a specialty liquor store in Olympic Village where it commanded $8 for its Highland Park–cask aging. Short glasses seemed fitting, so the humans poured it three ways (I gadded about between the three glasses, ending up with the lion’s share).

“Black oil” is not a misnomer. In the glass OLA DUBH is thick, oily, and darker than Coca Cola. Harviestoun compares its appearance to that of “used motor oil,” but I don’t know of any automotive waste that exudes such symphonic waves of dark chocolate, espresso, sherry, and peat. This breathtaking aroma is but a prelude to an exquisite cascade of malty, smoky, leathery toffee-tinged gloriousness—enveloping the palate and winding up with a soulfully bitter cocoa finish. Prickling the tongue with gentle carbonation, OLA DUBH is a rhapsodic hybrid of whisky and beer, warming and mellow yet curiously tingly on the palate. Sweeter than a stout and infinitely more complex, OLA DUBH wrenches a forbidden word from even the most hardened and obdurate taster—the taster who has sworn never to utter the word—yes, against his will and without resistance, my dad said it: OLA DUBH is sessionable.

Because if you could—if you possibly could—you would want to draw your experience with OLA DUBH out over several hours. With its glass-clinging, massive body and absolutely subjugating intensity, this beer takes over your mind; it controls you; it OWNS you.

After everyone drank their two fingers of OLA DUBH, there was no way we could immediately sample another beer. It wouldn’t have been fair. So everyone sipped Carmenere while my mother concocted one of her meals seemingly designed to bother and disconcert everyone’s palate, and together those incongruous new tastes helped arrest everyone’s pining for the OLA DUBH.

In all honesty—although this may be the sort of creeping determinism my furry head cooked up to cope with the emptiness of the OLA DUBH bottle—I doubt you could drink such a viscous beer all evening. At least humans probably wouldn’t want to. But we bears have some crazy stomach enzymes. 😉