wine

Get thee behind me, Fluffy!

My Fellow Inebriates,

This morning my mum drove my dad to the airport for his first-ever business trip with the corporate dark side.

Like many unbalanced people, she did a thorough scan of the house, and then another identical one, looking for unlocked doors, appliances left on, liquor cabinet secured, etc. Through the window I watched them drive away. Then I went back to sleep. All the bears were asleep—Glen, Red Bear, Fluffy…

Mum dropped Dad off at the airport and Miss P off at Grade One. She and Miss V shared a ginger cookie at Starbucks and did the grocery shopping. Finally they came home.

And one of the stove burners was on.

It wasn’t a burner anyone had used that morning. They’d used other ones, but not that one. And there it was, on “Lo.”

Obsessive compulsives like my mother check for these things before they leave the house. They make sure they are last to leave, just in case anyone else has an idea about turning on all the lights or taps for no good reason. When you have OCD you look out for stove burners—even ones you haven’t been using.

My dad was incommunicado on a five-hour flight to Toronto. The kids…they would never touch the stove; my mum has frightened the living daylights out of them regarding fire. As for my mum…she didn’t use the burner, but she doesn’t specifically recall checking it, although she recalls checking three times that the front door was locked.

It has a little red light! She would have seen that! My mother is a freak about stuff like this. She couldn’t have left the house without seeing that!

Now, I was sleeping off some Malibu dregs, and although I did briefly get up to say good-bye to my dad and remind him to check in with Ravenskye for me on Facebook, I conked out straightaway after. So I don’t know about that burner…

But I have an idea.

I think it was Fluffy.

If you’ve been following, you know Fluffy is the Fleecy-marinated semi-comatose bear who arrived shortly after my Granny died. He was her bear, and some strange shit’s been happening since his arrival. Cold spots. Noises. Fearful kids.

I’d like to say this all seemed benign, but it was creeping me out. And now! Finding stove burners on is a seriously sinister development. Somebody is trying to get our attention—as though being offensively redolent of fabric softener wasn’t sufficient. Fluffy, I don’t know what you want, dude, but you are seriously giving me the willies.

So here’s what I proposed to my mum: buy some chardonnay. Granny and I had a history of occasionally drinking chardonnay together, particularly some nice unoaked ones and a Semillon blend once. We had some good chats over her chardonnay, and she didn’t mind me dipping into her glass.

My mum has company coming this week anyway, so she did visit the booze shop. But she didn’t buy chardonnay; she bought sauvignon blanc.

I told her she is messing with things we cannot even comprehend. She is thumbing her nose at powerful spirits by buying the wrong booze.

She said she prefers sauvignon blanc and that the wine consultant recommended it.

Good enough for me, but will it keep Fluffy out of mischief?

If I don’t post for a few days, it’s because he’s set fire to the house.

It’s all you now, Dad

Nothing cures sadness like alcohol, and that’s why my dad needs to stop for some on the way home. If only he would pay attention to my plaintive texts.

It’s not just for me, my fellow inebriates, it’s for my mum. Davy Jones of The Monkees died today of a heart attack at his home in Florida. This is depressing enough, reminding my mum as it does of both his age and hers, but it’s worse because my mum spent her pre-teen years fawning over Davy Jones and fantasizing about a romance with him in her oh-so-distant adult life. Even when she occasionally took a rest from Davy to fantasize about Peter Tork, Davy was mostly it for my mum.

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Being a young bear, I missed The Monkees and didn’t get to experience Davy’s moves on a crappy rabbit-eared TV. I wasn’t there when my mum made such a compelling case to her brother about how dreamy Davy was that her brother conjured up an imaginary friend named Davy Jones and professed his love for him at the dinner table, weirding the whole family out. I’d never even heard him sing Daydream Believer until today, people.

And that’s why I’m guessing my mother is devastated by Davy Jones’s death today. She must be reeling, bereft, inconsolable, abject. Which calls for wine.

So Dad, if you’re reading this, please go and buy some wine. Your woman is suffering and you need to remind her that you’re the main man in her life now.

 

BODEGAS CASTANO MONASTRELL (2010)—worth keeping on hand for the End of Days

My Fellow Inebriates,

The four-year-old recently took the scissors to Glen Bear, who ended up with a surprisingly restrained fur trim, which nevertheless prompted my mum to put the scissors in a high-up cupboard until the “paper only” rule is better internalized by the kids.

Thankfully not Glen or any of us

Glen has fewer brain cells than I do, which puts him into the negative numbers, but now he also looks like a dork. And even though he doesn’t care or really realize what happened, I’m shaking in my fur. It could have been any of us! And who knows? If the kid had been feeling especially demonic, Glen could have been decapitated.

Rattled by this incident, I started thinking about how illusory our sense of safety is. If you’re enjoying computer access and have the leisure to read an alcoholic bear’s ruminations, it’s a good guess that your basic physiological needs—food, water, air—are taken care of, as well as security concerns such as shelter and privacy too. But as my friend Scarybear likes to remind me constantly, we are just one semi-apocalyptic event away from chaos.

For me that event might consist of scissors-wielding kindergartners, but Scarybear is thinking about much larger destabilizing events. We talked about asteroids (and hemorrhoids) recently, but Scary finds the asteroid scenario, in all its preventability, boring. He’s thinking a gamma-ray burst will do us in this year.

Of course gamma-ray bursts occur all the time. They’re invisible to our eyes, which means we’re blissfully unaware of the daily gamma flashbulb that goes off, bathing our little blue marble in gamma radiation and then winking out. These bursts are 10 quadrillion times stronger than the sun. They don’t even come from our own galaxy—they come from other, distant galaxies (a long time ago, hitting us now) and are thought to be caused by collapsed stars merging. Wow!

So, Scary says in the brief pause he takes from snarfing an entire container of ice cream, what if two collapsed stars in OUR galaxy merged? OMG!

Uncertainty is frightening. I feel exactly the sort of trepidation Scary does about gamma-ray bursts when I’m considering buying a new bottle of wine. Like lots of wine drinkers, I have “go-to” wines that are always reliable; they hit the sweet spot between price and quality that allows you to feel good about dropping $15 to $20 in your local booze shop and pounding your purchase in front of the TV. It sucks to go out on a limb and come home with some barnyardy vinegar and have to drink it knowing you could and should have bought one of your old reliables.

So when our friend Robert came over with one of his old reliables, I took notice. BODEGAS CASTANO MONASTRELL (2010) certainly hits the sweet spot on price ($11.97) and boasts a reasonable alcohol content (13.5%). Made from 30-year-old monastrell (mourvedre) vines, this Spanish table wine is opaque and violet with a fresh berry nose. In the glass it sports generous legs and likewise coats the mouth with a plush, hearty mouthfeel. Stone-fruit top-notes and structured tannins make for a satisfying palate pleaser with a moderate to long finish.

BODEGAS CASTANO MONASTRELL is striking for being unassuming. The flavors are balanced without jockeying among themselves for prominence, which makes the wine undistracting—an excellent choice for a party, an involving conversation, or a really gripping episode of Breaking Bad. And if you’re fretting about the End of Days, BODEGAS CASTANO MONASTRELL can help you relax.

Not Scarybear, though. He was freaked out by Glen’s dorky haircut and worried about his little humans getting ideas about performing ursine surgery, so he transferred all this worry to thoughts of Armageddon—gamma rays especially.

He has a point. The Milky Way is pretty big and pretty old, and collapsed stars aren’t so easy to detect, never mind two of them spiraling into one another. Even if it happened a thousand light years away it would look like a second sun on our horizon, and our atmosphere would get cooked. With our ozone layer fried off, we’d all get skin cancer, but even if we hid indoors, the burst would annihilate all the ocean plankton, destroying the basis of our food chain.

Scarybear figures this could happen any time, meaning that it has already happened in our galaxy and the deadly burst is racing toward us at light speed, ETA Mayan End of Days.

Which means we have just 306 days left to stock up on some reliable wine.

What’s your “old reliable” at the liquor store? Are you stocked up?

In case you were wondering what happened to those decapitated bears