As I alluded to last night, I just got back from a few days in Napa, which was kickin' rad. I didn't have the wherewithal for a substantive post at 1:00 a.m. this morning, but now I do. Here are a few things that my informative mini-vacay taught me.
Swirling wine in the glass actually does make a difference in the way it tastes, it's not just an affectation. Swirling things like water and orange juice, however, indicates that you've been spending too much time in wineries.
The process for making sparkling wine is extraordinarily complicated. The best part involves a flash-frozen plug of yeast being shot out of the bottle at a hundred miles an hour.
The name of the Italian opera song that I've been trying to identify for the past few months is "Con Te Partiro" by Andrea Bocelli.
Francis For Coppola has so much money that he can intentionally make ass-headed business decisions and have them talked up as positive things by his tour guides. For example, apparently FFC is concerned that people are buying his Niebaum Coppola wines because of his name, rather than the quality of the wines. In a move that will necessarily make the wines harder to sell, therefore, he's dropping the name "Coppola" from the winery and renaming it "Niebaum Rubicon" after the winery's flagship blend. Maybe he'll start taking his name off his movies too, you know, to make sure people are seeing the movie because the movie is good.
I'm really, really bad at golf.
...And that I really, really hate golf.