there are some new reviews oozing though here, but we're not deckin em up all pretty til we work out an otherwise unborn style for this sleazy rube we call drankster
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that's a George Grainger Aldridge cartoon ... obviously a pre-screwcap man
25 November 2008
BUY THIS WINE
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Barossa Mystery 2005
$78; 14.5% alcohol; cork(!); 94+++ points
Exquisitely complex, alluring, fine, dry and elegant, this wickedness is intensely wholesome indeed.A deep, gently stewing compote of all berries red, blue and black, prunes, figs, tweaked to a sharp edge with great seasoned oak and the acrid gunpowdery effect which wild yeast and dry old terroir can impart, it’s very simply one of the best reds to pass this desk in yonks.It has a little mild chocolate, too.Not A. P. John’s Barossa cooperage chocolate.Nope.This is like cooling baked chocolate mousse.The palate’s sinuous and lithe, almost writhing in its intense determination to occupy you.The tannins are amazing: maybe schisty overall; maybe mudstone/slate, with an avuncular twist of briar.But that fruit takes over completely in the finish: as essential and refined as classic Barossa red can get.I suspect the alcohol is higher than 14.5%, because the finish is just the teeniest bit hot. There are other minor imperfections – a little too much coal dust; the faintest whiff of cork dust – but the rest of the wine has the intensity and impetus to flood over that, which it does ever so slowly, like a desert stream gradually fanning out over the floodplain of your palate.It’s bloody awesome now, but give it a decade and, well, there won’t be any left in a decade ... it’s too good!
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DRANKSTER ... drinks had by DRINKSTER, which is bigger, but same crude brute ... That’s an IAN FRANCIS of Santa on the bridge away up there ... nice Christmassy feel ...
It 's impossible to review everything, so forgive my misses. Don't say I point high - my average over the week sits around 70/100. Plus (+++) indicates wines which will improve with proper cellaring. Prices vary from you know to wherever... I list Aussie Dollars.
went to a concert that reminded him of a band we played in. We played Dead and ZZ and Allmans thrash on everything in 1974. The concert he saw was LucyW and Buick Six:
LUCINDA WILLIAMS
Obliged to say I saw Lucinda Williams last night, and that her band Buick Six opened unannounced with a set if their own, in which no words were sung except a short bit of Beck-like chorus-ey vocalisation at one point, and, that they used the same methods and gags as we once did, and I don’t say that lightly. Good for them, but I was taken a bit strangely by it all. There is obviously a context, but I am finding what bands do lately just uncanny. They started with randomly directed perverse noises evolving into Dead-like meanderings building to a proper hard working riff like the Allmans, breaking into Apache from the The Shadows several times as a cop this chorus, then back to the scrabble, ending in an elevated freak-out with underlying structure. Then they did it again, several times. The sound of two Gibsons being played very loud and frantic in that piping voice they have is primal. On the last tune, the drummer came forward to play an odd assortment of deep percussion objects and then one of the guitar players put down his little black guitar and went back up to the standard kit and sat down to join in with what turned out to be a very Allmans one big slam per bar hard drive as the guitarist left playing went so close to climax choruses of One Way Out it didn’t matter. The whole time I did not know what to feel. I was impressed and pissed off, no, more like frustrated, all at the same time. Why is that? Not nostalgia. Partly because they did not break into a sweat to do any of this. We may have been rough at times, but there was passion. Doesn’t matter though, they have learned to keep it all in the head. I felt strange because these were extremely accomplished players and what they were doing was so mannered and labelled and clever, but of course ultimately irresistible. The museum of white straight ahead rock music without black affectations. Not one of them looked like a professional musician - more like cheaply dressed science undergraduates whose mathematical minds allow them to navigate fretted instruments. Having torn the place (Hamer Hall, which is an opera theatre with a very good sound) to shreds for about twenty minutes, they stopped. They then came out and played behind the diva with great electric country accomplishment, as the tunes worked their way back to the Crazy Horse playing Beethoven level. There gave really good, transcendent playing for her. Four people did all this damage. Lucinda was in good shape. According to her intro, the band was so interesting to listen to at sound checks she started getting them to open, which probably explains the lack of sweat. She closed with what visiting American acts are prone to do lately, a respectable in the aisle homage of It’s A Long Way To The Top (If You Want To Rock and Roll). Saw Gillian Welch close with that in Melbourne, introduced as an old Australian folk song she had found. The third encore was a Jimi Hendrix song.
AKHMOTOVA
How can I live with this burden?
And yet they call her The Muse.
They say: "You and she by the meadow..."
They talk of a "Divine Murmur..."
She pulls you around worse than a fever,
Then for a whole year, not a word!
The Last Toast
I drink to home, that is lost,
To evil life of mine,
To loneness in which we’re both,
And to your future, fine, --
To lips by which I was betrayed,
To eyes that deathly cold,
To that the world is bad and that
We were not saved by God.
Anna Akhmatova 1937
LEONARD AND FRIEND
“I only drank professionally", Leonard Cohen says of his more absorbent days. "I found this wine: it was Chateau Latour. The experts talk about the bouquet and the tannins and the fruit and the symphonies of tastes. But nobody talks about the high. Bordeaux is a wine that vintners have worked on for 1,000 years. Each wine has a specific high, which is never mentioned.”
ROBERTO el ROGUE NESS
“Recently we were quoted in the City Beat Summer Guide as saying that we call Moscato d’Asti ‘the Zombie Detector’ because if you don’t like it you are probably dead. What the editor cut out (and what made the reporter do a spit take and nearly fall off his chair when we said it) was that we also noted that ‘neurologists will tell you that there are receptors for crack cocaine and marijuana right in your brain...well, the one for Moscato d’Asti is right between them’
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