Ummm Yum

A friend sent us this picture.  We have no further comment.

Life is totally unfair.

This isn't for sure yet...

We heard he was coming since our tasting is McCall Wines - well his advance guys got in touch with our guys yada yada .... no set time yet.  Sometime between 3-6 at 132 Front Street in Greenport was all they would say . security considerations or something (he has a history so we are told).

We had some T-shirts printed up just in case.  Band is out back to surprise him.

Still iffy at 6am.....

Hrmppphhhh

Occasionally we have a dozy of a visitor to our shop and we smile and grit our teeth and say nothing.  One of our friends was in just a bit ago when one such person came in and he witnessed the whole thing. After the denizen left, he turned to us and said, "Now don't you wish you had said something"?  We replied it just isn't our way.  He then offered up a list of nifty retorts - things I wished I said.  Enjoy:

The exchange between Churchill & Lady Astor: She said, “If you were my husband I’d give you poison.” He said, “If you were my wife, I’d drink it.”

An exchange between John Wilkes and the Earl of Sandwich (both English Parliamentarians of the 18th century):
The Earl: “Egad, sir, I do not know whether you will die at the gallows or of the pox.”
–Wilkes: “That will depend, my Lord, on whether I embrace your principles or your women.

“He had delusions of adequacy.” - Walter Kerr

“He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.” - Winston Churchill

“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.” Clarence Darrow

“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” - William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).

“Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I’ll waste no time reading it.” - Moses Hadas

“I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.” - Mark Twain

“He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.” - Oscar Wilde

“I feel so miserable without you; it’s almost like having you here.” - Stephen Bishop

“I’ve just learned about his illness. Let’s hope it’s nothing trivial.” - Irvin S. Cobb

“He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others.” - Samuel Johnson

“He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up.” - Paul Keating

“I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.” - Groucho Marx

Ok. This is some tasting coming up

This Saturday is McCall's Vineyard, and one of the North Fork's best reds. Serious stuff. Real Deal. Cat's Meow.  You can visit them online here. It makes us happy just thinking about tasting this wine and their equally great chardonnay with our friends. In fact, we are jumpin' for joy.

We are putting the word out now so that you can plan. Saturday 3-6pm. 132 Front Street, Greenport. Across from Mitchell Park (kinda) and the Post Office.  Big smiles aren't optional; they are required

What am I doing up at sunrise?

I must be crazy.  Remember when your parents told you that "nothing good ever happens after midnight"? Well, now the saying at our age is "nothing good happens before 7am"!

Seriously, this time of year there is a time at sunrise when the beams of light come in through the kitchen window and hit the frig dead on. The reflections are amazing.  The leaves outside are in near perfect silhouette. It is some show.

After a pretty dreary set of days we are back in the sunshine and nature is back in the limelight. To think that if I was asleep, I'd miss this, the birds singing to the sun and the dancing images on my frig.

Real men don't eat Quiche

There is a simple reason of course. Quiche, better known as cheese custard with stuff added, is faux "non-masculine" because of the crust of course. It gets soggy. Men don't like soggy crusts.  They like flaky crusts and not that suff that leaves grease marks on paper plates at receptions.

Since we are a "spirits" store, we have found the way to make men like quiche and it is on our shelves.

Have a nice morning. 1/2 water and 1/2 "vodka"...the vodka  evaporates and makes for a drier, flakefilled crust..it's about 5 minutes in.

Sincerely,

Debbie Homemaker

Listen up Mr. Whoeveryouare

We told you that the wine tasting featuring Y+R organic wines was "SATURDAY" not Friday when you called us last week. I guess you didn't hear me and yes I did "speak up Earth Woman".  How sexist!  And we told you as much as we would like to do a "special" on it we were only going to do that during the tasting or if you bought a case.

There was no need to get all huffy and the policeman was only doing his job when he gave you the ticket. Parking is sometimes a problem in the village but there was just plain no need to use Mitchell Park. And leave that big magic  ray gun thingy home next time for cryin' out loud.  Now that clock doesn't work...you know the one you clobbered with the gangplank and zapped when it dented that weird car you drove.

Honest to God.  And what is with this guy Gort you sent over?. Manners manners manners; they mean a lot to us..... he was just getting all weird when we told him the tasting was Saturday so next time come yourself (you owe us for a display by the way - if you knock it over you own it is the rule around here).

Try again from 3-6 today and a "Klaatu barada nikto" to you too.

Memo from the useless sign department

A wag from a local blog posted this picture a while back.  He sent it on over. 

Some days going to work is just like this....particularly on bright sunny days with a gentle breeze, no humidity and spring fever in full bloom.

Never know if you are the hiker or just breakfast.

drum roll please

In keeping with spring and green, we are going to take a whack at a VERY good set of organic wines  this Saturday 3-6pm.  Sometimes we get a little skeptical about "organic" as for instance skin care products need only to have one "organic" product in them to be labeled as such so we did our homework. But we checked this out pretty well and we will swear on our dancing shoes that this is the real deal.

First, a lot of wine is "organic" in that someone isn't dumping gobs of goo on them each year. Wine folk are very careful about this. VERY CAREFUL. Fact is, a lot of the wine from old vineyards is pretty much as pure as the driven snow...and if you just take a second to think about it....an old established vine, perhaps burrowing down 20 feet...well you get the idea.

A vineyard named YB or Y+B Wines (http://www.ybwines.com) has come out with a selection from which we are going to try three this weekend.  We've sent a few octobottles (bio-degradable 8 sided containers) home with close friends to get their opinion which we will post here.

We very much like the idea of this. Searching all over for organic vineyards and making what is reported to be an excellent product with no "footprint" - well it strikes our fancy and to use the parlance, we are "all in" on this. 

More on this. One of the octobottles features an organic from Spain, another from Argentina...well you get our drift.  Come put some dance in your step, some green in your life, and let a smile be your umbrella (8 sides of course).

In honor of one of our selections, here's a little toe tapper from Spain. Get those dancin' shoes a jumpin'.

Wine and Sand

A friend came in all agog after finding the 1941 movie "Blood and Sand" at a yard sale.  Matador becomes famous. Leaves wife for temptress....etc. Tyrone Power and Rita Hayworth et all....

When we got him quieted down and made him promise to lend it to us, of course that encounter got our little heads to thinking. We were thinking about sand..not bullfight sand...but sand and all that takes place on it.  How epic things like bullfights and beach picnics, solitude and sand castles act like silverware on that grainy tabletop.

We kept musing about this and were talking to a customer about it later yesterday afternoon.  He had just been to the post office and some pictures from over Easter weekend had arrived so, to humor him, we looked at his prize collection. We found one we really liked and he lent it to us because it was everything good that we think of with "sand" and made a real connection to our business - mostly that of wine.  The picture (above) is his and we spent some time thinking of a suitable caption for it. "How about a nice crisp Chablis?" was one.  "Do you have crackers for the Bree?" or "Hope mom got some decent wine for dinner!" were a few more.

What the picture is about, to us, is conversation. About taking a minute and talking to someone. That can be done over a sand castle at age 4 or over a glass of something nice (from our shop of course) long about sunset after a hard day or any day for that matter. Wine and sand are the tabletops in the kitchen, the park bench, the chairs in the back yard.

We decided that at our tasting this Saturday, we were going to put that picture on the counter and ask you to caption it. No prize for "best". Just your wit and wisdom.  Winning thought gets a smile.

Bergamo, Lombardo, you say potato I say....

Wine. Barrels and Bottles of the stuff.

Our tasting today is made up mostly of wine from Northern Italy - north and a little east...like head north from Milan and take one step right for every two steps forward. After a few hours of plodding, stop in the middle of Borgamo and face east toward Trieste...Alps on the left, foothills and vistas straight ahead. Super duper wine country. Some think the best on earth.

We have heard of Bergamo and like the name. It sounds expensive.  One of our friends happened to know a bit about the region and about Bergamasks or Bergamasques - originating from this area so we listened up.  Masques are ..well they are masks and long ago put on the end of sticks and held in front of the face. (obviously before rubber bands)  With that mask in place there was something of a plodding dance  these Bergamos did, a peasant dance, not a courtly dance, and there you have it, Bergamasques or a dance with a mask that kinda shuffled along.

We all remember I Love Lucy and Lucille Ball in a big tank of grapes grinding out the juice with her feet...plodding along...and some theory has it that the Bergamasque dance steps were very much like the moves you would make crushing grapes.  Nice story. We will leave truth to the politicians.

So shuffle on down from 3-6 today to Greenport Wines and Spirits (across from the Post Office on Front Street)..straight across the street and 1 step to the right for every two forward.

We are the ones with the stained feet.

Oh this is gonna be great!

One of our best buddies, Patricia from Lauber Imports, will be pouring the wine at our tasting this Saturday (3-6pm at our store across from the Post Office in Greenport). Pat is terrific at this - a real expert who is about as non-pushy and certainly non-snobby as anyone we know. She is also taking us on a little trip to her favorite Italian vineyards and this is just going to be great.

We learned that one of the wines will be from Collio, Italy and we mentioned this to one of our customers who also said "Count me in! This is going to be great"!  He proceeded to expand on a few trips he had made to that region some years back, the Alps in the distance, big time vistas, simply incredible food and the wine...my oh my.  We looked the region up online (here is a short overview) and found ourselves intrigued.

Yesterday our friend came back in to find a wine for poached salmon dinner night and we chatted a bit about his Italian trips, ancestors and local folks who he knew who had family come from that region (far north and east) and the weekend past with present family underfoot, all cool days, sunny and followed by a full moon that hung forever.  He painted a picture for us, and in talking about such things and we thought about the upcoming wine tasting a bit differently. We thought about the wines Patricia is going to pour for us and how they represent vineyards and ultimately real people who care about things like the grapes of course but of the quality of things that they enjoy; family, family history, the land, the pleasant and beautiful days and the full moons basking the land in that wondrous light.  It seems to us that if you deeply care about one thing you generally care deeply about a lot of things. Just a thought.

Enough daydreaming. Back to work.

Aha!

The famous or infamous Harry's Bar in Venice has a connection with out tasting this Saturday and when we started thinking about it, well, it is pretty neat (but then again we are somewhat of an odd lot here so what is neat to us.....well you get the idea). 

One our our patrons got all gushy about our Prosecco tasting this Saturday (3-6pm 132 Front St. in Greenport) and she did so on behalf of the terrific color - the white peach nectar color mixed with just a smidgen of raspberry juice to give it the glow.  She recounted that some years ago when she went to Venice with her mother, the elder dragged her to Harry's Bar and there she had her first Bellini - we might add an official IBA (International Bartenders Association) drink.  Wait wait wait...she had more to tell us...Cirpriani, the founder of Harry's and the inventor of the drink, named it Bellini after the early renaissance Venetian painter.  We are pretty sure that the pink in the drink is kinda close to the pink in the painting but that is just us.  But since artists don't really like to think in "pink" we are going to call it white peach blush.

We thought that since this is a big deal weekend in the Christian church and the Bellini's more famous works were religious depictions, what could be more fitting.  Anyway, thanks to our friend who knew so much and to Prosecco and Harry's Bar in Venice. 

Bottoms up.

Double Bubble Toil and Trouble

Yes we know it is double double toil and trouble, but we had a visitor in our ranks at the opening this morning asking about our wine tasting this Saturday (3-6pm 132 Front Street) and we were just getting around to think about it and he suggested a Prosecco that we just marked in and put on the shelf.  Our friend buys wine with us and freely admits that he likes the labels and how hard wine bottlers try to make their bottles stand out.  We politely observed that the real measure of the wine rests on the wine and not how it is packaged; an observation lost on this advertising type who was in the opposite camp.

So Prosecco it will be as we liked the new one quite a bit.  He suggested we write about it and "murder" the MacBeth quote starting "double double" and say instead "double bubble" as a play on words.  He was quick to point out that the bubble we usually ascribe to champagne comes about because the bubbly part is produced in the bottle with that second fermentation while Prosecco gets its second fermentation in the original stainless steel tanks; double bubble ....  yikes.

So our friend left us with that little tidbit and we are off on our day.