Archive for the ‘World Travelling’ Category

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10 Things I will never do again

May 6, 2012

The Negress likes lists and is going to post one every week so stay tuned. Sometimes it”s nice to know when you are done. These are not ranked but listed as the Negress thought of them.

1. Go see the Grateful Dead. Once in DC at RFK Stadium with Bob Dylan and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in the deadly DC summer was quite enough. No Dead spinoffs either.

2. Throw up at length in the bathroom at Fitzgerald’s in Houston. Take multiple shots of Weller, add swigs of Jack Daniels from the stage during a Dash Riprock show and you have a recipe for being tore up and sorry. Many thanks to the person who drove that night. You know who you are.

Dash Rip Rock

Members of the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame dadgum

3. Go to SXSW. The Negress acquired her last badge in 1999 and doesn’t miss it one bit. Except for the night she was onstage with the late Molly Ivins banging a tambourine. Austin is a fine place to visit but she will never go during South by or the ACL Music Festival. She wants to see her friends when they aren’t frenzied.

4. Stagger with two suitcases when your bus to the Melbourne airport breaks down a quarter mile from said airport. The Aussies’ friendliness and generosity of spirit does not always extend to customer service. The Negress flew to Brisbane and spent three hours in the airport between flights and drank diet Coke until she nearly exploded.

5. Pick up a full ostomy bag off the floor of a Manhattan theater. You want to know more about that, you just have to wait until the Negress writes her memoir, tentatively titled “Notes of a Chronic Negress” or “Another Black Room with a Pole in the Middle.”

6. Deal with a member of the clergy (identifying denomination will not be divulged) who began almost every sentence with, “I’m the adult child of an alcoholic.” The Negress just wanted her to pass the salt.

7. Take NJ Transit from Newark airport to the Newark train station to get on the PATH to Jersey City. One arthritic shoulder and two titanium knees scream out for another way to do this journey.

8. Be nervous about being in a room with Miami Steve Van Zant, Lenny Kaye, Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun. The Negress is actually sorry about this one since Jerry and Ahmet are gone.

9. Go see Gary Stewart in some wide spot in the road in Texas. This one makes her sorry too. Find the music and you’ll see what she means.

10. Sit on a tour bus in Belleville, TX while Brooks and Dunn blast their new single, “Rock My World (Little Country Girl).” This duo retired before the Negress and others could reach the “Oh them again” stage. She wishes some other musicians could take the hint, but that’s another list for another week.

Posted in Health and Wellness, Music and our culture, World Travelling | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments »

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The Negress pickles her brain with Top 40 and enjoys it immensely

March 11, 2012

The Negress has been flitting through several realms of late. Alcohol was banished for Lent so not much to report there. Music comes and goes. Work is front and center, and is going well as far as she can tell. Hockey is good with the Devils surging and one of her future ex-husbands, Johnny Oduya, now a member of the Blackhawks. Right now, the Blackhawks can use all the help they can get.

The Negress loves Ke$ha and does not feel guilty at all

The Negress loves Ke$ha and does not feel guilty at all

With the impending arrival of spring and the annual crash landing of Daylight Savings Time, the Negress needed a respite from all the hard thinking she’d been doing preparing for the toughest part of her FINRA registration. So she flipped the dial to her favorite Top 40 (these days known as CHR for Contemporary Hit Radio) station, Z100, in New York. It’s available online and on satellite radio.

One quick conclusion she came to was that there are only about eight or nine songs in deuterium rotation, most involving Katy Perry, Chris Brown, Rihanna, Pitbull, FloRida and Drake. Ke$ha(her Twitter handle is @keshasuxx, which we love) and Lady Gaga show up, but not often enough for our tastes.

Also, prolonged exposure all of this mindless Auto-Tuned robot pop can shave a few dozen points off your IQ. You may not notice immediately, but it does happen. You say “awesome” a lot. You wanna party with, like, your friends and stuff.

However, the Negress is quick to declare her enduring love for commercial radio, especially the triple-A station here in Chicago, WXRT. She especially thanks them for Mumford and Sons and even some of the Fleet Foxes. The new Springsteen single is running heavy there now, which in its own way is as irritating as the robot pop. The Negress escaped after 12 or so years in Jersey without gaining a Springsteen obsession. She likes him and the E Streeters fine, but not to the point of rearranging her life.

Sorry for the long rest periods here, but the Negress is busy. Back as soon as something worth talking about happens. In the meantime, roll down your windows and blast some tunes.  It feels like opening a can of  spring. Baseball helps with that too, so do it. Go Sox (White, not Red)!

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In which the Negress offers a BOLO and pops her cork

February 19, 2012
Green grow the grapes but they will ripen in time

We're all waiting on a harvest of some kind or another, no?

Your beloved Negress has been absent from her little corner of the bandwidth universe because she is getting Uncorked weekly, glorying in a new job and preparing for a convoluted solution to an ongoing health problem. She’s also been digging some tunes and reconnecting with pals old and new.

So, the new job. It’s a good one and it lets the Negress work as hard as she wants and enjoy the gains from that work. She can also help people, advocate for a company culture that has no peers in a business usually awash in short-term thinkers and brain-dead leadership. Thanks to some Federal regulations, she’s not going to say more than that here, but she’s very happy.

As for wine, a 21-day course of Augmentin has put almost all of her alcohol consumption on hold. This particular antibiotic leaves a metallic taste on everything. Add Prednisone and inhaled steroids, and wine is no fun. Woodford Reserve slices through the effluvia like a well-sharpened knife, but the Negress is too busy and happy to slip into an uncontrolled stupor. Also, she’s about to put her debilitating allergies where they belong. These drugs are a prelude to an effective protocol that should allow her to go outdoors with less agony.

However, she is still writing about wine. Thanks to the generosity of the folks at Nomad Editions, she executes a weekly column for Uncorked magazine, which is designed for tablet consumption, but can be viewed on any screen. You can get the app from iTunes, and view sample issues. Going all in costs a budget-friendly $9.99 annually. Read. Comment. Drink. It’s all to the good.

As for the tunes, the Negress caught both halves of the annual Chicago Bluegrass and Blues Festival. The first, headlined by David Grisman and Del McCroury, was satisfying, especially when the old “dawgs’ teamed up on a tribute to Bill Monroe (McCroury, now 72 with hair as immobile as Mitt Romney’s, was one of Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys). The Negress also gives big props to the Auditorium Theatre at Roosevelt University, which is beautiful and acoustically perfect.

While she does appreciate that Jerry Garcia’s love of  American string band and acoustic music led a lot of Deadheads to embrace the bluegrass way, she fervently hopes they learn how to behave. This is not to say they have to go all Bluebird Cafe solemn and silent, but all that hairy-footed Hobbit dancing accessorized by patchouli and Hacky Sacks is hard to take. The Negress almost screamed, “The last train to the Shire is leaving in 15 minutes. Haul it, friends.” But she demonstrated the restraint they seemed incapable of.

The next weekend was another story. The Negress headed to the Congress Theatre to check out theDrive-By Truckers,  Joe Pug and Dawes. Pug and the Truckers were transcendent and fine, with Pug winning points for doing Joe Ely’s “All Just to Get to You,” and making the original recede in memory. The Congress sounds like shit, unless you stand in the back under the balcony, but it had the right ramshackle fin-de-siecle feel for the proceedings. The Negress loves the Truckers unconditionally and thinks the songs about the frayed seaminess of the “New” South capture a sense of place and time like few others. As for Dawes, color this colored unimpressed. Everything felt watery and mellow in a way that makes you wish that the worst Chicago winter would descend on everyone you hate who lives in tropical climes and you have all the windshield scrapers and shovels. The Negress is sorry she’s been gone so long. It won’t happen again. Next up musically: Lez Zeppelin (March 9) and Rodrigo y Gabriela (April 12).

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Fleet Foxes at the Chicago Theater and a perplexed Negress

October 3, 2011

The Negress decided to go see the Fleet Foxes at the Chicago Theater Oct. 1 because she still does love music and the band kind of confuses her. She is trying not to be one of those bipolar cynics, swinging wildly between youthful disdain (I’m too cool for all of this so it all sucks) and ancient weariness (I did all this stuff the first time so it all sucks). Besides, she sings tenor in her church choir (when she goes to practice) and she likes harmony singing because it’s gorgeous when done well. As mentioned in a previous post, she had been in New York mixing it up with the other members of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame nominating committee. The committee is a bit like Fight Club in that we don’t talk about we do and then get vilified and bitched about when the ballot comes out. The Negress has only one public observation about the ballot: Hip-hop is nearly 30 years old and is a grandchild of the blues’ baby, rock ‘n’ roll. Also, rock has influenced and absorbed pop and dance music so don’t assume it’s all guitar bands with white men. Rock’s going on 60, which also means some of these idiots should take a page from REM’s book and break up and stop touring.

The obligatory cell phone camera show of the show marquee

The obligatory cell phone camera shot of the show marquee

Sorry. Back to the Fleet Foxes. First of all, the Chicago Theater is a great venue for good singers because it’s majestic acoustically as well as architecturally. The Foxes can sing, but they sound like sexless angels (we can save the debate on sexuality of heavenly beings for another post, preferably fueled by a good rye). Also, the best harmony singing requires impeccable diction, and these guys are more pre-pebbles Demosthenes than show choir.

With that said, the Negress was lightly mesmerized. Part of the lack of full embrace of the music was due to a small belligerent contingent at the show seated near her. She counted at least three fights that broke out during the set, and considering this wasn’t GWAR, that was just weird and distracting. Also, the band played under a huge film screen backdrop that alternated between a film loop of falling snow and some geometric patterns that could best be described as Not-So-Angry Quilting.

So, since the band has been compared to Simon and Garfunkel and Crosby Stills and Nash and other outfits with memorable vocal blends, what do they sound like? Someone suggested Neutral Milk Hotel but that’s just plain wrong (a trip to Spotify confirmed what had just been a hunch before). The Hotel people (doesn’t the name sound like a safe house for La Leche? Honestly.) have a unique sludgy underpinning to their vocal mix, and they seem to sing less harmony and more off-pitch unison. Also, her Neutral Milk Hotel is not your Neutral Milk Hotel so the Negress tries to avoid comparisons of the it’s-like-(band A)-mixed-up-with-(band B)-in-a-blender-on-acid variety.

What Fleet Foxes does make her think of is church youth group singalongs, a signifier she suspects is not big with the Pitchfork crowd. The best example of this is “White Winter Hymnal.” The Negress could visualize the youth pastor in a turtleneck strumming away while the kids scarfed down the pizza and sang well enough to keep their folks happy. Picture the United Methodist Youth Fellowship and you’ve got it. But she’s a sucker for a round so she succumbed  happily. They do kick this stereotype in the teeth with “The Shrine/An Argument,” which throws in a bit of dissonant sax playing, but that only happened once all night.

The Negress enjoyed the show as much as the nearby fisticuffs would allow, but she thinks she did find the key thing that keeps her from going all in on this band. The most memorable live shows are paced impeccably, building almost unbearable tension before a final amazing burst of, well, something. The Foxes seem to have a handle of this dynamic within individual songs (see “The Plains/Bitter Dancer” or  the show finale “Helplessness Blues”), but the kids are still getting feel of pacing a whole set. If they get handle on that, then the downloading will commence.

Openers The Walkmen grabbed a lot more of the Negress’ heart than she was willing to admit. Besides, you gotta love a band that worships Johnny Cash and the Pogues (blender and acid optional) and a singer, Hamilton Leithauser, with rockstar lung power. She even got over the triangle they pulled out on one song (that instruments conjures up visions of wriggling kindergarteners and a teacher playing “Mr. Whole Note Takes a Walk”) The word “rockstar” has been devalued of late (inept Iraqi spies, energy drinks and outlaw Wall Streeters have devalued the word without permission), but this guy has what it takes. The band favors old-style instruments but their music is timeless. It’s been growing on the Negress with each listen. They’re next up on Spotify after the Series 7 exam.

Fleet Foxes likely set list from the Chicago Theater Oct. 1 (from the always reliable Interwebs)

The Plains / Bitter Dancer

Mykonos

English House

Your Protector

Battery Kinzie

Bedouin Dress

Sim Sala Bim

White Winter Hymnal

Ragged Wood

Montezuma

He Doesn’t Know Why

Lorelai

The Shrine / An Argument

Blue Spotted Tail

Grown Ocean

Encore

I Let You (new song)

Sun It Rises

Blue Ridge Mountains

Helplessness Blues

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The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Follies and falling down again

October 2, 2011

So the Negress went to New York, saw some friends, did her Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame duty and then received a bottle of Paumanok Vineyards 2010 Chenin Blanc. The vintage is sold out and she can easily see why. The wines drinks well with or without food and is delightfully only 12% abv. Upon returning to Chicago, the Negress polished it off in about three sittings and wanted more. But she settled for some of her Bonny Doon 2009 Ca del Solo Albarino and was pretty happy.

However, while she was in New York, it was the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and the air was thick with potential threats, backed up traffic and vehicle searches. Whether the atmosphere or various other annoying input was the cause, the Negress fell down in Union City, scraped herself up a bit and wondered if other things might be getting to be wrong.

So she sought one of those bad ideas that should be banished from the kingdom. She drank a bunch of Pinot Noir and went to see the new production of “Follies,” with Bernadette Peters and an astonishing Jan Maxwell. The inevitable blood sugar crash made sure she missed quite a bit of the lengthy first act, but she pretty much liked it overall (also there’s a production here in Chicago that might be worth a comparison).

In the background of all of this were her attempts to absorb the material she needs to know for her upcoming Series 7 exam. The Negress can take tests but her usual flypaper memory had been undercut by a few too many sleepless nights and a some other annoyances of middle age. She also knows her family history of troubled brain chemistry. So meds were adjusted, she’s feeling better and has almost gotten a handle on the exam prep. So the next thing to do was face the music.

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NLGJA, Hurricane Irene and trying to sort things out

September 13, 2011

For a Negress who is supposedly leaving full-time journalism behind, let’s just say this farewell tour may be longer than Cher’s. She came to Philadelphia for the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association convention. Does this mean the Negress is coming out in some sense? Yes and no. Her history is bisexual, and she’s beginning to realize the spectrum of gender and sexuality is fairly fluid. She has several transsexual friends and believes in safe bathrooms for all and no stupid questions about shaving.

NLGJA is a very welcoming organization so she is proud to be a member since she knows she will never stop writing or being curious about the world. Plus, she had never spent a lot of time in Philly so it seemed like a good idea.

However, a couple of things happened. One, the Negress had her arthritic, bone-spur filled shoulder cleaned out arthroscopically Friday Aug. 19. She got the dressing removed the following Monday and headed to Philly on Wednesday. Yes she is sore. But she arrived in Philly on something of a mission — meet fun people and get a good cheesesteak. She accomplished those goals and got a couple of extra days in Philly thanks to Irene.

Some things she hopes NLGJA will do in the future: introduce a freelancer rate, add karaoke night (calling all sponsors), have a panel on racism in the LGBT community, have a productive panel on transgender issues (the one this year was dominated by a crackpot army of one) and stop asking Don Lemon about Anderson Cooper. The Negress adores Mr. Lemon and wishes him and his nice Jewish boyfriend well.

By the way, the Negress is still drinking wine but her Series 7 exam studies have seriously curtailed her consumption. Besides there are some other threads of her narrative fabric that deserve attention. So stay tuned. There are some stories to tell.

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Yellow Face, Chinglish and the AAJA convention and a dawning realization

August 23, 2011

The Negress spent a day with a pair of David Henry Hwang plays  in Chicago and several days at the Asian American Journalists Association convention in Detroit.  The Silk Road Theatre produced “Yellow Face,” an older play of Hwang’s about racial identity, stereotypes and artistic freedom while the Goodman has sent his latest, “Chinglish,”a masterpiece of interlocking misunderstandings, to Broadway. Thanks to the convenience of scheduling, the Negress saw them both on the same day and was delighted by each for different reasons.

Money on my mind

current thoughts so to speak

“Yellow Face” is a delicious mingling of a revenge fantasy, hard truths and the fluidity of racial identity. In some ways, it reminded the Negress of “Passing Strange,” which is happily available since Spike Lee made a film of its last Broadway performance. When you’re not white or not straight, you often fiddle with how you show yourself to the world. Sometimes it’s a matter of survival and there’s an enormous cost. Sometimes you can have some fun, but you can’t always be sure the joke isn’t on you. Expectations, stereotypes and archetypes keep close company and it can be challenging to separate them. The conversation begun with “Yellow Face” continues in “Chinglish” with the tables turned.  Hwang places an earnest white American businessman in China where his understanding of how things work is often lost in linguistic and cultural translation. As the Negress often says to friends near and far, some people just don’t get it. And some never will.

So, with all that bouncing around in her head, the Negress drove to Detroit for the AAJA convention. AAJA doesn’t have a racial requirement for membership, just a belief in the organization’s goals. Unity, the quadrennial gathering of journalists of color, is coming up next summer in Las Vegas. The Negress hopes to go, work and finances permitting and being a member of one of the sponsoring groups gets her a discount. The National Association of Black Journalists, of which the Negress was a member for a while, pulled out of Unity for various murky reasons, some of which are financial.  Unity has coincided with the Presidential campaign for the past two campaigns, and it is likely candidates will be invited to attend. While that’s a selling point for going to Unity, the Negress mainly goes because it’s fun and she gets to see a lot of friends from all over the country. Journalism as she knew it is dying in place, and she figures the upcoming Unity might be one of the last opportunities to see some pals before everybody’s required reinventions take them away.

Hence, Detroit for AAJA. The Negress had a great time and learned some things she didn’t know, which is always good. The most important of those was how much of an issue immigration is in Asian communities. One AAJA member took 22 years to go the legal route to citizenship since his having siblings in the U.S.  was not a strong enough family relationship for his case to be expedited. Also, since he is Filipino, there are country quotas that he also came up against as he sought legal status. Not surprisingly, many opt to enter the country without papers, figuring that there’s a good chance they can stay without getting caught. A highly publicized case in point is Jose Vargas, a former writer for the Washington Post, who came out as an undocumented immigrant and hid the fact from most of his employers and close friends for years.

Another area of interest were transnational and, in some cases, trans-racial adoption. The Negress found out that boys have been adopted from China, contrary to the prevailing perception that only girls are chosen. A panel discussion including adoptees as well as adoptive parents covered ways in which these adoptions have changed over time. More parents now are taking their child’s cultural and linguistic heritage into account, while that wasn’t always the case. It was delicious to hear tales of half Jamaican heritage black, half Chinese parents adopting half black, half Korean kids and living happily ever after.

The Negress made a desultory pilgrimage to the job fair and had an enjoyable conversation with a woman who offers fellowships to journalist in search of career revitalization. Then she got sick to her stomach and went back to the hotel to resume studying for her securities license. Although the events were in close proximity to each other, they weren’t entirely

related. However, all led to a sure conclusion: The Negress is done being a full-time journalist, and she thinks that’s going to be OK.

Now back to calls, puts, straddles, bonds and other such lingo.

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2008 Bonneau Petit Sirah, 2006 Silverado Merlot, 2006 Fantesca Cabernet Sauvignon and 2007 Krutz Family Cellars Stagecoah Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon

May 20, 2011

The Negress lined up these four wines because she wanted to share a few thoughts about them before she completely forgot she had drunk them. This is how you can tell she writes drinking notes, not tasting notes.  Most these wines met their end when she cooked a Rick Bayless tomatillo salsa verde braised pork loin so note the pairing for those of you who note such things. Anyway, She was charmed by all of the wines for different reasons. First the 2008 Bonneau Petit Sirah is a big but graceful wine that doesn’t pitch off the cliff into jamminess. As is usually the case, you won’t easily find this outside of California but a quick click over to Cellars of Sonoma (full disclosure: I belong to their club) can remedy that.  The Silverado 2006 Merlot is also a club-only wine with a little being sold direct at the winery. The Negress is ferociously partial to the North Fork Merlots and usually finds their Cali counterparts to be blanketed with fleecy tannins and very little structure. Well, not this Merlot. It’s got structure, some blackberry and is, well, a bright and happy wine.

The Negress is nursing shoulder injury (not sure what it is but it seems to be improving thanks). She might have gotten it lifting the Fantesca bottle. The bottle feels full even when it’s empty. Perhaps this weightiness is a good match for a Spring Mountain Napa Cabernet, but methinks it just adds to the price. The Negress brought this wine back from a Wine Writers Symposium a coupe of years ago. A little more bottle age seems to have been OK, but the Negress felt this wine was just OK. She loves some of the wines from the Spring Mountain AVA and expected to love this one. Place it under the usual suspects category.

Lastly, the 2007 Krutz Family Cellars Stagecoach Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon is a bottle from the winery’s limited edition artist’s series. The Negress got hers from Cellars of Sonoma, and it made sense why they would feature this Napa cab in their club. The wine was supple, nimble and exciting with nice but not engorged fruit. Not sure how much of this is left, but it ‘s worth seeking out.

All of these wines weigh in at between 14.5 and 14.8 percent alcohol bu volume. As has often been said, 14 is the new 12.

Not long after you read this, the Negress is heading off to the National Restaurant Association show here in Chicago. You can follow her doings there over at FoodserviceDailyNews on their Twitter feed @FoodTalkToday.

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Musical interlude: My 10 best SXSW moments

March 21, 2011

The South by Southwest music and media conference ended Sunday, and it made the Negress a tiny bit nostalgic. She had also just heard Joe Boyd and Robyn Hitchcock at the Old Town School of Folk Music so old stories and sweet reminiscence seemed like the thing to do. Also, she’s afraid she will forget some of this stuff if she’s not careful.

My first SXSW was in 1989. I shared a room with two women from a club in Houston that has a namesake in Berwyn, IL. (note foreshadowing) and couldn’t have been there otherwise. The Negress slept little, walked  and cabbed around, heard mainly Austin bands and met a lot of people she hasn’t seen since. The Negress quit it in 1999 after some medical mayhem and the sense that staying too long at this fair would be dangerous and unrewarding. But there some moments that are worth calling out of memory. Here are the 10 I can remember best:

1. Dragging Chris Morris then of Billboard to see Townes Van Zandt at the Hyatt Ballroom back when the whole festival fit into the Hyatt. I think it was 1989.

2. Seeing Gail Davies, a Nashville veteran, at the Hole in the Wall, strutting her stuff. She’s a book waiting to happen as far as being female, writing, producing and performing in Nashville when they had almost gotten over the “gal singer” syndrome.

3. The first time I saw Alejandro Escovedo and his orchestra there. The Negress got over Escovedo’s toxic charisma after a few more encounters (anyone who ever made it through a Buick McKane show might have some idea what the Negress means), but the musical was moving and special that night.

4. Playing tambourine onstage with the late Molly Ivins while shouting out “Wild Thing.”

5. Seeing a young mess of a band from Houston, Dive, making its way through a loud, furious showcase from which nothing came forth.

6. Having the courage to realize that “supergroup” Little Village was awful. Nick Lowe, Ry Cooder, John Hiatt and Jim Keltner were not good together.

7. Being by the fireplace at the Four Seasons while Huey Lewis stomped out a blues rhythm with his cowboy boots and tried to explain a song idea to Nick Lowe. Once this hysterical outtake was over, the Negress went up to Lowe and thanked him for saving her life.

8. Meeting and befriending Rosie Flores, Jo Rae DiMenno and the rest of her family and others too numerous to mention. Some of our lights have faded but the Negress still loves them all.

9. Confirming that Will T. Massey was awesome and remains so in spite on one overproduced, muddled major label album, but a body of work before and since that’s dazzling.

 

10. Deciding one year that enough ground had been broken and heading off to see Jeff Beck with fellow rock goddess Jaan Uhelszki and not being sorry for a moment of that set.

The Negress will get back to other delights shortly.

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Jack Stuart of Benessere Vineyards and the Napa Vintage Perspective tasting

March 20, 2011

The Negress finished up her time in Napa by avoiding some of the usual pitfalls of the pre-Premiere Napa Valley events. She could have gone to all the AVA tastings, greeting the sheep at Spring Mountain, straining to hear over the throngs tasting auction lots. But this year, it was time for a change. She did start off by doing the Pinot Noir division of the Napa Vintage Perspective tasting at the Rudd Center for Wine Studies at the CIA. Then she ended up chatting with Jack Stuart over at Benessere Vineyards. Stuart had been the winemaker at Silverado until 2004. In short, more perspective. Some of the Pinot vintages were oaky fruit bombs. One producer, I just wrote “indifferent across the board.” Life is too short to drink indifferent wine. The Negress brought up her disappointment with the tasting to Stuart, and he offered the following: “I think some of the young wine makers haven’t been around long enough to know what a traditional Pinot Noir tastes like. American new oak is too much for Pinot. It’s a more delicate wine.”

Wine writers tasting Pinot Noir at the Napa Perspective tasting

All work and no play makes for a dull wine life

At Benessere, which took over the old Charles F. Shaw winery (yeah Chuck’s old haunt before his name was sold and slapped on oceans of plonk), they made 124 cases of 2008 Pinot Nero. But the majority of their 4,000 to 5,000 case production is Sangiovese, Zinfandel and Pinot Grigio. The half bottle of 2006 Sangiovese the Negress took with her back to Meadowood paired nicely with a venison entrée. She’s waiting to try the Zins, regular and the Black Glass, on a suitable occasion. She tasted the regular Zin at the winery, but only remembers that it was light on its feet.

We also sampled the 2010 Pinot Grigio, which is the first vintage that is Stuart’s from start to finish. Most people’s gateway Pinot Grigio is Santa Margherita, and that’s deeply unfortunate. The wine is crazy out of balance and almost syrupy. When Stuart arrived at Benessere, his goal was to make the Pinot Grigio less sweet. He has succeeded and maintained the varietal’s distinct minerality.

Stuart took his cue from the climate of the Alto Adige in Italy, where the weather is cool. His Pinot Grigio is on 42 acres in Carneros, which is also a cool growing area thanks to the moderating influence of San Pablo Bay. The juice is cold temperature fermented in stainless steel, and then spends some time in old barrels.

One thing Stuart was conscious of when he came to Benessere was that he was coming to a place where he admired the wines they were making, but he knew that he couldn’t make any sudden changes. He did ended up toning down the sweetness of the Pinot Grigio, but it was, “a controlled evolution.”

During his days at Silverado, Stuart supervised some replanting of the vineyards, especially after a 1986 phylloxera outbreak. Current Silverado general manager Russ Weis said the wider spacing of the vines was a leftover from the old days, but Stuart said they used 4×6 and 6×8 spacing and it was relatively recent. “They’re not as narrow as some, and we did change to headtrained, cane-pruned vines from the cordon and spur training.”

The Negress threw out an analogy to winemaking and Oscar fashions. In the days of Bjork and her swan and Kim Basinger and her mermaid tail, errors in judgment shone out like shook foil. Now, with everyone being guided by stylists, the jaw dropping miscues are gone, but blandness has seized the day. Isn’t this as true of wine where “meh” has replaced “Ewwww” as the watchword?

Stuart  stopped judging wine competitions because of the “Ewwww” factor.

“When I did judge, out of tasting a dozen wines, the most powerful, odd wine made the strongest impression and they would usually get acknowledged,” Stuart said.

But Stuart also acknowledges the difference between tasting professionally and drinking.

“I had a nice spatlese Riesling when I was out for dinner the other night and it went well with the chicken and couscous. But I was also with good friends and it was a lovely night. When I was working on the Pinot Grigio, I shut the door of my office and tasted without any distractions. I was looking for flaws and ways the wine was off-kilter. But you have to separate work from play.”

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