Tuesday, March 9 2010

Road Trip!

The longest journey starts but with a single putting-on of shoes . . .

It's starting a bit early this year: I'm on the road, again. This week I'm running around Pennsylvania, up to King of Prussia for the Wineries Unlimited Trade Show (funny enough I ran into an old friend, Dominic Rivard in Pearson airport, heading for the same thing, only from Nova Scotia. Small world!) and a lecture for my pal Jason at Keystone Homebrew, for a very cool event, Meet the Source Night. According to the press release,

Now is your chance to learn more about winemaking ingredients, directly from the source(s)! (That's right, we're introducing you to our connection!) For the first time ever, we have organized an evening of fun, informative presentations and winemaking discussions with a star-studded cast of Keystone Homebrew suppliers. Learn more about the wide variety of fresh and frozen grapes, juices, wine kits, and other winemaking supplies

Posted by Roadwarrior Tim AT 6:28AM

Thursday, March 4 2010

733t Haxorz, LOL

Internet not actually as shown. It's more like a picture of cats speaking ungrammatically.

I can't claim to be an internet guru-type guy. I can do a little html, and fiddle with the tools provided by webslingers, but for most of the time I think back fondly to the days of the command line. I'm probably one of the last people whose first programming exposure was on punch-cards and got so excited when DOS came out I squealed like a little girl.

But we've all passed a lot of water since then. I've been working on a little tidying-up of my blog page, getting the schmutz out of my links down the left side of the page here ('Buy My Magazine' no longer sends you to Publisher's Clearinghouse) and I've added a few things.

Posted by InterTim AT 10:59AM

Monday, March 1 2010

In a Pickle

Weaponised cucumber

Who doesn't love a pickle? They're sour and crunchy and salty, go great in sandwiches and at picnics and they're a great way to preserve food without refrigeration. According to The Internets:

Pickling, also known as brining or corning, is the process of preserving food by anaerobic fermentation in brine (a solution of salt in water) to produce lactic acid, or marinating and storing it in an acid solution, usually vinegar (acetic acid). The resulting food is called a pickle. This procedure gives the food a salty or sour taste.

Posted by Full-Kosher Tim AT 11:29PM

Friday, February 26 2010

Full Circle, Faithful Service

We had a special day here at Winexepert this week: one of Winexpert's customer service people was awarded her five year service plaque, and we celebrated the day with cake and congratulations.

Thanks for all of your hard work and dedication Joanne!

Joanne Harris has been an integral part of our team for five years now, helping Linda out in our retail store and manning the customer service lines and email answering. In addition she's a great utility team-member, filling in for labwork, helping with admin work in the front office and generally being one of those people whose unobtrusive competence, thoughtfulness and good cheer helps make a busy, active workplace successful.

Nominally I'm Joanne's supervisor. Really, I just coach the customer service department a little and they return the favour by providing the absolute best customer service experience in our industry. The funny thing is, I sort-of used to work for Joanne. It was a while ago, when I was a paperboy for the long-since defunct Maple Ridge Gazette. Joanne worked in the front office where I used to turn in my grubby collection of nickels and IOU's for my route. Funny, I seem to remember having to crane my neck to look way up to talk to her behind the Gazette's front counter . . . maybe there's something wrong with my memory.

Posted by Tim AT 2:01PM

Monday, February 22 2010

Grapes, Wineries, Harvests, You

As is my custom, I was perusing the New York Times the other day when I came across this tidbit from Dining and Wine Section: Try the Red: Napa Learns to Sell. The article's hub is the idea that due to unsold inventory from the 2009 harvest, Napa wineries now have to actually market, advertise and actively sell their products, rather than deigning to allow consumers to take it from them. On one level that's enough of a hook for me: learning how big wineries approach things like consumer contact, promotion, web presence, it's all good stuff.

But the article conceals a interesting facts, and glosses over a really Big Point: there's yet another imbalance in supply of grapes. Grape prices have fluctuated as an agricultural commodity in California ever since prohibition was repealed. It got so bad that in the past the largest purchaser of California grapes (Gallo) tried to use its purchasing power to stabilise pricing, by declaring what it would pay per tonne for various varietals, prior to harvest. Not to say they're entirely benign (sometimes the price was only just what was necessary to cover the cost of getting the grapes out of the field and setting up for next year) but Gallo knew full well that if the price was too low some high-volume/low margin growers would either rip up the grapes and plant almonds, or they'd simply abandon their land and walk away, and there would be no grapes for next year. On the flip side, in lean years, there were some shady deals, where contracts went unfulfilled when another player bid higher per tonne or the spot market in grapes got hotter than a smoky bearing.

Posted by Bemused Tim AT 12:24PM

Thursday, February 18 2010

Guess Who's Coming to Bottle

My friends at Coastal Winemakers had a surprise yesterday: Walter Gretzky dropped in to help bottle wine.

Left to right, Brad, Walter, Bert and Val

Posted by Reporter Tim AT 12:41PM

Wednesday, February 17 2010

The Food of Love

If music be the food of love, play on,

Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken, and so die.

Duke Orsino, Twelfth Night Act 1, scene 1, 1–3

I always considered Orsino a self-indulgent dullard. Well, to be fair, that was the role Shakespeare cast for him. But honestly, the food of love is most often food. It's beyond a cliche as a signifier in our world, from 'The way to a man's heart is through his stomach' (it's actually through the diaphragm and up), to the classic Mama urging her children to take seconds and thirds to avoid breaking her heart, to the idea of the romantic dinner.

My wife and I almost always celebrate special days together with a meal, and this Valentine's day was no exception. As is my custom I made her eggs Benediction. It's like normal eggs Benedict but I use cheese sauce instead of Hollandaise (can't abide by the stuff) and serve it with a side of steamed broccoli. It's pretty tasty.

Posted by Mushy Tim AT 4:37PM

Thursday, February 11 2010

Beer and Lawsuits

From the Faces of Evil file, look at these two little cherubs:

Make beer, not lawsuits. Weasels.

If you've read my previous blogs you'll know I enjoy the occasional beer, and that Central City Brewing is my favorite brewery/pub/watering hole in the whole world. Not only were they voted best local brewpub by CAMRA BC, but also their IPA was voted best beer in BC! I've been friends with their brewer, Gary Lohin, for years, following him from brewery to brewery, usually demanding he make me more beer.

Two peas in a beer-soaked pod. Gary and me at the 2009 CAMRA festival

With all this in mind, you can imagine how bummed out I was to find out that California's Bear Republic brewery is suing Central City over trademark infringement. If you're not familiar with Bear Republic, they're in wine country in California, and they make a wide variety of award-winning beers that are very tasty and innovative. I've enjoyed a lot of those beers in the past . . .

Their suit (download a pdf of it here) contends that Central City Red Racer IPA infringes upon their beers Red Rocket and Racer 5. Let's take a look, shall we?

Posted by Big Angry Tim AT 2:14PM

Monday, February 8 2010

Whisky, On the Rocks

There's a face that could use a wee dram

In addition to my day job in the wine industry I have many other interests, including beer, whisky, tequila. brandy, rum, gin, champagne and virtually all other fermented beverages. It's not so much that I'm a lush (I do have aspirations that way, but I'm modest about my talents). It's more that the history of civilisation is the history of alcohol. After all, neolithic hunter-gatherers didn't settle down to farm because they were hungry for a steaming bowl of grit-laden, mouldy gruel: they planted grain to make beer! Similarly, the Romans didn't conquer territory because they had better soldiers, boots, roads or organisation: they conquered territory with an agricultural system hinged on the production of high volumes of wine.

Posted by Tim O'Shanter AT 4:33PM

Thursday, February 4 2010

News Round-Up

Tim, you ignorant Sauvignon . . .

Since I've been away from computers and my traditional sources of news for a couple of weeks, a few interesting tidbits have piled up, and i thought I'd share. First, from the Fraud Files, French Wineries, Co-operatives, Negociants and Conglomerates Charged in Pinot Noir Fraud.

Posted by Anchorman Tim AT 2:07PM

Monday, February 1 2010

Back In the Saddle Again

Aye, you can call me Angus MacGringo, of the clan MacGringo. Tequila and haggis for all!

Richard Orben once said, 'A vacation is having nothing to do and all day to do it in'. By that measure, I had a pretty successful time the last two weeks. This was our third trip to the Caribbean side of Mexico and it just gets better every darn time. I know this is technically a blog about wine, but there really isn't any in Mexico--sure, Mexico makes wine, but it's universally bad, and while they give the cheap stuff away at all-inclusive joints, it's not worth drinking, being the very cheapest imported swill.

Posted by Tanned Tim AT 2:40PM

Monday, January 18 2010

Travellin', Man

No, it's only this beautiful on days ending in a 'y'

I'm off, only this time it's not for wine business. Instead of the exotic locales of Philadelphia and St. Louis I'm heading to boring old Mexico. We're staying on the Caribbean side at a place called Xcaret. It's an all-inclusive resort inside a nature park, next to a Disneyland-style Mayan theme park.

Posted by Itchy Foots AT 12:43PM

Thursday, January 14 2010

Out to Lunch

Brenda, Tim, Gladys and Floyd

Had the chance to step out for lunch today with my parents and my sister, who was in from Kelowna, in BC's interior. I'd love to report that we enjoyed a couple of bottles of wine with our repast, but my parents are teetotal and Brenda was very abstemious, so I made do with a pint of Crannóg Ales Crannóg Ales Crannóg AlesStout, a fine brew.

Posted by Young Mr. Vandergrift AT 3:31PM

Monday, January 11 2010

Books, Customer Service, and Marketing

So many words, so beautiful.

I love books. I read three or four books a week, own several thousand, and would have more books than would fit in my living space if I didn't need space for beds, kitchens and the cat's laboratory. Books and reading are the secret keys to the universe. Bruce Sterling said in his immensely important work on futurism, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years, that successful people in the future would be those who could read and understand information, and re-purpose it to good use. That's essentially how I make my living--that and being charming, mostly. Reading is my primary method of dealing with my world, and prosecuting my job activities.

Posted by Tim the Grumpy AT 2:54PM

Tuesday, January 5 2010

Spine Chilling Tales!

I've gotten a couple of notes asking me if I did the Polar Bear Swim in White Rock again this year. The answer is, of course! My old friend (it's not that either of us is so old, per se, it's that we've known each other for coming up to 40 years) David and I hit the beach January 1st with several hundred other lunatics for White Rock's Polar Bear Swim.

David seems nonplussed. Weakling!

Posted by Timski AT 3:18PM

Monday, January 4 2010

Resolutions Kept

Funny Cow Blue, Marcia Baldwin Looks blue-licious!

The last day of the year is traditionally one where new resolutions are made. In this context, my dictionary says a resolution is 'a a decision to do something or to behave in a certain manner'. Deciding to behave a certain way is much easier than actually doing it but that's human nature all over.

Posted by Timulator AT 3:47PM

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