Red Red Wine

Today I had my last day of classes and also the last day of the wine tasting class. Now it's time to summarize what I've learned. About wine, that is.

Wine is part of our cultural history, it was even excepted from the prohibition in the 30s because of the sacral communion. It's pretentious and classy. A label might describe the wine in words like honey suckle, licorice, apricot and vanilla, while the $2-dollar bottle might taste like ash and smell like a fish tank. Wine was quite a mystery that needed to be uncovered.

First we need some words to describe wine:

Red wine is fermented on the skin, white is fermented without the skin, the inside of the grape is always transparent. Fruity means that the wine is sweet, but you never ask for a sweet wine, that means that there is sugar added. If a wine is dry it feels like sand paper in the back of the throat. Acidity is another important factor, this should be balanced because otherwise it's like drinking vinegar. Tannins is an acid, it's supposed to taste like when sucking the skin of the arm, after the taste of salty sweat. A wine can be mellow: medium bodied or full-bodied, I would describe this as the density of taste, from watery to something more complex (:-P).

  

You have all seen them, the cultural snobs swirling their wine glasses, holding it in the foot, examining the color, sticking down their nose in the glass, sniffing, taking a sip, gurgling the wine in their mouth and then uttering some opinion about the vineyard, the year, the body, flavors etc, and you hate them. I've joined the club now, hehehe.

The reason you swirl the glass is to aerate the wine, adding oxygen to it. Oxygen brings out the flavors of the wine. Swirling it also increases the kinetic energy of the molecules, making them vaporize so that you can smell them. The reason you smell the wine is because a big part of your taste is actually smell. The form of the glass is also no coincidence. You might have heard about serving wine at different temperatures, if you like the wine chilled, then you should hold the glass in the foot, if the wine is too cold, you hold the cup in your hand warming the wine. Just like beer is served best cold, but tastes bad warm, the cold brings out the fresh and crisp taste in white wine, reducing bitterness. Even red wine is best served a little chilled , at "room temperature" from the old non-central-heated era.

You examine the color because it's beautiful but also to see if there is fruit left in the wine, fruit adds flavor, but might look nasty so usually wine is filtered. If there is sediment in your wine, then it's a "good" wine. You gurgle the wine to add more oxygen to bring the flavors forward. Then you're supposed to say what flavors you taste. This is personal. If you eat a lot of apples you'll recognize the apple flavor immediately. I almost never taste the apricot, but instantly notice flavors of blackcurrant, it's only a matter of what you're used to. Usually wines are described with pleasant flavors, but there is no need to keep it safe. I described one wine as "smells like corn tortillas". Corn tortillas smells awful. 

Since the weather varies from year to year, wine from the same vineyard from different years taste differently. So if you really liked a wine, try to find more bottles from the same year. If it's the first time you taste a wine, the year doesn't really matter, unless you remember how many sunny days and the amount of precipitation there was in Australia, Chile, South Africa or wherever the wine comes from. The reason you buy an old bottle of wine is not because it tastes better, it will almost certainly be undrinkable, but it's part of our cultural inheritance, just like art. A white wine can be aged 4-6 years, a red 8-10 years, they will oxidize if they stay longer. In rare cases (:-P), like in the cold at the bottom of the sea, carbonated wine like champagne might last longer, because cold and carbon acid is preservatives. Thus wine bottles like dark,  cool and humid environments, like a cellar, they don't like to be shaken (maybe all the earthquakes make Californian wine bad?).
 

In class, we talked about how wine affects the body and mind. First: don't drink and drive. Don't drink too much. Don't drink if you're on medication. Excess drinking or mixing alcohol with for example painkillers can cause liver failure. If the liver fails, you  need a liver transplant, you're a dead man walking. Women should not drink if they're pregnant unless a retarded child is on the wish list. Women should not drink if they have a family history of breast cancer. Simply put: don't drink if your doctor tells you not to.

Well, that said, let's get juicy.

Our teacher had his own winery so we tasted his wines. Every week we tasted three wines, one white, one red and one desert wine.

Whites

07 Chenin Blanc: this is the corn tortilla wine. It has lemon taste and is spicy in the end. The grape is very acid so it's usually mixed so it will be more balanced. 

07 Sauvignon Blanc: it has a little acidity and tastes like pear. The best Sauvignon Blancs come from New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, Chile, Australia and Italy.

06 Semillon: like a bowl of dried fruit in it's fig and raisin taste. No freshness. Drink it with a baguette and gorgonzola.

05 Chardonnay: golden color, smells and tastes like syrap, it's like apricot juice with 14% alcohol.

06 St Emillion: buttery and wooden, which sounds pretty bad but is quite pleasant actually.

Reds

07 Barbera: Light orange-red color. Dry. Tastes syrup, raisin and blackcurrant. I can be chilled. I liked it.

06 Cabarnet Franc: Mild and fruity. Tastes like plum.

06 Carignon: smells like blackcurrant, tastes like plums and have an acid aftertaste.

07 Cabarnet Sauvignon: fruity blackcurrant aromas. Wow. I. Love. It.

99 Syrah/Shiraz. Usually I like shiraz. This was awful. It tasted green olives and salty. It was hilarious watching the row of people tasting it, when they one by one got a disgusted facial expression.

Desserts

Forgiveness (a mix of grapes). This wine was dedicated to the teachers mother after her death. I tastes like a melted strawberry lollipop.

Jolie: the wine is a golden blend of symphony and muscat, like liquid honey and tastes like honey too.

Lady in Pink: it has a beautiful pink color and tastes like strawberry lemonade.

07 Symphony: this is an American grape, the best contribution UC Davis has done this world. It's a hybrid of Muscat of Alexandria and Grenache Gris. Overwhelming taste of mint.

05 Muscat of Alexandria: there are two more kinds of muscat, Black and orange Muscat. It's hard to find in stores so if you see them get a bottle and dry. It's heaven on the tongue.

The most important thing I've learned from the class is that the best wine is the wine you like, and if it's a cheap German import, then it's perfect. If you like ice cubes in your white or like to add spices to your red and heat it, it's all up to you, wine is meant to be enjoyed. The wine can taste like BP's oil spill and still be the best wine you've ever had, if you drink it in good company.

Rolling on a River

I went on a four-day canoe trip with the excursion club to the Colorado river on the border between Nevada and Arizona. It was quite an adventure.

It started off Friday morning 6 AM when we gathered outside of Embarcadero Hall. It was 24 people on the trip so we got into the cars and drove off. After an hour we got a call from one of the other cars, their vehicle had broken down, it was oil all over the floor, so they had to rent a car and would be delayed. 

Well then, we drove happily to Las Vegas, stopped on the way for lunch. There was an outlet just beside the restaurant so I added two more pairs of Converse to my collection, the classic red and some pink-orange-ones with bright blue laces. I cant help it, they cost $15 each.

After Las Vegas approaching cars started flashing their lights at us, we didn't know why until the car started wobbling. There must have been sparks from the wheel. One of the tires was almost blown away. Something had stuck in the wheel and cut up the tire so it was almost falling off. We called the others and told them what had happened and that we would be delayed. 

There was a full-sized spare tire and it took only 10 minutes to change it, so soon we could continue. It took us 8 hours to get to Colorado river, 12 miles downstream from Hoover Dam. 

It was already late so we didn't start paddling the first day but cooked dinner and camped  instead. We slept  under the stars. In the middle of the desert the nights are warm and dry.

Saturday we paddled 7.5 miles upstream. It was hard, especially when the dam was open and the current strong. We paddled two and two and we soon figured out the necessity to keep close to the shore to avoid the strong current in the middle of the river. The sun was cruel and I wore my hippie hat and classes and one of the leaders soon gave me the nickname Residental Hippie. It was beautiful. The water was deep green like a melted red wine bottle. I stared into it mesmerized. The canyon walls rose infertile on both sides, yellow, reddish and gray. We found a nice little camping ground along the river. There where hot springs, one of them had a waterfall with hot water that worked as a shower. The water was warm and clear like a jacuzzi. In the dusk, the air swarmed of bats. Other animals we saw were snakes and mountain sheep. The excursion club had planned the meals for the entire weekend and brought gas stoves and pots and everything. It was pretty advanced, they had even taken two gallons of pancake mix with them for breakfast. We had a campfire and were taught the art of making s'mores. The recipe for s'mores is the following:

two graham crackers

one mashmellow

chocolate

there are two ways to make them, the traditional way is to roast the mashmellow until it's golden, put it on a cracker, add a piece of chocolate on top of the melted mashmellow and then add the second cracker creating a biscuit. The improved way is to put the chocolate inside the mashmellow and then roast it.

I slept in the open close to the rock wall. In the middle of the night there was a loud bang, like a gun shot, and sound of some scattering. I thought the rock wall was bursting and falling down on us. In the morning one of the leaders got up to make breakfast, then there was another bang. It was the pancake mix that exploded. The baking soda had been heated for one day so the containers were full of high pressure gas. There was pancake mix all over the camp.

On Sunday we left all the back packs and some of the canoes at the camping ground and paddled upstream to Hoover Dam. We were three people in each canoe without any load. The current was very strong. Our team consisted of two girls and one guy, we were not very physically powerful and rather unexperienced paddlers, but we were cheerful, kept close to the shore, planned ahead before attempting to round a corner with strong current and kept the same rate when paddling. We even had a motivating song "Na na na na, oh yeah!". This was a winning strategy and our power team was one of the first boats to reach Hoover Dam. Only half of the teams managed to do that.

On the way back we stopped on a small beach and totally randomly found a long deep cave with a hot spring inside, it was like a sauna. We needed a flashlight to explore the 20 m deep pitch black cave.  Even more downstream we went hiking. We walked along a little stream of hot water that sipped from the mountain walls. The rocks were covered with brown-green algae that was soft as jelly and hot from the water that fell like soft rain. The path had ropes so that we could climb steep passages, some of them were vertical walls and we had to walk on the rock with the legs pointing horizontally out from the wall, pulling us upward with the rope. 

During the second night we sat at the campfire. Most of the group had gone to sleep, but a few of us stayed for a while. One Norwegian guy wore "capris", shorts that end on the calves, which is very non-American. An American dude with the old-fashioned German name Hans, mercilessly teased the Norwegian for it. Whatever the Capri said he got a retort from the American about the trousers. They were not manly enough, obviously foreign and simply ridiculous. Finally a German guy intervened: "Some people wear capris, some are named Hans, it's OK". Not much later, words were abandoned and the fireplace turned into a no man's land in a marshmellow war. In the morning the entire hillside was covered with small white pillows, as if the marhmellow trees had shed their seeds.

We had dreamed about the last day, when the current would carry us all the way back to the cars without a single paddle stroke. Something went wrong.The dam was closed and the wind blew in the wrong direction, turning the waves upstream. We had to fight against the current both up- and down the stream!

It was Memorial Day, but we avoided the traffic jam on the 15 between Las Vegas and LA and took a detour through the Nevada desert. The air conditioning in the car was on -40, it was cool as long as we were in the desert but I woke up in the car freezing. Now I got a cold.

My camera battery died on me, so I will add pictures when I manage to get some from other people.

Falling Empire

I've made some small changes on this blog which made me realize that the Google Empire is falling apart. For example, Chrome and Blogger, both own by Google, are not compatible. Managing pictures, changing size, view them in the profile on your blog using Chrome - not working. I have to switch to Firefox. Fail. I wanted to add  a blog search box to the gadgets, but the gadget provided by Google doesn't work. Google no longer knows how to do search engines. Capital failure.  Finally, instead of followers, subscribe on updates to your RSS feed,  maybe by using Google Reader (!). I use it to get updates of webcomics, like wulffmorgenthaler and amazingsuperpowers, and other fun stuff I've Stumbled Upon on the internet. 

And vote on my poll! I want feedback.

Parentheses

My mood has gone to Hell and back during the weekend (no, it's not PMS). 

It's time to start planning the return to Lund. The first thing was to find somewhere to stay. Mom said that I could move back home, you know, compensate for being gone for so long. It has some advantages for sure, like no rent, free food that someone else is cocking. The disadvantage: it's the end of the world. It takes one hour to get to Lund, commuting is a pain, there would be no social life and as a 23-year old it's a matter of principle to have your own home.

So I was looking for housing via AF Bostäder. I found a pretty cheap dorm room in Parentesen (the Parenthesis) with move-in-date in July. The summer is free so I have to pay for July because it's the first month, but not August, and in September all the new students get prioritized. It was the perfect deal for me. Forty other people had tried to book the room, but I'd been three years in the queue and booked it 10 minutes before the time went out. Nice, I thought. Well, hold your horses. The rules are that if you book you use your place in the queue, and if you don't get the contract you don't get your place back. To sign the contract I needed to provide three documents. The transcript, registration info and a photo copy of my student's nation card. To get a nation card you have to pay a fee every semester. The rules changed while I've been abroad and instead of one bill where you pay for all the student fees, there's a separate bill for the nation fee now. So, after calling my brother, my mother, they are the ones opening my mail and paying my bill while I'm abroad, and looking into my bank account I realized that I hadn't payed that fee. Fuck. So I begged/ordered my brother, the Pirate, who was in the middle of writing a big paper (B-uppsats) to go to the nation and get a bill and pay for it. I emailed my transcript and registration info and explained the situation.

I got a not-very-polite answer that there was missing units for the fall and that I had to present a paper proving that I had passed 15hp during the fall, that is half time studies. I had until Monday to present this paper. Panic, panic, panic, I don't have a paper like that! With this short time I could only get an Unofficial Transcript from UCSB. Crossing my fingers that it would work, I attached it with a list of contact information to offices that could prove that I studied here. I was so nervous, I begged to nameless gods, cold sweat running down my back, wishing, hoping that they would accept it.

10 minutes later I got an answer. Since you're an exchange student you get excepted from the rules, you don't have to have any units registered or be a member of a nation, if you want the exception we can sign the contract immediately. They had probably not looked at the registration info, just the transcript. Yeah, I want that exception! Now the contract is signed. I will move to Parentesen. And now I've payed the nation fee of 200 SEK for nothing. I'm so happy it worked out.

If I Were a Girl

With just a few weeks left before I leave the calendar is full of goodbye-activities. Tonight I'll see Mr. Carrot and The Sober Guy for the last time at Woodstock, they are going back to Italy tomorrow morning. Yesterday I went on a boat cruise organized by the International Student Association. The dress code was fancy, "dress to impress", so I did. I've never been the girly type. I feel more comfortable in an orange jumpsuit than in a little black dress, assuming that the orange jumpsuit is the one worn by engineering students and not prison inmates. I had bought a brand new dress. It's as sweet as spun sugar. Girls are supposed to dream about pretty pink dresses, this dress is more of a boy's dream though, because it's really short. It's hard to sit or bend forward without constantly pulling down the hem. The front is not very extraordinary, the back on the other hand is more elaborate. The dress was, however, not the only unusual attire. I wore high heels, something that I almost never do, they are too hard to skate in. The last thing, the ultimate test of one's femininity, was faux eyelashes. It's messy to glue them onto the eyelashes, but what a change, it looks like Minnie Mouse-eyes. I almost felt like a drag queen, except this is socially acceptable and even encouraged. It was like turning into an alien, almost unrecognizable, still fun and interesting, like an anthropology study.

The boat trip was awesome, we had a DJ and a dance floor. It was pretty windy though, so the floor was rolling back and forth, but none fell into the sea. The sun set over the ocean and we saw lot of seals.

We got back to Isla Vista in time for my roommates 21st birthday party. One of her friends was DJ:ing in our living room, we had strobe light and the furniture was moved away creating a dance floor. Around eleven it was packed. The birthday girl was however hiding with her head in a toilet. The only unfortunate thing that happened last night was that someone punched a hole in the ceiling, which we have to repair.

Mein Herz Brennt

In history class we cover the first half of the 20th century. If you feel good about yourself in a shiny-happy-jolly way right now, be warned, this is quite a dark piece of commentary. Ignorance is bliss.

I've been reading works of von Treischke (The Greatness of War), Lenin (What is to be done?), Stalin (Liquidation of Kulaks), Mussolini (Fascism Doctrines) and Hitler (Mein Kampf). von Treschke glorifies the purifying battle, that kills the inferior and weak. Yes, what species doesn't befefit from killing itself? Lenin and Stalin seems to have thought that their deeds was for the greater good and that the end justified the means. We want worldwide communism, who cares that the peasants eat their children because we took their grain? I must say, Mussolini seems...lucid. Which is most horrifying since he despises pacifism and democracy and prises warfare and Italian expansion. There are people claiming that Hitler wasn't insane, that any human can turn into such a monster, well, reading Mein Kampf is reassuring. There is no such thing as rationality or reason on those pages. On the contrary, the Jews were both the bloodsucking exploiters of the working class and the Marxists fighting for the proletariat? That makes...sense.

During the last few lectures we've seen photographs of piled corpses and cannibalism in the Soviet Union, carpet bombings, Hiroshima, liberated living skeletons from World War II. And the numbers. Depending on sources they vary greatly. 37 million died in WWI. 9-18 millions in the Russian Civil War. Stalin starved and purged 20 million to death during his two decades in power, that is 12% of the Russian population. In the Lagers about 6 million people were tortured and killed (hey mom, what about visiting Oswiechim for the third time this summer? at least there the campgrounds have showers...). In World War II, the deadliest military conflict in history, 60 million people were killed, whereas 2/3rds civilians. After that one might think that humanity had learned from its mistakes, well, not, say hello to Pol Pot.

We think that other people of other times were different, that we wouldn't let atrocities like that happen in our time. But they do happen, all the time, in different parts of the world. Genocide, slavery, oppression. We close our eyes, we do nothing, say nothing, deny it, don't care. Because if we cared too much we wouldn't bare to live. Like when we joke about Hitler, we have to laugh otherwise we would cry.

Extravaganza

Once a year the student association at UCSB organizes a festival, a mini-Coachella in the soccer arena. It's free for everybody. So last Saturday, everybody was going to the festival, everybody meaning thousands of people (approx 12 000). At the same time. There are two entrances to the arena and the lines were huge, five meters wide, hundred meters long, not moving significantly. We cut most of the line and stood packed in a crowd of people. Some jumped over the fence into the bushes on the other side. The line didn't go forward. Suddenly someone pulled the plug and everyone pushed forward. The fence was down and the flood of people carried us in past the cops in the entrance. No one could stop us.

The band were not that big, last year they had famous bands and then people from LA came and made trouble, someone told me. A Candian band, Chromeo was the best, you can find their low-budget music vidoes Night by Night and Fancy Footwork on Youtube.