2007 Best of California Wines (All Varietals)

Louis Latour Chablis

May I suggest you pair this with Peking Duck — for it really is delicious. Both of them: the duck, the wine — mmmmm….together, they are even better, but if you must take only one, you are most definitely in for a treat. There are no surprises here: duck is fatty, artery-clogging goodness, and Chablis is pure earth minerality.

Of course, it’s not that simple, and that’s what makes this wine/pairing so great: you couldn’t, for example, smear a stick of butter in dirt and expect the same effect.

So, yes, Latour’s Chablis is predictable, pavlonian even — but you really must try it. Think: Rosemary bread in cold pressed olive oil. What’s not to like?

clipped from www.vinquire.com The Wine Shop at Short Hills�Info HTTP://www.shorthillswine.com/sku15856.html $15.97 750�mL

Roland La Garde Grand Vin (2003)

All lace and perfume, this lovely pearl was plucked from the most unlikely of oceans — the well airconditioned Duty Free in Bali, Indonesia (for $25 USD). It was, in a word: remarkable. Not only because it was the only decent wine I’ve tasted in Korea in months — and it really has been months — but also because it was startlingly delicate. It whispered its way to pleasure, and boy did it know what to do! For a 2003 Bourdeaux, I expected a masculine, Pay-Attention-To-Me, I’m-SO-Good, punch in the nose; but Roland La Garde delivered nothing of the sort.

Poppies, Daffodils, Rape, Mustard — I drank of Warhol Yellows and Red, swirling dainty sips of Channel.

clipped from www.cellartracker.com

clipped from www.vinquire.com Roland La Garde Grand Vin (2005) The Wine Warehouse�Info http://webstore.winewarehouses.com/p-400-roland-la-garde-gra $19.99 750�mL

Vina Carmen Merlot Rapel (2005)

It took me a moment to know where I’d seen you before — and then it hit me: Trader Joe’s. Two Buck Chuck. Yeah, I’ve had this wine before; in fact, I’ve had this wine countless times before. And you know what? It’s not that bad. But be advised: drink it quickly, and drink it with food, and by food, I mean snacks — popcorn, peanuts, anything cheap and salty will do. The wine is fine if you don’t try to make it into more than it is: a quick, cheap way to get drunk while snacking on carbs. It’s an afternoon slacker, Sunday-morning-got-nothing-to-do kind of wine. Enjoy it…for all that it never tried to become.

(10,000 won ($9) in Korean grocery store — a relative bargain!)

clipped from www.vinquire.com Monster Beverage�Info http://www.wineaccess.com/store/monsterbev/ecommerce/product $7.99 750�mL

Pay-To-Rage

This reminds me of those bars I’ve read about in China where women pay to beat up male bar staff. It’s not exactly like a strip club, but there’s something fascinatingly porno about this pay-to-rage trend.

clipped from money.cnn.com A smashing business Dinner special Ceramic white dinner plates are Lavely’s biggest seller – they require a strong toss and break violently against the wall.

So, you want to open your own restaurant?

We’ve all heard the restaurant scare stories: 90% fail in three years, it’s impossible to make any money, the customer is fickle, you have to clean the toilets yourself, your employees steal from you, your customers steal from you…

Ok, we get it — but, if you still want to do it, here are some basic guidelines on how to make it work. To me, the trick seems to be getting rent to be “8% of turnover” — if only I could get my apartment to consume such modest proportions my personal “turnover” — which, in England, means “revenue”…by the way.

clipped from www.ft.com The key to achieving the profits that will ultimately make this – and any restaurant – possible, he believes, is the rent. “For each of my sites, I have chosen slightly run-down streets but ones which I believe have a great deal of what I call resonance. They have got to have a lot of atmosphere. Where we have been able to do this, we have done deals where the rent is about 8 per cent of turnover.” Merrony then explained the impact this has on his bottom line. “We are serving about 300 customers a week which means sales of �8,500 to �9,000 a week. My food cost is about 30 per cent of sales and my wine a little higher because I don’t want to make them too expensive. I employ a kitchen porter and two waiting staff and after Tracey and I have taken a decent salary, the restaurant is making about �2,000-a-week profit. Rather unromantically, restaurants are in the business of renting out seats and our fixed costs mean that we do this at about �2 a seat.”

Santa Rita, Cabernet Sauvignon 120, Rapel Valley, Chile, 2005

Much better than expected. This baby was brought from home, tucked into my luggage as I left JFK to return to my labor camp in Seoul.  That I bothered to accompany my (far more expensive) clothes with this $5 bottle of wine, just waiting to explode its wonderful redness, is testament to the lengths one must often go to experience even mediocre wines in Korea.

This is no fine wine; but it’s good fun: sweet cherry and strawberry high notes that disappear too quickly. Airy, lacking body, but pretty face (remind you of anyone?). Not well integrated. Fun tannins that steal the show from a short eucalyptus-tinged finish that could have, would have been nice if hadn’t been over powered by acidity.

More raw than round. Grassy, with hints of not-quite-ripe green pepper. Sussurations of moss, wood and spice are almost there, just too distant to really be heard–it’s probably my imagination. The color is impenetrable dark purple.

Bought at Trader Joe’s, New York City

clipped from www.vinquire.com Santa Rita 120 Cabernet Sauvignon (2005) Merchant’s Fine Wine�Info http://www.merchantsfinewine.com/archive_wine/feb_2007.html

Jacob’s Creek 2005 Syrah / Cabernet

Just barely OK. One tiny notch above drinking nothing at all; though, notably better than the other down-under wine tried recently, the undrinkable Wyndham Cab-Merlot which was in actual fact disgusting. (bought in a 7-11 in Indonesia for $20; $7 online).

clipped from www.winezap.com 2005�Jacobs Creek Shiraz / Cabernet � Serving Fine Wine Since 1970. Why Pay More? At Laurenti Wines�(877) 472-0743 ���in Mercerville, New Jersey as of 9/23

Wyndham Estate Cabernet Merlot Bin 888

Disgusting, grape juice jam, silky but vacuous.  No complexity, no tannins, no acidity; just thick, viscous punch.  NOT OK, not worth drinking at all;  if you must partake, make sure this isn’t your first drink. This is one bottle you’ll never want to see again.
(45,000 won (~$42) in restaurant; $6.79 online)

clipped from www.vinquire.com Total Wine & More (Alexandria-Landmark)�Info http://www.wineaccess.com/store/totalwine-alexandria-landmar

Perfume

Purportedly, this blog is about “wonder”–and for me, smell ranks right up there with the most wonderous of them all. Over the years, I have been fascinated by smell, the conscious inquiry of ones’ environment through this particularly rich sense, and even more so since losing (and since regaining) the ability to smell almost two years ago. So, when a friend offered me one of her favorite reads, “Perfume” by Patrick Suskind, I was eager–more than eager, really.

http://www.amazon.com/Perfume-Story-Murderer-Patrick-Suskind/dp/0375725849

It was about ten years ago that I discovered smells — that is, the first time I really smelled, with intention, hope and judgment. Up until this point, I knew only the general aromatic milieu of, you know, wet dog, big sister, dank basement, movie popcorn, mom’s baking–there was no precision, no granularity; smell was blurry and opaque, asking and giving in most modest proportions.

When they finally arrived, outdoors smells came first, though slowly–camp fires, grilled fish, fir trees, wet leaves, forest moss, fresh great lake water (which, to be sure, is full of smell and flavor).

It wasn’t long before I discovered people too. Surely, people smelled before this changing of the guard, but it was only after smell took over from vision did I really start to notice the attractive force of “chemistry”. For myself, and maybe for others, I had come to consciously identify “chemistry” with the left brain activities of language: “he understands me so well”, “we never run out of things to talk about”…etc etc…we’ve all seen people getting along like a house on fire when they’re caught up in a dialog of passion (romantic and otherwise). But as smell took over from vision, I came to wonder about vision, language and attraction…how do they work in concert to flood my body with excitement and demands? Still too, I had this lurking suspicion that music/aural sensation was yet a fourth sense to include in the mix of human pushes and pulls. How else can one explain the sudden repulsion from my up-to-then best friend upon hearing The Eagles blasting from his dorm room…? Was that a joke? At that precise moment, I realized there was alot I didn’t know about him–it was like this huge iceberg, and I dreaded finding out what else lurked in those waters of dubious aesthetics. And so, here I was with this book, Perfume, and I thought: Ah, now I’ll finally figure it out; I’ll plumb the great depths of what it means to be a sensory being.

I didn’t figure it out, and the book as a whole would have been more interesting if I hadn’t been been thrust into an inquiry along this very line of thought a great many years ago, at the very moment The Eagles made assault on my senses. That not withstanding, Suskind’s ending is superb, if only because he raises a truly great question: What if we know, we really know with certainty, and in fact we are right about it–what if we know how to make people like us, no not like, but rather to love us, to adore us, to worship the ground we walk upon, to cast off everything that is of great importance to be just that much closer to us…? So, let’s say we could have that power…but it would require changing ourselves in some way, or, to be more specific, it would require an enormous investment over years and years. And at the end of this period of work and investment, we would quite literally materialize before others as a fundamentally different person. The interesting revelation that Suskind provides, at least to my mind, is the rather startling notion that though you may appear different to others, you still appear exactly the same to yourself! The upshot: the very same sense of self that drives the main character to seek more power (because he is dissatisfied with having “less”) remains stuck to him like glue even after he has successfully summoned all the power he ever dreamed of!

We all know this. We do. The wisdom of every family member and self-help book repeats this, and yet, still we look constantly — all the time! — to change the way others perceive us. It’s as if we think that the goal of “self-improvement” can be achieved without feeling impact from the process and drive required to give birth to that goal. I think of weight-loss and two different view points, 1) I must lose weight because I’m too fat, and 2) I must lose weight because I am healthier and fitter than this. The first one nearly begs you to continue feeling sorry for yourself even as you may (or may not) succeed in shedding the pounds, and the second asks you to suspend disbelief and to change your own perception of self– placing the change required from YOU to come before the change you’re expecting from others. It’s not that we can’t and shouldn’t change ourselves, that we should avoid any kind of in-life adaptation of the self — but rather that we should watch carefully over our motivations to change. We can not expect to make ourselves anew if it is the old person responsible for the making.

This is exactly where Suskind’s main character serves as the perfect foil to himself — he revels in his own isolation, his very depression provides the one lasting source of contentment. And, so, it’s with revelatory irony that Suskind provides for him a life-long obsession with gaining the appeal and love of all of man kind. He ultimately achieves his dream and finds that he is loved, and that he still hates himself, that he still lacks the appeal and love of the one person he forgot to win over, himself.