They refer to the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament as March Madness. I say getting 8 inches of snow on March 23rd is March Madness! This weekend it’s down to 4 teams – The Final Four. I’ve come up with a March Madness competition that everyone can enjoy.
Does the world of wine look like this to you? These are only the wine regions in Spain for Pete’s sake! It seems so confusing but I can help. Or rather, René Descartes can help. 
René Descartes used the philosophical method of Reductionism to analyse a problem. Reduce the problem to its simplest elements – but no simpler. Look at the map below and see what Descartes can do for you! I call this approach the Cartesian Wine method and with apologies to all my friends who teach Math, it’s going to catch on much faster than Cartesian geometry. Here is the map of Spanish Wine 101.
It’s simple – and you can even leave out Rias Biaxas if you’re not going to drink Spanish white wines. For that matter I can take or leave Montsant – but give me my Rioja, Priorat, and Ribera del Duero. Using this method it is easy to understand Spanish wine. And if you have to make it even simpler then drink Rioja – LAN is my recommendation de jour.
LAN Crianza is on sale in Ontario for $15 this month and #44 on the WS top 100
If I may quote Monsieur Descartes, “ Je pense bois, donc je suis.”
“Rene Descartes was a drunken fart, I drink therefore I am” (Monty Python)
I found myself staring at a great bottle of wine last week. A 2004 single vineyard wine from Bodegas LAN - I love LAN - then I remembered that I forgot to memorize the Rioja vintages chart. Was it 2004 that was a crappy vintage or 2003? Who memorizes those things?
What I did remember was that I own an iPhone – that means that with the proper app I never have to remember anything – not even my phone number – AE would have loved that.
EINSTEIN, who was never able to recall his own phone number, was famous for not memorizing anything that could be quickly and easily looked up in a standard reference volume. “Never memorize what you can look up in books,” he said. In fact, EINSTEIN claimed never to memorize anything which could be looked up in less than two minutes.
Furthermore, EINSTEIN once declared that his second greatest idea after the theory of relativity was to add an egg while cooking soup in order to produce a soft-boiled egg without having an extra pot to wash. This was clearly a man who would have loved the idea of using his “telephone” to help him purchase a bottle of wine.
Neither Albert or I can memorize this and hey, 2004 was a good year!
