Took a 6 km bicycle ride along the coast. Roasting hot but a nice breeze cooled things down a bit. The coast is rugged and rocky with crashing waves sending up a big spray. About 2 kms from the hotel there is a rather run-down amusement park that looks like something from a Flintstones cartoon. It is called Il Mundo del Fantasia. Met a couple of young Cuban boys who looked in a state of disrepair like the amusement park. Ripped jeans and no shirts and smoking cigarettes. I was asked for clothes. I later heard from a guest at the hotel they had taken two suitcases of clothes to the amusement park and fights erupted amongst families scrabbling for the clothes. No thank you just requests for the clothes off their backs! Another couple heard this story and simply gave clothes to the nurse on duty at the hotel to distribute as she saw fit. The beach at the amusement park was littered with rubbish including construction debris. Not a nice memory of Cuba and of course the security guard at the hotel carrying a baseball bat.
RKS Wine: Cabriz Colheita Selecionada 2019 from the Dão in Portugal
The Cabriz Colheita Selecionada 2019 breezes in at $14.95 a welcome price point in these inflationary times. I contemplate with some trepidation what it might cost next year.
It is a blend of 40% Alfrocheiro Preto, 40% Tinta Roriz and 20% Touriga Nacional and was aged in French oak for 6 months.
On the nose some bright raspberry shimmers upwards leaving behind a solid base of blackberry and black cherry. On the palate an easy drinking wine with some gentle tannins creating a bit of a dusty wine. It is a solid wine with a firmness that best suits food. I recall my last media trip to the Dão enjoying this wine in Viseu accompanied by a few slices of grilled tomahawk steak. Sublime.
Drink now or hold until the end of 2023.
(Cabriz Colheita Selecionada 2019, DOC Dão, Global Wines, Carregal do Sal, Portugal, $14.95, Liquor Control Board of Ontario # 247973, 750 mL, 13%, RKS Wine Rating 88/100).
RKS Quote of the Day: “Confessions of a Shopaholic”
“That moment. That instant when your fingers curl round the handles of a shiny, uncreased bag-and all the gorgeous new things inside it become yours. What’s it like? It’s like going hungry for days, then cramming your mouth full of warm buttered toast. It’s like waking up and realizing it’s the weekend. It’s like the better moments of sex. Everything else is blocked out of your mind. It’s pure, selfish pleasure. “
Sophie Kinsella “Confessions of a Shopaholic”, 2001 Dell Publishing
“Travels to a Different Time ” : Santiago de Cuba: July 1996: The Pudge Boys from Hamburg
There are two rather pudgy boys from Hamburg that are staying at the hotel. Both are called Ollie. They rise late and soon after begin consuming vat quantities of Mayabe beer until they retire at 2 a.m. Both are students at the University of Hamburg and both have ponytails. They enjoy heavy metal and punk music. They are pool rats and never set foot in the ocean. I never see them at the dining room. Could they be surviving on beer alone? One night at the disco the pudge boys were trying to fondle some girls without any success so back to the pool they went to down Heineken’s they had bought at Hamburg Duty Free and swilled back many a bottle listening to Metallica. They said if you do not like Metallica you are stupid and right wing and probably work for an insurance company or a bank. They love their soccer team and watch them drinking a lagoon of beer.
RKS Quote of the Day: “Little Fires Everywhere”: Celeste Ng
“All her life she had learned that passion, like fire, was a dangerous thing. It so easily went out of control. It scaled walls and jumped over trenches. Sparks leapt like fleas and spread as rapidly: a breeze could carry embers for miles. Better to control that spark and pass it carefully from one generation to the next, like an Olympic torch. Or, perhaps, to tend it carefully like an eternal flame: a reminder of light and goodness that would never-could never-set anything ablaze. Carefully controlled. Domesticated. Happy in captivity. The key, she thought. Was to avoid conflagration. “
Celeste Ng “ Little Fires Everywhere” : Penguin Press 2017
RKS Wine: Fighting in the Trenches for Gewürztraminer
Wine drinkers aren’t exactly running to the shelves snapping up the latest Gewürztraminer releases. I have given up trying to figure out why other than noting it has characteristics and likes to make a statement. It simply may frighten off those so comfortable with Ontario Riesling and Chardonnay. So if you don’t appreciate a heavier on the taste and body wine so be it. But at least give it a try or two and figure out why you don’t connect with it. Or discover that you like it.
I remember having a glass of Cave Spring Gewürztraminer on their patio restaurant on a sunny fall day and was glad I made the choice as it suited a cheese plate and some herbed fries to the tee. Or was it the beautiful fall day that accompanied it so well?
So I saw it in the June 18th Vintages release and wanted to verify its goodness.
The wine has a dark gold colour so dark it strikes me as a late harvest Gewurtz. Peach, apricot, mango and Romanian honey on the nose. On the palate this may qualify for a full-bodied monster. Its flavours are not on its sleeve for sure instead buried deep in the wine. There is apricot, Greaves’s peach jam, mango nectar and a hot and spicy lingering finish. A spicy curry would wrap its loving arms around this beauty. A wine that walks down the street with swagger but get to know its soul it has a quiet and fierce determination to win you over.
(Cave Spring Estate Gewürztraminer 2019, VQA Beamsville Bench, Cave Spring Vineyard, Jordan, Ontario, $19.95, Liquor Control Board of Ontario # 302059, 750 mL, 14.5%, RKS Wine Rating 91/100).
“Travels to a Different Time” : Santiago de Cuba: July 1996: How About the Food? The Ignoramus With The Baseball Cap
The property I am staying at is managed by Canadian Hotel company Delta Hotels. As I understand Cuba a good part of the food is brought in from Canada. It was Canadians that gave a shot in the arm to tourism here. For example if you look at the juice dispenser the juice is from a company in Scarborough which is a suburb of Toronto. The food is simply prepared and tasty. There is not a huge selection but given the lack of meat and many foods available to Cubans I am content to be low key. The average Cuban hardly has any meat to eat. There is usually a good selection of fresh tropical fruit for breakfast and the papaya and mangoes are sweet and in season. There are grapefruits and oranges but they are not particularly sweet. The breakfasts have a Canadian edge to them with French toast, pancakes and made in front of you omelettes. The Cuban coffee is excellent but the milk rather ruins it.
There is a fish dish for both lunch and dinner.
Lunch is varied with a salad bar and copious amounts of fresh fruit. On Tuesday there was pasta with cream sauce, pork in tomato sauce and rice and beans. On Monday there were some burgers with fries.
There is a juice bar with a dispenser that makes a huge clackety noise every time juice is dispensed. The beer is light and fizzy which in this climate is appreciated. There is usually ice cream and meringue desserts. The cakes aren’t bad but there is an obsession with pink icing.
I saw a few turkeys on the tennis court one morning. There was roast turkey for dinner! I would call the cooking home style and I have no complaints. Especially since I hear the property next door too often serves hot dogs in tomato sauce.
What I find annoying in the dining room is not the food but a rather sluggish man with his overly fleshed girlfriend always grousing about the damn food. And he wears his baseball hat for every meal. How crude and ill mannered. I heard him at the airport in Toronto when we arrived saying how they were going to go to McDonald’s and get some “real food”. Idiots like that embarrass me. I hope the Cubans ignore that ignoramus. Cuba is a super cheap destination which you might say attracts a certain type of tourist.
On the Ledge Part 6: The Smell of Money: Wine Medals and the Big Wine Drinker Swindle!
As a former East German spy dedicated to the advancement of the proletarian revolution that has begun to fail miserably I have tasted the profits “Truth in the Vine” have been sending our way. Swindle wine drinkers for profit in the ratings game was a huge incentive to maximize profitability through medal awarding events. A winery that realizes a 90-point rating has a Willy Wonka ticket to the grand sweepstakes but gold and silver medals at a wine “competition” is even more profitable. Charge an entry fee, a fee for tables to taste wine, a set-up fee, a dismantling fee, a fee for labels to attach the winners is a gold mine. The stupid wine drinking public can be manipulated so easily without even thinking they have been duped. The small producers can’t afford our exorbitant fees. When I say our fees, we set up numerous benevolent and noble companies to sponsor these competitions! Of course we didn’t advertise every winery wins a medal. And the poor judges trying far too many wines with their burnt-out palates were dupes. These judges were trying at times over a hundred wines a day. My professor at the Karl Marx University in Dresden had studied the efficacy of wine competition judges and opined that a professional taster was only effective with 46 wines in a day punctuated by breaks including full lunches and dinners. To hell with that as when you taste the blood of profit you want more and more. The wine judges were dupes. The public were dupes. Our bank accounts swelled and the public lapped it up as did the Liquor Discontrol Board of Ontario. Sell. Sell. Money. Money. There are thousands of suckers born every minute!
“Travels to a Different Time ” : 20July1996: Santiago de Cuba: Lounge Lizard Perverts and Pastors Against the Blockade
On the way to Santiago de Cuba at Toronto Pearson Airport at 11:15 a.m. there are a few scary Cuban bound passengers who are sleazy looking. Quite frankly they look like greasy little perverts up to no good. Computer nerds with criminal intent. I have a very bad vibe these are pedophiles looking for action in Cuba. One guy has sheer evil in his eyes and looks like a fat walrus and the other like a computer nerd with a plastic liner in his shirt pocket full of pens and pencils. They stand out amongst all the passengers. They are guzzled out already dreaming of cheap Cuban rum.
On a decrepit Royal Airlines Boeing 727 that should have been retired in the Nevada desert years ago. Cheap sparkling wine erroneously and most likely intentionally called Champagne. Lunch of carrot salad, chicken coq au vin with industrial chocolate cake for desert and liqueurs. The pervert behind me reeked of tobacco and booze. At Santiago de Cuba the customs officials were slow as molasses. Intentional harassment ? It didn’t help we were behind a group on our plane from the United States “Pastors Against the Blockade”. The pervert lounge lizards were lapping up the beers on the bus to the hotel. Arrived in the middle of the night. The road was full of potholes. The Mexican room shuffle became the Cuban room shuffle which finally ended with a room with an ocean view. They kept the dining room open for us so it was some beef over rice. Hot as blazes.
RKS Wines: Memories of Lyon
They say there is nothing like travel to create a special relationship with wine. I recall eating in an astounding tiny Basque seafood restaurant in a small Spanish town of Hondarribia (right across from France) called Hermanad de Pescadores. We ended up in this simple restaurant as my wife had walked by it and said the smells coming from the kitchen reminded her of her grandmother’s cooking in Samos Greece. My goodness the halibut was the best I have ever had in a simple but flavourful broth. It was next to us that we met T a diamond merchant and I his aristocratic French wife. We ended up eating with them the next evening over another astounding seafood meal at Hermandad. I had written a review of the restaurant which was exemplary and they had it translated and placed outside their restaurant. We keep in touch with T and I and a few years just before COVID slammed France we ate in a sushi restaurant in Lyon with T and I. We had a Côtes de Gascogne with our sushi and T hit the nail on the head with the wine selection. So recently I spotted a Côtes de Gascogne and nabbed it fuelled by memories of the Lyon sushi.
The wine is a Domaine de Ménard Cuvée Marine 2020. It is a blend of 60% Colombard, 20% Sauvignon Blanc and 20% Gros Manseng with an unusually low 11% alcohol content.
Colombard was not exactly a grape with distinction in California where it was a mainstay of cheap jug wine, but in the Côtes de Gascogne it is particularly effective in contributing peach and nectarine fruit and citrus lemon perfume to wines.
How does it fare in this Ménard wine? Fabulously! It is almost as if it has restored my faith in white wine with so much acidic and tasteless gallons of it floating around. On the nose apricot, peach with lesser notes of tangerine and mango. On the palate it fails to daunt with hyperactive acidity instead a gorgeous tropical composition. It is somewhat like a Gewurztraminer with a muzzle on its snout. At 8 grams of residual sugar per litre it is not floundering in a bone-dry casket.
It certainly can handle seafood but it should have a succulent and low-keyed broth like at Hermanos de Pescadores. I am not sure that will be so easy considering the Halibut was caught in the night and prepared hours later. Perhaps we can hope in Canada for some simply prepared Fogo Island Handline Caught Cod from Newfoundland.
Putting aside fish this will pair nicely with Thai and Vietnamese food with lots of noodles and broth.
The wine sips beautifully and pairs very well with the food suggested. Drink by the end of 2023. Not meant for ageing. It’s flying high right now!
(Domaine de Ménard Cuvée Marine 2020, IGP des Côtes de Gascogne, Menard, Gondrin, France, $14.95, Liquor Control Board of Ontario # 310201, 750 mL, 11%, RKS Wine Rating 94/100).
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