1. Jackson-Triggs.  Elizabeth and I took a brief vacation in beautiful Niagara-on-the-Lake this week, and stopped in to the winery for a tour and tasting.

Being mid-week, and early in the season, it was just Elizabeth and I there — which meant it was pretty much a personal tour of the place.

It started a little slow.  We went outside and looked back at the new building (yay, limestone), and spent a few minutes in the vineyard (look, dirt), and then they took us back inside to show us where the action happens.

It was at this point that my eyes grew wide and I regressed about 20 years, hopping from foot to foot and pointing out ten things at once to Elizabeth while peppering our patient guide with questions.  The enormous steel drums in which they ferment the wine staggered me, as did the complexity of the winemaking process.  I had always thought it was more or less “mash grape, rot juice, bottle, and serve”, but it seems wine has gotten all elaborate.  Our guide talked to us about the different processes for making different types of wine, since some wines needed to be treated more gently.  She told us about the way different soil types add flavours to the grape.  She talked about American versus French oak casks, and how old casks are different from new casks, and how much they’re charred affects the flavour of the wine, and, and, and…

I almost wet myself.

I also, finally, learned that red wine results from using red grapes and allowing the skins to remain in contact through the first part of the winemaking process, while white wine uses green grapes and requires that you remove the skins from the process very quickly.

The tasting was a hit, too, and we ended up walking out of there with a very nice bottle of Shiraz.

2. Ice wine.  I’ve never really enjoyed sweet wines, including most white wines, so I never thought I’d end up liking an ice wine.  However, at the Inniskillin winery this week, we sampled a few different wines, one of which was a 2006 Vidal oak aged wine.  We both loved it, which amazed no one more than me.

So we bought some.

3. State Troopers.  Elizabeth got pulled over for speeding on the way home from our vacation, which was a little added adventure we could have done without.  The trooper, though, cut us a bit of a break and let us off with a traffic violation, which doesn’t hit quite as hard as a speeding ticket.

I still drove the rest of the way home.

photo credit: cking

1. Red wine.  And the fact that it is so insanely cheap down here.  Today’s choice: Penfold’s.  It’s low cost, but surprisingly good.
2. Movies.  Right now, we’re watching the particularly bad Johnny Mnemonic, starring the astonishingly bad Keanu Reeves.  But it’s a passable diversion at this point in the day.
3. The “Q” when you play Scrabble.  Today, I was able to actually play it, and racked up some serious points doing so.  Of course, in the same hand, I also got the “J” and the “X”, which I am still cursing.  Oh, and I’m grateful my wife won, because otherwise today would have been unbearable.