Snow Booze! And Pictures!

It's like snow cream, only ALCOHOLIC. How have I been living life without it?!

Well, anyway, as I sip this raspberry truffle delight I will begin with first things first: It snowed like the Dickins yesterday. I do mean that. It was Dickinsean in scope: drifts up to my chest perfectly designed to smother poor match girls, and packable in a way that would give the roughest of street urchins a delight.

Unfortunately this means mother and I had to move several hundred cubic feet of snow from our driveway. Allow me to illustrate:

That is my car. His name is Heathrow, and he is a Ford Focus. The snow banked up along his sides was the height of the snow on our driveway, just about up to his side view mirrors or about two and a half feet. Mother and I toiled away at his, her with a wrenched back and me with my... well there's nothing actually wrong with me, I'm just a stick figure and have problems lifting things. The banks of snow beside our driveway were well over five and a half feet high, and I am just under that, so tossing the shovelfulls of snow was a bit of a strain.

We got about this far down our drive, which is about a third of the way, before we managed to attract a team of teenagers with a snowblower, and with the promise of forty dollars and some cookies got them to clean off our drive that we could go inside and drink some of the terrible riesling I bought.

In my defense it was from the Hessen rheingau, where I grew up. I *know* that the dastardly Germans keep all the good rieslings for themselves, leaving us with a bunch of sugary Mosel river crap (I rather like Mosel rieslings, actually). Well shut up, parentheses, you with your reason, logic and good humor. You're not wanted here.

Anyway, this Liebfraumilch (yes, it was actually called that) was sugar water with a squeeze of lemon. It was rather nice because you could easily forget you were drinking something alcoholic, allowing the nice warming sensation to tempt you out of doors again to watch the High Schoolers engage in manual labor. When that bottle was gone we had a bottle of sub-par Sauvignon Blanc that I'm too lazy to really review.

This morning I engaged in more gratuitous shoveling, this time creating a run for the dog to go pee in.

 

That is the snow piled up at our door, having drifted. It was about at neck height, so at a guess I'd say about 4 and a half feet. I was shoveling along, creating a really nifty looking trench, when I happened to look up at the roof. 

 

...Oh what the hell. I did not come out here to be crushed by a gravity defying overhang of snow.

 

 

It was rather pretty though. Eventually I finished the dog run, just in time for a few episodes of Top Gear, the one in which Michael Schumacher is not, in fact, The Stig. After watching Hammond destroy his nadgers on a motorbike and defeating Team Galactic on top of some pixilated mountain, I discovered a recipe for alcoholic snow cream posted on The Ho Formerly Known As Crazy's facebook.

Holy Science! I cried. This must be tried! FOR SCIENCE!

The Formerly Crazy's facebook recipe was for a chocolate snow shake, but I lacked chocolate cream liqueur. I do have a half pound of high quality chocolate though, and so should probably get on that. Anyway, I used her recipe as a base and created a delightful raspberry truffle snow drank.

 

Now that's a two quart bowl of snow. Add about a half cup of cream (I had about an eighth of a cup of half and half and a gallon of skim milk so I sort of mixed the two), something like a third of a cup of sugar and a teaspoon of vanilla. Stir it up, making a mess of your kitchen in the process. Next, add your booze.

That's a quarter cup of regular vodka and slightly less than a half cup of homemade raspberry liqueur. Toss in a tablespoon full of Hershey's chocolate syrup and stir it all up, again making a terrible mess of your countertop.

If you are doing it right it will look like nice, healthy pink brains. Pour into a collins glass with a crazy straw and whipped cream.

Now this, similar to a Wendy's frosty, is a drink that looks like it SHOULD be drunk through the straw, but in actuality needs to be eaten with a spoon until some of it melts. It is delicious and delightfully inebriating. It is also very pink, which I guess is appropriate for valentine's day, but not really for Superbowl Sunday, which is supposedly an occasion for manliness. I guess you could easily add and layer food coloring for the colors of your favorite teams.

Next snow booze experiment: TEQUILA.

Cheap Ass Wine Tasting!

So last night I gathered together some of my closest friends and had a Cheap Ass Wine Tasting!

It was a blind tasting, which means we got to feel especially classy drinking out of paper bags and solo cups that BeerSnob stole from his roomie. The goal of the event was to have everyone bring an under 15-dollar bottle of wine, blind taste them, and when they are revealed we could be all "oh shit! this was delicious and now I know what to buy!" I described it at the time as "when you want to get crunk... classily."

The real class was provided by DesignBroad (no I couldn't think of a better nickname hon it is eight AM and I am hungover), who knows a crapton more about tasting wine than I do. The crunkness was brought most handily by Mr. The Bhomb, who brought his own infusions. His strawberry chocolate smelled amazing and tasted really good, though the cinnamon vanilla SEARED MY MOUTH LIKE THE FIERY WRATH OF GOD.

The apartment was provided by BeerSnob, who also provided a snobby beer for us to try. Rounding off our cast of characters was The Irish, Wellington TNT, and The Crazy. The Crazy's boyfriend, Nerdling 5000, was unable to join us because he was doing something unspeakably nerdy at the time.

So I numbered the bags of wine pretty much at random, but this is what we ended up with, more or less in the order that we drank it. I'm gonna start with

THREE PHILOSOPHERS

 

Apparently it's a "Belgian Quad flavored with cherries." Only BeerSnob was able to detect any cherry in this, everyone else was distracted by the literal pockets of yeast that were floating in it. I don't know about you, but I find it rather distressing when I feel like I should have baleen to help drink a beer.

Our first wine of the night was the intensely disappointing and actually kind of creepy STRAWBERRY SPLENDOR

 

This poured BROWN. Not red. BROWN. Like we're talking dried blood brown. It smelled like jam, it tasted like jam. DesignBroad claimed that it tasted like her dad's homemade strawberry jam, which is far more complimentary than this crap deserved. It tasted fake and overly sweet and seriously gross. We thought that it *might* be an okay gluhwein or mulled wine, but it was so sickly no one but Wellington TNT would finish their tiny pour. After revealing the bottle, we realized that it had "natural flavors added." That's EXACTLY what I want in a wine, eeeeyup!

Moving on from the grossness was wine number two!

MARQUES DE CACERES WHITE RIOJA

 

 Pretty much everyone liked this, which surprised a few of the people who normally only like reds. It's very citric and very mild. It's dry but not tannic, which The Crazy described as "watery." It's a very easy drinking wine, but not in a bad way. Design Broad thought that it was a very young Chardonnay, "like, Dumbo rides at DisneyWorld young." Turns out that it was some Spanish estate grape that I, in my inebriation, failed to write down. GO ME!

337 Cabernet Sauvignon

The Irish bought this wine entirely based on it looking cool, and it's hard to deny that it looks cool. It smelled extremely sweet with an overlay of alcohol fumes that I've come to associate with Cabernet Sauvignon. There was a distinct fruit flavor, like tart blackberries or black raspberries, and a hint of vanilla that was throwing me off completely. It was one of those wines that smells nothing like the way it tastes. It smelled harsh, but it was pretty mellow. I'm not overly fond of Cabernets, I don't like that alcohol smell, but this was pretty alright.

REDTREE PINOT NOIR

This smelled a little peppery and a lot sweet. It was a very clear red and had a very mild taste. It was extremely easy drinking, probably too easy. There was almost no aftertaste, which The Irish liked, but it made it very hard to determine what flavors besides "red fruit" were going on in there. It was Pinot Noir with training wheels on, and would serve as a passable introduction to red wine, or something to serve to people who don't normally drink wine but want to be seen drinking it for some reason.

MARQUES DE CACERES ROSE RIOJA

I've reviewed this one before! It was my contribution, along with the white from the same winery, and I loves it. DesignBroad had the typical reaction of someone who has never had a good European dry rose. When people see rose they think "white zinfandel from california fruit bomb sugar 'splosion." This stuff, as I've said before, is buttery, smooth, and dry with a nicely balanced fruit flavor. I have bought it before for 15 bucks a bottle, but found it at a more different liquor store (Jason's on Rt 40 for y'all in the EC) for 9.95. I CAN DIG IT!

Last, and probably least, is the BOHEMIAN HIGHWAY  CALIFORNIA CHARDONNAY

 

 It's got a great label, I've got to say. Sadly the wine tastes as green as the bottle, and by that I mean it is sauerkraut wine. It seriously tasted like sprouts with sugar on top. It was sickly. My fondness for sauerkraut notwithstanding, this wine needed to go down the drain.

So there you have it! We liked the Marques de Caceres and the 337, and I'd recommend the RedTree if you have a friend who refuses to drink wine. Avoid Goose Watch and Bohemian Highway at all costs, which should not be hard, because all of the wines above were less than ten dollars. Save your wallet: drink cheap wine!