If anyone needs me, I'll be third bum from the left, on a beach in Mexico. If anyone sees my cat driving my car or using my credit cards, please call his probation officer.

See you in a few days.

I'm here today to do something I very rarely do: talk about wine kits. What spurred me on was an article I read about Lego.

For those not used to my lumber-room of a mind and the way it generates associations (I'm not convinced I'm really conscious all of the time--I just have a big correlation-engine running in my head that makes it look like I'm thinking), sometimes it throws off connections that are at first blush, weird. Sure Lego and consumer winemaking are two things that encourage creativity, personal connectedness to a project, and the satisfaction of seeing something you made with your hands turn into a finished product. But that could be said of many lifestyle activities.

Nope, what made me think of wine kits is the fact that I've always wound up with extra Lego pieces from every box I bought. When I was a little shaver, this never bothered me--so what if I had some left over bits? It's not like a puzzle, or a caburettor, where missed pieces leave you high and dry.

But as an adult, I started to wonder why I always had leftover pieces. I'm not that much of a doofus . . . am I? It turns out that yes, I'm a doofus, but the extra pieces are just that: extra. Lego understands that a certain number of bits get lost from their sets over time, and they toss in a few extra pieces to every box, usually the mission-critical ones that set the theme of whatever you're constructing. I don't know about you, but I think this is awesome--they actually want you to succeed at your Lego play, and they pre-emptively reduce frustration by staunching a potential weak point before the end user even notices.

And here's the part where I talk about wine kits. For those who aren't currently using them (shame on you, do you want me to starve?) all kit wine is made partially with concentrated grape juice.

There's a bit of confusion around why we use concentrate--is it because it's cheaper than unconcentrated juice? (Not as such--there's cheap juice and expensive concentrate, and an unbreakable linear relationship between cost and quality in each). Is it because it occupies less space than unconcentrated juice and is thus easier to ship? (Yes, partly, but see below for the biggest reason.)

The big answer is that concentrate acts as a preservative. If you come from a line of home canners, or are just an enthusiast of preserves and jams, you'll understand why. Jam is made from fruits with moderate to high acid levels, with sugar added to it. Acid means the pH is low, preventing the growth of spoilage organisms and moulds while slowing browning, and sugar is actually toxic to most cellular life--the osmotic pressure of high sugar solutions bursts the cell walls of spoilage bugs, killing them. When you concentrate fresh juice, you increase the acidity, lower the pH and raise the sugar level--voila, you've preserved the grape juice without ruining the quality or using fierce chemical preservatives.

Ahem. This all means that when you go to make the kit, you're obligated to add water to it, making the volume up to the original amount, usually 23 litres (5 Imperial gallons, 6.1 US gallons. If you've ever wondered why kits are all 23 litres, it's because that was the common size of glass water bottles in the empire when home winemaking got started here, and we've stuck to it partly because of momentum, and partly because that's the smallest amount of wine I can visualise wanting to make.)

Where it becomes an issue is at racking, fining and stabilising. After the kit is transferred out of the first fermenting vessel into the carboy it will be shy just under a litre of volume due to the amount of yeast cells, colloidal material and (if any) oak products that are left behind as part of the process. No problem, until fining and stabilising day: after you've added the stabilisers (to keep the wine from oxidising or spoiling during ageing--the same things are used in commercial wine) and the fining agent (used to clear the wine, again, same thing in commercial wine), you're instructed

'Top up the carboy to within 2 inches of the bottom of the bung. Use cool water. Topping up helps prevent spoilage.'

And that's what throws some folks. The concern is that the wine is going fine--won't adding water at this point dilute it? Wouldn't it be better to use wine to top it up, to prevent a loss of flavour and aroma? We continue to get calls on this, year in and year out at Winexpert.

The answer is yes, the water will dilute the wine--to exactly the level we want it to be diluted! You see, all Winexpert kits are made to 4% over strength, with extra Brix levels and Total Dissolved Solid material calculated to produce a kit that will work out perfectly at 23 litres + 4%, which is 0.92 litres, or about a US quart. 

It's like Lego. We want to make sure you make great wine, so we throw in that extra so you don't have to go out and buy a bottle to top up.

Now, a couple of things. First, you can't make the wine to 23.92 litres on day one and go from there. You won't have enough room in the carboy for the additions and stirring necessary at the Fining and Stablising step. Second, if you need to add much more than 920 ml of topping water you've a) got an off-size carboy, or b) not added enough water on day one, or c) been too fussy at racking to the carboy.

C) is the kicker: we really want you to rack over everything except the lumps from the primary fermenter--essentially, if it'll go down the racking tube without fighting back, carry it over.

So this is what kept me awake until three in the morning, thinking about Lego and winemaking. If I'd played with Lincoln Logs as a kid, I have no idea what kind of a career I'd be in right now.

Some days it seems like I'm picking on Alder Yarrow. Today, however, Alder is just the messenger. Unlike previous blogs, wherein I was  uncharitable about something Alder said, this time I'm grateful to him for pointing out someone else who has earned my pique: Talia Baiocchi, and through her I'm climbing back on my favorite hobbyhorse, You Can't Trust Wine Writers (Including Me).

It all started like this: Alder posted a link to an article about Vinturi wine aerators on Bon Appetit. In it the author, Ms. Baiocchi, who was guesting at Bon Appetit (she writes for eater.com) reviewed the Vinturi, an interesting gizmo designed to aerate wine quickly, mimicking the effects of decanting.

She got the PR stuff about the Vinturi right:

The Vinturi wine aerator is a 6"-tall device that looks a little like a funnel and is meant to speed up the process of decanting. To use it, pour wine through the Vinturi into your glass, and watch the device take advantage of Bernoulli's Principal, which states that as the speed of a fluid increases, the pressure within it decreases.  According to a Vinturi rep, this "accelerates the natural blending of air and wine, revealing its true essence and character." In other words, the Vinturi claims that it can do in a matter of seconds what a decanter does in an hour or more

Fair enough, that's the idea behind it. And before we go any further, full disclosure: my company has distributed Vinturi aerators as a promo item in the past, but we've never sold them and once we moved the last of them we've had no commercial contact with the company since. I don't work for them, and I don't own one myself (the lab took it). But I do have lab data on their effects on wine, so I was terribly interested to see what conclusions Ms. Baiocchi drew from her tests. She set up a trial involving three New York sommeliers.

We sat down with New York sommeliers Michael Madrigale (Bar Boulud, Boulud Sud), Francesco Grosso (Marea), and Jordan Salcito (Crown) for a blind tasting to find out if a Vinturi really delivers a better glass of wine.

So far so good: people who sell wine for a living, and a blind tasting. I'm all for it.

Then, the wheels all fall off this experiment. Not just off, but all at once in a way that not only wrecks the car, but takes out an innocent family of fluffy little ducks on the way to a careening pile of wreckage that leaks sloppy methodology and facile journalism all over an otherwise lovely landscape.

A total of four wines of varying styles were tasted blind in four flights; each flight consisted of a glass that had been poured directly into the glass and one that had been poured into the glass through the Vinturi aerator. Each sommelier was asked to choose the wine they preferred and discuss the differences between the two glasses in each flight.

Wait, what? Straight up one-on-ones? That's not how you do blind tasting to produce data! That's how you share wine in a bar and produce anecdotes, especially in a chummy group of three New York sommeliers (it's a small world: they all know each other, at least by reputation).

The first problem is the sample size. Four wines, three people. It's a statistically useless exercise right off the bat, and nobody who conducts any kind of scientific study would turn in a sample study that tiny.

Second, you don't do one-on-ones. You do triangle tests. Instead of two samples, each different, you serve three samples, two the same, one different. And you don't just do that once: you do it multiple times, switching it up to eliminate chance.

Third, nobody talks about the wine until after the scores are tallied--that way subtle cues can't be passed along by a dominant member of the tasting group to the others.

Here's where the sweet, fluffy little ducks get it:

Before we get into the tasting, a side note: As the first drops of wine met the Vinturi, it let out a noise that toes a thin line between sloshing and muffled screaming. The pourer was so surprised that she missed the glass, and every single person in the room stopped to stare, then laugh. In other words, the thing sounds ridiculous, like a dying cat. 

Not only is this not a blind trial, it's a million miles from one. Three seconds with Wikipedia and you get this:

Double-blind describes an especially stringent way of conducting an experiment, usually on human subjects, in an attempt to eliminate subjective bias on the part of both experimental subjects and the experimenters. In most cases, double-blind experiments are held to achieve a higher standard of scientific rigor.

In a double-blind experiment, neither the individuals nor the researchers know who belongs to the control group and the experimental group. Only after all the data have been recorded (and in some cases, analysed) do the researchers learn which individuals are which. Performing an experiment in double-blind fashion is a way to lessen the influence of the prejudices and unintentional physical cues on the results (the placebo effect, observer bias, and experimenter's bias). Random assignment of the subject to the experimental or control group is a critical part of double-blind research design. The key that identifies the subjects and which group they belonged to is kept by a third party and not given to the researchers until the study is over.

Double-blind methods can be applied to any experimental situation where there is the possibility that the results will be affected by conscious or unconscious bias on the part of the experimenter.

In a true blind tasting, the person pouring the wine and the person serving it are not the same. The samples are numerically coded so that there can be no transfer of bias from the server to the person doing the evaluating. No matter how starchy someone is, they would still convey subtle non-verbal cues as to which wine sounded 'like a dying cat'.

The tasting notes reflect terrible bias. They aren't presented from the individual tasters, but are rather a group consensus formed after the tasting: '. . . the group noticed that the wine seemed a bit oxidized and muddy'. Again with the anecdotes, not with data.

I don't know Ms. Baiocchi, and she certainly seems to be enthusiastic about wine. That's all well and lovely, and I can hardly criticise anyone for writing about their wine experiences. But if she's going to give advice on consumer products based on supposedly scientific methodology (ie, taste trials), she needs to exercise more experimental rigour.

And, she could do a bit more research: Nathan Myhrvold, genuine big-brain turned food researcher, wrote a short piece for Business Week on Hyperdecanting. Myhrvold is an interesting cat. After retiring as Microsoft's chief strategist and technology officer, he got interested in food and cooking--interested as only an intellectually curious, hyper-intelligent billionaire used to commanding teams of researchers with gigantic budgets can be. While it's not relevant to the article he wrote, I can't resist pasting in a picture of his research kitchen:

What, your kitchen doesn't have an oxy-acetylene rig and an autoclave?

Ahem.

His article posits a much more vigorous approach to introducing oxygen into wine: by placing it in a blender on high.

Wine lovers have known for centuries that decanting wine before serving it often improves its flavor. Whatever the dominant process, the traditional decanter is a rather pathetic tool to accomplish it. A few years ago, I found I could get much better results by using an ordinary kitchen blender. I just pour the wine in, frappé away at the highest power setting for 30 to 60 seconds, and then allow the froth to subside (which happens quickly) before serving. I call it "hyperdecanting."

Whoa. If the Vinturi is supposed to speed things up, frappé-aerating is going to do everything it does and more. Is Myrhvold confident of the technique?

Although torturing an expensive wine in this way may cause sensitive oenophiles to avert their eyes, it almost invariably improves red wines—particularly younger ones, but even a 1982 Château Margaux.

But wait! If I'm saying we shouldn't trust wine writers, and in the past I've railed against the '. . . logical fallacy, argumentum ad verecundiam, argument to respect. Because most of us trust people with credentials and acknowledged expertise, we tend to roll up our brains . . . ' If I'm to be consistent, I can't just assert that you should believe Myrhvold, because that would be intellectually dishonest.

But that's okay. He doesn't think you should believe him either--at least not without properly rigorous scientific evidence.

Don’t just take my word for it, try it yourself.

But set up a proper blind taste test to avoid subconscious bias among the tasters. That’s a bigger problem than you might imagine. Researchers who examined the voting records of wine judges found that 90  percent of the time they give inconsistent ratings to a particular wine when they judge it on multiple occasions.

To avoid bias, use a "triangle test," which is a scientifically rigorous way to test for a perceptible difference between wine prepared two different ways. Get as many judges as you can—10 is the minimum to get good statistics. Give each judge three identical glasses, and label the glasses X, Y, and Z.

Hyperdecant half a bottle of wine and save the other half of the bottle to use for comparison. Out of view of the judges, pour an ounce or so of wine into each glass. The undecanted wine should go into two of the glasses, the hyperdecanted wine into the third, or vice versa. Vary the order of presentation among the judges so that not all are tasting the hyperdecanted wine first or last. Record which wine goes into which glass, and have the judges guess which two of their wines are the same. You’ll probably find that hyperdecanting does clearly change the flavor of the wine. To determine with scientific rigor whether your tasters prefer the hyperdecanted wine requires a more complex trial called a "paired preference" test, or "square" test. But a blind side-by-side comparison works passably well, too, and requires no math.

Dang, how about that. Somebody writing about wine who wants to share interesting observations, and then have you check them with a properly conducted rigorous trial.

Again, I'm not angry at Ms. Baiocchi. Nobody who earns a living writing has enough time to make perfect articles every single time, and I'm not comparing my work to hers--heaven forfend, if I had to earn my living exclusively through wine writing I'd rapidly be living in a cardboard box, drinking from a paper bag. But if there's one thing we owe our readers, it's an honest attempt at rigorous thinking.

And don't trust us.

Happy New Year to all of you, my friends. May this coming year bring peace, happiness and contentment for you and all those you love.

It's traditional to make resolutions on New Year's, but I really only have one: I never, ever want to have another year like 2011 on my dance card. I don't want to be a gloomy Gus on a festive night, but a very boring and uneventful 2012 would be just what the doctor ordered (literally).

For all of you who enjoy reading my stuff (get a life!) I do have one resolution: to catch up on some important blogging that has slipped by me while I was distracted. In the meantime, enjoy yourself and keep those you love close to you--and if you're looking, I hope you may find someone to love as well.

Cheers!

Whether you celebrate Christmas, Sol Invictus, Jul, Hanukkah or some other mid-winter seasonal festival, this is the time of year to reflect on the balance of the seasons and the turning of fall to winter, symbolic of death, rebirth, change and hope.

It's been exactly one month since I posted a blog entry. To people who've been waiting, I very much apologise. My personal life has unfortunately taken up much of my attention, and it's lead me to neglect my updates here. For all my friends who've been waiting to see pictures of the Limited Edition season, I'll get those up right quick, and for those looking for my particular brand of snarky disdain for the opinions of other wine writers, I've got a backlog of dismissive sneeriness to let loose, as well as some observations about modern wine thinking. 

However, that's down the road a wee bit. Before I get back to blogging, I'd like to wish all of you reading this the best of the season: no matter who you are or how you identify your beliefs, there's rarely a time of year when it's more welcome to be friendly, open of heart and free with good cheer and fellowship. May you find good in those around you, and take comfort in your families and your friends, and share the joys of your season with others.

Tim

Today we pause to honour the heroes who answered the call for their country. Canada has a proud legacy of valour in war and service in peacekeeping and humanitarian missions.

To all of our honoured dead, and those still with us, and those currently serving, I salute you, and thank you. Ave atque vale.

I’m not a smoker. To be sure, at one point in my life I tried really hard to become one, in an effort to emulate my father. Not only did he look like Johnny Cash (The Coolest Man Who Ever Lived) but also when he pulled a smoke out of his pack of Navy Cuts (the ones with the pretty girl in the Glengarry cap on the package) he would smoke like a cross between James Dean and a burning forest, with his internal landscape rearranged to permit the ingress of at least a dozen cubic feet of smoke every time he took a drag.

He also killed time in front of the TV rolling his own, a fascinating process that involved a machine the size of a paperback book with a tobacco loading slot and a lever, that when yanked carefully both compressed the shreds of demon weed into a tube and injected it into a waiting filter-tube. I mean, how cool is that to a gadget obsessed little shaver?

Alas, despite my misguided efforts to emulate my favourite authority figure, it was not to be. Childhood asthma, nicotine intolerance and general wimpiness prevented me from getting much farther than two puffs into a package of smokes before I had to lie down or throw up, most usually both. Plus, it made my mouth taste like a gas station floor (you can’t really call yourself a connoisseur of taste until you know that one by heart).

As an adult I’ve managed to develop a taste for a pipe and the extremely occasional cigar. Of course, inhaling pipes and cigars is optional (unless you’re a maniac) and it’s mainly a minor affectation I indulge on sea voyages, hikes and the rare occasion I’m enjoying a solitary brandy looking out over the ocean.

But I talk about tobacco fairly frequently. This odd turn of events comes from both written and verbal descriptions of red wine. Certain grapes, mostly those grown in warm (but not hot) climates develop a lovely floral nuance in the finish that wine nerds describe as ‘tobacco’. Usually I tell people that it is closest to the aroma of pipe tobacco, which has usually done the job.

But if you’re of a certain age (old, like me) you’ll have noticed that there are far fewer pipe smokers today than there were twenty or thirty years ago, at least here in North America. My cousin Dick and most of the weird uncles have given it up (or, very sadly, passed on to the big ashtray in the sky) and there’s a distinct lack of tweedy British types on our shores today. The fashion to use tobacco in any form seems to be slipping from our society.

Not that I mind, on the whole. It wouldn’t do to mistake my nostalgia for approval of a filthy habit that stinks up everything it’s near and, when used correctly, kills the people who engage in it. Can you imagine if you were trying to get tobacco approved as a consumer product today, with the science we have now? “So your product contains hundreds of toxic compounds, causes permanent lung damage, degrades cardiac function, is a potent source of carcinogens and has as a main active ingredient a psychoactive chemical that affects cognition and brain chemistry in ways we don’t fully understand and is both lethally poisonous in even very small doses and one of the most fiendishly addictive compounds known to man? Is that right, Mr. Marlborough?” Hah, good luck with that.

I hit on another descriptive strategy to counteract this lack of Meerschaum-munchers, by telling people that the smell I was talking about was the aroma of Nicotania, the plant that produces tobacco leaves. I grow a bunch of it in my garden at home every year. Not only is it a very pretty plant, with long, elegant flowers and big, well-formed leaves, it also produces the most impressive perfume—not from the blossoms, but from the leaves themselves, where sticky goo collects and causes the smell to adhere to your hands and anything else it touches for hours. I’ve always assumed that this was the ‘tar’ mentioned on cigarette packs, but it’s probably just a vegetable polysaccharide of some kind—goo, for want of a better name.

As good as Nicotainia smells when you touch it, it smells better after the sun goes down. This is because it’s a Vespertine, and like another more famous Vespertine, Night-Blooming Jasmine, it makes most of its delicious smells after the sun goes down. That’s why it’s planted right under my bedroom window, so that late fall affords me the nicest air-freshener imaginable.

If you’ve got space for flowers, I’d recommend Nicotainia. It’s hardy, grows in a wide variety of climates, and I think it’s charmingly pretty—you don’t even have to smoke it to appreciate it--although every year I do save a couple of leaves, cure them, and roll up a cigarette.

Reminds me of why I never could get the hang of smoking.

As I review blog entries from the last four years (I've been babbling here for that that long? How is that even possible?) a couple of patterns emerge. First, as projects come and go, the number of blog entries I put out ebb and flow, and mostly seem to be in ebb these days. If my boss were trying to find out how much time I was putting in on my job, a pretty good gauge would be the number of blog entries in any given month—more work = less blog. I simultaneously feel guilty and irritated at this. Guilty because despite the haphazard quality of my blogging efforts, I've been startled by the number of people who tell me they actually read timswineblog.com. It's gratifying, and not a little weird. One of the things I've learned from the pro-bloggers conference is that content is king, and regular updates keep readers happy; thus my guilt at letting blogging slide so often and occasionally for so long.

Irritation comes in because I actually really enjoy blogging. I've never been one to keep a diary or a daily journal, despite many efforts over the years to try to do so. I start with the best of intentions, but at the end of only a week or ten days I go back and have a look at what I've written, and it all seems like random drivel, so I tear out pages and give up again.

I really admire people who can keep up a regular journal. I bought Michael Palin's autobiography this year (Palin is a British actor most famous for being part of Monty Python, and has also done several travelogue shows). He has kept a diary almost his entire life, summarising and writing down everything that happens to him every day. Not only has this allowed him to put his life into context, it's also given him excellent fodder for autobiographical books (the volume I bought is thick enough to stun an ox, and it only covers his Python years!)

For me the blog is a sort of journal both of what I've been doing over the last few months and years and what's been on my mind at the time. Admittedly, a lot of what's on my mind is nonsense, but at least I have a sense of what I've been seeing and doing, in a format I can't tear out and throw away, no matter how much I cringe when I read it again.

After the work-induced irregularity of my blogging, the second thing that comes up when I review entries is that, as regular as the changing of the seasons, I do the same sort of work-related activities, at the same times of the year: conferences, holidays, Limited Edition tastings, educational seminars, festivals et al, and each of them brings other activities and patterns with it. If this is October, I must be on an airplane.

And, indeed, I am on an airplane (an Embrair 175, Delta 5893 from MSP to YVR), coming back from Minnesota and Wisconsin. I was travelling with my indomitable companion, Brian Wright. Brian is the US sales rep for our distributor, LD Carlson, and a good guy to do the road warrior gig with.

For those who don't travel professionally, many people who spend a third or more of their time travelling for work often refer to themselves and each other as 'Road Warriors', not because they behave like bandits in a dystopian world, but because it takes a lot of discipline and focus to get on six airplanes in five days, stay in four different hotels and put on a thousand miles in a car without losing your luggage, too much sleep, your personal effects or your sanity. It's a point of pride that we approach travel with a take-charge attitude, adapt to flight cancellations and schedule changes with aplomb, and work fiendishly to cram productivity into every hour.

Of course we all slip. This trip I'm terrifically short on sleep because the most economical way to do an in-week business trip is to fly in the day of your first appointment. In order to go east and get anything done before nightfall it's necessary to catch the earliest flight possible—not only because of the long flight times (typically 4+ hours to get from my home on the West Coast to the centre of the continent) but also because of the time change. Tacking on a magical three hours of time zones to a 4 hour flight means you have to take off at 7 am to make a 4 pm business meeting, and to make the day worth it you need to schedule evening stuff as well.

With US travel you really do need to get to the airport plenty early. Since I'm a top-tier frequent flyer, I can usually by-pass regular check-in, and get a jump on security clearance, but Homeworld Security is a whole 'nother bag of onions, especially if you're in the Vancouver airport when a cruise-ship lets off four or five thousand people to fly home. So it's up at 4 am to avoid the awful, horrible, not-very-good traffic that forms a permanent clog on every major artery in Vancouver 20 hours a day, 365 days a year, hit the airport, participate in security theatre and make it to the plane.

By the time the business day is done, it's usually 10 o'clock or so (most of my consumer events start at 7-ish, I talk for 45 minutes to an hour, hang out to pour wine and answer questions, do a wrap-up with our retail partner and realise that I haven't eaten since an airport sandwich at 2 pm. After a quick bite, almost always in a bar since they're the only places that have kitchens open late, it's back to the hotel to try to catch up on some emails, voicemails and urgent projects, before collapsing like a heap of dishevelled laundry into the bed.

And then it's up at 6:30 to make a breakfast meeting and get the day going. The only way to sustain this is to sacrifice sleep and fight back the tide of fatigue with lashings of coffee. Excess coffee consumption carries its own price. As Terry Pratchett once observed, it doesn't really make you more alert of itself: it merely borrows some alertness from your future self, alertness that will have to be paid back, one way or another, down the line.

Witness to this zero-sum energy game is my ability to sleep on airplanes. When I was younger, and didn't travel as much, I simply could not sleep in a moving vehicle, even on a 20 hour flight to New Zealand or Japan. Now, with my circadian rhythm washed away by the battering of time-zone switching and odd hours, I can barely stay awake on planes. It's as though the seat-belt clasp is some kind of tranquiliser talisman: it clicks home and my head tilts back, mouth open and a ribbon of drool down my neck.

I usually make a supreme effort to wake up after only a short nap, because airplanes are a brilliant place to get some writing done. There's normally no internet, I don't watch most popular TV or movies, so that doesn't distract me, and I'm almost always travelling alone, so I don't have anyone to talk to. I just did a quick word-count on this blog entry, and I've written over 1200 words in less than an hour. To be sure it's self-referential inconsequentialities, but all words are grist for the mill, I say, so I always try to make the most of airplane time.

Another way this trip has me slipping up is control of personal items. Not only did I leave a perfectly good jacket in the Minneapolis airport on Tuesday, I can't find my pocket camera. I'm hoping I tucked it into my suitcase, but I have a sinking feeling that I saw it sitting in the hall where we had our event last night. If I did, I can get someone to check for me, but the lost and found at MSP didn't have my jacket. Even Brian had some issues this trip, leaving his headphones in one of the hotels we stayed at.

It feels like a defeat to my inner road warrior. In the last ten years I've lost four pairs of sunglasses, two sets of headphones, an iPod (I'm pretty sure a Vancouver airport pickpocket got that one), phone chargers and cases, and dozens of miscellaneous items. Honestly, if someone made a decent purse for men, I'd seriously have a look at carrying one just as a catch-all for my junk.

There's also a series of weird effects stemming from frequent travel. The first is a cognitive mess, a combination of déjà vu and jamais vu. After you've visited your 80th or 90th city everything looks familiar—even when you're visiting a place you've never been before. It's a side-effect of the human brain's penchant for pattern recognition. Many airports and downtown city cores have very similar features, and as your mind seeks familiarity it can generate a powerful sense of having been there before.

Jamais vu is even odder. Because your brain gets clogged with the places you've been, and you're exposed to so many versions of the same streets and buildings, suddenly the familiar can seem strange and new, or dislocated in time and space. Combine the two and suddenly you feel as though you're simultaneously trembling on the verge of recognition and utter unfamiliarity.

Hah! What was that I said about forcing myself to stay awake? My neck is sore and there's a puddle of drool in the hollow of my collarbone, and there's only an hour left in the flight. It seems I fell asleep as I wrote that last paragraph. When I asked the flight attendant if I had been snoring, she said no, but the lady behind me let out a rather unladylike snort, so I know that I was probably sounding like a bandsaw trying to cut horseshoes. C'est la guerre.

Another thing that comes from visiting so many cities and places is the ability to watch a travel show or a news item about a specific place and announce, 'I've been there!' This would be a lot more impressive, I guess if I was announcing it about the pyramids, or the Eiffel Tower, but usually it's Barrie or Schenectady—lovely places of themselves, to be sure.

But after all of that, I still love travelling for my job. I get to see new people, meet folks who I've talked to for years, get to know them and their families see what they do with our wines and check out the communities they live in. It's excellent compensation for the hours and the road-bruises.

And I wouldn't change it for the world.

Updated

I was home for the weekend and now it's off to events in British Columbia. When (or perhaps if . . . gulp!) I recover my camera I'll post some pictures of my events in Minnesota and Wisconsin. I've enjoyed seeing my wife and petting my cat, who gave his usual response to my return: 'Oh, look: it's that man who comes here to do his laundry.'

The only thing better than travelling must be coming home.

It's that time of year again! After keeping it under my hat for almost a full year, I can now fully reveal the varieties of the Limited edition. Are you ready?

All right: It's going to be 3 reds and 2 whites.

Ha ha ha ha, that never gets old! Tune in in just over 90 minutes to get the real scoop, when Winexpert does a full announcement of the varieties, styles, regions, flavours and foods. See you then! 

Here it is! All the info on the new Limited Edition wines with tasting notes. Where do you get 'em? At you local Authorised Winexpert Retailer, of course. Remember, they're limited, so order early to make sure you get yours.

January - Washington Meritage

The Region: The Red Mountain AVA is Washington’s smallest, at approximately 3,600 acres. Grape growing conditions are almost textbook perfect: slope, exposure, weather conditions, good air drainage, large day/night temperature swings, gravelly soil with high calcium carbonate content and high pH and the nearby Yakima River to moderate temperature extremes—there could hardly be more positive flavour influences to grapes grown here.
The Wine: A blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Petite Verdot, this wine features great extract, deep colour and intense aromatics of dark berry fruit, cassis, peppery spice, cedar and smoke. The seductive nose of this wine foreshadows magnificent texture and flavour, including dark berries, liquorice, vanilla and warm brown spices that glide across the palate. The texture and mouthfeel of the wine offers up silky tannins and a velvety smooth structure.
The Food: Marinated & Grilled Flank Steak with Blue Café De Paris Butter.
Ageing: The complexity and structure of this wine will require three to six months to unwind, and it will continue improving for several years. Due to Due to the ripe tannins it will also benefit from decanting before serving.
Sweetness Code: 0 (dry)

January - South African Sauvignon Blanc-Semillon

The Region: Known as ‘Valley of Wine and Roses’, South Africa’s Robertson Valley has a very hot climate with minimal rainfall—less than a foot per year. Luckily the calcareous red clay loam and clay Karoo soils have excellent water holding capacity, and the gentle slopes and varied microclimates allow for precision planting to maximise grape quality.
The Wine: Sauvignon Blanc has wild, herbaceous flavours and tart, grapefruit-like character, which shows strongly in the young wine, while Sémillon has flavours of honeydew melon and sweet honey that take a bit longer to come out. Together the two grapes make a lush, balanced wine with great up-front fruit and a satisfying, rich finish.
The Food: Pan Roasted Digby Bay Scallop, Jewel Yam Purée, White Truffle Oil & Salsa Verdé.
Ageing: The citrus notes of the Sauvignon Blanc make this wine tempting to drink right away and after three months the Sémillon will rise up to give a mellower white wine. It will improve for at least a year, giving deeper flavours of melon and honey as it goes.
Sweetness Code: 0 (dry)

February - California Petite Sirah/Zinfandel(Limited Edition 2005)

The Region: Nestled in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Amador County is sometimes called ‘California’s Piedmont’. With vineyards running from 250 to 2900 feet in elevation, and summer temperatures ranging from 80 to over 100 degrees F, the excellent growing conditions have encouraged diversified plantings.
The Wine: Grippingly tannic, bold and deeply coloured Petite Sirah complements the jamminess of Zinfandel, taming the abundant blueberries and blackberries with a hint of dark cherry and vanilla. Full-bodied with a lingering palate and peppery spice, this is a wine of unprecedented power and length.
The Food: Apple Cider Brined Thick-Cut BBQ Pork Chops.
Ageing: This is a wine that shows best with ageing. After one year the blackberries will come out, and at two years will tame the tannin’s grip, showing the black pepper and rich dark fruits.
Sweetness Code: 0 (dry)

March - German Traminer Spätlese

The Region: Germany’s most famous growing region, the Mosel Valley, with its mineral-laden soils, produces some of the world’s finest off-dry wines. The sheer mountains and rugged steep slopes make the most of the northern sunshine, but they also mean that vineyard work must be done by hand, and yields are very low. This results in carefully crafted, very intensely flavoured wines.
The Wine: Traminer is the parent of the more familiar Gewürztraminer and Spätlese is a German wine term meaning ‘late harvest’, indicating a wine made from fully mature grapes that are picked at least 7 days after normal harvest, so they are riper and have higher sugar levels. This is a gently golden-coloured wine, unmistakable in its heady, aromatic intensity, with a pungent fragrance of lychee, tropical fruit and rose petals. Its flavours are ample, lusciously fruity and spicy.
The Food: Vanilla Bean Glazed Peach Cobbler
Ageing: The intense fruit character will be apparent immediately in this rich wine making it a tempting sipper right away, but the deeper floral characters of rose petal and lychee will become much more apparent after six months to a year.
Sweetness Code: 1 (off-dry)

April - Spanish Matador Trio Red

The Region: From the green damp north to the arid south, Spain is the country with the most land under vine in the world. Mancha is Europe’s largest denominated wine region and its hot, dry growing conditions yield intensely flavoured red grapes.
The Wine: Tempranillo are deep blue-black berries, high in colour and extract, with delicate aromas. Cabernet Sauvignon’s small berries yield high tannins and intense structure, while Monastrell adds grip, earthiness and ripe red fruit. Lush, tannic and complex, with intense black fruit flavours of black cherry, raspberry, black currant and notes of plums and tobacco, the wine takes gracefully to oak, adding layers of vanilla, cedar and rich coffee nuances.
The Food: Mediterranean White Bean Salad, Marinated with Garlic, Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Parmigiano-Reggiano& Fine Herbs.
Ageing: With soft acidity and lush tannins, this wine is enjoyed after only three to six months, but the black fruits, cherry and plum notes will take six months to show well, and the vanilla/coffee nuances will show best afterone year.
Sweetness Code: 0 (dry)

Here's me doing the introduction to this year's Limited Edition videos--if you'd like to see the rest of the presentation, have a look at our video website.

Bill and Janet Freeman have had a great Wine On Premise operation in Kingston for years, and they've been a very valued retailer for us. As part of our plans to extend our brand value (oh my, that sounds corporate-y!) we're partnering with some of our best retailers to set up model stores. These will have carefully planned and designed looks in terms of fixtures, decor, posters, layout and equipment, and we'll be working to make sure the experience our customers receive is the best in class at every branded store.

The place wasn't quite finished--the best laid plans of mice, men and trades subcontractors must give way to broken-down delivery trucks, but it's going to be spectacular--completely integrated design, beautiful layout and great decor. I can hardly wait to see the finished version.

A big part of the success of our new model store is the retail partners we've got.

Not only are Bill and Janet a couple of sharp folks, they've got a secret weapon in their corner. Mike knows his stuff and his customers love him dearly--he also really knows how to have fun, as he demonstrated when we hit the oyster bar. Oyster bar?

The spread they set up for the store opening was wonderful, with excellent canapes, tasty cheese, cases of oysters and delicous wines--all commercial wines, of course, given that it's never legal in Canada to give away consumer-produced wines. Pity.

Winexpert was well represented that night.

But it wasn't all oysters and Champagne. There was a draw for some spectacular prizes, a charity draw and a little bit of business.

I had a fine time, and really enjoyed hanging out with the Freeman's crew. It was a bit of a whirlwind, as I had to fly out the next morning, but I'd do it again in a heartbeat--be sure to drop in on them if you're in Kingston. You can tell 'em I sent you.

It's that time of year again! Your intrepid correspondent is off to Victoria (and typing this on a Ferry across the Strait of Georgia--how about that technology!) to cover the goings-on of BC's finest brewers along with a few invited attendees worthy of the exalted status of 'good brewers'.

You may have read previous blogs about the GCBF and my attempts at Gonzo photojournalism, and this year should be no different. If you want to follow the exploits of a motley, quasi-journalist on the road to beervana, look at my twitterfeed (@WinexpertTim) or my Facebook page (are you my friend yet? Why not? I love you!) or check this blog whenever I regain consciousness and get pictures (evidence!) posted.

If you're at the GCBF I'm the big one in the kilt with the hat that has a PRESS badge in the brim. Feel free to buy me beer!

I may have mentioned this before, but for those who don't know, I'm in charge of the Winexpert Retail store. I confess, that really means just I get the title, but it's actually my right-hand woman, Linda who runs things with the able assistance of Joanne and Shirley. I'm a lucky boss to have competent, hardworking folks like these out there making me look good.

The retail store is where all of Winexpert got started. Back in December of 1983, Doug and Ross Tocher opened up a wee homebrew shop called Brew King, a little ways up the valley from where we're now located. They worked hard and prospered and eventually decided to go into the manufacturing end of the business, producing and selling packaged juices and concentrates to other consumer winemaking shops in BC, and eventually spreading to the rest of Canada, the USA and now the world. From small acorns, mighty trees grow!

Unlike 99% of the consumer winemaking stores in BC, we don't offer ferment-on-premise services. All of our stuff is for the take-home trade, which is where the DIY meets the road. While I'm a big fan of the on-premise concept (not everyone loves the smell of fermenting grape juice, but most people love their own wine), I want to get my hands on the wine and wrangle it myself.

And so do a lot of other folks, although not quite as many as there were back in the mid-90's when things really took off. We don't see quite as many younger couples coming in as we did in the early days, which I think is a darn shame. During a recessionary time like the one we seem to be in right now, it makes sense to maximise your dollars, and making your own wine at home is a great way to have your cake (wine) and eat (drink) it too.

It's time somebody did something. So I am. This September, we're going absolutely bonkers with a sale. Check this out:

A few retailer-words: the bring a friend thingy applies to new customers, the Chai Maison buy one get one 50% off can't be combined with the White Zin offer, 10% off can't be combined with other offers, but yup, it's on every single thing in the store, and you'd be kooky not to take advantage of this! On the 17th I'll be manning the grill, making burgers and hot dogs for you and the kiddies (and for me, of course). It's a really fun time:

Come on down: this is one of my rare appearances where there's no agenda, so if you have winemaking questions or just want to shoot the breeze, I'd really enjoy chewing the fat with you--and I'm not just talking about my delicious burgers! Get a friend hooked, er started on winemaking and get $20 bucks for yourself (which can be combined with other offers), have a burger and we'll have a great sunny day.

Winexpert Retail: 1622 Kebet Way, Port Coquitlam. Just off the Mary Hill Bypass (turn at the light on Broadway) 604 464 1882

See you there!

It was lovely last weekend, the perfect day to have my mother out for a birthday dinner. I'm home pretty rarely, and the folks don't travel as well as they used to, so it's not often they get out to my place. I decided this would be a perfect time for a homey little crab boil. For those who haven't read my blog before, I did my first crab boil back in June. I've done one more since then, and figured it was about time for a third.

I'd have to say the meal was a success. The crabs were sweet and succulent, the spot prawns firm and juicy . . . aw heck, it was all good. Mom told me she had never eaten cracked crab before! I guess it was about time, then. Spot prawns were a first for both Mom and Dad as well, but they really liked them. Still, I was the only one who sucked the heads. Hepatopancreas isn't for everyone, I guess.

Funny enough, it was the most food I've ever seen my dad eat. Not that he doesn't have a good appetite, but he kept up with me, and I've got 120 pounds on him! Glad you enjoyed yourself, Pop.

We spent a lovely afternoon on the patio, watching the beach go by, shaded from a bright sunny day. Finally, it was time for cake.

She says it's the last time she's turning 39, and more power to her. Happy birthday Mom, many fine returns of the day.

I’ve had a month now to digest the wine bloggers conference, and to try to figure out what it really meant, after all the tasting, the schmoozing with suppliers, fawning over famous writers, observing authorities, and cocking a snook at critics. I’ve been struggling to find some sort of over-arching theme to what’s happening in a field where I’m supposed to have something cogent to say about wine, and a meta-commentary about what everybody else is saying about wine and how they’re saying it.

Previous conferences have had their share of controversy, which I worked very hard to encourage. The two most prominent tempests in a blogspot have been 1) the difference between the corrupt and co-opted old-order of wine critics versus the wet-behind-the-ears, no-credentialed jerk-off-the-street-and-easily-swayed blogging newbies, and 2) Whether or not the current international style of high-alcohol fruit bomb wines are delicious, or a sign that the world is about to end in fiery torment.

I wish it was simple enough to say that these contentious issues have blown over, and everybody is satisfied with the state of wine writing and the alcohol content of wine. They haven’t and they’re not. The truth is that neither of the issues got much air time. It seems that some kind of attention deficit has simply rubbed them off the agenda, with proponents for either side content to consider the lack of rancour as a sign that they’ve won or at least that the other side has finally quit talking nonsense.

You may wonder why I’m so concerned about this. On the question of who has the most (or least) integrity between the old and new my stake is low: I’m not a journalist, nor an ethicist, and I’ve rarely reviewed wine, in a blog about wine. On whether or not modern high-intervention/over-hung grapes winemaking stinks like a rotten trout in a sauna, I’ve made my opinion pretty clear in the past. However, for my own part I have a lot of influence over the style of the wine we make at Winexpert (not that I’m the winemaker—heaven forfend, I’m not qualified. It’s Susan and Nancy and their team that do the hard work, and do a great job of it).  For more than a decade I’ve steadfastly maintained my position that our our regular table wines need to be in the sub-14% alcohol range, so that’s 25 or 30 million bottles a year that conform to my vision for wines fit for human consumption.

Perhaps my desire to see a greater conflict rage or at least some kind of ongoing controversy about issues for wine consumers comes from a naïve vision of journalism, and the heroic place it can and should occupy in our world. Somewhere deep in my heart I want Upton Sinclair to rake some muck about wine, or Woodward and Bernstein to contact Deep Crush, or maybe best of all, Howard Beale to go crazy on camera and to shout, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!”

Instead, I see old-school publications that seem increasingly less relevant to normal people who drink wine, kowtowing to ridiculously expensive bottles and mailing in lukewarm PR bumf right out of the press package, and bloggers who think that their opinion is some kind of sacred pact between them and Bacchus, when really they couldn’t taste their way out of a paper bag with a rented tongue, showing off laughable writing and puerile opinions.

Worst are some of the newer publications that claim to be promoting wine to a more youthful segment. Never has there been a more cynical attempt to manipulate opinion—it’s a marketer’s feverish, shameful dream to reach the 18 to 34 market with a message about products, and in the wine business, hooking the kids early is seen as the path to success and riches. Worst are the self-consciously hip magazines which seem to mistake frenetic pacing, hipsterism, and general erratic writing (and behaviour) for coolness and relevance. Ninkasi save me from self-involved liberal arts majors writing about wine!

What I really want, is a Hunter S Thompson for wine writing.

Full disclosure: Thompson is my hero. To be sure, he’s not an uncontroversial choice. But what Thompson did was create a kind of journalistic integrity, wrapped up in an intensely personal, introspective milieu. Like Joseph Conrad, he went straight into the heart of darkness. Like Conrad’s protagonists, he sometimes went mad or went native, or simply went off the rails. But his madness was never gratuitous, however horrifying or transgressive his behaviour. He was mad because it was the only way to make sense of the world he was immersed in. ‘When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro’, was the motto of perhaps the most professional weirdo going.

And Thompson never flinched. Staring corruption in the face, he bet on football with it. Confronting bad faith and evil motives, he sat in a bar and drank Singapore slings with them. He baited the most powerful man in the free world, questioned the integrity, motives and abilities of the holders of the highest office in the land, and the wisdom of some of the most beloved traditions and events in American history.

And all the while he kept his typewriter firmly planted on the main nerve, telling a compelling story about what was really going on.

I’m not a Thompson scholar. Heck, I’ve only read a couple of the biographies out there, and the volumes of his letters and papers, so I’m not speaking ex-cathedra on the man. I’m speaking about how his writing affected me, and how aware I was at all times that he was trying to tell me something important, something relevant, something nobody else would cover, or talk about—or even understand if they did cover it.

Is there an equal to Thompson out there? Nearly every writer who’s ever put ink to paper can tell you, it’s jolly good fun to write a Gonzo pastiche, and some people have even taken a piece of his technique and done him one better, by immersing themselves inside their reporting while maintaining greater levels of focus on the subject (I’m thinking of David Foster Wallace: A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again is pure Thompson, burned clean of any dross by the refiner’s fire of Wallace‘s intellect.) But none of these folks are writing a column or blogging about wine.

But somebody should do it. Somebody should be turning over rocks, pointing to the blind, wriggling things underneath and shouting to the world about what they see, good, bad or simply weird.

It’s not going to be me. First, I’ll never be that good a writer. I’m a purblind hack, muttering over his inkwell, using too many commas and straining metaphors like a fork in an underwear drawer. Second, this is not that kind of blog. As a representative of a responsible corporate citizen, it’s not the done thing, let me tell you.

But, I can do my little part. I have rarely reviewed wine on this blog. Once in a while I round up the empties under the sink and shuffle my tasting notes into a ‘Weekly Wined Up’, but I have made it a policy to never review wines I didn’t like. When they were bad, I poured ‘em out and never spoke their names.

From now on, I’m going to show a little more spine. I taste plenty of terrible wine. In fact, one of the most frequent pieces of advice I give in tasting seminars is to go ahead and taste wines you don’t think you’ll like. You don’t have to drink them, but tasting them, and quantifying exactly why you don’t like them, is a tremendous aid to developing your palate and finding out what really blows your skirt up in good wine. I have been disingenuous in not sharing my opinions on bad wine I’ve tasted alongside good, and that makes me as culpable and worthless as any wine blogger or critic I could name. So I have to change, or I don't have the right to complain any longer.

In the spirit of integrity and full disclosure, I have to say upfront that I’m probably never going to review any wines made by my parent corporation here. First, how could you trust me? My paycheque, very important to me, comes from head office, and even though we produce a fine range of excellent wines, winners of awards and medals in international competitions, served in the finest restaurants around the world, in styles and price ranges to suit all palates and pocketbooks, available at fine beverage stores everywhere (be sure to pick some up today), it wouldn’t be appropriate to tout them in this blog.

There’s the chance that some of the wines I’ll review will be in direct competition with ours in the commercial marketplace. I’ll try to avoid those—the Canadian market is pretty cosy and we all know each other, and eviscerating a competitor would be as wrong as talking up the excellent quality and great pricing of our wines (go buy some). If there's a conflict, I'll mention it. But that leaves an enormous number of lousy wines made with bad motives for me to comment on.

This could be kind of fun. Now, where’s my rotten attorney? It's time to go to the liquor store and straight into frantic oblivion . . .

Oh, I almost forget: high-alcohol wines still suck.

Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.

Well, perhaps it's not that bad. I've still got Monday off (to compensate for the BC Day holiday that occurred while I was on vacation. Yes, I've been lolly-gagging for two solid weeks, and the only thinking about wine that I did was to consider which bottle to open with lunch, and which one to open with dinner.

Where did I go? In the parlance of our times, I took a 'staycation'. Not really because of economic necessity, but because I really love staying home. Regular blog readers will recall that I live on a beach, and lead a scandalously hedonic lifestyle when I can get away with it.

Besides, we had just come back from a few days in Washington DC, visiting monuments and national historical sites and museums. Enough of the travel and theu hurly-burly of travel and airports. I was perfectly in the mood for some down-time. After all, there was plenty to do. Both of the gardens needed tending

The vegetable garden was producing, albeit a little slowly compared to other years. We had a cold, late spring and we were away just as it started to warm up.

There were indignant cats to placate

And some that needed encouragement to think outside the box

And, as is our custom this time of year, we spent an evening watching the Perseid's meteor shower, floating in the hot tub. The seeing this year was okay, but we had to deal with a very bright full moon

Even without the interference of a bright moon I don't have enough camera skills to capture falling stars--for those of you who missed the shower entirely, check it out here.

We also went to check out a recent arrival at the beach.

The Wildlife Branch says that marmots are not native to this area, but then again, neither am I. Cute little rodent, and while it's not tame, it's not worried at all about human beings. Still, nothing like seeing a six-pound rat strolling along beside you on your constitutional.

It's back to the office at the crack of business hours on Tuesday. I had a brief look at my inbox, and if you're waiting for an email from me, I'll do my best to fit you in before I hie off to Ontario for a sales meeting. Tanned, rested and ready, that's me.

America has a secret source of wealth that many people don't think of as riches. It's in her museums and galleries and monuments. Some of the most momentous events of the last thousand years are memorialised here in Washington DC, some of the most impressive examples of the natural world are on exhibit and explained, and some of the most beautiful sculptures and paintings are right here, where anyone with the eyes to see and the soul to appreciate can simply walk up and look at them--and walk away in wonder.

Visiting the Lincoln Memorial was something I was very eager to do, and it was especially meaningful because my wife was with me. Some of her ancestors were slaves, and between visiting Monticello and viewing the slave quarters there, and seeing the devotion to the memory of Lincoln, we were both powerfully affected. It's not something I would have missed for the world.

We also spent time in several of the Smithsonian museums.

The Museum of Natural History was magnificent. It's great to see science presented so clearly, rationally and calmly. There's a conservative movement in the US to 'teach the controversy', which is to say it's an attempt to replace science with faith inside the educational system here. This is not in evidence anywhere in the Smithsonian, and it made me feel a strangely warm sense of pride in the scientists and educators who worked to make all of the wonderful exhibits.

But for me the best was the Museum of Art.

I confess: I'm an art geek. Ever since Mr. Bugler showed me the beauty and magnificence of the art of Western Civilisation (thank-you, Sir Kenneth Clarke) I have been mesmerised by painting, sculpture and poetry. My whole life I've been looking at art books and prints of some of the most famous artworks in human history, and yesterday I got to look at them, to just stand in front of a Rubens, a Hals, a Brueghel . . . they're more magnificent than I could have imagined, with life and movement in every brush stroke. Rubens famous self-portrait hung as though he were standing at a window, his reserved look seeking my gaze as I moved around the room . . . I was very powerfully affected, and I'm glad to have seen it.

And I can't wait to come back some day.

I'm taking a day off to have a look around Washington DC. It's taking longer than I thought because of all the impasses and mires around here. Just kidding--I know the politicians are all working hard to make sure . . . whatever it is they want to make sure of.

I'll finish up my blogging about the Wine Bloggers conference on the weekend, because I can't let my wife catch me working while we're technically taking a day off. Yesterday we visited the Smithsonian Natural History and Aerospace museums (I was awed and delighted: what a wonderful thing, free museums that are among the best in the world) and today we're going down to the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol Building and that Smithsonian Art museum. That will take about eight hours or so, and then it's time to pack and collapse in a heap to go home to catch up on kitties and work. 

If you've never been to DC, it's an amazing place. I've leared more in the last day about America than I have in a year in history class. I'm very anxious to visit Lincoln and to see the other memorials.

Onward!

Day Two of WBC starts with a wrap-up of day one. After speed blogging and a general flopping onto my face for a nap, it was time to go out to Monticello, the original house of Thomas Jefferson, author of the US constitution and general amazing dude. Monticello itself is a five minute drive away from downtown Charlottesville and very much worth the visit. It's a gorgeous property and a very stately house--not only a national heritage site, but also the only home in America to be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

To my everlasting delight, I was seated on the bus next to one of my heroes, Jancis Robinson. Yes, Jancis Robinson, creator of the first television documentary on wine, editor of the Oxford Companion to Wine, writer, first person outside the commercial wine trade to become a Master of Wine, et cetera. Turns out she's not just your classic Oxford educated wine genius, she's also very gracious and generous towards great sweaty fanboys who get tongue-tied in her presence. I'd like to think my status as a contributor to the Oxford impressed her, but I think she's just generally a genial person.

Then we deboarded the bus and walked out onto the grounds of Monticello, and into a hellish blast of heat. And not a dry heat either: with the calculated heat index it was hot enough to render human fat, so I was in real trouble. Fortunately I stayed re-hydrated with plenty of water, and the occasional glass of wine.

Even though there were fans and a tent to keep the sun off, it was nearly too hot to drink--words I thought I'd never say. Fortunately I mustered a thirst and tasted some very good wines. Virginia seems to be specialising in aromatic whites, including a preponderance of Viogniers. The styles ranged from rather hot, cooked fruit versions to amazingly crisp, zesty iterations (guess which kind I like) and the majority were excellent. I also had the opportunity to taste a number of Nortons. It's a strange grape, with an interesting history--the kind of story of intrigue, heartbreak, twists and skullduggery that you just couldn't make up if you tried. The best one of the night was definitely Chrysalis Vineyards Norton. It was the new vintage, blended by a fresh winemaker who really knows his stuff. It was definitely its own grape, but unlike a lot of hybrid or native grapes, it didn't need a 'but' after any description of it. Amazing stuff.

Along with the tasting came some lovely comestibles--grits with shrimp, crab cakes, fried green tomatoes, some really great slaw, whole roasted tenderloin sliced and served with blue cheese horseradish cream and pork belly sliders, made from Polyface farms hogs. Excellently good, and I was pleased to eat something from a fully sustainable, local source.

After dinner it was time for a stroll around the grounds of Monticello.

After that it was back to the bus and off to the hotel for a quick nap before 'The Other 46' tasting. It was a little sparsely attended, but that's to be expected, given the incidence of heat stroke and booze-exhaustion on the part of most of the bloggers. I had a great time hanging out with some of the wine folks afterwards, including my pal Todd Trzaskos, from Vermont Wine Media. Todd is a mensch, carrying the load for wine promotion in Vermont and spreading the lvoe all around. He was also the kind purveyor of some excellent Vermont beers that night. You can only drink so much wine before you need a palate-cleansing beer! Cheers, Todd--you're a life-saver and very generous with your time and beer.

After an undetermined amount of time, I retired for the evening, and collapsed in a heap. The heat here does not leave much energy for movement or extaneous work. Fortunately, I was all rested up for another big day . . .

I`m very glad I got a good night`s sleep: it`s been a whirlwind morning so far. I got checked in, grabbed a glass and hit the trade-show floor, where I immediately met dozens of bloggers I know--great to see them all again!

You could really see that a lot of folks weren't just soaking up free wine, but were thinking critically about what was being poured.

A word of explanation about my sartorial choices: I`m wearing my kilt down here in Virginia. It`s over 35C (100F) and the humidity is off the charts. Without a strategy to keep cool, I wouldn't actually melt: I`d probably render, leaving a greasy stain on the hotel carpet. I've mentioned in previous blogs that I only wear pants when I`m working, the rest of the time it`s a kilt. I`m just far enough off the reservation today that I`m comfortable sans bifurcation, but it does generate a certain amount of comment and notice--the reason why I don`t normally wear it to business events: it`s distracting. So so I've got a few picture requests from folks who mostly seem to approve.

Ahem.

After the trade-show circuit I got my computer and my accessories and got a seat early for the keynote address. It was done by a hero of mine, the fabulous Jancis Robinson, editor of the Oxford Companion to Wine. I may not have mentioned today that I am a contributor to the Oxford--did I mention that I`m a contributor, with my name in it and everything?

She made a lot of really good points about relevancy, message and had some sharp commentary about the level of originality and the depth of investigative journalism in wine blogs. I don`t know if I agree with the idea that it`s the job of bloggers to be muckrakers or digital Upton Sinclairs--I think it would only be possible to do that if one were independently wealthy, because the minute a blogger started goring established oxen they`d lose any access they ever had, and would have to fend off irritated wine marketers forever more.

Jancis wrapped up to some great questions and well-deserved applause--lovely to hear her speak in person.

Now I`m in the seminar on marketing to millennial consumers. Time to learn!