Thursday, July 2 2009

Don't be fooled by all the pretty, fellows: she's a sharpie!

As a social gadfly and quasi-public nano-celebrity I have a very large circle of acquaintances, colleagues and co-conspirators. My actual circle of friends is much smaller, and I cherish the ones I have all the more for it--including great pals like Melissa (that's her above).

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Tuesday, June 30 2009

With glowing hearts, we see thee rise . . .

To all my American friends puzzled by the absence of Canadian voices on the other end of the telephone/email device July first, we have a good excuse: it's Canada Day/Fête du Canada! While on many levels it's analogous to the American Independence Day, it's mostly not, really.

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Monday, June 29 2009

Things go better with Kalimotxo?

Two things combined this week to make me feel both out of touch and completely excused for my cultural ignorance. The first was my discovery of a drink called Calimocho, or as the originators spell it, 'Kalimotxo' (apparently tx is pronounced 'ch' in Basque).

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Tuesday, June 23 2009

Mary, Mary, quite contrary . . .

Y'know, I feel a bit guilty most of the time because I'm always running late with deadlines, blogs and projects, being a natural born procrastinator. I'd like to think I have good excuses, like spending the weekend working in my garden, teaching the cats to skeet-shoot or building a cathedral out of Popsicle sticks, but if you use a good excuse one day, you'll use a bad excuse the next, I suppose.

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Tuesday, June 16 2009

But he that dares not grasp the thorn Should never crave the rosés.

Anne Bronte may or may not have drank rosé wine, but she seemed to know about thorny situations, and the European Commission seems to have it's share of pri . . . er, prickles. Case in point, their recent cowardly retreat on changing how rosé wines are produced. In a nutshell, the proposal was to change the manner in which pink wine is defined across Europe, allowing rosé to be made from blends of red and white grapes, in addition to the traditonal method seen in some areas of making it from 100% red grapes and relying on short maceration times to give the light pink colour.

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Thursday, June 11 2009

Rex Johnston and Barbara Bentley

Sometimes I have the best job in the world. Not only do I do something that I love, I also get to meet other people who love making and sharing wine as well. It's a community of folks who, while all different and so varied as to defy classification, all seem to share one thing in common: they're really nice. And every once in a while I hear something about one of my winemaking friends that's so good I have to share it.

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Sunday, June 7 2009

It's a good life, if you don't weaken.

"A meal without wine is like a day without sunshine."
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste (1825)

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Saturday, June 6 2009

Welcome to the bingo capital of Canada!

Ah, Winnipeg. I come here at least a couple of times every year. Winesense, our retail partner in the city, does a solid week of Limited Edition wine tasting events every winter, and I do at least one training session for their staff and managers each year, so I get to see the city pretty frequently (as well as Brandon, too--hey Ben! Go Wheat Kings!)

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Tuesday, June 2 2009

Stand tall, soldiers: you did your best.

It hasn't been drinktacular at Madhouse Manor lately. I've been on the road quite a bit, and thus doing my drinking out of town. Still, we managed to have a few people over and a couple of patio afternoons and I've piled up a few reviews.

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Friday, May 29 2009

Sniff, it's so pretty I just keep breaking into tears

I've been promising that I'd visit the new digs for Beyond the Grape for months now, and last Friday I finally made it. It was worth the wait, because the new location is a knockout.

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Thursday, May 28 2009

I wanted a haircut, not a shave!

No, it's nothing so gruesome as a head-ectomy. I was going through my pictures this morning and came across a sequence from Portugal. I was there last Spring, studying the wine and cork production. One of the funnest things I got to do while there was to participate in a Port decanting ceremony at the Vintage House in Pinhao, at the upper end of the Douro river.

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Monday, May 25 2009

Waiter! There's a fly in my Sauvignon!

It was quite the weekend in Napa. Winemaker Magazine hosted their second annual conference on the 15th and 16th of May. Since I'm a columnist and feature writer for them I got the invite to be a speaker as well. This year I thought I'd do two seminars, one on troubleshooting wine kits and another on a larger topic.

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Monday, May 18 2009

On the patio at Domaine Carneros, working diligently . . .

Yee-haw! After a year of conferences crammed into two months of work in only 21 days (math was never my strong suit, but my geometry is good enough for me to describe hyperbole) I'm home and resting comfortably. Last stop was a stint in the stupendously gorgeous Napa Valley, for the Winemaker Magazine 2009 conference.

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Friday, May 8 2009

But why has all the rum gone? White Rock Willie gets his raspberry on

What on earth do delectable raspberries and my ruthless, rum-swilling neighbour, White Rock Willie have in common with the Final Frontier? Well, as it turns out, Outer Space Smells of Rum and Tastes of Raspberries. According to the UK Guardian

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Wednesday, May 6 2009

SR-6, Nevada. Photo by Dave Becker

I've been a long time gone, and what a month this last week has been.

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Thursday, April 30 2009

It'd leave a sour taste in anyone's mouth

It's no secret that I'm not BFF with Robert Parker. He is, after all, pretty much the most pernicious influence on the world of wine today, dumbing down good wine, pumping up bad wine, and generally distorting consumer perceptions about what wine is and should be--all to his personal profit.

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Monday, April 27 2009

On the outside looking in?

I have curious, if somewhat tenuous connection to Randall Grahm (above), proprietor of Bonny Doon Vineyards and all-around wildly inventive marketer and polymathic winester. Bonny Doon used to sponsor a writing contest, 'A Gutwrenching Parody of Staggering Silliness'. On a whim I entered one year and to my surprise I took 5th place (of ten) in the Laureate's category for my silly little parody of Gravity's Rainbow (link: it's about halfway down the page).

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Wednesday, April 22 2009

I can't believe you forgot the marshmallows! What will we eat with the lark's tongues?

Regular readers of this blog (why does that phrase always make me think of bran cereal and prunes?) will note that I like a bit of comparative culture. Last April I made note of Grounation Day, the Rastafari commemoration the visit of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie to Jamaica in 1966. This year I got interested in the Roman festival of Parilia.

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Monday, April 20 2009

Will there be a test on Monday?

I had an interesting experience last week. I had to take a training course on a field outside my normal one (specialising in explaining consumer-produced wine can only be considered ‘normal’ only for a given value of normal, one supposes) and for once, instead of being the guy with the books, lectures and tests I was the guy with the pencil, paper, and question.

It was a firearms training course, so while I have past experience with the subject, I’m no expert, and had to rely on my instructor for almost all of the correct technical information regarding the technology and construction of firearms, the correct and safe use of them, and the way they must be used under law.

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Saturday, April 18 2009

Amish limousine, seen in Niagara On the Lake

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Thursday, April 9 2009

Red wine does not go with gasoline

Interesting news from Decanter: Allegrini winery gives away wine to designated drivers. It works like this: in restaurants the designated driver who does not imbibe gets a bottle of Allegrini's Palazzo del Torre wine to take home and enjoy at another time.

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Tuesday, April 7 2009

Startlingly accurate cartoon by Dave Walker

Customer service occupies a lot of my attention. I'm responsible for the answers we give to, and the solutions we provide for people who have concerns with our products. You know the saying, 'The Buck Stops Here'? Well, it usually stops antlers-first, and 'here' is my desk.

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Monday, April 6 2009

Boing! Boing! Boing!

I love reading the British newspaper Financial Times for a variety of reasons. First, it's got good journalism and a soothingly neutral and cool quality to its prose. Second, I don't understand high finance at all, but sometimes they come through with an article simple enough for even me.

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Friday, April 3 2009

The Bluebird of Chattiness?

It's official: I am apparently a band-wagoneer, now having signed up for a Twitter account, @WinexpertTim.

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Thursday, April 2 2009

Europe's greatest ruler and its greatest lover, born this day.

April 2nd marks the birthday of both Karolus Magnus, rex Francorum, rex Langobardorum and imperator Romanorum and Giacomo Girolamo Casanova de Seingalt, a librarian with an interesting hobby. Modern folk will most likely recognise them by the handles Charlemagne and Casanova.

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