ANDERSONS CONN VALLEY 2007 PROLOGUE CABERNET SAUVIGNON

$23.99

So what happens when one of Napa's hottest red wine producers has leftovers after blending some of their greatest wines ever from the benchmark 2007 vintage? We wish they would have called us. But we guess we'll just have to be content with their Prologue, one of the finest values you'll ever see on a Cabernet from Napa. All the hallmark elegance, black fruits and Margaux-like florality associated with Conn Valley just with the volume turned down a touch and at half the price! Works for us. Remember, this is all estate juice, with the stuff that did 'make the cut' before this wine was produced garnering 94-100 points from Bob Parker himself. Just telling you, this is no-brainer city...

Buy Now From Winex

I often wonder about the first occasion that someone tries something...crazy. Like the first guy to bungee jump or skydive. The reward being surviving I guess. The Vietnamese have some pretty quirky ideas about beverages that fall into this arena. Here's the scenario I imagine.

It's a hot day. Most days are hot in Viet Nam. You've just found or maybe killed a big snake, like a cobra. Coincidentally you've got a huge dead scorpion your wife left in your bed and maybe a... lizard of some sort.

What to do? Oh, hey it's time to bottle the fermented concoction you and your neighbor have buried in the backyard. So you grab a couple of bottles and as you're filling them, Genius strikes! Why not put the dead snake, scorpion and lizard into the bottle with the "booze"? Ha! That'd be funny! OMG, then we can sell it to American tourists!! Brilliant.

Don't bother trying to bring a bottle back to the States. Seems you need a permit to import endangered species.

The taste? Oh, please be serious. It's dead things in cheap booze!

Chuc suc khoe!

(credit: RedtreeStudios.com)


Switching arms might be a good idea too. No sense in stressing one elbow.

Let's just try and get our heads around 45 million years. Unless you're nut case Creationist, and I use the description lovingly, any life more than 6 thousand years ago is made up. I don't worry about offending the nut cases as I'm sure they don't read my blog. They'd have to recognize too many scientific aspects of just wine making and that wouldn't be comfortable. Not to mention computers and printing! Eewww... science is hard. But I digress.

I love aged wine. Real fond of great beer too. Great OLD beer sounds even better but, 45 Million-years-old? Wow. But just a mere drop in the cosmic bucket of time. For reference, 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs went extinct. Varying theories, most likely climatic change either by nature or big rock hitting Earth. Any who, not everything croaked. Plenty of smaller creatures made it through the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event and yeast? Likely they didn't even notice.
So 20 million years into the future, things are hopping. At some point some sap from a local tree oozed out and some yeasties floating by, got stuck in it. (We used a pic of a bug as yeast is camera shy.) Between then and now, researcher Raul Cano cracked open a piece of amber (fossilized tree sap), found some really old yeast that looked familiar and thought, "Hey, that's yeast and you can make beer with yeast!" It took a number of years to convince someone to take his yeast for the beer ride, but Peter Hackett, a Northern California brewer he met skiing, took him up on the wacky idea. Push forward a couple of years and once again Mankind's curiosity and scientific know-how has created something wonderful... beer. Really old beer. Beer made from 45 million-year-old yeast that taste great! (no word on how filling...). Starting this fall FOSSIL FUELS BREWING will start selling it's wondrous creation at a pub near you.
(See Wired Magazine online for in-depth story.)

Alabama. What to do with this wacky cousin of ours. I guess it should come as no great surprise, (considering they have the 2nd worst stats on High School graduates, that top/bottom honor goes to Mississippi,) that some folks down there would consider a classic French poster from 1895 that was selling bicycles, to be pornographic.

Some numb-skull in their state bureaucracy decided this label is just too titillating for the public good, and has banned the wine. (Imagine what the word "titillating" must do for him.)

The good news? There's a place where the really ignorant can fit in without question. Now if we can just lure them all down to Alabama.

Maybe some real porno would do the trick?

Gallo and gang are sponsoring a "Sonoma Wine Country Weekend Sweepstakes."

Enter the Sonoma Wine Country Weekend Sweepstakes for your chance to win an unforgettable Sonoma experience featuring wines from MacMurray Ranch, Gallo Family Vineyards, Rancho Zabaco and Frei Brothers Reserve. http://www.sonomawinecountrysweeps.com/

Let's see September 4 to 6? Nothing on my calendar. I mention this only as if you do win, you might consider me as your getaway partner? No? How about a t-shirt?