Old Doug
Posts: 8279
Joined: 5/12/2011
From: Atlanta, Georgia, US
Status: offline
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2006 Mas de Daumas Gassac Vin de Pays de l'Hérault - "The Grand Cru of the Languedoc" - well, I don't know about that, but I liked it.
2001 Marqués de Cáceres Rioja Gran Reserva - Viva La España! Tempranillo + Mazuelo + Graciano grapes. One of the most dense, toughest corks I've ever encountered. Damn good wine.
What's more fun than just blasting into a wine shop and seeing what strikes our fancy? I did that, and the above two are the result. Luckily, they also had Riedel glasses available as singles, otherwise it would have been styrofoam coffee cups here in my office.
I had a pretty decent post going, then did something stupid with my fingers and lost it. Overcoming writer's block - they rarely mention alcoholic beverages, the old industrial building that I'm in, Wheeling, West Virginia, they used to make barrels for tanks here during World War II, the huge lathes, giant cranes, drills, presses, shears.... my seldom-seen office. Evening outside, the sun finally over the buildings to the west, a surprisingly strong wind outside making the full summer-green leaves oscillate wildly. Hot day, wine on an empty stomach, felt a bit queasy there for a while, but got going. Then, blood-alcohol fingers and WHAMMO it was gone, some strange set of keyboard commands had been issued, not to be recovered from, almost an hour of life lost. But of course it's not really lost. It's just damn near dark outside.
U.S. Army Materials Technology Laboratory, Watertown Massachusetts. A building like the one I'm in right now. Originally the Watertown Arsenal, established 195 years ago. Used to be 10,000 people worked there. Time was, they researched and produced ammunition, experimented on guns and cartridges, figured out how to best use advanced metallurgical processes as they welded and machined heavy artillery. Later, they worked with depleted uranium to develop shells and armor. There was even a nuclear reactor for testing purposes there in the 1960's. In 1988, Congress said it should be shut down.
Big old brick building with big, old multi-pane windows. Beautiful in its own way. Late 1800's, early 1900's - they don't build them like that anymore. Now there are shops, offices, Harvard-affiliated organizations there. There's a mall, gov't buildings, United Parcel Service, even a yacht club. Yet wow, you should have seen it in its day. It cost tens of millions of Dollars to get it all shut down and cleaned up. There were PCB transformers there, so my company got a call. I went there for nine or ten years, one, two, maybe three times a year. Gotta get rid of the liability before things can be sold.... The main brick building is still there, and it looks good.
The end was hard. There was culture and community within, and now it would be gone. One old machinist had to be literally dragged away from his post. Just a skeleton crew at the end, sorrows all around. My contact person was career Army, I'm shamed to have forgotten his rank; one of the most decent people I've ever known. His office was full of pictures of the past decades at the plant, of his family, his fellow soldiers, co-workers. He was all about duty, but it galled him that the place was being shut down. Good grief, it galled me, and I'd just been a relative sometime-transient. Yet, this is the way of the world, and in my business I've seen it ever and always - when you close a place down, you have to take care of any PCB liability before you can sell the place, before it can become something else. October 1998, probably, I walked through those old institutionally colored corridors, government paint schemes, military notices, bulletin boards, huge posters of mission statements. Up the steps to his office, and there he was, no longer one of thousands, but one of a handful of people left. He was just one of hundreds of people that I saw, off and on, every year. I was just one of who-knows-how-many he saw. Yet - I was always glad to see him, and he was always glad to see me, and thus my throat was a bit tight as I laid the paperwork down on his desk for him to sign.
He signed, I gave him his copy. He said, "Bye, Doug." We shook hands. He wasn't a big guy, and he seemed especially small right then, in the midst of all the large things coming to a close. Damn me for a fool for not getting his address or phone number. I walked down, then out, and got into my truck, leaving that last time, working the tractor-trailer through the tight quarters I'd cursed so often - this place had been laid out in horse-and-buggy days, after all.
As they say, "War is hell," and I don't know that much about it. I have a brother in the Air Force who was in both "Gulf" wars, now retired. Our great, great, great grandfather was a Union Army soldier - he was on the side of the North in the US Civil War, a big (said to be 260 lb. or roughly 21 stone, at the least) farm boy from southern Indiana who got captured and spent time in the Andersonville, Georgia prison camp. He was 90 lb. or 7 stone when he got out, but he lived, and had kids. His great-grandson, my grandfather, was never in the military, but he was one tough old bird. My father was born in Aruba in 1937, where at the time my granddad was working in an oil refinery. This was not the touristy, developed Aruba of the modern era, this was a settlement in the wild, where there basically was no law, where life and limb were not taken for granted, and -- apparently -- my grandfather was a bad-arse, so to speak, his fists speaking most loudly. Filtering down through the years were also tales of whiskey and wild times, though in his later life he embraced religion and decried all alcohol use. I never asked him -- he wasn't the type to talk about himself in that way. He was a very strong man - I was in college in 1977 and I remember him working on his knees, cutting greens -- mustard greens, collards, turnip greens, which he supplied to many residents of inner-city Indianapolis. He'd load up his pickup truck with bushel baskets full of the stuff, and into town he would go. To fill the baskets took hours, hours upon hours of working on his knees, cutting, cutting, at age 74.
There is a letter that exists from his earlier life, from the 1920s or early 1930s, when he felt compelled to leave home and go "on the road" literally selling pots and pans. I believe he wrote it from Iowa, where he'd found a farmer who agreed to give him room and board for the summer in exchange for labor. I guess the pot and pan business wasn't doing all that well. It's an interesting read, short -- ten pages with big writing on them -- and I'll post it here if I can find it. A snapshot of how life was, way back then, and at least a sideways glance into the stubborn, determined, yet also possessed of some weaknesses man, hard-to-know, that was my grandfather. Died in 1997, age 94. His wife, my grandmother, is still going strong -- she'll be 100 years old this November. I don't think she has ever had any alcohol. She was actually my granddad's student at one time -- she being 8 years younger, during a brief stint when he was a teacher in his young life.
Wine-Searcher is showing this Rioja being available for under $30 some places. Very good deal. I tread toward the precipice of excess -- the last glass of the second bottle of wine is now poured, my empty stomach being the recipient. Writ reckless am I. Very good quality-to-price ratio, methinks; not a wine to be hurried, not a wine to be trifled with, and most satisfying in the end.
There is a pure world of ice, snow and rock, in the world's high places. There are enormous reservoirs of cold that exist, they lie at the poles of our world. They hide as summer comes every year, and appear as winter's banner's unfurled. Context is everything. What is our philosophy? What assumptions do we make? These, to me, are the heart of the matter, much more than any conclusion we come to, after the fact. Two bottles of wine gone.
< Message edited by Old Doug -- 7/28/2011 7:41:25 PM >
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RE: Postings after 1 whole bottle consumed alone - 
will move you, sometime. 
Enjoy that hot weather down there, Hoss. 
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