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.