Wine is the oldest processed food and the most natural. Take grapes, squeeze, add yeast to the juice and you’ll get wine. Wine tastes good, its nutritious and healthful in moderation, it even looks beautiful in a glass. But sometimes things can go wrong and even a great wine can become flawed. Here’s my list of helpful tips to avoid buying wines with issues.
Winemaking is usually a straightforward endeavor. You take grapes, squeeze them to get the juice out, then add yeast and wait. Rosé wine is probably the most elemental example; take some red grapes and drain away the juice from the colored skins before the juice becomes too darkly pigmented, then ferment and you have made a rosé wine.
After a particularly grueling work day that saw a truck from our Bangkok warehouse arriving at 6 a.m. instead of 2 p.m., as scheduled, and two hotels simultaneously ordering the wrong wine and each expecting a second tip back with the right wine within 30 minutes of closing time, the little sign along the trail that read, ‘This way go to the beach’ seemed like divine inspiration. The idea of slipping away for a few hours with a cold bottle of Riesling, getting a beach massage and taking a dip in the Andaman Sea when I should be returning my e-mails was an irresistible temptation. Read more »
Everyone seems to have their personal worst commercial airline experience. I have more than a few; many of them hair raising. I once was aboard a flight to Guatemala City that was forced down by the cannon fire of British fighter jets because it strayed into British Honduran airspace. I have watched as the door fell off my plane somewhere over the jungles of Costa Rica and I once helped put out a fire aboard a Bangkok bound plane moments before departure. I have spent 12 hours out of Auckland sandwiched between two All Blacks rugby players on a full flight because they got the window and Isle seats, and I didn’t. I have learned the hard way not to order the vegetarian meals on Varig and that Alitalia thinks non smoking means the left side of the airplane. I have been subjected to the in-flight entertainment of mothers breast feeding their infants in the isles of budget carrier Southwest, and I have deplaned in New York only to discover that my dog went on to Frankfurt. And the way some people snore like mutant amphibians while their children prance about the isles like feral goats is enough to create a spiritual bond with Islamists who want to blow up aircraft in mid air simply because their fellow passengers are infidels.