wine

CAMERON HUGHES LOT 313—A yummy way to get your resveratrol

My Fellow Inebriates,

Even with full-on exploding-out-both-ends stomach flu, the kids don’t want to sleep. They want endless games of Uno, Sequence, Sorry…hours of Power Rangers Samurai episodes (accompanied by a parent and some bears, of course)…as many books as can be read between vomiting spells…but not bed. Not at all.

A hundred years ago, everybody’s grandma would have given those kids some Scotch. Or in our case, Malibu, because that’s all we have. But in their predictably boring way, our parents are toeing the line when it comes to alcohol and children, which means they’re passing up twin benefits—health and peace.

Sure, alcohol depresses the immune system. None of my hobo friends is going to be on the cover of Men’s Health anytime soon. But a small sip of wine would confer some heart protection and lower the odds of developing Alzheimer’s disease and other age-related dementia (“which we’re not concerned about just yet for the kids,” my mum said).

Resveratrol

But what about my parents? Just a couple of weeks ago my dad locked his keys in the trunk of the car. My mum sent Miss V off to school without her lunchbox. And somebody consistently forgets to flush the toilet…a somebody under 7 years old. Surely Miss P could use red wine’s memory-boosting resveratrol?

“You are really reaching,” said my dad. “This is a good opportunity for you to dry out.”

But why? The bears aren’t affected by the LBHQ stomach bug. We bears have nasty-ass enzymes that allow our digestive systems to process anything. There’s nothing my mother could cook that would kill us, and that’s saying something.

It’s really hard to watch Power Rangers Samurai while sober. It is a totally stupid show. IMDB rates it 4.8/10, which is the lowest rating I’ve ever seen. If we are going to sit on the couch letting it melt our brains, we must have some resveratrol.

A good source would be CAMERON HUGHES LOT 313 CALIFORNIA FIELD BLEND (2010), a captivating mixture of Zinfandel (71%), Petite Sirah (10%), Syrah (10%), and Carignane (9%). We sampled it about two weeks ago while watching Fringe, which made the show less scary and less comprehensible. As with lots of J.J. Abrams programs, if you miss a couple of episodes you’re really f*cked, especially if you don’t have enough resveratrol. At 14.5% alcohol, the wine didn’t do J.J. Abrams any favors, but who cares? This is the last season for Fringe, he is probably totally bored with it, and he will probably end it in a totally unsatisfactory way.

Cameron Hughes is not a vineyard or a vintner. Describing itself as an “international négociant,” the company sources and finances small lots of high-quality wine from the world’s best regions. By partnering with high-end producers it creates 100 unique wines per year and sells them at a fraction of the price of bottles bearing the source wineries’ official labels.

If this seems crafty, consider the term “Field Blend.” A field blend is produced from a bunch of different varietals all grown in the same field and harvested at the same time (but since they don’t reach maturity at the same time, a best-guess average picking time is chosen and the vintner hopes it works out). This is kind of like trying to guess when everyone in the house will stop barfing so you can disinfect the sheets, and apparently very few winemakers use this old-school method any longer because of the risk that many of the harvested grapes won’t be optimal. But with Zinfandel comprising more than two-thirds of CAMERON HUGHES LOT 313, the method is somewhat less risky than with a more evenly distributed blend.

The hue is deep, ripe cherry. Wood smoke and lush fruit exude from the glass along with spice and berries. Oak aging provides tannic weight; the wine parches just slightly past mid-palate after enveloping the tongue with a burst of berry and smoky, rich, balanced Zin fruit. The finish lingers and lingers.

CAMERON HUGHES LOT 313 is one of those fabulously concentrated wines with enough structure to make it a conversation piece. Given CH’s approach to wine production, it would probably compete with a wine twice its $20 pricetag. Moreover, this particular blend will never exist again.

All of which recommends it highly as a post-flu restorative, if not a kiddie sedative. Of course I proposed it to the family, but my dad said he was still grossed out by toast. I said, “Oh, well, I’ll have some CAMERON HUGHES without you.”

My mum said, “If you mention wine one more time, I’m going to read you The Velveteen Rabbit and substitute “bear” for every occurrence of “rabbit.”

The Reverse Wine Snob—Recommend!

My Fellow Inebriates,

Occasionally I am too drunk to write much, so here’s a shout-out to The Reverse Wine Snob.

If you ever find yourself with less than $20 in your pocket (or g-string, if you’ve had to sell your clothes), and you want some wine, Jon Thorsen is your guy. Thumbing his nose at bottles over $20, the Reverse Wine Snob has garnered a lot of attention lately with his spot-on wine recommendations for those who are rightfully unwilling to pony up more than 20 bucks for a bottle.

Thorsen has a great palate, and wine producers have realized this. Despite his avowal to focus on sub-$20 wines, wineries continue to send him unsolicited samples of $20-plus wines, so he’s had to create a “Saturday Splurge” feature so he can review those too (as opposed to turning them down and recommending they be sent to Liquorstore Bear…but I digress, wishfully).

I totally admire the Reverse Wine Snob. If I weren’t drunk all the time, I’d still only be maybe be one-tenth as coherent and informative. In fact, if I ever review a wine and you think I meandered a bit or didn’t quite get around to what it actually tasted like, it’d be worth your while to look the wine up on the Reverse Wine Snob.

If I were to make only one small criticism, it’s that he never features the People of Walmart.

COUNCIL’S PUNCH BOWL SAUVIGNON BLANC (2011)—S’not much better than this

My dad busted Miss P the other day for smearing her boogers on the wall.

No one had thought to tell her not to do it. But when Dad caught her in the act, all the weird grey-brown sticky patches on the walls—over the last year—made sense.

As for my mum, she must have just thought that walls do that—they develop brownish, unidentifiably adhesive streaks over time. The thought had occurred to neither of them that P would excavate one or both nostrils and deposit the treasure on the walls.

Dad had just finished painting the girls’ room pink with purple polka dots, a process he took so seriously and performed so exactingly that he had difficulty allowing anyone else to pick up a brush. His scrutiny of these walls was already intense, which enabled him to notice P’s dried slime and, if not put two and two together, at least have an Oprah-style (albeit lesser) aha moment when he finally witnessed the crime.

Needless to say, he was really grossed out.

Finding snot all over the walls, I suggested, was sufficiently traumatic to warrant opening a bottle of wine. As long as the wine wasn’t sticky or gluey or brownish like P’s old boogers.

Who knew that Nana and Papa would arrive the very next day with COUNCIL’S PUNCH BOWL (2011) from Ganton & Larsen Prospect Winery? This fresh, unoaked Sauvignon offers up lively tropical and orchard scents and hits the palate with refreshing dry crispness—like a sunny, booger-free meadow.

As you know, at LBHQ we don’t usually gravitate to light, refreshing wines with only 12% alcohol. Neither does my Nana, who bought the wine by accident. A happy accident, I say, because we needed something with light and fruity high notes to overcome the lingering effects of a household-wide realization that throughout the course of who-knows-how-many months the walls have been gradually painted with a six-year-old’s nasal drippings.

Enormous thanks to Nana for mistakenly buying this summer sipper (a steal at $13!). Needless to say, she’s been apprised of the booger situation, and no doubt when she and Papa return to Vancouver Island, where the kids stayed a couple of weeks ago, they’ll assiduously check the walls for snot trails.

There are worse things to find on the walls, of course. My mum read a scene in a novel this morning in which a severed arm was thrown against a wall four times. Snot’s not so bad. S’not so bad. But COUNCIL’S PUNCH BOWL is much better.