Doktor Weingolb

I got tagged with a musical meme by my buddy Joe at a perfect time.

I've been reminiscing about the traveling I did in California during the first half of April. And I've been reminiscing about the West Coast(-inspired) music that often served as ambition for my trip.

Neither one is with me anymore. Both the scenery and songs are now gone. All I have are memories, and luckily, some mp3 copies on my hard drive.

So here then, thanks to Joe of Joe's Wine Journal, is what I have been listening to lately -- sounds that have definitely shaped my spring (these are not mp3s but rather video links so just click on them to listen to the tracks).

MGMT - "Of Moons, Birds & Monsters"

Shea at Just Grapes responded to Joe's tag with "Kids," this band's most alluring pop song in my opinion. But MGMT are a very talented act with some serious chops in so many genres: glam, psychedelica, classic rock, indie dance, even disco. My great hope for modern music in 08, though I must say that their live show doesn't suggest the how incredible their debut full-length recording is. Buy Oracular Spectacular before your friends do.

Sonic Youth - "Disappearer"

The best band in the universe once wrote an album called "Goo" that chronicled the effect of show business to those new to the biz. It's a modern-day Gypsy but with a noisier score than "Everything's Coming Up Roses," and it's more about Hollywoodland than anything I else I could grab when I was packing my bags for my first trip to Cali.

Saint Etienne - "Postman"

Though a British band with a French pop element, Saint Etienne sing many songs that evoke or pay homage to postwar California. Much of their 1998 album named Good Humor (with its characteristic US spelling), evokes California living and chasing the American dream, usually with a catharsis or two along the way.

No Age - "Neck Escaper"

The band shown at the end of the video linked above is not No Age, but another Los Angeles band named AAnchors AAweigh, who I enjoyed at Spaceland in Silver Lake on April 11. No Age, meanwhile, is primed for big success with their new album Nouns following the critical acclaim of their last release Weirdo Rippers, from which this infectious track is taken.

Imperial Teen - "Room With A View"

The rushed, do-it-all, fit-it-all-in-better-than-you feeling of this song captured my week in San Francisco in retrospect. It's about grabbing what you can, while you can, even though you know it's not gonna last. The band is not on my regular rotation list but I admire them more than I listen to them, which is okay too.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs - "10 x 10"

I'm always aurally turned on by the sounds of this Brooklyn band, now spending much of its time in LA. No clue about what this song is actually about lyrically. I just love their feisty throw-downs, their great guitar sounds and their sense of self.

Pavement - "Fillmore Jive"

This could be the best song of all time. After seeing the musical depth of this Bay Area band's ten-year oeuvre when jazz masters James Carter, Cyrus Chestnut, Reginald Veal and Ali Jackson pored over songs from the Pavement catalog, there's no doubt that cuts like "Fillmore Jive" can live forever. It's nice to be particularly into this track at the moment once again.

The trouble with Californian wine may be California -- the Freeway State.

Half the time I was trying to have fun and kick back; the other half I was desperately trying to burn up the alcohol I ingested so I could get back in the car and up the next on-ramp.

Here I am suffering through a dubious do-it-yourself Breathalyzer test in Griffith Park. I don't even think the test worked, but more on that later.

To tell it to you straight, my palate is no more a lover of the fat reds of California than my liver is. And I've been vocal in my disapproval of American wines, even when my liver for the most part would stay intact. Arising transportation issues made my outlook on exploring the local wine scene dimmer -- even in sunny SoCal.

So the idea of navigating my rental car from wine stop to wine stop in Sonoma, Santa Barbara and Temecula was dead in the water before it ever began. I drove to Mar Vista, and took a tour of some chateaux which were are simple, flat-roofed and hugging the ground instead. I took snapshots, not shots of wine, while I was there.

I wasn't even going to try to try California wine after coming all this way. It was my own stubbornness and fear of DUI, plus a wee bit of being a bad wineblogger (or else I wouldn't have created my first-ever video documentary on YouTube on the rather dry and sobering topic of postwar California tract housing and subsequently post it online to my other non-wine blog... Clearly a good wineblogger would've produced from this trip some insightful, if scathing, wine podcasts instead of researching residential history for a Mar Vista montage that nobody will want to watch).

A LIGHT AT THE END OF MY TUNNEL VISION

I may have been so busy forsaking Californian wine along with its higher than normal alcohol content that I didn't recognize this bottle of value wine that we picked up in Los Feliz. It came with a cute Retsina glass cellophaned over the top and was only $11.99 -- a no brainer for a spur-of-the-moment picnic wine. And that was before we tasted it. It wasn't bad!

In retrospect, I think my fellow wine drinker and I could've finished the bottle and I could've had the usual "full share" of my portion and not left the remaining wine you see here. It was a nice "light" Cali alternative.

It got the same thumb's up that my co-pilot gave me for putting the keys in the ignition. While DYI Breathalyzer tests can be tricky to administer and interpret, ultimately friends don't let friends drive drunk.

Which is great.

But as I said, me = bad wineblogger. I don't have any more details to give you on our experience with the wine than what is written and pictured here.

But I have more than that for my next post: I did myself and others a big favour by tasting and writing a note for a Chateau Montelena.

Well it's a good thing that I didn't jet off to Germany over the weekend because I totally missed the news from Friday.

Drs. Vino and Debs, and the Winedoctor too, you all might want to read this carefully.

. . . researchers in Germany have faced criminal probes in recent months for using the title "Dr." on their business cards, Web sites and resumes . . .

Under a little-known Nazi-era law, only people who earn PhDs or medical degrees in Germany are allowed to use "Dr." as a courtesy title.

. . .

Violators can face a year behind bars. (!!)

And then it gets worse, after it seems to get better.

Last week, state education ministers met in Berlin and recommended that the law be modified so anyone holding a doctorate or medical degree from America could be addressed as "Dr." without running afoul of the police.

Anyone with a PhD from Canada, Japan or the rest of the non-European world would still be excluded.

Okay, so maybe all the doctors I mentioned above might not need to worry much longer, but I may need to seriously think about mothballing this site before I ever visit Cologne.

Read the whole story in last week's Washington Post.

Arriving home from holidays spent with my family in Ontario late on Boxing Day, I have wine on my mind and lists at my fingertips.

This time of year is particularly good for amassing long wish lists. Wines you'd like to buy yourself, wines you'd like to store into the new year to share with others. The timing is particularly good for me. That's because, for a change, I'm perusing the aisles in the Ontario Liquor Board's Vintages. Or being generous and not following a budget to more freely make wine purchases.

I also equate this time of year with an opportunity for me to enjoy wine at lunch and at dinner (as my grandfather pointedly made known to all my relatives gathered around the Christmas dinner table -- I'm still not sure if his comments were a pat on the back for my resilience and earnest enthusiasm or the start of a future intervention).

THE ANNUAL BEST OF LIST . . .

My Annual Best of List for the last 12 months will be appearing here over the next five days. I won't have one single favourite as I did in 2005 and 2006, when I selected one top wine. This time, I'll be singling out a handful. They are all wines that I haven't yet posted any reviews for here, mostly because I was saving my notes until the end of the year to anoint my number one drink-it-everyday, anyway-you-like-it wine.

The gauge is drinkability plus affordability: Charming, masterful wines that are ready to drink now and come in at around $20 or less (even in Canadian dollars and including a hefty Quebec tax -- so these will not break any banks). Hmmm... Shall I offer some examples of what I am talking about?

WANNABE CHIANTI

One wine you won't see on my list but clearly could have is the Poggio alla Badiola IGT Toscana 2005 from the vaunted Mazzei house. You also won't see it in Ontario's LCBO flagship store at Yonge and Queen's Quay, as I was there and looked hard, hoping to find just one bottle of the four cases that was indicated on the LCBO website. They must've been scooped up fast because this baby is a special "Give me all 48!" bargain. Wannabe Chianti? Why not.

As of today, I've only briefly tasted this wine after picking it up at the SAQ. I desperately want to search out more for proper note-taking but already I'd easily make this bottle a top runner-up for the year or an honourable mention or whatever it is that makes people sit up and take notice. It could be the greatest Italian wine value that's out there. And since well-made Italian wines are not usually cheap, especially in Quebec, this is certainly one to watch out for.

OLD WORLD MALBEC

While I'm allotting space for bottles that didn't make my list, here's a couple more notable 2005 reds that amaze me. (What is it about 2005?) They are both from Cahors in Southwest France. I call them the CDC 05 and CLC 05 -- the Chatons du Cèdre 2005 and the Clos la Coutale 2005 -- and they're just the ticket if you ever find the general repertory section of the SAQ a little drab. These are very cheap and very widely available. Having had them both many times over many recent years, it seems to me that they've never been better. Priced at $12.45 and $14.25 respectively (and that's in Canadian funds after all taxes), they are below my daily wine budget's typical range.

Amid the mass-produced alternatives that they share the shelf with, and amid all the ersatz Fuzion in the Argentina section that stares them down from across the store, these two are real standouts of the moment.

This was a long and mostly unplanned blogging hiatus. Since the end of November, I've been able to travel and uncork great wines with both the legendary BrooklynGuy and the consummate taster Joe of Joe's Wine.

On both occasions, I got to meet their families and felt tremendously welcome. And while I had met BrooklynGuy and Joe before, meeting up with them in their element and spending more time with them was a little bit like getting to know your favourite Pinot. These guys have truly great blogs, but I still gotta say that virtual wine appreciation isn't as nearly good as the real thing -- especially with great guys like these two. You learn a lot.

And for me this just makes blogging seem less important in comparison, less vital. At the moment, journaling about wine feels almost like an afterthought -- or like talking to an answering machine when you know someone will eventually pick up if you call again.

That said, I still have a bunch of stuff I want to enter for my own record-keeping and whatnot, so the wineblog is resilient in that regard. Doktor Weingolb's decanters aren't being hung up for good so I'm turning them around. Wine to come...

Which I suppose might mean that my cup doth overflow as well... But are too many corks translating into too few posts?

It may be time to do an audit on the corks I keep in my kitchen drawer. Have I been keeping up with all that I have been uncorking and enjoying?

I don't keep every cork, just the ones that stopper really great wines or are exceptional corks in and of themselves.

Corks with cork taint, thought they might be "exceptional," are not included. I prefer to keep the nice exceptions -- corks with intricate designs and memorable vintages etched into their sides or corks with deeply pigmented colour leeched into their ends.

Sometimes I keep plastic and Diam corks, but I tend to separate tehm because, for the most part, they make for useful household implements rather than souvenirs. One of these stabilizes my clothesline, for instance.

Oh, and I love the reusability of those corks that have those black plastic twist tops that often come out of Pineau des Charentes or LBV Port bottles. They earn a special place.

But no, I won't be starting a screwcap drawer any time soon.

• Labels... Who needs them?


• How to interpret a wine label


• How to interpret a wine labeler


• Colourful wine labels


• The wine label as a branch on a family tree


• Wine Label Week wrap-up
  

Before I become the David Cronenberg of wine blogging, I'm going to radically shift the recent trend of dark and foreboding posts around here, i.e., Damaged Goods I & II, which centred on mutilation -- both oenological mutilation and the bodily kind too.

(Basically, in those entries, I realized that I'm the type of wino that will go down with the ship: the discovery of tainted wine leads to painful blood blisters from resealing the contents by hand; and furthermore, when spoiled wine unexpectedly happens in the middle of dinner at a BYO resto, too hastily speeding your ruined wine for an exchange suggested by your "sommelier for the evening" (who actually works at the wine shop up the street from the restaurant) can land you in a traffic accident if you are not careful. It's all a bit like the Cronenberg film Crash, but with wine all over the car seats instead of sex.)

So without further ado...


Tweet, tweet... It's Wine Label Week! A sweeter, gentler, more mild-mannered approach to paying tribute to what's in the bottle. There will be some wine opened and tasted to be sure -- and I promise that whenever possible I will enlist cute budgies to help present the material -- but ultimately the focus next week will be on wine bottle labels. Specifically, what they can tell you about wine and what they can't.

At the end of September last year, Doktor Weingolb was ... hmmm, apparently posting lots of pictures of food from the looks of it ... and as such, missed the opportunity to launch Wine Label Week. For those of you keeping track, the first-ever theme week on this blog was last year's Portuguese Week or the great Semana português!

Btw: Doktor Weingolb is pleased to report that in 2007 Portuguese Week has spun off into something more like Portuguese Month, with Catavino hosting WBW 38 on the subject of wine from Portugal! Click here for details on how to prepare for that.

In the meantime, stay tuned for WLW #1: WTCTYAWWTC -- it's straight ahead!

---

I can't believe it !!

The world is waiting . . .

---

Pictured here is yours truly and a friend of my good friend Cathy Champagne -- her name is Lindsay.

A wineblogger can only consider himself lucky to have a friend named after expensive French sparkling wine, but back when this photo was taken at Hallowe'en in 1998, I was still a long way from ever tasting the stuff and I think mutual friend Lindsay was too. (I know the extreme dapperness we exude in this photo might lead you to think just the opposite.)

This was the first time I had ever met Lindsay, let alone drink with her. Our costumes were so complementary -- we had independently shopped at Value Village for our duds -- we decided to go as a couple. That was the only thing I thought the two of us had in common at the time, but these days I happen to know that Lindsay has spent the summer curating her next rosé, and on really special occasions she loves savouring a good Nebbiolo.

THE WINO IN ITS INFANCY

But look at us then: coloured plastic wine glasses and crap Baby Duck-like wine from a crap line of table wine made by an unmentionable Ontario producer. Okay, I will mention these wines by name because I can see that the LCBO has mercifully discontinued their sale outright across the entire province. They were Oakridge, a forgettable range of wine branded by Andrès Wines Ltd. (I don't think that it was even CELLARED in Canada, if you know what I mean.)

I can still taste those bottom-of-the-barrel Cabernets. But hey, we all can't start with Champagne, right? So take a look at the background of the photo and how the empty bottles are lined up on my windowsill. These wines we were drinking were actually being rated. I was ranking them into an order. This was the beginning of my wine habit -- those earliest moments when my development into a full-fledged wino was becoming irreversible.

76%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

After a lengthy vacation from blogging, and more recently, yesterday's persistent Internet service outage from giant Quebec provider Vidéotron, my numbers are finally coming down to safer, saner levels. I am now only 76% addicted to blogging.

Between my own free will and my service provider forcing me to limit my blogging, I feel like a new man.

Others on the internets are not so thankful of this interventionist tough love. This French blogger writes that for at least two hours there were so many complaints phoned in to Vidéotron technical support that contacting anyone who could tell you anything at all was entirely hopeless.

This IT blog for a Quebec broadcaster indicates that even getting that far -- finding so much as a dial tone -- was out of the question for the unfortunate folks who use Vidéotron's IP telephone services in addition to its high-speed cable Internet. Bummer.

I know this first-hand because for dinner last night I was visiting friends who faced exactly that situation. Communication to the outside world was out of the question, until, by some good luck and little know-how, we were able to update a Facebook status using a cell phone. The send-success tone that the cell phone emitted came with a little rush of dopamine felt by all.

Later on when I got home difficulties continued to affect the network so I'd say the problems must've lasted at least five hours.

So while I never got to post yesterday, I see that Brooklynguy's latest post covers many of the topics of my own offline dinner, wherein a local feast from the nearby Farnham farm of André Samson showed off the freshness and delicacy of the season. Check out Brooklynguy's Wine and Food Blog for the joys of farmers' markets and fresh produce.

My six-week vacation is not over yet but I might be coming back soon. Meanwhile I'd like to say that I am not sick of wine. And I am not sick of blogging.

But first, since Facebook has already announced it, I might as well say it here: Today is my birthday. I'm 32.

WHY I'M NOT SICK OF WINE

I'm not sick of wine because tonight I'll be trying out Vieilles Vignes du Domaine Château-Langlois Saumur (rouge) from the bounteous 2002 vintage. I'll also be drinking Quinta de Cabriz Dão 2003, a new favourite discovered over Easter earlier this year.

Basically, in terms of red wine, I've been craving Portuguese and cool-climate French reds. The are great dinner wines. They go so well with food, and I've noted in the past that this is especially so in the summer months. I also think the regions produce wines that complement each other. They tend to follow one another nicely and these two in particular should deliver a bell pepper nose and an earthy, herbal palate. Why wouldn't I want these served at my birthday dinner?

WHY I'M NOT SICK OF BLOGGING

Not anymore anyway. Timing has a lot to do with it. Here's what I mean: My job promotion in April brought with it a new challenge: start a blog on Information Technology. After a couple of months, it finally was launched yesterday, perhaps my most essential birthday present this year.

Using Word Press to create the blog was a great experience. It is certainly a much more powerful tool than Blogger. At the moment, my employer doesn't entirely endorse blog technology, or at least many typical aspects of it, and certainly not as an official communication medium. So we had to heavily customize the templates and settings that the WP software provided. The end result may look nothing like a true blog. But to me, it still felt like I was in blog overdrive, especially with WBW happening simultaneously here on the wineblog. In the end, this month has amounted to burnout. But I can say now that July looks different. (Joe and Art's encouraging comments also helped me realize this.)

***

Right, so it's my birthday and it's a Summer Friday off for me. What do I do? I go to le Fromentier for my favourite pastry in all of Montreal, the Agrumier (shown at the centre of the image at right). After a humid spell, le Fromentier's pastries are back at the top of their game, and these orange and licorice danishes, which are only made on weekends, rock my world.

These danishes are not too sweet. Almost savoury. This is a up-and-coming trend in pastry-making, as reported in the New York Times, and corroborated by my sister, who recently landed an apprentice position at Olson Foods + Bakery, one of the projects of pastry chef Anna Olson.

So I trek out to the bakery. I take my camera too because I'm feeling festive, and most of all, because I love how le Fromentier writes the date on their chalkboard. It's one of the first things you see when you walk into their sprawling bakery, and I could already envision "22 juin" in lovely penmanship (chalkmenship?) welcoming me to the store. A Kodak moment.

Fantasy met reality when I stumbled in, wet from a birthday sprinkle (not even the kind you might get on a birthday cake) and stupefied to find that the date on the board was still 21 juin. The shop had been open for an hour, so if the date wasn't changed by now, you had to figure that the date wasn't going to change until tomorrow. My birthday was not happening at le Fromentier.

I let a few people who were behind me in line go ahead of me but then it finally struck me that prolonging my queuing was not going to do anything. I took a second to snap some pictures of all the fresh pastries (might as well, since I brought my camera) and walked up to the man behind the counter to order.

"Tourist or spy?" he asked, in French.

Not being too fluent in French, all I could understand was that this conversation was starting out on a topic totally unrelated to danishes.

"J'ai pas compris," I stammered. Another baker was now in attendance, as all the other customers had exited the store.

He went on to say that he was talking about my picture-taking. Ha ha, I got it.

And then without missing beat, I launched into my best French in years. I detailed how I got gentle reassurance, joy and the general feeling that all was right in the world from seeing the date scrawled on the chalkboard each morning I entered the shop. In no uncertain terms, I explained that my hopes and dreams were crushed by the errant date, and that today, of all days, they had made a terrible terrible mistake, because it was June 22, which was my birthday, and now in a cruel twist of fate I was facing no record of it ever occurring. And I continued: Suddenly, I said, today was just any old day to me, but wetter.

Indeed, I was soaked, and sorry for myself too, but I figured if they didn't really want to know why I came in with a camera, they wouldn't have brought it up. And besides, I thought, maybe now we'll see some action with that derelict chalkboard. My eyes darted to the brush dangling from the chalkboard and then back to them.

After a pause, they tried excusing themselves.

I nodded along but only I knew it was in sarcasm. I thought to myself: Yes, of course you've been much too busy to see to updating yesterday's date. Yes, of course there are other things that need to be taken care of first. (Sure enough, they were all lies. The other baker finally admitted to writing 21 juin because he thought it actually was 21 juin, not 22 juin, which is my birthday, though I had to assure him of this twice more).

And finally the chalk was out the box. I pointed to the Agrumiers I wanted but then they pointed to another, a Basque. It was a chocolate one that looked like a personal-sized birthday cake, kind of like a cupcake only flatter. It was their birthday gift to me.

But then there was more. An aborted attempt to sing Happy Birthday with the butcher at the counter behind me; a tempting suggestion to sit in the corner by the door and receive the kisses of the customers that passed; and a fancy redesign of the corrected date on the chalkboard customized to include my name.

I love le Fromentier.

***

In a strange celebration of my birthday, the most recent Vintages report this week from Natalie MacLean of Nat Decants encapsulates my explicit praise of Hillebrand's Showcase Cab Franc 2000 -- one of my most beloved Canadian wines. I can't believe Nat didn't bother to invite me to help her finish the bottle. Or even tell me. I found out about it later when I stumbled across her dregs.

Compare the reviews folks, and then tell me where you heard it from first. Hers and mine.

And let me be the first to tell you: there are only 35 bottles of this stuff left, 'cause I'm getting two for my birthday.

Once again, googling leads to giggling... Click this image and take a long lingering look at the search engine suggestions.



Doh! Apart from some sponsored links, Google says Doktor Weingolb is your first stop on the Internet when you need to get your Whitney Houston crack photo fix. And proudly so!

Or no. Not really at all. What's Google thinking? It's not the first time I've asked. Time to get answers.

If you sometimes ponder the appropriateness of Google search results, then read this Sunday Business article called Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine which recently appeared in the New York Times. It's interesting, if only for the idea that Google is the search engine leader of pack because it knows how to translate too brief, too vague or mistyped queries into exactly the online information that its users want.

For example, a search term like "apple" is not the same as "Apple", according to the sociolinguists at Google. Cracking good work but maybe it's not all that it's cracked up to be.

Someone looking for crack photos featuring Whitney Houston is offered my wine photos from NoHo where I chose to crack open a bottle of wine. :(

I figure I can sell a good Viognier to anyone anyday yet I think this amounts to one blog visitor who's very displeased with my referral.

Further reading: Google PageRank: What Do We Know About It?, Smashing Magazine

Election days have never been good days here at Weingolb. Blog traffic reaches notoriously low levels when office workers are forced by employment regulations to take extra time out of office so they can vote.

This is an undeniable reality. Take a look at the web traffic for this site on Tuesday, November 7, 2006, the date of the last U.S. general election. Also see the tally from the Quebec provincial election yesterday, Monday, March 26, 2007.


The Tuesday election makes my weekly visits graph look like someone took a bite out of it; the Monday election flatlines the chart to start the week with the same number of visits as a typically slow Sunday (Monday is usually among the biggest traffic days, just compare it with the one from the previous week).

At this point, I guess I should try to say something perceptive about today's election results, since it's current and since the only method by which my wino friends and I can get wine is through the state.

Well, let me say this: Election days ain't that great for the candidates either. Take a look at new minority government leader Liberal Jean Charest and then take a look at his official National Assembly opposition Mario Dumont of the Action Démocratique du Québec (ADQ). Ouch. Who voted for these two?



In clearer-minded days, Dumont had some sobering things to say about the state of the Société des alcools du Québec. The provincial liquor monopoly faced a scandal last year and I think the ADQ got more than a negligible amount of votes from it. Watch a segment from his interview (in French) broadcast on Tout le monde en parle.



Maybe if the election actually happened at this time last year, I'd be captivated. But I'm not. Instead I'm totally disinterested because I've discovered La Braccesca. Fattoria La Braccesca Vino Nobile di Montepulciano 2001, to be exact. Take a look, folks: La Braccesca here at the SAQ and La Braccesca there at the LCBO. Believe it. Last Thursday, Vin Québec revealed that this $20 wine at SAQ is some $10 cheaper than at Ontario's LCBO.

They say a minority government hasn't happened in 150 years in this province. I'm here to tell you that kind of the SAQ bargain is more than a minor occurrence. It's without precedence. It's never happened!

Today I received the two greatest comments to this blog ever. Or at least I'm very tempted to think they are the greatest. They came this afternoon about an hour apart from each other and glommed on to the post previous to this like a bear cub to mama Panda bear. One from a total stranger, one from a fellow blogger whom I've met only in cyberspace.

First off, it pains me to think that Weingolb could be going away.

That would mean no more comments like LindaS's. She provided an amazing wine tip and did so only because she stumbled upon this blog when researching her nifty little tip online. The thoughtful stranger who in her endeavours reveals kindness and a hidden kinship.

And no more words from Neil of Brooklynguyloveswine.blogspot.com who makes cyberspace seem a lot more human that it could possibly pretend to be. Neil, thanks for taking the time to write! It's always nice to be noticed. (And some folks like Neil seem to know that it's even nicer to reach out when you've NOT been noticed.)

So let me say that these two comments were so rewarding that, yes, here am I posting what feels like the first real post in much too long. So this is a bit of a thank-you, dear commenters. And an apology too. I should explain (and for some reason I need to turn this into a game).

The reason this blog has been quiet on the new entries is because I have been tremendously busy. What have I been up to?

1. I won the lottery.


2. I earned a major promotion.


3. I accepted a regular column on another blog.


4. I set off fire alarms with each attempt to select "Publish Post".


5. I pulled the guts out of my iBook; then formatted my hard drive, just for fun.


6. I had a massive freakout session when Safari suddenly stopped uploading my files to Blogger.


7. I panicked when "statistics for visitors from the last 16629 minutes" were not yet available on my site meter.


8. I drank two entire bottles of dep wine that I picked up from a gas station and then decided to take a long LONG look in the mirror.

Details (including real wine reviews!) tomorrow and this weekend.

Going from bad to worse... much much worse

The jury still out on how this blog will recover but the diagnosis is now known, at least for the most part.

The first blow happened in the early hours Saturday morning, after the folks at Site Meter had packed it up and left up for the weekend. One of their servers, namely "sm1" (i.e. the one that this and many other blogs use to view their web traffic) went completely haywire.

Being the Internet peek-a-boo geek that I am, it was only a few hours after the incident occurred that I developed a fairly good idea of how seriously bad things were. What I mean is basically this:

Awake, 7 am...
1. Click bookmark for Weingolb site meter, as part of usual morning routine
2. Wait approx. 30 seconds (odd, that)
3. Read an unfortunate message, obviously meant for administrators at Site Meter, that involves error 'ASP 0113' wherein a script apparentally times out
4. Refresh
5. Repeat steps 1 to 4 in vain

Okay, I get the message that this ain't gonna work. My visitor logs will have to exist without my explicit awareness, causing me to go off and ponder whether the tree that falls in a forest when no one is around makes a sound . . . Fed up with that ruse I choose to restart my computer, just for kicks. It could work, couldn't it?

And so I power down and watch the last signs of life flicker from my computer. Little do I know that these final flashes and whirs are indeed the last ones for a very long time, possibly forever. (Just for kicks -- more like getting kicked while you're down.)

It's my hard disk. It's now in the shop (along with the rest of my iBook) being tinkered with and I'm expecting the worst.

No site meter. No site. Or at least no site for me. I can tell my blog still exists though. I may not be able to visit it myself but I've gotten comments over the weekend. This means I know it exists. And, well, of course there's the fact that I've actually posted this entry to my blog by borrowing a friend's laptop. Yup, the Internet is still there. I'm just reaching out and touching it in a different way. During lunchhours at work. Other unnamed stolen moments, like this one ;)

But as many of you may know, I mainly post from notes recorded over the previous month. My drafts, tasting notes, photos and the like that I have been working on are suddenly gone. This combined with the fact that my friend has a Windows laptop makes me less than keen on posting interim entries. Not having a site meter in place pretty much seals the deal. What can I say?

So stay tuned for updates, folks! I do hope that they are coming soon. In the meantime, I suggest you direct your attention to Midnight Poutine, which is what I will be doing over the next couple of days.

Having your own website on a holiday is giant trap of tackiness. On Valentine's Day it's the kiss of death, especially for blogs, and above all for wineblogs. Wine is perceived to be romantic.

If Google slips into their masthead a chocolate-covered strawberry that cleverly looks like a "g" and Yahoo! depicts a little love story with raining hearts on their logo, then of course a wineblog would want to at least feature a special post, if not totally customize Blogger's template to shades of pink and red.

So what do I do? Last February 14 I sent a valentine to an inanimate object. This year is winding up to be no better since I am about to do an exposé on collective nouns falling in love with one another. It's state-run corporation love!

Pictured above are the current ad campaigns of the LCBO (Liquor Control Board of Ontario) and the SAQ (Société des Alcools du Québec). First some background for those who don't know: These two wine monopolies cut a line that divides a English province from a French one. Like the Capulets and the Montagues, they don't mix well. If you've ever tried returning to the LCBO tainted wine you bought at the SAQ you know this. They'll shake their fists at you and growl that you should go back to where you came from. You'd think that they were mortal enemies.

But what to make of these pictures then? Both trumpet the arrival of South American wine; both celebrate the fact that love is the air. Well why not? Chilean and Argentinian wines are typically released at this time of the year. And it is Valentine's Day too, isn't it? Add that to the fact that we all know Latin Americans tango at the drop of hat (I don't think they stop tangoing on February 14 at all, except to eat and to watch Evita). Put all this together and -- whoomp, there it is! -- the SAQ and LCBO are in lovey-dovey lockstep, casting curious glances at each other like it's the first night of instructional ballroom dancing at the Gatineau community centre. They have so much in common it's evitable that they will fall hopelessy and irrevocably in love, and... um... merge.

Until then (but not for long) the two corporations continue to operate separately. The SAQ's worldly and exotic promotion runs through the weekend. The discounts during the LCBO's Latin Fever last a bit longer -- until February 24. Click on the tangoing twosomes at top for details.

I finally got around to seeing the latest film by Michel Gondry, who is one of my favourite directors. He did Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and a pile of music videos. Really good music videos. Anyway the movie is not about wine in any way, nor is it about food. It's a bit about Brooklyn, but mostly about hip hop and Dave Chappelle. It is of course, Dave Chappelle's Block Party.

I think this means that yet again Gondry has had to play second fiddle in a major motion picture that he's directed. In ESSM, he was upstaged by writer/producer Charlie Kaufman; in DCBP, he is eclipsed by subject/star Dave Chappelle.

In any case, I chose to see this movie on the weekend because I still have New York on my mind. Gondry did a good job making me fall back in love with Brooklyn, which I reluctantly left on January 2, not having come close to seeing the many faces that the borough proudly shows off.

One face, for example, is Clinton Hill, which I had never even heard about before. In the film, the Clinton Hill district -- with its landmark and recently-in-the-news house called Broken Angel -- was the backdrop for the block party. It surely will be the next neighbourhood on my list of places to visit (and the block party site will be easier to locate than the corner outside Paris that Gondry previously inspired me seek out.)

I REPEAT: THIS IS NOT ABOUT WINE

Really no part of this post has anything to do with wine. This, despite the fact that you are reading a wine blog.

"You're a wine guy," said the man who operates my favourite (as-yet-unlicensed) café. He is quizzical, desperate for an answer when he sees me. "Why you keep blogging about our coffee?"

He asks a good question. Do I know the answer?

"Wine in the evening and coffee in the morning..." I offer him as an explanation.

But that is not it. Is it because you can take tasting notes on both coffee and wine? No, that's not really it either... Is it because there's nothing like following a wonderful wine-filled meal with a good espresso!? No again. Oh, for chrissakes, because it's all snobism! Ahem, no...

I should've just told my coffeeman that I tweaked it. That would be the truth. And to anybody who asks why they're are reading about Brooklyn and coffee in a wineblog: I tweaked it. Yes, I TWEAKED IT!

Tweaking your blog in all its glory was described by David Carr yesterday in his column in the New York Times. NYT blogger Eric Asimov then revisited those themes on his blog. Emails have been sent out all over because of Carr's column and that's because he speaks the truth. Check it out.

Right after I tell you more about Brooklyn...

Initially, I was inspired forced to explore Brooklyn coffee once I realized I was leaving behind my favourite café in Montreal and I would need a replacement. My café, called Caffè ArtJava, has an honourable artisanal approach and -- so my sources had told me -- the approach is mirrored in several coffeehouses in Greenpoint and Williamsburg as part of a burgeoning Seattle-like coffee scene. Translaton: The coffee that has spoiled me and that calls out for me continuously is only an L train away.

First we hit Greenpoint's Café Grumpy, but we could not stay. Next time, Grumpy -- I promise! (Maybe at your new Chelsea location.)

Then we breezed into Williamsburg and the Oslo Coffee Company. Hello! The best coffee in New York! I worship their Odin coffee blend which they use for all their espresso-based drinks. It is light and nutty, with that edge of orange rind flavour I love. It's so different from my darker, more chocolaty hometown espresso at ArtJava, but I loved it without making an effort to compare. It's like making a wino choose between a top Bordeaux and a top Brunello. You simply love them both. Down the hatch, then.

Since August, Oslo has been running another location on Bedford Avenue, not too far from its original location on Roebling Street. This we found out by literally stumbling across it. The Bedford shop does not have a phone. The Oslo people do not have a web site. The emphasis is obviously on pleasing whoever walks in their door. They are very friendly. The photo at top is of their small dining area which shows off their openness to neighbourhood.

After that we circled. I wanted to walk by Gimme Coffee! on Lorimer Street (off Grand Avenue), if only to complete the winning trifecta of macchiato-makers. Gimme, as well as being a coffeeshop chain, is the name of an Ithaca-based coffee brand. That meant this Gimme Coffee! coffeeshop possessed the same beans that went into my favourite ArtJava macchiatos -- Gimme Coffee!'s Leftist blend (or Gauchiste, if you're drinking it in Quebec). So in the end this was a detour that required no armtwisting. We got there and it tasted like home, but in a smaller paper cup, as the photo at left shows. My macchiato even looked like home, with its attention to latte art and rich roasted tones.

It was no match for Anthony at ArtJava but it still convinced me that it always is a bit of a comedown when you have to say to Brooklyn.

I never knew how much I would fall in love with the borough.

It's great to see fellow wine bloggers Water into Wino and The Caveman back online and posting once again. These guys have been busy doing some amazing non-blog-related things over the last few months this summer. Now, simultaneously, they are back at it, and I for one am happy to see it.

Of all my peers, these two bloggers mean a lot to me. Water into Wino launched his site at exactly the same time I created Weingolb and we both started out with a penchant for Cabernet Franc wines, an eye for Niagara wines and a prolific output. That was back in December 2005. Though we've gone off in different directions (he's been hunting funnel clouds while I've decided to stay at home and eat more) I still consider a kinship there. Guess I better get his link back in the sidebar now that he's back from Kansas!

The Caveman has such an deep and established repertoire in wine that I wouldn't try to compare myself to him. He is a seasoned sommelier, a keen import specialist, and from the looks of it, an awesome cook. Now he's a going to be a wine journalist with a regular wine column touting massive distribution. But like me, he is from the Montreal area and surrounded by the same state-run catalog that I am. So I feel a strong kinship with him too. When he did a rundown of the best rosés at the SAQ earlier this year, I was hooked on every word. I look forward to reading his column in the Gazette.

All that aside, the real reason you should read these blogs is because they are down-to-earth, passionate and written with enthusiasm and care.

Weingolb is too young to die; too tedious to keep soldiering on without a tiresome play-by-play. So here is the most boring blog post ever. [It's so boring, I fell asleep before I could finish uploading it on Friday.]

Ready?

This is the 100th post on Doktor Weingolb, and a few days ago this site saw for the very first time 100+ visitors within 24 hours.

But wait! There's more...

The debut appearance by Weingolb on Alawine's 100 Top Wine Blog Rankings has also just been announced. Weingolb is number 43! (See clickable image.)

And that's not all. Also during this past week, I've hosted visitor 3000 and now today I'm acknowledging Weingolb's five-month anniversary! December 1, 2005 seems like just yesterday. Yeah! I'm hosting, or whatever it is they say on Saturday Night Live.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge receiving the 100th response to this blog. The comments, emails, and hate letters have at long last tallied up to 100. Here's hoping I don't have to wait as long for the next hundred.

So it's a sudden surge of benchmarks here at Doktor Weingolb. I found the succession of events so stupefyingly uninteresting that I had to publish them. Sometimes this stuff is too good to keep to yourself.

Yesterday I counted down the final minutes of winter. Normally, I am not someone who engages in any kind of rite of spring. But for me, this year's vernal equinox marked more than just a seasonal observance. I've made it through the entire season without one single cold or winter flu!

I keep records on wine, not on sniffles, however this streak of good luck makes me want to crunch numbers. I can say that if ever there was a time for me to be bedridden it would have been the winter of 2005/06. All my coworkers suffered immensely with something, in many cases the "worst most persistent" cold in their adult lives. I thank them for staying home when their contagion was at a peak. Beyond that, I seemed to have developed a knack for interpreting pre-sneeze body language, honed skills towards impeccable hand-washing, and oh yeah, had a drink every day.

Yes, a drink a day. Why not? After all, this is a wine blog here. I didn't set out to string together day-after-day of wine consumption at the time I started this blog last year. It just sort of happened. I guess this blog has made me realize a personal best in terms of number of glasses of wine drunk (whether it has met its potential in terms of worthwhile wine writing, valuable tasting notes and useful cellar records, I leave that to the reader to decide).

My friend Johanna calls all of my wine-drinking something else: Self-taught immunity. She suspects that my cold-free winter has something to do with the daily doses of wine I've been administering myself. The alcohol in wine is enough to kill off a lot of pesky germs, or something like that. Could be true I suppose. In the end, I'm just glad that a sore throat or stuffed up nose -- two of the worst enemies of civilized wine drinking -- didn't interfere with my duties or (what-has-turned-into) my everyday enjoyment of wine.

Okay, so with that, I now leave you and the lab coats to ponder over my personal stats.

Wine has been coursing through my blood for:

• 121 consecutive days
  
  That's 17 weeks, more than an entire season, or exactly 4 months to the day as of yesterday (Hey Hope Springs Eternal! Happy fourth-month anniversary to me!)



• 82 blog entries
  
  That's 885 paragraphs 37,000 words, or 174,207 characters -- 211,368 characters if you count the spaces!



• Roughly ten Friday night round robin tournaments at Tomlinson Fieldhouse

Follow the bouncing hog: It's Portuguese week.

My last two posts have gone from wine cops to wild pigs. Today we arrive at a boar of another kind. The Portuguese piggie. Which is kind of what I am. With a battery of Portuguese red wines -- a self-confessed personal favourite of mine -- on sale throughout the province through the weekend, I simply have to make this announcement. Yes, this week will be a theme week. I can't help but hone in on the unique grape-cultivating country that is Portugal.

In Portugal, wines, as well as fortified wines, such as the renowned Port wine, are produced and then shipped all around the world. Just last night, wine expert Francois Chartrier was featured on Radio-Canada's Tout le monde en parle (speaking of going around the world), where he proclaimed to wine consumers everywhere the new age of the Portuguese red. Like him, I love the stuff: Often a bottle priced mid-range will leave you thinking that you're drinking wine of a considerably higher price. And now until Sunday March 5, a selection of these choice products are even less expensive than their already low list price. Some of the deals are advertised in this flyer.

So for those who have an interest in all things Iberian, stick around these pages for the next five days.