Elf Sternberg

This Friday, after the kids were in bed I opened a bottle of Stone Vertical Epic, an incredibly wonderful beer fermented with the juice of wine grapes on top of a Belgian golden triple, along with chamomile.

The total combination is a very tasty, only slightly bitter, tantalizingly sweet Belgian-style Ale, that also manages to be almost 10% alcohol. (I didn't realize that until I was into the second glass of the two-glass bottle; usually, I get stuff in the 5%-6% range, and I never get knocked on my ass quite the way this stuff did.) They claim it's a dry brew, but I didn't notice that at all, not with all the Riesling flavor thrown in on top.

Stone Brewery (the guys who make Arrogant Bastard, the stuff with the demon on the cover) also claims that this beer is meant to be aged for at least two years before drinking, but what they have on the shelves now is so incredibly good that I don't think anyone's going to wait that long.

Even better (and more demanding), they posted the recipe to their website! If you feel like making this at home, you're welcome to try. I might actually consider making beer, for this recipe.

If I do, I'm totally labeling it Fepic Ale.

I haven't blogged about this because it was lost in the notebook I took with me to the restaurant, but one of the things I had the pleasure of discovering a few weeks ago was a wine called Tormaresca Neprica, which was odd because it was an Italian wine served at a French restaurant.

But it was still amazing. It's dark red, thick, and not oaky at all. It has a gentle, floral smell with no acridness at all. It's made with grapes called "negroamoro" and "primitivo," neither of which I've ever heard of before, and is blended with some cab-sav. Pretty good stuff, all around, although I wince at the food miles.

I've got to see if I can find some locally.

This evening LisaKit had her semi-weekly D&D game. One of the running themes of this game is Barrels of Evil, apparently imported from some other plane. Since we're dealing with Barrels of Evil, one of the other players brought a bottle of R Winery's 2006 Cab Sav, Evil.

It has a nice smell, but it's very astringent. Purple colored, flows freely, not very oily. It's not a bright wine, despite the astringency.

It went pretty well with the lamb and root vegetable stew I made. (3 lbs. lamb shoulder and neck, dredged in flour and browned in bacon grease, stewed for an hour in two cups of red wine. Then toss in 1 lb. each cubed potatoes, turnips, parnsips, and fennel bulb, stew for another hour, stirring ocassionally. Eat when the vegetable are soft. Yum!)

I haven't been blogging because I've been coding my damned brains out. Between a social networking site (that isn't paying me), a social bookmarking site (that isn't paying me), my own little projects (which aren't paying me), I haven't had time to blog. Worse, last week I spent most of it running around like a chicken with my head cut off between the election, four dentist appointments among the kids and Omaha, Kouryou-chan's dance classes, and other life-changing events. It sucks being the only driver.

PopCap games has released Bejeweled Twist for the PC, and is scheduled to come out with a Mac version later this year. Since Omaha is a Mac game reviewer, she gets nifty free copies of lots of different things and one of the things she scored was a copy of Bejeweld Twist PC edition. Most people have seen Bejeweled, the tetris-like game where you try to line up jewels to score points; it's PopCap's best-selling game and damnably addictive.

I have long praised PopCap for being Wine compliant. I've bought three of their games before: Zuma, Bejeweled 2, and Peggle (Peggle's my favorite; unicorns for the win!), and all three run absolutely flawlessly under Wine. They've all worked so well that I have to wonder if PopCap does a QA pass under Wine. Testing under Wine would probably cost them a day of development and open up an entire new audience that they couldn't reach before.

Bejeweled Twist doesn't work under Wine. It plays, but there's a bug in the registration code. Apparently, Twist uses DDE to talk to the underlying HTTP libraries, and there's a disconnect such that Twist is passing an empty URL to winebrowser and no dialogue is happening between the two. So I'm stuck in "Free User" mode, which has a lifespan of 120 minutes before the game craps out and I'll have to re-install it or something. Other games with on-line registration mechanisms have worked for me in the past, so this is a bit of a disappointing step backwards.

It's a pity, because Twist is a very beautiful game, with great audio and gorgeous backgrounds. It's really just Bejeweled with a different mechanism for lining up the stones, and with new "benefits" and "reward" modes. But since I have a registration code, I'd like to, you know, be able to register my game.

Snoqualmie Vinyards has a number of wines that they tout, and the 2004 Chardonnay is among them. T best thing the website says about it is its "new packaging!", which I will admit is rather nice. Unfortunately, that's the only thing that's really nice about this wine.

It is, as wines go, harsh and flat, with no appreciable aftertaste. The bottle says it has a "creamy texture and smooth finish," which is about as close to fraudulent a description as I can imagine. I am not a fan of white wines usually, but the Columbia Valley winery made a lovely 2003 Chardonnay, smooth, sweet and peppery all at the same time, and I was hoping that this would match it, but it did not. Maybe it's just not aged enough, but I doubt even that. I cannot recommend it.

Falling Star 2005 (51% Merlot, 49% Malbec) is a blend of two varietals of grapes grown in Argetina. Merlot is a fine old variety; I'm not sure where Malbec comes from. This wine is very inexpensive; I picked up a bottle from Trader Joe's for $3.99. I love it that wine is about the same price as Pepsi.

This is a fine ordinary dinner wine. Although it can be drunk by itself, it shines quite well against smooth, savory meals like broiled whitefish or chicken. It is a bit oaked, almost outside my tolerance. It has a very nice smell to it, nothing too suggestive or surprising. It has a very odd peppermint introduction that even Omaha noticed was there, and it goes right down without much aftertaste. It's mostly trying just to be a nice wine, and it succeeds. The price is more than right for the quality.

Last Friday, fallenpegasus and I opened a bottle of Fat Llama Shiraz, 2004 vintage, and were simply unimpressed. It was heavy, oaky, and not at all sophisticated. It wasn't the worst wine we'd ever served, but it certainly didn't rank as a repeat buy.

Today, I had another glass with dinner. It had improved significantly with a little exposure to the air-- it was much smoother than it had been. Still way too oaky and a bit too simple for my tastest. It may also have been the meal: on Friday, we had halibut fillets. Today, I made ground chicken burgers with crumbled bacon and bacon-grease sautee'd onions mixed into the grind, and then cooked the chicken patties in the bacon grease in a stovetop grillpan along with charred Grannysmith apple slices. Stunningly delicious, and the wine went with it very, very nicely. I'm not inspired to buy Big Llama again, but I am inclined to forgive it for its terrible showing against the halibut.

Y'know, the good life isn't that expensive after all. A couple of burgers, a $8 bottle of wine, some spare time... After dinner and we put the kids to bed, I owe Omaha a massage. Naked, with an oil with essence of lavendar, marjoram, and orange.

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.

It has been a quiet weekend so far here at the Sternberg Villa. We watched Teenagers From Outer Space, a charming little cheeseball from 1959 with no budget and very little script. The aliens wore mechanics' jumpers highlighted with duct tape and aimed rayguns that they bought from the local 5&dime. The hero was a softspoken young man who had read banned books on his homeworld and had learned compassion; the villain was a sharp-faced extra who enjoyed using the word torture! far, far too much. The monster they brought was a lobster shown in shadow puppetry. The dame was nice for a 1959 dame.

The wine of the evening was a 2003 Chardonnay from Red Bicyclette. I'm sure there are people who like it, but it only confirmed for me that I am not a white wine drinker. We also played a few rounds of Harry Potter Uno, and Omaha thought I looked "handsome" with my reading glasses on. I'm only 39. It's too soon for reading glasses! Kouryou-chan wimped out of the game after one hand and went back to reading the book she had been involved in before we invited her to play.

I have not been sleeping well. Despite going to bed at midnight, I was up by six. This was fine with me; it allowed me to go downstairs and watch a little anime. I'm so far behind on what I've planned to watch, mostly because I have absolutely no TV time at all in my schedule. I watched a few episodes of I Like What I Like, a beautiful boy-on-boy soap opera set in an all-male college and rife with highjinks. I'd totally do Ran in a heartbeat; why Hashibara doesn't "get" him is beyond me.

We had waffles for breakfast. It had rained last night, a lovely thing really since it's been so dry recently. Maybe the grass will have one last chance to perk up before the cold kills it dead. But this gave us a chance to get caught up on housework: I cleaned the kitchen and fixed the downstairs bathroom while Omaha vacuumed the stairs. Fixing the downstairs bathroom involved replacing the broken valve in the toilet. Huzzah! No more climbing all the way up to the main floor during those late-night Doom III sessions.

Kouryou-chan made her own lunch of egg salad, although I boiled the egg for her, and Omaha made an absolutely delicious dinner of boiled shrimp, pasta shells, diced tomatoes, green bell peppers and shallots all mixed in a combination of olive oil, basil, and a few other herbs. I suggested Romano cheese and Omaha agreed that it might help: the saltiness brought out a lot of the basil flavor. It was exquisite.

Tonight's wine was the Glen Fiona Syrah, made in the Washington Columbia valley. $12.00 a bottle and a steal at twice the price: blackberry and very gentle oak, it has a peppery start that's clearly the product of some subtle champagnation, but which fades rapidly upon exposure to the air. Good with food, you start dinner charged and activated but end mellow and gentle, a quality much accentuated by a surprisingly high alcohol content. One glass was more than enough.

We had bought a Rival brand ice-cream maker from one of those massive "off-hand lots" stores, and it broke trying to turn the finally frozen mass of strawberry ice-cream I had thrown together. I'm not even sure I like the ice-cream; it's too heavy, with too much cream. Although it was good when we first made, it has crystallized a little since then. Bit of a shame, but I ate some anyway. I felt a duty to do so.