Wine Tasting, Ancient Style (Assaggio del Vino, Antiche)

Who among us has never gone to a wine tasting party? We're talking about the kind in which the host wraps up bottles brought by party goers, then gives the secret bottles numerical identities, and paper and pen to the guests for writing tasting notes and voting for the favorite.

I enjoy being a bit bipolar in my reviewing technique, mostly for comedy, but if you are going to the trouble of reviewing something, why be bland about it?

If a wine happens to fall below average, I mock it relentlessly with the tasting notes. Things end up on my sheet like 'Old rotten saddle leather ridden by a leaky Cherry Kool Aid Man for weeks' or 'Everything that Cavit strives for, but worse and with a powerful cumin flavor and gorgonzola bouquet'.

But if a wine is better, I skew the results of comments wildly in the other direction. The prose on the notes quickly changes to the likes of 'A wine that thumps you on the head and demands respect. Complex lingering finish with vanilla and currant having just the right amount of French oak aging', that kind of thing.
All of it of course is rooted in a few grains of truth about the wine being tasted.

We have a wide variety of wine available today, but the ancients had a fair selection also. Wine came to ancient Italy from the Greeks at about 600 BC, and has been made there ever since. Pompeii itself was a major distribution port for wine, and if you go there today you can take pictures of the rows and rows of formerly wine containing amphorae like I did.

After Pompeii was destroyed in 79AD, the Romans got a bit protective of their wine trade a few years after that and had vineyards destroyed outside of Italy in 92AD under Emperor Domitian.

Here are some grapes I took a photo of in France near Chateau St. Maur last year that managed to escape Roman uprooting.

At this point, you might be wondering 'how did the ancients get the wine to ferment with no internet and readily accessible Home Booze Kit(tm) or yeast?'
Well, yeast occurs naturally on the grapes. There are recorded instances of birds eating overly ripe fruit and flying erratically into walls because they are over the legal intoxication limit for flying!

Anyway, as the Romans picked and stomped (not in the Country Western music sense), they left the skins in the amphorae with the juice and it happened all by itself. I would like to believe they were smart enough to just pour back part of a bottle into the new batches, so the strain of yeast would become more refined and specialized
over time.

Here is a picture of a remarkably well preserved ancient wine press in Israel, but some have also been found in Italy.

Some random Roman wine fun facts:

• Senator Cato (contemporary of Julius Caesar) wrote extensively on wine, as did Pliny.



• It's documented that sweet white wine was the most valuable in ancient times.



• They used to sweeten some varieties of ancient wine with lead!

I think this weekend, I'll open up a really old vintage Italian wine, unleaded.

Hope yours is good too.

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Quando vado a di festa vino (prova di assaggio), scrivo le osservazioni divertenti circa come i gusti del vino. La storia italiana del vino è affascinante.

Awards, Guitar Riff, and Signs

There has been so much work, vacation planning, and tomfoolery going on for me lately. But I've been able to finally finish my old looking dedication sign.
















Now I can have a pool built around it because, wow, it is really hot outside.



Also, one of my favorite people Zepo Lopez up in Oklahoma has awarded me the 'Blog it Forward' award. You know, now that I see the words 'forward' and 'award' so close together, it kind of freaks me out because they are so similar... It's a good tnihg I'm not dsylxeic.













Anyway, thanks very much Lopez, and I hereby pass the award along to some incredible *and* funny folks:

Grant Miller Media


GHenry at Goldfish Broth


Heather Cherry

Julia D at Homemade Hilarity



As you can see, I've restricted my choices to a narrow band of the available alphabet spectrum this time. So, please read them and comment favorably because if I send people, I might get a coupon or something. Just kidding about the coupon.


But everyone wait, that's not all... I recorded a little goofy guitar riff (not enough spare time these days to record the whole enchilada) for Lopez because she twittered that she was putting in some quality time at a casino. Let this abbreviated riff be a warning to not ever gamble what you cannot afford to lose (Animals House of Rising Sun).






Of course, she is a seasoned poker player from what I've heard. I kind of think that with enough card hands, poker is more of a game of skill than actual gambling. What do you guys think of skill vs. gambling where poker is concerned?

Strange Photos and Sundials (Fotografie Bizzaro e Orologi del Sole)

My camera phone saw a few strange things today. An experimental street light at the Dallas Museum of Art's sculpture garden... Maybe they didn't think it all the way through.




















On the way to work, I saw a horse getting hauled off to jail after obviously being arrested. I wonder what it did? It looked very guilty.
















My elevator on the 48th floor was having all 660 feet of cable replaced because the old ones were fraying and about to snap (kidding, they were reclaiming the much more valuable copper, I think). Maybe I'll run down the stairs this afternoon instead of taking the elevator (stairs actually take 6 minutes and 30 seconds).
















Over by Southfork Ranch, someone left a few stacks of gigantic number 2 pencils, they must have forgotten the sharpener.













Sunlight streamed in this morning and hit my muse bust in exactly the right proportions to make it light up as if intentional. This made me think of how that actually probably only happens exactly right once every year. Kind of like the Office episode where all the characters are watching the screen saver to bounce in *exactly* one of the corners in pure diagonal movement.

And this is the roundabout way of getting to the subject of time in the ancient world. In antiquity there were a few obvious ways of telling time better than looking up and just observing the sun's location.

One way was to burn accurate candles. In order for it to be big enough for a whole city to see, can you imagine the Roman equivalent of Big Ben being replaced each day? But it would probably be nothing but trouble, since Roman candles shoot firey exploding balls all over the place.




















Another way to tell time which had been around for a while was the water clock. But its operation was somewhat sketchy in freezing weather, plus they didn't have electric pumps to refill the water all the time.

The sundials however, were accurate on most sunny days. They even used the sundials to calibrate the water clocks. So maybe it was sundial during the day waterclock at night? Plus, the sundials were portable. Imagine glancing down at this baby on your way to an important business meeting on the Palantine (Collis Palatium).















I might just be motivated enough to build me a proper sundial that throws down shadows and also points out mosaic months of the year. You know, in case my water clock goes dry. Ooops, its a shade past time to go...

Work In Progress and Tour (Lavori in Corso e Chiamata)

Last weekend, I made a bit more progress on the ancient marble sign. Now I only have one line to go plus the thin chamfered marble border I'll be putting around it as a frame. I need to take a better picture with shading for the full effect of how legible from a distance this is, but the sun went behind one of the rare clouds we have in a Texas summer.

I love the way it looks now without any leftover pencil markings, it's more 'real' looking to me now.

Also, my Chi-Ro mosaic is pretty much done. I was thinking about bordering with gold Orsoni tile and offering up to the Vatican in exchange for a special backstage pass for the archaeological area under St. Peters Cathedral. I would be finished with several of these projects by now if not for picking and booking apartments and hotels for Italy. Maybe I'm too particular?

And now, away from the 'normal' format whatever that is... Mr. Condescending asked several bloggers the following questions probably in an effort to determine whose place he wants to visit most with his favorite trailer park family in tow. By the way, to keep it clear, this is no form of invite. If I come back late and you have broken in and are eating and drinking in the media room, I'll be figuratively releasing the hounds on you. Careful, remember this is Texas.

• What books are on your favorite shelf?
• What DVD's are on your favorite shelf?
• What are your TWO favorite cookbooks.
• Select 1-3 recipes you will cook for your special guest.
• What will we be drinking that is available?

To drink, there is water of course, various beverages, and access to this open bar. The expensive stuff is locked away until I know you much better.

I eat out often, but in case I get the culinary urge that actually requires instruction, I put on my official Brinker International chef pants with the black and white vertical stripes and my Chilis corporate tshirt and pull out these two cookbooks.

The first one is Emiril's Delmonico and from it I would recommend the Chicken Delmonico with the house salad. The second cookbook is Todd Wilbur's Top Secret Recipies. This one has always fascinated me because I love copying stuff you get out in restaurants. For example, I never would have imagined putting powdered sugar on fried chicken is how Chick-Fil-A makes its distinctive coating. Anyway, I'd recommend the nice prime petit fillet in the style of Ruth Chris' steakhouse from this book.

As for DVD's I usually throw away the cluttery plastic boxes and just keep them in big binders, but I did have some to put on display. If you squint, you can probably make out 'Rounders', 'Tombstone', 'Gross Pointe Blank', 'La Vita e Bella', 'Better Off Dead', and 'Star Wars' among others (by squint I mean seeing the titles on the movie boxes, not the movies on the screen. You'd have to be on the farthest back row for that to be a problem).

And finally, here is a bookshelf. Can anyone spot the book printed more than 100 years ago? I have various books on mosaic, fresco, history, language, sculpture, music and various literature.

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Il mio segno di marmo quasi è completato. Se visitiate, immagini sopra che cosa là è di fare. Nessuna preoccupazione, ho parecchie pellicole con di lingua italiana. Ciaooo!

Foundations of a Good Pavement

I've been interested lately in the ancient ways of laying down a foundation because I'm thinking of doing a large 80m sq outside pavement that will more or less serve as a canvas for some mosaics I have in mind. Maybe make a few bronze legged ancient couches and such for lounging around said pavement.



The books of architecture by Vitruvius in classical antiquity really cast a light on how they built things to last, and why some of the buildings in the Roman forum are still standing, even with several tons of stone supported for thousands of years. I also think those Seven-Eleven convenience stores on the Appian Way will be there forever because of this.

In Book 7 chapter 1, Vitruvius covers the proper way to lay down a pavement or foundation. First, they hammered the soil down to compact it tighter than your glutes after an hour of squats, and then set a layer of logs on the ground on top of that. Next, at least six inches of stone were set down on the logs, followed by 12 inches of the smaller stone cemented together with lime which was compacted by beating it with wood.

But that's not all... Then an upper layer of another 6 inches, this time more rich in lime, was set with stones and leveled off. Finally the slab pieces or mosaic tessarae were mortared on to that. So back in the day, they used 2/3 meter thick foundations. Very impressive, much more thick and longer lasting than the foundations of today.

And now for something completely different, OtherWorldlyOne (warning, a bit salty sometimes) picked me for another one of those questiony things. I like her comments and blog, so who am I to turn that down? Feel free to do this one if you like.

So here are ten things not previously published about me (that I'm aware of).

• On the piano, I can pick out a note I hear in the first try, but it's always exactly 1 and 1/2 steps off. I blame years of playing the trumpet, which is a B flat instrument to the piano's key of C.
  


• The tops of my feet have absolutely no hair.
  


• I've never had a tattoo or piercing of any kind, and never felt the need to get one.
  


• I karaoke sometimes, but unfortunately I sound similar to Billy Joel.
  


• As a kid, I always wanted to play hockey, but there was not much ice in Texas so I couldn't.



• I was blessed with an unnaturally good sense of balance and can still do an unhealthy amount of skateboarding tricks including multiple 360s.
  


• When I make margaritas, they always use small amounts of Cointreau and pineapple juice, and are always on the rocks because frozen is just not the way to go.
  


• I have never been to South America, even though boat chartering is less expensive there. At some point, I want to go hiking to see Machu Picchu.
  


• I used to be able to throw a really wicked baseball breaking pitch, but haven't tried in a while.
  


• When I was 12 years old, I took the SAT (college admissions test) because Duke University wanted me to.

So there you have it!

Have a great weekend all, I'll be working the marble and studying the Italian if you know what I mean...

PS - Like my ironic subject made in Photoshop?

Your Most or Least Favorite Remakes?

Not directly concerning art or old stuff, but in the spirit of the neoclassic, particularly the retro aspect of enjoying something that used to be, does anyone out there have favorite song remakes?

It doesn't really matter about genre, time period or anything, I was just curious what some of the better remakes are in your opinions. Also, what are the worst of the terrible remakes for you?




Song remakes that might be better than original to me:
'Every Little Thing She Does' - Ra (originally Police?)
'Don't Dream it's Over' - Sixpence None the Richer (Crowded House)
'O Sole Mio' - Me First and the Gimmie Gimmies (traditional Italian)
'Life is a Highway' - Rascal Flatts (Tom Cochrane?)
'Unchained Melody' - Sanchez (Righteous Bros?)

Can't tell if these are worse song remakes or just regular awful:
'American Pie' - Madonna (Don McLean?)
'I Love Rock and Roll' - Britney Spears (Joan Jett)
'Bringin on the Heartbreak' - Mariah Carey (Def Leppard?)
'Walk the Line' - Travis Tritt (Johnny Cash)
'How You Remind Me' / 'Someday' (Nickelback covered themselves)

Completely unrelated, here is a great J. Davenport tromp l'oeil painting, 'Territorial', for you to consider, and while you do that I'll be going through your stuff*.


















* Jack Handey reference...

Carving like a Slave (Intagliando Come uno Schiavo...)

I've just been carving marble like a slave this weekend. A highly trained slave with some cold Japanese beer, which I'm pretty sure they didn't have back in the olden days. Well, I take that back, because in the first century AD, 30% of the entire population of Rome was made up of slaves, so they probably had beer readily accessible, but I'm not entirely sure if they'd made contact with the Japanese yet.

Did I mention it was hot outside? It was 103F / 39.4C outside and I was feeling it.

Here are some pictures of the progression as of Saturday. I love the way the V-incised letters cast shadows. This kind of result cannot be obtained through sandblasting with a rubber mat (the quick and skill-less alternative). The curves in the letters are particularly fun to carve (as I found out with the 'D', and then the 'C' on Sunday).

Also, I've been booking hotel rooms for the Italy trip. Mom (who I'm taking) is excited, and I can't wait to be back in Venice again.

Clearly visible is my Tom Perkins book, which is the best book on stone lettering I've ever even heard of. His work is amazing and the book is too, and has helped me realize this project.

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Sto intagliando le lettere in un segno di pietra. La birra ha aiutato a me per non essere uno schiavo. Sarò in Italia in ottobre se chiunque ha marmi buona da vendere a me. ;)