wine

CALONA VINEYARDS ARTIST SERIES SOVEREIGN OPAL (2010)—Delightful, even if it fails to get the Tooth Fairy sufficiently drunk to work up the courage to get the damn tooth

Impatient for more tooth-fairy funding, Miss P yanked a lateral incisor out this evening, fascinating Miss V and grossing me out with the bloody artifact.

She’s not supposed to do these things while Dad’s away in Ontario.

First of all, he’s missing a milestone.

Second, my mum is totally chickenshit about getting the tooth out from under the pillow. She’s so worried about waking P up that she’s too timid to do it; she usually gets Dad to do it unless P’s lying conveniently off her pillow.

You can't handle the tooth

Which she wasn’t tonight. Squarely over the incisor, P lay in a sweaty sleep, looking insufficiently comatose for the would-be tooth fairy’s liking. Mum managed to deposit the Tooth Fairy Water (diaphanous red this time) and slid three bucks under P’s pillow, at which point P shifted and opened her eyes—seeing nothing, we hope, but actually looking kind of creepy. So Mum beat it out of her room, toothless and defeated. Tomorrow P will find money AND a her bloodied tooth—and wonder what the hell is going on with the tooth fairy.

The tooth fairy wasn’t even drunk. Yes, we had one glass of CALONA VINEYARDS ARTIST SERIES SOVEREIGN OPAL (2010) while waiting for P to drop off to sleep, but at 11% alcohol it wasn’t going to compromise the mission. It did, however, wow us with some delightfully delicate floral aromas and unexpected complexity. If you’ve never heard of the Sovereign Opal grape, it’s because it was engineered by Agriculture Canada to thrive specifically in BC’s Okanagan Valley. A cross between Maréchal Foch and Golden Muscat, the grape takes robustness from the former and personality from the latter.

2010-calona-vineyards-artist-series-sovereign-opal-20110605115731-314238For $12.99 I wouldn’t have expected this wine to offer so much nuance: juicy citrus notes, rose petals, honeydew melon, and pear strike the palate pleasingly, with the slightest hint of almond in the background. Medium-bodied and off-dry, the stuff is crazy yummy, especially for the price, and those fantastic fruit harmonies haunt the palate lingeringly. SOVEREIGN OPAL overdelivers and then some, unlike the parsimonious tooth fairy who can’t wrap her head around paying more than three bucks for a tooth that P ripped out of her head in one agonizing, blood-spurting effort.

Moreover, the tooth fairy can’t get her shit together to go back into the kids’ room and somehow retrieve the tooth. See, that’s what she’d make Dad do if he weren’t on a business trip right now. Dad isn’t a pussy about making noise or rearranging the kids and their covers once they’re asleep. He doesn’t freak out when they stir and half-open their eyes in that Exorcist way. My mum sucks at being the tooth fairy.

But my dad sucks too, because he’s emailing photos like this one.

 Stag's Leap

We were pretty happy with our $13 bottle of wine, and here’s dad sending pics of a $37 bottle bought by some suck-up supplier. Not that we begrudge him…it’s freaking cold in Ontario and he deserves a little happiness. It’s just that we really needed him to be the tooth fairy and get that tooth.

PETER LEHMANN BAROSSA BRUNETTE (2008)—Don’t be a tool

My Fellow Inebriates,

Sixteen bucks in our local booze shop and we had ourselves a bottle of PETER LEHMANN BAROSSA BRUNETTE (2008). We’d had some luck with Peter Lehmann wines before, mostly because they’re competently made and easy to drink, and we held this one to the same expectations. How did it measure up?

peter lehmann barossa brunetteIn fairness to Peter Lehmann, his BAROSSA BRUNETTE was upstaged by an Argentine Malbec we enjoyed immediately before it (review to follow). Although we have friends who would debate this, the LBHQ policy is to have the lesser wine first, moving from good to better (we can’t afford “best”). It’s very pleasant to savor one wine only to have it topped by another. This way you get to enjoy both wines—the first in ignorance of the second. If you have the better wine first, whatever follows is going to seem like relative crap.

Well, yes and no. Sometimes it’s just a shock to the palate. Sometimes that second wine isn’t necessarily lesser—just different. You have to let those taste buds shift gears and adjust. If the second wine is decent, this usually occurs within one glass. However, if the wine is relative crap, you end up bitching about it until it’s gone, wishing it were like the first.

This may have been what happened with PETER LEHMANN BAROSSA BRUNETTE. Following a Malbec that overdelivered with complexity and ripe fruit, the Lehmann offering came across as one-notish, industrial swill. Which probably wasn’t a fair judgment. So let’s address it on its own merits.

To do this we have to dismiss our impressions of the first glass. All of us (bears, parents, our friend R) were getting pleasantly pissed when we opened the BAROSSA BRUNETTE. Almost pissed enough to enter the basement for Guitar Hero embarrassment.

We will ignore the first glass. A Guitar Hero interval…

Just what we needed to absorb the first wine. The second glass is fair game.

Okay, so LBHQ (and guest) impressions were as follows:

Dad:

Barnyardy…one-notish…mass-production…couldn’t get past the barnyard note

R:

Industrial/standard…thin…turpentine/petroleum…ish. Didn’t really quite work…

Mum:

Mass-market swill but not objectionable; I’m having more.

Me:

You guys really don’t have to finish it; I’ll take care of it.

The stuff is pretty standard and typical for its price range—certainly not a “find.” A 75:25 blend of Grenache and Shiraz and ringing in at 14.5% alcohol, BAROSSA BRUNETTE is earthy and dry with unexpectedly assertive tannins yet a surprisingly short finish. As much as we’ve been happy with previous Peter Lehmann buys, this one reeks of mass production and even has the sense of being constituted of leftovers. As R said, it doesn’t really quite work.

But there our criticism ended. We had alcohol to ingest and “Bulls on Parade” cued up. My dad kicked my mum’s ass; she is really never going to improve at Guitar Hero, but at least she has thumbs and can make the attempt. Between songs we dissed Peter Lehmann’s marketing team for the following ad copy about Peter Lehmann, the man himself:

Peter Lehmann logo

This wine is a testament to the man and his bravery to dream.

Even when you write your marketing copy in the third person, everyone who reads it knows you signed off on it. Or at least you should have, especially if you’re saying your product is representative of you and your bravery to dream.

I’d like to believe Peter Lehmann himself is blissfully unaware of the douchebag copywriting being done on his behalf. After all, the guy is 82 years old. If I were 82 I’d be hanging by the pool, and if I owned a vineyard I’d be wrecked all the time—too wrecked to care what anybody wrote about me.

Let’s hope that’s the case. But for any of you out there, let’s just say: Even if you write your ad copy in the third person, everyone who reads it suspects you signed off on it. So if you say you’re a “gifted innovator,” a “visionary,” or a “thought leader,” we generally read it as “dickhead.”

Note to anyone with a marketing bio: It wouldn’t hurt to self-deprecate a bit. Your work stands as its own testament, does it not? Don’t be a tool.

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.”