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                Lot of people talking about unicorns these days.  Wait, is unicorns capitalized? Well, if it isn’t it should be. It’s a fucking mythical creature for fuck’s sake.

                That being said don’t expect me to go on a tangent about how this wine I got to put in my maw this evening is like a Unicorn.  Firstly, I don’t believe it’s a good idea to put a Unicorn in one’s mouth.  Not a live one anyway.  Like if it’s a bacon wrapped grilled tenderloin of Unicorn, I’d be all over that shit.  I hear there’s a four star restaurant in Colorado that lets you pick out your Unicorn and shoot it so that the chef there can prepare it for you however you’d like.  Good times.

                And I just went on that tangent and Unicorns aren’t the point.  The point is this wine I’m talking about.  What was it like?  It was like putting a mythical creature in my mouth.  But not a Unicorn.  A palate like a soft red late afternoon ray of sun.  And sitting right in the center of that ray of sun was a 1967 Cherry Red Corvette Sting Ray.  With a naked chick standing right next to it.  I’m pretty sure everything that I can think of that’s awesome was going on with this wine. 

                You know what else is cool.  Darth Vader.  This wine had an unmistakable Darth Vaderiness on the mid-palate.  The Darth Vader at the beginning of Star Wars, walking confidently down the halls amongst the defeated, I definitely got a strong sense of that in the mid palate.

                The mouthfeel.  Is it actually possible to live inside of a Rainbow?  Has anyone ever tried it?  I would bet every dime I have that living in a fucking rainbow tastes like this thing did.  Mouthfeel wise.  So, Vader on the mid-palate.  Living in a fucking rainbow for overall mouthfeel.  I could taste it ruin my ability to enjoy pinot for at least a few weeks.  What’s going to live up to that? How deep a wormhole am I willing to go down to find out?

                I heard about this guy once and apparently he’s into shiny clothing but he’s also really into vino.  SO much so he had to make it.  He had to travel through the perils of central California, an untamed wasteland on which Mel Gibson’s greatest accomplishment, the movie The Road Warrior, was based.  He found a mound of limestone in the middle of nowhere overlooking what is now the Silicone Valley.  They told him to just walk away, but he put in.  Grew grapes.  Plotted. 

                Vineyards got planted and things were coming to fruition…That fucking sentence back there, is horrible.  It sounds like the voiceover for a post montage scene in a Disney movie.

                Long story short he began making vino.  Some Chard, mostly pinot.   (Fuck I did it again.)   The vino he makes is consistently some of the best wines I’ve ever had when it comes to mind boggling balance and subtle explosiveness.  It is a quiet storm.  This is probably what the wine that Jesus made tasted like. 

                I’m speaking of Calera.  

                A friend recently shared a 2005 Calera Selleck Pinot Noir.  Forrest floor, ripe cherries, platinum stripper pole…fuckin juice.  Cherubs danced around my head in jerky hip hop movements and then I was allowed to kill them all with my mind.  The wine took me to a place that’s hard to come back from.  A wall of jadedness will follow me around like a dark cloud as I meander through different wines in the coming weeks.  I’m many times thankful none the less.  No one ever said the high white note didn't cost anything..   

Syrah. Try Not to Stare at It's Eyepatch.

            What the fuck is your problem Syrah?  Every time I decide to have a sip or two of you I go home and get my ass torn out by my wife because my mouth looks like I’ve either been drinking wine all day or hanging out at the local McDonalds giving Grimace BJs for Cornas money.  This isn’t to say I wouldn’t give Grimace BJs for Cornas money.   I mean, do we even know what Grimace is?  Sure it’s got a deep voice but on whatever planet it is that it’s from that could be how chicks communicate…and holy shit is Cornas good.

              

            Not to mention there’s your reputation for getting into bar fights in seedy pool halls after hours.  You smoke too much and frankly that leather jacket you wear with all the zippers on it is not only a tad bit out of style (huh, because I know that you wear it without a hint of irony) but it smells like a Wrangler commercial.  I love you man, I really do, but if you don’t change your ways we may have to have a vintervintion.  

                Syrah’s been called a lot of things, nuclear purple, a brutish bastard, a beautiful woman with rough hairy legs, Shiraz.  No one’s really sure where it came from or how it came to be in its most famous home, the Rhone, but theories abound.  One thing we do know for certain thanks to the fancy pants DNA testing that we can now do, Syrah’s daddy is Dureza.  Dureza is a little known and even less planted grape that has it’s it origins in the Ardeche region of France.  It’s more or less been completely wiped out and we have the folks at the Montpellier Wine Nerd Emporium and Grape DNA Getting Place to thank for the continuation of its existence.   Syrah’s mom is Mondeuse Blanche, a grape that has been in Savoy for centuries.

                We can’t be certain how long the grape has been around for.  There is evidence that in AD77 Pliny the Elder wrote of a wine that was made in Vienne (Cote-Rotie) from a dark skinned grape that used to piss every one off because they would work the vine and vats and come home looking like Grape Ape.  Could this wine be the precursor to the modern Cote-Rotie?  Who knows?

                It’s even more of a convoluted enigma when it comes to where this grape may have come from.  The Iranians claim it as one of their own, but then again the Iranians claim everything as their own.  There are a couple problems with the theory that this wine came from Iran.  According to ancient lore the grape was brought by the Phoenicians from Shiraz (ancient Iran) to what is now modern day Marseilles.  However, no traces of Syrah currently exist anywhere near Marseilles.  The other problem is that a gentleman by the name of James Busby may have made the whole thing up for his 1826 book of such a ridiculously long name I chose not to relay it here.  In the book he said he believed the plant was brought over by a single Hermit.  A hermit with super powers.  For instance he had perfect night vision, and he could shoot laser beams out of his anus, which made it hard to aim but there is no record of him ever missing his mark. 

                I tend to lean toward the idea that Syrah is a full-on French grape.  Its an asshole, and as I said earlier it smokes like a chimney, it thinks Jerry Lewis is funny and it’s not deathly afraid of mimes, and it hasn’t figured out that the Citroen is an ugly car.  That shit is French to its very fuckin core. 

                Did you know they grow it in Australia too?  They do but it’s called Shiraz.  Guess who introduced it to Australia?  That James Busby guy who was trying in the early 1800’s to convince everyone that Syrah came from Shiraz.  Holy shit people, you’ve all been horn-swaggled.  Whereas French Syrah is brutally elegant with the depth of a giant chasm, Australian Shiraz is like the inside of a day shift stripper’s thigh who wears a minty cherry body rub.  It sounds fun at first, but it may not be your thing if you’re not into Motley Crue and or Sir Mix-A-Lot. 

                There’s also this thing we grow in the United States called Petit Sirah.  Is Petit Sirah a long lost offspring of Syrah?  Actually yes, Petit Sirah or Durif is a bastard of Syrah and Peloursin.  Syrah of course never paid a lick of child support and Petit was forced to strike out on its own.  It’s done fairly well but even if Syrah had stuck around to help raise Petit he only would have been disappointed.  Petit Sirah is a smaller grape that produces wines that are nothing like those which come from Syrah.  They can in fact make good wine if a miracle happens.  For instance, if you happen to be at a party and all there is available is Petit Sirah then you can maybe approach the guy with the beard wearing the robe and leather sandals and ask if there is anything he can do with the wine, he most likely won’t be able to because he’s probably just an old Widespread fan who’s still bummed about their breaking up but in a one in a million chance it could be Jesus.  And I’m sure Jesus would be more than happy to turn your Petit Sirah into Hermitage. 

                SO in closing, Syrah is an asshole.  But he’s my kind of asshole.  John McLain.  Dalton. Roadhouse.

Teleportation. You scientists need to stop watching old episodes of Big Bang Theory and laughing at shit that makes no sense to me and get to work on that shit...and another random thought.

                 I may have gotten myself involved in a god awful “competition" that could end up costing me dearly.  A friend and fellow wine nerd and I have started to text pictures of what we’re drinking to each other every Saturday night and with each progressing week the stakes seem to get higher and higher.  One week it’s a premier cru from the Cotes du Buene.  I answer with a second growth from St. Estephie.  He answers with a Puligny-Montrachet AND a Martin Estate Cab…etc.  This little throw down is going to end up costing me everything I’ve got.  I’ll be living in the street like a mere performance artist/ hobo clown having to beg for money just so I can afford the 2 hot dogs for $2.22 deal at the Kum & Go. 

                Now, this is one of the few draw backs to having kids.  We would be enjoying all these wonderful wines together if I could ever get out of the house to do so but being in the early stages of fatherhood it only makes sense that I am at the very least at the house and not epically wasted in the event of the unforeseen.  Therefore, through our texts we are living vicariously through one another.  I guess it’s the next best thing.  They need to hurry up and get that teleportation shit going.  I can say there will be a lot of glass trading going on if that ever happens.  What the fuck scientists?  What can you possibly be working on that’s better than teleportation?   

High Tech Meets High Falootin'

They say that more Lafite is served in Las Vegas each year than the entire Chateau produces any given vintage.  Counterfeiting big name wine bottles has become big business in America and around the world.  For instance, in China after a well-known wine collector purchased over one thousand magnums of 1855 Haut-Brion it was quickly discovered that all the bottles contained flat Pepsi.  The collector had gotten to his seventy-sixth bottle when he knew something was amiss.  Incidentally that was the first bottle he’s not mixed with Kool-Aid before drinking so he was truly able to understand he’d been duped.

                Steps are being made so that the oversized watch wearing daddy’s boys can buy bottles of first growth that they can rest easy knowing are the real thing.  At Margaux every bottle purchased comes with a certificate of authenticity, the serial number and vintage of the bottle etched on the side using the Hope diamond, and a Frenchman who will stay with the bottle and owner for the entirety of the bottles existence to verify that it is in fact what it says it is.  In the unfortunate event that the little Frenchman should pass his oldest male offspring (who has been groomed from birth for the task) will take over as the new curator of the bottle. 

                All bottles from Chateau Lafite that date beyond 2007 not only has a serial number etched into the bottom of the bottle but when held under a black light will reveal a rendering of Nicolas Sarkozy’s penis at half mass. The label itself will be made from the delicate hide of one of the many Pegasus which the chateau keeps in a stable in their gardens, not unlike the Budweiser Clydesdales. 

                Not to be out done Mouton has gone through great strides to ensure that every bottle that hits the market baring its name will be made from glass recycled from the Palace at Versailles.  The panes are lovingly carried to the chateau where a group of gnomes work through the night to reshape the glass into the Bordeaux bottle shape known the world over.  While this process is taking place the gnomes are careful to insert a single strand of the late Baron Philippe de Rothschilde’s hair into every bottle.  The empty bottles are all then packaged and sent to the Fortress of Solitude where Superman etches a different serial number into each individual bottle using his laser sight.  As if that’s not enough each bottle is then returned to the chateau where they are filled with the wine and corked using a special cork which not only has the vintage of the wine permanently etched into both the ends and the side but is also rigged with a tiny explosive device causing it to explode five minutes after removal.

                The latest bottles being released from Haut-Brion fire lasers out of it.  That’s it.  Nothing any more complicated than that and one would say that it’s merely a party trick.  But can you imagine the amount of technology that went into the production of that little “party trick”? Does your bottle of Silver Oak shoot lasers out of it? No.  Because Silver Oak sucks, that’s why.  Honestly, I wish Silver Oak did shoot lasers out of it…right at the idiot that bought the bottle.

                Finally we have Latour, the forgotten, unloved bastard of the first-growths.  The wine even the homeless Bordelaise wouldn’t be caught dead drinking.  Latour knew they really had to step up their game to make each and every bottle special.  Beginning with the 2011 vintage all bottles of Latour must be purchased at the Chateau.  The buyer simply puts in his or her order, flies or drives to the Chateau depending on their distance away, and arrives to see their order being poured into each individual bottle.  As an added bonus the wine is not only released from the barrel straight to the bottle but is allowed to run down a chute where it then dribbles over French movie superstar Gerard Depardieu’s scrotum before entering the bottle.  Each sip is like licking Cyrano de Bergerac’s ball sack.  Furthermore, the foil around the top is made from an alloy of adamantium and the more forgiving tin foil so that it is guaranteed to never lose that new bottle luster.  The bottle is made from repurposed glass from Louis XII’s personal collection of stemware which have been melted down and reshaped.  In the punt there is a single air bubble which under an electron microscope can be seen the vintage and serial number of that particular bottle.

                I hope this has been informative and I hope that now you can all rest easy knowing that that newer vintage of first-growth you purchase has all these awesome new ways of verifying their authenticity.  I cant wait to see some of these bottles in the market.  That is except maybe the new Haut-Brion bottle.  That one could prove to be the Sommelier’s worse nightmare.

                 

               

....

           There are different levels of what one calls a bartender.  You may order an ancient, obscure drink and see your bartender consult a book to find the ingredients.  Don’t be disheartened…yet.  This could mean that the person has never heard of said drink and is consulting a guide to tell them the ingredients so that they can go forth and make it improperly, or it could mean that you have a grizzled badass on your hands who has lost a lot of his or her memory due to a shortage of space allotted for bong resin and froo-shit modern drinks like the Straw-Razz Fuck-Bomb that has suddenly become so popular.  Let’s hope for the latter.  I love the latter.  In fact, I was the latter. 

                I’ve always been the guy that stands next to the keg.  At underage drink-a-thons me and my roomies threw at our house, to the time I spent as a professional beer jerk, to the years I was a “Beverage Manager”.  Whenever the party was happening, one could find me within close range of beer-getting place. 

Beverage manager, huh?  Another favorite made-up term of mine is “mixologist”, or SparkleDick.  Both BMs and Mixologists are adjectives for “I’m a stuck up douche who’s actually kind of embarrassed by this job.”  I actually fear for the safety of these people.  Eventually stealing the chef’s coat from off the rack is bound to lead to a cutting, deveining, and broiling.  Why the shit would you lift a coat from a person who carries around a bag of knives?

I no longer stand next to the keg; I am the person selling the keg to the person standing next to the keg.  Therefore, I am an adult.  Right?  Right.  Now I stand next to more kegs and cases of wine than even I could imagine.  Hugging them.  Kissing them.  Whispering dirty naughtys into their ear.  Life has become like a bowl of Chunky Monkey ice cream for me as of late, sweet, crunchy, god-damned delicious.  Don’t get me wrong.  I miss being a bartender, being on the firing lines, maintaining a thinner version of my present self, and drinking other people’s booze at a high discount.  However, this life is what I need at this age.  Nobody wants to go to a bar with a crotchety old bastard at the helm who takes it upon himself to pontificate about why life is no better than a bag of barf while pointing out your glaring inadequacies as a human being to you.   I wasn’t that guy yet but I was well on my way.

So I put myself out to pasture.  I’m in the rear with the gear.  I’m merely the water boy.  (Insert other jank cliché here.) 

I like it.  It’s quieter, run at a much softer pace. 

Burt's Best

                There is a man that is so over the top, so larger than life, his very existence is often questioned.  He does however, exist.  And I somehow got him to agree to be my next guest blogger.  Where did we go wrong America that a man like Mark Ruffulo is considered a heart throb?  The guy looks like he’d be bed-ridden for days due to a hangnail.  At one time America wanted its movie stars to have that shoot first, drink a beer, and say to hell with asking questions later and because the post written by my last guest blogger went over so well, I decided to continue with the theme and have yet another action star give us some of his thoughts about wine.  Only in this case instead of a bone breaking martial artist I went with an unapologetic All-American American guy.  This gentleman never needed to learn martial arts.  His slick mouth and holier than thou mustache has gotten him through the “hairiest” of situations.

                Am I speaking of Tom Selleck?   Shit no. I’m talking about the mother-fucking bandit himself, Burt Reynolds. What you probably know is that he spends most of his time wearing Neoprene vests and destroying our U.S. interstates with his Trans Am but what you may not have known is that Mr. Reynolds is also a very knowledgeable wine appreciator.  Because his birthday is coming up I thought it’d be a good time to get him to give us a few of his thoughts on what wine has done for him in his life. So without further introduction, and on his birthday, I give you Sir Dr. Burt Reynolds.

                Wine?  Yeah, I’ve been known to drink it.  I’ve also been known to snort copious amounts of blow from the ass crack of a shaven donkey.  I don’t see anyone wanting me to write about that.  I could write about that kind of stuff forever.  Or how about the time I powdered a dozen donuts with a half ounce of Molly?  I seriously thought I was Lee Majors for almost a week.  Not Lee Majors as in his character from The Six Million Dollar Man, but the actual Lee Majors.  The guy was unbreakable man.  I once saw him nose dive into an empty swimming pool.  When he finally came to he screamed “water’s for assholes” and began doing a butterfly stroke across naked concrete.  That’s a fucking man if you ask me.  Is he still alive? Anyone know?  Well if he is dead I bet a syringe, a .38 Special loaded with blanks, a boombox playing a Sinatra tape, his lawyer, and a small Thai boy were all in the room when it happened.

                Why does Burt Reynolds like wine?  Well, it tastes good, it makes food taste better, it gets stuck in my mustache and provides a little surprise libation later on in the day and most of all, chicks love it.

                But I digress.  I was asked by the guy who runs this electropage to give some thoughts about some of my favorite pairings.  I’m assuming he means pairing wine with food but I only eat two things, jerky (be it beef, rattlesnake, caribou, dog, turkey, honey badger, meerkat, horse, earthworm, nutria, or marmoset) and ice cream sandwiches.  It’d get pretty boring talking about the few wines that pair with those food products so instead I’m going to discuss wine pairings with things in my life that I enjoy.  Life moment wine pairings, which some may say is a fairly conceptual undertaking.  Others may be surprised I even know the word conceptual.

I'm the one in front.

                I may as well begin with the most obvious pairing.  The 1978 Pontiac Trans Am 10^th Anniversary Edition that was featured in the movie Smokey and Bandit 1-23 and Screaming Eagle Cabernet.  Any vintage of Screaming Eagle will do but the most important part of this pairing is that you enjoy it while hauling ass through Texas at unheard of speeds while an entire troop of interstate patrol cars chases you down.  The adrenaline coursing through your veins, the scream of multiple sirens, the roar of the 1 mile per gallon guzzling 6.6 Liter engine, and the unreal tannins from the cabernet all marry well into a perfect symphony causing every synapse in your brain to simultaneously explode.  Sure oysters and Gewertraminer are good, but they’re far from that good.

                You no doubt remember my role of Lewis Medlock in the movie Deliverance. I remember it like it was yesterday.  It was easily the longest I’ve ever had to go without a mustache because not long after that I filmed White Lightning, which I’ll get to in a moment.  My mustache is where I derive most of my supernatural powers.  In Deliverance it didn’t make too much of a difference because I was allowed to wear a sleeveless neoprene vest during most of the filming of that movie.  If the mustache is my number one power animal than the sleeveless neoprene vest takes second place hands down.  To get to the pairing I have to remind you all that there is a scene where the actor Ned Beatty gets his manginity taken from him by a couple of ne’er-do-well backwoods types.  Ned wasn’t very excited about doing the scene and what it may do to his career so at the time the director promised him an entire case of 1964 DRC which was epic even at that time.  Ned agreed to the trade and did the deed and the rest is history.  When Boorman (the director) got Ned that case of wine I had him pick me one up as well.

                Bottom line is, Ned Beatty’s a complete asshole.  He always has been and always will be. You’re probably saying to yourself, “how could a guy that's always as nice as Ned Beatty is in his roles be an asshole?”  Believe me, the guy would kick his own mother in the shin for half a cigarette if she hadn’t already abandoned him when he was seven.  One of my favorite pairings to date includes pulling one of those bottles of DRC from my cellar, popping the BluRay of Deliverance into the player, and watching that infamous rape scene on loop over and over again as I drink that entire bottle, finishing off the last drop as Ned’s bare ass is seen scurrying up that hill for his life.  Fuck that guy.

                For my third and final pairing I’m really just throwing a guess out there.  You remember the movie White Lightning?  Yeah, neither do I.  Apparently I played a guy name Gator and believe it or not that dickhole Beatty is in that movie as well and surprise surprise, he plays an asshole.  The guy was born for the character.   He played a cop and I played a guy that was running from him while trying to expose him of being on the take from moonshiners.  I learned all this on Wikipedia mind you because I don’t remember a damn bit of it, which is why it led to such a great pairing.  The movie took place in Arkansas and that’s where we filmed most of it because the extras are more authentic…and cheap.  Toothlessness is rampant and “redneck” make-up wasn’t needed at all.  That much I remember.  The rest of my memory is hazy though because of my consumption of the number one cash drop in Arkansas.  Pot.  I then mixed that cash crop with their number two cash crop, moonshine.  Boom, kick assed pairing and a good three months of my life are completely gone.  But in a good way.  From what I’m told I insisted everyone call me Gator even off camera presumably in the interest of remaining in character but it was probably because Gator is a kick-assed name and this was the seventies.  Nuff said.

                Hope you enjoyed my stories folks.  If I can leave you with one more piece of advice…sex while wearing a bolo tie isn’t as cool as it sounds.  Good night.

Now a fragrance called Musk of Badass.

(I’d like to thank my fellow wine nerd Barb for giving me the idea for this post.  Hope you’ve enjoyed it.)

Two Things

Coming Soon

Also, I'm very thankful for the Hosemaster's return.