DIANA KOLE

The F train’s closed-minded “no wine” policy...

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 23:20:59 -0400

The F train’s closed-minded “no wine” policy is easily skirted with an opaque drinking vessel, such as this coffee thermos emblazoned with photos of my roommate’s Canadian family.

Coconut-water bottles work, too.

Breaking with my unofficial, one-person tradition, this photo is...

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 14:50:00 -0400

Breaking with my unofficial, one-person tradition, this photo is not of the wine I drank but of the place where I drank it. After seeking out several old-ish, open bottles of red (which I’d generally consume with abandon, but I was trying to make an impression, here), I found some sort of white to act as evaluation fuel.

Into the tumbler it went, and I joined the crowd at Quirky HQ for a live—and live-streamed, soon to be available on the Internet, I believe!—Product Eval. Due to my distraction and lax photo planning, the above photo is just a screenshot of last week’s session, but you get the idea. This is a lovely, glassy space filled with lovely, though not glassy, people—and they do fully encourage “randoms off the street” to join, so I recommend stopping by some Thursday, if you can.

I do not remember what the wine itself was like, beside “better than I myself would purchase,” but in any case, it was overshadowed by the experience. There were heated debates about, say, the viability of using your trash can as a stool (consensus: not so viable, though this was a very cool trash can). One product concept was working-entitled the “ScrewHole,” totally in earnest, a name which really should go all the way to market. (This was, in fact, an excellent idea, the one best-received by both audience and community, which obviously signifies good taste.)

That name does actually sound more like a terrible cocktail. Red wine and orange juice, maybe? Or it could retroactively serve as a name for the worst thing I’ve ever accidentally created: vodka and soy sauce.

Don’t try it.

The decision to stay in New York and pursue this degree slowly and remotely has led to a glut of...

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 11:54:00 -0400

The decision to stay in New York and pursue this degree slowly and remotely has led to a glut of guilt re: efforts at translating and finishing thesis. That second one is towering and frightening and far away, but here is a bit of the first, full of unpleasant gerunds that seem impossible to avoid:

Since when had he been waiting? Waiting is always the wait for the wait, taking back the commencement in it, suspending the end and, in that interval, opening the interval of another wait. The night in which he waited for nothing represents the movement of the wait.

The impossibility of waiting belongs essentially to the wait.

He realized that he had only written to respond to the impossibility of waiting. That which was said was then related to the wait. This light crossed him, but only crossed him.

(Again, L’Attente l’oubli, Maurice Blanchot, p. 38. Heavy-handed, eh?)

Just outside of this gallery of sorts, the Austrian (?) artists...

Sun, 08 Jul 2012 18:40:28 -0400

Just outside of this gallery of sorts, the Austrian (?) artists had set up some boxed wine. This was an honor system, a self-service arrangement, though that particular side street in South Slope was not especially well trafficked. We’d been lured to this opening by a landing page featuring a photo of a glittering kiddie pool filled with octopi and pineapple, no text.

Surprising, then, to arrive and find a closet-sized space and, yes, this kiddie pool, but also a kind of installation composed mainly of snack foods. There was a sea creature with Twizzlers for tentacles. A banana painted white. We drank the wine and were (rightfully) ignored by the small group of onlookers.

Then, a longish trek to the Brooklyn Museum for art of far greater volume and renown. Lots of nice period rooms, some filled with terrifying portraits or bright product logos. That wine did cost money, though the drunken ambling about in darkened halls was very free.

11:41 PM on July 4th. Not that it matters or anything.

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 23:41:00 -0400

It was July 4th and we spent the day talking. There was sitting, and walking, and staring at trees in the park but we really didn’t do anything. I jumped into a fountain and was photographed for a commercial in the park. That’s what normal people want so bad. To be so normal that you can be in a commercial, for everyone to see. But I didn’t do anything.

It’s probably my favorite thing. I can watch anime and feel the same when I spend a perfectly white, anglo-saxon evening in the park. Today, at the park, I thought about Monet’s and Renoir’s paintings from the impressionist era, with white dresses and parasols and general appreciation of how “green” and “natural things are. I saw them in brief brushstrokes, just colors and I thought it was beautiful, even though they were just colors to me. I guess they thought the same about me, and that’s fucking beautiful. I’m just a brushstroke in a painting? For someone to consider me despite any logic? I’m just a lanky kid in a fountain. I always thought I was the only person who could find beauty in ugly places, but maybe other people can do the same.

But that’s just my alcohol and marijuana-induced opinion. Take whatever you want from it. If you disagree, please, let it be known. I’m just a kid in a fountain.

(This has been a guest post from Agustín Lopez.)

“Wellness and wine resort,” this proudly symmetrical...

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 17:57:00 -0400

“Wellness and wine resort,” this proudly symmetrical sign reads. I am and was skeptical: before the party happened, because wellness and wine were clearly the same thing; and afterward, because my god, no, there was no wellness at this palace, only gluttony.

I would expect to be served vodka (wodka, rather) in Poland and was (a bottle arrived at each table as the salad course did. Shot glasses had already been set in place with our proliferation of little forks and whatnots). This was a birthday, though, and champagne had to precede every drinking “event,” loosely defined. There was a truly unlimited amount of wine available to me.

The wine itself (fine, probably?) was far less interesting than what I observed as I drank it: a sort of bar mitzvah scene for elderly Poles and Slovaks. Large white tent, gift pile, food upon food, mid-eighties hits. And then the incongruities: the juggler of flaming liquor bottles, the fireworks display to rival any I’ll see tomorrow. There was a suckling pig at midnight. I’m told I ate a lot of it.

In fact, though, I am reconsidering my skepticism: I felt virtually no hangover. Wellness, indeed—however undeserved.

How I interact with the world ninety percent of the time: “I wanted to wave to you when you...

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 18:14:58 -0400

How I interact with the world ninety percent of the time:

“I wanted to wave to you when you came in but I had this coffee in my hands and I was afraid I’d spill it and then I was afraid that by failing to wave I appeared unpleasant and then I felt myself scowling at appearing unpleasant and then I realized I must really seem unpleasant and so had already made a disastrous impression.”

Ben Lerner is great.

One might think that a night beginning in the courtyard of an...

Sat, 09 Jun 2012 17:45:49 -0400

One might think that a night beginning in the courtyard of an NYU dorm filled with nineteen-year-old Goldman Sachs interns could only gain respectability as the hours went by, especially considering that we are drinking wine out of styrofoam cups here. One would be wrong.

There was a steady progression of people showing up with child-sized bottles of whiskey and regular-sized bottles of wine, which we brought into normal establishments and proceeded to pour into available cups. This is a money-saving technique that nobody recommends, except for thirteen-year-olds drinking Slurpees at the movie theater, and it is made no better by the fact that most of these cups were plastic and emblazoned with the Bud Light logo.

Whose idea was this? Certainly it was mostly mine. It flouted a general and important principle—if you can’t afford to go out, jeez, just do not go out (cf. the rule for poor tippers, whose lowly ranks I seem to have joined).

There has been honorably purchased wine in genuine wineglasses in the interim, I promise. I plan to drink some tonight, and to pay for it, with money.

This is yesterday’s retrograde wine. The copy’s...

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 23:56:56 -0400

This is yesterday’s retrograde wine. The copy’s pretty good, which is why we have chosen to revive it for review. All capitals, of course; a sample: “DON’T JUST SIT AND WAIT, MOVE, QUICK AND WAKE UP WITH THE PLANET’S MOST LIVELY AND AWESOME SYRAH! IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO SIT STILL WHEN THIS SPECTACULAR SYRAH PASSES IN FRONT OF YOUR NOSE!!” All punctuation is [sic], of course.

Tonight’s wines came at a >75% discount from Warehouse Wines & Liquors. One had a Twitter account, which I feel is lazy social media strategy.

Says guest commentator, “I really don’t have anything to add. The label is orange, and that is kind of relevant to the Pantone color of the year. I am 100% sure it is not at all related to that. So. Ok. That is fine. The wine is large and un-trendy, and also has a lot of sediment in it. Which is not so fine. But it is all ok, because I am sure it was relatively inexpensive. So. Yes.”

It was, in fact, inexpensive. Empirical analysis!

This is a goblet of wine from Radio City. Due to confusion, I...

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 10:52:00 -0400

This is a goblet of wine from Radio City. Due to confusion, I was given some kind of special wine rather than house (per my policy, “always cheapest always”), and it came in this absurd chalice-type thing.

It’s a poor-quality photo because I was somewhat embarrassed to be trying to capture both my wine and the beginnings of Pulp (scrolling text banners: “Do you want to see a dolphin?” » dolphins). Seeing this made my self of ten or so years ago (and of every year since, really) feel wholly gratified, and less nostalgic than might have been expected. Haven’t seen “Gatz,” but am assuming this rendition of The Great Gatsby’s last paragraph was better executed, if only for looking at America as somewhat other.

We are drinking BANDIT, a liter’s worth of Cabernet...

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 00:35:49 -0400

We are drinking BANDIT, a liter’s worth of Cabernet Sauvignon that’s widely available in our area for a non-objectionable price. It tells us that it’s perfect for “camping” — that’s not a thing I’ve ever enjoyed, and I’m not sure what their target audience is here in New York, but I respect the effort anyway.

It promises us “33% MORE WINE” relative to, I suppose, a traditional bottle. Perhaps this choice negates all of my non-environmentally-friendly actions over the past few months? Thanks, Bandit.

We neglected to photograph this wine until it had been finished,...

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 23:58:00 -0400

We neglected to photograph this wine until it had been finished, which is why the bottle is empty. Hand is obscuring the label, but it’s a purple swollen pig, tied down by phantom ropes to the “A” in LAGRANJA. The label literature is especially precise (and all-caps, perhaps appealing to the part of the brain that likes majuscules?).

The wine’s name means “THE FARM 360,” so goes label. “THE LITTLE PIG IS FLYING BECAUSE IT EXPRESSES A SONG WHICH THE SPANISH CHILDREN SING WHEN SOMEBODY HAS ASKED FOR SOMETHING WHICH IS IMPOSSIBLE TO REALIZE, HAS A DREAM OR SAYS SOMETHING ABSURD.” It is, it claims, meant for “EVERYDAY DRINKING,” like the Amis family endorses.

Guest contributor Sarah Lefkowith notes: “It tasted kind of tinny, but not in an off-putting way. Considering the Thai food and the random lychee martinis, our tastebuds were already subdued. Perhaps I’m not the best authority on this. Regardless, tinny and full is my verdict. If that’s a thing.”

It’s a nice auditory-taste blend of synesthesia. Well done, unambitious Trader Joe’s $4 wine!

These are wines. One is red and one is white. We have purchased...

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 00:28:49 -0400

These are wines. One is red and one is white. We have purchased them to complement this massive five- (six-?) course dinner that has just ended—magret de canard, daikon salad, other disparate items—and we are now availing ourselves of the remnants.

First is LES JAMELLES Sauvignon Blanc. “It kind of tastes like the wine that was in the glass before I poured it,” says Scott. “It is best at 8º Celsius. We have probably been enjoying it at about 20º,” because Quebec has decided that it is summer? There is a nice font on the label. “Full-bodied turpentine” is the next assessment.

J.P. Chenet is a wine I’ve reviewed earlier (strange ergonomic design), a Cabernet-Syrah. “I can taste the dent in the bottle,” says Scott. I think he is exaggerating the strength of this wine’s effect on the palate. It is nondescript.

“I can’t stop moving. I have a condition,” says Scott, upon being asked to provide a non sequitur.

Listening to “The Blue Nun” just now reminded me to...

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 23:44:00 -0400

Listening to “The Blue Nun” just now reminded me to review this particular wine from last weekend. (“What’s the secret, Peter? Naturally, I’ll say it’s the wine. Mmm, it does go well with the chicken.”) This was at one of those 2nd Ave. sports bars near KFC (a spot which gives me enormous waves of nostalgia for reasons not interesting enough to go into). It was a Canadian meet-up of sorts: myself (expatriate to Quebec); past and future roommate (Vancouverite); her mother and mother’s friends (same, plural).

As is probably apparent, I’ll always choose wine in a bar where wine is demonstrably not given much thought (cf. all Irish pubs, including if I were to partake in St. Patrick’s Day tomorrow, which I will not, because eighteen years of living in Boston have worn that novelty thin). I just asked for a house red, and the poor server ended up rushing about to check on various availabilities before presenting me with this, the sole option—Cabernet Sauvignon? It was nice of her to do, though, and she was far more patient than I ever am when working in the service industry.

Those are nachos in the background. Yes, nachos were ordered, plus something else involving deep fryers, probably. Those little plastic baskets that shitty food invariably comes in also bring out some latent nostalgia in me.

The quality of this photo is pretty indicative of the mild blur...

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 00:17:00 -0400

The quality of this photo is pretty indicative of the mild blur in which we made our wine-related decisions. This is a flight: we arrived at this wine bar in the hopes of expanding our repertoire (consisting thus far, that weekend, entirely of Trader Joe’s and something in a juice box). The selection here—where? Somewhere on Bowery?—did not disappoint. Nearly everything was Italian, a region I tend to avoid since Quebec’s selection is miserable, so we gave ourselves over to the will of the server.

The two on the right-hand side were the wines we chose to investigate further. This was half out of convenience, mind you—they took the menus away, and so pointing was easier than remembering a certain provenance. I believe we chose the heavier of the array, the kind that might best accompany meats doused in sauce and good olive oil, because rich wines remind allow me to pretend that I myself am rich.

That illusion was quickly broken when we received the bill. How does time spent in fake luxury pass so quickly? Anyway, I spent perhaps ten times my ordinary wine budget to leave this nice vortex of indulgence. Unable to learn from our mistakes, we then bought a cross-borough cab ride and drank the remaining $4 Trader Joe’s bottle I had left in my bag.

This is one of our duty-free purchases (the economical one)....

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 23:16:00 -0500

This is one of our duty-free purchases (the economical one). It’s a 2010 Bordeaux, CHÂTEAU DE MONS, which promises a website that is now owned by the French version of some cheap name purveyor thing. (There’s also an English website for the Château itself, equally Web 1.0, which “intoduces [sic] to the very peculiar art of etchings” and is, thank goodness, “suitable to the public at large”.)

We spent perhaps ninety hungover minutes at this CDG duty free, deciding how to best utilize our last twenty euros, and eventually settled on buying one good and one shitty bottle of wine. (Add to that a double carton of cigarettes, which ended up being short and delicious, and some nice single malt, otherwise fiscally out of reach at the SAQ.)

It doesn’t taste as heavy as a Bordeaux might usually, and is more flat. No matter: it’s easy, earthy drinking, and I bought it at a time when I thought I would never want to see wine again in my life, so my purchasing discretion was limited. There are many reviews of higher-quality wine, dutifully photographed and then promptly forgotten, TK soon.

In the background are some flowers roommate bought in, I think, December (“I’m now devoting a portion of my disposable income to flowers each week; they make me feel nice”—nb, this is a male roommate), and an equally old schedule of cat feeding. We are living in the very recent past here, a state heightened by the fact that something just dumped a horrible amount of snow on Montreal, right when one might otherwise begin hoping for spring. An illusory groundhog effect. Last Friday, we were taking off our coats and walking up little spiral staircases onto monument roofs. It would be unfair to compare today’s minor pleasures (green curry) to that.

At the top floor of the Galéries Lafayette, there is a very...

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 15:49:00 -0500

At the top floor of the Galéries Lafayette, there is a very clean, white (almost said “modernist” but caught myself; hate when that word is slapped onto any neutral-toned, Scandinavian interior) cafeteria. It sells wine by the carafe, via fast food-style spigots. This bathetic machine maybe reflects how much France loves McDonalds: there are so many, and they are shining and tasty and they grind your espresso to order! What!

So having an array of grape varietals on soda-tap is maybe not so strange, to the French. We got another massive lunch (they cooked steak to order, too) and sat with our carafe and our view of many iconic architectural things. Kind of wanted to slap myself for enjoying the experience so much, but if I had, it would not have lessened the objective pleasantness.

The Galéries Lafayette are immense—two entire city blocks, connected by a (strangely nonsmoking) open-air walkway. It’s essentially six layers of mezzanine, which allows the building to avoid that stifling atmosphere department stores often develop, and also to show off its absurdly elaborate stained-glass ceiling. (Ah, subtle link!) It evokes the feel of an opera-house bathroom in a burgeoning empire: jeweled and luxurious, but in a small bubble pleasantly stripped of cultural context.

(Not that this is true, but all that pink and gold invites you to imagine it might be.)

This wine, LES VIGNES OUBLIÉES, accompanied a truly fantastic...

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 15:35:00 -0500

This wine, LES VIGNES OUBLIÉES, accompanied a truly fantastic pile of fish at a restaurant named, pertinently, Fish. It was staffed by English and Americans, all girls around my age (one of our party expressed surprise—”This whole place is run by women!”—a comment I tried to parse for him, but then abandoned the effort).

It was excellent—a Côteaux-du-Languedoc. I chose it off a blackboard, a cute ruse that convinced me of the existence of some thoughtful sommelier who appreciates that often, people (I) like red wine with white fish. This was illusory: it’s not particularly rare; you can find it at the SAQ (for the same price as the restaurant markup, oof). My palate was fairly obliterated by that point, anyway, as a result of a 5-à-7 that lasted a few extra hours and spanned many wine-y miles.

Go here, if vous vous trouvez à Paris, and order anything: in my (limited) research, the small sample size leads to unlikely and pleasant wine-fish combinations.

“The signature skyscraper of our own age is the upended glass coffin. When I look at the...

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:39:21 -0500

“The signature skyscraper of our own age is the upended glass coffin. When I look at the set-back shoulders of the old ones, I visualize them at the date of the crash, with suiciding holders of mortgage bonds cascading from level to level, like spent fish coming down a salmon ladder. It was a brilliant epoch.”

“‘Just think,’ Ricecakes would say. ‘Behind each of those windows, a man is awake, scheming to take somebody else’s money.’ It gave him a group feeling…”

“He is better company, even two blocks away, than a bust of Pallas sitting up above my chamber door, and of more solace than a good conscience, for he indicates that the future is long.”

—A.J. Liebling, an especially good reason to make use of digital archives. That first quote is (perhaps morbidly) pertinent in light of New York’s past decade or so.

I chose this wine, invisible though its label may be, because it...

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 23:30:00 -0500

I chose this wine, invisible though its label may be, because it came with a story. Not sure whose marketing proposal this was, but apparently someone at this winery thought it would be useful to appropriate an anecdote about a minor player in French history with the same name as a very major one.

CARRELOT DES AMANTS seems to have won some sort of bronze medal last year at an international « challenge du vin », which, sure, I won’t contest. Its back label, though, requires a bit more context than is provided. « En 1574 », it says, « Charles de Balzac, dit le ‘Bel Entraguel’, Seigneur des Dunes, fût l’amant de la reine Margot ». Apparently, they found each other one night in a little alleyway, “tenderly embracing in the pale light of the moon.” One said, even, that “a silver goblet” of wine led to this meeting!…

Hardly a notable story—how many couples have briefly come together in similar ways? But this particular de Balzac was involved in a duel that represented, apparently, a lot of the tensions involved in Henri III’s reign. He was seen coming out of the chamber of a lady of “disreputable social conduct” and was then challenged by some other court guy. Everyone got very seriously stabbed except de Balzac.

More interesting (ish), though, is that the Reine Margot was Henri III’s sister, and that he imprisoned her for eighteen years. (She took the time to write her memoirs, which is, I think, the only acceptable condition under which one might undertake such a project. Ugh, memoirs.)

So four years elapsed between this “meeting” and the duel—was the disreputable lady Margot? Was Henri pissed that de Balzac was frequenting prostitutes instead of his sister? Dumas père writes that Margot had a man killed for publicly exposing the affair. I mean, my sources are just Wikipedia and this wine label, and also this “happened” four hundred years ago, so I suppose there is no real accountability. My recent forays into fact-checking make me wish for sounder evidence, but speculation is more entertaining at the moment.

The wine itself is a good-enough balance between that questionable “bronze medal” sticker and the $12 it cost me. Recommend!