Travel pix & Reading Lists

Marzemino

polynesiapink — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:13:32 +0000

Seeing as I haven’t posted anything about wine yet I thought I should start with one of my favourites, Marzemino.

As I mentioned I really love this wine, it’s flavourful and very smooth. Apparently it was also one of Mozart’s favourites. Here’s a little snippet on that: Factoid: In his opera Don Giovanni, Mozart repeatedly mentions Marzemino: “Pour the wine, excellent Marzemino.” Rovereto, the second town in Trentino, and a center of Marzemino growing, hosted Mozart and his father Leopold on many occasions. On 26 December 1769, the thirteen-year-old Wolfgang held his first public concert in Italy, in the Church of S. Marco, Rovereto, before a great crowd fascinated by so young a genius. Today, the town holds a Mozart festival in memory of the musician who helped put it on the map, from: http://www.eamonn.com/2005/05/marzemino.htm. Not being a wine connoisseur I was happy to come across this article written about Marzemino that describes it very well. So here’s part of a review on the famous wine from http://terroir.winelibrary.com/2007/02/24/marzemino-mozarts-favorite/. A Marzemino is not a a heavy wine, but it is very flavorful, “spunky” even. It’s color tends to a bright purple color rather than the red or brick tones of many other wines. Marzemino is more acidic than tannic in character with a medium weight body, but with a very good intensity. Marzemino often is said to smell of wild berries, violets, and asian plums.

The latest DNA profiling has shown the variety to be a relative of its Trentino brethren LAGREIN and TEROLDEGO (profiles pending!) which nearly proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that the variety is native to northeastern Italy. As mentioned above, most Marzemino is bottled as a varietal (single grape variety) wine, so the name “Marzemino” nearly always appears on the label, though in the Garda Rosso DOC, Marzemino always plays an important role in the blend, it rarely appears on the label.

Marzemino’s “claim to fame” (if it can be said to be famous in ANY way) is that it was said to be Mozart’s favorite wine grape. So much so that Don Giovanni’s librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, wrote the name of the wine into the opera – I believe the Don himself sings something to the effect of “…pour the wine, an excellent Marzemino” or something similar…

Marzemino pairs very well with big-flavored medium to soft paste cheeses, stewed chicken and rabbit, grilled pork dishes, and any dish containing mushrooms.

My concluding comment on the wine is that I love it with just about anything and highly recommend it, so if you’re ever in the Trentino area, or in Northern Italy ( I lived in Milan and found it very easily) you should definitely check it out. Drink and enjoy )

A Sunset from Spain

polynesiapink — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 05:14:21 +0000

Here’s one of my favorite pictures of the sky in Andalucia. The sunsets there are just gorgeous, the colors really are like this, in fact I didn’t do anything to the picture, it’s exactly as it was!!! I wish I was there now instead of here where it’s been overcast if not raining every other day almost the entire summer, yikes!!!

Red sky over Malaga

Regarding food

polynesiapink — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 03:25:19 +0000

Like usual I can never seem to find time to do things the way I’d like to, and complicating matters is the fact that my pictures, recipes, and most other things are still in storage boxes due to our move from Europe back to North America. I’m hopeful though that very soon I’ll have some postings up related to food, recipes (especially for Italian dishes), and other topics related to gastronomy and wine. In the meantime for a wholesome approach to food and wine, here’s a good place to start: www.slowfood.com.

My Reading List

polynesiapink — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 02:20:39 +0000

Ok, so here’s my first posting. I have a mess of books I want to read (more than 200 right now) so I’m going to start listing them here on the blog. Of course, I can’t start the list without first recommending Strange Tribe, a family memoir by John Hemingway. It’s a great book that deals with issues of sexual ambiguity, cross-dressing, bipolar disease and the father/son relationship in the Hemingway family. However, being married to John I realize I might be considered biased but honestly I’m not, if I didn’t like his book I just wouldn’t mention it. It’s a compelling read and seeing as the book’s received excellent reviews from other readers, I’ll just add links to those instead of writing one myself. So, here are two of them for starters: Review from St. Petersburg\’s Times,and hemtribe.htm.

I’ll post my list of books and if anyone has read any of them I’d be glad to hear whatever comments you might have. Other things I’ll be writing about or posting pictures of are tidbits on pottery, travels and food.

Got to get my list ready now.

Pamplona, Spain.

polynesiapink — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 17:17:20 +0000

An afternoon corrida from the Fiesta of San Fermin this year.

Cows on the beach in Spain

polynesiapink — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 01:28:32 +0000

The List

polynesiapink — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 22:41:51 +0000

So, here’s my list so far, in no particular order…

1. The Glass Wall by Jeanette Wells

2. Greatness: Who makes history & why by Dean Simonton

3. The 7 daughters of Eve

4. The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel by Joel Henry

5. Touched with Fire: Manic-depression illness & the artistic temperament by Kay Jamison

6. Zoot Suit Murders (book on LA gangs)

7. Outlaw Journalist: The life and times of S. Hunter Thompson by William McKeen

8. Dylan Thomas: the Biography

9. Lillian Hellman: A life with Foxes

10. D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider

11. Quicksands by Sybille Bedford

12. James Ellroy: American Tabloid

13. Cooked and Raw by Claude Levi

14. Wind Horse Woman by Lyn Andrews

15. Zelda Fitzgerald, HerVoice in Paradise by Sally Cline March 2004

16. Bobbed Hair & Bathtub Gin: Writers running wild in the ’20′s by Marion Meade in 2004

17. African Game Trails by Theodore Roosevelt 1893

19. A heart-breaking work of staggering genius by Dave Eggers

20. Lawrence of Arabia & American Culture: The making of a Transatlantic Legend by Joel C. Hodson

21. Evolution of the Sex Problem: American narratives during the eclipse of Darwinism by Brent Brender

22. Hemingway a Literary Life by Linda Wagner Martin 2007

23. Almost a girl: Male writers & female identification by Alan Williamson

24. Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern U.S. 1180-1980 by Loren Daniel Glass

25. Modern Primitives: Race & Language in Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway and Zora Neale Hurston by Susanna Pavloska

26. Shadow Lovers: The last affairs of H. G. Wells by Andrea Lyn

27. The Tibetan Book of the Dead

28. Animals in Translation: Using the mysteries of autism to decode animal behavior

29. The Myth of Right Hemisphere Creativity by T. Hines

30. Byron: A Biography (relation study between manic-depression illness & the artistic temperament) by Leslie A. Marchand Knof 1957

31. King Bongo (Havana in the 1950′s) 2003

32. Thomas Sanchez Rabbit Boss (on the destruction of native Calif. cultures)

33. Steven Roger Fischer’s book on brief history of animal language

34. The Second Brain by D. Gershon

35. Creative Visualization by Ronald Shone

36. Sacred Journey of the Peace Warrior by Dan Millman

37. The Man who would be Queen: The Science of gender-bending & transsexualism by J. Michael Bailey

38. Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

39. The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert burton

40. The rise of Theodore Roosevelt

Quote of the day

polynesiapink — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 18:17:19 +0000

“Thank you whoever you are I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
T. Williams

Atlantic coast in Acquitaine, France

polynesiapink — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 22:37:21 +0000

Seeing as this blog is also about travels I had to put a picture of one of my trips!!! So here’s one of the promenade in Soulac-sur-Mer, south of Royan, on the Atlantic coast in France, close to where I lived for a couple of months.