Wine around the world

Bleh!

ai noes how u fillz

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Hello everyone!  I’ve had a really busy week and I’m tired of doing homework tonight, so I thought I’d update my blog!

I’ve had a pretty eventful week since my last update.  Last week I did a few things including:

• Watching a free concert at the San Francisco Bath House.  One of the bands was called Die! Die! Die!  and the lead singer kept jumping into the audience, right where Rachel and I were standing.
• Watched The Navigators, an acrobatic/ trapeze performance put on by the Festival of Circus.  It was really awesome, they were doing amazing tricks and flips.  I kept thinking they were going to fall!  Unfortunately, I forgot to put my CF card in my camera before I left.  I was only taking a short walk, I went down to the waterfront where I could see a pretty across the harbor over Lower Hutt.  Then I kept hearing someone announcing that a show was about to start and walked over to Waitangi park to watch acrobats!  You never really know what you’re going to find in this town.
• Went salsa dancing at Shooters.  Salsa dancing every other Friday night!  Yay!
• I explored the Te Papa Museum, the National Museum of New Zealand.  There are many interesting exhibits inside on the native animals and plants of New Zealand, as well as history of human settlement in the country, and a Maori Marae.
  

  Entrance to the Te Papa Museum

• Sunday was our trip for international students to the Wairapa Valley, where there is an abundance of wineries.  We visited two wineries for wine tasting, and stopped in a little town called Greytown in between tasting for lunch.

Scenic views on the drive up to Wairapa

The cute little cafe we had lunch in at Greytown

Wine at the Alana Estate, the second winery we visited

This 11-year old girl was pouring wine for everyone, and she was really funny! I doubt that that would happen in the USA!

Our group!

• Monday I have the entire day off since I don’t have classes, so I walked to the Cable Car station off of Lambton Quay downtown and took the Cable Car up the hill to the Botantical Gardens.  The cable car has been around since the early 1900’s… about 100 years old!  There is an interesting cable car museum at the top of the track showing the history of the train with the original train inside.
  

  The cable car I took!

  After looking through the museum, I took a nice walk through the botanical gardens.  The gardens were really beautiful.  They had a rose garden, the Lady Norwood Rose Garden, and the roses are in full bloom this time of year.

There are also some interesting sculptures around the place!

• After walking around the gardens for a couple hours, I rode the cable car back downtown and searched for the Revolt of the Mannequins.  The mannequins are part of the International Art Festival in Wellington and came all the way from France!  They invaded a bunch of shop fronts downtown and are on display all week long.  Apparently the mannequins move every day to tell a story, I’ll have to come back another time to check it out.
  

  The Positive Test

  

  The Angelus; By Millet

  

  The Comic Fire Brigade

• After finding all of the mannequins, I walked down to Civic Square since I haven’t taken a proper photograph of it yet, and wound up in the City Art Gallery.
  

  Civic Square. The City Gallery is the big building with the polka dots on the left.

  There was a really cool exhibit going on, showcasing Janet Cardiff’s The Forty-Part Motet.  Instead of a piece of art, a circle of forty speakers were set up in the gallery space.  Each speaker played one voice in the forty-person choir singing a re-working of Thomas Tallis’ Spem in allum numquan habui.  For fourteen minutes, you could sit and listen to an ultimate surround sound of the recording.  You can walk from speaker to speaker and hear each individual singer, instead of hearing them all at once.  I thought it was a very different way to present a choral work, and a very beautiful song.  Click below to give a version of the original 1573 composition a listen!

Spem in allum nunquam habui by Thomas Tallis

• Then, on Tuesday, Freya, Emily and I checked out a wildlife reserve close by called Zealandia.  It was really pretty there, the plants here kind of reminded us of Jurassic Park because of all the huge fern-looking plants.  We saw a lot of birds, including a lot of ducks.  We also got to see a tui bird up close.  It sat and sang on a branch for 5 or 6 minutes right in front of us and wasn’t scared a bit!  I didn’t get too great of a photo of it, since I had my wide angle on, but here’s the best shot I got:
  

  (Click to make photo bigger)

  Click here to hear what a tui bird sounds like!

  There was also a big dam in between two lakes in the reserve as well as an observation tower that we climbed up to view the park.  We only got to stay for 2 hours because the park closed earlier than we expected it to, but it was fun!  We also got in for free because we got free tickets from the international office!  Awesome!

The lake at the entrance to Zealandia

As for my classes, they are going all right.  Most of my teachers seem pretty knowledgable.  My advertising class is pretty interesting, we learned about how shopping markets set up their stores to get customers to buy tons of stuff.  My consumer behavior class is pretty boring, however.  We had a substitute last week and she actually stopped reading power point slides because they were “self-explanatory” and told us to sit and read them for a couple minutes in total silence.  If I wanted to read the power point slides, I could have just read them off the class website myself and not bothered going to class… oh well.  The regular teacher for the course isn’t too much better, but at least he doesn’t stop lecturing for minutes at a time.

Well, that’s my last week in a nutshell… This weekend I’m going to the South Island!!! The international student group is taking a ferry across Cook Strait to the South Island to see Queen Charlotte Sounds.  We are going to go kayaking and dolphin swimming, so I’m really excited!

Bottles By Design – Tenerife will put any message, together with any photo or image on a label to turn a bottle into a keepsake to celebrate any special occasion.

A Wedding, Engagement or Anniversary, a new baby or even a New Job or Home – any event can be made that little bit extra special with a present with a difference.

We all want to spoil our mum on Mother’s Day so why not give her a bottle as a keepsake. Choose from Red or White Wine or a bottle of Cava and decide what message you want to add to the label, all this for only €8.

Congratulations to all of those who have already done so, your Brownie point score has gone increased tenfold up!!!

Ladies – just a reminder that Father’s Day is only minutes away – 10th June 2010, so perhaps you could get his favourite bottle personalised??

(Pravda)

Cocaine is cheaper than a cup of coffee in a London restaurant, authors of the parliamentary report made to estimate the government’s struggle against the import of heavy drugs in the country said. The price of one gram of cocaine has lost 50% of its value during the recent decade.

Deputies of the British government believe that the measures, which the government takes to struggle against the import of heavy drugs, are dismally inadequate. The drug is still available in the streets, and the cost of cocaine dropped during the recent ten years from £80 to £40 per gram.

For comparison, a cup of coffee may cost from £2 to £8 in London. A glass of the cheapest wine or beer costs at least £3.50 pounds. The price of cocaine could drop against the background of its worsening quality, experts say. The drug may often be mixed with other substances, such as painkillers.

The cocaine, which the British police confiscated in 2009, was 27% made of the natural product. In other arrested batches, there was only %5 of pure cocaine.

There are other reasons that may have led to dropping prices on the narcotic substance. Prices on illegal substances depend on the risk connected with its delivery, storage and sale. A lower threat of punishment triggers the growth of competition on the market, which eventually results in lower prices.

Today, Britain is one of the prime receivers of cocaine in the Old World. British MPs believe that cocaine has gained popularity with the help of celebrities and successful businessmen. Many celebrities use cocaine and do not receive any punishment for it. Moreover, successful entrepreneurs may often look absolutely normal and take high positions in the society despite their addiction to cocaine.

British supermodels Kate Moss and Jodie Kidd would often make headlines because of their fondness for cocaine. Singers Katherine Jenkins and Amy Winehouse publicly stated that they used cocaine.

A cocaine scandal occurred in the British armed forces in 2004, when it was said that the Royal Highland Fusiliers and the Royal Scots took cocaine.

Great Britain comes second on the use of cocaine in modern-day Europe. The country can proudly take the first place at this point: traces of cocaine were found on 99% of the nation’s bank notes.

3% of Britain’s adult population tried cocaine in 2008-2009, which marked a five-fold increase in comparison with 1996. Britain is also one of the leaders when it comes to the use of such drugs as ecstasy and amphetamines.

A trip to the spring wine tasting of one of the UK’s biggest supermarkets proved strangely fruitless.

I’m not talking about the wines – plenty of fruit in most of them – more the reluctance of anyone from Tesco to divulge information about what’s going on in their wine business.

Lots of information about the wines themselves was on offer. As customary at these things, you’re given a big book with notes and more detailed background about each wine than could ever be needed.

So if you want to know that Tesco Finest Darling Sauvignon was fined with bentonite I’m your man. And if you’re itching to know which of its wines go through cold racking and stabilisation before making it to your fridge just drop me a line.

In the vain hope that someone not connected with the drinks industry might read this, a little description of the set-up at one of these events might help here.

All the major supermarkets hold them, usually twice a year to showcase the wines they hope we’ll be drinking at the barbecue or around the Christmas dinner table. “Did you spit or swallow?”, I always get asked at home, to which the answer is always “spit”, because not to do so would with over 100 wines to get through would (a) see you drummed out of polite wine tasting society and (b) lead to your appearance as a case study in the next issue of the British Medical Journal.

The event consists mostly of proper wine writers slurping and spitting their way through a selection of the range, before going away to write insightful 900-word appraisals of the range for The Times if you’re Tim Atkin, or a Twitter-length summary of two of them if you’re his successor at The Observer.

Hacks like me, who make a living churning out articles about the less sexy stuff, such as merchandising, the supply chain and market trends, also get asked along, and to fulfil our side of the information equation we rely on informal chats or formal interviews with buyers and category managers, so we can give the rest of the industry some idea of the workings of the collective wine department mind.

It was odd then that on arrival yesterday, I was offered an interview with a senior Tesco wine person who then elected to display a straight bat that resembled Geoff Boycott doing an impression of Chris Tavaré in the style of Alistair Cook.

My rivals reading this are by now may be rubbing their hands with glee at the exclusives they managed to extract but I suspect not – it seemed as much a policy matter as personal reticence on the part of the individual.

Which left me wondering what the point had been in forking out the train far to get there. It wasn’t as if I went armed to do a doorstep, Roger Cook-style interview armed with nefariously-obtained facts to throw in a buyer’s face.

Remember, I was invited along and offered some time with a Tesco representative, yet some of the topical but mostly harmless trade issues of the day met with the kind of panicked response of a minister due to appear before the Iraq enquiry on the same day that the Telegraph reveals details of his expense claims.

Odd.

Yesterday was a pretty freaking good day.  A classic. That’s because it involved:

1. a beer tasting in the afternoon. Yup, happened to pop around to the folks at &UNION as they were cracking open some new brews from a microbrewery in Namibia called ‘Camelthorn.’ Yes, I hear your sniggers. The cameltoe jokes are inevitable, especially after a few. One wonders how that goes down in the hard-knock bars in Windhoek? Not that I’ve ever been to a hard-knock bar in Windhoek, but I imagine they’re filled with big, hairy German-speaking locals that ride Harley rip-offs and say the German word for ‘wench’ a lot. Anyways, the beers were okay. Camelthorn Weissbier being the best, and their American Ale (which is a Pale Ale really) also quite tasty. Poor packaging though. Checkout a video on the brewery here.

2. a wine tasting after work. Nothing wrong with that at all. Tasted a few decent wines at Caveau as part of a little ‘bring your own bottle’ gathering they want to do every Tuesday with mates. Very unlike Caveau, since if you (foolishly) decided to bring your own bottle on a normal day, you’d probably get asked – politely, at first – to take it back to the car. However, a few regulars brought bottles and gathered around the main table. What was good? Groot Constantia Shiraz ‘Gouverneurs’ Shiraz 2006 is a cracking wine, that’ll age forever. Veenwouden Syrah 2007 is tasting gangbusters right now. And Hedonist Red 2008 (Syrah Grenache Carignan Viognier) was also a favourite, though the bottle maybe slightly heat-exposed.

3. a catchup dinner with a mate. One that involved far too much wine. In fact, with partners, the four of us consumed 6 bottles and about two kilograms of bacon & asparagus risotto. Then at midnight we strolled up to the Engen where after we consumed 8 cheese “chickenburgers” from Barcelos and a pack of Bugles (those Woolworths ones that are addictive). Anyways, enough about that, the wines we drank were: Deetleefs Familie Brut 2006, a fresh bubbly with nothing too remarkable about it; Hawksmoor ‘Barrel 59′ Syrah 2008, a delicious, ‘chocolatey’ style; Ondine Cabernet Sauvignon 2007, rather nasty stuff; JH Pacas Shiraz 2004*, possibly the worst wine I’ve had in years, I wouldn’t wish this on anyone, even Julius Malema, he who berates wine-drinkers; and two bottles of Mapoggo Cab Franc/Cab Sauv/Merlot 2008, a pleasant red that goes down well after four bottles of other wine.

It’s not often I get to do a beer tasting, a wine tasting and a catchup dinner with a good mate of all in one day. Needless to say I needed a Disprin this morning. Well, two really.

* this wine is so bad I actually went and looked up about it online, which you can do at their website if you’re reaaallly bored. Anyway, rather hilariously, they write “After researching into the name “Pacas”, we discovered that it is the name of a rodent found in south and central America…” This is quite apt, since the wine tastes like it was made by rodents in south and central America.

Inspired by “Wine Family” (Oggau Estate);  it’s time to individualize your self.  We love the representations.

L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon

This was my second visit to the restaurant and both visits are within about 2 months of each other. I went there the first time on a Thursday evening and the again on a Friday evening. The number of guests on the Thursday night was far fewer (at the table seating) than that of the Friday evening (also table seating) and it seems this contributed to the difference in the service level.

On my first visit, I was thoroughly thrilled to have found such an delightful fine dining venue in Hong Kong. the ambience was excellent, the service was good, the staff attentive and the the food was exquisite and because we did not go for the degustation menu that time, we did not discover the many plastic cutlery they give you.

First let’s talk about the food. both times, we had the Steak Tartare because it was that good. The quail was another dish we had both times, again because it was just too good to be missed. Both times there were dishes (entrees and with the degustation menu) with black truffle and I couldn’t help but notice that the second time around the black truffle has lost quite a bit of its flavour. I am not familiar with how these are ordered but it tasted to me like it’s past its time. Perhaps because it’s technically out of season and other good restaurants aren’t serving them anymore?

The degustation menu was good but nothing especially caught my eyes. I would suggest ordering a la carte from the menu rather than the tasting menu. Desserts are a must. Very good wine list and the starting price is very reasonable.

In general, it really was a very good experience, but there are still a few things that I couldn’t help but mention. i know I’m being very pick here but for what I paid, i expected best and I have been to places where the service was better and they charged less. So bear with me for a while.

Things that they can improve on:
- the screeching of the chair legs when the chairs are being moved is extremely annoying. Less so when it’s not busy, very much when it’s a full house. I know 3M has a great product for that. Check it out.
- Aside from the pearl spoon used for the caviar, I see no reason why the other courses required that many plastic spoon to be used. And if it’s absolutely necessary as a culinary requirement to use plastic, please would you find something that doesn’t look and feel like a child’s cutlery.
- In general the staff were wonderful but if only they could pay a little more attention to when being signalled rather than the chair in front of them, it would be perfect.
-I ordered the wine by glass, in most restaurants I’ve been to, I still get to taste it before fully committing to it., which I am pretty sure was what happened the first time, but second time, nope, they showed me the bottle and then just poured a full glass straight. Two glasses as well. I was in a conversation and did not register this fact until she walked away. Didn’t want to make scene so I let it go. But decidedly very poor service in that regard.
- Serving time between courses were not very well timed. the first few courses came out really quickly, more quickly than a good evening of dining should be and then when it got busy, it got really slow. One of the courses we had to wait for a 20 minute break and another a 15 minute break where as earlier only it was bang, bang, bang, one straight after the other. So perhaps time management in the kitchen needs to be reviewed. IMHO.

I think that’s about it. I really don’t want to come across as being too harsh but I had such high expectation after the first dinner I went and booked the second night a month and a half in advance!

You might need your other half to help you drink win out of this.  Regardless, this glass is a complicated matter; we’re not sure if it is evil or nice.

Wine Bottles Art.