Big House Red 2003

The Big House Red
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It's been a while since I did any wine blogging, so let me try and catch up. Last week's wine was Big House Red, from Bonny Doon Vinyards.

There is a scene in an episode of Frasier where Niles ends up in some dive of a restaurant and tries to order wine, finally falling down to simply saying, "I'll have a glass of your... red." This is that wine.

Despite all the hype of the website ("a potent blast of raspberries and licorice" my left gnard), this is simply a red dinner wine. As such go, it's quite good, but it is neither terribly complicated or parkerise. A good accompaniment to savory dinners such as steak or marinara pasta, and a good dinner wine as opposed to a party wine.

Fat Bastard 2003

Fat Bastard 2003
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The French have a new word: parkerise, which means loosely "something the Americans would like." Or, to be more specific, something one American man likes, that man being Robert Parker, the wine taster and judge for The Wine Advocate. For twenty years, Parker has been judging wines and awarding them an arbitrary score on a 100-point chart. At first, his scores corresponded to wines that sold well in America; now, they drive those same buying patterns. Parker likes wines that are full, have lots of fruity flavors, tend to have a powerful but pleasant smell, have a touch of complexity but are not too challenging, and are just as good, if not better, standing alone as they are with a meal.

So I was somewhat surprised when I saw this week's wine, Fat Bastard Shiraz 2003, which was made from picked harvests of grapes grown in different vinyards in France. Shiraz is generally the province of the Australians and the American West; the French do not generally indulge in this extravagent kind of cheap, parkerise wine, although there must be somewhere in France where the Shiraz variety of grape is grown. But French wines are generally very territorial: the idea that a wine is made by a vitner not directly associated with the farmer is considered anathema to most French producers.

And so it is with Fat Bastard Shiraz. It doesn't taste like a Shiraz. It tastes more like an ordinary, if somewhat better than average, variety of dinner red. Like the last wine I reviewed, its pleasant astringency ends a meal much better than it starts, which only emphasizes its role at the dinner table rather than in front of the fireplace. It has little nose to speak of. It leaves no aftertaste, but fades away almost instantly leaving none of the oak or shiraz complexity that I favor in other wines.

I picked it up because the label amused me. It will get finished over the course of the week, but I probably will be moving on to other wines. Still, if you're politically motivated by such things, do note that Fat Bastard gives 5% of their profits to breast cancer research, so maybe you have a reason to try it out anyway.

The Nazgul in the Senate.

Jim Henley proposes that for now on, the nine Senators who voted against John McCain's anti-torture legislation be known as The Nazgul.

They are:

• Sen. Wayne Allard [R-Colorado]
• Sen. Kit Bond [R-Missouri]
• Sen. Tom Coburn [R-Oklahoma]
• Sen. Thad Cochran [R-Mississippi]
• Sen. John Cornyn [R-Texas]
• Sen. James Inhofe [R-Oklahoma]
• Sen. Pat Roberts [R-Kansas]
• Sen. Jeff Sessions [R-Alabama]
• Sen. Ted Stevens [R-Alaska]

"Darkness went with them, and they cried with the voices of death." - The Silmarillion, pg 358, Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age

Gruesome

Alaska: B4UDIE.
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Is it just me, or does this billboard send totally the wrong message? If you can't make it out, it reads "Alaska: B4UDIE."

So I hacked my first Rails application, and I wonder...

... will I remember what I'm doing when I'm sober?