And thus we have entered the final (and about seventh, by my calculations, based on how long it has felt) week of November and a good week it has been so far, what with the time being half past noon already on a Monday afternoon as I write this and nothing unpleasant having taken place so far. In a burst of spontaneous slackness I took the initiative and prolonged my weekend on both ends, taking last Friday off from work, and not bothering to go in today, either. No one has called and inquired as to my whereabouts, not very surprisingly in the light of current developments in the weather front and how it affects everything in my line of work. Yesterday morning the streets were barren, black and dry, and now the world is filled with snow. It started to pour down yesterday afternoon and has been going on for most of the night as well, judging by the amount of it. The overall feeling is surreal and dreamlike, partly because of me having skipped work and partly because of the muted and immaculate quality of the view outside my kitchen window. The layer of snow on the trashbins looks to be at least 40cm thick. The trees loom large and seem to have acquired entirely new forms of gnarled shapes. The caretaker radiates the bleak air of a man defeated, shoveling away among the towering snowdrifts. The bears tear at the corpses of unfortunate postmen whose mailsacks are blown open in the icy wind and the wolves gnaw at the bones of hapless ex-janitors who fought the storms of last night and lost. All this in my backyard. I wonder what it must be like in the streets out there but am not that eager to go and find out. I’m very content here, now, indoors, reading a book of latin aphorisms and preparing adventurously marinated garlic cloves to pester (and present) the relatives with come Christmas. In crastinum differo res severas.

Almost completely unrelated to anything at all, here’s the “Happy Happy Joy Joy”-song by Ren and Stimpy.

THIS WEEKS’ BOTTLES OF CHOICE:
La Cuvée Mythique, red wine from France. Here’s what it says (among the usual blah blah promises of outstanding quality and earth shattering drinking experience) on the label of the bottle: “Since 1990, a group of wine growers in the South of France decided to create a “mythical” wine that would express the best that the Languedoc has to offer. To symbolise the painstaking task of tending vines in an untamed environment, they chose the Owl of Minerva, the goddess who taught men how to master Nature.” And true enough, the Owl gawps at you, in an enigmatic way, from the mythical label, probably symbolising and expressing all kinds of things among which I’m sadly forced to count also The Mediocrity So Often Present In Red Wines. I really wanted to like this wine very much but couldn’t find anything remarkable to say about it no matter how I tried. Very decent and very forgettable. I breathed in the unextraordinary scent of it, marvelled at its’ almost black colour, gurgled, smacked my lips and swallowed down to get the hang of the taste of it and still couldn’t think of a better description than “nice”. Which, of course, is extremely preferable to, say, “unnice”. The Owl of Minerva, of course, is not something to be dealt with lightly, but I’m quite sure I can’t be bothered to buy this wine again.

La Guita Manzanilla, sherry from Spain. I’ve always overlooked fortified wines, probably for good reasons, but I’ve also always kind of lumped them together in my mind, port, sherry, madeira and what have you. Recently, the craving to taste sherry has been nagging, unexplainably, in the back of my mind. So I went out and got a small bottle of this bone dry manzanilla sherry, and some olives and manchego cheese to go with it, not knowing what to expect. I’m able to survive without olives but the combination of sherry and manchego was marvellous and really impressed me. This clearly was my best experience ever on combining wine and cheese and I will definitely start keeping a bottle of sherry in the drinks cabinet from now on, to wash down my experiments with tapas once I get going with this book of tapas recipes I recently acquired. Drinking sherry without food could turn out to be too much for a novice such as I although me and the Loved One were able to finish the 0,375 sized bottle in only two days.

Cidraie, cider from France. “Just as the ladybird associated to its name, Cidraie can be placed on any table and make any moment of the day sparkle.” Said to be the flagship and most sold cider in France and utterly lovely and charming it is too. I hadn’t had this for too long a time but after finding myself in an actual bar a few days ago gladly had several bottles and was pleasantly reminded that this is my favourite of all the ciders I’ve tasted. With the alcohol content of only 4% it’s easy to drink 3 or 4 bottles of this without turning into a drunken nuisance. I’m very partial to this cidre blond indeed and the only downside to it is it’s limited availability and rather a steep price in Finnish bars.