The Cheese Board, what are you drinking?

well that Bell's Official hazy didn't impress. i liked it alright but had expectations i guess for my first offering from them. just didn't have much oomph/complexity. i'll stick with hazy little thing and not think twice fwiw

Where do you live outdoor_miner?

So Cal, in a little town called Redlands east of L.A. (not by choice, mind)

try Bell’s Two-Hearted Ale, kind of their signature

Not that I’ve had it in a long time but i always liked Bell’s Two Hearted.

my closest bar (that isn’t the cheese bar!) had an excellent two-hearted special on tuesdays for a long time. 20oz pour for $5

oh damn, I've raced bikes in Redlands.

I would head over to Hangar 24 and see if they have any of these:

https://hangar24brewing.com/beers/l-39-ipa/

I've never had it, but I have had several batches of their Pugachev's Cobra and it is extremely well made. I can imagine they did a good job with the L-39?

and two-hearted rules!

haven't been to hangar since the summer, but i'll def go and look for that (probably not today on account of redlands' classic bike race that's going on all day and my abode is damn near the middle of it). ritual is another good brewery in town but i don't think they do hazy rn.

Haha, sorry about that... it's a fun race though!

was out for natural wine on saturday. had a bottle of Monastero Suore Cistercensi Coenobium Ruscum. Verdicchio, Malvasia, Grechetto, Trebbiano.

made by nuns. two weeks sur lie, so barnyardy as heck, hot on the nose, minerals, caramel. nice wee wine.

i've had one of their wines! not that one tho, the one i had was their more normal white

i dont think 2 weeks on lees necessarily means that a wine will be barnyardy?

oh yeah i think i should have said "also".

skin contact too i should note

i guess the difference between the ruscum and their other white is the other one is not skin contact

White wines typically don't get barnyard aromas, because that is usually associated with brett (wine fault) and those yeasts can't deal with higher acidity.

Btw which wine bar do you usually go to?

(some people do like brett in their wines)

ok, i am bad with wine knowledge. is it possible for a skin contact to have a yeastiness to it or am i probably tasting something else and misidentifying?

there's not many places with much natural wine in vancouver that are not primarily restaurants. i got to https://www.juicebaryvr.com which is the main place in the city that is wine focused and all natural wine

it's also walking distance from my apartment which helps

You totally have fine wine knowledge!

Skin contact for white wines usually can give it a little more body and maybe some tannin if it gets to be almost an orange wine. The sur lies where the wine isn't being racked (letting sediment/leftover yeast from fermentation settle and then moved to another vessel) and then also stirred can give it nutty, creamy notes, more body. Left longer, you have things like champagne that are briochey, toasty, yeasty.

thank you for that info. i should probably do some study, my partner has some of the wset books at home i should read.

also had a glass of a pet nat from a new winemaker called neon eon from summerland in b.c.'s okanagan region which was a zweigelt. good light carbonation and easy drinking, but a little sweet, wouldn't fancy a bottle of it

Oh yeah, the wset books are pretty comprehensive but kind of dry. There are some fun sites, like Wine Folly. ( I think she has a book now). If you have amazon prime I think the Wine Bible is available on check out for free (but not the canada amazon).

Oh man, I never see any canadian wines, except for ice wine.

Is your partner doing wset?

she hasn't done it but is thinking of doing so. but she has read through some books a colleague gave her, she's a server at a farm to table resto so it helps professionally and she enjoys wine and wants to know more about it.

i didn't even know that they made wine in canada until i moved here. although given that the climate is very similar to the american parts of the pnw i suppose i shouldn't be too surprised.

as the province has the monopoly on liquor distribution there tends to be a bit of a protectionist thing, so you end up having lots of bc wine available (although the more interesting stuff usually ends up at private wine stores rather than government ran ones) and less foreign stuff

i suppose that's a bad way of describing it, the liquor store will be mainly foreign wine for sure, but the BC wine is over-represented

That is similar to every wine growing region.

If she is a server she should just do Court of Master Sommeliers and try to become a certified sommelier. Both are very similar about theory up to a point but wine service is part of the court program and more knowledge of wine producers.

I don’t often buy wines from the States cos it’s hard to find value, but took a punt on a few bottles of Trousseau-Gris from Jolie Laide and I’m very glad I did. Really gorgeous delicate copper colour, lovely soft texture, floral nose but fresh and mineral taste.

Also a young vine Xinomavro from Thymiopoulos - really tasty red berries and a beautiful aroma (reminded me of Alpha Box & Dice’s ‘F is for Fog’ Nebbiolo).

xp I remember when I lived in Ontario I’d go to LCBO and every time walk straight past all the local wine cos I assumed Canadian wine must be shite because I was dumb. Gutted I didn’t try more now, only time I see it in London is occasionally spotting an Inniskillen ice wine for like £150 on a dessert list...

xp. ah. that could be an idea.

i have had bad luck with ontario wines, though i have only been in ontario for about 10 days all-in so i haven't much experience with them.

funny canadian thing: federal legislation discourages the inter-provincial distribution of booze so you rarely see ontario wines (except ice wines) in b.c. liquor stores

government are maybe going to change that https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/canadian-vintners-association-budget-2019-wine-booze-rules-1.5066018 but the liberals might be the government after the election this year

might not be

Yeah, every state in the US has their own special booze laws. It's absurd.

And I am in chile right now and they only recently started getting non-chilean wine that wasn't argentinian, champagne or bordeaux.

yeah i don't think i ever drank non-chilean wine in chile.

I have been trying to only drink on the weekends. and . now. relief.

a saison called "the bees drank honey in the lion's skull", because the name sounded metal and the weather is right for a saison

it's some heavy shit, big on flavor, the sort of stuff i like

that's the name of an album by Earth iirc

i knew i recognized that name from somewhere

i totally will buy beers just because i like their names and/or label art. it's not any worse than buying records for the cover art imo. better because once you drink them you don't have to worry about what you're going to do with them after that.

i'd drink a cider called "when we were eating unripe pears"

I couldn't drink or stand the smell of gin for 30+ years thanks to a youthful overindulgence, but I'm back in the saddle and learning the difference between gin styles. Got a bottle of Bristow botanical gin today, same distiller as Cathead vodka. Verrry nice...I sipped some neat a few minutes ago and am still enjoying the play of botanicals on the tongue.

ohhhhh, I was picking up some wine today and was looking at the nice selection of gin. Was very tempted because I love Hemingways and thought about getting a little strange about gin. But I passed because I can only really concentrate on a couple of things at once right now.

had this last night: https://www.vivino.com/autour-de-lanne-pot-d-anne/w/2069943

chilled natty cinsault from languedoc. I'm really in the mood for light and fruity chilled reds, but good ones are hard to find in this city/too pricey for me to drink out v often.

I've had some really hit or miss bottles of natural wine this month. The only one that I remembered that I really liked was La Porte Sainte Jean from Anjou (chenin). I did bring back to stash Camut calvados small bottles of 6 yr and 12 yr and a Drouhin Petits Vougeot premier cru borgougne.

I will drink cinsault and carignan all day long. They don't even have beaujolais in your town?

I'm maybe getting too caught up with natural wine. i can probably get a decent enough beaujolais without too much trouble

I would think you could get Jadot beaujolais and bourgogne villages where you are. I know they carried it in costcos in the US for about $10-$15 usd? Jadot is always reliable. I was really turned off by some of the natural wine I had recently. Some of the chenin was just too appley and I had some super oily alsace rieslings and some languedoc rousillon blends that had surprise muscat that I was not happy with.

natty wine is definitely risky business at times. have had undesirable variation just between different bottles of the same vintage recently.

i can get Louis Jabot Beaujolais-Villages Combe aux Jacques 2017 for like $25 canadian in the liquor store in the building i work at so that will be getting drank in the park this evening

My spouse is not into natural wine which I can understand. It makes it harder for me though, because if he doesn't like something I am **forced** to finish it all and it gets to be a little too much at times where I just want something very typical as a cleanser.

How much would a decent okanagan pinot noir be where you are?

$30ish canadian

$20 for "not bad"

I'm really in the mood for light and fruity chilled reds,

^^^This plus pet nats are what I have been craving all summer. We visited my mother in law a couple weeks ago in the Finger Lakes and visited two wineries making natural wines (there are only a few doing that in that region). Picked up a couple pet nats and unoaked cab frank near-roses.

I have a pretty high tolerance for natural wine idiosyncrasies, although I have lost my taste a bit for the super dry/tannic orange wine style like in some Georgian wines, which I used to love. I no longer want the enamel stripped from my teeth.