Eager to prove

Well, if nothing else, I feel as if I have a new secret. And I do! I wonder how long I will be able to keep it. I have a weakness for weaknesses, you see. There was a time when I would write and re-write my posts, crafting them into whatever disaster that I could not muster the strength to prevent. Though now I do not read them a second time, and it shows. When I do go back and look at them they are riddled with typos and poor sentences, half wrought thoughts, too many commas. Never enough ideas and wit. What am I to do?

I spend the hours of the day working now. I took on a new role at work and there is much to learn, much to do. It is both vivifying and tedious. I do not yet know how to present myself. That uncertainty both tickles and mortifies me. I am eager to prove my worth but currently don't possess very much of it with which to prove anything. It is all in the doing. 

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I am Bruce Wayne

In just slightly less than one month it will be ten years since I have written here. I have come back to hide, in a sense. Nobody reads here any more, so I am anonymous, at least in that way. I shut my other site down. I began to hate too many things about it - my persona, the persona of all others, etc. Hatred is not something that should be endured or entertained. I am trying to release mine back into the nothingness from where it seems to have emerged. 

You should be able to detect if I succeed. It's all embedded in the tone. Well, perhaps not all of it. Like the Batman, I have complicated feelings about "family" also. I would say that I share them, but who would ever share such a thing?

 

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Primitivo Di Manduria, Epicuro, Red Wine

I am becoming what many warned me that I might, a wine snob.  I just poured two bottles of wine out as undrinkable.  I tried letting the first one "breath" by pouring it into a decanter, but it was beyond saving.  The second one still sits on the kitchen counter.  I haven't decided if I'm going to torture it before pouring it down the drain.

Trader Joe's is not a place to ever buy wine unless you know exactly what you're getting.  Several of the wines there taste like grape juice mixed with generous portions of vinegar and cheap gin.  The stuff that used to make people go blind.

Now there is only one bottle of wine left but I don't have much faith in it.  It might be drinkable if I was already very drunk and had no concern or consideration for myself any longer, but that's not the case.  The day is young and I want a wine that tastes accordingly.

It is shameful that a grocery store has better wines and better selection than Trader Joe's wine shop.  It will be some time before I forgive them, if at all.

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Caretaker Pinot Noir, 2009

The experts say that Hemingway very likely did not ever say, "Write drunk, edit later," even in jest towards another.  He famously wrote and revised in the mornings and did not drunk until after he was done writing for the day. I have a book of Hemingway quotations, his wisdom concerning the act of writing. When I unbox my books I'll search and see if I can find a source for it.  Perhaps this time the experts are wrong and the internet is right.

The wine above was purchased at Trader Joe's.  I have tried to be a fan of the Trader Joe wine store but it is a very patchy collection offered there.  The wines either seem to be remarkably drinkable at $7 a bottle, or indigestible grape flavored Smirnoff at $10 a bottle.

But I can almost respect a grocery store that's willing to commit to bold lies.

.

Robert Mondavi, Pinot Noir 2008

I have reviewed this wine once before, sort of.  Instead of writing about the wine I wrote about my reactions to the flat mockumentary, "Mondovino."  I have more to say on that subject but tonight I will write about the wine, alone.

Wine and wine culture are impossibly pretentious.  It really brings out the secret snob in many. The overt wine snob is beyond consideration, unworthy of print.

I have tried to write about my wine experiences here, but it is difficult.  Drinking wine and writing do not always produce readable results.  A friend sent me a quote from Hemingway today.  I will have to do some research and see if he actually said it, or more properly, wrote it.

The internet eagerly says so, but we know about trusting that correctionless sphere of www. error perpetuity.

The quote came across as, "Write drunk; edit sober."  I did a search and also found, "Write drunk, revise sober." which sounds more like Hemingway, but I am not the expert.  We will ask one of them and then we will see.

In the morning we will all be wiser.


Ok, I had truly hoped to write a post for this site tonight, it's been more than a month now.  But it was not meant to be.  There are other forces at work.

Greater forces, further even than the demonic Mondavi.

To them I now retire.


The sleep of seizure produces, haunts her. - Go'ye

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Dashwood, Pinot Noir, 2009

splash

the illusion is that you are simply
reading this poem.
the reality is that this is
more than a
poem.
this is a beggar's knife.
this is a tulip.
this is a soldier marching
through Madrid.
this is you on your
death bed.
this is Li Po laughing
underground.
this is not a god-damned
poem.
this is a horse asleep.
a butterfly in
your brain.
this is the devil's
circus.
you are not reading this
on a page.
the page is reading
you.
feel it?
it's like a cobra. it's a hungry eagle circling the room.

this is not a poem. poems are dull,
they make you sleep.

these words force you
to a new
madness.

you have been blessed, you have been pushed into a
blinding area of
light.

the elephant dreams
with you
now.
the curve of space
bends and
laughs.

you can die now.
you can die now as
people were meant to
die:
great,
victorious,
hearing the music,
being the music,
roaring,
roaring,
roaring.

Charles Bukowski






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Sebastiani, Cabernet Sauvignon 2008

Life is hard.
I offer few answers, tonight... none.

Each step is an ever-increasing stride into the backward maelstrom of eventual regret and sudden disbelief.

Or, is it only a backward winding stairway to the heavens.


As I said, I don't have it all figured out...


I seek only truth, and not especially your version of it.



The best way to tell who really loves you is to love them.

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Firefly Ridge, Cabernet Sauvignon 2009

I read an interesting article about taste recently, here it is.  It doesn't say much new, but it is worth the quick read.  It posits that music affects how we feel about the wine we drink, how it affects our "taste."

It would be great if a great album would make average wines taste much better.  Perhaps they do. The sense of smell still controls the tongue, however.  It is true, of course. There is no sense in drinking nice wine when you are congested, though some might say that one shouldn't be drinking at all when sick. But it is truly a waste to do so when you can not smell the richness of the wine.

So tonight I am drinking a cheap bottle of Cabernet.  It is passable at best. I enjoyed the wine from last night much more, for the same price.

Well, speaking of the things one is not supposed to do... I have eaten a Vicodin because I am in pain.  It is somewhat preventative when it comes to writing.  I will go now and watch Ugetsu.

My readership has fallen somewhat dramatically since I've started writing this wine blog.  Perhaps I will start a foreign-language film-blog and cut my reader-base in half again.

Soon I will be back to just writing emails.
C'est la vine....

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Robert Mondavi, Pinot Noir 2010, Private Selection

At $6 a bottle I'm not sure what qualifies this as being from the "private" selection, unless you consider a grocery store a place where private transactions occur.  But the wine is okay.  Ok?

It does not have the depth or richness of the 2008 Pinot that I reviewed previously, but it is neither arrogant nor misguided. If this wine gets its own domain-name one day it might really compete with Google Sauvignon. But right now it's conducting itself in much the same way that a teenage runaway does... overstatement and hyperbole, gross exaggeration of fact, of experience.  I should know, I ran away from home many years before they finally kicked me out.

I was thinking... so many things can be ripped unseen from the hands of industry... so much media, so much content, can be just lifted from the aether.  Why not wine?

I want to remodel an internet in which great bottles of wine might be torrential.


No, scratch that.

I have an even better idea...

Fight for a greater depth of information, a semblance of the analog, a whisper of the whimsy.

Let's rob the blanks, empty the drawers, sniff the panties of eternity.
Let's grab the cash, let's hitchhike askance, take pictures of far consequence.
Let's fear neither rock nor roll, less dance, let us stance.

.

Viansa, Arneis 2010

White wine is nice.  I don't know why I don't drink it more often.  It is pleasant and refreshing.  Also, one need not drink an entire bottle of it in a single sitting.  It will hold for many days afterwards in the refrigerator.  I might have to shift my focus towards some whites. White power, etc.

I've been told that I can also let many reds sit opened, though re-corked, in the bottle for a day. It can actually improve the taste of certain wines, it's been said.  I have an unwritten policy that I will finish any bottle of red that I've opened, and as quickly as possible.  A dangerous and willful policy, I know.  But what can one do, really?

I'm certain that this bottle was a cheap bottle.  It was a gift from an SFPD cop.  Nope, I just looked it up.  It's about $20...  No ordinary cop, I guess.  He must be getting kickbacks. I should have his rotten ass thrown in prison. But what can one do, really?  He used to work undercover in the bathhouses in SF, he would probably squeeze right into prison life.

Ok, buy this wine.  I recommend it...

Never spend more than $25 on a bottle of white wine, until directed otherwise.

.

Gustave Lorentz, Pinot Noir 2008

This wine reminds me of being an altar boy, stealing wine from the priest's closet, just to loosen up a bit for the Sunday performance, etc.

I forget how much this bottle of wine costs, but it was about $2000, maybe a little less.  A little pricey, for my tastes; just a poor altar boy from the outback, patentless, patient, educated by Jedi's.

But it is the type Pinot I enjoy, as if it is from another time, and I don't mean 2008, I mean from my childhood.  It tastes like the wine I used to sneak/steal from my friends parent's houses, though in all honesty that was probably only Me, and Ernest and Julio, down by the schoolyard.  Who knows, it was perhaps a 2 liter plastic "bottle" of wine cooler, and not even wine at all; some vile carbonated soda with alcohol mechanically swirled into it, for sales.

Wait, it was Bartles and Jaymes, I remember now, it is all coming back to me, like a court testimonial.


I once took a bet.  The year must have been 1984.  The bet was that I would drink a 2 liter bottle of wine-cooler in less than 10 minutes.

I did.


It took much less time to forever purge my body of the vile liquid.  It happened towards the rear of the Ponderosa steakhouse parking lot on S.R. 436, in Altamonte Springs, for those interested in checking the facts....

There were many witnesses, though none reliable, other than your faithful wine critic, of course.

.

Bourgogne, Pinot Noir 2006

I have made it out of Sonoma Valley, once again.  There is a wine shop here that specializes in wines from other areas.  I believe I've mentioned it before, the Valley Wine Shack.  I go there when I want to develop a comparative basis for my tastes, to become more international, continental, etc.


Recently I was accused of being impoverished because I didn't share the tastes of another.  It was strange.  I won't bore you with all of the details but the essence of it was that a woman thought that a model that my friend had photographed was beautiful.  I found the image to be beautiful but not the model.  I found her to be oddly proportioned, positioned, which she was.  I went on to explain that in all beauty there is some strangeness of proportion (I believe it was Bacon who uttered this sentiment, though I am not sure).  This elicited the reply that if I could not see beauty in this model then I am suffering from a form of poverty, she then went on to bolster support for her forcefully demanding aesthetics with the contention that she would have sex with the model before she would with "any young little chicken, for sure!"

Oh, fuck it... here is the whole dialogue, for anybody interested.  It can be found in the comments section.  I suppose that I will bore you with all of the details....


I started thinking about the idea that in all beauty there is some strangeness in proportion, and why this is not as true with wine, perhaps not at all.  Do we seek strangeness of proportion in wine?  Mostly not. We seek balanced flavors, not extremes.  Hints are preferable to arguments.  Partially because we are ingesting it to enjoy, not to be challenged by it, to tussle with its many oblique wonders.

Wine is only external for a few moments, mostly it is enjoyed internally, or during the brief interval of transition on the palate.  Once on the inside it can conduct the most hideous felonious disgraces and we mainly forgive it, re-seek its friendship. We damn only ourselves for its cascading misdemeanors and lingering loss of balance.

Enjoy.

.

LaRochelle, Pinot Noir 2008

This wine sucks, at almost any price.  It's my birthday and I went to the wine store and chose one that I've looked at many times, and have wanted a few times in the past, but passed it over for other wines, for whatever reason.  I was sucked in by the clean design lines of the label.

It is far too acidic and leaves a bad taste in the mouth.  It lacks the pleasurable complexities of other wines in the same price range and from the same region.

What really pisses me off is that it was very close to the price of the Frei Brothers wine posted earlier.

(brb)....

Ok, problem solved. I just went to the wine store and bought a bottle of the Frei Brothers Pinot, shown below.  Same image from earlier, different bottle.

Ok, I'm being cheap with the images, here is a different image, a more expensive one:

I love this wine.  It is delicious and open and has much to taste.  

It is a metaphor for what the wine drinking experience should be.

.

Frei Brothers, Pinot Noir 2007

I must be honest, I drank this wine weeks ago.  I have lost some of my fervor for writing about wines.  I kept the picture up on my web browser, occasionally looking at it, hoping to guilt myself into writing about it.  I felt bad for not writing as I really liked the wine.

I am drinking a different bottle (LaRochelle) now, and one that I don't care for nearly as much. Perhaps it only needs to open.  I was brought under the spell of design, I liked the label.  You will see it in my next post, which might be in just a couple of minutes if I decide that I REALLY don't like this one.

Yes, I used all capital letters for emphasis, such is the strength of my feelings on the matter.

I strongly suggest this Frei Brothers Pinot. I believe it was around $18 and worth every hard-earned dollar.

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Sebastiani, Pinot Noir 2009

Ok, more poetry....
 to describe my very brotherly feelings about wine

Is there any other time, Welles,
or any way?
anyhow.
ok.
que?

-Qrson.



In fact, tonight I might do an interpretive jazz dance to reflect my innards, feeling.


In a previous life, about 4 years ago, there used to be this semi-annoying kid that was vaguely dismissive about anything that he hadn't done himself.  He was a self-proclaimed avant-garde dance enthusiast, or so he claimed.... in utter unhypnotic hipster denialism.

Hold on, let me see if I can find his digitally preserved moment of public obscurity:
Well, here it is, sort of....

The video doesn't seem to want to play for me, but the comment: "I get it...the "art" isn't what's on the stage, but the anger that it causes in me. And the strong urge I have to slap that tubby bitch in the face."  

This insightfully accurate comment serves the purpose of my point perhaps better than I ever could.

One morning I wrote freely on an open community chalkboard: "Avant-garde dance is neither."

I liked the circularity of the statement, almost solipsistic, but in open opposition rather than in the usually self-serving way, yet entirely self-serving in its humor.

The sentiment reigned.

Avant-garde wine is also, either.

Well, the wine above has nothing at all to do with what I am writing about.  What I am writing about has very little to do with what I am writing about.

Tomorrow I will write about another bottle,
to not do so would be un-animatedly inauthentic, as conceptual dance.

.

"It's a Head Snapper", Pinot Noir, 2009

I didn't want to sleep.  I do not want to sleep tonight.  

I have an October Hare running clumsyjack inside of me, 

Lepus as a Hatter, sadder made, never mad..... 

some few people I know I get stricken,

the marble-touched bounce in Spring, 

some fall, some wicked.       

hardly stepping; 

all.ways: always calling.

picked. chosen. 

Tonight I am catholic half-kidding, 

half-falling, along the awful augur of Autumn,

soon frozen. 

I opened a split-second, stalling, another bottle of wine; after some minor deliberation, a sudden frenzy of impatience. . .  the seconds passed, wine barely lasts, and even less does time. 

with time, we are all in, and usually dozing.

I decided to back-up my computer and then update the system software, a menial task; something I strongly advise the dangerous to do,... while drinking, heavily and slow. 

through n' through.

I work at a bar,  iShould know.

and u shud 2 

So often I have problems; though I have not had difficulty in some time sleeping.  

Night falls here in this valley with a deadening unheard chime, and away we go breasily... 

slumbering along with the timber-ghost of London, tumbling away, tussling, 

with endless Chinese echoes in the night, a handful of racist ghosts in flight.

It is true, that all moral judgments of the past are strictly and currently right.... 

But, c'mon London.... you great white trIpe.... 

your tightness impaired you far too young, 

genius or none, pedestaled or hung, 

or perhaps your westward hype has been re-sung, 

by dung, by night.

"To Establish an Inferno lite...." by Jack-Ass, 

(not a donkey, not a mule, mostly horse, of course...)

#ftards

#nowords

#slite

Otherwards....

These days have emboldened us all to tempt the stars, to challenge the clouds, 

the celestial clocks, ever ticking inwards....

... just tonight have I sat in this living room, 

at some dull computer, in silence, 

yet heard the distant doppler of automobiles both distant and in distance, 

and motor-heart cheered., set thusly 

See,thingly.

I've followed the red shifts above, 

the antithetical unknown voice inarticulate, 

the ever-fading of going, 

cars never slowing, 

towing along my failing ears, 

glowing with the steering stars. 

failed years.

Again, once only

I want the sound of cars to be triumphant, 

as it was when Bruce Springsteen was here, 

dear, lonely, Boss,

It is midnight time for the Bosses to fuck off.

If not, 

then I guess 

we'll just accept 

the sleepiness 

of the 

Occupy kids...

tossing off.

getting teared,

both here and thear'd

fueled,

we slog on

for two plates of

macaroni 

and some 

stale bologna.

the mind knows mostly shit.

minds don't occupy, minds inhabit.

inhabit it....

git it?

.

Rex-Goliath, Pinot Noir

Again no vintage printed on the label.  I suppose when you're naming your wine after an infamous 47 pound cock you really don't have to provide much more information. The Gallus gallus  was apparently a circus attraction near the turn of the century.  This fowl behemoth apparently drew them in from far and wide.  I imagine a 47 pound cock would really scare the kids, perhaps even mom... money well spent. One wonders if they ever let the thing get drunk and run through town late at night.

His sobriquet was His Royal Majesty.... the label on the neck of the bottle reads "Lush and Velvety"

Indeed.  The bottle is no thicker than any others were on the shelf, perhaps this Giant 47 is made up of only legend and whispers.....


Enough about cocks, royal or otherwise.
We all have work to do around here.

.

pro-mis-Q-ous

This wine was $10, and that's exactly what it tastes like.  They didn't even bother putting the vintage year on it, meaning it was likely made from the harvest of a few different years.  It's the type bottle of wine that is cute to bring to a dinner party and slip in with all of the nicer wines, hoping that nobody will notice, or if they do, only that they'll think the label is cute, or provocative, fuck-worthy.

I suppose you can't blame them.  I mean, it is clearly advertised as only being "california red table wine" and that's exactly what it is, though not bad by that standard alone, table wine.

To be perfectly honest this is what I was referencing in my last post.  That I am fast becoming an ignorant wine snob.  I very well might have thought that this wine was vaguely wonderful a few years ago.  My taste for wine has increased in the last few years and I can feel the sense of savor suddenly raising its expectations of self, since Sonoma... alliterally....

I don't mind.  I could use some change in my tastes, even if they are for the worst, and semi-permanent..... It is called preference promiscuity, intercourse inclination, a danger dive.

It is also called other things, based on chance circumstance, the accidental dance, drunken wine rants.

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Francis Coppola Pinot Noir 2009

I am on the precipice* of snobbery,  I've been practicing my exaggerated sighs, etc.  It's becoming increasingly difficult to enjoy cheap wines.  I try to keep the price of the wines I'm buying under $20, and that is usually easy to do, while still getting some very good wines, but if I go below $10 I often suffer.  I used to be able to find, and enjoy, many wines for right around the $10 range.

People warned me that this might happen and it is to be fought.  It is difficult to regain simple joys.  I know.

I've had this ubiquitous Pinot before, many times.  A good friend back in New York stock-piled the stuff and I would come over to his loft and drink his wine whenever he would let me.  It is a good and easy wine to agree with, not great, but very drinkable and consistent.

I rushed the picture of it... I used a flash.... something I rarely do.  It was getting dark when I got home and I couldn't seem to get a stable shot of it.  So be it.

Because the second "P" is washed out from the flash it looks like "COP OLA"... I was going to write about the entire thing as if it were cop wine, a Pinot made especially for cops, but I got bored with idea before I even started.


* I considered using the word "verge" but it didn't seem good enough for the new snobbery, me.

.

Dashwood Pinot Noir 2009

Ok, I've learned my lesson.  

Readers Against Writing Drunk contacted me.  R.A.W.D. has spoken....

I will try harder next time, or softer. whatever.  But no more 

There was a Pinot from New Zealand (Villa Maria) recommended to me from a good friend. I wasn't able to find it but I was able to find this Pinot from the same region, Marlborough. So here goes....

I like it.  

We drove around today enjoying the country.  Here is a pic to give you an idea.

Yes, it is a beautiful place to live. This is the view from the Arrowhead tasting room. I preferred their wines to those of St. Francis, the tasting room we visited just before this one.  It was a decidedly Catholic experience, St. Francis. 

He is a hard imaginary saint to hate, but I'll give it my Catholic best.