review

M. CHAPOUTIER BILA-HAUT SYRAH/GRENACHE, CARIGNAN (2009)—No, it didn’t have 9 lives; it’s gone

Miss V has no intention of peeing on demand for the doctor trying to confirm a bladder infection. Hence the package that came home today:

Needless to say, I don’t want anything to do with the project of coaxing urine out of a four-year-old into a cup. If, for example, my mum brought me into the bathroom to amuse Miss V, thinking the diversion might keep her on the seat until the pee was secured, I would be very afraid. It’s hard enough for an adult female to pee in a jar without spraying hands, seat, floor and counter. When a four-year-old attempts to do it, you don’t want to be a nearby absorbent bear who’s already under threat of the washing machine.

Because so many symptoms suggested a bladder infection, the doc prescribed an antibiotic anyway. If he doesn’t get Miss V’s pee, the exact microbes won’t be known, but they’ll get exterminated anyway. If he does get the pee, bonus. Within a week Miss V should be cured of her tummy aches and pungent excretions.

This latter symptom got me thinking about wines with a urine aroma. In particular I remembered our Easter dinner wine, suggested by a wine consultant other than our usual go-to. On learning of my parents’ preference for full-bodied, supple reds, he pointed to M. CHAPOUTIER BILA-HAUT (2009), a Syrah/Grenache/Carignan blend. His recommendation wasn’t exactly on the money. (He did disclaim that French wine wasn’t his area of expertise.)

True, BILA-HAUT poured rich and purple into the glass, exuding distinctive earthy fragrance and fruit-forward promise. Blended for ideal acid balance and drinkability, it seemed like a good dinner choice.

The first sips were curious—slightly more acidic than suggested by the aroma, and slightly lighter on the palate than suggested by the legs. The wine had a thinness to it that fruit bomb enthusiasts tend to avoid, but one has to have an open mind.

On to the next sips.

While Grenache typically has a soft, static character and doesn’t develop much as the wine opens, a Grenache blend is a different animal. The Syrah component in BILA-HAUT kicked up the spice and contributed an earthy wildness; the Carignan added tartness and zing. But during that critical first 15 minutes while the wine breathed and I had to be held back physically from it, the fragrance changed. The shift wasn’t subtle. First the scent was a maddeningly unplaceable brambly fruitiness, and then it was…wet cat. From wet cat it morphed to cat pee, at which point my dad abandoned his glass on the counter.

Mum and I persevered with BILA-HAUT, although for most of dinner she left her glass untouched, then returned to it while she loaded the dishwasher. I kept at it the whole time, so I can document for you, my fellow inebriates, the delicacy of its arc from fruit to sodden alleycat to litter-box offering to…fruit again.

Yes, peeps, the wine did become drinkable. It just had to go through a nasty olfactory phase. We all go through phases, some of which are olfactory too. Ever decide you were no longer going to shower? Or that deodorant was for losers? Okay, maybe you didn’t do those things. But remember the hair you had in the 1980s? Phases! Some phases are just ugly. And BILA-HAUT certainly went through one of these while the family was stuffing itself full of ham. For a while it smelled rank. But I swear to you that after an hour it was okay. And it was even better the next day.

So what the hell makes a wine smell like feline number one? Interesting, the chemical compound responsible for that unique cat-piss odor is often present in wine, particularly Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Sauvignon. The offending compound, p-mentha-8-thiol-3-one, smells like kitty tinkle only in a specific concentration range, below which it smells herbal and above which it smells like blackcurrants. Wow!

So that explains how our Easter wine began dinner delightfully redolent of berries, survived being consumed at dinner by assaulting us with puss ‘n’ piss, then redeemed itself as dry, tannic and slightly herbal.

Which is pretty cool and scientific, but it won’t help us get Miss V to pee in a cup.

KITSILANO MAPLE CREAM ALE—Finders/keepers for the Easter Bunny

My Fellow Inebriates,

Ever lost a camera or memory stick while on vacation? Losing an awesome camera sucks, but losing months of saved pictures is devastating.

If you’re like many people, you leave hundreds of photos on your memory card without copying them over to your computer or printing them. I had to remind my parents of this the other day when my dad decided to take the camera card to work in his pocket. OMG! How would we get all those pictures back of me posing with wine bottles?!

Either this or the prospect of losing everything—from her trip to Ireland to Miss P’s 6th birthday—freaked my mum out and prompted her to copy the pictures over to the hard drive. But why was it so hard to get up the initiative to do it?

Is it because we believe in the kindness of others? Does my mum think that, if she left the Canon on a playground bench, someone would scruple to return it to her?

What would you do if you found a forgotten camera?

Well, first of all, I would look at ALL the pictures on it. Because there might be some funny or racy shots. But, after I finished snooping, I’d contact ifoundyourcamera. Founded by 21-year-old Canadian journalism student Matt Preprost, the site was conceived as a way to bridge losers with finders of cameras and memory devices—no fees to either.

There’s something really affirming about ifoundyourcamera. Using crowd sourcing to help us help other people is a great way of leveraging the web, and the site has pages of success stories to recommend it.

Just recently one of my mum’s friends accidentally left her camera in a restaurant after lunch. (If you have a lot of liquid lunches, the probability of this increases.) She never saw it again. In all likelihood it was stolen, but imagine if the thief had had the semi-decency to extract the camera card and contact ifoundyourcamera. He/she could have kept the camera, disavowed all knowledge of it, but returned the irreplaceable pictures. Then, using insurance money, my mum’s friend would have bought a kickass new camera.

If we’d had a kickass new camera, here’s what I would have done at Easter. I would have set it up on a timer to take pictures at intervals, so we could catch a shot of the Easter Bunny. You see, he took the last beer out of the fridge. It was a KITSILANO MAPLE CREAM ALE from Granville Island Brewery, one of the nicer Lower Mainland breweries and a cool tourist attraction.

When my dad bought this beer he was worried that the maple would be overwhelming. He bought it, I would assume, because he loves me so much; he wanted me to have something novel to review. Granville Island has a great track record with us, though, so that worry diminished before the beer finished pouring.

In the glass KITSILANO MAPLE CREAM ALE is a striking amber with a creamy head. On the nose, maple is apparent without being cloying; vanilla and caramel notes play back-up. On the palate it’s refreshing and balanced—again, not cloying, but satisfyingly sweet (my mum thought perhaps a little too sweet). The mouthfeel is very rich and creamy, yet still quite crisp. Moderately carbonated, this ale goes down very smoothly (and quickly). The sweetness lends it a perceived heaviness that might prevent (other) drinkers from imbibing it all night, and lingers on the tongue for quite a long time.

Overall, KITSILANO MAPLE CREAM ALE is a pleasant member of the Granville Island beer family. I’d still take the PALE ALE over it, but it’s a damn decent beer.

Unfortunately the maple flavor must have appealed to the Easter Bunny’s sweet tooth. I wish I’d been awake with the camera to catch a shot of him leaving us bereft of beer and leaving behind a shitload of non-alcoholic chocolate. But let’s face it, you don’t really want to leave a camera running non-stop: if it happened to catch my parents in some marital affectionate moment I would have to bash the whole apparatus to pieces.

And speaking of Things That Cannot Be Unseen, another of my mother’s acquaintance’s, Bea, once handed her camera to a trustworthy-looking tourist while on vacation in Mexico. She asked the dude to photograph her parasailing. Don’t forget my mother is ancient; this was before digital cameras. Bea did her parasailing bit, then looked anxiously for the tourist. Initially she thought he’d pulled a fast one. But he did emerge from the crowds and hand her the camera. When, back in Vancouver, Bea developed the photos at the drugstore, she found one shot of herself parasailing, and ten of the friendly tourist’s genitalia.

Which isn’t the sort of photo ifoundyourcamera would have published, even if Matt Preprost had been out of diapers and preternaturally web-savvy enough to start the site in preschool. So it was lucky for Bea that her tourist friend was so nice. Not only did she get a parasailing shot; she got some free porn too (which, incidentally, wasn’t how she saw it).

THE GARDEN PATH SHIRAZ CABERNET SAUVIGNON (2006)—Good without animals

My Fellow Inebriates,

Transman reminded me today that the Canada geese are back. You can tell by all the green goose poo on the sidewalks along 64 Avenue and 201 Street, one of our habitual routes around Langley. The geese congregate by the liquor store, honking and shitting their assurance that spring is here.

Where the goose poo is in our hood

I had wild animals on the brain because of yesterday’s post about roadkill cuisine. It was a post that prompted a follower or two to discontinue reading Liquorstore Bear, perhaps because it espoused a roadkill diet (“freeganism”), perhaps because of a cynical link to Pascal’s wager, or maybe because somebody couldn’t handle the truth about the would-be payload on Noah’s Ark (We’re taking on water, Japheth! Jettison the dinos!).

I’m as much of a stats whore as anybody else with a WordPress blog, so I did wonder who’d left me (I couldn’t figure it out), and what the exact proverbial straw had been for them. They’d stayed with me through bestiality, animal porn, unorthodox comments on pregnant drinking, plus all kinds of misguided astrological advice. I pictured the reader muttering, “I just wanted to know what wine goes with chicken, damn it.”

As you know, I’m not a food guy, but I still appreciate the question. Chicken cordon bleu? Chardonnay. Pad Thai? Sauvignon blanc. Prime rib? Shiraz or cab. Wine/food pairing notions have achieved pretty good societal penetration; everybody’s got a loose idea of what goes with what. But roadkill poses a challenge. And if you’re still with me, I hope it’s because you won’t mind this handy guide:

Meat

Wine

Badger

Merlot

Beaver

Zinfandel

Frog

Pinot Blanc

Groundhog

Pinot Noir

Kangaroo

Shiraz

Cat

Gewurztraminer

Badger meat
huntergathercook.typepad.com

Social convention, and nothing but, separates such animals from the ones you find in Save-On Foods. That and the fact that they’re gamey, riddled with ticks and often carrying TB. But don’t let that stop you—just cook ‘em really well.

Of course you know, my fellow inebriates, all this comes with lashings of hypocrisy. I don’t eat meat myself, and I feel anxious on behalf of my fellow animals on the lower part of the food chain. (I couldn’t very well recommend a wine pairing with bear, for example.) The geese worry me especially with their frantic honking and sudden movements. What’s to prevent anyone from pulling over the car on 201 Street, putting on the emergency lights for a minute, and hacking a goose’s head off with a machete?

Such a person would need only make a 180° turn to find the liquor store. They could stow the spurting goose in the trunk and shop for a complementary wine—Riesling, Gewurztraminer, or even Barolo.

This isn’t something I picture either of my parents doing. They are totally boring people. But they do frequent that liquor store, where there is a very good consultant, who recommended THE GARDEN PATH SHIRAZ CABERNET SAUVIGNON (2006). Made with fruit from Australia’s well regarded Langhorne Creek vineyard, this oak-aged blend exudes ripe currant, berries, and floral notes—leggy and purple in the glass. Medium- to full-bodied, THE GARDEN PATH is lush on the palate, fruit-forward but delicately balanced: a lovely, controlled fruit symphony that rewards the drinker with a satisfying finish.

Such a wine deserves to be enjoyed for its own merits, and THE GARDEN PATH offers such an intriguing array of taste harmonies that the best thing to do would be to decant it, then focus on every sip. But if, just before you unscrewed the bottle, the scent of barbecued squirrel happened to waft from your neighbor’s yard, you might want to put the bottle under your arm and invite yourself to dinner. (You might.)