Jeff Duntemann's ContraPositive Diary

• One of the most remarkable photos of a volcanic eruption ever taken apparently happened by sheer chance, when the ISS passed over the Kuril Islands just as the Sarychev Peak volcano let loose. The rising plume literally punched a near-circular hole in the cloud cover.
• Just in case you happen to see a nuclear weapon go off, having one of these in your pocket would be handy to quantify things. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the pointer.)
• From Bruce Baker comes a pointer to a NYT article about the perils of being an outsourcee for an unscrupulous publisher. And so much for our textbooks being created by experts with advanced degrees.
• John Cleese's lighthearted but still informative documentary "Wine for the Confused" can now be seen on Hulu, at the cost of a few Toyota commercials. I'm good with that--and in complete agreement with Cleese that knowing good wine from great wine is not automatic, and in fact knowing good wine from bad takes more effort than most would think. Don't miss it. (Thanks to Roy Harvey for letting me know it was there; I saw it on TV a couple of years ago and much enjoyed it.)
• We may gasp at 64 GB thumb drives now, but storage technologies coming to market in the next few years will make 1 TB thumb drives not only possible but commonplace. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
• The annual amateur radio Field Day event happens this weekend, from 1800 zulu on Saturday to 2100 on Sunday. I've got the radios boxed up, and will be experimenting with a interesting rotatable dipole made from a pair of AN-45G collapsible military whip antennas, on top of a pipe mast made of four 5' sections of 3/8" pipe mounted on my ancient telescope pipe base. The rotator is my right hand, turning a greased 2" pipe joint on its own threads. I'll describe the dipole with photos if it works; if it doesn't work I'll admit failure and quietly forget about it. But if you'll be on the air, I'll be working solo from a nearby campground as K7JPD. Listen for me.
• From the Too Weird To Be True but True Anyway File: The woman who may well become our first Hispanic supreme court justice stated quite flatly in her Princeton University senior thesis that "...in Spanish we do not have adjectives. A noun is described with a preposition." I'm a Polish-German-Irish-French ubermongrel who last took Spanish in 1973, and even I know better than that. So...can I be on the Supreme Court instead?

• Pete Albrecht alerted me to Collecta, an interesting twist on a general Web search engine, in that it gathers news being posted Right Now, and displays it item by item on the screen in realtime While You Wait. Alas, most of what it seems to index are tweets, which may just barely count as information, for small values of "information."
• And yet another stab at the same concept.
• Kingston has just announced a 128GB flash drive. Figuring an average MP3 is 5 MB in size, that's 25,600 MP3s. And if the average MP3 runs 4 minutes, that's 71 days of music running 24/7 with no repeats.
• Rich Rostrom sent me a link to a (pretty dense) medical research paper suggesting another possible benefit of low-carb diets: ameliorating schizophrenia. A 70-year-old schizophrenic woman went on a low-carb diet and after eight days ceased experiencing hallucinations. Not any reasonable cause-effect here in this one case, but boy, this suggests a promising avenue of research. (Steak, cheese, and fish are way cheaper than designer drugs.)
• It's gotten cold enough in Brazil this year to allow Brazilian vineyards to make the first-ever Brazilian ice wine. (Babelfish translation of the original Portuguese.) Ice wine is a dessert wine delicacy made from grapes that are allowed to remain on the vine long enough to freeze in the first cold nights of autumn. Trouble is, there are almost never enough freezing nights in autumn in Brazil to make ice wine. (Most ice wine comes from places like Austria.) Ice wine is great stuff: I'll continue to worry about global cooling but damn, I'll buy a bottle!
• Ten years or so ago at Coriolis, we had an underwear policy. We did not, however, have an open wounds policy. HR gets more complex all the time...

• Sorry for the recent quietude here; the weekend was a whirlwind, and it took all of yesterday just to catch my breath.
• Scott Kurtz' PvP webcomic celebrated its first ten years by showing us that Brent Sienna actually has eyes. Wow.
• Allan Heim sent me a pointer to a nice article on the Fermi Paradox that expresses a position I have been drifting toward for most of my life: That we are probably alone in the universe, perhaps not only as intelligent, tool-building beings but also as living things, period. The author makes a case that being alone in the universe would be very good news, but not for the reason you might think. Read it.
• Borland is apparently selling their CodeGear division (which develops and supports Delphi) to Embarcadero Technologies, a database tools company. This was not unexpected, and to be honest with you, I can't tell if it's a good idea or not. One of Delphi's most serious problems is that it got so good after five or six years that most people stopped upgrading; I'm amazed at how many people are still using Delphi 6. The cost of the product was also an issue—there is no ~$100 starter edition—and the Turbo Delphi Explorer experiment demonstrated how important the ability to install components was. An amazing number of people wrote to me to say that they downloaded the free product, installed it, fooled with it for a week or so, and then went back to Delphi 6.
• From Mike Sergent comes a pointer to a NYT piece indicating that most people do not have the training to discern the level of subtlety in wine flavor that they claim to, and that a lot of it may exist mostly in our heads anyway. This is not news (to me, at least) but it's nice to see it going mainstream.
• Michael Covington posted a fascinating graph of changes in home prices from Q4 2006 to Q4 2007, suggesting that the "housing bubble" has not been evenly distributed. The coasts have suffered, as have most major cities and trendy places like Colorado's Front Range, but flyover places like Nebraska and Wyoming have posted solid increases in that time. In addition to that, sharp differences by state suggest that state-level housing and banking policies have more to do with housing cost changes than most people are willing to admit.
• Also from Michael is a graph demonstrating that the US economy is not as much of a disaster as Big Media has been hammering on. (I won't invite all the usual hate mail by explaining in detail why this is, as it's pretty obvious if you think about it.)
• The other day I found myself thinking something remarkable (for me): I would rather buy a Mac and run my essential Windows apps in a Parallels window (or in a compatibility box like Crossover) than move to Vista.

Basically, charge more for it. That's all it takes, and I roared when I read the account on the Boston Globe site. Take that, ye wannabe wine snobs! In summary, when people have not learned the subtleties of wine flavors, they fall back on the assumption that good wine is more expensive than so-so wine, so when told how much a bottle of wine costs without being told what it is, they overwhelmingly declare that the more expensive wine is the better wine—even when all the wines in the tasting are exactly the same wine.

Heh.

Perceiving the subtleties of wine is like playing the piano, or most any other musical instrument: It takes years of practice, and (though we may mightily deny it) many or even most people have no talent for the skill and cannot learn it. Add that to the fact that human taste perception varies wildly from individual to individual and cannot be quantified, and, well, it cooks down to this: Buy what you can afford and learn to like it, as the odds are that you cannot tell the difference between good and ordinary wine anyway. From the article:

After the researchers finished their brain imaging, they asked the subjects to taste the five different wines again, only this time the scientists didn't provide any price information. Although the subjects had just listed the $90 wine as the most pleasant, they now completely reversed their preferences. When the tasting was truly blind, when the subjects were no longer biased by their expectations, the cheapest wine got the highest ratings. It wasn't fancy, but it tasted the best.

The larger issue, that expectations color what we consider "objective" perception, is worth close study, as it applies to a lot more than just wine. People say that house brands are inferior to name brand only when they're told which is which. Our sense of taste is not as good as we think, nor are our skills of perception. I don't buy brand name Rice Chex anymore, nor real Diet Mountain Dew. (And we buy Joe's Os when we're somewhere that they're sold; they beat Cheerios all hollow.) I save money, and I'm just as happy as I was going with name brands. Objective quality is perceptible (and thus definable) for some things, less so for other things, and not at all for a great many (perhaps most) things. Being able to tell which is which is an important skill. Don't assume that you know more than you do, nor that you can discern more than you can.

A recent phone conversation with Michael Abrash triggered some insights in this area. More on it when I find the time. And thanks to several people who sent me the Boston Globe link; I believe Rich Rostrom was the first.

Not much time tonight, but it's worth reporting a recipe that Carol threw together off the top of her head earlier today:

Pork Stew

Cut a two-pound pork roast (not a loin) into 1/2" cubes. Sprinkle flour on a cookie sheet and then salt the flour. Coat the pork cubes with flour and salt, then brown them in oil. Add half a 750 ml bottle of some sweetish wine. We used Mountain Spirit Winery's Angel Blush, a fruit wine consisting of 40% apple, 40% pear, and 20% raspberry. Cover and simmer the browned meat in the wine while you cut up three Yukon Gold potatoes and two apples (we used Braeburns) into similar sized cubes. Simmer for three-four hours. It's not critical. Add water if the liquid level gets too low. The apples will break down and contribute some body to the gravy. Makes a lot; we should get three suppers out of it.

I tend to like sweeter wines, but I've never really warmed to fruit wine of any kind. I just finished the bottle of Breezy Hills Raspberry we brought home from Iowa (near Minden) last October, and it wasn't terrible but wasn't great. Fruit wines tend to taste yeasty to me, a little like beer, and I don't know if it's just a taste quirk of mine, or if I simply haven't tried any really good fruit wines.

The stew recipe was an experiment to see if stews (which can sometimes have a sweet edge to good effect) could be simmered in a sweet wine. The Angel Blush is a little too sweet to drink in any quantity, so we used it in the stew, and it worked very well. I don't think I would cook a darker meat in sweet wine, but for whatever reason, it went beautifully with lean pork. Give it a shot.

Last night was Open That Bottle Night, the annual event that Wall Street Journal wine columnists John Brecher and Dorothy Gaiter created almost by accident a few years ago. The idea is for people who have been saving a bottle of wine with emotional or historical connections to their lives to stop hoarding it, just open it, and enjoy it. It was a golden opportunity for us to pull out the dusty bottle of the Schlossadler Gau-Odernheimer Petersberg Dornfelder Rotwein 1994 that we had originally intended to open on our 25th wedding anniversary in 2001. The bottle has a peculiarly effective sort of self-preservation instinct: We forgot and left it behind in Phoenix when we drove to Chicago to celebrate our 25th in 2001. (9-11 was only a week before we left, and other things than wine were on our minds.) We then figured we'd open it on the 35th anniversary of our meeting one another in July 2004, but again we were in Chicago. The following year we figured we'd open it on July 31, for the 36th anniversary of our meeting, but were famously foiled by my flop into a patch of poison ivy. We then figured we'd open it for our 30th wedding anniversary in 2006, but by that time the bottle had gotten so far back in our memories that we clean fergot.

That bottle was a survivor, heh.

So a couple of weeks ago, while reading John and Dorothy's column in the WSJ, Carol looked up from the paper and said, "We have to open That Bottle on February 23." This time for sure, Rocky!

And so we did. David and Terry Beers were here for dinner, and we cobbled together a Polish feast, with some kielbasa, honey millet bread, and cheese pirogi. Although I was concerned that the wine might not have survived (like all dornfelders it's fairly light, with only 9.5% alcohol) 14 years isn't all that long a time, and just as several people reassured us, the wine was unbowed.

What I did find remarkable was how indistinctly I recalled it. (We had bought half a case in October 1996, for our 20th, and I would think it would have remained clearer in my mind.) Dornfelders are almost invariably off-dry to semi-sweet, and this one is about as sweet as any dornfelder I've ever had. I remember it being a little drier, perhaps because I've had numerous drier dornfelders since then. The fruit was explosive, with some of the most intense black-currant flavor I ever recall in a wine of any stripe. It went well with the kielbasa, and the four of us had a wonderful evening talking about life, relationships, dogs, writing, ebooks, and ultra-mobile PCs. (It's that kind of crowd.) I don't recommend dornfelders to everyone—sweet reds bother a lot of people—but this one was a keeper, and if you have an open mind, sniff around the odd corners of your larger wine shops and try one.

Alas, we have no bottles of anything even remotely that old, and certainly nothing with that memorable a run of brushes with consumption. So next February we may just go eenie-meenie-mynie-moe and pull something from the rack. The wine is the thing, sure, but more than that, it's about friendship and having history together. This July, Carol and I will have known one another for 39 years, and we're pondering a whomper party somewhere in summer 2009. I guess it's time to shop for That Special Bottle so we'll have something to pass around in celebration of friendship, ours and that of all the many people we value in this beautiful and extravagant world.

We brought a wine home from Chicago last summer that sat quietly in one of the top slots in our kitchen island rack, mostly out of sight and until a few days ago, completely forgotten. The wine is Tabor Hill's Classic Demi-Red. It's a $9 wine from Michigan, and I broke it out looking for something that would go well with a spicy (for us at least; read here: has some spices in it) chicken goulash that Carol threw together just for fun.

Yes, it's fairly sweet by wine snob standards, but it's less sweet than St. Julian's excellent Red Heron, and on a sweetness par with most white zins. It has the virtue of not being sour, as semi-sweet wines too often are, probably by imitating white zin. It's fruity and does not have the sour white zin ragged edge. The label calls it "soft" and I agree. No perceptible bitterness, and not grapey, though "grapey" is not a show-killer for me. (It usually means having a whiff of concord in it, which is not always a bad thing.)

It's a 12% wine and went down very easily, making a good complement to the goulash. I don't know where all you can get it. We saw it in several of the Meijer's markets outside Chicago, and I can only assume it's common in Michigan. I have yet to see it in Colorado, and we probably won't have it again until our next trip in.

Nonetheless, if you like sweetish wines, I call it highly recommended.

By the way, tonight is The Wall Street Journal's Open the Bottle night, and we will (finally!) be opening the bottle of 1994 Schlossadler Dornfelder that we failed to open for our 30th wedding anniversary back in '06. Maybe's it's vinegar. I don't know how well dornfelders age. But we'll let you know.

• I started using two nice little utilities this week, and both are worth a look. The first is MozBackup, a program that creates a single compressed backup file from your Firefox settings and bookmarks, or your Thunderbird settings and mail. It comes out of the Czech Republic, so some of the English is a little rough, but it works beautifully.
• The other is MBoxView, a no-install app that does only one thing: It allows you to view an MBox file such as the mailbox folders used by Thunderbird. I occasionally set up a mailbox folder for a project, and then when the project is over I exile the folder to my archives so it isn't cluttering up my Thunderbird folder hierarchy in perpetuity. I don't refer to such archived folders very often, but when necessary, the utility makes looking at ancient mbox folders completely trivial.
• Here's a great page on a plastic model I had almost fifty years ago: The Von Braun Ferry Rocket, a three-stage finned behemoth that nicely anticipated (in function if not in shape) our Space Shuttle. It was featured in Collier's in 1953 (note one of the other headlines on the cover: If they only knew...) and there are some very nice paintings of how the device would operate, including some scary-claustrophobic single-occupant re-entry capsules. Thanks to Pete Albrecht (who also had the model back in the day) for the pointer.
• Also from Pete comes a pointer to the Fantastic Plastic site, with photos and brief writeups of a lot of other space and aviation plastic models from the 40s to the present day. Some breathtaking—as well as silly—stuff was out there capturing young imaginations. I had this. And this. And this.
• From Ken Rutkowski's online newsletter come some interesting stats: Only 12.5% of Americans drink wine. And those who drink wine regularly fall into a fairly tight demographic:

  More than half of all frequent wine consumers are 50 years or older and that adults who earn $50,000 in household income who are 45 years or older with no children living at home are 85% more likely to frequently consume wine compared to the average adult. According to The Media Audit, adults who fit these criteria are termed “Affluent Empty-Nesters” and they are a prime target audience for wineries and distributors.

  "Frequently consume wine" here means have a glass of wine at least three times during a two-week period. Not surprisingly, San Francisco is the wine-drinking capital of America, with West Palm Beach and Fort Myers close behind. This is a pretty concentrated demographic. Maybe I should actually write Sweet Blindness—think how many more Americans might drink wine if they realized that not all of it tastes like cat-piddled oak floorboards!

I haven't reviewed any new wines lately because we've been traveling so much (albeit only to and from Chicago) that we just haven't tried many. But yesterday we ate dinner alfresco on the back deck, and tried a chilled mild (5.5% alcohol) Italian rosé from Bartenura Vineyards. It's the first Malvasia I've ever had, and Carol and I (and our friends David and Terry) were stunned at how good it is.

First of all, it's a summer wine, and while the vineyard calls it semi-sweet, it's sweeter than most wines I place in that category, though half a notch drier than what I would call a true dessert wine. The label calls it a red, though to me it's a rosé, albeit a dark rosé. Strong fruit, redolent of cherries. Very light effervescence, of a degree that you can feel but can't see in the glass.

It's a little too sweet to go with a non-spicy main course, and might be better with dessert or (in non-dinner circumstances) with bread and sharp cheese. I could see it going well with something spicy, especially if you have no ideological objection to sweeter wines. Pizza? Quesadillas? The world is flat, heh. Give it a shot. Near $10, and fairly widely distributed. You may not see it in the Italian section of your wine shop because it tends to get exiled to the dessert wine section. Do ask. It's worth the extra trouble to find.

One of the questions I'm asked very regularly by people who cannot abide dry wine is this: How do I tell how dry (or sweet) a bottle of wine is from the label? Answer: Mostly, you can't. The level of residual sugar in wine (which determines its place on the dry-sweet spectrum) is very precisely measurable, but there is no legal requirement to put the residual sugar level on a wine label, and so most wineries do not. The broad categories into which wine sweetness can be placed run like this:

• Dry: Less than 1% residual sugar (RS).
• Off-Dry: 1%-2.5%.
• Semi-Sweet: 2.5%-4%
• Sweet: 4%-8%
• Dessert: 8% and up

Wine snobs often complain about as little as 0.5% RS, which may be part of why wineries don't put precise figures on their labels. When I speak of "off-dry" vs. "semi-sweet" in Contra, I mostly have to go by taste, as I don't have numbers, much as I would like them. Furthermore, some wine types are all over the map, the best example being White Zinfandel, which I've tasted as anywhere from off-dry to sweet. (Most white zins hover on the border between off-dry and semi-sweet.)

German wines have their own terms, and because a lot of very good non-dry wines come from Germany (where people don't engage in wine snobbery to the extent that Americans do) I'll summarize here:

• Extra Trocken (very dry) less than 0.4%
• Trocken (dry) 0.4% - 0.9% (Kabinett)
• Halbtrocken (literally, half-dry; what I consider off-dry) 0.9% - 1.2% (Spatlese)
• Lieblich (semi-sweet) 1.2% - 4.5% (Auslese)
• Suss (sweet, generally dessert) 4.5% and up. (Eiswein, Beerenauslese, etc.)

Sometimes the figure is given online, often in slightly obfuscated form, in terms of grams/liter. A wine with 2 grams of residual sugar per liter of wine is considered a 0.2% wine and pretty dry. A wine with 30 grams of sugar per liter is a 3% wine and semi-sweet. CK Mondavi quotes their wines this way, while Robert Mondavi quotes them as conventional percentages, at least in their PDF brochures. Asking people at the wine shop is dicey, since wine shop people generally have an ideological aversion to anything that isn't either bone dry or else a European dessert wine.

Other clues you can use to spot non-dry wine:

• "Late harvest" generally means "sweeter than dry" and also less tannic, at least among reds. That said, this term covers a lot of territory, from off-dry to very sweet dessert wines.
• "Serve chilled" or "summer wine" imply non-dryness. Most dry white wines (like Chardonnay) are assumed to do their best at something below room temperature, though duels have been fought over just how much below. Having to explicitly say "best serve chilled" is code for "not dry."
• "Very drinkable" also tends to mean non-dry, though I think it's a snob euphemism for "wine you can gulp down without grimacing." Not all "gulpable" wine is bad wine, and I did plenty of grimacing as I learned to like dry wine. (I still grimace at the bitter oaky swill that passes for Chardonnay these days.)

I should point out here that I review only non-dry wines in Contra, not because I like nothing else, but because reviews of dry wine are everywhere and people who cannot abide dry wine are poorly served (nay, generally insulted as unworthy yahoos) in the conventional wine press. I'm guesstimating that more than half the wine I drink is dry to very dry (0.5% RS and down) and I drink it happily and often with delight. It's the snobbery I object to. There is no necessary connection between wine sweetness and wine quality. None. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise.

(Important note: This is a rant. If you don't know what a rant is, please look it up. I've discovered that I've had to warn some people, as it's a bit of a departure for me. Thank you.)

The mostly insipid Slate has (finally) knocked one out of the park: Mike Steinberger's recent four-part series on wine language and individual differences in how we taste things, including wine. Mike has confirmed for all time what I have long suspected: That bitter wine (including most Cabernets and nearly all Chardonnays) is shit wine. No, he didn't say that. What he confirmed is that the human experience of taste is not uniform—we don't all taste the same things the same ways.

Duhh!

Wine snobs generally assume that if they say a wine is spectacular and sublime, it is. If said wine makes Jeff gag for its bottomless bitterness, well, that's because Jeff is a yahoo red-stater with insufficient education and breeding to appreciate the spectacularly sublime whiff of cat piss and moldy oak floorboards. The possibility that bitter tastes overwhelm all other tastes in my mouth doesn't occur to them, because it doesn't happen to them, and of course their experience is normative. But now—OMG—one of the wine snobs has had the courage to admit it.

The series is informative and funny; read it all if you have any least interest in wine. Mike explains the current state of the art in flavor science, and how research seems to divide humanity into supertasters, tasters, and nontasters, who differ primarily in the intensity of their reaction to bitter flavors. (Here's another piece on the topic.) Then he lays waste to the whole concept by getting his sense of taste quantitatively tested, only to discover that the science as it applies to him points in all different directions: His genes, his tongue anatomy, and his sensitivity to bitter flavors do not agree. As is true in so many different areas, we find that in the subjective experience of flavor, we need more science, and better.

Wow. A wine critic has been forced to admit what most of us intuitively grasp: Each of us tastes what we eat and drink in entirely different ways. The standard language and uniform culture of wine enthusiasm are learned, and although they are weakly based on identifiable nuances in taste, the operative word is "weak." This language and culture are passed along as received wisdom and mercilessly enforced, though every so often a cultural power like Roald Dahl has the courage to call the whole pretentious business the nonsense that it is.

Here's the only thing you really need to know about wine, and it's as true of wine as it is true (as Professor Schickele says) of music: If it tastes good, it is good. Do not apologize for what you like, ever.

Let me throw yet another handful of mud into the faces of the wine snobs. Michigander Steve Salaba brought a bottle of St. Julian's Red Heron wine ($7 at Meijer's) to Chicago on his last trip here, and we tried it during dinner at Gretchen and Bill's last week. It's a semi-sweet, non-vintage blend of American red grapes and Concord grapes, and quite unlike anything we've ever had before. It's a wonderful summer grilling wine that goes beautifully with the hot dogs and hamburgers that Bill expertly flung about on the coals. Serve it chilled.

Red Heron is about 75% Concord, which is a taste you don't get much in wine because wine snobs hate Concord and have declared it bad in all its possible uses. According to them, Concord tastes "foxy." Umm...what does that mean? And is it really bad? The truth is that we're in circular reference territory here: Technically, "foxy" refers to the flavor of the Concord grape, an American native that was originally called the "fox grape." So the wine snobs dislike Concord grapes because they taste like...themselves. I suspect that it really means "reminds of us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which are unworthy fare for self-anointed cultural sophisticates." (One particularly pugnacious wine critic called the Concord grape a "mutant blueberry," though it really is a grape and tastes nothing like blueberries—or oak floorboards either, which we consider a big plus.)

Red Heron is not easy to find outside of Michigan, and I'm unlikely to get it once we return to Colorado. So it is with relish that I will recall sipping Red Heron from my grandmother Sade Duntemann's 1919 crystal goblets, between bites of Bill's most excellent hamburgers. Life is good, wine does not have to be dry, and your experience of wine—as with all of life—is unique. Let the wine snobs chew their floorboards with ecstatic praises. It works for them. You and I can see it otherwise without explanation or apology.

This past Friday night, Carol and I and our friends David and Terry went up Highway 24 through Ute Pass, and stopped for dinner at The Wines of Colorado, in Cascade. It's a slightly unusual combination of wine shop and restaurant, with the twist that every single wine they sell is made right here in Colorado.

The restaurant is informal, with seating both inside in mountain lodge decor and outside on the banks of a small creek. (It was mighty chilly at 9,000 feet Friday night, so we ate inside.) The food is not fancy, but it was superb: I had a half-pound buffalo burger, Carol had an Austrian bratwurst (I guess they don't make them in Colorado), Terry had a steak sandwich, and David had a chicken ceasar salad. All entrees were under $10. I'm partial to buffalo meat, and this was one of the best burgers I've ever had, irrespective of species. They didn't grill the mushrooms to mush, and even the roll was home-baked and tasty, if a little crumbly around the edges.

The best part of Wines of Colorado (which some might call a gimmick) is this: After you order your food, you go down the hall to the wine shop, where the tasting bar is located. They have twenty bottles of wine open for tasting, arranged in a semicircle from dry (on the left) to dessert sweet (on the right.) You can try as many as you want, and then order a glass of any of them for $4.25. Considering how often I've paid $6 or more for a glass of Sutter Home white zin or some crappy cheap Chardonnay that turned my mouth inside out, that's a steal.

I chose a late-harvest Zinfandel that surprised us all by not being as sweet as most dessert wines, while having a wisp of effervesence. (I've tasted the same thing a time or two with certain Gewurztraminers, but you can't always count on it, even with the same vineyard, wine, and vintage.) The subtle fizz took some of the edge off the sweetness, and while I wouldn't have chosen it to drink with a rare steak, it was fine burger accompaniment. The wine is from Balistreri, and is unfined (unfiltered), which makes the fruit borderline explosive. Not for everyone, but I've long been a Zinfandel fanatic (both dry and sweet) and bought a couple of bottles to take home. $24.

Overall, it's a great place to stop for dinner if you're in the Pike's Peak area. Just get on Highway 24 and go uphill (west) to Pike's Peak Highway at Cascade. Turn left and you're there; it's right off 24—and right on the road to the top of Pike's Peak. Highly recommended.

Back a few weeks ago when I was in Chicago, I went walking, and north of Dempster along Waukegan Road I ducked into a small wine shop. In browsing the aisles I found a wine I had never seen before: St. Julian's Blue Heron White. It was cheap ($6.99) and the winery name recalled my patron saint, Lady Julian of Norwich. Who could resist that?

I had modest expectations, but the wine is actually pretty damned good. It's somewhat sweeter than a white zin (4% residual sugar vs. 2.5%) but with absolutely explosive fruit, and a distinct hint of peach. The acid was modest, and kept the wine from trending sour. Like most German whites, it's low in alchohol (9%) and very drinkable. I would guess this would make a fantastic summer barbecue wine.

What's interesting about Blue Heron is where it's made: Paw Paw, Michigan. The sticker isn't clear in the photo, but Blue Heron won a gold medal at the 2003 Indiana State Fair. One doesn't think of wines being made in Michigan, and one doesn't think of wine being awarded ribbons at state fairs. Contrarian (and small-town boy at heart) that I am, I consider those big pluses.

I can't find Blue Heron here in Colorado, and that doesn't surprise me. There is a whole subterranean layer to American wine culture under the category of local wines. And especially if you prefer something not utterly dry (once you get past white zin, most nationally distributed American wines have virtually no residual sugar at all) local is the best place to look. There are many wineries in Colorado (Cottonwood Cellars is one of my favorites) that simply don't distribute out of state, and many wineries in "odd" places (read here: anywhere not on the West Coast) don't distribute beyond a few adjacent states.

Not all local wines are good. We had a bottle of a semi-sweet wine from Indiana recently that was pretty bad (how it got into a Colorado wine shop is unclear) and only about half of the Colorado wines we have tried are worth mentioning. What local wines are is unpredictable, and I mean that in a good way. Virtually all conventional Chardonnays taste alike these days; for adventure you have to go to the vines less traveled: Zinfandel, Pinot Noir, Niagara, Pinot Grigio, etc. Stay away from Chardonnay and Cabernet. Popularity has ruined them. And if you like a little residual sugar in your wine, find the local wine corner in your local wine shop, and start reading labels. I've found that local wineries are much more likely to list residual sugar levels than national wineries, where the assumption is that residual sugar on all wines is simply zero.

If you like semi-sweet wines and can find Blue Heron, grab it. St. Julian's has another off-dry white called Simply White with 2.5% residual sugar, which is a little less sweet. I'll try it next time I get to Chicago and report back here.

We had dinner over at my sister Gretchen Roper's house the other night, and when it came time to choose the wine from the collection in the cabinet (which leans toward whites) Gretchen pointed out that she had an open bottle in the fridge. It was Glunz's May Wine, from the Glunz Family Winery in (of all places) Grayslake, Illinois.

I hadn't had May Wine for a number of years, so we decided to try it. May Wine is an early harvest white wine that (like Beaujolais Nouveau) is a little thin and not as rich in flavor as wines from later grapes, or wines that have been given more time to develop some character. To give May Wine something for us to remember it by, vintners add an aromatic herb called woodruff. I'm not sure how to describe the aroma of woodruff. We who sat around Gretchen's massive dining room table couldn't agree. Gretchen thought it smelled of new (unburned) tobacco. I thought it smelled a little bit medicinal, in a foxfire, Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman kind of way. Carol hadn't yet identified what it reminded her of, but it reminded her of something. Licorice Snaps?

May Wine is off-dry, though certainly not anywhere near a dessert wine, and when served cold is bracing and completely different in effect from other white wines. It's been called a gulping wine (I've heard of people drinking it over ice with a straw!) but the aroma is remarkable and worth savoring.

The aroma isn't the only thing remarkable about Glunz' May Wine. When I asked how long it had been open, Gretchen kicked back in her chair, made an embarrassed face, and said, "about a year and a half." Eek. Now, white wine keeps better than red wine, and if it sits in a cold fridge can keep for far longer than the wine snobs are willing to admit. However, eighteen months in an opened bottle is something of a record for wine that I have been willing to drink and then found good. I can only figure that the woodruff has a certain preservative effect. We drank half the bottle and nobody felt funny, and the unique flavor of May Wine was undimmed. It's worth a try if you're up for something different in the wine world.

I drink Cabernet Sauvingnon now and then, especially if someone else is buying, though it's sometimes difficult to get it down without having to tell my host, "You been took, dude." On the other hand, I almost never willingly accept a glass of Chardonnay, and certainly never buy it. The reason is pretty simple: Cabernet at least has the virtue of being a red wine. Chardonnay lacks that advantage, and often tastes so much of oak that you wonder if you've gotten something vinted in a barrel made of ripped-up floorboards—floorboards from a house full of incontinent cats, at that. (I was at a wine tasting in the basement of St. Paul's Cathedral in London in 2000, and one of the white wines presented had been described by Australian wine freak Oz Clarke as whiffing of "cat's pee on a gooseberry bush." Later on that's what they named it. And they weren't kidding.)

Cabernet and Chardonnay are the collies and Dalmatians of the wine world: so inbred and self-referential that they all taste alike—and they all taste awful. That's what happens when too much wine of a single variety is made. Both wines are generally bottled with virtually zero residual sugar, and so much oak that they go bitter and begin to taste like Nyquil. White wines in particular should never be that utterly dry, as then the oak and the acid take over, and you're drinking...yup, cat-soiled floorboards. This is where the "Anything but Chardonnay" movement got most of its impetus, and I'd join except that "anything" includes Cabernet. I'll pass.

So it was with wry satisfaction that I learned that "unoaked" Chardonnay was becoming increasingly popular. Instead of soaking it in floorboards (with or without cat urine) they ferment it in stainless-steel tanks. This allows a little more of the fruit to come out, and while the wine is still very dry, it's not bitter. Chardonnay is generally made with a second fermentation that adds all sorts of odd whiffs to the wine, which have been described as toast, vanilla, butterscotch, and coconut. (Gosh, why not grapes?) Too much of that and it almost begins to smell burnt. People argue with me but I also think that the second fermentation makes the acidic taste that most white wines exhibit go over the top and become, well, sour. Unoaked wines are supposedly more acid than oaked wines, but I don't see it. It may simply be that the presence of the oak corrupts the acid somehow. I'm not sure, and over the years I've begun to suspect that wine doesn't taste precisely the same to me as it does to others. Your mileage may vary, but they're definitely worth a try, especially if brutally dry, bitter wines bother you. Look for Wishing Tree Unoaked Chardonnay, an Australian wine I had in Chicago a year or so ago and enjoyed. About $10. (Alas, I can't find it locally here in Colorado, but I see online that it still exists.)

Unoaked wines are sometimes called "unwooded," "naked," or even "barenaked." You have to read labels carefully or ask for them, and expect the wine snobs to look at you funny. I've had a couple, and they are an immense improvement on conventional Chardonnay, to the point where they no longer taste like Chardonnay at all and more strongly resemble a dry German Reisling. I still think almost any German white is better than almost any Chardonnay, but if you're feeling adventurous, stick with Chardonnay and go barenaked.

I got a polite note from a chap named Tony, who sells the Wine Clip on his site, and which I (somewhat rudely) made fun of in my March 7, 2006 entry. Supposedly, the Wine Clip breaks down large wine tannin molecules into smaller ones, a process that happens naturally as wines (especially dry reds) age. Smaller tannin molecules do not taste as astringent as larger ones, so if there were a way to break down large tannin molecules into smaller ones, you could get wines that taste as though they had been aged for years even if they were right out of the vat.

This, to me, would be a good thing, as I have hyper-sensitive buds for bitter tastes, which is the main reason I cannot abide beer, dark chocolate, and a lot of dark green vegetables. However, I remember back when I was in college, during the Arab Oil Embargo, when people were buying up cow magnets by the case and duct-taping them around their fuel lines, to enhance mileage. What the precise chemistry of the magnetic effect was, no one could explain to me, and so I never bothered; I just stayed home a lot and wrote SF stories.

Passing fluids past magnets for some benefit has thus left a bitter taste in my mouth, heh.

The tannins issue has been covered a lot in the wine press, and there are reasonably skeptical reviews of the Wine Clip, along with a number of other even more unlikely (and seriously more New Age) wine enhancers, like this one. Tannins are covalent compound, and thus unlikely to be affected by magnetic or electric fields. Beyond that, I just don't know, so what I'm going to do is open it up to the rest of you, some of whom have degress in chemistry, whereas I'm just a science fiction writer. Is there any possible way that strong magnets could break down large tannin molecules into smaller ones?

Tony didn't flame me, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and recognize my limitations as a scientist. Can this thing possibly work? I encourage people with real scientific backgrounds to post comments so that everyone can read them verbatim.

Wine drinkers in Europe do not throw the childish "dry good, not-dry bad" tantrums I've repeatedly observed over here in the US. At one of my parties I once watched a guy dump a glass of $35 late-harvest Zinfandel down the sink, muttering about "crappy soda pop wine". Clearly, he had no idea how to judge whether a wine is good or bad. His only criterion was that if it wasn't dry, it was bad.

Europeans know better. It's easy to get bad American off-dry wine, but almost impossible to find good American off-dry wine—so the search often ends up on another continent. A few weeks back I found another good one, albeit sweeter than what I generally call "off-dry:" the Eszesvin Kunsági Kekfrankos Ausbruch 2003. "Ausbruch" indicates that it's a late harvesting of the Kekfrankos grape, meaning it will contain more sugar than grapes harvested earlier.

The Kekfrankos grape is one you don't see often, especially in the US. "Kekfrankos" is its Hungarian name; elsewhere in Europe it's called the Blaufrankisch grape, and over here, when you see it at all, it's Lemberger. The grape tends toward spiciness, and low tannins—a good thing, since tannins make wines bitter, and I am very sensitive to bitter tastes and consider tannins a type of wine spoilage. (Alas, this hokey new-age gadget won't fix tannins. You have to make the wine correctly to begin with.)

The Eszesvin Kekfrankos Ausbruch gave the impression of a less tannic, semi-sweet version of Tyrannosaurus Red, a dry (but not beastly dry) Colorado Lemberger that I enjoy periodically. Tannins almost not detectable (yay!), medium bodied, with less spice than I'd like. It leans tart, which can make a sweet wine come across as a little less sweet. As for how sweet it is, well, it borders on what I consider a dessert wine. However, its tartness allows it to go well with spicy foods, and while I don't think I'd drink it with steak, I think it would work with Mexican, spaghetti, or barbecue. (Or, as some wine sites suggest, with a good spicy goulash!)

Again, I would perhaps prefer a little more spice and a little less sweetness, but it's an interesting and different wine, and if you can find it, try it. I ordered it from Debra Heinze's Drink Better Wine outside Chicago. About $25. Recommended.

I write a fair bit about off-dry wines because nobody else does, but I like dry wines as well. I'm picky about my dry wines, however, and my standards are fairly high. I rarely run into a cabernet that I like, for example, and the main reason is that these wines go so far dry that they don't taste like much anymore, least of all the grapes that they were made from.

That's Jeff's First Law of Wine: Wine is made from fruit and should taste like fruit. (My long-time readers have heard me saying that for years.) If a wine doesn't taste like fruit, it doesn't matter to me what else it tastes like.

The other night Carol and I had David Beers and Terry Blair over for dinner, and we broke out a wine for which I had high hopes, and it did not disappoint: Forgeron Cellars Columbia Valley Zinfandel 2003. It's by far the most fruit-forward dry Zinfandel I've tasted in years, and ranks right up there with Coturri's Freiburg organic zinfandel. There's good zinfandel spice here, and a richness of body that you just don't see in every bottle of dry red that you crack. This would be a superfine red-meat wine. (I'm not afraid to admit that I drank it with chicken, but I'm just a contrarian.)

Take note that Forgeron comes from an odd place for wine: eastern Washington State, near Walla Walla. I have never had a Washington State wine before Larry Nelson turned me on to them, but I always welcome odd wines and wines from odd places. (Why always drink the same damned things?) There are some wonderful wines from Colorado's Western Slope (near Grand Junction and Palisade) that nobody sees outside of Colorado. I've mentioned the off-dry and slightly fluky Roadkill Red a couple of times, which is probably the best spaghetti wine I've ever had. (It's a little too sweet to have with good steak, though that might just be me.) Another Colorado gem is Tyrannosaurus Red from Carlson Vineyards, a middling dry but fruit-forward $13 lemberger. Not everthing good comes from Napa! I guess this means that you may have to hunt for Forgeron wines, or have a cooperative wine shop order them for you, but in the case of their zinfandel, this is worth the wait. It's not a cheap wine ($27) but again, for special occasions with good food—howzabout dinner with your honey tomorrow?—I'd find it pretty hard to beat.

• NASA is making a sort of ad-hoc satellite out of an old space suit. This is a fine piece of duct-tape engineering, and you can listen to its telemetry on 145.990 MHz FM, within the 2-meter amateur radio band. The word "telemetry" here is not quite how I mean it (old guy that I am) but that's OK: SuitSat will recite its internal condition in English (after a prerecorded greeting in five languages) through a speech synthesizer. SuitSat will be inflated and will look like a human being with arms and legs outstretched. Now, does anybody dare to hope for sufficient resolution to get a photo?
• Many of you have already seen this (it was the EDS Superbowl ad in 2000) but if you haven't, go take a look. It's one of the funniest things I've ever seen on TV. I think it's even better than 2001's "Running of the Squirrels." Thanks to David Beers for the pointer.
• Wines to Avoid Dept: Run screaming from Three Thieves Zinfandel, which counts as one of the five or six worst wines I've ever tried. Fortunately, it's in a weird jug and easy to spot. I ended up dumping half of it down the sink. It'll be awhile, however, before anything will challenge Sweet Walter from Bully Hill. (The name itself is ironic; having met the man once, "sweet" is not a word I would use to describe Walter Taylor.) Whatever bad karma sweet wine didn't get from Mogen David it got from Sweet Walter. Yukkh.
• You might want to uninstall Winamp 5.12 until such time as AOL/Nullsoft comes up with a patch: There's a nasty security hole in it allowing an exploit that can be triggered by playing a sound file from an infected Web site. I've used Winamp since 1998 but I'm looking for another MP3 player at this time; what are your favorites?

• From Pete Albrecht comes a prescient 1976 Saturday Night Live transcript describing...the Blog Diet. (No, it's not quite what you think, but read it anyway.)
• From Rick Widmer comes a definition of "politics" that I wholeheartedly endorse: "Poli" from the Greek for "many" and "tics," for "blood sucking insects." Amen, bro.
• Saturn reaches opposition tonight, and is as close as it will be for another year. Look for a bright yellow star NE of Leo. It's brighter than anything else in that general part of the sky. It will be well up in the east at 9 PM or so. You can spot the rings with binoculars steadied against a fencepost, and with even a small telescope the view is very nice, if small.
• I found a nice dornfelder red wine from the Rhine country in Germany that ranks as the best off-dry wine I've discovered in some time. (I look for them in the odd corners of large liquor stores, and occasionally I find one.) It's Valckenberg Dornfelder Rheinhessen 2004, and while it's perhaps a touch sweeter than most dornfelders I've tried, people who aren't used to dry red wines will enjoy it. Under $10.
• Cringely wrote an excellent article last month about the decline of print media, and I just keep forgetting to link to it here. If you're interested in publishing at all, read this.