Domaine de Villeneuve - Chateauneuf-du-Pape (2004)

Domaine de Villeneuve "Les Vieilles Vignes"
Chateauneuf-du-Pape (Appellation Chateauneuf-du-Pape contrôlée)
Domaine de Villeneuve, Route de Courthezon, Orange, France (2004)

Full strawberry nose on opening this bottle - divine! Full, robust, great legs, and great longevity. Complex layering of fruit, earth notes, and slight spice, this wine is definitely reflective of the price tag ($$).

We enjoyed it this evening with boeuf bourgignon, artichoke risotto, cheese, and salad.

I was saving this wine for a special occasion, and I am very glad I did. It was worth the wait, and the investment.

Coron- Beaujolais nouveau (2009)

Coron Père et Fils
Beaujolais nouveau
Nuits St-Georges (Côte d'Or), France (2009)

This year's Beaujolais nouveau was released yesterday, an event many have been anticipating for weeks... or in some cases, since the Beaujolais nouveau (2008) ran out last November.

This year's vintage is rich and red in colour. The signature Beaujolais nouveau trait of banana can be detected immediately, at first whiff. The wine is light and sparkly to the tongue, and as it rests light apple and ruby red fruits are detectable. In comparison, the 2009 has less banana, but more fruit than the 2008.

Quite enjoyable!

McWilliams - Cabernet Sauvignon (2006)

McWilliams
Cabernet Sauvignon
Hanwood Estate, South Eastern Australia, 2006

I found this wine to be lightweight throughout. I chose it to accompany a homemade chili, and it did not overwhelm nor did it get overwhelmed. Lots of blackcurrant, with a hint of vanilla and an easy oak finish.

Las Moras - Tannat (2006)

Las Moras Reserve
Tannat
San Juan, Argentina, 2006

It starts lightly, with lots of fruit, and eases into a sweet, silky, and woody, but slightly spicy finish.
A subtle but deep wine. Tannat is a new grape on the scene and I am enjoying discovering it more. In this wine, I loved the balance between woody and fruity.

Joie Rosé (2008)

Joie Farm
Rosé
Naramata, BC, 2008

A lovely, crisp, and refreshing rosé from the Naramata bench in British Columbia. This wine is well-balanced, not too acidic, with a clean fruit finish. Old-world stylings in the blending make it an easy and not too complex wine to pair.
One of my favorite wines this summer.

Château Aydie - Tannat (2005)

Château Aydie
Tannat
Vignobles Laplace, Madiran, France (2005)

Dry start that quickly evolves into a dark sensuous fruit. This Tannat has all the character and elegance of the grape, with the slight French zing. Best decanted and let to breathe for the best body.

Gabarda - Rosado Seco (2006)

Gabarda
Rosado Seco
Spain (2006)

Dry, crisp, and fruity rosado seco. Ruby red in colour, this rosado mixes the body of a red wine with the lightness and sparkle of a green wine. Pairs very well with salad, fruit, and cheese. Delightful chilled, less-so warm. Perfect for summer.

Brumont - Tannat-Merlot (2005)

Brumont
Tannat-Merlot
Vin de pays des côtes de Gascogne, France (2005)

Light, full-berried wine. Simple at first encounter, but mellow, warm, and smooth with each additional. The merlot adds much to the body and berry (cherry), but the Tannat, a grape local to the Gascogne region of France, keeps the wine feeling like smooth silk on a warm summer's eve.

Barefoot Cab-Sauv (2007)

Barefoot
Cabernet-Sauvignon
California (2007)

Lovely mellow and curvy wine. Gold-medal winner at the World Wine Competition (2007), this laid-back west-coast wine is presumptuous enough to challenge the European Cab-Sauv combinations, and come out neck-and-neck.

Rich and full bodied Cabernet combines with luscious berry to produce a very easy and pleasant wine to drink with many dishes.

Caracter - Argentina (2008)

Caracter
Chardonnay-Chenin
Argentina (2008)

A surprisingly delectable wine made of equal portions of Chardonnay and Chenin grapes. First impressions were of pear and crisp apple, followed by a hint of herb and tropical fruit.

Made in Mendoza region of Argentina, a region more well-known for its full bodied reds, this was a lovely summer delight.

It Has Been a Long Time

It has been a long time since I have posted... Thoughts of Randomness have been competing with the Business of Life...
en tout cas, here we are again, in modified form: Reviews of wines, food, and places to go and see will also find their way into these musings of mine - enjoy the journey!

Wedding Wear

You thought you had interesting wedding wear? Check out the latest from John Deere
http://www.cbc.ca/photogallery/_world.html?dataPath=/photogallery/world/gallery_20/xml/gallery_20.xml

A Must See Movie This Summer

Cape Town Gets Bizet
A film version of Carmen explores post-apartheid South Africa
By Richard Poplak
July 27, 2006

“Through surgery we must create order” reads an ominous 1976 South African governmental report on “matters relating to the coloured population group.” Four years later, due to the so-called Surgical Method, entire communities were forcibly removed from their homes and dumped on a piece of ground 30 kilometres from Cape Town, in a barren stretch called the Cape Flats. This place was given a Xhosa name: Khayelitsha, or “new home.” As township violence elsewhere in the country spiraled out of control, hundreds and thousands fled to the Flats, bringing their troubles with them. Shacks were built upon shacks; multicoloured corrugated iron structures bloomed from the hardscrabble streets. When the apartheid regime ended in 1994, the Flats was home to more than half a million people, most without basic services, almost all without hope. Khayelitsha is a scar upon the land, a legacy of the apartheid era that is still, 12 years later, a contusion that refuses to heal.

In the midst of this teeming, roiling mess, we find the film U-Carmen eKhayelitsha, the winner of the Golden Bear at the 2005 Berlin Film Festival. Director Mark Dornford-May and his Dimpho Di Kopane theatre company have wrenched Georges Bizet’s 19th-century opera staple from the safety of the concert hall and dumped it into the grit of a shantytown. For the uninitiated few, Bizet’s opera tells the tale of a fiery Spanish cigarette girl who ignites the male tinder around her to explosive effect. Brooding prison guard Jose, promised to another woman, is drawn to the titular anti-heroine. When he is passed over for a dashing matador, things take a slide towards the nasty.

Opera-to-film adaptation aficionados — a decidedly small niche — will find much to ponder in this production, not least of which is the omission of Bizet’s “greatest hit”: Toreador Song. Indeed, the film prompts the question: how much can you bend an opera before it breaks?

Dornford-May, a British ex-pat now based in the Cape, has long been an opera bender. In 2000, after cutting his teeth at the popular London-based Broomhill Opera, he was asked to start an all-black opera outfit in South Africa. The results have been, for the most part, spectacular. Culling Dimpho Di Kopane’s 32 performers from thousands of township and rural hopefuls, he has amassed a formidable troupe. Before it was envisioned as a film, U-Carmen eKhayelitsha was developed as a stage opera in Cape Town and then travelled to London and beyond. Reviews were uniformly ecstatic.

When the U-Carmen crew buzzed through Toronto for a series of performances at the Elgin Theatre in 2003, I was lucky to catch a show. The performance bustled with plus-sized performers singing with plus-sized voices, all whipping the tale along at a furious pace. The libretto, translated into Xhosa — with its mellifluous clicks and clucks, the linguistic equivalent of driving a sports car with the handbrake on — worked with nary a hitch. This iteration of Carmen (played by Pauline Malefane) was more slattern than sultry, more sassy than subtle. With furious gravitational impetus, she and Jongi (Andile Tshoni) — the renamed Jose character — were drawn to one another like a planet dashing into its moon.

The film, sadly, is nowhere near as successful. But as far as experiments go, it’s fascinating. Dornford-May is not yet a filmmaker; his mise en scène is awkward, his pacing drags, his staging is klutzy. He doesn’t have the chops to reconcile the clamour of township life with the burnished elegance of Bizet’s score. The verité-style photography, although excellent in depicting a township “city symphony,” feels silly in the context of an opera adaptation. The effect is like characters in a documentary breaking into song, backed by a full orchestra. The standard European instrumentation also feels odd — why did Dornford-May and musical director Charles Hazelwood choose not to include some indigenous touches? There are two films here, and they don’t coalesce.

There is, however, one compelling reason to see this film: Pauline Malefane’s interpretation of opera’s infamous femme fatale is a thrill ride. This is not a Carmen you’ll see on the cover of a woman’s fashion magazine any time soon. She’s heavy and sweaty, her face acne-scarred, her eyes like slate, her hair straightened far too often. But there is a strange Asiatic beauty about her; her sexuality feels dangerous. When she says, “If you love me, you’d best beware,” she means it. Her voice, too, is steely, unrefined yet somehow gorgeous. It’s an astonishingly brave performance, and it is a credit to Dornford-May that he did not compromise on casting his stage company in the film. These are not, by movie-making standards, conventionally beautiful people — they look hard and battle-worn. They look like the people of Khayelitsha.

That’s where this Carmen mines its tragedy. Malefane’s Carmen is brazen because she has to be. When she agrees to trade sex with Jongi’s commander for freedom, we understand the notion of her body as a commodity: in Khayelitsha, you sell what you have. Her decisions — and her ice-cold heart — are the product of an environment that consumes the weak. But, as she learns all too late, it consumes the strong as well. Khayelitsha does not bother with such Darwinian distinctions.

In the film, a series of expository flashbacks tell us that Carmen and Jongi are both originally from rural areas. They, like so many black South Africans, were drawn to urban life because rural life had nothing to offer. The city, of course, could offer little more. During apartheid, South Africa’s blacks were forbidden from living in urban areas by the Group Areas Act, which gave rise to places like Khayelitsha on the periphery of cities. Today, economic circumstances still keep the bulk of the black population in the townships. Thus, Carmen and Jongi’s destructive attraction serves as a stirring metaphor for the brutality of the apartheid era. Drawn to the flicker of bright lights, hundreds of thousands of souls were destroyed.

Dornford-May has bent Bizet’s great opera, and occasionally he breaks it. But U-Carmen eKhayelitsha remains a powerful portrait of life in South Africa’s townships. Like Tsotsi, last year’s Academy Award winner for best foreign film, it allows us a glimpse into the legacy of one of the 20th century’s more ignominious regimes.

Township life is, thankfully, changing. South Africa’s current African National Congress government is pumping billions of dollars into infrastructure and housing in problem areas. In Soweto, real estate is suddenly a hot commodity, and Bimmers and bling are as likely a sight as shoeless street urchins. A byproduct of this economic rebirth is the emergence of a cultural renewal — clubs and galleries and theatres are springing up where there were once only shacks and squalid drinking holes. Perhaps, in the near future, we can expect a Soweto or Khayelitsha opera house. If so, with U-Carmen, Dornford-May and his talented company have provided a stirring opening movement in what could become a powerful aria: music as balm, opera as hope.

U-Carmen eKhayelitsha opens July 28 in Toronto.

Richard Poplak is a Toronto-based writer. His first book, Ja, No, Man!: Growing Up White in Apartheid-Era South Africa, will be published by Penguin in 2007.

Barenaked in Labrador

Reality TV lands Barenaked Ladies guitarist in Labrador

Wednesday, July 26, 2006
www.cbc.ca

Ed Robertson of the Canadian band Barenaked Ladies will be in Labrador this week to record several episodes of a reality TV show that will debut this fall on the Outdoor Life Network.

The show, Ed's Up, will follow the adventures of singer-guitarist Robertson as he travels to rural parts of Canada to work at unusual jobs.

So far, Robertson has changed railroad ties in northern Ontario and worked as a ranch hand in Alberta.

Ed Robertson of the Barenaked Ladies will be working at a sawmill and building a bridge in Labrador for his reality TV show.
In Labrador, Robertson will experience two jobs. First, he will work at a sawmill in the small community of Northwest River. Then, he will help to build a bridge across the Churchill River.
Ed's Up producer Craig Fleming said that although the show focuses on unusual jobs, nothing is fictionalized.

"We're not inventing jobs, or cheating, or faking anything," said Fleming.

"These are jobs that real people really do across Canada and we want to see Ed do them."

Fleming said that working on the show has been exciting for everyone involved, including Robertson.

"He is a real Canadian in love with Canada and, like all of us on this job, this is a dream come true," said Fleming.

"Going across Canada and meeting these people that do these real salt-of-the-earth jobs is really inspiring for all of us."

Labrador's inclusion in the show is welcome news to Leander Baikie, who works for the Central Labrador Economic Development Board.

He hopes the show's viewers will want to experience Labrador for themselves.

"In times of scarce resources for marketing and advertising our tourism initiatives of Labrador, this sort of becomes essentially free advertising for Labrador," said Baikie.

Ed's Up is expected to film 13 episodes this summer. It will premiere on the Outdoor Life Network this November.

Go Grannies!

Granny Brigade honoured by Canada's top soldier
www.cbc.ca Jun 8 2006

Gen. Rick Hillier, the chief of Canada's defence staff, presented a special award to a special brigade on Wednesday — the Granny Brigade!


Granny Brigade founder Gladys Osmond was honoured with a Medallion for Distinguished Service.
For years now the small group of women in rural Newfoundland have been doing their part to boost the morale of Canadian soldiers serving overseas.

Gladys Osmond is the founder of the brigade. One wall of her Springdale home is full of thank you notes from Canadian soldiers stationed around the world.

She writes letters to Armed Forces personnel in the field.

"I write about what's happening in Springdale, if the birds are singing," she said.

The idea started when Canadian soldiers went to Bosnia as part the UN peacekeeping mission in 1991.

Since then it's grown to be big — very big. Last year, the Granny Brigade sent over 10,000 letters.

The soldiers write back, thanking the grannies for the contact from home. Some of the soldiers have even stopped by to visit.

So in honour of all that work over the years, the man at the top of Canada's military came to Springdale to tell Osmond and her Granny Brigade how much it all means.

She may not be a soldier, said Hillier, but all those letters over all these years earned Osmond a medal from her country.

Osmond says she didn't do it for the praise. The medal, the Medallion for Distinguished Service, is nice, but tomorrow it's back to work on the letters.

Random Act of Kindness?

I met an interesting woman in downtown Vancouver today. She was riding on the sidewalk behind me. I didn't even know she was there until she stopped beside the woman standing next to me at the stoplight and said, " You are beautiful. I know I don't know you, but you are beautiful". The woman's reaction was as expected. She half-smiled, blushed and quizzically looked at her complementor.

This distributor of feel-good compliments has uncombed, coloured and slightly dirty hair pulled back into a wee ponytail, underneath a bike helmet rammed onto her head. She wore old blue jeans and a track jacket from the early '90s, faded from weather and use. By any current standards she would not be considered a beauty herself, but she seemed completely unconcerned by the paradoxical nature of her comment.

As the light changed to green and the signal to walk lit up, she pushed off on her bike and sedately made her way across the street. About half way down the block I heard her say "That is a lovely skirt you are wearing. I know I don't know you, but I like your skirt". She got about the same reaction she had gotten five minutes beforehand.

You see many interesting things in downtown Vancouver.

I wonder how often she does this. What are her criteria? Has she ever gotten a compliment of her own or been thanked? I think she deserves a compliment of her own. Compliment Woman, thank you for making days a little sunnier for women you don't even know. Your tiny acts of kindness are commendable for their seemingly innocent inspiration and for the feeling they give the women to whom they are delivered. Cheers.

Shake my head...

Sitting in my favorite internet café, I just saw the oddest thing. Bemused, I can only shake my head and chuckle. Ok, so this Thing: An old Asian woman in sweat pants and a sweat shirt and old keds, running up the hill. She was really working it! The funny part is that she had a lit cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth.

I Won a Trip to the Bahamas!

Toiling away in front of my computer, my head full of numbers, my reaction was not quite as enthusisatic as the young man had anticipated when he broke the news to me.

"You have won the St. Patrick's Day Free Trip to the Bahamas Draw!" he jubilantly exclaimed.
"Oh, that's nice", I responded.

For the next half hour he proceeded to list all the things I had won, where I would go, and how many stars each hotel had. He even told me my prize included one other person. So, I could take my boyfriend (My who?).

All I had to do was to pay a 399$ promotional fee for each person going. And I could easily charge it right then and there to my Visa. I could even sell the trip afterwards if I decided not to go.

According to the Better Business Bureau, this is all legal. It is a way companies (such as this one Green-Blue Promotions) get rid of the last remaining seats on package tours. There is always 'just one more thing' to pay. For example, the plane ticket to Florida, from where the cruise was to depart was never mentioned. The taxi ride from the airport to the hotel. That extra night, between when the cruise docks in the Bahamas and when the free **** hotel picks up.

For the first time in my life I won something. And I turned it down.

Ok, So You Want to Be a Political Leader

In the past month, Rick Mercer has posted the Liberal Leader's seat on ebay, offering training to the winner instead of free postage. Now Ashley MacIsaac seems to want in on the job too! Rita MacNeil anyone? How about Leonard Cohen or Alanis Morissette? What is your vote?

The following is courtesy of www.cbc.ca/news

Cape Breton's outlandish fiddler Ashley MacIsaac has expressed an interest in leading the federal Liberal Party.
Cape Breton fiddler Ashley MacIsaac, seen here in 2000, has announced his desire to run for the federal Liberal leadership
This week, MacIsaac, 31, insisted to various media outlets that he has been a lifelong Liberal and that his bid for the federal leadership is not another stunt.
"I know that I've courted a lot of press in the past for situations in my entertainment life," he said in an interview.
"I have for many years relied upon the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll image to sell tickets. That's not what I plan on doing to sell my particular platform of what I think the Liberals need to do to move forward."
The bad-boy musician, who shot to fame with his 1995 album Hi, How Are You Today? and the hit song Sleepy Maggie, has developed a reputation for eccentric behaviour over the years.
In 1997, a kilt-clad MacIsaac ended a performance on Late Night with Conan O'Brien with a kick – revealing his lack of underwear.
More recently, MacIsaac has claimed he was planning to have a gay wedding in Alberta (no wedding was reported) and that he would run as an independent candidate for the federal government in Dartmouth, N.S. (he later withdrew his plans).
MacIsaac told the Canadian Press that his platform will include aboriginal and youth issues and strengthening ties with Quebec. He has also said that he will sell artwork he owns to finance his leadership bid.
While Liberal party officials declined comment on the fiddler's bid, Nova Scotia Premier Rodney MacDonald supported the idea as "quite interesting."
"We'll have to see if he goes for it," MacDonald told CP.

Best of Luck Mr. MacIsaac!

I wish you longevity!

Giant tortoise dies after a long, long life
Thu, 23 Mar 2006
www.cbc.ca

A giant tortoise, thought to be more than 250 years old, has died of liver failure in Calcutta, India.

Named Addwaitya, which means the One and Only in Bengali, he had a long and storied history that goes back to the early days of the British colonial empire.

Historical records show the giant tortoise was caught by British sailors in the Seychelles.

Historical records show he was caught by British sailors in the Seychelles Islands and carried to India where he was presented to Robert Clive, a rising star in the British East-India company. West Bengal Forest Minister Jogesh Barman said he spent many years on Clive's estate before he retired to the local zoo in Calcutta about 130 years ago.

It's not certain exactly how old Addwaitya was when he died, but written records of his life go back more than 100 years.

"We have documents to prove that he was more than 150 years old, but we have pieced together other evidence like statements from authentic sources and it seems that he is more than 250 years old," Barman said.

The giant tortoise was a favourite of the Calcutta zookeepers. "This is a sad day for us. We will miss him very much," one keeper told Reuters.

Aldabra tortoises are found on Aldabra island in the Seychelles, in the Indian Ocean. They average about 120 kg and can live more than 100 years.