This album from N.A.S.A., it would appear, features every hip-hop artist you might ever want to listen to, all in one place. Spin tips it as the party album of the year. Can't say I disagree. Downloads at the end of the link, or listen to "Whachadoin" here (via Pitchfork).
These are the songs I found myself listening to over and over again this year, roughly in order from least over-listened to most over-listened. Some of them struck a personal chord. Some are just too catchy to be ignored. And yeah, there's 26 of them, because I just couldn't whittle it down to 25. Enjoy, please!
26. Hazelwood Motel - Break Myself In Two. This song is dead last onto the list time-wise, and probably actually belongs somewhat higher on it listened-wise, but I'm too lazy to redo the numbering. I love its simultaneous loudness and quietness. That when they're done, they end. And of course the driving guitar, which seems to be a theme this year. (Previous post, with info on where to download.)
25. A.A. Bondy - Killed Myself When I Was Young. Whoo, boy, this guy is off somewhere deep in the black forest. This is actually one of his more cheerful songs. Here's the Daytrotter session. Below, something else.
24. Absentee - They Do It These Days. You just don't hear good rock and roll with piano and trumpets and smart lyrics much any more. More driving guitar, too.
23. Ketch Harbor Wolves - So Long To The Ground. Download their album - the whole peaceful thing - for free here.
22. Yoav - Yeah The End. This is a gorgeous mellow song on a gorgeous mellow CD that resides in my top five list this year. Listen to it here or check out a stunningly good live set that doesn't have this particular song on it here.
21. The Cotton Jones Basket Ride - Chewing Gum. This is an ambling, shambling tune, "Feeling softer than the velvet sky, longer than the sun." Download it here.
20. The Mae Shi - Run To Your Grave. I like the directness of this song. Here's the beat. Here's the chorus, yelled. Here's, err, some driving guitar. Here's the rest of the song, also yelled. Here's a video in primary colors.
19. Kanye West vs. Radiohead - Reckoner Lockdown. I thought Kanye was the bomb on the MTV music awards when he did this song with those crazy taiko drummers in the background. However, I hate the album version/just not a fan of vocoder. But this remix with Radiohead got it halfway back to decent again. Not to mention that I can't possibly have a year-end list that doesn't somehow have Radiohead on it.
18. The Ting Tings - Great DJ. Were it earlier in the year, this would probably be higher on the list, but these guys sort of faded for me. Still, check out the Daytrotter session.
17. Saul Williams - List of Demands. This song was the soundtrack to a shoe commercial that was on non-stop during March madness. I don't remember the shoe, but the song lingers on. The song itself was written some time ago, but this guy is no dummy, so he reissued it on a CD this year. This is an outrageously cool rockin' version from 2005.
16. Catherine A.D. - Carry Your Heart. This is late onto the list. I like the crazy key changes in the chorus. Visit her MySpace page.
15. The Subways - Rock & Roll Queen. This song did not worm its way into my head until I saw "RocknRolla". Since then, I've probably played it an average of once a day.
14. Calexico - Two Silver Trees. If tumbleweeds could sing, this is what they would sound like.
13. The Bug featuring Warrior Queen - Poison Dart. I can't understand a word of it, but I love it. So very fierce. Another album that is in my top five (Via KEXP.)
12. Little Jackie - The Stoop. I love this song because it perfectly reflects how I feel about Brooklyn. So what if I don't have a stoop. NPR live session here.
11. T.I. featuring Rihanna - Live Your Life. The sheer audacity, to sample a not very good song from O-Zone, and turn it into a riotous ANTHEM. Here's the live version from the MTV video awards.
10. M83 - Highway of Endless Dreams. Appropriately named, is what. (On last.fm)
9. Raconteurs - Salute Your Solution. Good dirty South backwoods rock and roll with killer keyboard, some seriously cool reverb, and an even cooler video. Go here to watch it, since their record company no longer allows embedding. Or go here to listen.
8. Lil Wayne - A Milli. Lil Wayne is outrageous. The lyrics on this joint are insane. And the chant of "a milli" is a heartbeat that won't be ignored. I especially love this live version with ?uestlove doing the a millis AND playing the drums.
7. Eddy Current Suppression Ring - Colour Television (download here. All the characteristics of a song I'd love - strong driving bass line, jangly guitars, and ironic pop culture lyrics. Another wheel of fortune. Another million tortured. Acomin' from my color television. Another story televised. Another million hypnotized.
6. Atmosphere - You. Just a good recession-era jam. A late entry into the top five albums.
5. Kings of Leon - Closer. For three hours, I stood crammed like a sardine in front of the All Points West main stage, awaiting Radiohead. Luckily, Kings of Leon was playing for an hour and a half of that. That was all it took for me to go from "meh" to a fan. This song, it oozes sex. (Via Pretty Much Amazing.)
4. Nada Surf - The Fox. I liked this song, but then I happened to be playing it while I was reading Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," and now I love it. Funny how its meaning changed for me. I haven't the slightest idea what this video is all about, and it assuredly isn't the official video for the song, but it is suitably strange.
3. Michael Franti - Remote Control. I saw Michael Franti for the first time at All Points West, and the dude just oozed happiness. This song is an anthem for good, in a year that needed such an anthem. Hey world, you know you got to put up a fight. Download here.
2. The Kills - URA Fever. With driving minor key bass beat, thrash guitar and creepy point-counterpoint vocals, this was a perfect tune for driving along the shore at night this summer. It was also a perfect tune for getting stuck in Holland Tunnel traffic. Second favorite album of the year. (Previous post.)
1. Elbow - The Bones of You. This is my favorite song of the year, on my favorite album of the year. This song is about nostalgia, and is nostalgia. Download it here, and check out a great year-end list while you're at it.
I have no idea just how unusual white rioja is (seems counter-intuitive though, no?) so I won't make a big stink about it. But I will say that you should run buy yourself a bottle of this hint-of-banana-oh-so-smooth-tasting 2005 Sierra Cantabria Organza before it is ALL GONE. I had it with a magnificent tasting dinner at Blue Hill, and I can't even remember which course I had it with, because the wine obliterated the food. I then ran out and bought two bottles of it the next day at Astor Place, which now seems to be out of it. Should have bought up their stock.
I heard Hazelwood Motel on a KEXP year-end podcast, and I have had them on repeat ever since. I am not the only one; plays of this "Break Myself In Two" masterpiece have, like, doubled on their MySpace page in the last couple of days. Of course, at least 20 of those come from me...I lerv the snarly guitar so.
I wonder if these guys are named after one of the several Hazelwood Motels I found online while hunting a non-existent decent picture of them.
KEXP is giving away an MP3 of this and other good stuff here!
I'm currently engaged in my annual time-suck of scanning other people's year-end music lists to make sure I miss as little good music as possible. It's a thankless task - mostly the same not-that-interesting indie-flavor-of-the-moment bands cropping up over and over.
But today I happened on a list with a bunch of stuff I'd never heard of before, and when I hunted down the bands' Myspace pages, I found myself lingering over nearly all of it. Two Sheds, A.A. Bondy, All Smiles...who knew? So good!
I don't usually pay much attention to who's picking the music I'm rushing through, but in this case I did. Twas a band called Everest. They're on tour with Wilco and Neil Young. And, surprise surprise, I like them too.
You can listen here; download here; and check out their favorite bands here.
After going through my music files, I have settled on a handful of songs that are definitely going on the CD. There are a few good ones missing here, thanks to the total computer meltdown I had in the middle of the year, which means I'm going to have to go through the physical music files as well...and buy a new burner. Sigh.
Anyhow, when I try to sum up this year, it feels like it should be with a combination of angry punk, rocking anthems of hope, a few mellow chill-out songs, and a few other random songs that are good just because they're good. I think that's represented in this list, presented in no particular order:
The Kills - URA Fever: I think I listened to this song 100 times on repeat in my lime green rental car over the summer. Hypnotically catchy.
Elbow - The Bones of You: I woke up to this song playing on my alarm clock one morning, and by that evening I owned the CD. The lyrics are about the nostalgia a song can induce in you...I wonder what nostalgia this song will one day induce in me? Listen to a live version here.
TI featuring Rihanna: Live Your Life. This song has been stuck in my head, off and on, for months now. It should be illegal to be so catchy. I'm not even going to post it here lest it get caught in your head too.
Kings of Leon - Closer. Didn't really get into these guys until I saw them at All Points West. That, plus this song - one of the 10 sexiest ever, I think - converted me. Listen here.
Catherine A.D. - Carry Your Heart. Love the creepy minor key modulations in her voice. And the lyrics. Put one foot in front of the other and pray that nobody will ask how you carry your heart. That one, and another one, here.
Eddy Current Suppression Ring - Colour Television. I don't know anything about these guys, but this song is like an updated, wiser "57 Channels and Nothing On". Available here.
Lil Wayne - A Milli. I had this album on non-stop for a while this summer, but it somehow feels already like a relic of the past. This live version with ?uestlove of The Roots doing the "A Milli" chorus is inCREDible. Listen to the banter at the end.
This could be the coolest thing ever...but instead it is merely the most frustrating, thanks to pixellation, copyright issues, and the inability to view what other folks have done - or what you yourself have created once you close the window, despite what that handy little widget up there would seem to indicate.
Every year I put together a CD for friends of my favorite music of the year. I always feel a little presumptuous about doing it - who am I to tell people what the best music is? Everybody has their own taste - but I do it nonetheless, because of...well...because of my inflated ego?
Anyhow, it's picking time. Over the next couple of weeks, I'm agonizing over whether or not some of the songs on the borderline should go on the playlist. If you like them, tell me so.
This first one I just stumbled across today on someone else's year-end best of list. I know entirely why I like it. It's the beat, which gnaws at my memory familiarly. I was thinking that it must be similar to some Radiohead song, but only at this second, as I was writing this, did I figure out what it reminds me of. The bass beat, the note sequence, the spaces between notes, sounds like a slightly rushed version of the Buena Vista Social Club song Chan Chan (video below - speaking of - Ah! What a song).
A few weeks ago, as anyone who scrolls down on this page can easily discover, I fell deeply in love with Long Island's Channing Daughters winery. Last weekend, after quaffing the sole bottle (what was I thinking!) that I purchased of Rosso Fresco in just a couple of days, I went on a hunt to find some more here in the NYC.
I was rudely deterred on my first tedious outing to crowded, grumpy-inducing Soho, to the Vintage NY outlet there, which at some point between the summer and now seems to have closed. But last Saturday, I had more luck at Gnarly Vines Wine & Spirits in Fort Greene-ish. I live not so far from it, so trekked over with a friend, and found it to be totally chill and laid-back, not So-ho-haughty at all. More importantly, they had a few bottles of the good stuff, and I did not buy QUITE all of them. But you should.
A friend once asked me if I thought the Hold Steady was trying to bring Christian Rock to the mainstream surreptitiously. My response was that I doubted it, and even if they were, I didn't care. I feel the same way about The Cotton Jones Basket Ride.
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..."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Commentary on stuff I like, which is mostly music, but is sometimes, in no particular order, college basketball, wine, books, pop culture, media, weird business trivia, Brooklyn, good food, and other stoopid stuff. And sometimes, commentary on stuff I don't like, which includes but is not limited to, in no particular order, the MTA, rude people, too much work, and other stupid stuff.
I have no idea just how unusual white rioja is (seems counter-intuitive though, no?) so I won't make a big stink about it. But I will say that you should run buy yourself a bottle of this hint-of-banana-oh-so-smooth-tasting 2005 Sierra Cantabria Organza before it is ALL GONE. I had it with a magnificent tasting dinner at Blue Hill, and I can't even remember which course I had it with, because the wine obliterated the food. I then ran out and bought two bottles of it the next day at Astor Place, which now seems to be out of it. Should have bought up their stock.
I'm currently engaged in my annual time-suck of scanning other people's year-end music lists to make sure I miss as little good music as possible. It's a thankless task - mostly the same not-that-interesting indie-flavor-of-the-moment bands cropping up over and over. 
A few weeks ago, as anyone who scrolls down on this page can easily discover, I fell deeply in love with Long Island's Channing Daughters winery. Last weekend, after quaffing the sole bottle (what was I thinking!) that I purchased of Rosso Fresco in just a couple of days, I went on a hunt to find some more here in the NYC.
A friend once asked me if I thought the Hold Steady was trying to bring Christian Rock to the mainstream surreptitiously. My response was that I doubted it, and even if they were, I didn't care. I feel the same way about The Cotton Jones Basket Ride.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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. 
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.
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.
9 a.m.: We're both eating bagels this morning.
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.
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!
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