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Odonata Rorie's Ale

Goddamn, I drank far too much last weekend.  I mean, I had one of those weekends where, looking back now, I’m embarrassed.  I was a complete lazy drunken ass all fucking weekend long.

See, we went up to wine country.  Healdsburg, to be exact, and we stayed in a really nice house overlooking a lake.  ‘We’ being almost all the reviewers here on this obnoxious blog, we split the time evenly and divided our trip up into two kinds of days: beer days and wine days.  We had a lot of work to do there, so tasting typically began before breakfast.  Seeing that all of us see spitting wine (or beer) as alcohol abuse, I don’t think a single one of us made it past 9:00 on any given night.

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Another outlandishly good Pinot from Davis Family… I got 3 bottles 3 days ago and they’re already all gone.  Not gonna be too creative with this one because I’m already more than half-drunk…

…but, to put things in perspective, let’s use the following anecdote:  I uncorked and then immediately re-corked a bottle of an otherwise good Santa Cruz Mountains Pinot tonight– only because I’d had this Davis Pinot two nights running and the other (much more expensive) wine didn’t hold a candle to the Davis.  So I corked the SCM wine back up and opened a new (and my last) Davis Family bottle.

The mouth feel on this wine is… well… crap… this is going to sound kind of queer for a straight guy to say… the mouth feel is velvety.  In an effort to redeem myself I’ll get juvenile and say it’s velvety like a willing vagina.  Happy now?

The notes say it’s “food friendly”, but I’m going to counter that by saying it’s far too good to waste on food.  This one is a sipper– last night I held it on my tongue for a solid 30 seconds and it just kept on letting loose with damn near obscene goodness.  At 5 seconds it said “how ’bout some ripe cherries?”.  At 10 seconds it said “How ’bout some strawberries and cream?”.  At 20 seconds it said “Did I mention there was a pound of butter in the strawberries and cream?”.  At 30 seconds I was thinking about aged Guatemalan rum and a moist cuban cigar.  Not once did I taste astringency, harsh tannins or get a pucker in my sphincter (or palate).

I can’t believe that something this good is supposedly good for your heart.  God bless resveratrol and the winemakers that allow us to enjoy it in such a magnificent form.  While I’m at it, I think I’ll praise some other shit I love that’s good for you:  God bless blow jobs and surfing.

I’m giving this wine 120 points on my 100 point scale.  I’ve been drinking far too much Pinot lately, and this is the best of the recent lot.

Root |root|:
1.
verb, Australian origin; recreational procreation, with all the “pro”s and no “creation” (if things go as planned).
See Also: horizontal mambo, shag, beast with two backs.
Uses: “Rootin’ in the Back of the Ute” (Kevin Bloody Wilson.  Translated: “Fucking in the Back of the Truck”), or “Oy, youse wanna go ‘ave a root before the old lady gets home?”

2.
noun, Santa Cruz origin; Gabe Potkowski’s nickname.

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Had a long night last night at a bar that boasts 88 different kinds of tequila, which precipitated the following:

When you ask for the bar tab and it’s so long that the bartender has to roll it around a toilet paper roll, you’ve been drinking too much tequila.

When the bartender looks at the tab, does a double take and says “wow, you drank all that?”, you’ve been drinking too much tequila.

When the idea of fighting the bouncer looks like a fun challenge, you’ve been drinking too much tequila.

When some jackass on coke decides you’re his best friend and spends a half hour telling you how much money he makes, and you don’t knock him off his stool because you can’t tell which double-vision version of him to hit, you’ve been drinking too much tequila.

When you have to close one eye so you can see your wife on the stool next to you, you’ve been drinking to much tequila.

When you don’t notice she’s not your wife, you’ve been drinking too much tequila.

If she ends up being a he, you’ve definitely been drinking too much tequila.

When your wife throws up in your office parking lot and you wash it away with your own piss and call it good, you’ve been drinking too much tequila.

If you pissed on your boss’ tire in the process and washed that off with more piss, you’ve been drinking too much tequila.

When you wake up on your office couch and lock yourself out of the office while puking in the bathroom, forcing you to have to either sleep in the hall or walk 3 miles home, you’ve been drinking too much tequila.

When you don’t notice that the door’s not actually locked– you just can’t turn the knob — and still walk home, you’ve had too much tequila.

When the sidewalk repeatedly slaps you in the forehead on said walk home, you’ve been drinking too much tequila.

When there’s a turd in your undies and you’re not sure whose it is, you’ve been drinking too much tequila.

A friend of mine gave me this bottle of 76% Syrah, 21% Grenache and 3% Carignane a few months back, and I’ve been trying very hard not to drink it.  I figured, with 5 years of bottle age already, I’d give it another 2 or 3 and have myself one nice bottle of aged syrah.

Well, as typically happens when confronted with wine, my willpower gave out and now I’ve got my big sniffer buried balls-deep inside an incredibly rich glass of Santa Cruz grape juice.

I’ve always been a fan of Paul Draper’s wines.  I like his style.  Before native yeast fermentation was cool in California, Paul was doing it.  Ridge has also long adhered to sustainable farming practices, believing that the right thing for the environment is also the best thing for the wine.  Paul figured out, as the French did long ago, that if you care for your fruit in the vineyard, you don’t need to mess with it much in the winery. And, unlike me, Paul is eloquent and thoughtful about his passion, often speaking in terms not often heard in the corporate wine world.  If you haven’t seen it yet, check out From Ground to Glass, in which Paul is set in almost stark contrast to some of the more commercial wineries in the area.

From the label:

Forty inches of winter rain and a warm spring produced a good crop, despite further rain in May during set… Natural yeasts carried the wine to drynes; we pressed at seven days.  An uninoculated malolactic and twelve months in small cooperage followed… The dominant fruit is syrah, which provides structure.  Granache brings an exotic dimension to the fruit, and old vine carignane adds bright acidity and a touch of elegance.  A total of twenty-two months in air-dried American oak has brought the tannins and full body into balance, and five years of bottle age will bring further complexity to this fine wine.

It was that last part, written in July of 2004, that got me tonight:

five years of bottle age will bring further complexity to this fine wine

Some quick math on the world’s oldest calculator (my fingers) and I was ready to pull the trigger.

It pours a nice, deep, inky ruby, with just the slightest hint of amber around the edges.  The nose is of ripe dark fruit with just a breath of cedar and tobacco.  It smells well-aged and integrated, with not a singular component screaming out of the glass at you.

As a woman once said to me after head, it’s “a damn big mouthful” (sounded more like, “uth uh doom bug mufful”); and it comes with a similar viscosity too, coating the entire palate  with its goodness.  I’m getting plums and a touch of currant after smoking the first 2 pulls off of a moist robusto cigar.  At 13.8% ABV, it’s not a monster of a syrah; instead it’s a balanced, nuanced, perfectly ripe wine that would go well with food, despite the fact that I’m drinking it without.  The acid is there but mellowed, letting the true fruit flavors shine.  This is quite possibly the most complex and rewarding syrah I have ever tasted, and has me wishing I could speed up the clock and age the rest of my cellar to this perfection.

All in all, I’m giving this 02 Syrah a perfect score.  If you can still find any of this anywhere, buy it.  You’ll be glad you did.

Being of Italian ancestry, I have what some women have politely referred to as a Roman Nose.  Also known as a big fucking bump-in-the-middle dog-style power sniffer.  And like my canine counterparts, I’m led to and fro not by my genitals (usually), but by that monolithic – nay , phallic -  “old factory” olfactory factory stuck to my face. Read more »

OK, look: unlike the San Diego contingent, I am not a beer snob. If the weather’s warm, the beer’s piss-colored or darker and cold, and I’m thirsty, I’ll drink it and probably like it. It’s cold, it’s somewhat refreshing and it tastes great when you’ve been out angling for Halibut all day with nothing else to do but talk about strippers with the other guy on the boat. Look, I’m a guy who once split a flask of Jack Daniels’, 3 homebrews, a 12-er or Bud, a joint and another 30-pack of Bud with 2 other people while at-sea on my canoe, then stopped at the gas dock (in a canoe with no motor, go figure) so I could get another 12-er for the long half-mile trek through the harbor.

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I’ve heard the term “chasing the dragon” used to describe a heroin addiction before, referencing the fact that a junky is forever chasing the unattainable perfect high that comes from the first-ever hit.  Despite the fact that my experience with opiates consists of a couple of recent bouts with a nasty cough and the subsequent codeine-laced prescription syrup (I should probably review that stuff here– wow!), I am more than passingly familiar with the concept of chasing the dragon.  I’ve been doing it ever since I drank my first sip of MacPhail’s 2002 Toulouse Vineyard release.

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I think it’s possible that I’ve been unduly ambivalent about Kosta Browne wines in the past couple of years.  In fact, I’ve called some of their past releases pretty awful things.  I think the words “overripe”, “flabby”, overrated”, and “grossly overpriced” have entered into my Kosta Browne discourse of late; and I think I’ve been unfair.

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The following tasting notes were missing from my recent shipment of 07 Ketcham Estate Russian River Valley Pinot Noir, so I thought I’d do the winery a favor and post them here:

Greetings dedicated allocation buyers!  It never ceases to boggle my mind how infinitely wise and amazingly handsome you are, especially you Juanote.  I hear you’re well-hung too.

Well, 2007 was a banner year for most of us making Russian River and Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir.  Unfortunately, you won’t recognize that immediately in our 2007 Russian River blend.  In fact, you probably shouldn’t open it yet.  In fact, on second thought, you definitely shouldn’t open it yet, unless you have an affinity for the tightness of nun’s assholes.  We added so much tartaric acid to this shit that you could substitute it for the cran part of a vodka cran, and the tannins will definitely need some time to get tired of kicking the shit out of those cranberries.

So please, do yourself a favor and just savor the anticipation of opening one of these bottles.  Stare at them in your cellar.  Talk about them with friends.  Let the dust settle in on them.  But whatever you do, don’t actually drink one for at least another year.  One day each and every one of these bottles is probably going to be phenomenal enough to jizz thy jeans.  Or at least, we like to think so.

But hey, it sure does smell good though!

So there you go.  If you must drink one now, decant it and have some stanky cheese handy.  Otherwise, I’m pretty sure these will be worth the wait if you sit on them for awhile.  Their last vintage was the same way:  I really didn’t like it when it was new, but I absolutely loved it a year later.