Wine tastings rock so hard. For a really low buy-in, you can try a diverse assortment of wines, talk to people who actually know things about wine to pick up terminology (useful if you’re interested in calling wines something beyond “dry” and “sweet”), and get pleasantly drunk. Usually at like five in the afternoon. Oh, and usually there are hors d’oeuvres.

So when one of Dandan’s friends proposed doing exactly that at Cercle Rouge in Tribeca, we jumped. Like most wine tastings, this one had a (innocuous) gimmick: all the wines were organic and French (I seem to recall being told that there would be Italian wines too, but I don’t recall seeing any).

There were around 80 wines, with a pretty good distribution of regions whose names I really ought to recognize. I took notes (I always take notes at wine tastings so that I don’t look so much like a jackass who’s just there to get toasted), but they’re somewhere either in Dandan’s apartment or in the trash.

In summary: there was a lot of good wine, but I noticed a few trends: there were a lot more blends then I would have expected, there were several rosés that people were taking seriously and totally not just drinking because they were 19 (in fact, the sparkling FRV 100 Gamay was possibly the best wine we had), and, most telling of the difference between the French and the American palates, I found that a lot of the wines lacked any “punch.” There wasn’t a single wine I tried that offended me, but out of the few dozen I tasted there were only a few that were particularly distinct. Do I expect wine to taste too much like citric acid and Kool-Aid? Was I in the wrong mindset? Was I drunk? On all three counts, the answer might be “yes.”

Whatever the case, the vintners were enthusiastic and informative, the hors d’oeuvres were worth the $5 by themselves (steak tartare… mmm). After most of our modest party had hit their limit, the authors of this column squeezed in a bonus round or two, and then we all wandered down the street to the affiliated wine shop where we bought a few bottles of the better stuff. We hoofed it, mildy intoxicated at six in the evening, over to Chinatown where we devoured a platter of Vietnamese food and then rather a lot of espresso. I seem to recall that most of the wine we bought was consumed over Pictionary later that evening.

If that’s not a fine day, then I don’t know what is.

There are some milestones in life that we’ve all experienced and can relate to. Getting your driver’s license. Holding onto your first paycheck. Finding out that tonic water has calories.

Yes, my dear, I’m afraid it’s true: the tooth fairy doesn’t exist, tonic water is not just water with quinine, and your father was the one that accidentally ran over Pookie when you were 8.

Neil: “What? No, you’re making things up. Tonic water doesn’t have any calories. It’s tonic water!”
Me: “Why do you think gin & tonics are so sweet and delicious? It’s not gin & magic.” (note to self: create a cocktail called Gin & Magic)
*One wikipedia article later*
Neil: “Tonic water has as many calories as soda? That’s bullshit!”
Me: “Oh trust me, I know.”

Tonic water, usually sweetened with, of course, high fructose corn syrup in the US, has around 120-140 calories per 12oz can, which is pretty much exactly the same as any other soda that rots your teeth and gives you diabetes. It did, at one point, consist merely of carbonated water with quinine, back when it was used as an anti-malarial by British forces in tropical countries. I’d love to see if I could actually find some tonic water that’s still made this way, with no sweetener and massive amounts of quinine so that 1) I can drink G&Ts instead of take anti-malarials when/if I travel to the appropriate place (like, outside my Manhattan apartment in 20 years), and 2) just to see what the original G&T taste was like. Btw, one of the above statements is completely fallacious, but I’ll leave it up to you and your doctor to figure out which.

Anyhow, after a revelation like that, we had to drown our caloric sorrows with some gin & tonics. We picked up tonic water from Whole Foods, which sells their own 365 label of tonic water, for the reasonable price of $2ish/6 cans. The one over at Union Square also sells Q tonic water (read: designer tonic water made ’specially for G&Ts) for $11.99/4 bottles, but I’m not made out of enough gold to buy it (I might pick it up next time though, just out of curiosity and financial masochism).

Matchup between our current in-house gin brands…! All G&Ts were made with 1.5oz gin to 3oz tonic water (1:2 ratio), poured over ice and garnished. 1 can of tonic water makes exactly 4 G&Ts.

The Great Hyperbole-Free Gin & Tonic Matchup - 2008!

Brand	Hendrick’s	Bombay Sapphire	Tanqueray Rangpur
Garnish	Floating cucumber slices	Wedge of lime	Wedge of lime
Verdict	It’s… surprisingly very good and refreshing! We both thought the taste of Hendrick’s by itself was… “weird”, but with the floating cucumber slices in particular, it became the best “summer”-ish drink. Great balance.	Great juniper/botanical tones cutting through the sweetness of the tonic water. A classic gin & tonic	This just didn’t taste right. The lime infusion with the gin just ends up feeling too… harsh, and the tonic water didn’t help round that out
Rating

To summarize: Hendrick’s puts an interesting twist on the G&T, Bombay Sapphire makes a classic, and Tanqueray Rangpur is a dud. Till next time, friends!

For kind of a while now, I’ve been on a dark coffee kick. From a strictly political standpoint, that’s dangerous; some would claim it’s a slippery slope from there to being another Starbucks drone. I disagree; I think that 20% of the problem with Starbucks is soporific music, and the other 80% is the fact that most of their beverages no longer classify as coffee. They certainly do roast their beans a bit dark, and that may not be to everybody’s liking, but that’s a standard coffee-house aesthetic decision, and not a sign of the apocalypse.

So, after working my way through a pound or so of some Viennese Roast that I bought out of the bin at the local co-op, I found myself at Trader Joe’s in desperate need of coffee.

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Rejoice, ye humble supplicants kneeling at the foot of the Beer Gods; our prayers have been answered!

Take MenuPages, add beer, you get BeerMenus.com, or a rather comprehensive listing of bars & restaurants and their respective beer menus, currently only available in New York (but of course). A quick browse through the site yielded many fruits; I finally know where I can find that delicious amazing nectar known as Dogfish 120 (and for only $7/bottle? I feel like that’s got to be some kind of typo… maybe a little bit of investigative journalism is at hand? Oh the depths I’d go to for the Truth and a bottle of Dogfish), and there’s apparently a free beer & … oysters? tasting on May 6th at Blind Tiger Ale House. Well sir, you’ve sold me twice - beer & oysters rank right up there with oxygen in my book.
On a more disappointing note, the uptown offerings seems to be fairly meager. A walk through my neighborhood shows 8 restaurants/bars. That’s at least 30x that existing up here. Conspicuously missing is the UES beer mecca of David Copperfield’s (if 30 taps & 100+ bottles doesn’t count, then nothing does).

Still, a solid/clean site that just launched 2 days ago — looking forward to seeing this site become a real go-to spot for beer in the city. In retrospect, it’s quite amazing that this particular Web 2.0 niche took so long before being filled…!

So the editors of this illustrious journal were sitting around experimenting with martinis one day recently, and — violating the second rule of alcohol consumption — we had a computer open. As anybody on the entire planet could tell you, computers and youtube go together like gin and olives (which is to say: very well but it’s not exactly good for you).

I honestly couldn’t tell you the details of how this happened, but we wound up on the youtube channel for something called drinkstv.

In a phrase: oh the pain. They’re wrong about everything, wrong in a way only a South Florida bartender serving up liquor to flabby, overtanned fratboys (and the female equivalent) can be.

Maybe some people enjoy having their intelligence insulted. Me, not so much. Try this experiment:

1. Watch this little clip on how to make a mint julep.
2. Okay, now do it again but don’t look at her boobs this time.
3. A LIME?! SPRITE?

For those not in the know: mint, bourbon, sugar (powdered or granulated; there’s some debate), a splash of water, and a lot of crushed ice. That’s it. It’s not a “mojito with bourbon.” In fact, the only thing they have in common is mint and sugar — and you shouldn’t really be bruising the mint in a julep so even that’s kind of a stretch.

And that abomination used fairly costly bourbon to boot.

Make no mistake: I’m not opposed to hot bartenders (though “oh look cleavage” and “hot” comprise a Venn diagram that doesn’t overlap all that much), but their job isn’t to be hot; their job is to give me something nice to drink. If you really want to use sex to sell your product, open a strip club — and then hire competent bartenders. If I’m ordering cocktails at all — and I don’t order anything more complicated than a whisky sour much exactly becaue of stuff like this — I’m going to do it because I think the bartender knows his or her trade.

Because let’s face it: this is the internet, and it’s full of things way more titillating (har) than anything you can see behind the bar at any club. For free, even.

God help me if I went up to this woman and ordered a sazerac.

In closing, let me note that the comments on the youtube video I linked make it almost worthwhile. Usually youtube comments are transcendentally stupid, but for once they actually seem to get it.

Having recently acquired a $5 gift card, I stepped into a Starbucks yesterday - for the first time in a while (yay for living in a city where the number of small independent coffee shops actually outnumber the chains). I was downtown, at Astor Place, and wanted to sit down to read for a bit. After nearly backing out after seeing the swarm of NYU students buzzing around the place, I decided the line was moving fast enough for me to pick up a caramel apple cider — pretty much the only drink I get there anymore, since I no longer have that sweet tooth for frappuccinos that my 15 year old self had and I don’t have a high opinion of their coffee, tea, or cappuccino. As I was idly looking at the menu overhead, I noticed the board looked… strange.

Coffee	$1.10	10
Tea	$1.10	0
Caramel Frappucino	$4.79	300

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As a scientist, I like quantitative formulas. As a young Manhattanite, I like to drink. To wrap these statements altogether, to find out which brands have been enjoyed the most from my home bar, I suggest the following:

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I cannot stand alcopops. I can’t stand the marketing to women (or conversely, the lack of marketing to women for beer, scotches, gins, etc). T00 many college-aged women just give up on beer (well, yes, nobody likes beer initially) and stick to the Smirnoff ices, the wine coolers, the Bacardi breezes and god knows what other . Take high fructose corn syrup, add artificial flavouring and food colouring.

Regardless of the sociological & health-related reasons, this little tidbit provides all rationale needed for disliking Smirnoff Ice & it’s kin…

How many calories are there in a bottle of SMIRNOFF ICE®?
SMIRNOFF ICE® has 228 calories per 12-ounce bottle, that’s about 70 more than a super-premium/imported beer but don’t worry, that difference in calories is about the same as one hot wing, five little pretzel twists OR 3 tortilla chips…with nothing on ‘em.

Smirnoff US Website

What? Who on earth would find that reasoning logical?

Let’s do some bullshit mathematics, why don’t we? First, face value: 228 calories per 12 oz bottle? I’m a smaller than average person — my estimated daily calorie intake is in the 1700-1800 region. 7 bottles of Smirnoff Ice is my entire daily calorie allowance (plus my death by diabetes). Now let’s consider I drank my daily calorie allowance in Guinness instead (150cals/12oz and a 20934802934x better tasting drink)… that becomes 11 bottles, which means I could drink my normal limit of 6-7 beers, and still have room for lunch. Those additional 70 calories per 12 oz-bottle? That is 44% more calories per bottle. Drinking 3 beers is practically the same thing as drinking 2 Smirnoff ices — make it become a habit, sprinkle in a dose of 20-somethin’-year-old binge drinking, and you’ve got a recipe for absolute disaster.

Please, for the love of everything decent in the world, don’t drink alcopops. If you’re just in it to get drunk and you don’t like the taste of beer & wine, then just take shots and cradle a glass of water in between them, and keep on trying beers/wines/cocktail concoctions you enjoy and won’t cause massive obesity with the liver cirrhosis.

I recently had the distinct pleasure of dining at one Mr. Bartley’s in Harvard Square. Most of the things on their menu are solid, and therefore aren’t of much interest to liquephiles like you and me, but I did encounter the darndest concoction: the frappe.

A “frappe” is pronounced “frap” (we require none of that high-falutin’ French here), and it is made of milk, ice cream, some flavoring that I assume comes in syrup form (said a Southern-bred friend: “It tastes like that powered strawberry milk I drank as a kid!” and indeed it did), and a blender.

In other words, it’s a milkshake.

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To the great delight of my tenderly growing home bar, I just received a marketviewliquor shipment, and along with a couple bottles each of the wonderful Shiraz & Niagara varietals we tried during our vacation a couple weeks ago, I also picked up a bottle of Disaronno Amaretto ($18.99/750mL), which is really the one, the only, the true amaretto. I have to admit, I did seriously consider getting the Trader Vic’s Amaretto ($13.99/750mL) but decided the $5 difference wasn’t worth it, at least, this first time around. And oh geez, I’m so glad I opted for the Disaronno.

The shiz is amazing! Absolutely amazing! Impossibly delicious, even on its own with a bit of ice (and I generally find liqueurs too sweet and cloying to stand on its own). It’s a bit of a sweet almond, buttery flavour — you really have to try it, its rather indescribable. Where this particular brand stands out is that it doesn’t taste chemical or synthetic at all.

But where this amaretto really shines is in… cocktails!

Amaretto Sour // 2:1 amaretto & lemon juice. Shake.
Ah, one simply cannot talk about amaretto cocktails without first discussing the Amaretto Sour. So simple yet stunningly flavourful!

Bocce ball // 2:1 vodka & amaretto, fill with orange juice. Stir.
This is basically a variation on the brunch favourite, the screwdriver, but I’ve never heard of it before, only when I googled “Cocktails with Amaretto”. I have to say; I very much enjoyed it. The amaretto flavour complemented well with the orange juice. I suspect it’d be perfectly fine without the vodka — its just there to make this drink a quiet assassin.

Butter Nut Scotch // 1:1:1 scotch, butterscotch schnapps & amaretto. Shake.
Ok. I really didn’t expect this to be good. But I just happen to have these ingredients lying around (despite the Mr. Boston butterscotch schnapps I have being pretty gross, and the scotch being really a blend of scotch and whiskey), so I had to try it. Its not bad, got potential as a rich & satisfying drink (abet a dangerous one from the sheer amount of alcohol involved) — the amount of the schnapps needs to be reduced because it stands out too much in this particular ratio, but I think with a little tweaking, this could a surprisingly good cocktail.

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