by Christina Waters | Apr 16, 2007 | Home, Wine |
Take a careful look at this label. Memorize it. Now go out and find one just like it and bring it home. This is your new best friend, oenologically-speaking. It is Bonny Doon Vineyards‘ 2004 Syrah Le Pousseur, loaded with meaty tones of spice, cassis, some indefinable berry and a top note of eucalyptus. Maybe bay leaves. Whatever. This is a wine to delve deeply into, or simply to enjoy while thumbing through your dog-eared copy of The Three Sigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Already this wine — another star from the intergalactic consciousness of wine auteur Randall Grahm — is ample and complex enough to match any rack of lamb, molecule for molecule. Given a few more years it will be able to enter any Rhône intensive in the northern hemisphere. Well under $20 but drinks like a whole lot more.
by Christina Waters | Apr 16, 2007 | Home, Wine |
Vitiphiliacs and Bonny Doon Vineyards wine club members gathered at the winery last Saturday, for a dinner of rustic elegance wrapped around some sensational wines. Convened by BD founder Randall Grahm, the dinner helped to introduce the latest oenologic from the irrepressible impresario du vin. Sure enough, the “David Bowie of wine” is reinventing his vintage dreamscape once again, only this time instead of a predictable expansion, Bonny Doon Vineyards is in the midst of a surgical down-sizing. Way down. Determined to return to the roots of his personal vision, Grahm is transitioning from mega-winery (450,000 cases last year), to a micro, hand-made, biodynamic, all-Santa Cruz Mountains estate facility. With the re-configuration of priorities, comes a new marketing strategist, Burke Owens, recently of Napa’s Copia, and former sommelier at Masa’s….But back to the dinner.
Randall explained to me over chilled Erbaluce di Caluso spumante and crisp baguettes topped with alderwood-smoked salmon that he was aggressively seeking new vineyard property in the Santa Cruz Mountains. And a renewed quest for terroir baby, terroir. And after years of making his reputation as a leading Rhône Ranger, thanks to BD’s wildly successful Syrah, Grenache, Mourvedre and Roussane blends, Grahm is once again slouching toward Burgundy. “I really feel that pinot noir is something I want to try in a new way.†So the focus is now intensified. (more…)
by Christina Waters | Apr 13, 2007 | Food |
Amish Gold, Amish Paste, Ananas Noir, Aunt Ruby’s German Green, Aunt Ruby’s Cherry, Azoychka, Barad’s Yellow, Basinga, Berkeley Tie Dye, Big Beef, Big Rainbow, Big White Pink Stripe, Black Cherry, Black Ethiopian, Black from Tula, Black Krim, Black Plum, Black Prince, Blondkopfchen, Bloody Butcher, Brandywine OTV, Brown’s Yellow Giant, Camalay, Caspian Pink, Cherokee Green, Cherokee Purple. Sound good? These are only some of the over 100 varieties of heirloom, exotic, hybrid and rare tomato seedlings on sale at Ben Lomond’s mighty Love Apple Farm, this weekend April 14 & 15. Proprietor Cynthia Sandberg, who grows biodynamic produce exclusively for the kitchen of acclaimed, Michelin-starred Manresa restaurant, has the greenest thumb for miles around.
Don’t miss this opportunity to purchase intriguing varieites, and to tour the grounds of Sandberg’s fertile acres. From 10am to 5pm – this weekend. For details, check the website, Love Apple Farm, 9299 Glen Arbor Road, Ben Lomond, CA.
(831) 588-3801
by Christina Waters | Apr 11, 2007 | Home |
Purists beware! I love this stuff even though it lacks the required shade of political correctness, the highest possible cacao content and the appropriate “save the world” branding. It’s just killer Swiss dark chocolate that comes in tiny plump squares filled with impossibly succulent chocolate truffle creaminess. Mouthfeel and then some. I have two of these after lunch and my IQ soars, I love everybody and I attack my mammoth workload with a positive (okay, at least not negative) attitude. Lindt Chocolate Truffle bar – under $3. Life-affirming chocolate. Ummmmm.
by Christina Waters | Apr 8, 2007 | Home, Movies |
It’s such a pleasure to watch Alfred Molina work — his powerful, expressive face can register sensuality (Diego Rivera in Frida), cunning (Cardinal Aringarosa in Da Vinci Code), and delicious evil (Dr. Ock in SpiderMan). So facile an actor is he that he almost (almost) makes The Hoax bearable, especially since his every small gesture wipes the floor with Richard Gere. Gere, the sequentially type-cast American gigolo, still can’t do much with those little, teeny, porcine eyes and waning hormonal swagger.
This is a big fat shame, since The Hoax — based upon the true lies of con-man Clifford Irving — requires that we sit through two hours of continuous Gere. Gere strutting. Gere with a Texas accent. Gere wearing tight, dyed-brown curls. Gere attempting humor. Gere gesturing in the general direction of subtle emotions he knows nothing about. Gere fails, however, to do much more than fill up what looks for all the world like a freshman effort from the UCLA film school. More’s the pity, since the socio-political environment of the early 1970s in which Irving cooked up his scheme to fake an autobiography of none other than clandestine billionaire Howard Hughes, froths with innuendo.
We’re on the very edge of the Watergate scandal, and Hughes has got some goods on Nixon. Enter Irving, a shallow narcissist who’s willing to compromise his sidekick and research go-fer Dick Susskind (Molino), as well as his long-suffering wife (played by a waddling, bewigged Marcia Gay Harden). Irving storms into McGraw-Hill and hands them forged documents (whipped up by himself) allegedly from Howard Hughes, authorizing Irving to write HH’s autobiography. McGraw-Hill falls for the trumped up document, sort of, and the hoax is on. In its day, the media hype around this scam was as big as the crumbling Nixon administration. And the story is still breath-taking – which is why this failed film is all the more irritating.
Gere couldn’t deliver a film with both hands and a Blackhawk helicopter. He groans, grunts, prances, yells the F-word for emphasis, slams a few doors and laughs his head off while driving in convertibles. Yeah, it’s that interesting and complex. What I really need to know is how somebody named Lasse Hallstrom got ahold of the financing to make this film. The attempts at screwball comedy, such as scenes in the McGraw-Hill editorial chambers when Gere and Molino twitch and squirm as they are almost revealed to be liars, just fall flat. The script is pathetic, as if written by extraterrestrials without a working knowledge of either human emotions or something resembling the English language.
Just when you thought Gere’s career was in the toilet, he surfaces here long enough to flush it all the way down the drain. Try to hold on to your memories of An Officer and a Gentleman. They are all that’s left of Gere. Molino, a splendid and versatile actor (who we can only speculate must have had some overdue house payments) will live to act another day. Meanwhile, the real hoax is on us!
