Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez! (As they say in New Orleans for "Let the good times roll !")
There seems to be a lot of confusion about the date for Mardi Gras. "Fat Tuesday" is actually only one day - the last day of the "Carnival" period, which technically begins on January 6th and continues until the first minute of Ash Wednesday. This year that's 12:01 AM on February 21st. The party gradually builds up to a crescendo on Fat Tuesday and then suddenly dies at the stroke of midnight. In the places where there's a really big celebration the real festivities start 10 days or more before Ash Wednesday. So they're ready to get started just about now!
(Take a look at these videos to get your party started.) They're a little long, so you might as well pour yourself a nice glass of Wine, rock back and relax !
A little history:
(If videos jump right click and set quality to Low.)
Some great Zydeco music in the soundtracks for these two next clips. Oh, if you're offended by the unclothed human body don't watch the Body Art; things get a little wild at Mardi Gras, but they say that New Orleans is nothin' compared to Carnival in Rio !
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French Quarter Mardi Gras:
Body Art at Mardi Gras:
Now lets see how they do it on the Côte d'Azure in France. Here are two spectacular parades in the City of Nice.
Battle of Flowers:
The Night Parade:
(If videos don't play, click both stop buttons and then the forward button.) To get the full effect on these, right click on the video and select zoom – full screen.
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Well I'm ready to party, how about you? Raise your glasses one more time ... "Laissez les bon temps roulez!"
What's my favorite bottle of wine you ask ? Well, that's a good question. Like any good wino, my favorite bottle is the one just opened !
Seriously there are so many wines to be tasted that it's hard to have a favorite. Being a Wino, I'm always searching for a great value wine - Good Wine Cheap! I've found a couple that I keep meaning to blog about. Maybe soon I'll get one of them out of my head and into text.
If you're really asking for a recommendation on a great wine, then here's one for you who live in California: any of Josh Jensen's Pinot Noirs from the Calera Wine Company (his vineyards in Hollister, CA). The best will have a vineyard name on the label – Jensen Vineyard, Selleck Vineyard, etc. But I'll warn you; these wines are pricey and out of a Wino's budget. They're special occasion wines for me and they don't even serve them at Thanksgiving at the soup kitchen! I recommend this wine because Pinot Noir is one of my true loves, and Josh Jensen is making an old world style pinot here in the USA.
I first heard of Josh Jensen when I read "The Heartbreak Grape" by Marq de Villiers, a fascinating book about "a California winemaker's search for the perfect pinot noir". I heartily recommend this book if you love Pinot Noir. It's not your ordinary wine book; it's written as a story and is somewhat biographical. In addition, you'll learn more than you ever wanted to know about Pinot Noir! Probably more than Miles of Sideways fame.
When New Jersey hosted the annual convention of The American Wine Society, I called Josh Jensen and asked him to give a presentation. He was happy to do one of the sessions at the conference and give us a tasting of some of his best Pinot Noirs. In 2006 the Calera Wine Company was named Artisan Winery Of The Year by Wine & Spirit magazine. Calera also produces Chardonnay and Viognier. Did I say pricey? Well, the individual vineyard Pinot Noirs are going for $40 to $60 per bottle from the winery for the current releases. I haven't found any prices in my local liquor stores. Last time I tasted Calera Pinot was in a nice little bistro in downtown Denver. I spotted it on the wine list for about $40 and knew that to be a great bargain in a restaurant. It didn't fail to impress me again … and my friend as well. Calera also makes a Central Coast Pinot for a more reasonable $23 per bottle. I haven't tasted it since the AWS conference in 1999, but I'm sure it's worth a try. We won't expect it to have the intensity or bouquet of the individual vineyard Pinots.
If you taste any of Calera's wines please don't forget to revisit here and leave a comment.
I decided to comment on her blog and add a few details
Dear Diva,
Great Blog, but I think you forgot something. I would insert it as item One-dot-One in your list. As an alternative to Abstinence, which I don't advocate in any form, how about Moderation! If you're over 21 and you've PartiedTillYouPuke at least twice, you should know that it's never worth it. So how bout enjoying that pleasant little high that you get from a couple of glasses of wine and keeping it there all evening. After all, if you're lucky enough to have a Hot Date for New Years Eve (spouse counts), the last thing you want is to be TDTF when the public party's over! On second thought … it might be even worse if your date were in that condition.
So how do you keep from getting more than a little buzzed?
My first rule is DON'T DRINK HARD LIQUOR!Doing more than one shot is for people who are looking to get blasted and have deceived themselves into thinking that they won't regret it in the morning. If that were you, you wouldn't be reading this far.
My Second rule is DON'T DRINK MIXED DRINKS!The strength of a mixed drink is completely unpredictable; it all depends on how the bartender pours. How can you moderate if you don't know how much alcohol is in your glass? There can be as much as three times the alcohol in one glass as in another. If you like mixed drinks, save them for a night when you're only having one or two… not on New Years Eve.Remember its harder to count and harder to control yourself as the evening goes on.
You KNOW you're gonna top it all off with that glass of champagne at midnight, so why not stick to wine all evening?Wine drinking is easier to moderate because the alcohol content is fairly constant from glass to glass and there's naturally a high proportion of water to alcohol. To avoid a hangover take a break after the second glass or when you start to feel the effects. Have a non-alcoholic drink – water, club soda, coffee, tea – and finish your wine later. The water in those alternative drinks will help keep you on an even keel. You can always have another glass of wine, but you can't undo that last one once you've had it … at least not easily and discretely. Don't forget that you'll continue to get more drunk for about a half an hour after you finish your last drink.
Some people claim they get a terrible hangover from red wine. There is actually no science to prove this, but if you've had a problem with red wine in the past by all means stick with white wine. In spite of what WebMD says about congeners, that's just a minor nuance of the total hangover. You get sober by having your liver (and a few other organs) get rid of the alcohol. That takes time. You don't get a hangover from the alcohol in your body, you get a hangover from the waste products that your liver produces as it metabolizes the alcohol, the main one being acetaldehyde. Simply put, acetaldehyde is a poison. You feel like shit when you have a hangover because your body is in a toxic state. Every molecule of alcohol that's processed by your liver converts to one molecule of acetaldehyde when it's metabolized. Your liver has already done a lot of work metabolizing the alcohol and now it has to clean up the mess it made. It takes the liver even longer to metabolize acetaldehyde than alcohol. Your liver is tired and it has already used up a lot of its resources and reserves. If you've moderated your drinking and spread it out over the whole evening then your liver has had a chance to keep up on the acetaldehyde metabolism. If you really overdid it then your liver has a lot of catching up to do and that will take all day. There are better ways to spend New Years Day, especially if that Hot Date is feeling better than you are.
So if you overdo it, how can you help your liver clean up this mess you've made? Well, by giving it what it needs to get the job done. Eat some food, whatever you can stomach; some simple carbs, stay away from heavy stuff like fats and oils. Take some vitamins, especially vitamins B & C; alcohol depletes your system of these vitamins. A total supplement with minerals would be great; magnesium and zinc are essential in all metabolic reactions, especially the ones in the liver. And of course drink plenty of water.
A little more about the Hair of the Dog theory; don't give your liver more work to do !The exception to this I found is that ONE and only one, bottle of beer may settle your stomach and speed some carbs and vitamin B into your system. The other treatment that I've used is to sweat out the toxins. Don't try any vigorous exercise, but an afternoon in the Sauna always fixed a lot of physical discomforts for me, including a few hangovers. Use Caution – if you're not used to the temperatures in a Sauna now is not the time to start.
One more "don't"; DON'T SMOKE!This is even more essential if you are an occasional smoker who only smokes when he drinks. I haven't had a "morning after" headache since I stopped smoking. I'm convinced that those headaches after a night on the town were caused by low-level carbon monoxide poisoning, sometimes on top of acetaldehyde poisoning. Second hand smoke in the clubs was more than a contributing factor. This should be a lot easier now that a number of states have banned smoking in bars and restaurants.
Before I close … DON'T GO NEAR TYLENOL !Acetaminophen is metabolized in the liver using the same pathway as alcohol/acetaldehyde metabolism. Tylenol and alcohol essentially compete with each other for priority and precious metabolic resources. This can overload the liver to the point of doing irreversible liver damage. The makers of Tylenol say that alcohol is the culprit, but this is simply not true. Human beings have been ingesting alcohol a lot longer than they have been ingesting Tylenol. In fact the only reason we can metabolize either one of them is that alcohol is naturally produced in our intestines in small quantities by the normal processes of digestion.
In spite of all this, your liver loves alcohol. In fact it's your liver's favorite food. Your liver metabolizes small quantities of alcohol just like it is food. But your liver metabolizes large quantities of alcohol just like it's a drug that needs detoxifying. Which finally brings me to my essential philosophy:Wine (alcohol) is food; don't use it like it is a drug ! You can have a great New Years Eve without getting blasted.
Sunday is the day when I usually have lunch at home since I take so many of my other meals in the pubs and restaurants. I use the opportunity to indulge in a bottle, either my own or store bought, while the couch is closer than the car. Yesterday I made sure to pick up a bottle of the New Beaujolais so that I wouldn't have to wait any longer to taste it. None of my usual watering holes are hip enough with their wine selection to have had any Beaujolais Nouveau. It's been out since Thursday and three days was long enough to wait.
Lunch is simple; a hearty bowl of soup, a chunk of cheese, a few slices of rye or pumpernickel, and a bottle of wine. Normally I exercise restraint even at home and vacu-vin the bottle halfway down before taking my glass over to the couch. But today, well this Nouveau just isn't gonna taste the same tomorrow even under the best of conditions.
A sweet bubble-gum nose jumped out of the bottle right behind the cork, not even waiting for the first glug into my glass. It was followed by a faint whiff of banana ... which the winemakers try to avoid … but in a wine so young and fruity as this it just adds to the charm.Dry, I think ... the perception of sweetness is all in the fruit.The apple-like acidity (no malo-lactic here!) is balanced just right with the sweet fruitiness, the cool alcohols, and the low tannins from that "macération carbonique". Can't detect any of that sulphorous-ness that sometimes takes the edge of enjoyment off the nouveaux, and which is so common in very young wines that haven't had time to de-gas. Sounds like I like it, don't you think ?
A good example of what nouveau ought to taste like, it's better than last years" and the year before.The 2003 was wonderful, but didn't taste like Nouveau because it wasn't – that summer was so hot that they had to harvest in August and the new wine was nearly twice as old by the third Thursday in November as it usually is. The 2003 Nouveau tasted like a Beaujolais Villages that was released a little early.
If you're going to try to ply your beer drinkers and white-wine drinkers with a little Beaujolais Nouveau, this is the year to do it. I just hope that your bottle tastes something like mine – there can be a pretty big variation between one batch and another with this very young wine. Well, I have a half glass left and my couch is calling to me. What a lightweight , huh? Used to take a lot more to get me to the couch alone!
Oh … before I forget … PRICES !Didn't have much trouble finding Nouveau this year. By Saturday it was in both of the stores where I checked. The first was Jonathan Ron Liquors in Brielle. Haven't been in this store till now, but I will be back. They have a great selection of wines, even ones that are hard to find. But their price on the Beaujolais Nouveaux was $11.99! Now that's out of line. I know that these early shipments have to come by air from France, but that's still way too much. Especially when the same store has a selection of other older Beaujolais for about $10 bucks. Predictably the Buy Rite in Point Pleasant had a better price - $8.99. Now that's still more than this wine is worth to an 'ol wino, but like I said it does come by air, and that's what the traffic will bear in the past few years. Sometimes the price does drop a buck or so by Christmas when subsequent shipments get here by sea, but I don't know if it'll get any cheaper this year. I'll be happy to pick up another couple of bottles at $7.99 in December if I can.
These early shipments all seem to be from George Duboeuf the biggest bottler in Beaujolais. They are brought in by William J. Deutch & Sons, the exclusive importer for the eastern US. I did get Mr. Deutch to give a tasting at our AWS Conference in 1999 when we had it in New Jersey. He sent the northeast account rep with a nice selection of Beaujolais Crus, the best Beaujolais bottled under specific village names. A couple of years later, when the Conference was in Greenwich, Ct., Mr. Deutch gave the tasting himself, and that time included a Moulin-a-Vent.
You may find some Beaujolais Nouveau in your neighborhood from Joseph Drouhin or some other bottler. My experience is that they are harder to find, and often more expensive. But sometimes they're better. At any rate, I hope you find a bottle for a reasonable price and give a try at converting those white-wine drinkers.
If you taste this wine don't forget to comment here and let me know what brand you found, how it was, and what you paid for it.
the day that the new wine is released from Beaujolais ! And I'll admit it … this 'ol wino loves Beaujolais!If you're a serious oenophile you probably don't agree. Beaujolais will never be considered "A Great Wine". It's looked down on by most wine lovers, especially in France, because it doesn't have the depth, the longevity, or the mature flavors that they're looking for. But that's exactly its charm – it's young, and spontaneous, and full of life. Gee, if we were talking about a woman we would put just as much value on those qualities as we would on sophistication, maturity and experience. In fact, here in the USA, we usually short change maturity and experience and go for youth over everything. So why isn't the USA having a love affair with Beaujolais ?
I've often thought that Beaujolais has a great potential for converting beer drinkers to wine drinkers. Why? … Because it's a quaffing wine, not a savoring wine. And this can be dangerous – you can't down a six-pack of Beaujolais and still get home ok. (If you were born in Beaujolais, you won't agree with that either.) The villagers of Beaujolais love their wine just the way it is and don't give a damn who disagrees. They drink it liberally. Traditionally they serve it up by the carafe and at one time drank it by the mug or tankard. So if you know some beer drinkers who turn their nose up at wine, try plying them with a glass of Beaujolais. Just might work.
Beaujolais is also a great wine for converting white-wine drinkers to red-wine drinkers. Beaujolais is known as the only white wine in the world that happens to be red. That's because it doesn't have the tannins that make red wine taste like red wine. That's right, it's not the color that makes red wine taste the way it does, it's the tannin. Beaujolais is deliberately lacking in tannin because of the way it's made. First of all, the Gamay grape isn't especially tannic to begin with. Then when they ferment the grapes they don't bother to crush them. In fact it's against the law to crush them if you want to call your wine Beaujolais. The grapes ferment naturally from the inside out and pop by themselves, releasing the newly fermented juice. The wine picks up the color, but not the tannin. So if you know some white-wine drinkers who say that red wine turns their stomach, try plying them with a glass of Beaujolais. You might even need a blindfold, but hey, if we can cure a few of the white-zinfandel addicts in America it's worth an innocent deception.
Well, now that I've extolled the virtues of Beaujolais in general, let's get back to Beaujolais Nouveau. This is the first taste of the new wine. The French Government doesn't allow the wine to be sold before the 3rd Thursday of November. Among those who do like Beaujolais this creates a little bit of a contest to get the first taste of the new wine. The producers and wine merchants have taken advantage of this to create a lot of media hype about the Nouveau release date. But what the hell, it's a lot of fun anyhow, especially if you can find a place that gets one of those little barrels shipped in for a Nouveau release party. There's a terrific French Restaurant in Providence, RI that does this, but unfortunately I won't be there tonight.
If regular Beaujolais is the fresh young woman of the wine world, then Beaujolais Nouveau is "jail bait", the ingénue of the wine world – and she'll never be the same after the first six months in the pubs and bistros. Nouveau is actually vinified separately from the regular wine-of-the-year and is even more youthful than the regular Beaujolais. Often it doesn't quite taste like wine, but more like grape juice with the sugar taken out of it. It's very enjoyable, but only if you approach it as a beverage of it's own instead of expecting it to taste like real wine. One of the best things about that first taste of Nouveau is that it's a predictor of the quality of this year's vintage. If it is good then the regular Beaujolais and the Beaujolais Villages will be even better when they are released in the spring.
So if you have an opportunity to taste some Nouveau tonight, or in the next couple of weeks, don't miss it. It goes great with Turkey! A bottle of Nouveau and a bottle of Beaujolais Villages is a good combo for Thanksgiving. For a little more sophistication go with a Fleurie or Moulin-A-Vent. Those non-wino relatives will find that these wines slide right down, so maybe pick up an extra bottle. Oh, by the way, don't be fooled into trying any Nouveau from California – it's just not he same thing. There's not one producer that I know of who's using the right grapes. Most California Nouveau is made from the "Gamay Beaujolais" grape, which is not the Beaujolais grape or even the Gamay variety, but an inferior pinot noir clone that was planted all over California years ago. In Beaujolais they use only "Gamay-Noir au Jus Blanc".So go for the real thing even though it is a bit overpriced because of the media hype.
One of these days I'll finally move to Beaujolais and drink it by the tankard.
Last night I went to the second of this semester's tastings sponsored by the Central Jersey Chapter of the American Wine Society. The theme of this tasting was Bordeaux Blends. We tasted 8 wines, all related to the traditional blend of CabernetSauvignon-CabernetFranc-Merlot established for many generations in Bordeaux. The format was usual for this chapter, but not the usual for other AWS chapters. Dr. Lena Brattsten, who runs these tastings is a college professor and also a Wine Educator, so her tastings are rather structured. Thirteen of us sat around a conference table with 4 glasses & a tasting sheet in front of each, and tasted 2 flights of really wonderful wines.
Lena gave a little background on Bordeaux blends, enumerating the 5 grapes traditionally blended in Bordeaux:
-
Cabernet-Sauvignon
usually 50% or more
-
Cabernet-Franc
usually much less than 50% *
-
Merlot
usually much less than 50% *
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Malbec
usually less than 5%
-
Petit Verdot
usually less than 5%
*
there are a few producers in Bordeaux using mainly CabFranc or Merlot, but we're not talking Ch. Cheval Blanc here
We also discussed the emulation of this blend by wineries throughout the world, and in particular the "Meritage" movement in California, where a consortium of producers regulate themselves almost as strictly as the French government.
The first flight consisted of 2 Bordeaux blends, 1 true Bordeaux, and 1 straight Cabernet-Sauvignon. The intention of Flight #1 was to get a feeling for these wines. The second flight was of the same types but from different producers. For the second flight, we bagged, shuffled & numbered the bottles. Yes, we tasted this flight blind, with the goal of guessing the "type" as related to the first flight. When it comes to wine, I love these little guessing games.
After each flight we discussed the wines round the table, analyzing them for appearance, nose, body and finish based the notes we made on our evaluation sheets and re-tasting the wine that was left in our glass. There were many interesting comments and descriptors for each of these wines – too many to list here.Every person had different preferences among the wines in each flight. Some tasters scored the wines, but since there were many new students present, crossing over from Lena's "Wine Insights" course, we didn't put a priority on scoring the wines.I took advantage of that to lay off the numbers and just get into appreciating the wines. After all, these are all high-end wines and the scoring range would be narrow anyway, with every one falling in the 14 to 19 point range (AWS uses a 20 pt scoring system).
What became obvious from the first flight was that it is difficult to discern a difference between the straight cabernet sauvignon and the blended wines. There are so many other variables involved: climate, winemaking style, age, time & type of oak used for cooperage. I don't think the Bordeaux Blend evolved because there is something sacred about that blend of grapes. I think the producers planted different varieties because they knew that each variety would respond differently to weather variations in a particular growing season. So a variety that ripens earlier or more fully than cabernet can be used to normalize the base wine and produce a more consistent product across the years - by blending different percentages in different years.
The difference that was very apparent is the difference between old-world wine and new-world wine!The true Bordeaux stood out stylistically from the rest as being less "fruity" and more "winey" (my term for those mature flavors and aromas that develop as a result of the winemaking process, as opposed to the grape-growing process.) This wino loves his wine winey – but that is very subjective and often an acquired taste.The new-world wines were all quite fruity by comparison, but that doesn't mean that they were lacking in complexity by any means. In addition to the complex of fruit produced by the blending of well-grown and fully ripened grapes, these wines all had well integrated oak flavors of varying type and intensity. Most of the new-world wines had more than a hint of American oak in them, although some of them may have been in French oak for at least a little while. All this fruit, oak, tannin, acid and alcohol made all these wines BIG ! It's amazing that not one of them was really out of balance. I'll chalk that up to Lena's expertise in selecting wines for our tastings.
All of this held true for the second flight as well. We ripped the bags from the bottles before we discussed because the group didn't want to wait to find out which was which. Almost everyone picked the Chateau Léoville-Barton as being the old-world wine. Results for guessing the other wines were variable and scattered. I managed to guess the Almaviva right by a stroke of luck. Then after re-tasting it some deep black berry or black cherry flavors that were not in the other wines came through.
We polled the group for the favorite wine of the night and predictably it was the Chateau Léoville-Barton. But that was not unanimous by any means, especially among the tasters who like their wine fruity. We were all surprised to find out that the Léoville-Barton was not the most expensive wine of the evening – a good value within the lot – but not exactly a bargain. These wines are all out of reach of an ol' wino's pocketbook, but where else could he taste $480 of wine for twenty-five bucks !
satisfied
thirsty
pleased
movement in California, where a consortium of producers regulate themselves almost as strictly as the French government.
Almost everyone picked the Chateau Léoville-Barton as being the old-world wine. Results for guessing the other wines were variable and scattered. I managed to guess the Almaviva right by a stroke of luck. Then after re-tasting it some deep black berry or black cherry flavors that were not in the other wines came through.