Burial Brewing 'Premium' Adjunct Lager

I am late to beer.  It is not that I didn't drink it, just that it never had the power to move me, as wine has had since my early 20's.  But beer kept looking at me late at night, never pushy, never minding that I was making a fool of myself with some wine that was really beneath me.  And convention is a powerful thing.  I'd flirted with the idea in college, but nothing really blew my skirt up.  And besides, it could be a big hassle, it could be scary! 

But today, Premium taught me a new kind of love.  Lips a few times, just the merest touch, then my throat opened, unbidden, for this new lover and his clean, thin-muscled self.  Oh brave new world!

Meriau Rosee de Pineau d' Aunis

A heavily charred barrel, still smoking from the char, with staves of pine and chestnut inserted at intervals between the oak, into which is dumped a hundred beehives, combs heavy with honey, wax, and struggling larvae.   To seal the barrel, cottonwood honey is baked into a waxen disc for the top.  At the same time a wine is made from pineau d' aunis in the touraine with partial skin contact.  Just before bottling this wine, the winemakers drink most of it, and replace it with the stewy contents of this barrel, while mumbling angrily about Depardieu and the communists.

Kalin Cellars Chardonnay 1995 W Cuvee

There is something so Japanese about Caviste in Winston-Salem.  Here is this one man in this little store doing this one thing so enormously well.  As I wandered around his store grinning, recognizing so many beloved wines, I saw this strange bird hanging from the wall, her 1995 proudly displayed as well as gram or more of sediment.  He told me the story, the distributor, laughed with me at the strangeness of the fact of this wine, and told me to wait until fall to drink it.  Naturally I drank it that day.

Golden as in light shining in a golden box, thick, yellow, saturated, dirty gold.  Not gleaming or pristine, but glowing from within, thickly, slowly.  You could not read by this light but you could find your beloved in a crowd of bodies, by their shape, by their motion.  The nose is, on the one hand, butter, but so is butter, and if butter smelled like this then it would be as precious as truffles.  Which reminds me that there are also truffles here, rubbery and bright, acrid, like new tires, very little stately porcini.  Outrageous acid, heartburn-inducing, like a 750 of daiquiris.  The palate is unctuous, oily, full, there are hazelnuts and almonds and fat.  Concentration, fat, gold, rubber, graham crackers sodden in a torrent of hot butter, the mind reels.  If this is wine, and River Road is wine, then what does the word wine mean anyway?  Overwhelms sausage and cauliflower alike, is a ballista where cheese is a thatched hut.  This wine needs cinnabon!

Cuvee Jules Chauvet Beaujolais Villages 2014

Sour cherries, of course, but they are in among the bubble-gum and acetone and ethyl-methyl  phenolics of sorghum-spirits, which heads right off towards flowers.  And not the good kind.  The "tea-rose, tea-gown", a mandarin fusty cinnabar cabinet filled with dried osmanthus.  The hand is old but not infirm, the artifice of cosmetics cannot totally hide the smell of drying blood, the bruises too dark, bruised wet flowers, fleshy and thick, the air just above them warmer and more humid than the air two inches further away.  The musk of fresh cranberries, the pungent sour of sumac berries.  She has treated her papery skin with witchhazel.  Its brambly pricks whisper across your lips as you kiss the bruises and abrasions, upholstering the inside of your skull with luxury's own velvet.  You wait at a threshold you dare not cross but are desperate to be beyond, where her shape is seen, and the smells and tastes are fast and thick and there are no more philtres and masks and buttresses.  This is the preparatory peignoir, imagined, alone, humming to herself, puttering through her cremes and powders and arcane tools.  The beauty-things all create an effect, their removal exaggerates their absence.  It is here at her vanity, half-painted that she is herself.  When Donne grew up, did he know better?   Those little red earrings, a gift from whoever, do they smell of sandalwood, or am I imagining it?  The drawer full of flowers, aren't some of them a little rotten?  Jules Chauvet is a lecherous Jacob Marley of melancholic boudoirs, shaking silent chains at the careful application of eyepencils.

Formigar colterenzia Chardonnay 2007

Oh feast!  Oh unexpected plenty!  Where time has left the graphic design and the winestyle zeitgeist behind, still sentiment can extract dews distilled in buttered pears and outrageous baked goods.  A spine, too, persists and after I sip, I sigh, and my son says, "Daddy, I'd like more swordfish, please".  What is this life?

Palmina Malvasia Bianca 2012

What is this?  I'll give you a dollar if you can tell he what this is.  What is that fruit, or vegetable?  (20 mins pass). PUMPKIN you toadstools!   Pumpkin, persimmon, sweet potato, the chemical that orange things have in common, then tannins?  Also mangosteen, wtf?  Who is this wine for if not for me!   

1974 Chateau Musar Rouge

Titania eating fairy strawberries on a cinnabar divan, but only after a full 20 minutes in the glass.  Why is this wine so old?  What does that even mean?  Age makes sense in some chewy/impossible Bordeaux that mellows into smooth caresses, but this is silk sublimated, the old made aged, orangey-brown and outrageously pretty, unnatainbly expensive, a pleasure for a tiny group of people.  Could age another twenty years?  Could I age another twenty years and still be interesting?  Am I interesting now?  Being able to sit quietly and drink wine like this is a great motivation to become wealthy.