While some of my friends from around the world were mugging it up on Facebook about Greek debt, monetary vs. fiscal US policy, Italian bonds, Euros and other economic news of current interest, I was hiding in another part of the Internet researching large numbers and the future of privacy.
I don’t know who among the Johns et al are right in that discussion, but at some point we are going to have to acknowledge that there are some clear options to acknowledge may happen based in our soon to be economic history.
From Wiki on “Large Numbers”:
“Some names of large numbers, such as million, billion, and trillion, have real referents in human experience, and are encountered in many contexts. At times, the names of large numbers have been forced into common usage as a result of excessive inflation.
“The highest numerical value banknote ever printed was a note for 1 sextillion pengő (1021 or 1 milliard bilpengő as printed) printed in Hungary in 1946. In 2009, Zimbabwe printed a 100 trillion (1014) Zimbabwean dollar note, which at the time of printing was only worth about US$30.[11].
Sweeping inflation bills after the introduction of the forint (August 1946) Source: Wikipedia
How did Hungary get out of the Pengő in 1946? Simple. They introduced the florinc and set a generous official conversion rate. I would attempt to describe it, but the numbers are simply boggling. Here is how the scholars at Wiki describe it.
“End of the pengő
The Hungarian economy could only be stabilized by the introduction of a new currency, and therefore, on 1 August 1946, the forint was reintroduced at a rate of 400 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 (400 octillion) = 4×1029 pengő, therefore the total amount of circulating pengő notes had a value of less than 0.1 fillér. The exchange rate to adópengő was set at 200 000 000 = 2×108 (hence the 2×1021 ratio, mentioned above).[4] The exchange rate for the US dollar was set at 11.74 forints.”
In 2008 I had the privilege of being a guest at the UN observation mess (bar) in Sukumi, Abkhazia (Georgia). I sat for 4 hours or so sharing drinks with members of UNOMIG about 3 weeks before the 2008 Georgian-Russian war erupted all around them. Each was from a different country. One of the soldiers I really enjoyed chatting with was from Zimbabwe.
We shared drinks for 4 hours. If I establish the Zimbabwe rate of inflation in late 2008 and apply it to his bar bill, I am going to come up with a rather interesting number. If he had bought all of his drinks and my drinks and paid in advance, would the inflation have saved him enough money to cover my drinks? I would bet that it would be worth prepaying and I’ll do some math later to figure it out.
I may not be an economist, but I play one on the bar stool.
But it didn’t work that way for my Zimbabwe friend. There is no cash at the bar, which meant that as a guest, I could never reciprocate with cash from my pocket. Each member’s bill is offered and paid after the end of the month.
This could severely affect my friend’s lifestyle. He bought a $5 drink in the middle of July in USD and paid the bill a month later in Zimbabwe dollars. I’m going to do the math on that one as well. How much did he pay in ‘late charges’ rather than being allowed to pay cash up front?
These two history lesson make me wonder why nobody is wondering how a possible hyperinflation in Greece will affect the price of a tea in Rotterdam when both are using the same Euro.
All right. I’ve had just a little too much Icewine at my friend’s guest house, but what’s a guy to do? In sleepy Niagara-on-the-Lake attwo a.m., leaving the car where it is and walking seven blocks is the right thing to do. It’s a safe and quiet town and a walk at night is a comfortable neighbourhood feeling.
September brings warm winds off the lake that cleans the downtown’s daily accumulation right out. The warm winds also bring a feeling that fall is not far off, and jackets will be welcome friends in just a month.
But tonight it is just me, the wind,King Street, and the small furry black and white rodent out front of the Hepburn house.
The critter is not unexpected.
It is skunk season and this has been a summer of skunks. For some reason, the very unscientific research I’ve been doing suggests that the skunk population has exploded. The two living out back under a summer cottage had five babies, and the dock area community earned it’s name of the past one hundred years as ‘skunk hollow’ by watching the cute little critters grow through adolescence, even to the point of feeding them peanuts. A rogue skunk lives by the Whale Inn, and presumably sleeps through the weddings held in the park gazebo. I refer to him as rogue because he didn’t find a mate this year, not because he is aggressive. He is just trying to get by as a skunk, like all the others.
They aren’t malicious, and have made peace with the locals. They don’t spray unless they are attacked or startled. They just want to root for food in the lawns and seek out the peanuts that are left behind by negligent squirrels and jays.
The locals have made peace with the skunks. We try not to startle them. We make noise before our paths cross and they amble away. Startling them doesn’t make sense, not that this town is known for an abundance of sense. We have lively and spirited conversations over the fences about whether the black and white buddies will be out in the afternoon, how far their spray can effectively go (and the wag who is also a sailor adds the “upwind or downwind?” dimension). We’ve settled on twenty feet either way.
I clap my hands like a crazy man and shout, “hey you, hey you, hey you, beat it, beat it, beat it”. He shoots his tail up, looks around, ready to shoot. I’m outside twenty paces and he does what good skunks do, and clear the sidewalk. I’m embarrassed by the noise I’m making in this sleepy small town at two a.m., but I have balanced the neighbours quiet enjoyment with the risk of smelling rather awful inNiagara’s restaurants for the next week. Niagara’s restaurants are safe. I wonder what the B&B guests in the Hepburn house are thinking.
My neighbour’s cat, ‘Goofy’ is already an unwitting accomplice. While the neighbour lazed in his hammock by the river, he reached down to pet the cat. The cat wasn’t, but seemed to enjoy the gentle affection until his owner looked down to find Pepe Le Pew at the end of his hand, enjoying the attention. The neighbour did the right thing by ceasing to pet the skunk.
My other neighbour found how industrious the babies can be. He heard a noise in the kitchen of his cottage. When he opened the cupboard under the sink, he found five of them all with butts in the air and face down tearing into a bag of cat food. They had dug a way in along the water pipes. He closed the door and went back to the television. Sometimes discretion is a wonderful thing.
The next member of the smelly gauntlet is rooting in front of the Prince of Wales. I wonder if his ancestors were here rooting around in 1973 when Queen Elizabeth visited. I’m sure that the Queen had people to run ahead of her shouting, “hey you, hey you, hey you, beat it, beat it, beat it”.
I didn’t have my own people, and felt rather un-queenly flapping my arms and yelling, well outside the twenty-foot “line of stench”. It doesn’t matter that nobody can see you at two a.m. They MIGHT! The Prince of Wales management might have to decide if there is a skunk problem or a drunk problem. I hope they didn’t see my face.
I got by a couple of the furry monochromes rooting by St. Mark’s parsonage. They were too heads down in the turf to notice me, and I was able to skirt the twenty foot clearance with lots to spare. I was tired of yelling and was ready to sing something a capella. Perhaps OhCanada! would do it, or something by Shania. After four encounters, I’m clearly losing my shyness.
Rounding the corner, I’m in familiar territory. I know about the rogue near the Whale Inn. I know that the family of nine out back are pet-able. I know my neighbour is not likely tossing peanuts out the door to attract them, and I know that I don’t have to cross the vicious, scary and largest skunk known to man that usually stands at the corner of Ball Street.
I am ready to sing, “I Did it My Way”, but they don’t give me the pleasure.
Five people seem to agree on the location of the centre of the universe.
I rarely recall the very first thought of the day. For most of us, the day begins in routine.
Wake early, check the Blackberry for email and messages and the all important Facebook. These are the things that are important in life; the things that we can do something about.
Then a quick check of the news headlines for the things that we as Canadians cannot do anything about but will talk about as if we can use knowledge of the Greek run on the banks to affect this day. Check the word of the word of the day and take a quick look at the Weather Channel app. Take a quick look out the window to see if the Weather Channel accuracy is a wag’s topic for one of those water cooler discussions today. Again, the less we can do about it the greater the chance to share complaints and opinions with other wise people.
I’m sure that people of other countries discuss similar things, but here in Canada it is a national meme, like Icewine, Maple Syrup, golf season for the Maple Leafs, beavers and Mounties.
The word of the day is omphalos. What a fun word!
My brain begins to noodle the word and its concept. It means ‘centre of the universe’. It is a Greek word. It entered the English language for some in the 1850s and it entered my own version of the English language at 5:37 am on May 17, 2012. It is also a synonym for ‘navel’.
It is of Greek origin, so one would not pluralize it with an ‘i’ ending as might be done with Latin words. If we follow Greek pluralization rules, then Omphaloses would be the word for two centres of the universe. Why would we ever need to pluralize “the centre of the universe”?
How can there be two centres of the universe? Objectively there could only be one in this universe. There could be two centres of two universes, but we would more likely refer to the center of two universes. Where does this leave the lonely omphalos?
Subjectively we all have our own centres of the universe so ‘omphaloses’ is a useful word. In fact, it is such an important part to each of us individually. Self esteem, ego, and viewpoint is defined from our own centre of the universe. From here we begin to develop self-awareness and share our centrism with others, as Id gives balance to Ego, and to altruism, charity and the better parts of being part of the human race.
Years ago a friend of mine refuted that Toronto was the centre of the universe. He claimed that he was and that he organized his world by moving it closer or further away from his centre. He meant this geographically and spiritually and was able to include altruism in his view of bringing parts of his world closer to the centre. In short, he had made omphalos a less selfish concept.
Another friend has two navels.
There have been many omphaloses perceived over time. Philosophers and despot rulers have embraced Geocentric view where the Earth is the centre of the universe. Heliocentric have killed others in support of their view of the sun being the true centre was a more correct view of the world
Classic Japanese might state that the axis mundi, a more spiritual view of omphalos is without a doubt Mount Fuji. Around the world other cultures that live near their mountains would claim that their landmark is indeed the omphalotic symbol of their culture. Greek tradition says that the omphalos is a stone placed in a temple in Delphi. Christian and Jewish tradition states that a rock in Jerusalem is the spiritual centre of the universe.
I could imagine sneaking into the temple and moving the omphalos stone a few inches to the left. Would everyone in the world begin banging their shins on tables because the universe had been shifted those few inches without their knowledge?
The classic Big Bang theory allows us to estimate where the centre of the universe really is. It is about 13.75 billion years ago at the point where all matter exploded from the singularity and has been travelling outwards ever since. It is a neat model until two things happen. Bible scholars have argued that the universe is approximately 6000 years old and metaphorically believe that the centre of the universe is in the bible, or the Earth.
It is far easier to buy into Big Bang or fundamental Christian view than to try to understand the quantum view of the universe. Where is the centre of a doughnut-shaped universe anyway? Is there a single shared centre for all the universes or does each have their own?
It is time to shift the best parts of the world closer to my centre.
There is no menu, no Zagat, no “best of” lists for those best parts so I’m going to enjoy figuring out what those best parts are.
A lot of things come together when someone says no to something you are passionate about. This made me feel great, although it was a bit of tough train of thought and the kindness of a stranger that helped me help me pull it all together.
It could have been a bad experience. I had sent Dr. David Suzuki an invitation to join a film project of mine, ‘humbly Seeking Sochi’ for the episode on Agios Efstratios, a tiny Greek Island of about 400 people that has managed to become pretty well self-sustaining by investing in solar, wind, and energy conservation methods.
Instead, Dr. Suzuki said,
“Needless to say, I am honoured to receive your request. I’m afraid though that at my age, the idea of being involved in a filming project is not what I am interested in, exotic though the location will be. I would suggest that you might consider either of my daughters, Severn and Sarika, who have both been involved with me on the Nature of Things and are infinitely more photogenic.
“Thanks for asking me.
David Suzuki”
The idea that one of my heroes might decline because of his age startled me. I read it as an honest admission to me, a stranger, but it got me remembering a couple of points in my life that reminded me of my advance on mortality.
The greatest of stories are told in the smallest of moments and there are no great shipwrecks (although I’ve survived one) or no great wars (it missed me by a couple of weeks) in the great revelation Suzuki reminded me of.
I was about forty when I moved into a high-rise apartment. I unpacked, set up the answering machine, and promptly left for a week. When I came back, I punched the button on the answering machine.
There were no messages, and it played my welcome greeting, “Hi I’m not here right now…”
My blood ran cold. How did my father’s voice get on that machine? Did he call in and in a technologically challenged moment succeed in hacking the machine and getting into the welcome message? I wanted to call him and ask, or accuse, or ask in such a way that I could accuse him if he couldn’t come up with the right words.
I played it again. I played it again.
The next day I played it again and then did something wise. I forgot about calling my father with wild accusations. I recorded over the welcome message.
Then I played it. My first thought was that the ‘damned clever fellow’ had done it again.
In a blinding flash of the obvious, I realized that I was becoming my father. Indeed, I already had become. My voice was his voice when played back.
In the early days of planning the ‘humbly Seeks Sochi’ trip, I was chatting with my dad.
I’m sure that it was a rambling enthusiasm of unorganized thoughts, probably the second best time of the project other than actually sailing from Athens to Sochi. There were no realities at the time. I didn’t know I would be against three knot currents through the Dardanelles, or that I would have such a problem in planning Odessa until my Moscow friend said something totally innocuous that would become the Odessa theme, or that the whole project would involve such detailed logistics and planning. Dreams are wonderful!
I said to him, “Dad, why don’t you join us for a week’s sailing somewhere. We’ll work it out somehow and I’d love to share this with you. “
I wasn’t prepared for his answer, “Son, in two years, I’ll be 80 and I’m not sure I’ll be up to it. “
Dad and the dogz in the hood
My father lives on a steep hillside on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia. In an astounding metaphor for life, he spends many of his days building retaining walls and plotting ways to defy what gravity schemes to bring down the hill. He is in far better shape than I am and he is usually more successful at defying the gravity immediately around him than I feel I have been.
His cold logic disturbed me. There is no changing it. He has counted the years, ignored the numbers and learned to enjoy his Sisyphean task. I am left disturbed but envious.
I told the first story to an acquaintance and after I had finished, he looked into his soup and said quietly “And I looked down and saw my father’s hands… “ I confess that it took me a little while to understand it and then I was humbled.
I cannot work on a keyboard without that phrase pleasantly nagging me as I hunt and peck and watch the back of my hands. I am doing different things than my father did, but my hands and the voice I hear recorded have become a sincere reminder of where I have been and where I am going.
Tyler Philp of North of 9 Fine Wine shared an article on wine tasting that got me wondering: how could I create an appetizer that paired with almost any wine.
The dish looks great, is colourful, evokes fragrance, texture, taste, and is easy to enjoy one handed while standing at a social event or a wine tasting.
Perfect appetizer for Icewines and wines
There was no recipe or link provided so I called him to ask what the original ingredients were. Philp described the original dish as goat cheese in a phyllo purse sitting on Ontario strawberry coulis with blades of wheat grass. He went on to say that the small appetizer was served during a Sauvignon Blanc tasting that he was hosting.
Then we began discussing various ways to make this dish pair with any wine. The dish consists of two things that don’t change: Phyllo pastry and the dish itself. There are three variables that one can change to suit the occasion: Stuffing, sauce, and garnish.
The basic recipe to make 6 servings looks like this:
Phyllo pastry
12 ounces of stuffing (estimate 2 oz. per portion)
18 tablespoons of sauce (estmate 3tbs. per portion)
Garnish
Place the stuffing in the phyllo and bake at 300of or 150oc until the phyllo is starting to show brown. Assemble the plate as shown.
What could be easier than this? This a great way to give leftovers a noble end! All we have to do is create a list of logical combinations and we’re set for all occasions. What stuffing, sauce and garnish and matching wine could be used? The answer is, “anything you would like”.
Philp suggested a number of options but it became clear that there were literally thousands of combinations of foods and wines to try using this simple recipe. Here are some of the leaders:
Stuffing
Sauce
Garnish
Wine
2 ounce Lobster pieces
Melted butter
Arugula and Riesling
Riesling,Champagne
Shrimp
Thai sauce with ginger
Lemongrass
Vidal Icewine, Gewürztraminer
Pork cubes
Applesauce
Serrano pepper slices (if you are adventurous)
Fruity Chardonnay
Beef tenderloin cubes with blue cheese
Olive oil, chives, salt & pepper
Sprig of rosemary
Cabernet Sauvignon (try a jammy warm climate Cab)
Chorizo sausage meatballs cooked up with onion, chickpeas, cloves and garlic to taste
Vegetable stock
Sprig of thyme
Shiraz (Syrah) or perhaps Malbec
Seared foie gras
Applesauce
Fresh raspberry
Tokaji, Vin Jaune, Vidal Icewine, Sauterne
Grilled BBQ chicken pieces
Spicy peanut sauce
Cilantro
Sangiovese
Smoked gouda cubes
Primavera
Savoury biscotti
Gewurztraminer, off-dry Riesling
Lamb pieces
Curry sauce (spiced to taste)
Red peppers (cool) or Serrano peppers (warm)
Pinot Noir, Rioja Reserva, Malbec
It is easy, versatile, and a wonderful way to assemble a great appetizer. Check your fridge or wine rack and start creating!
It was pretty exciting. And it didn’t smell as bad as I thought it would, and it was more beautiful than I had expected. The Amorphophallus titanum had bloomed on May 4, 2012. Here are a few pictures.
Niagara Parks manager Joan Cornelius is excited about the Amorphophallus Titanum plant that has grown more than 2 meters in just 30 days. “It grew 6 inches in a day but now it is slowing down, getting ready to bloom”
May 31, 2012 The Amorphophalas Titanum in Niagara Parks is expected to bloom within days.
Amorphophallus Titanum is commonly known as the Corpse plant for good reason. When it flowers, it emits the foul smell of a large rotting dead mammal. The spath also turns blood red to resemble rotting flesh. This attracts carrion eating beetles and flesh flies, insects who pollinate the plant.
Cornelius adds, “It is still growing, so it is not ready to bloom yet. It grew 1 ½ inches today, so we think it will open late Tuesday, perhaps Wednesday. And it will bloom for about three days and then die”.
Cornelius points to a second, much smaller corpse plant beside Morph. “This one is only 10 days behind so we’ll have two plants blooming within 10 days”
Six of these rare plants were donated to Niagara Parks by Mr. Louis Riccardiello a New Hampshire collector. Mr. Riccardiello holds the Guinness Book of Records title for the tallest Amorphophallus titanium ever grown in captivity. It grew to 3.1 meters in June, 2010.
Two of these plants are blooming this May. The others are being carefully tended by Niagara Parks gardener Wayne Hoeschle. He says his secret is to water and fertilize it very well as soon as the shoot breaks through the earth.
Amorphophallus Titanum was first bloomed in captivity in the Kew Royal Botanical Gardens in 1889 and since then, about 150 blooming events have been reported from around the world. Hoeshle believes that this is the first blooming event in Canada. “And we have two of them” he adds with a smile.
There will be Amorphophallus Titanum excitement from now until approximately May 20th at the Niagara Parks Floral Showhouse in Niagara Falls.
I met Joseph Smith in 1998 or so, in a first class seat doing a red eye flight from Calgary to Toronto, back in my Natural Gas executive days. We didn’t talk for the first hour and then I decided that Harvey Mackay was right, “Never Miss a Chance to Meet Someone”, or perhaps Mr. Smith, as I recall his name was, was twenty or thirty years more mature than I was and started the conversation. He might have been seventy, or eighty, or pushing ninety, but talking with him was as pleasant as sharing trucks in a sandbox with a new kid.
After the ‘what do you dos, ‘and the small talk, Joseph Smith told me was head of Danzas’ Russian oil rig logistics division. “Image an oil field that costs $50,000 per hour to operate and it is shut down by a single part; what do you do?”
“Whatever it takes!” he said with a triumphant smile, “including buying the replacement part an airplane seat.”
He clearly loved life, and loved his job. I understood how much he loved his wife when he tried to call her from the airplane phone and the connection was bad, and then he was cut off. At 36,000 feet, He began to worry about her sitting comfortably at home.
“How did you get into logistics, especially in Russia?”
He began the story. He had three friends in Russia and they formed a company in the 1960s to run a small courier and logistics business that focussed on moving specialized goods in and out of the Soviet Union. He said that they started operating and within three or four months they realized that they were going to be successful, even wealthy from the enterprise. FedEx was started in 1971 and DHL didn’t go international until the late 1970s.
Then late one night three big men knocked on his door with a single message, “Call Your Partners”. He said, “Why?” and they repeated “Call Your Partners”.
In the 1960s there was no internet. There were rotary dial phones and long distance calling was a big deal, but he got through to his partners. All three said the same thing. They too had suffered a visit in the night by large men who demanded that the company be turned over to them. There was no ‘or else’. These were the Russian thugs of the 1960s.
It wouldn’t be polite to do what I wanted to do, which was jump at him across the armrest with a blurted out “What did you do?” In fact, the stewardess came by with the drinks cart on either side and our attentions were divided. Then dinner came and I suppose that we did some small talk, but the elephant called “Tell me what happened!” remained, and I think he might have been enjoying this. He was able to get through to his wife and confirm that both of them knew that the other was all right. I want that when I am eighty.
Trays cleared, and about an hour from landing, we reconnected. I asked him about some of the details of his business and about his wife, and how they met, but the answers were lost in the screaming question that so far remained unanswered.
“So Joseph, you were in quite a predicament. “ “Yes I was”. “That was a tough thing to face.” “Yes it was”.
Finally, “How did you get from there to Danzas 30 years later?” I was thinking this was subtle.
He smiled. He’d had me on the razor’s edge for about an hour.
“When one is faced with a big Mafia, one goes to a bigger Mafia.”
What on earth did that mean?
He went on to say that he took his company books into the head of the dockworker’s union in St. Petersburg. He walked up to his desk and dropped his company books on his table and said “I would like to give you this company. Free. As you can see, it is very profitable company and because of certain troubles, I cannot continue to own it, so I’d like to give it to you. However, I and my partners would be happy to stay on in a small capacity to ensure that it continues to make everybody money”. He said that the man looked over his desk and said, “Tell me of your troubles”.
He says he told him, and continued to run his business with a new major partner and his original partners. He never heard from the first set of thugs again.
The flight was coming to an end, we buckled up, but I felt that there was more to this incredible story.
He continued, “Very shortly we became known as a company that could get freight through the port of St. Petersburg in hours, where every other logistics company could take days or weeks to get their freight through. We made a lot of money! “
I remember the story clearly. I recall that his birthday was on January 6 and the next year I sent him an email congratulating him. I’m not positive that his name was actually Joseph Smith, but I recall seeing his business card and writing his birthday on the back.
Thanks to his story generously shared, we all know that there is always another way.
I was looking at the table wine grapes being harvested now in Niagara and wondered whether to hazard a guess at what the Icewine harvest might be like when January, or February comes. Then I thought about how wrong we would all have been to take early guesses at the Niagara table wine harvest.
Niagara had a lot of rain this summer, and then 25 days of straight sunshine in September, which were almost perfect conditions for a wonderful grape harvest. But then it started to rain. It rained through October. Then it got cold last week. The farmers had taken a lot of the white grapes off, but with a lot of the reds still hanging on the vine, an early frost hit overnight. A crop that promised lots of quality and quantity still has the quantity. However, the stellar quality is now less than stellar, but certainly not as bad as ‘bad’.
However, it has the local media in an uproar reporting a massive (in Niagara, 12,000 tonnes is ‘massive’) surplus of grapes that will make farmers go bankrupt, and so on. News media makes their money on bad news.
I asked a couple of my suppliers if they were affected by this glut of less than ideal quality grapes. They didn’t seem concerned because they had commitments for all of their grapes.
One said, “Sure, the guys who are trying to grow 10 tonnes per acre have too much crop and the brix and flavour just isn’t going to be as concentrated as it should be so of course it will be hard to sell. I grow two to three tonnes per acre and they are all sold.”
Farmers can control how large a harvest will be by pruning the fruit in early season. By pruning back many of the grapes early, the remaining grapes will have better quality because the vine will focus on feeding less fruit with more goodness. This is as much art as science. Farmers who don’t prune or prune very little are making far more grapes, but they will be of a lesser brix or flavour and the crop, while bigger, will be less valuable, and harder to sell.
“What about the frost damage?” I asked another family winemaker who grows his own grapes. When the frost kills the leaves, development of the grape ceases. If a farmer doesn’t have wind machines to protect his vineyards from frost, his crop runs the risk of fungus, rot, and damage, and the grapes will have ceased to develop normally.
“Some farmers will be claiming crop insurance. I’m happy that the frost has killed off the canopy. The grapes are finished growing, and now I’m going to let them desiccate on the vine a little bit, concentrate the sugars, and then pick them. It’s kind of a mini-amarone thing happening right on the vine.”
I like this kind of innovation. In an industry where one doesn’t expect so much innovation, a little frost allowed this grower to make use of weather that couldn’t be expected to improve some of his grapes, and he had a plan that he had thought forward through fermentation and probably right to his shop shelves.
Innovation is good. Almost 200 years ago German farmers had their grapes frozen by an early winter and invented Eiswine, which was adapted to become Icewine, Niagara’s, and Canada’s signature wine.
Another farmer will be grafting Malbec buds onto 30 year old roots and protecting them against the frost. He’ll have something close to an old vines Malbec crop to take off next year and since as a winemaker, he lives and breaths his reds, I can’t wait to see what Malbec comes out of that winery. Malbec is a rare variety in Niagara.
At Pillitteri, they have just released another sparkling Icewine. This time it is a sparkling Cabernet Franc. Pillitteri is the leader in bringing different varieties to market. They are still celebrating that they have been able to keep the sangiovese vines alive through the winter so we may see another vintage of Icewines reminiscent of Chianti. Pillitteri is also plotting to make a ripasso style wine, but beyond that, those in the know won’t share the secrets until it is in the bottle. They already make a winning sur lies Chardonnay, so Pillitteri is not afraid of a little innovation with secondary fermentation
Over at Reif Winery, Klaus Reif was walking around his tasting room offering customers samples of his first batch of raisins. He’s adopted an as yet, still secret technology from another branch of agriculture and dried out a few tonnes of Coronation table grapes, virtually inventing a new foodstuff, the Niagara raisin.
The Niagara Region is developing culinary and innovative local ingredients like Klaus’s help make the experience truly local. If a Niagara raisin is on the menu next time I’m out dining, I’m ordering it!
I found the unkindest words from a wine writer in one of those long forgotten big coffee table books. In the Italian wines section there was a simple entry about Cinque Terre wines. I also recall that Icewine and wines from Canada weren’t even mentioned in the book so this was a very long time ago.
“They make white wine mostly. Some years it is passable. Other years you wonder why they bother.”
I’ve always remembered that phrase as the compelling reminder of cruel dismissal in a very minor section by a long forgotten author in a book so far in my past that I don’t recall the colour of the cover.
Of course I had to go to Cinque Terre and explore the wine.
Cinque Terre is a chain of five small towns on the Western side of Italy’s boot, about halfway between Genoa and Pisa. They are connected by an impossibly convoluted mountainous road and the walking trails that make these five jewels, each with a different character, such a destination for hikers. They also are connected by trains which rival any city’s subway for easy use.
I drove down from Munich, which gave me a chance to enjoy the mountains of northern Italy, where the locals still cling to the belief that they are Germans, down to Lake Como. Along that road, at no particular spot the locals begin to relent and embrace Italy. Then the mountains spit you out into Amarone country, through the vast vineyards of the Po valley and on through Lombardy until mountains reappear and one arrives in Liguria.
Long ago, while Britain’s King John was signing the Magna Carta, and the Vikings were settling Canada, the Mongols ruled China and were sacking Moscow the people in the Cinque Terre region began terracing their vineyards on the slopes of the Mediterranean Sea.
I did the math. They moved more rocks to build the Cinque Terre terraces than the Egyptians moved to build the great pyramids.
Today, the greater efficiencies of the flatland vineyards have turned many of the terraces into wonderful local gardens growing white asparagus, lemons, olives, and grapes. While the local wine industry is under threat from more efficient areas of Italy, Cinque Terre remains an amazing place to hike, eat and vacation.
And now my beef with that wine writer. Local wines, wherever you find them, can be simply amazing if you wrap them in a traveler’s experience.
Wake up early in one of Cinque Terre’s striking villages, perhaps in Manarolo or Vernazza. Open the shutters of the trattoria and let the light stream in, and hit the market early. Pack fresh focaccia, sun dried tomatoes, hard and tangy Genovese cheese and pick a local bottle of white wine.
Hitch a train or hike over to Manarola , and begin climbing south until you reach the ancient church, Santuario della Madonna di Montenero, at the top. Then sit down and enjoy a late breakfast with wine made of your morning’s market shopping on the side of a hill, 400 meters above the Mediterranean Sea. Talk, doze, watch, wonder at how this part of the world is so elegantly put together and yet everything is on a slant. It doesn’t matter, and nothing else in the world matters.
Then head down the hill into the towns and explore, looking for the perfect place to share a bottle of wine and watch the sunset. That can take an entire afternoon. Pick up a different local white wine. Catch an early dinner of fresh local fish and Fettuccine di Pesto alla genovese. Then head down to the rocks under the fort at in Vernazza’s harbour or settle in to natural armchairs carved out of rock high up in Manarola, or a private beach off the Via dell’ Amor walkway and make the wine last through the sunset.
Do this with a lover each day for an entire week and prove that anyone suggesting that local wines anywhere are just passable should get off their couch!
Again, no Icewine connection, other than this is in the heart of Canadian Icewine country!
This is a tip of the hat to the over 65 boats and crews that will be attending the 50th Shark Class Sailboat World Championships here in Niagara on the Lake this coming week. Crews will be from at least five countries, three in Europe and it is going to be special.
I’m not competing. From my previous posting you might think that I kind of lost my boat, “Humbly, the Magnificent Champion of the Universe, but no, that happened quite a while ago and my boat is fine. I’m just helping with the organizing until they notice that it’s really helping with the disorganizing!
If you are local, the event is open to the public, although the races will take place out all week out on Lake Ontario.
Many years ago, before I got involved with Icewine or even fine wines, I did other foolish things.
Today, my friend Sue asked me if I could swim because her young son was playing at the waters edge near us. I said yes, but then this whole story came flooding back into my memory.
I sailed out past the breakwater to begin a long downwind ride across Lake Ontario. All morning, the weather stations had been reporting West winds at 30 to 40 knots and up to 3 meter waves. This was playtime for Humbly, my 24′ Shark sailboat. We had been out many times in these conditions and Humbly always surfed along downwind under main and storm jib at exhilarating speeds ahead of the crests.
For about an hour Humbly went faster that she had ever gone before. She surfed down 3 meter waves, and in the gusts the pressures turned into humming in the hull and vibration on the tiller. There was tremendous pressure on the mast and rigging. The rudder was kicking up a rooster tail.
At about 4:00 we were between 6 and 8 miles from the South shore.
The mother of all waves picked Humbly up, turned her sideways and heeled her almost 90 degrees. It bumped the bottom of the boat and boosted me off balance off of the seat. I felt like a volleyball set up for a spike. The wave broke over the cockpit and slammed me over the leeward coaming. Somewhere in the tremendous rush of water I took my left hand off the tiller and the next thing I remember is hanging in the water on the port side reaching up and over the transom grasping the tiller with my right hand.
Then the boat tilted to windward and I lot my grip and went underwater.
When I came back to the surface the boat had righted herself and rounded up into the wind with her stern about six feet away. I swam for it and lunged for the motor but missed it by just six inches and went under water again. I had missed my only chance.
Rage waved over me and I screamed, “You dumb country fuck!” The rage passed almost immediately. Humbly sailed away towards the South shore.
I started to think. I was alone. I was wearing a farmer John wetsuit bottoms and a Mustang floater coat. Inside the left sleeve pocket were three small aerial flares. There was a whistle, two small flashlights, and $2.75 in change in the side pockets. I was barefoot.
The floater coat and wetsuit kept me buoyant so I thought that my biggest danger was hypothermia and I hooked up the beavertail attached to the floater coat to try to reduce heat loss from my crotch
I could see the far shore when the larger waves lifted me and even though the boat was still only a few hundred feet away I started cheering her on. Humbly was headed south on her drunken course. I imagined that when she hit the rocks along the shoreline there would be a movie style explosion with flame and smoke that would attract attention and help.
Until then, my choices were to either curl up and float to conserve heat, or to swim towards shore.
I decided to swim. I still had two flares. My fragile game plan was to swim towards the shore. When Humbly’s sails disappeared I would know that Humbly had hit the shore. The search would start and then I could fire off the last two flares and then rescuers would come out and get me. Simple!
First I had to learn now to swim. Other than swimming back to my windsurfer after a fall, I had not been swimming for over twenty years. The floater coat kept my head above water but would not allow a normal swim stroke, and the neoprene wetsuit bottoms kept trying to flip my legs up and put my face in the water. I found that the best compromise was in a combination of breast stroke and pedal kick which kept me moving forward very slowly and somewhat upright.
I stroked slowly and watched my boat get smaller. I tried to remember more on survival. I don’t think I’ve ever thought so much about anything.
The next couple of hours became a series of stroke, stroke, watch Humbly stagger towards shore, stroke, try and remember anything to do with survival, stroke, sputter, and stroke. The boat moved further away but the shoreline did not seem any closer. I was drifting East in mountainous waves and swimming South.
After about an hour I noticed a seagull floating effortlessly above me. It struck me that this was not fair and I yelled to the gull, “Hey, gull! Go and tell them where I am and I’ll give you a fish.” He floated there for a minute and then wafted away. I told myself that he could see that I had no fish.
The sun sank lower to the West and I realized for the first time that I would be out there after dark. I could still see Humbly in the distance and it was alarming how far the boat was going and how small the sails were getting while the shore didn’t seem to be getting any closer.
The sun went down and I started getting cold.
Every little while I had the urge to speed up and a couple of times I tried to swim faster but this never lasted when I realized that slower was better. This was difficult. I have always had trouble pacing myself in anything I have ever done but this time there was no choice. Now that it was completely dark waves were sneaking up from behind and clobbering me, leaving me sputtering and indignant.
A blue flashing light caught my eye off to the left. I waited for the next wave to pick me up for another look and saw the light on top of a large yellow vessel with a black hull floating about a hundred yards away to the southeast. I saw it again and reached for the flares in the sleeve pocket of my floater coat. It seemed to take forever to very carefully get the flares out of the pocket and out of the plastic bag, put one back in the bag, replace the bag in the sleeve pocket, unscrew the end of the flare, point the business end up, and pull the chain. I had never fired flares before and was scared witless that I might drop either one. The flare arced up, over and doused downwind. I was both disappointed at how quickly the light show was over. I waited a few long seconds.
Suddenly the boat accelerated to the West. They had not seen me! As fast as I could I pulled out the other flare and fired it in an arc in front of the boat. It did not reach the boat, but it did arc nicely and doused off its starboard quarter. I kept watching the boat’s direction. No change…no change…no change. The boat kept on going and disappeared to the West. I yelled; I screamed; I called it names and cursed its wake.
When I calmed down I realized that I was upset that I now had a long way to swim. I decided that I was still going to make it swimming, but I didn’t want to. I wanted a ride. “OK self, you have no more flares and there is a blind madman in a forty foot rescue boat driving up and down the shoreline at high speed. Just my luck he’ll come back and nail me in the head.”
I settled down into a slow routine of stroking and started to daydream.
Strokes. More strokes. More strokes. More strokes.
I tried body surfing and caught a few waves that turned into exciting and long rides, but I realized that they were not free rides because they took so much energy.
Things were going well enough. “What can possibly go wrong?” I could hit a cold patch in the lake. I could run into a current where a stream empties into the lake just in front of me. I could get hit by a bugs-in-teeth rescue boat driver. I worried about getting ashore. I didn’t want to be bashed against the rocks along the shore by these huge waves.
More slow strokes. I was getting close!
I was about twenty yards from the breakwater when the panic set in. I was now close enough to the rocks to use them as reference points and I didn’t seem to be getting any closer. How could I come this far to get pushed away from the rocks by a current! I ran out of breath and rested, collected my wits, and went back to the slow stroke, stroke, game plan that had been successful for so long. A few minutes later a wave picked me up and deposited me gently on a large flat rock.
Nothing about Icewine today. However, if you are enjoying reading about Abkhazia, please take a moment to look at Dr. Genie Pritchett’s blog as well.
Genie is an American doctor who volunteered with Doctors Without Borders, (MÉDECINS SANS FRONTIÈRES) to go to Abkhazia and her perspective is honest, interesting, and well written.
Find her blog here or cut and paste http://www.abkhaziaadventures.blogspot.com/
My friend Tim lives in Moscow and in his career he has been a school teacher in Sukhumi, a wine executive for a Georgian winery, a land developer in Moscow, and probably many other things I’ve yet to discover.
Tim’s English is excellent which is fortunate for me. My Russian language has already been demonstrated in previous articles to be enough to avoid a shotgun wedding at the Russian border and to convince hockey players to drink wine. Beyond that, I’m lost with the Russian language.
We were working on a bulk wine deal between Russia and South America and trying to ensure that we were on the same page about how a particular transaction might go. Tim told me this allegory which clears up a question about how serious a buyer or a seller is.
Tim’s story goes:
Two men sat down to talk business.
One said, “I will sell you one liter of honey for one dollar and twenty five cents”
The other said, “I will buy the liter of honey for eighty cents.”
They negotiated for a long time and eventually agreed on one dollar for the liter of honey.
Then both men got up from the table.
One man went to go find honey. The other man went to go find money.
Icewine Guy Meets Svetlanas and The Soul of Abkhazia
I marvel that in the former Soviet Union there are a very large number of babies born named Svetlana. It seems that half of the folks I met in or from the former Soviet Union countries are named Svetlana. This makes it easier to remember names, but harder to talk about them. “Svetlana from Moscow, Svetlana from St. Petersburg” is a distinction that must be made, but frankly that distinction is for my benefit. They are all the same to the people around me in Canada, except for the three Svetlanas I know who live in my small area of Canada.
They do help me though with nicknames. Svetlana from Sukhumi prefers Sveta. Svetlana from Novy Afon prefers Lana. My close friend Svetlana from Tashkent prefers Svetlana, but I can get a rise out of her by calling her “sweaty Lana” and she replies with “Philsky”
Lana is the head of Abkhazia’s International Department. She went to Moscow, took a University degree and began a rat race of a career in Moscow; a “good job”. Then she decided that she should ‘downshift’ and come back to Abkhazia to work. Her role in Akbhazia’s foreign ministry is underpaid, but she makes up for it teaching at the University.
Her English is exceptional, and when she started doing simultaneous translation between Minister of Agriculture and me, I was actually startled. It didn’t take me long to get used watching the Russian language coming out of my mouth in deep and foreign tones and into my ears in her very feminine, perfect English lilt, but the first few sentences caught me off guard.
She offered to take me sightseeing, much like I take people here to Niagara Falls and I was thrilled to have a chance to see some of the tourist sights. This area has a rich history. This is the region where the earliest recorded winemaking has been discovered, about 7500 BC. Schoolboys are taught about Jason and the Golden Fleece. This is where Jason and the Argonauts came to find it. It seems that lambs pelts are perfect for putting in mountain streams as they capture heavy gold particles in the wool and incidentally make a ‘golden fleece’. St. Peter (or locally called St. Simon) came here in 55AD and was killed near Novy Afon after a few years of hermitage. Nearby are the largest caves in the world. The New Athos Monastery is majestic on the nearby hill.
I’m not much of a tourist. The world’s largest caves would be interesting if there were no guardrails or signs like, “This way to the egress”.
In my free time in Moscow I did not see Red Square for two reasons; I couldn’t figure out how to cross the road to get to it, and I wasn’t that motivated because everything I saw was interesting. If you want a thrill ride in Moscow, I recommend Tim, my Georgian friend who drove me through the deserted streets around the Kremlin at 120 km at 3am in a mad burst of exhilaration. We were both stone cold sober and perhaps next time I’ll see more of the Kremlin. I do recall my hands on the dashboard, gripping tightly. I did see the Kremlin from the across or along the river, but I was perched high up in a nightclub called Soho Rooms, getting to know some rather interesting people.
So where is the soul of this land?
I have decided that it was with Lana, walking through some delightful woods to a small cave which is a shrine to a saint who lived 2000 years ago. We in the west typically call him St. Peter, but locally he is called by his birth name, St. Simeon. Lana pointed out red spots in the river which appear magically and are said to be the blood of St. Simeon. The locals killed him for some reason and now they revere him. The former Soviet world is full of such conundrums.
A garden of rocks sprouted out of nowhere. The river begins at the foot of a high rock face, bubbling out of the ground. It is clear and beautiful and there is no need for bottled water, drinking fountains, or pop stands. It is fresh and drinkable. In fact it stands out as beautiful tasting water, filtered through the Caucasus Mountains and popping up virtually untouched in the copse of trees at the foot of the cliff.
Novy Afon was missed by much of the destruction of the 1992 war so it remains reasonably pristine, but it joined the economic black hole that sucked in all of Abkhazia and it shows. There are no bullet holes, and the huge Georgian monastery of New Athos was untouched, as tempting as a target it must have been, by both sides in 1992.
Everybody in Abkhazia, indeed, all of the rural Caucasus, makes their own wine. Wine is the soul of hospitality among these incredibly hospitable people. Grape vines are trained up trees or trellises, harvest is done by hand, and fermentation happens in large clay pots that are buried in the ground in a shed as a natural form of climate control so the wine doesn’t overheat. Beside the largest pot is the second largest pot, and beside that is the third largest pot, in a cascade of ever smaller pots sunk into the earth of the wine cellar. The wine in the second smallest pot is poured into the next smaller and so on up to the largest pot to make room for the new harvest. Presumably some is drunk from each vintage year and the finest wine is often in the smallest pot.
Before I left, I read in a cooking book that the name of these pots was “Kvevri”
I only saw one in Abkhazia, on that walk to the shrine. It was turned over and we took pictures of each other standing beside it.
Lana was, I think pleased that I knew what it was, but she was sweet and patient but firm when she explained that “Kvevri” was the Georgian name and that the Abkhazian name was “Apshah”, which means something like “home of the soul”.
The only Ashrah I saw on this was upended, broken and would hold no souls. It was left on the side of a path on the way to a martyr’s shrine.
I wasn’t there to take in war stories. The 16 year old bullet holes in the apartment buildings were grotesque to me, but people lived in them, and children grew up under the pocked walls that remind everyone that 16 years ago this was a war zone and almost was again in August 2008, and could be again.
On the way into Sukhumi Max pointed out the bridge over the Gumista river up ahead. “That is where we stopped them in ‘92”. “Then we went around the mountains and circled Sukhumi and they had to evacuate.”
In the 1992 war, a battalion of Chechnyan mercenaries were the sharp edge of Abkhazia’s defense and counter attack, and they were arranged by the Russians, and supplemented by the tiny Abkhazian army and militia. Abkhazia had declared independence, and Georgia disagreed and sent troops in to re-take the territory.
In the encirclement, they almost caught Eduard Shevardnadze who was then Georgia’s president in Sukhumi. He escaped by the skin of his teeth.
The geography of low tech war was simple. The mountains were impassable. The sea was controlled by the Georgian navy and air force. This left a slim flat area that land armies could fight over. Flat streams that poured out of the Caucasus Mountains provided tactical obstructions every few miles.
The rocky flats of the Gumista River had been heavily mined to stop the Georgian advance. In just 2 years, Abkhazia became one of the most heavily mined areas in the world. It took 16 years of HALO to finally clear up most of the mines.
As we crossed the bridge, he pointed down to some woods on the north shore of the Gumista river. “That’s where I was”, he said.
“But Max, you were 15 years old!” I blurted out. I was looking at this man sitting beside me, trying to make a link between him and the scared 15 year old clutching an AK-47 and looking through the darkness at another army. I could no more do this than I could reach my own young self at Trafalgar Square a few weeks before.
He nodded and we drove into Sukhumi, his home town.
I met Fred Weir at the Canadian Embassy Icewine tasting in Moscow in June. Fred is a fellow Canadian who writes about Russia for Indian, Chinese, British and American newspapers, including the Christian Science Monitor. We had just enough time for a friendly chat and connect before I stood up and served enough Icewine to Moscow’s wine elite to drop a diabetic elephant into a deep coma.
Seaside Cafe on the Black Sea
A couple of weeks later, I was walking the quiet and calm waterfronts of Sukhumi. Max enjoys pop culture. Over glasses of Abkhazian wine, lavash and great cheeses we talked about his country until the conversation drifted away, and then we shifted to talk of Hunter Thompson and Ralph Steadman or other Rolling Stone issues. Max has an advantage in that while his country is isolated by the world, his work takes him abroad. This and his American education give him a perspective that most Abkhazians would not see. When I left, I gave Max a bottle of Dan Aykroyd Icewine.
Dan Aykroyd’s contribution to pop culture leaves an interesting patchwork. In the Soviet Union, he is well known, but when I mentioned Dan Aykoryd, some would light up and say, “Ghostbusters!” and others would light up and say “Blues Brothers”. This didn’t have so much to do with the age of the person I was talking to and I never did understand what made a Russian remember Ghostbusters over Blues Brothers or the other way around and not both.
I was thrilled about the Dan Aykroyd Icewine. When I shipped the samples to Moscow, it was a great tasting celebrity wine. When I got there three weeks later, it had won Ontario’s “Wine of the Year”. The medal and the recognition didn’t change the wine inside, but it was great to show that the home of Icewine was heaping honours on an Ontario boy and his wines.
A week later the prelude to August war between Abkhazia and their Russian protectors and Georgia started up in the form of car bombs, shootings and kidnappings. A bomb went off in the market where I had so enjoyed looking for local foods to pair with the Icewines. Another blast killed four people at a birthday party near the southern border. Reporters were sent into Abkhazia to cover the war.
“They always want to cover the war,” I recall Max saying about the reporters, “but there is so much more going on here.” But Max’s job was to meet with each of the media and he has presence so they all met him, usually followed by a pleasant but briefer and more formal meeting with Sergey Shamba, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Max’s boss.
For me, a delightful punch line came in an email from Fred shortly after he visited Abkhazia. Here it is in Fred’s own words,
“Yes, it’s a small world. I met at least two people down in Abkhazia who mentioned you. One of them was Max Gunjia, who started talking about ice wine in the midst of a political interview, then your name came up … Interesting place, Abkhazia;”
Part 1 left off with Max, Teddy, the Macedonian and I having dinner in a seaside cafe in Sukhumi.
During the dinner, Teddy invited me to visit the UNOMIG compound. I grew up as an army brat and lived on army bases all my life but I knew that this, I knew was going to be a visit of a different kind.
As I passed through the guardhouse at the gates the guards searched my laptop computer bag carefully, and an escort took me to Teddy’s office about 4pm.
Somehow we ended up at the base bar. The UNOMIG team is multinational. For example, their operating rules state that a four man observation team will take two trucks and that each of the four must be from different countries. I recognized the some of the country flags on their shoulders but Teddy made the introductions and ensured that I sat with beer in front of me and got to know his mates. Of course as a Canadian Icewine salesman, I was the oddity and I sensed that oddities are better than television for these guys.
The American chided the Zimbabwean beside me for the fact that the Zimbabwe election results were mired in problems with counting ballots. I leaned over and asked the American where he was from. “Florida”, he said. What irony! With rampant inflation the price of a bottle of Icewine in Zimbabwe currency was 1,174,000 dollars in July, 2008. The Zimbabwean took the brunt of the good natured jabs that day until the Australian, a larger than life caricature of an Australian, arrived to dish it out happily to everybody.
They were intensely curious about Icewine. I passed around one 200ml bottle of Pillitteri Shiraz Icewine that would retail in Moscow for about $400. They cradled it in reverence and when it had made it around the bar I asked if they would like to try some Icewine. The thought of a $400 quarter bottle of wine had them intrigued and the talk evolved into arranging an Icewine tasting for the UNOMIG guys the following night. I’m not sure whose idea it was, but I recall that Teddy kept a full beer in front of me the rest of the night.
Icewine, like all wines, is better paired with complementary food, good company and circumstance. I had the wines that I had carried over three borders in my suitcase left over from Moscow wine tastings. The company would be superb. However, this wine tasting at the end of the world, in a place that sounded like a Harry Potter destination needed some food pairing.
The next day, Lana offered to show me around the Sukhumi market to pick up fruits and cheeses.
Lana is the head of the International Department in Akbhazia’s foreign affairs department. Like many well educated Abkhazians, she took a degree in a Moscow university and worked in Moscow for many years before “downshifting”. I understood her word exactly. She was teaching English at the university in Sukhumi and helping Max and the Minister try to perform feats of foreign affairs in a country that no other country recognized.
But now the challenge I had was to find local foods at the market that would pair well with Icewines. They couldn’t be cooked and so had to be raw or pre-cooked and assembled shortly before the tasting. I’m used to working with a chef for such things but today all the presentation and preparation would be done by the common denominator, me.
Abkhazia uses no pesticides, herbicides or unnatural fertilizers. The entire country is organic. The country has been cut off from the world since 1992 so Abkhazia has been spared from genetic engineering of its produce. The water that comes down from the mountains is the purest in the world. The local vegetables and fruits that I found in the market are the freshest and tastiest I have ever encountered. But they weren’t what I was used to! What an adventure!
kanasta on flickr captured a moment in the Sukhumi market.
All afternoon I and my new friend trotted around the Sukhumi market. I was literally a kid in a candy story tasting cheeses, breads, fruits, and some unknown concoctions that I was so happy to find. She introduced me to her mother’s friends who tended the market stands. She patiently answered all my naive questions, and in the end we had a couple of bags of fabulous foods to try with Icewines.
On the Eastern shores of the Black Sea, Lavash is a wonderful white bread that rises a bit into a fabulous loaf. Closer to Arabia, it would be a completely flat bread that does not rise, but in these parts, it rises just enough to make it a bread, not crackers, and to have the ability to hold taste and smell in the bread. Khachipuri is a cheese bread. If we were making cheese bread in North America, we might fold feta and ricotta into bread dough and bake. All over the Causasus Mountains the recipe for Khachipuri changes based on what is available locally.
Suluguni cheese is a wonderful smoked cheese. I had a brief translation problem when I asked what another kind of cheese was. My friend stopped and tried hard to describe the animal it came with. It had long horns. The animal’s hair was long and grey. It was a big animal. Could it be that I was pairing Icewine with yak cheese? It was heavy and salty and perfectly paired with Riesling.
Lana arranged in Russian with the taxi driver to stop at a bakery on the way to UNOMIG. As I walked into the bakery, they were pulling the Lavash out of the oven and handed it to me. I know I have never in my life ridden in such a lovely smelling taxi.
As I passed through the guardhouse at the gates the guards looked at me. I held my bags up and said, “I’m taking booze to Teddy”. They passed me through immediately.
Winetastings are winetastings. The staid ones begin with a brief history of why the Niagara Peninsula creates a perfect microclimate for Icewine. We talk about the harvest happening in the dead of night in the bitter cold and why that is important for making great Icewines. Then we begin to sample, and talk about colour, nose, taste and finish like all wines, interspersing the pours with anecdotes and tidbits about the wineries represented there.
The Dan Aykroyd Icewine was appreciated, proving that Dan is a Canadian known pretty well around the world. There was a moment of silent reverence when the cork on the $400 bottle of Pillitteri Shiraz was eased out and carefully poured around. I got to retell the story of Allan and Brian Schmidt taking their The Vineland Estates Icewine to the magnetic north pole.
As I poured the Reif Icewine, the Australian fellow asked, “Did you stomp these grapes with your own feet?” Now Icewine tastings are usually formal, staid events where one tries to present the wine in a structured and studied manner. His question, and my response, “Yes I did, but after a while I got tired and sat down on them” signaled the end of any formality and the event evolved into a casual cocktail party.
I’m pretty proud of being Canadian. We have a great country. I was pretty proud and pleasantly surprised to meet the Canadian representative in UNOMIG at the end of the wine tasting. I didn’t know that this fellow was the Canadian as he wasn’t wearing a uniform flag patch. Teddy had to introduce us. He was a tall, very black man with a distinct Ethiopian ethnic background. He had immigrated to Canada, and then went back out into the world as Canada’s representative. On many levels, I was proud to meet him. What does a Canadian look like?
Yesterday, July 15, 2009 the UNOMIG mission left Abkahzia. Russia had vetoed an extension and has moved troops into Akbhazia at the invitation of the Akbhazian leaders. This includes an air base, upgrades to road, sea and rail infrastructure and a permanent presence of Russian troops to face the presence of Georgian troops on the southern border, supported by American troops. The USS New York was recently in Poti, Georgia. The New York is one of America’s newest warships. It is packed to the gunnels with electronics and her mission is electronic information gathering. The cold war is not over.
The good news is that Abkhazia needs the infrastructure, the jobs, and the hard currency that will be spent, and perhaps a different bunch of guys with guns on the border will bring a stronger version of peace. The bad news is that there are still guns pointed at guns, and this area will be a political football between east and west for some time to come.
Max is taking me for a tour of the main Sukhumi waterfront. For me this means a stroll along a closed road with a tropical park on the one side and a curious collection of buildings on the other.
The Former Casino on Sukhumi's waterfront
The buildings go from the fresh and shiny Ritsa hotel to the burned out shell of the Hotel Abkhazia which stands in glorious ruins as a reminder of the bloody 1992 war that gave the Abkhazians freedom from Georgia on one hand and the armed peace that created this gilded cage which trapped the Abkhazians in and the rest of the world out.
It is ironic that the Hotel Akbhazia is a ruinous symbol of the war but I was told it actually burned down a couple of years before the war.
There are a few restaurants in the few blocks that we stroll. I get the impression that a strange face here would be noticed among the locals pretty quickly. Elderly men play chess and backgammon near the large blue pavilion where I had gotten a superb cup of coffee earlier in the day.
The shadows of the palm trees grow longer over the road and reach towards the buildings. Out on the water, the massive piers that just into the Black Sea begin to turn orange. One has small black figures moving about the restaurant perched over Sukhumi Bay. The other is deserted except for a lone fisherman hopefully perched like a shadow puppet over his potential dinner.
As we pass an outdoor patio, Max stops to talk to two people who were clearly from the outside world. After weeks of being submerged in
Hotel Akbhazia
Russian language that was just now becoming a melodic sound, it was a plunge in cold water to hear Teddy’s friendly booming Irish lilt, and his friend, when he made a less garrulous introduction, spoke in a Macedonian accent. Something is up!
Max introduced us. Teddy and his friend were part of the United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG) whose mission as unarmed observers was to represent the United Nations in maintaining the peace between Georgia and Abkhazia. They were a part of a multinational team that took long walks in the woods which had once been described as one of the most heavily mined area in the world looking for signs of aggression. This was Teddy’s realm, hospitality. In the Caucasus, one of the most hospitable bunches of people in the world, the Irishman was able to come out large and more hospitable. I was no longer in Abkhazia when I accepted his invitation to sit down at the table. I was now in Teddy’s world.
For the next couple of hours, we talked all over the world, and I got to eat some amazing cheeses, fabulous fish, and some passable wines that were made superb by the company, the conversation, and the setting sun in this gilded cage called Abkhazia.
In 1954 James Bond ordered the first ‘ultra cool martini’ by uttering these words:
“A dry martini,” he said. “One. In a deep champagne goblet.”
“Oui, monsieur.”
“Just a moment. Three measure of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large, thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?”
“Certainly, monsieur.”
The barman seemed pleased with the idea.
Gosh, that’s certainly a drink,” said Leiter.
Bond laughed. “When I’m..er..concentrating,” he explained, “I never have more than one drink before dinner. But I do like that one to be large and very strong and very cold and very well-made. I hate small portions of anything, particularly when they taste bad. This drink’s my own invention. I’m going to patent it when I can think of a good name.”
Every one of us remembers Bond and his Martinis and almost all of us at one time or another wish we could have pulled off something that cool.
With whimsy, I suggest that if you have the nerve to walk into a fine establishment anywhere in the world and say to the waiter…
“I’ll have a Vidal Icewine, chilled, with two spicy Thai shrimp on the side…
“and my friend will have a Riesling Icewine, also chilled, with two Malpeque Oysters on the half shell and a thin twist of lemon zest.
“Serve it first, and then we’ll order.”
..no sommelier in the world will mess with you.
You will have just pulled off that thing James Bond did with the Martini in 1954.
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I was writing this passage in my Icewine book, (which you can download free at www.vinocanada.com) and was struggling to explain that after reading the book the reader would be one of the most knowledgeable people in the world about Icewine.
So I started doing some math. 6 billion people. There are probably 6,000 people who know something about Icewine, including (and I love you all dearly) many sommeliers who would claim to know, but don’t quite. So then I did some math and I had to use a calculator to make sure I got the decimal point in the right place. 6000 out of 6 billion is 0.000001. If you read the Essential Icewine Companion, you’ll know more than 99.999999% of the people on this earth do.
Here’s a bonus: If you catch me making a mistake with the decimal place, you’ll prove you know more than me about statistics!
I wrote this for one of the chapters in my Icewine book. The Essential Icewine Companion is guaranteed to give you the tools to be cooler than Bond!!
The thing that I love about this wine business is the people and circumstances that I find myself in. This blog is about life as a wine guy. That's all.
From time to time I'll throw a commercial comment in but mostly it's about life and how I find it.
forgotten big coffee table books. In the Italian wines section there was a simple entry about Cinque Terre wines. I also recall that Icewine and wines from Canada weren’t even mentioned in the book so this was a very long time ago.
than the Egyptians moved to build the great pyramids.
place to share a bottle of wine and watch the sunset. That can take an entire afternoon. Pick up a different local white wine. Catch an early dinner of fresh local fish and Fettuccine di Pesto alla genovese. Then head down to the rocks under the fort at in Vernazza’s harbour or settle in to natural armchairs carved out of rock high up in Manarola, or a private beach off the Via dell’ Amor walkway and make the wine last through the sunset.
The mother of all waves picked Humbly up, turned her sideways and heeled her almost 90 degrees. It bumped the bottom of the boat and boosted me off balance off of the seat. I felt like a volleyball set up for a spike. The wave broke over the cockpit and slammed me over the leeward coaming. Somewhere in the tremendous rush of water I took my left hand off the tiller and the next thing I remember is hanging in the water on the port side reaching up and over the transom grasping the tiller with my right hand.
cold patch in the lake. I could run into a current where a stream empties into the lake just in front of me. I could get hit by a bugs-in-teeth rescue boat driver. I worried about getting ashore. I didn’t want to be bashed against the rocks along the shore by these huge waves.
We were working on a bulk wine deal between Russia and South America and trying to ensure that we were on the same page about how a particular transaction might go. Tim told me this allegory which clears up a question about how serious a buyer or a seller is.
I have decided that it was with Lana, walking through some delightful woods to a small cave which is a shrine to a saint who lived 2000 years ago. We in the west typically call him St. Peter, but locally he is called by his birth name, St. Simeon. Lana pointed out red spots in the river which appear magically and are said to be the blood of St. Simeon. The locals killed him for some reason and now they revere him. The former Soviet world is full of such conundrums.
Before I left, I read in a cooking book that the name of these pots was “Kvevri”
In 1954 James Bond ordered the first ‘ultra cool martini’ by uttering these words:
