23 July 2008
In the Name of Science
Chocolate 'cake' in a mug in a microwave. Don't forget to scroll down to see all the ... evidence.
One researcher's results:
"I mixed the ingredients exactly as ordered, and put it in the microwave. Over the course of five minutes the scents that came from my microwave were: Cooking chicken, old motor oil, cocoa, and burned coffee.
"It took me two tries to get a fork into my leaning monstrosity, and when I bit into it, it was crunchy. I threw it at a wall as hard as I could and it didn't break at all."
Another intrepid researcher substituted Nestle's Strawberry Quick for cocoa powder: "It tastes a little like strawberries, and a little like failure."
14:55 Posted in food and drink , science and tech , silliness and humour | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
20 July 2008
Websites with Narrow Focus, X
I've been saving them up for this post.
It's Lovely! I'll Take It!, "a collection of poorly chosen photos from real estate listings. With love." And comments. Don't miss it.
potentially nervous: "The world's going to hell. Here are some bunny photos."
How I Spent My Stimulus. Tell your story.
Kim's Page o' Chopsticks. Chopstick wrappers, actually. (Thanks, Mike.)
06:45 Posted in animals , art and photography , finance and business , food and drink , householding , pop culture , silliness and humour , websites with narrow focus | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
28 May 2008
Brand Timeline Portrait (R)
Following Jane's lead, I'm blogging the (visible) brands I use today:
7:15-7:45 a.m.
Getting up, getting ready ... Zadro is the Shower Bug I listen to in the shower.
I'll note only this first use of Quilted Northern ...
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
7:45 a.m.
Getting dressed ... socks and necklace don't seem to have a brand on them ...
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
8:00 a.m. - 9:45 a.m.
What's happening in the virtual world?
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
8:15 a.m.
Dog feeding and cooking rice for future dog meals ...
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
8:45 a.m.
Feeding me, vitamins (some are not branded), cleaning up ...
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
9:45 a.m.
Going out -- need jacket, gum, shoes, and a treat for the dog ...
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
11:00 a.m.
Returning-home treat for the dog ...
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
11:00 - 11:52 a.m.
Now what's happening in the virtual world?
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
11:52 a.m.
Going out again for a walk ...
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
12:05 p.m.
Got a phone call while walking ...
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
1:00 - 1:30 p.m.
Home and reconnecting ...
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
1:27 p.m.
Water plus tonic water ... Lunch was leftovers in a non-brand plastic container, so no brands to record. Then in the garden.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
1:50 - 2:00 p.m.
Playing with the dog ...
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
2 - 2:30 p.m.
Working out ... weights don't seem to be branded ...
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
2:52 p.m.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
3:00 - 3:40 p.m.
Watched taped "Workout" and blogged, read online, etc. ...
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
4:50 p.m.
Did dishes. Oh joy. (Swept earlier, but no brand names on broom or dustpan.)
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
5:15-5:30 p.m.
Made cornbread to accompany leftovers for dinner. Most cornbread ingredients not name-brand.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
5:35-6:10 p.m.
Reading the paper online and doing email as cornbread cooks and before heating up leftovers ....
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
5:42 p.m.
Dog eats again.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
6:15-6:55 p.m.
Dinner (leftovers, cornbread, and half of Christmas beer) and TV. Dog goes out.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
7:00 - 9:30 p.m.
Reading. Drinking tea. One phone call.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
9:55 p.m.
Dog to bed.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
10:00 p.m.
Evening ablutions.
22:00 Posted in consumption , finance and business , food and drink , householding , lists , pop culture | Permalink | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
16 April 2008
Getting Cancer, the Natural (Usual) Way
An article in Slate yesterday by Darshak Sanghavi (pediatric cardiologist and professor at U. Mass Medical School) asks why the U.S. and Europe focus our rhetoric and resources on some uncommon and/or unproven causes of cancer rather than trying to prevent and better screen for the many natural causes of cancer.
In part, he says, it's because of a popular (but false) motif, that "the natural world is less toxic and more healthful than the industrial one," so that avoiding cancer, it seems, can be accomplished by buying organic, unpasteurized, and more 'natural' foods and cosmetics:
"Unwittingly, we've seriously impeded cancer prevention with this not-so-useful distinction between the natural and artificial. It's distracted us from the uncomfortable truth that most cancers are caused by the natural environment around us. As a result, we expend great effort and ink on low-yield strategies to prevent cancer, even though the better ones lie within our grasp."
Sanghavi talks about some 'artificial' sources of very few cancers (asbestos, DES, Alar, and folic acid) and a few of the most common natural causes of cancer: UV-A rays of the sun, Helicobacter pylori bacteria, Hepatitis B, the human papilloma virus, and exposure to a mold product called aflatoxin.
He ends by suggesting that we've been approaching cancer prevention as something within our individual control, just another consumer shopping challenge, when actually it's vaccines, large-scale agricultural reform, and regular screening that would reduce cancer deaths:
"Our scattershot approach to preventing cancer subscribes to the cult of personal responsibility, albeit with a recent eco-friendly twist: To really help themselves, goes the thinking, people must simply take charge of their health and avoid cancer-causing, artificial products. Somewhat insidiously, we're starting to believe that cancer mostly is prevented by informing individuals to change their consumption habits -- not by proactive, broad-based public-health measures like widespread vaccination or agricultural reform.."
13:35 Posted in death , earthcare and environment , food and drink , health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
14 April 2008
Disgust, Boundaries and Mortality
A long article in Psychology Today ("Mystery of disgust" by Erik D'Amato, 1998), examining what makes something disgusting, and why, contains this interesting bit:
"[E]ach area of disgust is, in its own way, a jarring reminder of our animal nature. The things that most disgust us -- defecating, dying, giving birth, eating dubious or unclean foods -- are the very traits we most conspicuously share with other animals.
"Perhaps it's no coincidence that the only body product we generally don't find disgusting is tears -- the only one considered uniquely human.
"Social disgust operates much the same way, according to [Jonathan] Haidt: 'If physical disgust is about distinguishing ourselves from animals, then social disgust is about distinguishing ourselves from "demons." "Human being" is a charged category, and we want to keep its boundaries clearly defined. Someone who cheats on his taxes can be human; someone who eats human flesh cannot. Socially disgusting acts are those that reveal that you have inhuman motives.'"
"The reason such reminders of our 'animality' are so harrowing may be equally uncomplicated: any reminder of our animal nature is also a reminder of our own mortality. Certainly, we can coolly discuss death and even come to terms with it; indeed, the knowledge of life's precariousness is singularly human. But it is also the most crucial threat to the psyche, and as such must be repressed. No wonder so much of what we find disgusting relates to death and illness: blood, boils, amputations, and mutilations suggest the fragility of life; corpses and body parts simply verify it."
So -- things disgust us to the extent that they remind us that we, like all animals, die?
What interests me particularly about this is that many of the people I've known in real life and through books who have been most willing to sacrifice their very lives for others' benefit -- which amounts to a "crucial threat to the psyche" -- have also been those most easily disgusted and repulsed by hospitals, corpses, bodily functions gone awry, and physical mutilations.
What's going on there?
19:28 Posted in death , food and drink , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , sex | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
31 March 2008
New York Stories: The Death Stakes, Table Waiting, and Driving in the City
Several today:
In the NYT, an article today about people who eschew public transportation in NYC, although "80 percent of the people who drive into Manhattan during the workday already have access to mass transit that would take no more than 15 minutes longer." Some of the reasons for driving even with cheap and reliable public transportation available: include enhanced freedom and flexibility; "the ability to avoid dealing with other people;" the car is more comfortable (plusher, wired for sound and ... video?); dislike of waiting, standing, and "the hassle" of the subway (prefering the hassle of driving, finding a place to park, having to feed the meter multiple times); a desire for a few minutes more sleep; dislike of walking; and transporting a dog.
---
In the Telegraph today, Phoebe Damrosch provides tantalising bits of her experience as a head waiter in a posh and celebrity-frequented NYC restaurant. Her book about it, Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter, was published in September. Training for the job was a rigorous 3-month indoctrination into rules, cooking procedures and ingredients, "philosophies, uniforms, elaborate rituals and an unspoken code of honour."
Allergies were ubiquitous: "When we learnt in the pre-shift meeting that, due to a serious allergy, the host [a famous comedian] requested there be no truffles on the menu, a colleague leaned over and whispered, 'What percentage of the population even knows it's allergic to truffles?'" and "Celebrities love to be allergic to things, including any or all of the following: nuts, fish with scales, fish without scales, shellfish, all fish, wheat, dairy, sugar, chocolate, egg yolks, duck eggs, onions, garlic, pineapple, mango, peppers, fennel -- the list goes on. Either that or they are so bored by good food that they have to spice it up by asking for an all-mushroom tasting menu (as a famous newsreader did)."
More at Super Chef, The Amateur Gourmet, NYT review.
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This one's not about NYC per se :-) but after watching a few episodes of The Real Housewives of New York City -- where there's pathetically cut-throat competition to look young, to seem hip, to have status -- I feel sure it applies. It's Michael Kinsley in The New Yorker writing about the competition among Boomers, in particular, for "longest life" and "shortest death." (Kinsley himself is 57 and has Parkinson's disease.)
"What's more, of all the gifts that life and luck can bestow -- money, good looks, love, power -- longevity is the one that people seem least reluctant to brag about. In fact, they routinely claim it as some sort of virtue -- as if living to ninety were primarily the result of hard work or prayer, rather than good genes and never getting run over by a truck. Maybe the possibility that the truck is on your agenda for later this morning makes the bragging acceptable. The longevity game is one that really isn't over till it's over."
"And even if you add a few years through your own initiative, by doing all the right things in terms of diet, exercise, sleep, vitamins, and so on, why is that to your moral credit? Extending your own life expectancy is the most selfish motive imaginable for doing anything. Do it, by all means. I do. But for heaven’s sake don’t take a bow and expect applause."
He also points out that it's not a zero-sum game; if I die young, that doesn't mean you live longer. What's odd is that it seems like a zero-sum game. Reading the obituaries can imbue the completely false belief that because these folks have died, and particularly if they are younger than I am, then I'm spared. I'm alive, they're dead, I win. Weird. Kinsley does compare the competition to live longest to a tontine, an estate-planning device well-known to Agatha Christie fans, where "the amount you got back depended on how many of your fellow-investors you outlived." In this case, outliving someone else doesn't ensure that you will be long-lived (much less happily lived) but you'll be rewarded with a warm feeling of having out-endured your friends, enemies and peers, even as you miss them and wish they were still around.
As far as the short death goes, I must be the orderly type: "Or, if you’re the orderly type, you might prefer a brisk but not sudden slide into oblivion. Take a couple of months, pain-free but weakening in some vague nineteenth-century way." Sounds good to me. Of course, Kinsley reminds us, "The government statistics on how people die are lavish and fascinating. Let's forget for a moment that it's a catalogue you can't really shop from" (other than the suicide option).
Kinsley says, "I was around fifty when I went public about having Parkinson's, and the effect was like turning sixty." I love that sentence.
He goes on, "A person who is sixty and healthy almost surely will live many more years. But sixty is about the age when people stop being surprised if you look old or feel sick or drop dead. (It's another decade or so before they stop pretending to be surprised.)"
He says that "only in life's last chapter do the differences [in how old we feel and are perceived to be] get enormous. We are not shocked to see a seventy-one-year-old hobbling on a cane, or bedridden in a nursing home, and we are not shocked to see a seventy-one-year-old running for President. The huge variety of possible outcomes -- all of them falling within the range considered 'normal' -- makes the last boomer competition especially dramatic. So does the speed at which aging can happen. Sometimes it's even instantaneous. Fall, break your hip, and add ten years."
11:45 Posted in books and reading , death , food and drink , health and medicine , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
06 March 2008
Popovers, mmm
Popovers are one of my favourite foods to make and serve, especially as the first course in an afternoon tea, with butter and fruit preserves. The first time I recall having them at tea was outdoors on the lawn at Jordan Pond House, on a trip to Maine in 1993, though we may have had them in England earlier than that. I remember scones in the UK, which I don't like nearly as well, though they do go down a treat with clotted cream.
I have most often made popovers, on request, when a friend and her family (also friends) come to visit, because the daughter in particular likes popovers and/or perhaps the ritual of eating them.
Kim O'Donnel at WaPo tackles popovers today in her column. She mentions that there are many different popover recipes and philosophies, which I have also found to be true. Joy of Cooking mentions the same thing: "Everyone enthusiastically gives us a favorite popover recipe, and all are equally enthusiastic, but contradictory, about baking advice."
The recipe I use -- which is Susan Branch's, in Notes From a Vineyard Kitchen -- is almost identical to O'Donnel's, except that for Branch's recipe the oven temperature is lower, the cooking time is longer -- and Branch's recipe serves 12 while O'Donnel's serves 6; the difference is whether you use a regular muffin pan or a dedicated popover tin, with deeper cups. (They work fine in a regular muffin tin.)
Other variances I've noted in reading popover recipes over the years include whether to preheat the oven or to start cold, how high the oven temperature should be set to start and whether to reduce it at some point in the process, and how long to bake the popovers: suggested times range from a total of 25 minutes to 50. To wit:
- Joy of Cooking starts at with a temp of 450F and after 15 minutes reduces to 350F for another 20 minutes; Martha Stewart does the same.
- Cinnamon Mornings by Lanier starts at 450F for 15 mins, then reduces to 375F for 30 mins.
- Great Food Without Fuss by McCullough and Witt (which has a number of good bread recipes) emphatically says not to preheat the oven and to bake at 400F for 40 minutes, or, for drier popovers -- why? -- at 375F for 50 mins; I found that 400F at 30 minutes works best for their recipe.
- Fifty Ways to Cook Most Everything by Schloss (which I rely on for cooking rather than baking) recommends 450F for 15 mins, then 375F for 10 mins more, the briefest cooking time I've found.
- Paula Deen (at Food Network) bakes for 30 minutes at 450F.
- Beard on Bread doesn't include popovers. Can't find them in any of the five Moosewood cookbooks I have, either.
Two things everyone agrees on: don't overmix the batter, and serve them right away.
I'm baking chocolate chip cookies as I type this and it's confusing my brain to smell one delicacy while thinking about another...
<< Photo credit: Nicole at Baking Bites (see her recipe, too) >>
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29 February 2008
The Power of Expectations
Never understimate the power of expectations -- particularly unconscious or semi-conscious ones, the ones you might deny if asked about them explicitly. And never understimate the power of cognitive dissonance, also at play in this study, reported in the Boston Globe:
SCIENTISTS AT CALTECH and Stanford recently published the results of a peculiar wine tasting. They provided people with cabernet sauvignons at various price points, with bottles ranging from $5 to $90. Although the tasters were told that all the wines were different, the scientists were in fact presenting the same wines at different prices.
The subjects consistently reported that the more expensive wines tasted better, even when they were actually identical to cheaper wines.
The experiment was even more unusual because it was conducted inside a scanner -- the drinks were sipped via a network of plastic tubes -- that allowed the scientists to see how the subjects' brains responded to each wine. When subjects were told they were getting a more expensive wine, they observed more activity in a part of the brain known to be involved in our experience of pleasure.
What they saw was the power of expectations. People expect expensive wines to taste better, and then their brains literally make it so. Wine lovers shouldn't feel singled out: Antonio Rangel, the Caltech neuroeconomist who led the study, insists that he could have used a variety of items to get similar results, from bottled water to modern art....
The human brain, research suggests, isn't built for objectivity. The brain doesn't passively take in perceptions. Rather, brain regions involved in developing expectations can systematically alter the activity of areas involved in sensation. The cortex is 'cooking the books,' adjusting its own inputs depending on what it expects.
Our judgment is biased. It seems to me that we rarely acknowledge the breadth and depth of our subjectivity.
I'm reading Gavin de Becker's book The Gift of Fear, and Other Survival Signals that Protect Us from Violence (1997). He defines intuition as our awareness of perception before it hits our judgment -- in other words, an awareness at some level of sensory perception unbiased by expectation, knowledge, moral reasoning (I should, I shouldn't, etc.), expertise, and other subjective mechanisms for denying what our senses notice. Of course, even in the initial "noticing," there is some judgment, some bias, that causes us to notice something at all, that distinguishes a perception we notice from one we don't. Even in noticing, we are already comparing what we expect with what we perceive and finding that they don't quite overlap. That's intuition. Too often, de Becker argues (and provides a wealth of examples to demonstrate), we argue ourselves out of our intuition. We, in essence, say that regardless of what my tongue says (or nose, but not in the case of the Cal Tech experiment), this wine must taste better because it costs more. The assumption that expensive = better, and that (false) knowledge that this one is more expensive than that one, make it all but impossible to actually perceive reality.
In the scenarios de Becker outlines, however, the consequences for our almost knee-jerk denial of our perception and our intuition are much more grave than paying big bucks for plonk. We may sense signals that someone will behave violently towards us, but usually we ignore them or deny them, telling ourselves, "He seems like a nice guy," or "I don't want to appear rude" or "It's probably nothing."
I'll blog more about de Becker's book tomorrow. Meanwhile, have a nice glass of wine :-)
17:50 Posted in food and drink , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , other people said it | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
11 February 2008
Italian Fish Stew
When the wind chill hits the negative numbers (today, for instance), I like to make this warming comfort dish. (Thanks, R, for the original recipe.)
Italian Fish Stew
Serves 4
1 Tbsp. olive oil
1 onion, chopt
2 celery stalks, chopt
1 red bell pepper, seeded and chopt
one 14-ounce can diced tomatoes
6 ounces green beans
1 Tbsp. pesto
1/4 cup dry red wine
10-12 oz. tuna, mahi-mahi, or halibut, cubed
8 ounces pasta shapes, cooked (can substitute cooked cubed potatoes)
1 cup grated cheddar or gruyere cheese
________________________________________________________________
Heat the oil in a flamerooof casserole or heavy-bottomed pan. (I use a cast iron pot.) Add the
onion, celery, and red pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes. Stir in the tomatoes and beans, bring to a boil. Reduce the heat then cover the pan and cook for 3 minutes. Stir in the pesto, wine and fish, and re-cover the pan. Cook gently for another 8 to 10 minutes, until the fish is cooked. Add the cooked pasta, cover the pan and heat through for 2 to 3 minutes. Meanwhile, heat the broiler. Transfer the fish and pasta to a flameproof serving dish or leave it in the casserole or pot if suitable. Sprinkle with the grated cheese and brown under the broiler. Serve immediately.
10:55 Posted in food and drink | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
28 December 2007
More on Dissent and Rebellion
In a follow-up to his post yesterday at Overcoming Bias, Eliezer Yudkowsky blogs today about the difference between really voicing a dissenting pov and just faking being a rebel or iconoclast -- acting different for the sake of seeming different to others (and perhaps to self as well, to gain a little distance from those 'others'). That, as he points out, is just a bias the other way: instead of instinctively or mindlessly leaning toward conformity with the group, self-aggrandizing rebels lean instinctively or mindlessly away from it. Even worse, most rebels feel they are being mindful, are making a real choice borne of special awareness and their own uniqueness, from an established "I" rather than as a reaction to others.
I want to comment on a few things Yudkowsky says. He cites vegetarianism as a true act of rebellion, one that takes a bit of courage ("to tell people that hamburgers won't work for dinner"), but he sees it as an act of Standard Rebellion, one that other people think they understand and that gives them a handle for relating to you, the vegetarian. OTOH, he says, what takes "real courage" is acting in a way or on principles that are incomprehensible to those around you, that don't give them a handle for relating to you.
I'm a pesce-vegetarian (I eat some fish but not poultry, pork, beef, etc.). I don't consider it an act of rebellion. It's just a preference, like prefering or abhoring mushrooms or liverwurst is a preference. It's no big deal, even in rural east coast areas, to be a vegetarian. Twenty years ago I brought my own food to cookouts; now there are so many yummy meat-like soy products available and so many people who are trying to eat more veggies that I'm lost in a crowd, and it's fine.
Second, I think it's as disheartening when others "think they understand your motives (even if they don't)" and think they can relate to you based on their assumptions and extrapolations, as it is to have to "[brave] the outright incomprehension of the people around you." (Yudkowsky seems to say that the first is in some way a better, easier-to-bear situation than the second.)
But on that score, that's sometimes how Girardian thought feels to me, the way Yudkowsky describes holding a belief in cryonics: "There are other cryonicists in the world, somewhere, but they aren't there next to you. You have to explain it, alone, to people who just think it's weird. Not forbidden, but outside bounds that people don't even think about."
When I give a tiny explanation of some Girardian idea (as I interpret it), the response is usually that it's an intellectual exercise unrelated to the real world; in fact, I might be an intellectual who's not in the real world. What I see as an ordering principle or overarching story that minutely matches my experience of human social and psychological life and that completely informs my everyday, real life actions (as much as Jesus's "Follow me" does), others often see as incomprehensible, weird, the luxury of someone who has time to think. Still, I think I prefer that response to being assumed to be a crank, narrow-minded, a nazi, a left-winger, a rabid animal activist, someone who lacks passion for life, a regimented health nut, similar to some celebrity who's a vegetarian, etc. (all traits found on a Google search of "vegetarians are"), on the basis of my eating habits.
11:15 Posted in food and drink , girardian anthropology , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , pop culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
30 November 2007
Wine Class #4
We went to our last wine class this week. The handout was tips for pairing wine with food. In short:
- pair wine with food, not food with wine ... For one thing, the wine list in most restaurants is larger than the food list, so your selection of foods is more limited than your selection of wines.
- either match a food dish in intensity with the wine (earthy wine with earthy food, e.g.,), or let the wine provide a complement to the dish's intensity -- e.g., an acidic wine with a greasy meat dish, or the example on the handout, a dry crisp German Riesling with an Indian curry
- whether the food is meat, seafood, poultry, vegetable or what have you, match the wine to the intensity of the entire dish/meal (and the sauce or preparation style might be a major factor here), not to the type of meat or non-meat you're eating. There'sa red for vegetables and fish, there's a white for steak and burgers. This reminds me of the Color Me Beautiful concept that clothing and makeup should match one's "season" -- everyone can wear red, or yellow, or white, it just depends on the tone of the colour. Likewise, there is a "tone" of red or white wine that will work with most foods.
- if you're serving a salad with wine, do not use vinegar in the salad or the wine will taste like vinegar. Use lemon juice or something else for salad dressing acidity.
- if you're cooking with wine, use the same wine you'll be drinking with the meal or a wine that's similar.
- decanting for 15-20 mins in a wide decanter is good for young wines; as wine ages, it doesn't stand up as well to oxidation.
WINE TASTING
Henry Varnay sparkling white wine (Blanc de Blanc?) from the Loire Valley, a combination of chenin blanc and chardonnay. No vintage year. $12/bottle.
Visual: effervescent
Aroma: perm solution, said three of us. We didn't talk about this wine too much, so not sure what anyone else smelled.
Taste: light taste, not lingering
Not a wine I would choose -- "perm solution" is not my idea of a bouquet.
Trappolini Orvieto 2006 from central Italy, with these grapes: Trebbiano Toscano (Procanico) - 40-60%, Verdello, Canaiolo, Grechetto, Drupeggio and/or (no more than 20%) Malvasia Toscana. Fermented in stainless steel with no malalactic processing. 12% alcohol.
Visual: greenish yellow, very clear
Aroma: I smelled anise, pear, geranium. Other tasting notes say: "pear, pineapple and apple followed by aromas of almond and straw." That's odd, because the anise smell was very strong for me and others at the table.
Taste: I thought it was pretty bitter on the mid-palate, fairly hot alcoholic, but not very persistent
Cerro Anon Crianza Rioja 2002 from Spain. $16 or so.
Crianza is aged extra long in oak, 8 months in this case.
Visual: Clear to veiled, rubyish even though it's fairly old
Aroma: spicy, musty, berries, prune-plum, dried fruit
Taste: Very smooth, not harsh at all, very tannic, earthy. The teacher tasted bright, fresh fruit on the front of the tongue, but I didn't. I thought it lacked some fruitiness. The strong tannic and lack of fruit made it feel unbalanced to me.
It's a wine I drink often, bec. I like tannins and I like the earthy smoothness, but now I also know that, to my palate, it lacks something.
Château Lamartine Cahors 2004 Cuvée Particulière , a Malbec from France. "Cuvée Particulière" means the grape is grown on an older vine. 2004 was a pretty good year in this region. Lamartine is known as one of the best wineries in Cahors. This is a good wine to age. (Another website says the wine is made from: "90% Malbec and 10% Merlot from 40-55 year old, low-yielding vines.") Like a Bordeaux in structure and weight. $24/bottle.
Visual: veiled, very inky
Aroma: tobacco, boysenberry, spicy
Taste: spicy, tannic
Decanter magazine: "‘Great complexity with lifted plum and damson fruit aromas. Deep, full and lots of plum fruit backed by well-handled tannins." Other tasting notes, for the non-Cuvée, say: "Light woody smell with slight hint of liquorice and little red smashed fruits."
11:41 Posted in food and drink | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
24 November 2007
What I'm Reading: Policy and Mediocrity, Wine, Metro Readers
Mostly what I'm reading is Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook (1962), which is 600+-pages and fascinating. I'm at about page 430 and will finish by the time we discuss it in bookgroup next week.
Otherwise, online:
>> We've Got A Ticket To Read in The Observer, about the French Metro-riding public's reading tastes. Robert McCrum is scanning riders in search of evidence of "existentialists in the Sartrean sense;" doesn't find too much of that, but reports what Parisians are reading and how it differs from Londoners. Appeals to the voyeur in me.
>>Exclusive Interview with 'The Wire' creator David Simon, 2 Nov. 2007. I've never seen "The Wire" (it's on HBO) or heard of David Simon but the interview is nonetheless worth reading because it's about the tragedy of modern American cities and lack of political will to improve the lives of citizens. Simon, while with the Baltimore Sun, wrote "the Edgar Award winning account of the Baltimore City Homicide Division, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (which later spawned the NBC series)." Now he writes for HBO's "The Wire," a sprawling, epic tale about the decay of the American city." Among themes the show explores are drugs and law enforcement, education, the media, politics, and reform.
Simon is direct in his critique of much of what passes for excellence these days:
Talking about journalism: "You see these sort of 'we gotcha' stories, bite sized morsels of outrage, half-assed scandals. No one is tackling big problems. That kind of ambition is gone. ... At some point, Wall Street found the industry. And instead of being sheltered in a series family owned companies, the newspaper chain entities, which are beholden to stock holders and share prices, began buying them up. At that moment when Wall Street raised its hand, that was pretty much the end."
He's asked: "The failure of law enforcement, the death of the working class, the impotence of reform, the inequity of the education system -- how much can you really blame on newspapers?"
Simon's response: "I'm not blaming the newspaper for the origins of the problem, the origins of the problem are a complete lack of social policy. Our social framework is 'Can I get it promoted now, can I make a buck off it?' The entire country right now is like a pyramid scheme with no other ethic or social framework behind it. So obviously there are a lot of forces at work. I'm just saying the media, which is supposed to be the assertive watchdog of the political and social culture, the last hope of reform -- they're not here anymore."
Asked "As far as how bad it got – that pyramid scheme -- do you think it was ineptitude, self preservation or was this a calculated maneuver by those that set our policy to stay atop the pyramid?", Simon answers, "I don't think that it's that anyone had a plan to do this. People were simply thinking short when they should have been thinking long."
>> Calculating the Carbon Footprint of Wine by Pablo Päster and Tyler Colman, who is DrVino.com. ... The 'good news' is that for those of us on the East coast, it's no worse ecologically to drink French (Italian, Spanish) wine than to drink California wine. The bad news is pretty much everything else. For one thing, growing grapes is very resource-intensive: "Compared to many other crops, grapes yield relatively little output per hectare. Grapes considered in this study yielded between 400 and 800 kilograms (kg) per hectare, whereas corn can yield between 30 and 80 metric tons per hectare. Grapes require between 50 and 100 kg of agrichemicals (biocides and fertilizers) per ton while corn requires around 40 kg per ton. Grapes can also require a large amount of water relative to their output; between 1.2 and 2.5 megaliters per hectare, or 550,000 liters per ton." Still, "The greatest climate impact from the wine supply chain comes from transportation," quite an obstacle for those of us who don't live in wine-growing areas. The full 20-page PDF is here.
12:10 Posted in books and reading , community , consumption , crime , education , media, film, tv, radio , finance and business , food and drink , politics, government and law , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (1) | Email this
15 November 2007
Wine Class #2: Old World v. New World
The second wine class focused on the difference between Old World and New World wines. I won't replicate the handout exactly here, but the highlights are:
Old World = Europe ; New World = everywhere else. In the 1860s, the phylloxera louse (introduced from North America) wiped out most of the vineyards in Europe, except for sandy places in Portugal and Spain; one result is that wine growers moved outward, including some from Bordeaux in France to the Rioja region of Spain, others to Chile (whose terrain is inhospitable to the louse) and other locales, bringing their expertise with them. In the New World, wine was grown at first mainly because the Catholic church needed it for Eucharist.
Wine varies by country in part because food varies by country, and wine and food are meant to complement each other. In Europe, wine is seen as a food product. In Maine and in much of the U.S., wine is seen as a controlled sin whose consumption must be watched and regulated closely. The concept of 'organic' or 'all-natural' foods and drinks doesn't really fly in Europe; most Europeans assume and expect that what they eat is all-natural.
Wine also varies by country and region primarily because of climate and terrain, and also because of different historical traditions and/or innovations and different ways and scales of farming. For example, in the U.S. and Australia, there is more land available than in tightly packed Europe, and that's more favourable to large scale corporate farming techniques.
We also learned that aging in oak barrels (French: vieilli en fut de chene) can cover a multitude of sins in wine, and that from 5-10% of wines are 'corked,' which means that a bad cork has made them undrinkable. If a wine smells like moldy cardboard or the underside of a flower pot (I'm not sure I know what either of those smells like), send or take it back, because an impurity in the cork has tainted it. Wine with synthetic corks and screw caps can also be bad, but it won't be corked.
Wine is fined (filtered), to remove sediment and extraneous bits, in several ways, including with a cardboard filter or with clarifying agents like rennet (i.e., mammal stomach), egg white, clay, or other proteins
On to the wines!
WINES TASTED:
D'Orsaria Pinot Grigio 2006 from Northern Italy. 12.5% alcohol. $15 or so.
Meant to be drunk young.
Visual: crystal clear, light hayish in colour, pretty fluid
Aroma: moderately intense, smells of young green fruit (apple, pear), mild pepper, hay.
Taste: Dry. Spicy, has zing, a little sharp (poly-alcohols), more acidic than flat, weakish structure, nearly balanced -- acidity is bit out of whack, fairly persistent taste for a light white wine.
Notes from another recent tasting: "More floral aromas than fruit. It's not too acidic (huh?) -- so, it drinks well without food. Clean finish. Flavors of dry fruit, tropical fruit, and subtle, subtle grapefruit."
I didn't think much of it. It was too 'hot' in terms of alcohol. Not quite bitter, but too sharp tasting for me.
Lange Pinot Gris 2006 from Oregon's Willamette Valley. Organically farmed. 13% alcohol. $20 or so. (Sold out at the winery.)
Visual: Crystal clear, rosy golden colour, fluid to thick.
Aroma: Not very strong smelling. Smells of butter or cream, grapefruit, green apple, vanilla, honey.
Taste: Fairly dry, perhaps a little sweet; warm to alcoholic in alcohols; rougher than the first wine with sharper poly-alcohols; vigourous structure, not fruit-driven; nearly balanced -- alcohols a bit out of whack (but not as much as acids were out of whack in the first wine); intense taste.
Lange's tasting note (pdf): "Ripe melon, tropical fruit and citrus blossom ... The mid-palate shows pineapple, ripe pear and spicy vanilla. ... Round rich mid-palate and crisp finish."
I liked the citrus of this wine but it wasn't light enough (see: 'spicy vanilla') for a hot day -- on any but a hot day, I'd choose a red wine.
La Ferme Saint Pierre Cotes du Ventoux 2005 from the southern Rhone Valley in France. 75% syrah, 25% grenache grapes. 13.5% alcohol. (Link is to the 2006 vintage.) Drink until 2009 or so.
The first bottle poured of this wine, with a synthetic cork, was bad. To me, it smelled very off, like a root vegetable kept in the basement for several months, and there wasn't a hint of fruit. We had a re-pour, but to some of us, it still smelled bad and tasted (not quite so) bad. And some folks liked the first glass they got!
Visual: dark purple, clear to veiled, pretty viscous
Aroma: black currant, cooked or dried cherries, pepper, cigars. One of us smelled clams, and I could 'see' what she meant. There was a salty, earthy (clay-like?) smell there. I could also detect the cooked cherries, I think, but there was definitely something unpleasant mixed in ...
Taste: Dry, medium-warm, enough acidity to keep it from tasting dried out (not my experience: made my lips pucker), earthy/minerally component.
McManis Syrah 2005 (some students got a 2004 -- more on that later). From the central coast of California. 14.5% alcohol. McManis is a 'pretty good, affordable wine.' $10.
Visual: veiled to clear; thin to fluid.
Aroma: Lovely, full smell, I thought. Berries, vanilla, peppers, slight smokeyness
Taste: Dry, but sweeter than the previous one, more alcohol and less acidity than the previous wine, tannic, good structure.
I liked this wine (the 2005 vintage), especially the bouquet. The 2004, though, which is what the teacher was quaffing, smelled to at least three of us like cat urine. Maybe we still had the clam smell stuck in our olfactory epithelium.
Next week: Fermentation Techniques. And four more wines.
I've made "Analyzing Wine" into a digital file for easier printing.
16:15 Posted in food and drink , lists | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
11 November 2007
Top 100 Wines of 2007 / Wine Class
Wine Spectator annouces its choices for top 100 wines of 2007, beginning tomorrow with #9 and #10, then two or three more announced each day until Friday, when their #1 wine of the year will be announced. Next Monday (19 Nov.), they'll provide the list of wines #11-100. (The top 100 of 2006 are listed here.)
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In related news, I'm taking a wine class this month. Last week, we learned a little about how to evaluate wine visually, by smell and by taste, and we practiced on two whites and two reds. My notes (including the teacher's "Analyzing Wine" handout) follow.
ANALYZING WINE
("Analyzing Wine" is also available in a digital file (doc format) for easier printing.)
Visual
Color [for reds, purple is youngest, ruby is medium, brick red or orange-ish is most aged]
Clarity : veiled, clear, crystal clear, brilliant [related to degree of filtering]
Fluidity: watery, fluid, thick [do the swirl test ; viscous = sweeter]
Effervescence:
s