After a dinner date with Maribou at the little French bakery (she had a turkey sandwich, I had a French Dip), we were walking back to the car and saw the little wine shoppe that I went to a million years ago in 1996 with Megan, I think her name was, before we went to see Warren Zevon play at the Rack and Roll (HOLY COW THE CONCERT IS ONLINE!!!! CHECK IT OUT HERE!!!!! DUDE!!! I WAS THERE!!!!).
Where was I? Oh, yes. The wine shoppe. They were having a tasting and who am I to decline to try something new? I declined to try the whites because, yeah, I remembered who I was. The reds included a lovely little number called “Le Signal” (which is French for “The Signal”) and it was on sale! For 12 bucks! She explained that this wine was a 2003 and it was, I’m quoting her here, “ready to drink”.
“That makes two of us!”, I didn’t tell her because Maribou was there with me. Anyway, the nose was fruity and almost sultry with spice. I tasted it and there were blackberries and plums… which made me remember the Warren Zevon story and I told Maribou about it and she told me “I was still in high school”. Which made me feel old. Until I found the concert online, that is.
You should try a bottle. Drink it with a loved one. Listen to Warren Zevon. Enjoy every sandwich.
Check out song seven.
For the record, I only pointed out that I had been in high school back then after Jaybird said, “Oh! This is the wine shop we went to before the Warren Zevon con…. wait, that wasn’t you.”
Two can play at that game.
It wasn’t a “wait, that wasn’t you”, I began with “this is where we…” and I immediately realized that the “we” would likely to be interpreted as “me and you” when, really, I meant “me and someone else” and since I was in the weeds at that point I figured I’d soldier on with a “and by ‘we’, I mean ‘not you'” so I could get to the Warrenny Zevonny part of the story.
It honestly wouldn’t have occurred to me that you meant “me and you” if you hadn’t tried for a course correction, sweetie.
Yeah, Koz, funny how that always works. The Liberals’ extraordinary sense of touch–almost without fail, everything they touch or attempt to touch, turns toxic. The most ruinous, destructive, social do-gooding program in the history of the United States has virtually destroyed the African-American family—The Great Society. Within just two years of the Great Society, the illigitemacy rate for blacks went from 24% to 65%. Of the number of black children born between 1967 and 1969, 74% were on welfare before even reaching the age of 18. How about this one—in 1964, 75% of black children were living in a married houshold. Jump to 1995 and it plumetted to 31%.
“Great Society”, my ass. Do-gooding Liberal scum more like it. Interestingly enough, scientists at UCSD and Harvard have identified a “Liberal” gene! Yes, Hallelujah, you Liberals are all gentic defective mutants! I just knew there had to be some biological basis for the wacky wackos in the Academy. The name of your specific variant is DRD4. Yeah, that good old dopamine receptor, DRD4 just had to ruin the party.
Pray for a cure, Liberals. We’re just here to help. It must be living hell to have to listen to mutant liberal voices every moment of your life. Imagine the pain of hearing Chomsky in your head every waking moment.
Sorry, just too much to bare, to be honest.
“From the wild Irish slums of the nineteenth-century Eastern seaboard,
to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson
in American history: a community that allows a large number of
young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never
acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any
set of rational expectations about the future–that community asks for
and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder … that is not only to
be expected; it is very near to inevitable. And it is richly deserved.
Let me set forth the simple background of the report, entitled
“The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.”
Timothy Leary’s dead.
I mean: HEY! NO POLITICS!
You see Meister Jaybird, I just love to squeeze a few more jokes and ironies, and puns out of you!
It really is irrestible.
Ouch. Sorry, gentlemen, “liberal scum” was way overboard and inappropriate.
Much to my dismay, I’m finding some Liberals on this site to be pretty good guys and guys I’d love to have a few beers with.
And Blaise, a triumphful, rejoicing, Liberal turns out to be one of the more interesting fellows I’ve ever met.
Blaise, hope you’re feeling better. Read a great book a few years ago by William Styron-his words– “the insomnia, the self-loathing, the stifling anxiety, the confusion, the loss of concentration and memory, the zombielike stupor, the unfocused dread, the ”dank joylessness,” the daily horror ”like some poisonous fogbank [rolling] in.”
May you, my friend, not have to suffer such agonies of the soul.
Interestingly enough, guess who and what brought out of this barren, desolate landscape?
MUSIC!!!! Always music. And it was the music of Brahms–don’t know the specific info about the pieces but will get back to you once I do.
How do you say, “Enjoy” in German?
To your health!
You’re not on the main board. You’re on the video game/rock music/D&D/comic book board.
The politics-free board. The religion-free board. The philosophy-free board, as far as we can manage philosophy-free in any given discussion involving aesthetics board.
Oh God! Seriously, very sorry–lost track of my orientation to all three dimensions.
Not kidding Jaybird–thankfully and mercifully the injection of religion and politics shall end, at least for me.
How in the world did I ever cross over into opaque dead shadows?
Thanks for making me laugh. Often!
I don’t like wine. It drives me crazy that I don’t like wine, because I like the concept of wine. I like people that like wine.
I didn’t used to like beer, either. I forced myself to drink it until I liked it, I eventually did (you get the weirdest looks if you tell this to Mormons). Maybe I’ll have to do this with wine. Except, what I did with beer was basically carry a cooler in hot southern weather, when anything cold and wet tastes awesome (same tactic worked with Diet Coke). I’m not sure that would work with wine.
There’s no arguing matters of taste but I found that wine is best enjoyed as part of an entire group of things. Company, a steak, and wine. Company, chocolate, and port. That sort of thing.
Once you get comfortable with those, you can switch to two of the three, then, eventually, reach the point where you can say “oh, Boomerang is having a Superfriends Marathon!” and enjoy it with a fine Chateau la Fete Rothschild.
When I’m done with my chores today, I’ll go to BevMo and look for Le Signal. Sounds lovely. So does Warren.
I bought two bottles of it and I don’t regret a penny spent. I’ll probably use the other bottle at a dinner party next week, with red meat like beef or lamb. Maybe it’s trite and hackneyed to say this, but this guy went very well with chocolate — a fudge brownie was a much more congenial companion for this wine than was lasagna.
To be honest, I wasn’t blown away by it — a bit thick for my taste and velvety for my taste — but I’ll call it a perfectly servicable table red and a fine value for the $13-a-bottle price point. It’s certainly ready to drink now at eight years of age; I wonder if my ambivalence is because the wine has passed its peak, and the very reasonable price point is to clear it out of the cellars before it stops being enjoyable.
So I’ll echo Jaybird here — by all means, go on out and get a bottle or two; it’s affordable enough that even if you wind up not really caring for it, at $12 or $13 a bottle, you shouldn’t have to feel too bad about trying something new and if you do like it as much as Jay did, it’ll be an awesome affordable add to your rack of everyday table wines.
FYI for interested consumers: the kid at BevMo told me that it had been discontinued, at least for them, so it may be hard to find through major distributors. Counterintuitively for a wine named “Le Signal,” the label is a silhouette of a truck with three barrels on the flatbed.
There are very few wines I’ve been blown away by… Newton Claret is probably the only one that I’ve found regularly under $20 in that category…