Oh, the unending pretenses of wine, so vast that I can know nothing about it, but all the same I love drinking the good stuff. I can tell the difference. Anyone can. And everyone's right.

Since Mrs. Ditchman and I are wine enthusiasts (I'm more of a wine drinking enthusiast), we spent some of our anniversary doing some hoity-toity wine-tasting. Where, might you ask? Well since the private jet was being washed, we decided we'd head out to beautiful Temecula Wine Country. It's local. Step out of our house and 40 minutes later you're sipping the finest White Zinfandel you've ever experienced.

Or White Cabernet. Or White Merlot. Such is the rollicking uniqueness that are the Temecula wines, considered to be part of the "South Coast" region of California wines. If you are a believer in the old adage "friends don't let friends drink white zin," then you may be too snobby to appreciate Temecula wines. I won't hold it against you. On the other hand, if you're like me and are willing to try any wine just to say you did, increasing your breadth of knowledge and frame of reference, THEN BY GOD DRINK UP! Temecula Wine Country. Tis a silly place.

How silly? Sufficiently silly. Still worth it, however. Playing it safe, we hit three wineries. First up: Wilson Creek Winery. Home of that perennial Costco favorite, that bottled hit I'm sure you've heard of: Almond Champagne. How does it taste? Well, almondy. What kind of place is it? Well, why do you have to ask? It's like Fantasyland for adults who aren't interested in the details of fine craftsmanship. It's like wandering through a theme park with gum on the bottom of your shoe. It's twelve dollars for six tastings. They give you a ticket and tear off a bit after each taste, like a carnival. There are a million people, all clamoring for the "White Cabernet" which the server, whose knowledge of the wine was summed up with "It's the best one," relayed the information to you with such uninterested displeasure at having to be bothered to work on a Sunday, that you could just tell he'd be drinking a bottle of it when he got home later. In a tumbler. On ice. With Sprite.

They also served a "chocolate port" named "Decadencia," and if by "decadent" you mean "reflecting a state of moral or cultural decline" then, yes. Seriously. It tasted like they bottled the champagne bar spittoon after they dipped it in the days-old chocolate fountain out back in the dirty gazebo. I don't mean to be harsh, this is actually what it tasted like. To me. Just then, I observed a woman with two brimming glasses of the cocoa drool doing the hands-full-and-backing-out-the-door thing. "We must be snobs," Mrs. Ditchman leaned over and whispered, smile on her face, radiant in the light coming through the tinted glass of the tasting room on our anniversary. "WHAT?" I asked. I couldn't hear above the crowd.

So we left. Every wine country has that one winery where everyone goes. It's like a winery hub. All the other "serious" winemakers resent it, I'm sure, but it's that one winery, with their cheap, grapey fluke with the funny name that made a name for itself, that draws folks in. I always go to that place. I figure the wine is just going to get better from there.

Then we went to a place called Leonesse Cellars. Why did we choose Leonesse? Because it was on the free map provided by the Chamber of Commerce. Because we were driving by. Because they had a nice patio cover out in the vineyard. Their hit is the White Merlot. "No one else makes one!" the pourer proclaimed proudly, not understanding that no one makes "Alpaca Manure Wine" either and perhaps there's a reason. How was it? Well, it was better than the white cab we had at the last place. Anyway, there did happen to be a red cab on the tasting list that elicited some interest in the nose of my wife, but it was something of a stretch. (It would have had to age to the point where the bottle itself became vintage glass.) So we laughed our way out to the parking lot, snobs that we are.

I was becoming disappointed. I had held out hope, giving the Temecula Wine Country the benefit of the doubt. Surely there was some good wine in the region, it's just been overlooked! Why, it's a tough business when you've got Napa snubbing you and Paso Robles and Santa Barbara and their Sideways pop-viticulture overpowering your southland mystique. I really wanted to find a nice Temecula wine that I could take to my wine-drinking friends and say, "Oh, you've just got to try this terrific Temecula wine!" and then get laughed out of the room, where I could enjoy its secret goodness all to myself.

In the car, we looked at the map again. There are about two dozen wineries in the region. (Fourteen of them are award-winning!) Where you can spend an entire weekend touring the byways of Napa or Sonoma, you can drive around Temecula wine country in a half hour. The locals here would have you drive slow through their suburb, taking in the sights and sounds of wine country, enjoying the early-in-the-season ripening grapes and the misty mornings that precede the long, dry summers that are so perfect for certain Rhone varietals. Whatever. Don't blink or you'll miss it.

We headed down the highway. I was determined to try one more and I asked Mrs. Ditchman to pick. She mentioned the one we had just passed, as in, "How about that one -let's get this over with." I pulled over and looked at the map. My wife said, "No really. Let's just try it." Many wineries are all about luring you off the road with their irresistible architecture. They build fantastic stone walls with ornate, wrought-iron gates, reminiscent of beautiful Tuscany, or what you suppose beautiful Tuscany might look like. They have impressive signage. They put the tasting room up on a hill, carving a road right through the middle of the precious vineyard, winding up to a landscape flooded with rosemary and sage, roses and lavender. You like the wine already!

So here we had passed a winery that was a steel warehouse, with a vinyl banner out front that read "Cougar". We had strayed off the Temecula Wine Country main strip, if there is one, and found ourselves in the region's backside. I said, "Well, if I was going to make a wine in Temecula, it wouldn't be on this lame map. And it would be off the beaten path." And since it wasn't on the map, Mrs. Ditchman said, "Cougar it is, then" and we turned the car around and headed up to the square, non-descript building -which looked semi-abandoned without any limos, buses or trolleys out in front of it. We parked in the gravel, noticing the two public Port-A-Johns. "Oh, this place looks promising!" Mrs. Ditchman said in all seriousness, which then had us in tears, laughing as we got out of the car because it's typical of us. "No, really! It looks like it's right up our alley!" And we tried to wipe the embarrassing smiles off our faces as we pulled the metal door open and walked in. Alone.


Wine's a funny thing. When you go to the store and you want to try something new, what do you do? Look at the label? Read the description? What moves you to buy it? If a winery is spending a lot of time on a brilliant label design and a spectacular Venetian plaster in the tasting room, are they not trying to distract you from something? So I don't trust labels, appearances, or proverbial book covers. Oh sure, some of the best wines have wonderful labels and lavish winery grounds, but you're paying for it at $50-$90 a cork. I guess you can't blame a winery for dressing up like success, but really, wine is like this: you only know by tasting it. If you have a friend you trust whose taste is similar to yours, it helps. Otherwise, wine is for the blind.

So we found it, the gem of Temecula. The wine was terrific. We weren't drunk. The winemaker came out and met us. He apologized for the bathrooms. He was the only person we had met all day who knew what he was talking about. There were no ticket stubs to tear off. He was most proud of the Sangiovese, but they make a "pink" wine to appeal to the Temecula crowd. (It was the best pink wine we had all day, or, well, ever.) He wants to stick with the Italian varietals and described several grapes that are rare on this side of the world, but that they like to play with -Cortese, Fiano di Avellino, and Greco di Tufo. (They import the grapes from Baja while they're waiting for U.S. customs to allow the vines to be grown here.) I was also impressed with the Arneis and the Vermentino, which I'd never had before. Still, the Sangiovese was the favorite, so we bought a bottle. (We wanted to be sure it actually was good, and we'll try it later, on some day when its worth can be better considered.) Also, we pet their winery dogs.

So Temecula Wine Country is not a total waste of time, and you're just going to have to take our word for it until you brave the region yourself. And it's called Cougar, if you're wondering. They've only been around for a few years. They don't have any pictures on their website. They're still working on the place, but they're no dummies: they're going to make it look like a beautiful Tuscan Villa. We saw the plans.


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Achh. No time to blog or do anything today, other than run, run, run forever. I won't go into it. My wife made me.

MY WIFE, MY BEAUTIFUL WIFE! I will say we had a sweet anniversary yesterday, babysitter and all. We counted it as the ninth time we've ever gone out without the kids (in three years.) Actually, I just thought of another time... Okay, ten. (And that includes the salsa lessons.) It's not the way we planned it when we had kids, but you know, kids have a way of messing up whatever plans you had for your life. (Like: organize, achieve, declutter, etc.)

The pic I posted on Sunday (below) I just love. There we are walking down the aisle just moments after being wed, me shaking hands with the winemaker, like, I'll be in touch, man. No, seriously. I'm going to be needing you later.


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"The highest happiness on earth is marriage." -William Lyon Phelps





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And last night's dream was just dumb nonsense. Like a stuck channel selecting button on an old remote. I guess it's been a long week.

Went to a new brewery yesterday! Breakwater Brewing Co. in the new, revitalized downtown Oceanside. Okay, so the city isn't done revitalizing itself. Neither am I, but a brewery always helps. I saw it going in about a year ago and thought, of course, that's what this fair city needs! Finally made it down there yesterday, stopping in after going to the dump, and which I've been in the habit of doing every Thursday of late. Anyway, I walked in and was immediately disappointed in the layout of the place. It's not the glamorous temple dedicated to hops and barley, with a shrine of holy water nearer the taproom to thee. That's the way Gordon Biersch makes them, but rather this was little more than a pizza joint with cheap carpentry and a formica bartop. Ordered some beer anyway. It was awesome.

No, really. The beer is good. I've been to enough breweries that I can tell when the brewmaster is actually spending some time in there experimenting and learning. People don't realize that Karl Straus and BJ's and all those other odd microbrews that restaurants slap their name on for show are all the same dumb recipe made with tap water and surplus malt and little generic packets of yeast. I can't abide those places. So, Breakwater is pretty good. It's no Lost Abbey, but it's drinkable. And the bartender was friendly. Always: the best beer in the world is easily ruined by an inattentive, ill-mannered bartender. Bums me out.

Lost Abbey has kind of a depressed tasting room too, to be sure. It's not bad, given that you're in a factory warehouse, but where Oceanside Ale Works in a similar venue has a sunny and cheerful air about it, Lost Abbey is a little dark, a little dirtier, and hard to find. Like a lost abbey, I imagine. Only I suspect an actual abbey would be tidy to a fault.

Oh, what does it really matter if the beer is good, eh? I've actually been thinking about getting back to brewing my own beer. Years ago we made more than a few splendid batches, and had a grand time doing it. Each batch cost about ten bucks and would make over a hundred beers. The stuff wasn't half bad, honestly, and no more difficult than making bread -it's basically the same ingredients, you know. The hard part was managing all the damn bottles. First you have to drink a hundred beers (no problem) and save the bottles, and then you have to bottle and cap them one at a time, making sure you have enough caps on hand (and a working capping tool.) Then there's the problem of storing a hundred bottles of beer in the fridge, which is easy when you're a bachelor, impossible when you're living in the suburbs with your non-beer-loving brood. So I was thinking the solution would be to distill it to a keg and purchase a kegerator, for conditioning. I'll have to look into it.

And I'm looking for financiers. Invest some cash and you can have as much as you can drink and we'll name the first batch after you. It'll be a swell party.

Have a marvelous weekend. Mrs Ditchman and I were wed 6 years ago, Sunday. I may just take her out for a beer. She deserves it.




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So last night's dream is private. It was of the kind that would cause embarrassment and one to suffer accusation. Ever have a dream like that? Can you be blamed for it? I believe it was in some Disney movie where they said "a dream is a wish your heart makes when you're fast asleep". This can't be true. I've had some dreams that make my heart seem like rude, black chaff.

Hey look! There's one!


It's a shooting star, just sitting there in the desert. I presume they took the picture before they went over and plucked it off the landscape to deliver to the research institution. (It's full of tiny diamonds, you know.)

The article is here. Oh, science. Aren't shooting stars in the nighttime sky just the fleeting dreams of children? And those meteorites that land the ones that come true?

No.

There's a ton of end-of-the-world stuff in the news today. I was going to filter it all through here but... let me put it this way: Mrs. Ditchman said that if The End is coming, she didn't want to know about it. She's right. Let's ditch the character arc of the Apocalypse and just bring it on. I'm too busy to worry about it.

But I love that picture of the shooting star just sitting there in the desert. Some part of me wishes they had just left it there.


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Well, I WAS WRONG. I admit it. Shows you what I know.

Steve Wozniak made it to the third round of Dancing With The Once-Were-Household-Names. Somehow it defied all the rules of logic and physics and dance hall protocol, but he squeaked through. He had the lowest score delivered by the judges since Season 2 (we're currently suffering through Season 8) and still the fans iPhoned in their votes and put him over the top. So he shall return, and I, unfortunately, will watch.

I had to look up which season we were in, actually. This poor bastage, Tom Conroy, had to do a whole write-up on last night's show. Do the guy a favor and read it. He's been locked up in Guantanamo for over a year and he's obviously being tortured. Where's the Human Rights Commission when you need them?

Denise Richards and Holly Madison, the two models whose dance moves are rivaled only by unfolding wooden deck chairs, fought it out to the bitter end. And though the judges favored Richards' improvement over Madison's top-heavy cleavage, Richards was the one who got voted off by the fans. Sorry. Sorry.

I know this information is important to you, which is why I'm sharing it. Look, there's just nothing else on Tuesday nights, and I can't argue another show out of my wife anyway. Too tired to go upstairs and commit to bed, I submit to the show. It's moderately entertaining schlock like this that makes things like the heretofore unnoticed tunnel from the river to the White House basement so profound.

I still can't get over the guys prancing around, intently diminishing their masculinity with all-out fervor. The ladies, on the other hand, are nice to look at, but it takes a certain amount of courage for the men to shake their tail feathers. Only Gene Kelly could dance and make it look manly, if you ask me. And he, only barely. (The man was something of a god. Perhaps it was that unapologetic smile of his.)

Also, it should be noted, there's this guy. Not manly, per se, but he's certainly having a heckuva good time.

But who doesn't like dancing? I mean, actually doing it? Okay, don't answer. I admit that since Mrs. Ditchman and I took salsa lessons I have a new appreciation for it. The lessons ended a few weeks ago, and we were honestly just beginning to get the hang of it (well, okay, me. Mrs. Ditchman had it down from Day 1.) I was eager to watch DWTS to see their salsa moves, only to find that whatever it was they were doing, it was nothing like the traditional (and by comparison, bland) salsa that we had learned. Oh well. If we ever end up in Havana, we now know the moves.

I grew up with my mom, who was a dancer, watching every Hollywood musical ever created by man. I appreciate all those classics and their joyful, cheerful, romantic energy. Some of those old movies you come out of with a skip in your step and you find yourself spinning around lampposts all the way to the parking lot. They don't make them like that anymore. They try, as in Chicago and Moulin Rouge, but both those flicks were so thoroughly lacking in the traditional Fred Astair, Gene Kelly, and Julie Andrews elegance and innocence that they missed the point entirely. (My mom loved them too, though.)

Seriously. Fall in love and wave on the cab. Dance home in the rain.

It can't be resisted.




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I'm a sissy. My three-year-old daughter called me a "sissy" this morning. I don't know where she got the word, probably from a book, those tools of the devil! Maybe we should get her off those infernal things and back in front of the soul-numbing boob tube where she belongs.

She called me a sissy because at 6AM she kept pushing the little button on the little stuffed Easter bunny that sends it into a screeching, ear-wagging "song" of sorts. It drives me nutz, which she loves. "No! Nooooo! Make it stop!" I scream, as I thrust my head between the couch pillows. She thinks that's hilarious and squeals with delight every time, pushing the button over and over AND OVER... I love hearing her squeal and laugh like that, and maybe I am a sissy for it, but she can make that stuffed robot screech all day long if it keeps her laughing.

The Easter box is out of the attic, which is where the infernal singing robot-thing came from. It sits in that crate up in the rafters with its lifeless eyes, staring dead ahead at the other fluffy robots until the proper holiday rolls around and out it comes, happy as ever, wiggling its ears and bellowing out its dumb Easter song. In the Christmas box are similar toys: dancing penguins singing "Jingle Bell Rock", a little Teddy bear that reads The Night Before Christmas, and others. My sister has a six-foot tall Santa that has an entire repertoire. Hit the button and he'll sing and dance and ho-ho-ho for you all night. Pretty soon you just want to punch him right in the sugar plums.

It's my sister who sends us these things, and if it wasn't for the big Santa in her own living room I'd say she was trying to torture us. The book-reading Teddy creeps me out the most because it's just so real! (Ahh, that's what the world needs: robots that will do the reading for us.) I guess I prefer my household robots to be disconnected, faceless aliens, with little more than simple utilitarian qualities. (Hey robot! Get me a beer and vacuum the floor! Not light beer, you metal-minded moron -ALE!)

On the news this morning was this item, which I linked here months ago. Put guns on that thing and it will frighten the enemy back into the Stone Age, I imagine. For that matter, this would scare the enemy, too. But robot supermodels? Will never happen. Why? No sex appeal. Not yet anyway. And if you think there aren't a bunch of horny, geeky scientists out there in some Silicon Valley back alley working on robot prostitutes, you don't know how the world works. Weird.

What comes after the Information Age? The Robot Age, of course. We're almost there. Soon as they come up with a viable, sustainable power source, the world will change overnight. Here's another one: 5-foot-long robotic fish are currently patrolling the Mediterranean, looking for clues about the environment. Amazing.

And then things will really get spooky. I'm thinking of Super-Toys Last All Summer Long, the heartbreaking short story from the 60s by Brian Aldiss. (You can read it here in five minutes. I suggest you print it out on real paper.) It's heartbreaking because of the neutralizing of humanity that seems to accompany the arrival of robots. It's no coincidence that as the Information Age twitters us all apart, there will be people who will look to robots for companionship. I mean, real people are just so unreliable and problematic and distant, you know?

It could all just as well be called the "Artificial Age" with the "books" on screens and talking, singing toys taking the place of friends and artificial flavorings and artificial colorings and Alumawoods. I'm not sure they will ever be able to make a robot squeal and giggle believably. Or a robot with growing, silky hair and warm, soft skin, and alluring, finely-detailed eyes that can convey a mood with a millimeter-sized flick. Or even a robot with an amazing juvenile sense to joke that I'm a sissy.

Perhaps I am an old sissy, because I will reject the artificial people when they come knocking.




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