Cinematic Wines - Pt 6: A Space Odyssey via Astralis (and Sun Ra)

The final Cinematic Wine Series ends with a bang, a BIG BANG: Clarendon Hills Astralis 2002.


The tagline for the original Kubrick film, 2001: A Space Odyssey can equally apply to this amazing red wine from South Australia, Astralis:

Let the Awe and Mystery of a Journey Unlike Any Other Begin

Valued at £200 in London, this is an intense drinking experience now until 2050. Yes, you read right. Best drinking around 2025 - 2035, my friends.


What were you doing in 1988?


Not reading a blog on the internet, I bet. What do you think you will be doing in 2028?? Hopefully drinking Astralis (well, that is my wish for you anyway).


Kubrick's idea of the future in 2001: A Space Odyssey has many hopes and fears about the future, and now, long after 2001, the film is beguiling for its foresight and ability to even imagine such ideas in 1968.


The same applies with Astralis.


Astralis is a lot more than Science Fiction. Like all the great wines, this is time and space travel in ideas and potential.


As this is all future for me at this point in time (!), I will leave you with the official tasting notes:

Astralis Syrah

2002 Clarendon Hills Astralis (Shiraz) (98-100)
The 2002 Syrah Astralis Vineyard is akin to midnight oil. A viscous, unctuously-textured, full-bodied wine of remarkable intensity that represents the essence of a particular varietal as well as vineyard, it will need 8-10 years before it begins to develop. It is a legendary Syrah that those lucky enough to taste in its prime (circa 2025-2035) will give the respect it most certainly will demand. Thankfully there are people in the wine world like Roman Bratasiuk who make wines for future generations as opposed to those that offer immediate gratification. But let none of us who care about quality dismiss the purists and non-compromising winemakers such as Bratasiuk who are trying to do something beyond what has ever been accomplished. This may be his finest wine to date. Anticipated maturity: 2015-2050

Link: All 6 posts from Cinematic Wines Series in July

water no get enemy

If there's no wine left, I'll definitely try water. Just as Fela Kuti sings, water no get enemy (see song below).

A real treat in Paris, apart from the excellent African musicians in the Metro (if I am not listening to Fela Kuti on the ipod), is the huge range of water on sale at the local supermarkets. They all have different tastes from the downright funky to soft-as-a-pillow.

Today I had a pristine English still water called Hildon. It is the purest water I have ever tasted. Totally palate cleansing. It is even in a 750ml glass bottle, perfectly complemented to the size of a bottle of wine.

Apart from San Pelligrino, with more calcium than milk, this is my new favourite water. It also has high calcium content. I know there are a lot of people against bottled water, and I know the ancient Greeks didn't have much good to say about any water, but water has got no enemy here - bottled or tap.

quiz: what wine are you?

WW&S is Pinot Gris

More hip than most, you spot trends before they even really get started. If something is new and unique, you know about it... and you've probably tried it. You have a good number of projects, interests, and relationships - but they are all fleeting. The world is so appealing and diverse, you can't help but seek variety. Deep down you are: A true flirt Your partying style: Exclusive. You only party with people you've personally selected.

Link: Quiz: What Kind of Wine Are You?

honkeyfinger: invocation of the demon other

"Anybody singing the blues is in a deep pit yelling for help." - Mahalia Jackson at Rick Saunders breaks his silence

On my first or second night after arriving in London I heard about a night called, Not the Same Old Blues Crap, and you know I got a bit upset when I saw it, almost offended. That's my music you're talking about. You punks!

Ha! OK, the blues is a loaded word in itself, meaning different things to different people. Sure, I agree – there are too many boring Budweiser advertising types play their three chords at their 5oth birthday party... blah.

If that is you, no need to read any further.

Still here? Good. Then you'll like Honkeyfinger's new album called Invocation of the Demon Other. It is listening in the n'th dimension. This is what the harp sounds like very far away in another galaxy. The minor blues keys in distortion twanged the aorta vessel in my heart so much it hurt.

That's pretty much my working definition of the blues (when you're thinking evil).

A few songs grabbed me by the neck and wouldn't let go: Margarine Man, Trouble, The Sloth, True Believers and Burning Skull blues, amongst others.

If you know, love, or ARE the blues you will have your minds opened to possibility and your ears reconfigured. Run, don't walk.

And if you are in Minneapolis, check him out at the Deep Blues Festival at Lake Elmo, July 19.

Link: Great myspace page and website.
Link: Blues in London: interview with Honkeyfinger

get your fizz on

Courtney Love gets her fizz on

A new book on the history of hooch: Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol, By Iain Gately. Gotham Books.

"Real French Champagne was sweet but still. When the English imported it to their warm cellars in the 1660s, it went through a second fermentation and turned bubbly—sacrilege to the French, but soon de rigueur overseas....

One of Drink’s most fascinating subplots, as it turns out, is humanity’s apparently universal contempt for water. In ancient Greece, water drinkers “were believed not only to lack passion but also to exude a noxious odor”"

Link: A History of Hooch - New York Magazine

Fattoria Le Terrazze and rainy day women

Bob Dylan: "they'll stone you at the breakfast table"

Fattoria Le Terrazze Rosso Conero Sassi Neri 2003

On the pavement outside a pub on 4-lane Whitechapel Road in peak hour under an ominously dark sky. Feeling like a Rainy Day Woman.

Friend walks past with a half a bottle under his arm. Works in the City. Half cut from schmoozing with clients at some big buck$ lunch. In a 45 minute lunch ordered £500 worth of wine (4 bottles for 3 people??). Sure, I'll drink your capitalist scraps. Especially if it's a Fattoria Le Terrazze red.

Fattoria Le Terrazze are the same people who make Bob Dylan's specially requested wine, IGT Planet Waves.

Damn my champagne tastes on a beer budget.

Rush inside pub and grab a couple of wine glasses. This wonderful subdued Montepulciano wine hums along to the call to prayer from the Whitechapel Mosque across the road.

After 5 years in the bottle, the cedar oak beautifully integrated with the fruit; now light as red silk. Things slowed down. Even Whitechapel Road.

Pub hates me now. (Well, I had tried to order a wine from them but all they had was RED). Anyway, it was worth sneaking in a glass or two. Friend said, just blame the City schmuck. You shouldn't take it so personal, as Bob Dylan says. It's about the wine. But okay, I will...

Not so much Rainy Day Woman #1,2 & 3 5 after this.





Link: Fattoria Le Terrazze

Cinematic Wines - Pt 5: Champagne and Casablanca

As everyone is waiting, stuck in Casablanca, what else is there to do? Might as well drink more Champagne.

Good idea.

Casablanca is soaked in Champagne. Champagne features in nearly more scenes than the film's star, Humphrey Bogart. I'm amazed Champagne isn't featured in the credits as a character.

From the first moment we meet Rick (Humphrey Bogart) playing chess against himself in his saloon, Rick's Cafe Americain, he is seen drinking Champagne in a Marie Antoinette glass.

But of course, he never accepts drinks from anyone else.

"Waiter, a bottle of Veuve Clicquot 1926, a very good wine," orders the Captain for the visiting Nazi Major.

Then there's the bottle of bourbon Rick drinks while he waits for an explanation from his ex-lover Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman).

"Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine."

Rick sits in the dark remembering happier times. With the arrival of the Nazis in Paris, Rick, Ilsa and Sam drink through their last three bottles of Mumm Cordon Rouge.

Ilsa would rather pour the Champagne in the garden than let the Nazis drink it.

"Here's looking at you kid," as they toast their last toast together. Ilsa knocks over the Champagne. An ominous sign!

Meanwhile, everybody at Rick's Cafe Americain is drinking non-stop Champagne cocktails, Hennessy Cognac and French 75s.

It doesn't stop until the plane leaves for Lisbon.

Here's looking at you, kid!


Previous Posts in Cinematic Wines Series:
Part 4: Mad Max reds
Part 3: Gerard Depardieu
Part 2: Francis Ford Coppola Director's Cut
Part 1: Bandol and Bardot



Link: Casablanca film review

warm leatherette

Grace Jones at Meltdown Festival, Royal Festival Hall London, June 20, 2008:

'Warm Leatherette', one of the songs that broke her out of the underground in 1980, is a JG Ballard-derived track that sexualises a car crash. Tonight it is a singalong. 'You sing "warm", motherfuckers!' commands Jones, holding two cymbals up threateningly.

It's always tempting to use "WARM leatherette" to describe some red wines. Sometimes I have a secret desire to yell out WARRRM at red wine tastings in sterile tastings room. And also, my other favourite line:

Quick, let's make love before we die!


Link: Live Reviews: Thoroughly modern millinery - Guardian

Cinematic Wines - Pt 4: Mad Max reds

We were somewhere out in the desert when he said, “You know South Australia has the highest ratio of serial killers to population?"

The driver, a travelling winemaker, pointed to the dry hill exposed like a half-buried bone, "They found six people buried just over there."

Riverland, South Australia. This is Mad Max territory.

Out past the Adelaide Hills, the misty home to Grange, and keep driving for a few hours. You get to where there is only orange sandy desert. Then an hour later, endless rows of bright green vines.

The drought, and new sophisticated irrigation practices, are only some of the reasons why Australian wines have gone from an average of 12.5% to 13.5% in the past decade.

Of course, certain influential U.S wine critics don't help when they *cough* consistently give more scores for full-bodied monster truck reds.

Mad Max wines: full-bodied, full-throttle, ball-busting reds.

And it’s not just Australian wines inching up in alcohol. There’s wines from the Napa Valley also averaging at 14.5% alcohol.

Let’s see if this is just a fashion for macho wine or the end of the world is nigh (with Global Warming, who knows?).

But a backlash is brewing from big chain buyers. Marks and Spencer are not the only ones wanting them out. There could be a showdown.

Mz Darkly sez, "No censorship. Each to their own!"

Here are four Mad Max wines that'll stomp in your mouth wearing a black leather suit (if you like that kind of thing, that is):

• Tait The Ball Buster Red 2005 - 15.8% alcohol, Shiraz Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot from the Barossa Valley is a purple bruise of a wine.
• Carnival of Love Shiraz 2005 – winemaker Sparky Marquis’ vivacious personality is apparent in this 15.8% alcohol Knight Rider from McLaren Vale. Ranked number 8 out of 100 in Wine Advocate. 99 points from Robert Parker.
• Shafer Napa Valley Merlot 2005 - 14.5% alcohol - not as high as it has been, but still enough to pack a powerful punch of fruit.
• XVI du President 2006 RED France - 16% alcohol from a hot 2006 vintage in the Catalan Hills.

Don't say I didn't warn you.


Previous Posts in Cinematic Wines Series:
Part 3: Gerard Depardieu
Part 2: Francis Ford Coppola Director's Cut
Part 1: Bandol and Bardot

Cinematic Wines - Pt 3: Gérard Depardieu

"I'd far rather work with wine-makers than actors. They don't talk as much. If you have to explain a film as an actor or director, or even your wine as a winemaker, you lose the mystery.

"It is like asking Mozart where he found all those notes and what made him put them in that particular order."

Unlike Depardieu's famous character, Cyrano de Bergerac, it appears Depardieu's nose has done him well.

With women... and wine.

Since the early 80s, Gérard Depardieu has been making wines in partnership with renegade winemaker, Bernard Magrez. He has seven labels made from vineyards in Bordeaux, Languedoc in the south of France, as well as in Spain, Morocco and Argentina.

Depardieu unashamedly lives large. His wines have a New World taste, even the French wines have a happy, almost jolly, fruit-driven feel.

The Gérard Depardieu Toro Spiritus Sancti - from Spain, Castilla y León, Toro – is a 100% Tempranillo. Very dark and smoky with coffee and toasty oak.

The moral of Cyrano, as well as, Depardieu and his wines?

Be brave, be yourself and LIVE LARGE!!!!!!

Next in Cinematic Wine Series: WWS goes full throttle to the end of the world.

Previous Posts in Cinematic Wines Series:
Part 2: Francis Ford Coppola Director's Cut
Part 1: Bandol and Bardot

Link: Gerard Depardieu's nose for wine

Cinematic Wines - Pt 2: Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola Director's Cut Russian River Valley Chardonnay 2007

Apocalypse Now? I anticipated bombs of creamy fruit with splinters of big American oak. Instead, the Director's Cut shows a skillful edit of the blockbuster Californian Chardonnay.

The label gives you an idea of what's inside. The label is a Zoetrope of a girl skipping (zoetropes produced the illusion of movement in the days before film).

There's nothing static about this wine. It's non-stop and zippy: demanding to be enjoyed now before you're sleeping with the fishes. Racy, fresh palate – just like sinking your teeth into a green apple – balanced by a smooth malo-lactic fermentation and a slight vanillin oak touch.

There's a lot of sunshine here. Rather surprisingly, from a Director renowned for exploring man, darkly.

For more in the Cinematic Wine Series:

Previous Post: Bandol and Bardot
Link: Francis Ford Coppola presents (the wine portfolio)

Cinematic Wines - Pt 1: Bandol and Bardot

Brigitte Bardot as Camille Javal in Le Mepris, 1963 (Contempt)

Camille Javal: You like all of me? My mouth? My eyes? My nose? And my ears?
Paul Javal: Yes, all of you.
Camille Javal: Then you love me... totally?
Paul Javal: Yes. Totally... tenderly... tragically.

Welcome to Part I in Wine Woman Song's 6-part July series on cinematic wines. This summer WWS will bring you wines that live in full Cinemascope so you can make the most of the sunshine.


Let's start with the brightest film of the twentieth century, Godard's Le Mépris (Contempt) and a glass of Rosé from Bandol AOC.


Brigitte Bardot's natural home is St Tropez, near Bandol, in Provence, which is famous for it's dry Rosé. It's a perfect match to the film, Le Mépris, a caustic analysis of a marriage breakdown filmed in scorching Technicolor.


Starring Brigitte Bardot, the film is composed in bold splashes of red, yellow, white, and blue. This is Godard painting with Technicolor.


If you imagine how crystal refracts sunlight into its primary colours, you could say Bandol Rosé is a crystal. A lost crystal. I had to go on a search to find it.


Five different wine shops later, I found it.


When I found it, I was dazzled. Totally... tenderly... tragically.


Domaine Tempier Bandol Rose 2007 £16.99
Notes: Rose petal, orange peel, and the dry summer smells of the Mediterranean. Instantly put a smile on my face. It had no sweet aftertaste, but dry, soft and mouthwatering. The dryness zips over the palate. Feel alive again after Winter. I'd be very happy to have this without food, but I can't help but imagine - a la St Tropez - a sunny afternoon with a plate of fresh calamari.


Next post in Cinematic Wines series: Apocalypse Now? Stay tuned.


Link: Le Mepris (1963) IMDb
Link: Bandol Wine Festival, Fête du Millésime in December 2008

snack attack

What the food critics really eat.

"AA Gill, at Woodall Services on the M1 near
Sheffield bought three packets of crisps
including Walkers Sensations, Thai Sweet Chili
and a grab bag of Ready Salted."

Five stars.


Link: from popbitch