Evil. Evil. Worse. Worse. Catchy. Catchy.

I don't usually post about songs with lyrics that I don't have a prayer of deciphering (well, except for Radiohead) or musicians with long histories about which I know nothing or music types that make me scratch my head (Dubstep? What does that even mean?), but me gon make an exception for The Bug's London Zoo.

As in literature and film, I am in music occasionally a fan of things that carry an apocalyptic, end of the world, doomsday reek, but with a wink and a tongue ever so slightly tucked in cheek (think the sunglasses obsession in Terminator). And this suits.

Take this series of lyrics from "Skeng," pretty much the only lyrics I can decipher on the album unaided. "You don' wanna see me get Evil den...Then...Then...You don wanna see me get Evil...Evil...worse...worse...send for the nurse...nurse...doctor can't fix ya send for the hearse...earse...black."

Or the video, below, to "Poison Dart" - it's a tank, obliterating people with the bass line. It's an army, of grime dubstep warriors. Unh!

And, to take the tongue out of the cheek for a minute, "F**kaz" is an appropriately timed, angry rant about the state of the world:

"Fi all dem f**kin' people who ignore blatant facts just so dem maintain a order beneficial only to themselves..."

Check it.

And Now, Back To The Music!

Now that I have emerged from a happy cloud of wine, it is time to Rock. NRolla.

I have heard the Subways' "Rock & Roll Queen" a few times, but not so's you'd notice. Enough that it was sitting in the back of my head, in a bin marked "just another too-cool-for-school Brit band."

But.

Introduce a Guy Ritchie movie to this song, and then insert the band playing it live at a random point in the movie - at an actual club in the U.K. called the Fire Station, if what I read here is to be believed. Follow up by splicing images of the band rawking out to the song together with images of a beatdown outside the club conducted with, well, a pencil, and NOW you have a memorable song.

Sadly, I cannot find this particular scene on YouTube. So just take the original video and...insert pencil.

Twenty Wineries In Four Days: And So We Come To The End

1:45ish: As our tour of Long Island wine country comes to an end, we've decided to eat lunch at Modern Snack Bar, which is basically a diner. It's been around since 1950, and has remained seemingly true to its roots, serving good, simple food at affordable prices. Their mashed turnips are famous, so we order some even though they don't really go with my soft-shell crab sandwich or AMP's Caesar Salad. They're so good we slurp them up anyhow.

2:45ish: We're faced with a choice. Head home, or take a detour to the South Fork to visit Channing Daughters, tacking about an hour onto our trip? AMP's had their wine before and she loves it, and I'm obsessing over it after reading an article in Edible about their Mosaico wine and falling in love with the label. It winds up not really being a difficult decision: off to the South Fork we go. (Plus, we both kind of want to be able to say that we've been to the Hamptons and sneered at them.)

3:45ish: There's some weird art at Channing Daughters. But there's also a large, fuzzy, friendly dog who greets us at the door. He wants to be outdoors STAT. We herd him back indoors and check out the tasting room, which is nicely done, with seriously extensive notes about how each of their wines is produced, as well as about how it tastes. The Mosaico that I'm obsessing over, for instance, is made from 32% Pinot Grigio, 29% Chardonnay, 14% Sauvignon Blanc, 12% Muscat, 7% Tocai Friulano and 6% Gewurztraminer, the signage informs me. And it's fermented in an insane number of different types of vessels: "a stainless steel tank and stainless steel barrels, two Slovenian oak barrels, two Slovenian oak hogsheads and one Slovenian oak puncheon. A total of 27% of the wine saw new oak." I mean, damn.

As the above description indicates, these guys are doing different things then any other Long Island tasting room, that we've visited, anyhow. Most of the vineyards are growing Cabernet Franc, Chardonnay and Merlot grapes. Many of them share the same vineyard managers and winemakers. Inevitably, with the exception of a few stand-outs, they all start to taste much the same to someone with a less distinguished palate than Rober Parker's. No danger of that here. Tocai Friulano? I've never even heard of Tocai Friulano. The server explains that the owners think that Long Island has a similar climate to Northern Italy, so they've intentionally planted a lot of the same grapes that get grown there.

We've pretty much been sharing a single tasting at every single place we've been to since very early on, which works well except when we both really like a particular wine, in which case the tastings degenerate into open warfare. Here, there'll be no sharing. We start with the 2007 Sylvanus, which is a blend of Muscat, Pinot Grigio and Pinot Bianco. This is a field blend, which means that the grapes are grown intermingled in the field and harvested the way they're grown. I've never heard of this before and think it's totally cool; maybe I feel that way because the wine is soooooo good, and completely different from everything else we've tried.

Next, we try the 2007 Scuttlehole Chardonnay. This has been prepared in all stainless steel, which normally I don't like, but this time it works. (We've heard a lot of people out here sputter indignantly about Chardonnays that have been over-oaked; I don't know if this is really a problem or just a way of distinguishing their wines from California Chardonnays.) It also hasn't been through malo-lactic fermentation, a process our pourer takes the time to explain to us. Basically, wine can go through two fermentations: the primary one, which converts the grape juice to alcohol, and then malo-lactic fermentation, which changes one type of acid to another and which is common in red wines and the heartier white wines. Malo-lactic fermentation can be stopped by cold temperatures, and that's what they did with this Chardonnay.

We tried a couple other whites - both incredible - then a rose, then moved on to the reds. They don't plant a lot of red at Channing Daughters, but just like with the whites, what they do do with red here is completely different than any other vineyard. We tried the 2005 Sculpture Garden, which is 97% Merlot and 3% Blaufrankisch. I'd never heard of Blaufrankisch (which also goes by the name Lemberger); turns out it's grown primarily in Germany, Austria and the surrounding region. Our pourer said it's meaty, and maybe it was just her persuasiveness, but I swear I can detect sausage both in the nose and the taste of the wine. So good!

I bought four bottles of wine here, the most I bought at any vineyard: the Sylvanus, my Mosaico (which wasn't available for tasting), the Sculpture Garden, and another red, the 2007 Rosso Fresco, which she was kind enough to let me taste. It's basically a low-brow version of the Sculpture Garden, also with the signature Blaufranksich grape, and I'm drinking it and smacking my lips as I write this. Please, don't let this bottle of wine end.

5:30ish. So that's it. That's our four days in wine heaven. To summarize day four, Channing Daughters gets the largest smiley-face of all, Old Vine and Raphael get quite broad smiley-faces, Paumanok gets a smiley-face, and Jamesport gets a fairly wrinkled frowny-face. Four days wasn't quite enough to entirely do the North Fork; we definitely could've found another five or six wineries to go to (especially Peconic Bay, Shinn and Sherwood House). But since we already felt like winos, it was time to go. I leave you with a picture of a giant duck, the "hysterical monument," which we randomly drove past on our way out of Dodge - or Flanders, actually, which is where this fabulous roadside art is.

Twenty Wineries In Four Days: The Final Day, Part One

Thursday on the North Fork of Long Island was SO FUN it's going to take two posts to do it justice. There are just too many themes here, from unusual wineries, to a theory of Merlot, to the best winery we went to.

10 a.m. We check out of our hotel sadly and wander around Greenport. This sleepy little town starts to wake up on Thursday as wine-heads head out for the weekend. All the coffeeshops are finally open, and I successfully order my necessary jolt of strong caffeine. The local bookstore is open too, and I buy a biography written by one of the founders of the first vineyard on the island, Hargrave.

11 a.m. We pull into Old Field, which is pretty much what it sounds like, a tasting room in a field. This place is so different from the rest of the wineries we visited this trip, just a shack in a field with a table set up on the porch outside. The server ducks in and out of the shack's window to get wine, which is served in plastic cups. There's a loud fowl strutting around. They sell eggs. (There's another place like this in the area, called Sherwood House, but we didn't make it there this trip.) What a treat!

Brief aside: As I've been writing this, I've been experiencing considerable angst about what to call the people who poured us our tastings. I even looked it up on Google, and there just doesn't seem to be an appropriate one. I've been using "server" and "pourer," but these don't really do it justice. Perhaps I should invent my own term? Any ideas?

11:45ish: We swore we were only going to go to three wineries before heading down the LIE, but after that taste of Raphael we had the previous night, we have to add it to our list. Boy am I glad we did - this was one of my favorite places. It's pretty much the polar opposite of Old Field in terms of presentation, with a giant, luxurious tasting room fitted out with a gorgeous circular bar in the middle meant to look like a wine barrel. Rather than go for a full tasting flight here, we opt to try just three Merlots from different years: 2001, 2002, and a 2005 "Fontana" that is 80% Merlot. I've already described their 2002 Merlot so I won't go into detail here, except to say that they're all just as good as the one we had at the Frisky Oyster.

Our server rocked - one of the bottles had been open for a couple of days, so she poured us a sample from that and from a brand-new bottle of the same year, which was a pretty interesting comparison in and of itself. And she warned us off one of their newer wines that she thought wasn't ready for tasting yet - honesty we appreciate. A lot of the winemakers out here bring out their latest vintage as soon as the previous one sells out, which, since they're generally making not very many cases, means some wines make it to the tasting rooms before they're necessarily ready.

One last thing: we asked why the 2005 wine we tasted was called "Fontana," since it was 80% Merlot. She hemmed and hawed a little bit and said it was because the winemakers wanted to name it after the fountain in front of the tasting room. We developed our own theory shortly later - more on that in a bit.

12:30ish: I finally find pumpkin fudge, at a little shop on the opposite side of the road from the Jamesport and Paumanok vineyards. The friendly proprietor has only one box, but beggars can't be choosers. He also gives us directions to a "historical - or hysterical - local landmark." More on that in the next post.

12:40ish: Here we are at Jamesport. We had high expectations for this place - almost everyone we asked told us to go here and try their whites - but sadly, our expectations were not met. The wines may very well have been decent, but our overall experience was so poor that they were overshadowed. First of all, the guy behind the counter was totally lame, not interested in human interaction at all. He told us almost nothing about their wines, even when we asked leading questions. (US: So, you had an oyster-fest here last weekend, how was that? HIM: Fine. US: Errrr...so, what wines go good with oysters? HIM: Oh, whites. (Thanks, who woulda guessed?) Also, this was the first place there were actually fruit flies IN our wine, which was just kind of gross. They were in three consecutive glasses, and I didn't see them fly in, which makes me wonder if they were in the wine bottles themselves. And when we asked him to pour one of the fruit-flied glasses out, rather than giving us another sample of the same wine, he moved on to the next one. Dude, go work in the back office and take your crap attitude back there with you.

1ish: Wow. After that experience at Jamesport, we're really hoping Paumanok can get the bad taste out of our mouths. We're thinking this may be our last tasting before we head back, and we want it to be good.

Paumanok doesn't disappoint. After our morose Jamesport server, the young lady here is a right treat. She's willing to chat, and she knows what she's talking about. We share a full tasting here, and we like almost everything we taste. They have a 2002 Merlot here too, and we try it, asking why the Merlots that people are serving are so much older then the rest of the wines available: do they take longer to mature, or what? No, says our pourer: it's that movie.

She is of course referring to "Sideways," which came out in 2004. Anyone who's seen it will not be able to forget the famous anti-Merlot speech made by the character played by Paul Giamatti: "If anyone orders Merlot I'm leaving. I am not drinking any f**king Merlot." Who knew it had such an effect on Merlot sales? Now the renaming of that 2005 Raphael wine as "La Fontana" makes a lot more sense.

I'm feeling a little guilty - I stopped drinking Merlot for a time around then, too. But the side effect is nice: because of the dip in sales, we get to taste appropriately aged Merlot on our trip, rather than wine which may be too young, which seems to be the case with some of the other reds out here. And it's good. Still, I don't buy any Merlot here, having been spoiled by the stuff at Raphael. I do pick up a bottle of Cab Franc though.

Part two, coming soon.

Twenty Wineries In Four Days: Day Three

9 a.m.: We're both eating bagels this morning.

10 a.m.: All the cute little coffeeshops in Greenport are still closed, dernit!

10:30 a.m.: Pull into a coffeeshop called Eric's somewhere on Route 48. They don't have foamy fuzzy coffee but, promises the dude behind the counter, their basic coffee is darn fine. After getting a cup, I agree.

11 a.m. I came to the North Fork once before a couple of years ago. I have a vague recollection from that trip of a winery in a strip mall. Today, it turns out that wasn't just a wine-induced hallucination - it was Waters Crest. Their whole operation is in a strip mall - they're true "garagistes." They get their grapes from others' fields - a lot of the wineries out here do - and blend them all right there. In addition to good wine, they've got a neat story. Jim Waters was a home winemaker and volunteer firefighter before 9/11. After 9/11, he changed his life around and made winemaking his full-time career. The winery just released the 2006 Red Knight Red, named after a firefighters' motorcycle club that raises money for charity. The woman who poured our wine said it was quite an experience to see 100-some bike-riding firefighters show up at the wine's debut!

11:30ish: I am hunting fudge, but I cain't find any. All these cute little farm markets are pumpkin fudge-less.

11:45ish: We're at Roanoke now, which is somehow related to Wolffer, which we did not get to. Nice enough place, and the server brings out some cheese for us out of the goodness of her heart. She's also been on a fruit fly-killing rampage, which makes the tasting room so much more pleasant. Truthfully, this made more of an impression on me than the wine did, although I did grab a bottle of the Blend One, a tasty mix of Malbec, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Merlot.

12:30ish: Maybe the reason I can't remember any of the wines at Roanoke is because of where we went next - Macari. I won't dwell too much on how good this place was, apart from to say that AMP and I were having a debate about what's better - winemaking as art, or winemaking as business - and that Macari, like Bedell, does both successfully. They've got really nice low-end wines - I bought a bottle of $10 Collina 48 Chardonnay - and even nicer higher-end things, like the just-released $27 2004 Cab Franc I bought or the $43 2004 Bergen Road Meritage that AMP sprung for. Our server was lovely, too, putting up with us tolerantly when we decided to do our own blind tasting with two of their merlots.

1:45ish: From here we went jauntily down the road to Lieb. I've got mixed feelings about this place. I have fond memories of it from last time I was out here. Back then, we had a great pourer who let us try some old vines versus new vines wine. This time, however, the guy behind the counter was a little bit of an obnoxious hothead. In between correcting our pronunciation - it's "Merit-udge" - telling us how much wine his manager likes to drink, and waxing on about Pink Floyd, he did serve us some pretty nice wine though, so we'll let it slide. I especially liked when he pulled out their newest release, a Merit-UDGE, and forced us not to drink it until we'd swirled it for several minutes to age it a bit. He also explained to us what Meritage is - a name for blended wine that winemakers can pay to use on their bottles. Lieb also, unusually for Long Island, have made a Syrah, in memory of their vineyard mascot dog of the same name. Ultimately, we passed on buying any bottles here, but we did buy a glass of one of their Pinot Blancs - it's one of their specialties - and sat outside and drank it and ate some cheese. Because we had no knife, we bit off chunks of the cheese with our teeth. Classy.

3ish: Still hunting fudge. Still no luck.

3ish: We stopped by Osprey's Dominion somewhere in here. It was just a quick in-and-out. We tasted a few wines, pleasant but not extraordinary, and I picked up a bottle of the Richmond Creek red table wine, which at $11 seemed well-priced.

3:45ish: I'd love to say we continued on our wine-chugging ways, but really, we needed a break. So we hightailed it back to Greenport, where, miraculously, the tea shop was open. In fact, they were closing their kitchen within 15 minutes, but they took pity on us and let us have some tea and scones.

7:30ish: Ever since I first came to the North Fork, I have wanted to go to the Frisky Oyster in Greenport, based solely on its name. In fact, I have in mind that it could be a franchise, with slight variations on the name: The Ornery Oyster (which would be mine)...the Boisterous Oyster...the possibilities are endless. All that aside, this was my favorite restaurant we ate at out here. Really interesting, good food: squash and apple soup, mussels in white wine sauce. They also had a Merlot wine flight on the menu that I ordered despite myself: a side-by-side tasting of three 2002 Merlots: Medolla, Raphael, and Osprey's Dominion, some of which are no longer available to buy anywhere. The Medolla (from one of those smaller vineyards that don't have tasting rooms) was unremarkable in comparison to the other two, both of which were fantastic. The Raphael especially was incredible: so dark and thick it was almost sludge-like, and it tasted that dark and thick, too.

Our waiter held extremely strong opinions, so when we asked him what to have for dessert, he was unequivocal: "The key lime pie, of course!" On the menu, they refer to it as "The best key lime pie." We were both a little skeptical - we've both been to Florida - but after tasting it, we had to admit that it was definitely the best key lime pie we've had in the tri-state area. Finally, if I may just add girlishly, the wallpaper in this restaurant is so cute!

So, smiley-face round-up: Waters Crest gets a moderate smiley-face and Roanoke the same. Macari gets a ginormous smiley-face, Lieb a flat robot face, Osprey's Dominion a moderate smiley-face, and the Frisky Oyster gets a fittingly frisky smiley-face.

KEXP's Top 903 Albums

This is an ambitious project. I'm happy to see Radiohead with four albums in the top 20 (explaining why I love KEXP so much). A little puzzled by Arcade Fire at #3 and Neutral Milk Hotel at #6. And lest we fail to scroll down, New Order just snuck in at #903. Oh hey and wow, there's Love and Rockets at #899! Remember them? Although I would have picked their album with "So Alive" on it for this list, since that song TO THIS DAY still gets randomly stuck in my head. Your legs are strong and you're so so long and you don't come from this town...what does that even mean?

I just realized these guys have been touring this year, so lots of their stuff is available online. Start here.

I want a playlist...where's the playlist?

Twenty Wineries In Four Days: Day Two

9 a.m. I have a bagel for breakfast. AMP does not. Shortly, the folly of her ways will become evident.

10 a.m. Dear Lord, Greenport is a ghost town on Tuesdays. All I want is a decent latte, and I'm not going to Starbucks, dammit!

10:30 a.m. We have to drive to do it, but I finally find me some froofy coffee, at a little place called the Blue Duck. As it turns out, we are there on its first day. Good thing it opened, otherwise all these wineries wouldn't have much liked seeing my cranky coffee-less face.

10:45 a.m. Hmmm. Pugliese says they are open at 10 a.m. So why aren't they open? Why? We drive over to Bedell instead, and sit in the parking lot waiting for them to open. How pathetic are we? There's a car parked in the lot with a custom license plate that I think says "Grapest," which would be awesome: "Grape! Graper! Grapest!" But no, it actually says "Grapes1". I take a picture to occupy the time.

11:03 a.m. Bedell is open!!! They have a beautiful tasting room with a genial fella behind the bar. The people who work at these places are interesting - some of them own the wineries and make more money than ex-Lehman Brothers' traders once did, some of them are hired hands who are clearly just collecting a paycheck and don't know the first thing about the wine or care for that matter, and some of them are folks like this guy - pretty young, interested in the industry, not sure exactly what they want to do (maybe a brewery, he says), but they know their stuff. Wineries really ought to pay more attention to who they put behind the bar - it's amazing how much of a difference this can make in whether or not you enjoy the wine.

Bedell - like Corey Creek - is now owned by Michael Lynne, who used to run New Line Cinema and was executive producer of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. There's a certain cinematic flair in their presentation - the labels on the bottles, the design of the building, the view out on the vineyard. (Our pourer pointed out to us the difference between Bedell's lovely green vineyards and those next door, which belong to a winery that we won't name but that was mentioned already and rhymes with "Hen Bar".) No hobbits, although there is a timid dog. We spend full on an hour - maybe more - here, tasting the wine, wandering around their gorgeous building, and sitting on the porch in the sun watching some grapes being processed. It's pretty neat to be out here at harvest season; you get an idea for how much work actually goes into making good wine, watching the grapes being hand-picked and hand-sorted and just generally treated like small purple kings. I buy two bottles of wine: the First Crush red and the (wince) $48 2006 Bedell Gallery. I love me a big buttery Chardonnay, and this one makes my tongue water.

12:15ish - Back to Pugliese, which is now blessedly open. They have a vineyard cat, who shuns us. To be honest, it isn't really the wine that I like about this place - although it's more than decent - it's the bottles. They're all hand-painted, every single one of them. So pretty. I buy a bottle of '06 Cab Franc. Long Island originally planted Cab Franc as a blending grape but it turned out that the grape did really well in the climate, so now it seems like the island is obsessing over it. It's a rare vineyard where you won't find at least one bottle of the stuff, and lots of folks think that this grape is the future of Long Island. We've already had a good laugh over a headline in one of the rags we've picked up that starts off thusly: "Let's be franc."

12:45ish - Oh dear God, it's 12:45 and I think I'm drunk. Some of these wineries don't even have spittoons out on the counter. What's a girl to do? In our case, putter a hundred feet or so down the road to Lenz. Thank goodness these wineries are all scrunched together so you don't have to drive too far from one to the next.

Lenz is picturesque without being over the top. There are workers harvesting grapes in the fields, strategically placed, artfully toppled-over wine barrels, and a garage that you can peer into to get an idea of what's going on behind the scenes. In the tasting room, we get a real treat: a blind tasting of three different Merlots: the 2001 Old Vines Merlot, the 2001 "Estate Selection" Merlot, and a 2003 Merlot. I have been known to wax poetic about how much better wine from old vines is than from new ones, but I really got my comeuppance in this tasting. I guessed the 2003 Merlot was from the old vines, and entirely mixed up the two 2001 bottles. Our pourer gave us a tip: as wine ages, it gets darker...so you should, when tasting wines from several different years, be able to figure out the year based on which wine is darkest. But our utter confusion was yet more proof that you should just drink what you like, and who cares about the price or the vintage or the nose.

1:45ish: We put a moratorium on wine-drinking until 3 p.m. We - especially bagel-less AMP - need to eat. We drive over to Love Lane, which might be the shortest road on Long Island at maybe a quarter of a mile, and settle in at the Love Lane Kitchen, where neither one of us is tempted in the least by the wines by the glass on the menu. Just water please, and keep it coming. I'm pretty sure my chicken/avocado sandwich was tasty, but I can't really recall. After, we wander around Love Lane a little bit. There's a candy shop that has pumpkin fudge, but the store is a little creepy, so I pass. We do buy some cheese next door, where we are involuntarily sucked into a cheese tasting almost as serious as all the wine tasting we've been doing. (Blueberry cheese? Not for me.)

3ish: Honestly, if I didn't have my camera as evidence I wouldn't remember that Duckwalk is where we went next, but I have photos to prove it, so I guess that's what we did. The Duckwalk we went to is the Northern cousin of the main vineyard, which is in the Hamptons. It is owned by the same folks who own Pindar, and it's got the same commercial thing going on. Now, in snooty winemakerese, "commercial" seems to be a synonym for "bad," but I have to say that there's a little room in this world for commercial. I mean, why is slapping some cute ducks on your label a bad thing? And the wine? They make some perfectly fine stuff, and it is more reasonably priced than comparable mediocre wines at other vineyards out here. I bought a $12 bottle of red table wine that I am going to enjoy thoroughly with a pizza sometime soon.

One other comment on this place. I am not a big fan of dessert wines. I'm not a fan of sweet wines in general, so I don't bother with dessert wines - I'd rather just have dessert. Perhaps this will change as I get older and wiser, but for now my modus operandi is to taste the dessert wine, make a face, and let someone else finish it. But Duckwalk makes a truly lovely blueberry port - it was my favorite of all the dessert wines we tasted out here.

3:30ish: We are trying to go to The Tasting Room, a little store that pulls together a bunch of the smaller wineries that don't have their own tasting rooms. Sadly, it's closed Monday through Thursday, like rather too much of this silly island, so no tiny boutique vintage tastings for us. Instead, we tried pumpkin preserves (disgustingly sweet) at the shop next door and then headed for Castello di Borghese.

This is one of the oldest vineyards on Long Island, although it changed hands a few years ago. It's owned by Italian royalty now, and it gives off an impression of gravitas that can be a bit off-putting. But for us, that was lightened by the big truck advertising "Pinot Noir" out front, and by the guy behind the counter, whose idea the truck was. Turns out he's a Pinot Noir freak, and as such, he knows that fellow Pinot Noir fans will do u-turns in the middle of a highway to check out a bottle of the stuff. Pinot Noir is pretty rare on the island - I'm not even sure if we tasted another - so of course we had to try it. It was good but I wound up going for another bottle I liked more, the 2005 Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon.

3:45ish: We've moved just up the road to Vineyard 48. In retrospect, I'm not quite sure what I thought of this place. I guess my overriding impression was that it was a little odd. It is owned by several families who appear, in addition to their love of wine, to really, really, love chess. And it makes a mean peach wine, under the cheesy "NoFo" appellation. And that is all I will say about that.

4:29 p.m.: At Duckwalk, we got a free tasting coupon to go to Pindar, since they're owned by the same folks. So we try to go back. We think we've slid in just before their hard-ass 4:30 deadline. They appear to have a different clock. They've been wiping down the bar for the past five minutes. No tasting for us, but we're welcome to buy! Are you kidding me? I won't be drinking your wine any time soon, thanks entirely to your crappy attitude. As far as "commercial" goes, this place embodies all the bad aspects of it.

7:30ish: At several points during the day, we've asked people where we should go for dinner, and one place keeps coming up: Seafood Barge. The guy at Castello di Borghese even told us exactly what table to ask for. We drove past it on the way to our hotel on the first night, and thought, well, dive. Looks like a dive, has a dive name, so, dive. Au contraire: the only thing divey about Seafood Barge is its external appearance. Inside, it's very cute, done up in a nautical theme without being nauseating. And the food, oh, the food...curried crab spring rolls...pan-seared tuna with coconut rice in soy and ginger broth...yum.

So, smiley-face roundup: Bedell gets a giant smiley-face, Pugliese a moderate one, Lenz a moderately smilier than moderate one, Duckwalk a robot flat line, Castello di Borghese a moderate smiley-face, 48 a robot flat line, and Pindar a giant, giant frowny-face.

Twenty Wineries In Four Days: Day One

My friend AMP and myself are setting off on a tour of North Fork, Long Island wineries. We leave Brooklyn Monday at 1:30ish, and are in the land of the wine trees, as I once drunkenly called them, by 3ish.

2ish: In the car, we listen to an NPR segment about how listening to music while tasting wine can influence how you like it. We hear about one winemaker who actually plays music to his grapes. Later, we listen to Kings of Leon and debate what kind of wine they would go well with. A big mean red? Maybe whiskey would be a better accompaniment.

250ish: We drive by a sign that announces the existence of pumpkin fudge. I am intrigued, but say nothing, figuring we'll find more of it later. We're on a mission here, and it isn't a mission to find fudge.

3ish: We're trying to find Schneider Vineyards, which is on the map in the Long Island wine book from 2001 that someone gave me, but that's the peril of old books, 'cos this place ain't here. Maybe they just don't have a tasting room? Ah well. Instead, we go to Palmer Vineyards. There are insane numbers of people here, which puzzles us, until we figure out that it's Columbus Day. We are also swarmed by fruit flies, which we will soon discover is typical for this time of year. Our unfriendly server discourages us from just having a taste. They're too busy, she says, so we should order a glass. Ummm...hello? The whole point of wineries is to sample a variety of what they have to offer. Their tastes are also excessively priced - something like $4 for an individual taste - but we nonetheless order a couple and sample them (they're not great, or maybe the experience has just soured us). We sit out in the back yard and listen to a live bluegrass band, which was pleasant enough, but overall, this place gets a black mark. (They do have a fun sign, on the way in, though - see the pix.) Moving on.

3:30ish: We pull into Diliberto and instantly feel happier. They have a cute tasting room, in the kitchen of the Dilibertos' weekend home in Jamesport (during the week he's a lawyer in Queens, or so the Internet tells me). The tasting here is also a little weird - rather than standing at the bar and sampling the wine, you order it and they come around to your table and pour it - but we're game. We settle in and while we're tasting the wine, the classical guitarist who is noodling around in the corner drops by and gets our life story out of us and a few of the folks at other tables. It's some one's birthday, so we all sing happy birthday to her. The guitarist starts another tune, and suddenly the owner of the place is standing next to him belting out opera. And he's good, too! I buy a bottle of the 2004 Diliberto Cantina red table wine, and later wish I'd bought more, but it's too late - this place is only open on weekends and holidays. Make sure you don't miss it.

4:15ish: A quick in and out at Laurel Lake. Nothing special, but at least they like you to taste all the wine.

4:32: We try and hit one last winery, Pindar. Their tasting room is only open until 4:30, and they're militant about it. There's not going to be any tasting at Pindar today, and they're not shy about telling us. But we can buy until 5! Thanks, but no thanks. Moving on.

5ish: We check into the hotel in Greenport where we are staying, crack open the Diliberto, and have a glass on the balcony. Perfection. We also start plotting out our course of action for the next day with the copy of Wine Press that we picked up. Essential reading, I'd say. Little profiles of all the vineyards and an up-to-date map (no Schneider's). I start making a smiley-face guide to the wineries we're visiting. Diliberto gets a big smile, Palmer a big frown, and Laurel Lake an expressionless robot face.

7:30ish: We wander over to Claudio's for dinner. Claudio's is pretty cool, a weird combination of dive bar and legitimate seafood restaurant. They have a sign saying they're the oldest family-owned restaurant in the U.S. A beautiful old wooden bar that they apparently got from a hotel on the Bowery. With a real marble railing, and some gorgeous glass details. During prohibition Claudio's was a hot spot for the bootleggers to bring in the liquor, or so they say, and there's still a trapdoor under the bar. The seafood here is good and fresh, and the pumpkin pie is nothing to sneer at. We both have a glass of local wine with dinner. I can't remember what the heck I had a mere four days later, so it must not have been anything worth mentioning. AMP had a glass of Bedell's 2007 First Crush. It's the first vintage of it, and you'd think 2007 grapes might be a little young, but this is pretty good. More on Bedell later, but for now, wine tasting is hard work, and it's off to bed for us.

Swamp Cabbage

Swamp Cabbage, I just learned, is a recipe that involves hearts of palms (apparently best if freshly harvested your own dang self) and bacon - lots of it, with whatever other ingredients you want, stewed together.

While I have not (yet!) eaten swamp cabbage, I imagine it tastes like this band sounds.

Can't Believe TI Sampled O-Zone

Sometimes, you should let sleeping Eurotrash dogs lie.

Maybe THIS Is The Sexiest Song Ever Written

This song...it's plucked strings that hurt the fingers to listen to...it's sitting alone in a spooked-out empty room in an old house...it's a growl from the back of the throat that the voice can't recover from...it's one four-minute-long moan that you feel right down in the pit of your stomach.

Kings of Leon - Closer: Go here to get it.

'Exile In Guyville' Live

I (like 99.9% of Liz Phair fans) mourn the death of the old Liz Phair, anything post-Whitechocolatespaceegg. But she lives again, sorta, by playing 'Exile in Guyville' live in a few cities 15 years post its release. (Fifteen YEARS??? Gulp.)

I dunno, she says she's "emotionally present" in it, but I'm not so sure. Streaming over at NPR, here.

Keep Bringing It The Rest Of Your Life

I saw Michael Franti at All Points West, and while he might be too much of a cheeseball for me in general, this is one of my favorite songs this year. I'd like to figure out a way to blast it from the rooftops...

Don't ever doubt the power of just one man
The worldwide power of just one rhyme
Don't ever doubt the force of the bass line
Or a record gone round to burn the house down
You've got to let go of remote control

Janis Joplin On The Blues

Studs Terkel: I gotta ask the cliched question about the blues being a black man's music.

Janis Joplin: Anybody can sing the blues. Well, I don't know whether they can sing them or not, but they can feel them. Everybody's got feelings inside of them. It's just the faculty of being able to transform it into music. I mean, everybody's got 'em. Everybody's got those things, they've just got to know what to do with it. You either repress it or you use it. Sort of. I feel better after singing, yeah.

-From 'And They All Sang'