As a purveyor of fine wines, spirits and beers it is not unusual to watch products get on the distribution merry-go-round; moving from one supplier to another. I honestly feel very bad when I see my distributor’s salespeople hustle to get a new product on the shelf and build up a base of sales only to have it jump ship and watch another salesperson reap the long-term commissions on the repeat sales. This is especially true of my smaller, boutique, distributors. These guys don’t put their products in Wal-mart, the grocery store or the corner gas station. They build them in stores like mine, and I am very grateful for that. Unfortunately, they often see their products go to larger distributors once they are established and rarely see established products come back their way.  I couldn’t run my stores without the blue-chip products of the bigger suppliers, but to be honest it is the small distributors that make my stores thrive. They are the guys who bring the newest stuff that nobody has ever heard of. They keep things interesting and for that I thank them.

Remember that when you are shopping in your local mega-mart. The reason they don’t have anything you’ve never seen before is they don’t deal with the small, boutique, suppliers. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Kendall Jackson or Jack Daniels. I sell lots of the both of them. But without the small labels and small production offerings of a real fine-bottle retailer who deals with the smallest of distributors, you are missing out on the newest, most exciting and adventurous products on the market.

Backbone Bourbon – Uncut

Batch #01
114°
70% corn, 25% rye, 5% malted barley

Backbone Bourbon is an uncut whiskey aged less than four years, bottled especially for Crossroad Vintners (meaning it will never fly away to another distributor). You may have never heard of it, and you may never see it unless you happen to be in my neck of the woods at a bar, restaurant or store that sells products that are new, different and delicious.

From the label:
“Backbone Bourbon is a true uncut whiskey that is meant to be sipped and savored. The quality of this bourbon comes from its youthful vigor and the purity of tasting a barrel strength whiskey (where no water has been added to dilute the experience). We have left the backbone in this bourbon. The name is also a tribute to the strength of character that is found in the people of Midwest America.”

Backbone’s nose is a nicely balanced citrus/wood collaboration with orange zest and vanilla spicing the aroma of baked pie crust. It has a nice, creamy mouthfeel, rich and earthy with that same ‘crispy edges of the pie-crust’, bread flavor. The citrus and spice hovers, tantalizing and tingling, in the periphery while the edgy, young whiskey, alcohol bite holds center stage through a long finish.

Backbone is a very solid bourbon along the same lines as Knob Creek or Wathen’s Single Barrel, but with a richer mouthfeel. As this is a new product I look forward to seeing longer aged versions and perhaps offerings with different mashbill and special barrel finishes.

These are the kinds of things that make my job so much fun.

High West Whiskey Double Rye!

Batch: 11L02   Bottle: 1424

High West Distillery
Park City, Utah

You know a whiskey is going have boldness when the distiller feels good about putting an exclamation point in the name. Hand-crafted in small batches, with an exacting attention to detail, Double Rye lives up to the billing.

The eponymous ryes are a tag team of a brash two year old with a 95% rye, 5% barley malt mashbill; and a calmly smooth sixteen year old with a much more corn heavy mashbill of 53% rye, 37% corn and 10% barley malt. When put into a bottle together they create a best-of-both-worlds effect with bright spicy heat and mellow, well-developed, wood notes at a non-chill filtered 92 proof.

Double Rye has a bright and spicy nose full of citrus zest, candied apples and clover honey over a lurking clove zing. It is slightly creamy on the tongue and the wood notes really come through with vanilla, butterscotch and a faint cedar note. The rye heat carries through to a palate pleasing tingle that lingers through the citrus, persimmon, cinnamon finish.

Among whiskey-drinker’s whiskeys this one is a cut above. It is worth it to track down a bottle.

Abita Brewing
25th Anniversary Vanilla Double Dog

As a fan of brown ales I was looking forward to this one especially with it being a 25th Anniversary offering.

It poured a nice, rich brown with very little head. Smell was malty and slightly sweet with hints of cocoa and the promised vanilla.

The taste was nice and rich, much like the regular Turbodog but with an extra level of depth and complexity. The vanilla comes across more as a wood spice like that of a whiskey than that from a vanilla bean.

Overall it was a very good, but not great, offering. I would definitely drink it again. The taste is nice and the price is right.

Lemelson Vineyards

2008

Thea’s Selection Pinot Noir

Willamette Valley, Oregon

The Lemlson Vineyards Thea’s Selection Pinot Noir is one of the better Pinots I have had the pleasure to sample lately. Usually I prefer wines with a bit more weight than Pinot but the Thea’s Selection is certainly bulky enough to please my palate.

The nose is typical Pinot. Bright and heavy on the fruit. The taste is an entirely different story as it is much more fuller in body than most Pinots while remaining exceptionally well balanced. I am especially impressed by the winemaking skill it took to coax this much weight from a Pinot Noir grape while maintaining this seamless an integration of bright and dark fruit, bright acidity and firm grippy tannin. I have to wonder if there is a good measure of Syrah or something else dark and spicy blended here. Whatever it is it is a style I can really appreciate and get used to.

Delicious. Pair it with beef tenderloin or BBQ chicken.

by Toby Ball

Over the summer (The Summer of the Re-read 2010) I got an e-mail right here in the Red Herrings inbox offering me an advance copy Scorch City, a book I had really been looking forward to reading. However, because I was taking the summer off from blogging to re-read all those books I missed that email!

Dammit, I could have read this book months ago!

Ok, starting with  the cover. If you remember, the reason I picked up the first book by Toby Ball, The Vaults, was the cover (if you can’t remember, here is the review so you can refresh yourself). That cover was cool, but this cover is not only cool but seems to embody all of the essential elements of the book as well. The cover shows the four main characters of the book, yes in spite of having only one person in the picture, four. In Novels of The City (you can still use that if you want) The City is a character all on its own, an industrial northern city that dominates the region and the towns around it. In this novel The City is joined by a utopian black shantytown on its outskirts known as the Uhuru Community. The cover, to my mind, shows that Community being crushed, sundered or plowed-under by The City. The third character on the cover could be any of the viewpoint characters of the novel but my bet is Lieutenant Piet Westermann, who is caught in the middle of racial, political and religious forces while he tries to solve the murder of an emaciated young prostitute. Throughout the book he is constantly pulled in various directions by forces and ideologies that he may or may not believe in, yet have the power to affect him deeply. He is a man alone in a crowd just as he is alone among the chaos of the shantytown on the cover yet moving with purpose. The fourth character on the cover may be just my imagination but it seems there is a shadowy hand reaching out from the lower right side of the picture toward the lone figure. There are spooky and shadowy forces at work in the novel but what seals it as symbolic in my mind as a shadowy hand and not an artifact of the terrain is that the light is coming from the figure’s left meaning the shadow is reaching out against the light.

All kinds of symbolism there. Who needs to review a book when all you have to do is talk about the cover!

The novel itself is just as well constructed and thoughtfully laid out as the cover is. The events of Scorch City occur fifteen years after those of The Vaults. It is now 1950. There has been another world war. The threat of Communism has taken a McCarthyesque turn in The City and has become the major issue in a contentious mayoral race while anti-communist vigilantes roam the streets. The setting is still very noir but the heat, the paranoia, the no-win feeling of helplessness, give it a desperate dystopian edge. Everything seems morally ambiguous and you are never quite sure who is the good guy and who is the bad guy, much less who is a murderer.

I enjoyed Scorch City just as much as The Vaults, but for different reasons. Ball has come a long way as a writer in a very short time. In The Vaults my only complaint was that while the settings were vivid and gripping, the character cast seemed too large and unfocused. In Scorch City the characters are much more clear, each serving a vital role and holding a piece of the story that is their own. The plot was just as compelling and even more tightly written and composed.

Keep them coming Mr. Ball, I want more City.

On the other hand, there is opportunity for fun and bragging rights. This is your chance! Play the 2011 Christmas Card Game with your family and friends.

Rules:

Some point awards are positive (+), some are negative (-).

There are 12 positive and 12 negative awards.

Each card is individually scored by tallying the positive points and subtracting the negative points.

Awards are changed each year in order to prevent gaming of the system.

Positive Awards:

+2 points for each card received.

+1 point for a hand-written address.

+1 point for a hand-written return address.

+1 point for a family photo.

+2 point for a photo including a crying child.

+3 points if an alcoholic beverage appears anywhere on the card.

+1 point for a Christmas stamp.

+3 points for a Hanukkah or Kwanza stamp on a Christmas card.

+5 points for a hand-made (by the person sending the card) card.

+1 point if the card includes or features a child’s drawing.

+2 points for a first-time card from somebody you have known for 10+ years.

+2 for a personal hand-written message, of more than two sentences, inside the card.

Negative Awards:

-1 point for receiving a card you didn’t reciprocate.

-2 points if your name is misspelled or your address is incorrect, anywhere on the card or envelope.

-1 point for computer generated, stamped, or printed signatures.

-5 points if there is no handwriting anywhere on the card or envelope.

-2 points if a featured drawing is from a child over the age of 10 and under the age of 18.

-3 points if the card is accompanied by a fruitcake, fruit basket, or really, any kind of fruit.

-5 points if the cards contains a photograph where everyone is wearing the same sweater.

-1 point for a non-holiday stamp.

-2 points if the card includes an original poem by the sender.

-1 point if the card signature includes pets.

-3 points if the card signature includes more than two pets.

-2 points if the card rains glitter when taking it out of the envelope.

There you have it. Happy Holidays and happy card-sending!

So what happened?

Well, I took the summer off to enjoy “The Summer of the Re-Read 2011″. The latest books in several series that I have been following for years (including George R. R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons) dropped over the summer and I decided to take a break from blogging in order to go back and re-read those series from the beginning. The idea was to get more free time in order to more quickly burn through those books…

And then there was Civ World…

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Civ World

As diversions, distractions and things to think about when you should be doing something else go (in other words a true Red Herring), the game / insanity known as Civ World reigns (or at least reigned) supreme. For those of you out there who didn’t get sucked in by it, you are lucky, and I also feel very, very sorry for you. Civ World is a Sid Meier Civilization game created for Facebook. Honestly though, at this time I have very mixed feelings about Civ World. When it started I had no idea what I was doing and there was little to no documentation to explain the tricks. On one hand this was great because it was an honest, actual, STRATEGY game. You had to figure them out and those that played the most efficiently ruled. I spent hours playing and thinking about better ways of playing. Hours that I should have been doing more important things (like reading those books and getting back to blogging). On the other hand it was buggy, frustrating, constantly having its rules and gameplay mechanics changed in maddening ways, and then they went and tried to monetize it, and ruined it forever.

I would have to say the very best thing about Civ World is the awesome group of players I was very fortunate enough to team up with. The Civ World Strategy Group came from all corners of the globe: China, Bangladesh, Norway, Sweden, British Columbia (some guy named Sean Meade in South Carolina) and Alabama. These were wonderful, funny and incredibly devious and utterly implacable people. We had the game wired. We knew all the best plays. We crushed all opposition without mercy or remorse. If you were in a game with us, You Were Going To Lose. It was that simple.

I miss Civ World.

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The third thing that changed how much blogging I can do is that at work I was promoted. I am now the General Manager of three stores of purveyors of fine wines, spirits and beers. This is great! I am really happy in my new position and it challenges me in ways that managing a single store didn’t, and I still get to help customers find the great stuff they are looking for, my favorite part of my previous position. The downside, at least as far as blogging is concerned, is that I don’t have an office of my own anymore (though that should change eventually) and I have a lot more stuff to do so I generally work later.

New Job = Less Free Time.

Oh well, I get to try even more tasty wines, spirits and beers and I’m working on ways to create time to share the most tasty of them here. So it will all work out in the end with a little patience.

So, that’s the update. Blogging should increase in the near future. Thanks for reading!

It has sort of become a running joke but someday I think I will follow through on this. Someday…

From The Daily Beast:

“For the past few days, a mystery has been unfolding in Silicon Valley. Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy. Burson even offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-bashing op-ed, which it promised it could place in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post.

The plot backfired when the blogger turned down Burson’s offer and posted the emails that Burson had sent him. It got worse when USA Today broke a story accusing Burson of spreading a “whisper campaign” about Google “on behalf of an unnamed client.””

From Mashable:

“The PR firm is Burson-Marsteller. The blogger is Chris Soghoian. A Burson agent approached him to write a piece on Google’s Social Circle, a network of social connections that Google uses to deliver relevant search results. The Burson rep even offered to help write the piece and approached other news organizations, including USA Today, with similar offers.

Soghoian declined and instead decided to publish some of the emails from Burson. (They’re available here.) In one email, the Burson rep directly attacks Google, saying, “Google, as you know, has a well-known history of infringing on the privacy rights of America’s Internet users. Not a year has gone by since the founding of the company where it has not been the focus of front-page news detailing its zealous approach to gathering information -– in many cases private and identifiable information — about online users.”

The email goes on to describe Google’s service as the “latest tool designed to scrape private data and build deeply personal dossiers on millions of users –- in a direct and flagrant violation of its agreement with the FTC.”

When Soghoian asked who was paying for this campaign, the Burson representative refused to name the firm’s client. A Facebook representative confirmed to The Daily Beast‘s Dan Lyons that the company hired Burson for two reasons: “First, because it believes Google is doing some things in social networking that raise privacy concerns; second, and perhaps more important, because Facebook resents Google’s attempts to use Facebook data in its own social-networking service.””

This is what I thought about the whole situation:

Maybe if there was a 5GW fan page on Facebook they might have done a better job.

Theories of International Politics and Zombies

by Daniel W. Drezner

There are three sorts of people who are going to read this book. The first are the kind of people who see the title and aren’t able to resist finding out what zombies have to do with international politics. These may, or may not be very interested but they might actually learn a few things about how the world works. The second type of people are those who already have an interest in international politics, possibly recognize Daniel Drezner’s name, and pick up the book to find out in what context zombies could possibly apply to international politics. They might be mildly amused but depending upon how seriously they take themselves may not get past the first chapter or two. That’s their loss. The third sort of person has an interest in zombies as well as international politics. They probably have been awaiting the opportunity, or have already started, to explore this most interesting of black-swan scenarios and it is likely that they will chuckle their way through the book.

I happen to fall into the third category.

No, this isn’t really the kind of book for a thinker who takes themself too seriously, but it is a pretty short and amusing read for someone who likes to think seriously about the unknown unknowns that can crop up from time to time. Honestly, I didn’t agree with some of the characterizations of the approaches of certain kinds of  thinkers that Drezner presents (The neo-cons in particular, though I think that one was more than a little tongue-in-cheek) but I do think he gets way more right than he gets wrong. Actually I really only have one major quibble with anything that Drezner presented, probably because I went against the crowd and I personally think I had good reason for doing so.

Drezner presents two questions that he asked during his research. I remember answering both of them.

You face the following choice:

Option A)  The certain destruction of 500 zombies.

Option B)  A 50 percent chance of destroying 1,000 zombies and a 50 percent chance of destroying 100 zombies.

According to Drezner’s research 61% of respondents chose option ‘A’.

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You face the following choice:

Option A)  A certain increase of 500 zombies.

Option B)  A 50 percent chance of creating only 100 new zombies and a 50 percent chance of creating 1,000 new zombies.

The survey showed that 57% chose option ‘B’

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Dezner uses these questions to illustrate prospect theory where the tendency is to be risk-averse (and go for the ”sure-thing” in the first question) when you think you are winning, but risk-seeking (or take the gamble of question 2) when you think you are losing. By my recollection I voted opposite the majority in both questions because I viewed the scenarios in the opposite way than Drezner because the zombie apocalypse is pretty zero-sum when it comes to survival. In fact, I think the questions better illustrate the offensive (playing to win) and the defensive (playing not to lose).

In the first question I chose option ‘B’ not because I was risk-averse and afraid of losing, but rather that I am on the offensive against zombies and I am looking to win. Even 100 fewer ghouls walking around is better than none and getting 1,000 of them out of the way is even better. On the offensive against the shambling undead, a risk-seeking attitude is a good thing. Be methodical, yes, but seek every opportunity to remove potential zombie opponents.

The second question is one of those hard choice questions that I think really needed more information to be clear. I would like to know if Drezner had in mind the total number of people the decision-maker was responsible for. It doesn’t change my answer but it would be more important to know, to me, from a game-theory point of view. Regardless, I chose ‘A’ for the reason that it implies that I am on the defensive and I know at least 500 of my group would survive when survival, not losing completely, is the goal. There is no other rational choice especially if the risk of creating 1,000 new zombies means that the entire group is zombified. On the defensive against the undead the group is the asset that must be preserved, but in a triage-like manner. If there is a sacrifice that preserves the group, even if it severly diminishes the group, then it is a sacrifice that must be taken. Of course, I wouldn’t want to be potentially one of the 500 any more than anybody else but I definitely wouldn’t want to be in the 1,000.

 I wish this was out when I was in high-school or college. It would have made a really fun textbook.