Highland Cold Mountain 2014

The brass mixing  bowl is three feet wide, the arms are fit inside, hands in paddle shape, elbows at  right angles.  The burley smells of German chocolate cake. The beer smells of burley. Red color, dry finish, fresh burley nose pinpoint mousse.  Stunning.  Is this my favorite beer?  If it is, who am I?  An urge to hoard it is supplanted by an urge, unbidden, to make something as good, once.

Chateau Musar 1970 Blanc

The color and turbidity of urine that signifies kidney failure and imminent death.  The nose is of bourbon, then of various woods, none safe for food storage, all weeping saps for resins and gums.  Oberon's sleeping woodland beard, roots and precious clays and purest red mud.  

Here time has shattered the phenolics into shards and reshuffled them into psychedelic array.  Familiar smells emerge momentarily, faces drawn onto clouds by the brain, strangers in crowds assimilated by the lazy brain into long-lost friends, lovers long left.  Here we have linalool and her ensuing cacophony of fruits and things, but really it is lin and then some seconds later lool swims by and the brain produces the na, fills in the gaps, avoids the uncomfortable position between the nose's truth and the frontal lobe's need for narrative.  This wine is a direct representation of Huxley's reducing valve metaphor from doors of perception.    Drinking it, I am an old man in an unfamiliar city, who keeps thinking he knows the way, but keeps bumbling into tiny pleasure gardens and luxurious apartments, welcomed everywhere.  I am uneasy but joyful, tears well up, I am grateful for the ones who spent time with me and all this gorgeous sunlight filtered through high leaves and greenhouse glass.  I am weary, I cannot tell pleasure from pleasure.  

Chateau Musar 1984 Rouge

An unreleased vintage because of the bizarre details of its vilification.  Wartime in Lebanon prevented the harvested grapes from reaching the winery by truck for five days.  The grapes began fermentation in the skins and the resulting wine was madeirized.  Having aged thirty years, it is beginning to find its structure.  What!?!?  

Huge, hedonic, and yet beguiling.   Copper weapons flashing in the sun of a Phonecian feast-day for some royal personage, spices burnt in reckless offering, fruits set forth to rot on display, the musk of civets locked into Amber beads with the promise of reviving old men's erections.  The sun blasts time into nothing, an ancient grape vine in its dying effort pushes forth a single beady raisin, whose whole output of juice would not fill a thumbnail.  That droplet, vinified among bombs and machine gun fire.  

Amaro Montenegro

Uncannily cigar-like.  Sweetsmoke, like an eating smoke, not the Islay wicker man peat death nor the piñon and mesquite saddle-drying campfires of Mezcal, but a domestic smoke, cigar residue in a moustache sticky with rib sauce.  A balsamic note, and the cedar humidor, the spices that roil around oily maduros and the bright coronets that sing in austere Conneticut Shades.  

Partagas and Lagavulin Distiller's Edition PX

The world is my humidor,  (echoing Frankie goes to Hollywood laughter). The world is my humidor, my humidor filled with seething tropicals, built of sherry casks and staffed by Montse and her crack team of Catalan adulteresses.  Privacy is an illusion anymore but cigar smoke repels and Islay offends and the hour's untenable and the seating crude.  So we are alone, you and I, except for the whiskey, old enough to smoke with us and talk as though he still had his balls.  But even the fiercest malts mellow and the distiller's art matches this fire with that smoke, this rough burn with that emollient oak.  But I'm talking too much. Talk to me about Spain, old friend.  I miss Spain.  

Maculan Pino & Toi

Yellow straw gold, not quite Rapunzel not quite Jarrod.   The label made me think of Toro y moi, but the wine makes me think about oysters.   Maculan, the maculate, the stained, the blemished.  STAIND.  One of those cool smooth-surfaced screw caps that seem classier somehow for their impracticality.  Apples and pears, fake butter, a whiff of gas.  I shall call this nose Qatari Picnic in a Golden Eye starring a young elizabeth taylor.

Gramercy southern blend lower east again

The wine advances and recedes in shuddering waves, fingers toying with fabric, a rusticated breeze from something useful nearby, and velvet, sure, but velvet is not her essence, any more than orange peel is orange juice, the limonene keeps the bugs away, the world turns, wine is a fantasy, drinking is deliverance, and Grenache is a tawny girl from anywhere that knew you before you got old.

Unknown 30-year old blended (SGWIAKFOWRWAPBFOSUB)

This one was epic. 

I stood, unsure, a barrel before me, waist high, a glass in my hand and then whoosh!  and splat!  and suddenly I am in a scooby-doo/sesame street animation tunnel of tubes and vines and roots, except that each one is the seuss-chute whereby the world of platonic forms lets out into our world the great multitude of delicious things that haunt whiskey barrels.  An unblemished papaya cradles in its scary seed-pocket a steaming roasted chestnut that longs to be reunited with the smoke of a Jurassic brush fire but pines in vain because its fate, like the fate of the swirling multitude that stretches my Huxleian reducing valve is to disappear amid fumes and language, never to be known again. 

Or in other words, dammit, Adam, what was this whisky and dammit, North Carolina, your sons and daughters are thirsty and curious.

Aberlour 12

Liter bottle! 

Tasted from a gorgeous Edinburgh crystal glass I received as a groomsman's gift at a wedding last weekend. 

Bourbon drinker's scotch, really sweet and basking in the sherry finish.  All the good brown flavors from the oloroso, and the associated raisins, cinnamon, sweet roasted nuts.  Good weight, pleasing heat, really a pure pleasure.  No challenge here, nor cthonic salt monsters, neither any too-eager to please glenlivet-style obsequy.  Very nice.  I would rather have a free bottle in front of me than a pre-frontal lobotomy. 

Balblair Vintage Highland (SGWIAKFOWRWAPBFOSUB)

Only bottle in the bag with a label, and somehow I managed to forget which vintage (I blame it on the Ginuwine blasting from tiny speakers or on using my entire brain to talk to a thick-accented Scotsman about beer cost numbers later).  Never had or seen this malt in NC, thanks, government! 

Generous baggie-wielding whisky genius said that he thought his nose wasn't working because this one smelled kind of crap.  I nosed and nosed, mind blown that I had a glencairn glass in my hand and we were really doing this, despite the furor spilling beer on the floor and "dancing" all around us. 

Gorgeous, big entry, balance, really pleasing sweetness. Highland as it is meant to be, not bland and middling, but elegant and understated. 

Glen Moray Chardonnay Cask (SGWIAKFOWRWAPBFOSUB)

First of my posts in the "Scottish guy walks into a kitchen full of wedding revelers with a plastic baggie full of small unlabeled bottles" series. 

Glen Moray he said was a producer much looked over/down upon because of its associations with grocery stores and cheap, serviceable whisky.  Not so this chardonnay cask.  The nose is a riot of the various things one finds in a barrel of chardonnay: tropical fruits, dairy, essence of springtime, blonde-ness made flavorful, heaven.  The palate is balanced and glycerin, and the finish is quiet.  In a good mood I would call it elegant, in a bad one, weak.  Finishes are for marathons though, and this is a quick drink, and a lovely drink, at a reasonable price for persons not living in liquor gulags like NC. 

Ken wright

Oregon Pinot Noir came into town looking for work, a dream in her eyes.  Ken Wright was all like, baby, it's hard out here.  But OPN wanted that crazy TV ending, so Ken Wright was all like, Alright, but you gotta do it my way. OMFG.   The classiest North American expression of Pinot Noir I have ever had.  Delicious, structured, brooding, sophisticated.  Lovely all-around.

Open Letter to an Unnamed Distributor

I don't mean to be sensitive, but based on my previous experience with you guys, and with the larger distributors in general, assigning a delivery day to your customer based on what is convenient for you sounds like the same misunderstanding of the difference between sales and logistics that was expressed in your company's previous poor handling of our account, which resulted in us not carrying beers from two of our favorite local breweries. When Fullsteam, who self-distribute, say that they are only going to deliver on Wednesday and Friday, they are making a business decision based upon their capacity to provide service.  When a large distributor says that they are unable to deliver on a day, they are flexing the muscle granted them by the monopolistic three tier system to make their lives easier.  Their accounts have to carry the brands to which they alone can grant access, so what was a sales relationship becomes a logistics relationship.  But even UPS gives better customer service.
      
Not that a complaint or even a complete lack of business from a small account that does small volume really makes a difference to your bottom line.  We are a small business, independently-owned, not a part of a restaurant group or chain.  Our success depends upon our relationships with other small businesses and upon our attention to service, detail, and quality.  Your business seems to be focused on the unthinking acceptance of the dictates of multinational soap/cereal/beer/industrial chemicals companies and the presumption that your customers' customers will uncritically swill whatever re-branded glop you foist on them.  And it is a good business model, because you will succeed and you will vacation and send your kids to private school and my kids will share a room and drive used cars.   

Vina Tondonia 2004

Unctuous, full-throated Alto butterscotch song, with unaccented purity in the high notes and a charming, mid-century modern solidity in shades of thai tea or caramel.  But not sweet!  The jerez trick of taking only the sugar out and then melting down the werther's original, the chewy toffee, the nougat, the montelimar.  Good with ramen but better with jamon, this is the thing I thought i had invented when I was drinking over the top CA chard with jamon iberico, oak with oak, fat with butter, but I was imagining that the Spanish had left some pleasure undiscovered and that is a ridiculous thing to think.  Here it is, for drinking with the damned jamon of the damned acorns and Catalan women are all degrees of Penelope Cruz and olives and lemons and tiny fish, and culture and damn it Spain, freckled Galicians and the sauce Mahon-ese, and Baleares and snails and garlic and blood sausage and octopus and rioja and bulls and damnit Spain!  Damn it. 

Gramercy Cellars 2011 Southern Blend Lower East

The best thing about my job is that I am able to have my wife stay at home with our son and to spend time with them often. 

The second best thing is that people bring me wine.  Every week, people show up with wine, always for me to taste, and sometimes for me to take home.  This is a benefit I could never write into a contract, and even if I was making a million more dollars, I wouldn't be drinking all this wine unless I found some kid at Total Wine and paid him to buy me wine, but good lord that would be patrician as all get out.

So a nice man brought me some really good wine today, and I was late to our meeting and he still left it for me with a nice message.  This made me smile, at least until I got home.  Then I got home.  

Shit oh dear!

This wine should be teaching kissing lessons.  The structure is imaginary, futuristic; like wonder-woman's airplane loaded with cigar boxes full of oozy overripe cherries.  Except that instead of flying it is coalescing as tenderly as blushing cheeks by candlelight in the 50's.  America!  The imaginary perfection of the poodle-skirted buttocks, the angora-ed breasts, the sweatless, smooth and un-bumpy dream womanikin that the internet age has disabused teen boys of but that still hovers wispy and streaming above floodlit bleachers in autumn and hides in the bustling only-on-christmas crowd humming out of the church, a half-remembered name, blue eyes, the nose a little crooked, went to the other school, then college out-of-state.  She is here, too, an un-looked for and (as in not really there) imaginary purity, an implied wholeness that the mind forgives the palate for imagining because wouldn't it be nice.

But the finish is the thing.  I always want thunder and then echoes and aftershocks, I want the finish to never end, to roll out like a wave of molten lead that burns and smokes while it cools.  This wine does not do that.  This wine is an object lesson in aperture, separation, and tease.  The fingertips touch, brush as if by accident, the feeling overwhelms, the body is covered with tenderness, bathed in touch.  The lips touch, shy, desperate, still polite, and the breath catches.  The synaptic distance is the great intimacy, the hedonic contact a thing forgone, the real event having happened, an inevitability that does not thrill, but satiates.  Here is a wine saying, as quiet as you please, "you're welcome" and then disappearing into a half-remembered sunrise without a trace of fear or obligation.  The skull, swaddled in the velvet of pleasure, reclines to the pillow and the eyes roll back, lidded and slow.  The body knows before the heart that something real has happened, the mind demands interpretation, processing, but the body says, "later, in a little while, rest my love, the world spins, water drips from leaves, someone kissed you; sleep."

Inurrieta Cab/Merlot

Nose of latin grocery store, palate of fruit and bramble.  Nose evolves, it is nixtamal, lime (mineral) and cat urine, the smell of tradtional tortillas.  In the mouth it is a jumble of x's and t's, rumors of revolution and obstinate tradionalist conservatism.  Handball in a cassock in the sun, the ancientness of jai alai, a million dusty bricks.  Except that even the old men dance here, and they sell Morcilla in the Tesco. 

The small bottle of amontillado

...would not be nearly as impressive a title for a short story.  But here is the sapodilla king ( I wrote sapid, but autocorrect is psychically deriving tasting notes from my subconscious) of old Spanish things ( a wide category of pleasures).  Sapodilla indeed.  Brown, exceeding brown, aged more than its years, all dried fruits pressed together under a ton of cracked old leather to squeeze out the one oily drop left after years in the sun.  Warmth, tawn, umber. 

Kobalt "Port Styled Wine" 2010

They don't use the word Port because of the laws, and that's right, but man if this isn't Port, i don't know what is.  I can't remember when my lips and teeth have been so comically purple.  Blueberry pie in a crust of salt and cracked black pepper, booze, sweetness, tight tannin, baking spices, geez.  This stuff is expensive, but it should be.  This is why people are rich.  To have things like this.  Man.  Made in traditional Portugese methods, but using very fancy viognier brandy as the fortifying agent.  So good.  I am reminded of Bunting on Pound's cantos but am too much in the voluptuary mode to remember the words or care.  This is why the Portugese are so confusing.  Dour, Catholic Seattle of Europe making wine that makes the most liscentious California Zin look like a mormon sex educator.  And here is Kevin Carriker doing it in California with CAB.  This would be the cured meats equivalent of some hippie in Virginia making Iberico that was actually as good.  Here a rare point on the post-modern side of the board.  I want a cigar. 

Luca Ferraris Ruche 2012

The wine is thin, the wine is light.  The wine is the color of old cranberry juice.  The wine has a sour edge and spritzyness that verges on cooked/refermented/Gino's homemade-type wine.  The nose is perfumed, strange: magic markers, rose butter, overcooked strawberries.  This wine should go on thin, dry, crispy rye pancakes.  There is a whiff of blood, which is to say, iron, there is a ferrous whiff, a floral whiff, a succession of interlocking whiffs, a daisy chain, where some of the links are sharpies and some are bloody steel.  The palate is opaque but thin, brittle (thanks mr. finger), and short-lived.  The vague, almost imaginary spritzyness adds to the sense of acidity, overdoes it, feels like pop rocks on the sides of the tongue.  

I am determined that there is something I am missing.  I will have another glass and then continue. 

Bruichladdich Waves

A series of galleries approach the eye, the world is a chambered salt-shell.  Sequent vaulted whorls tinted pink and orange with iodine's essence thud massily, trochaic and wet.  Phalanxes stutter forward and recede again, messily; they are salt.  The ancient roots of Yggdrasil crack the ice floor; Rime-Giants stalk and rumble.  A steel cage lowered on a mossy chain to be battered by the waves and to keep the barrel inside from being crushed while it distills the sea into whisky. 

Cachaca Paratiana

Rain-puddled, barely navigable cobblestone streets, totally empty, and a hundred impossibly cute little buildings with brightly-painted shutters.  A mock-up of colonial old-town Paraty, but still wonderful, reeking of ozone from the storm, everything drenched, the cobblestones heaving and whimsical, arranged like something out of Seuss or Escher.  Then the shop full of bottles, floor-to-ceiling, many of them untouched for how long?  Are they even full?  There is no ladder to reach them, no one is buying them.  So many bright labels and antic brands and unpronounceable towns, but an indifference too, dozens consigned to the top shelf to gather dust and take up space. 

So we buy the cachaca of the place, the one called Paratiana because it is from Paraty.  It comes in a 700ml bottle (not 750) and the glass is the kind used in all great hot-weather developing world things, heavy and brittle.  I buy two bottles, one breaks on the way home, the other makes it all the way to Raleigh, and then lasts through moves and redecorations (and the innumerable raids on the cabinet [actually a closet now] to which many better bottles have succumbed) to make it all the way to now. 

We tasted a number of rums that evening, and there were others more delicious, but this had a purity and authenticity that many lacked.  It was not the best or most or least or any other superlative, it was itself.  It did not clamor to be described, it was quiet, pleasant, easy.  Like the faux-colonial building I bought it in, it is likely a product of factories and machines, and the great enthusiasts of cachaca would pillory me for holding it up as an example of anything.  But I like it.  It is a memory of something insignificant and beautiful, imputed romance, and the humid peace of rural coastal Brazil.

Lagavulin Pedro Ximenez Cask 1989

Hyperion!  Oh most perfect and tallest and best, with allowances made for age and time and weight and precedence but still best and far and away.  Drinking this after a bunch of other great whiskeys is like spending all day listening to great rolling stones songs and then getting high and putting on "Exile on Main Street" with your best friend.  It is everything, it is total, it is allatonce.  Listing the words Peat, Smoke, Sugar, Wood, Salt, Heat does not begin to describe, but is all we (both of us loquacious to a fault) could manage while tasting.  The small glass is passed reverently back and forth where everything else is tasted demurely in separate cups.  Exclamations are halted in mid utterance by gasps and sighs.

I will describe my experience.

The nose is a cigar, simultaneously lit, unlit, in your mouth, and across the room.  There are acres of spice-fields and a neighboring peat-bog, and no human cigar has ever actually smelled like this, but the principle of this whiskey is impossible simultaneity, so maybe an array of perfect cigars in combination could smell this way.  Drinking the liquid (one shudders to remember it) brings into your mouth a shooter marble-sized globe of smoke, weightless and perfectly spherical that hits your tongue and bursts, surging everywhere at once with every possible flavor (and some less possible), coating teeth and tongue and overwhelming the senses.  The finish is eternal and leaves your saliva salty and sweet.

It is sublime, not because it is so delicious (though it is soooo delicious), but because of its power to overwhelm.  The senses, tuned and pointed to tasting, the mind awaiting instruction, expecting pleasure, all are swamped by the tidal wave 1/4 oz sip; there is too much to know, the brain rebels, the mind founders.  It is the world, distilled, and there is no worry great enough to match its calming blitz.  I immediately thought of rainbows, because they are made of light and they are familiar, and yet they are bizarre and cosmic and elemental, and because they represent the principle of the limitation of the senses.  We look at a rainbow and see colors.  If we have good eyes and look more closely we see some gradations at the edges of other colors.  We will never be spectrometers, however and there is a huge swath of the spectrum that is invisible to the eye.  The rainbow is trite and pleasant as a reminder of what we can see (pretty colors) but numinous and cthonic as a reminder of what we can't.  This is this whiskey in the mouth, showing us the limits of our tasting apparatus and suggesting another invisible, un-tasteable world immediately adjacent in space-time.   

 And it is melancholy, because how will you taste it again?  Where will we find it, how could we afford it?  And secretly, you suspect yourself.  You say, "was this as good as thought or was I just drunk and in great company?"  You suspect that the great horror of returning to it to find it lacking will occur.  The permanence of whiskey (in contrast to the evanescence of wine) is a great danger in the sense, because the taster returns months later, years later, a changed person, and maybe that cherished dram is no longer so revelatory.   Except that I am sure this one will be, if I am so lucky to ever see it again.

If I have any authority as a drinks person, it is because I have tasted this.

Loveblock Pinot Noir

Otago Pinot Noir, thou spinning janus-head jelly-thou!  One moment you play at La France and the earthy/mossy/leaf-mould grandeur thereof, then the next you are the tackiest girl buying the tackiest hair clip at the combination Claire's/Journeys/Gadzooks that floats above some nightmare Mall of America with tentacles made of awkard puberty trailing wetly down to the parking lots below.  Whence the sourpatch/Mr. Sketch cherry flavoring?  Whence the green pepper!?  This wine, in stark contrast to the lovely Loveblock Sauvignon Blanc, tastes unfinished, tastes like a Pinot Noir made by a very talented backyard vineyard home winemaker from Northen England.  These grapes, were they kidnapped and kept in a dark basement all summer?  I exaggerate, there is fruit, but the poor red stuff has been snuck up behind and had a sack thrown over its head by a big, acidic, bully of a green pepper. 

I expect more from the country that gave us Flight of the Conchords and Black Sheep.      

Bricco Babelico Day 2

Round two with Bricco Babelico, open for about 24 hours. Is this wine drinking me? Tiny cut on my tongue that I hadn't noticed is now painfully apparent underneath the boozy flood of blood-soaked velvet in a newly-painted room. This wine is sooooo The Shining. OMG. Chocolate-covered almonds I am eating with it are like pretty hair ribbons on a Klingon war weapon. I often wonder if a wine is old enough to drink, but I find myself wondering tonight whether I am old enough to drink this wine. Geez.

Bricco Babelico 2008

I am drinking a California petit sirah from 2008 that almost qualifies as fortified wine in NC, 17.15%. It looks like paint and tastes like brick dust and the winemaker draws a distinction between the words "Babylonian" and "Babelized" in his explanation of the wine's name. Scholium continues to blow my mind.

Renardat Fache Bugey Cerdon

R-F Bugey Cerdon with coconut cake. I am 9 years old, a girl, wearing eyelet lace, with tiny cuts on my hands from reaching through the brambles for honeysuckle blossoms. The sun is shining and nothing bad will ever happen.

Scaia Corvina Day 2

Round two with Welch's squeezable Corvina: wine is even more of a fruit juice tonight, if that is possible. Having it with a Danish wedding cookie. I am 12, at a friend's older sister's wedding. They are Eastern European and I don't understand the food. There is this strange berry jam on the cookies and I want to like it, but it is just too foreign and I have yet to really engage with my aspergers in a meaningful way so I am overwhelmed. I am nervous about offending someone so I don't participate in the dancing and I wish they would just have some chocolate chip cookies or Coke or something. No one but me seems to think the food is weird.

Scaia Corvina Day 1

This corvina tastes like welch's squeezable Rasp-cherry. It really works with peanut butter. I just had a spoonful of Jiff extra crunchy to make sure. This wine is Sesame Street. This wine is speak and spell my first veneto. This wine is for drinking in a thin turtleneck and Velcro keds while you watch GoBots and have a bowl cut. Thank you, Scaia, for this wine.

Stone Cellars Merlot

Stone Cellars Merlot (and Chardonnay). Serving size 6-8 oz. complimentary with dinner buffet purchase. Sweet, vanilla-scented wine-syrup that tastes surprisingly of Merlot grapes. Really perfect with anything from the dessert bar, but especially with the tiramisu cup. Just watch out for the Hot Slots Tournament Crew if you want in at the dessert bar. Those ladies are tough. The Chardonnay could be avoided, but it is free, after all. I would have tried the white zin (for science) but my son needed a bath. After dinner, don't sleep on #amishmafia, the official reality show of free jug wines everywhere.

Bidoli Pinot Grigio

In Wine World, we (especially those of us from macho corporate retail backgrounds) are trained (maybe led is a better word) to eschew certain wines on a kind of elitist principle rooted in a misunderstanding of gender and language.  If Francesco says that Pinot Grigio is feminine, he is saying something very different from Frank, who says Pinot Grigio is for girls.  Francesco lives in a linguistic world where every object is gendered whether or not that gender corresponds in any way to the sex of anyone or anything, and a social world in which straight guys kiss each other without hesitation.  Frank gets the gist but misses the meaning when he consigns Pinot Grigio to the ladies-who-lunch bin.  (and for that matter when he spends his life awkwardly shaking hands with his best friends and feeling weird in locker rooms)

1: Frank!  Having lunch with ladies is fun.  Have a salad with your Pinot Grigio, it will help your digestion.
2: Francesco likes drinking Pinot Grigio.  He is a man (a straw man, maybe) who likes lots of different kinds of things.  He likes steak, and he also likes oysters, and no one thinks he is a hypocrite. 

Bidoli Pinot Grigio is my favorite to sell by the glass in restaurants because it also my favorite to drink after a long shift full of St. Patrick's nonsense in a hot shower, as cold as my fridge will get it.  I would put ice in if it wouldn't melt.   It is simple, clean, and right.  It is the wine equivalent of a hard-boiled egg with a pinch of salt.  No one can question its solidity, its permanence.   It is a jazz standard sung well in a pretty okay club by a competent singer you don't know personally.  It'll do.  In fact, if you consider all of the terrible shows you've been to because your friends' bands were playing, or all of the diet soda you've drunk for whatever reason you came up with to do that, it is a damn sight better than pretty okay.