Vinifico! The Original Vancouver Wine Blog

This one is definitely my wine of the week. Gorgeous, succulent fruit with an edge of smoke and brown sugar. It’s a great one for a cold night… or any night, for that matter – $24.90 at the LDB.

… and to all a GOOD night:
Merry Christmas From TBWA\Vancouver

The best of the holidays. Kudos.

I don’t care what any wine snobs out there may think, I like this one – the non-vintage Civ & Civ Lambrusco di Modena. It’s a fruity, refreshing, low-alcohol red sparkler from Modena, Italy that makes for a tasty sipper when you get home from Christmas shopping.

A manager of a wine store I used to ‘work’ at turned me onto this one (thanks Jeff). You can grab it here in BC for $9.99. With all the money we tend to spend at this time of the year, a tasty wine at that price is a welcome find.

I just got back from dropping some cash at Uppercut’s Christmas Warehouse/Sample Sale. Very cool men’s clothing. Go check it out… and definitely keep an eye out for their clothes in stores around town.

You can see some of their stuff online at Revolve Clothing.

I thought I’d get in the holiday spirit by joining the hordes who put together lists of their favourites for the year… Seeing as I’m a music freak, that’ll be the focus of my first list.

My top 5 albums of 2005 (in no particular order…):

1. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
2. Broken Social Scene – Broken Social Scene
3. LCD Soundsystem – LCD Soundsystem
4. Bloc Party – Silent Alarm
5. Arcade Fire – Funeral

I Know… I know… there are geeks out there who might point out that Arcade Fire’s album came out late last year, but I really listened to it this year. Great stuff that puts an exclamation on ‘Canada is cool!’.

Honourable mention goes out to Takk… by Sigur Ros, Aha Shake Heartbreak by Kings Of Leon, Alligator by The National, Plans by Death Cab For Cutie, Picaresque by The Decemberists, Howl by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Demon Days by Gorillaz, Harmonies for the Haunted by Stellastarr*, You Could Have It So Much Better by Franz Ferdinand, Witching Hour by Ladytron, Worlds Apart by And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead…, Apologies to the Queen Mary by Wolf Parade and Some Cities by Doves… Hell check them all out. They’re all great albums.

Pitchfork is a great site to check for album reviews and music-related articles… They’ve got a hilarious article up now: The Worst Record Covers of All Time. ‘Nuff said. Go check it out.

One of the very useful things that has emerged out there on the Internets for geeks and regular folks alike is the “bookmarklet” or “favelet“. This refers to what are are generally snippets of JavaScript code that perform a specific task… some resize your browser window to a specified height/width, some validate a page’s code and then there’s the one from the folks over at slayeroffice whose purpose is the subject of this post »» Drag this to your toolbar – Mouseover DOM Inspector v2.0.2.

Once added to your bookmarks toolbar, all you have to do is click the link while on any page and move your mouse over a page’s elements. The favelet displays all the attributes, dimensons and all the child & parent elements of that section of code. TOTAL geek stuff, but very useful.

Hit “Esc” to stop the coding goodness.

At this point, the clear winner of the value wine of the month is one I picked up purely by chance… The 2004 Gnarly Head Old Vine Zin. I saw the label and am by nature drawn to any Zinfandel with “Old Vines” anywhere on the label. Generally this means more concentrated and deeper flavours for the wine. This wine is made from 80 year-old vines from the Lodi wine region in California and does nothing to change my mind.

I am an avid Zin fan and for $20 (CDN) this one rocks. It needs a bit to open up, but after at least 1/2 hour it has a great nose… full of the briar and spice often found in more expensive Zins. In the mouth it backs up that spice and adds pepper, a tonne of berries, a good tannic backbone and what is really more than decent structure for the money. Bloody good for $20.

Now here’s a timely idea: iPod Gym. Basically, it’s a bunch of downloadable instructional exercise videos that will play on the video iPod. Pretty cool idea… they even have a bunch of exercises for the Swiss ball I bought a while ago that I’ve been using as a computer chair. Cool.