Take a hard look at this wine. A hard look.

Got it?

This wine is fucked up.

It created about a 1.5 to 2 hour conversation. First we thought the wine had gone bad, then we just thought it was bad wine, then we realized it smelled like Tequila, then we thought it was bad wine, then we though it had gone bad. Repeat.

It did test like Tequila. It might have been tequila and cranberry juice. We ordered shots of tequila and confirmed it tasted/smelled like tequila. Theories of plants mating between fields emerged, genetic science, nano technology, it’s hard to say what “man” did to this poor wine.

A small 33.3% of the crowed surveyed indicated it tasted like cigarettes.

Then Joel detected a faint port taste, which was confirmed. It was still bad wine, which smelled like tequila, and for the first 10 mili seconds tasted like port.

This is the modern art of wine. It challenges what you think “good” wine is. And as Joel said, “this is the wine that will bring you back to when you first tasted wine as a kid”. Because it is fracking gross. And challenging? The thing is they make good wine, so are they purposefully making bad wine? What is good wine? What is bad wine? Where am i?

RATING: NEARLY UNDRINKABLE
*I didn’t think such a thing was possible.

I spent a week in Mendoza with Rose and Steve and had a blast! Mendoza is in the largest wine growing region of Argentina and next to a lot of mountains (which you can see the snow capped peaks in the below pictures). We drank a lot of wine, went on a day long biking tour of vineyards, and ended up at a small beer garden. We were there the week before the massive wine festival, glad we missed that as prices for a place to stay doubled and looked like it was going to be crazy. Great running too, they have a fantastic huge park with trails in Mendoza.

It takes 14 to 16 hours on a bus to get to Mendoza from Argentina, basically going width wise across the entire country.

A delicious Malbec that I really enjoyed! This one is located near Mendoza (Uco Valley) and hoping to visit it later this month maybe. Learn more about this one here.

Another Malbec, and yet another bottle where I can barely read who made it. What is with all the fancy writing people? Ya ya it’s cool. This wine was ok, but a bit acidic or something I couldn’t put my taste buds on. And not as smooth as the last one, maybe a bit too fruity and acidic. I think that was it.

That said, I drank it.

This was a delicious wine from a small vineyard, I don’t understand how people describe wines as it always seems odd. Basically it was really smooth, tasted great, and I drank it. There is some additional info here about them too.

So, in short here are my plans for the next 18 months:

Jan – Month in Cusco, Peru (at 11,000+ feet)
Feb, March, April – Buenos Aires, Argentina.
May – Santiago, Chile.

I scored apartments with internet in each place and hopefully going to visit Brazil from Argentina quite a few times. I’ve got plenty of space at most places so hopefully some friends will come visit!

Still working down ideas of what I’ll do while I’m in each place, but the general idea is Mayan ruins, old churches, museums, food, steak, wine, vineyards, lots of fun work (webpub/wwwh), wine, beach, patagonia, etc. May 30th I fly off to Australia, still waiting to figure out that stuff, but I’ll be there for a year! And hopefully quite a few trips to Asia and surrounding regions.

I don’t often post book recommendations on the blog, in fact I’ve only written two full blog posts on books this year, the rest just get a small blurb on the big list. So keep that in mind as the title of this book I’m about to recommend should scare you away, the title is Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong: Why We Love France but Not the French.

So the title sounds a bit retarded but the book is absolutely amazing! I’ve visited France three or four times over the last couple years and I’ve been trying to learn more about french culture and history and this book is the answer, it is as if someone forced a book on french history, french politics, and french business outlook to have menage a trois and this book is the baby. The book is well written, well researched, and well laid out.

And a quick example, I’ve been involved with computers for a long time and I’ve never heard of the Minitel yet after a chapter of reading about it in this book I was stunned. This was basically a very successful precursor to the internet that launched in 1982, a mere year after I was born. This little networked device could do online dating, message boards, buy airline or train tickets, order stuff, porn, etc. Crazy that I’ve never heard of it.

So go buy this book if you want to learn how France works. It is great to learn more about another democracy that continually chooses a different path then the USA. And hopefully we can pull some ways to change our system out of the mistakes they have made, and the things they are doing very well.

And…

The other book I strongly recommended this year is War (Click Here to learn more about it). A documentary is also going to come out about the author and the soldiers he wrote about.

I really liked this wine and highly recommend you drink it.