If Wine Tasting Were An Olympic Sport, We’d Be Gold Medal Winners

Yes, y’all did just read that title.  Welcome to the best part of late July/early August that happens once every four years: the Olympics!  Lindsay and I love the Olympics; we were on the phone with each other for a good part of the opening ceremony because that was… we’ll call it uniquely British.

Without question, though, the best part was when HM Queen Elizabeth and one of her most well-known subjects, Commander James Bond, took a helicopter to the games and then proceeded to parachute from it into the arena area.  Danny Boyle could have skipped the rest of the opening ceremony and just showed that on a loop for three hours, done the parade of athletes, let the Queen and Jacques Rouge open the games, lit the cauldron (which I think is, despite it’s simplicity, the most elegant cauldron in the history of these modern games; I can’t speak for the cauldrons at the opening ceremonies in Ancient Greece), given Sir Paula his bit, fireworks, fin.  It would have made more sense than what happened Friday night in East London.  For the most part, I think we can all agree that for the most part, it was an incredible show, but there were a few bits that didn’t make much sense.  Plus, it seemed to be a bit of an edited history of Britain that left out a few details that I guess we’ll just let slide.

Now that the games have begun, my TV will permanently remain on a network of NBC from sun-up to sun-down so I can critique the entire thing.  First off, how is gymnastics a sport?  They all do a different routine so how are performances judged?  I don’t understand this at all.  Also, Ryan Lochte, try all you want, win all the medals you want, but due to your arrogance and that tattoo on your back, you will never be Michael Phelps largely because he has Mrs. Phelps, the only middle school teacher with her own line of clothing at Chicos, a great personal story, the mom-approved role model image for young children and pre-teens,  and that “I’m just swimming like I always do” attitude.  Also, you have more than one “grill,” which would be understandable, but still not okay, if you weren’t a white boy from upstate New York who went to UF for college!  This has been a moment of honesty, Olympic edition.

Back here in Charlottesville, Hannah and I competed in our favorite should be Olympic sport: wine tasting.  We’re excellent at wine tasting and though the French will no doubt claim only they can take gold in this sport, we feel that as students of a university whose initials spell grape in Italian, we’re a formidable challenge for the high-brow French, the “Bunga-Bunga” Italians, nearly broke (any day now) Spaniards, and hippie Californians.  Oh yeah, and we’re both from Virginia, which is a major wine-producing state that has been producing wine since before the Revolution, thanks in large part to Mr. Jefferson, naturally.

Side note: If I have learned anything at U.Va, it is that regardless of the subject, even the obscure ones, Thomas Jefferson has been apart it somehow!  Every single professor for every single class I have taken here has found a way to make a Jefferson connection.

So Hannah and I celebrated day one of the Olympics by heading forty minutes outside of Charlottesville to the Barboursville Winery.  Naturally, there is a Thomas Jefferson connection as he designed the house for his friend, James Barbour, the 18th Governor of Virginia and a US Secretary of War.  The house itself burned down on Christmas Day in 1884, but the ruins of it are a National Registered Historic Landmark and the symbol of the vineyard.  It should be noted we were technically breaking the law by going up to the ruins eight minutes after it was “closed,” but if anyone asks us, we didn’t see the sign until we left!

As for the wine, it’s good (they serve the more affordable ones in the sleeper car section of the Auto Train).  Here’s why it’s a great place to do a wine tasting: It’s like a buffet of wine, but a civilized buffet, like the one at the Bellagio.  For $5, you get to try twenty-one of the vineyard’s twenty-three wines, including their award-winning Octagon, the vineyard’s signature wine.  Not only can you have as many tastes as you want, but you get to keep the glass and if you bring it back with you for another tasting, it’s only $3.

Since I was driving, Hannah tried most of them while I stuck to just a few that I really wanted to try.  Nonetheless, it was still a lot of fun and I ended up leaving with a bottle of the dessert wines Phileo and Malvaxia, the latter of which tastes like alcoholic sugar, and that tastes wonderful!  The Phileo is also very sweet, but not nearly as sweet as that Malvaxia, which is 14% alcohol!  Also worth mentioning: the Cabernet Franc Reserve 2010, a wine that is very smooth and oaky (I love an oaky wine) with currant being the dominant note.  The Octagon 2008 was great, but that Cabernet Franc really impressed me.

Continuing the Jefferson connection to this week, I went on Thursday to Montpelier, the home of America’s Fourth President, James Madison.  Before I say anything about the house, I should say that I was the only person in my tour group not getting a Senior Discount and that was not fair.  Additionally, while the house itself has been structurally restored to the way it looked when the Madisons returned to live there following President Madion’s two terms in office, only four rooms are furnished, with very few things that were actually in the house at that time.  Most are reproductions or period pieces.  This is because, as the very friendly tour guide noted, Mrs. Madison had to sell the house and its contents following her husband’s death in order to pay debts.  When this happened, a large number of the contents were also sold so it’s definitely a work-in-progress.

Where Monticello has been restored to such a degree that Mr. Jefferson could walk in today and only ask how cold air is flowing through his house without windows open and why he doesn’t need candles for light, Mr. Madison would definitely have some questions.  The rotating exhibit on the second floor includes one furnished bedroom because, as my tour guide told me, “Once you’ve seen one bedroom, you’ve seen them all.”  Additionally, the second floor library, the room in which Madison helped draft the Federalist Papers, the basis for out Constitution, is now used to show a video telling the importance of the Constitution.

The house was owned, until 1983, by the duPont family, and following an extensive restoration starting in 2003, it was finally opened to the public in 2008, so this place is brand new, which is why I’ll let the lack of furnishings slide, for now.  Unlike Monticello, which will probably never change from its current layout, Montpelier is a place to which I’d like to return in five years to see how things have progressed.  Plus, with no disrespect to my soon-to-be alma mater’s founder (t-minus five days and counting), Montpelier was not designed to be artistic like Monticello, but with practically, and the drive up to the house is just breathtaking.  The duPont family added a lovely formal garden in the 1920s that has this incredible view as well as race tracks for horse racing.  The tracks are still used today for the Montpelier Steeplechase Hunt Race in November.

Now y’all know that’s a stately manor house.

Even the formal gardens have a picturesque mountain view.

Alas, as this weekend draws to a close and my final week as a college student is upon us, I’m off to educate myself on plankton, heleoplankton and whatever the hell else is on this list of terms.  Until next time…

-JD

How Are People Surprised That Paula Deen Has the Sugars?

So as many of y’all may have heard, Paula Deen, a woman who no doubt uses butter in place of soap, sat down with Al Roker, not exactly the world’s skinniest person, to reveal that she has Type Two Diabetes on “TODAY” yesterday and well, let’s be honest, when you spend your entire day making such delicacies as Sweet Chicken Bacon Wraps, Cheesy Shrimp on Grits Toast, Deep-Fried Squash, and my personal favorite, The Lady’s Brunch Burger—a “hamburger” that Miss Deen recreates using two Krispy Kreme doughnuts in place of hamburger buns, among other things—it’s a miracle it took so long for her to realize she has Diabetes.

Of the entire six-minute interview that Miss Paula conducted, it was most entertaining to hear her say that she will continue to make the… whatever one calls Ultimate Fantasy Deep-Fried Cheesecake, but with smaller portion sizes.  Well isn’t that nice, she’s going to continue promoting death as a hobby!  Oh I’ll never forget the night I stayed in Savannah on my way back to Virginia from Rollins in May of 2010; my own little butterball refused to let us eat at her infamous The Lady and Sons Restaurant for two reasons: first, it has the worst ranking of any Zagat-rated restaurant in Savannah and secondly, the people leaving the Savannah dining establishment looked as though they have swimming pools filled with margarine.  Ah, memories…

Moving on, I stayed at Camp Justin last Friday night on before catching the Auto Train on Saturday and before we had dinner at Prato, which was absolutely amazing, we got drinks at Spice and well, I think we’re still confused as to what happened while we sat in the unseasonably cool weather.  So one minute we were complaining about how bad the service was and then the next, a woman who looked not unlike a fan of Paula Deen walked past with her cat on a leash; that was the most normal part about this scene.  The lady had the restaurant staff prepare her a bar table for two and then proceeded to not only place the cat in one of the chairs, but she then gave the cat a blanket and food and acted as if nothing was wrong.  Now I’ve got nothing against cats; Jean’s cat, Lily, even has a special place in my heart after spending a month with her when I lived with Jean, but this was just unusual.  I think it was the cat’s owner who made the situation so odd.  her eccentric behavior was just something one doesn’t see every day, I guess.

After brunch with Justin, I departed Sanford and arrived into Lorton on the Auto Train last Sunday afternoon after a slight delay due to a freight train ahead of us on the track and immediately upon detraining, I checked to see if there was room left on the train leaving that afternoon for Florida because it was cold, bone-chilling cold!  And so 36°F isn’t THAT cold, but when you’ve spent a month in a place where the coldest it ever got was 55°F, then yeah, it was a big shock!  Alas, I didn’t get on the train, even though there was in fact room, and now I’m back in Charlottesville, where my building decided it was time to repaint the hallways some rather unusual colors.  While some floors received very glossy versions of normal colors such as Royal Blue and some unique version of Camden Green, the floor that my friend Lindsay and I live on has been given two colors: a very glossy grey and then an equally-glossy TRAFFIC SIGN YELLOW!  Bad is one way to describe how it looks; I’m going to go with overtly grotesque and nauseating.

Unfortunately, something else tragic occurred while I was away, though this is rather serious.  Grace’s little maltese, Oliver North, passed away.  It was so sad to hear about this, especially since it happened over the holidays and while she still has Henry Flagler, things won’t be the same without Oliver.  I think I’ll most remember the time Grace and I sat in her truck in a parking lot with Oliver going between our laps as we drank Diet Coke (that’s all she had) and listened to some disturbing show on Cosmo Radio.  It will be hard to imagine life without Oliver lurking about Grace’s apartment or living in her purse, but I guess all good things must come to an end.

That’s all for now, but until next time from a very cold Charlottesville…

-JD

PS: I guess this quote I have from Grace on Facebook about Paula Deen might actually be true: “I think Paula Deen poops mayo.”

What the Gaga?

We need talk about this before I can even begin to discussing anything that has happened in Italy in the last few weeks because the Gaga has gone crazy!  First off, the egg is beyond anything I’ve ever seen before in my life.  I mean really, who does that?  To make things weirder, however, Lady Gaga went on Good Morning America this morning and told Robin Roberts that she lived inside that egg for THREE DAYS before finally “hatching” at the Grammy’s in order to perform her new single, Born This Way:

I must admit that despite this being one of the strangest things I have ever seen in my entire life, Lady Gaga is without a doubt one of the most talented singers of all time.  There is simply no denying it because unlike many of the rappers and pop stars who emerged in the last two decades and are nothing more than one-hit-wonders (see: Sean Kingston, Gerardo Mejía, Baha Men, and of course, Vanilla Ice), Lady Gaga is in it for much more than the money; she’s a true artist who takes her music seriously and each of her songs give her fans a little insight into her very private life.  All of that said, Lady Gaga is a little strange.  Case in point, on GMA this morning when the Gaga dressed up in a latex condom-inspired suit to promote safe sex (which is the intention of Born This Way).  I used to try and imagine what the author Bill Bryson meant when he wrote in his book, Notes From a Small Island, that after putting on his raincoat, “[he] looked uncannily like a large blue condom” (127), now I have a better idea:

Lady Gaga, you are truly a unique individual.

I’ll be back to blogging about life in Siena tomorrow, but until then…

-JD