SteveCastellano.com

Sensory evaluation of wines wrap

Today I wrap another wine course, and assuming all goes well with next week’s exam I will be 3/8ths of the way to earning my Wine Specialist certification. Here’s a glimpse at the impressive selection of not-entirely-reasonably-priced wines we tasted in our final class.

Do the Gainsbourg

I’m a bit of a classicist and hard to please, and my preference for drinks being simple and straightforward often leaves me at a loss when selecting from a nearly limitless array of increasingly complex beverages. I have only created a couple of original cocktails myself, and the most recent is, I think, my most successful. It’s called the Gainsbourg.

Petrichor as wine note

I first heard the word petrichor in the recent Doctor Who episode The Doctor’s Wife and assumed it was an invention of the author Neil Gaiman. As it turns out it is a favourite word of his, but its origins can be traced back to two Australian botanists who coined the term in an article for the journal Nature in 1964.

Wine course wrap: Forget everything I said about France

Imagine a bunch of aspiring wine geeks sitting around a table at Betty’s saying sternly and indignantly to each other “That was absolutely not a typical California Chardonnay” and you have a pretty clear picture of the aftermath of the Wines 1 final exam last night.

Drink in summer

When you find yourself mixing the same old cocktails all the time, sometimes it helps to add a semi-random element to your decision-making. For me, that element is often the contents of our weekly organic bin, which for the past few weeks has included a small package of organic blueberries.

Fine wine course notes

I have recently re-entered the halls of academia, this time as a student of oenology, so that I may eventually be fully qualified to go off half-cocked on the subject of wine, rather than completely un-cocked, as has been my habit up until this point. Details of my successes and failures, to date, are encapsulated herein.

Technically I’m not supposed to do this

This is a Bacardi Cocktail made with our house light rum, El Dorado Deluxe Silver. That means it’s not really a Bacardi Cocktail as far as Bacardi’s trademark lawyers are concerned. But the name, like the name Sazerac (over which an acquaintance of mine was served a few months back), is now its own semiotic entity, whether the lawyers like it or not.

Vodka flight

We’d been the recipients of a bottle of Grey Goose as well as a bottle of Tito’s Handmade Vodka over the past year (before the latter became available from the LCBO) from generous friends and houseguests, and so together with our own bottle of Russian Standard it seemed criminal not to line them up and see if there really was a clear winner among them.

Why cook well?

Why cook well?

Why do anything well? Why make sure your belt goes through all the loops when you leave the house? Why listen to music? Why wash your hair? Why paint a painting? Why make love?

Room for improvement

My wife and I went to see Kate Rusby at Hugh’s Room in Toronto’s west end two Sundays back. She’s had limited exposure here in Canada, though true anglophiles will know her as the singer of the theme song for the understated comedy Jam and Jerusalem.