It’s either really early or really late for Halloween – take your choice – but when I saw that a guy named Len was offering to draw custom monsters based on a title of your choosing on his website Monsterbymail.com, I knew I had to get one.
So I chose “Pinot Swilling Parker Zombies From Hell!” naturally.
I’d actually hoped for a fleet of zombies slavishly following their master, who I hadn’t pictured as a zombie himself – more of a mad scientist type, but Len decided to go ahead and draw Parker as a zombie. Artistic license I guess.
Anyway I’m still stoked on the picture and I even had Len make a time lapse video of himself drawing Zombie Parker. Darn good likeness!
Unfortunately due to high demand Len has had to shut down Monster By Mail temporarily, but he promises to reopen for orders soon. You can get more Monster By Mail details here.
randy
2 years ago
What a joke…
Here in California, Pinot Noir has been elevated to a cult, superstar status with every producer proclaiming their love and respect for the variety… Let me offer a different perspective. Being a Zin producer in a cool climate region, I have the opportunity to hang out and work along side various Pinot growers and producers. In 2005, I assisted in harvesting a friends Pinot block for a very well-known producer who regularly scores 92-95 “points” in the Spectator and Parker for this single-vineyard designate. As the sugars rose from ripe to very ripe to heavily dimpled to eventual shrivel, the winery kept telling the grower, “oh it’s not ready- the mature flavor profiles aren’t there yet”, or “there’s no room in the tanks” and other various BS comments. Finally, at a mere 26.4 brix, we pulled off the totally decimated fruit, brown rachis and all and brought it to the winery’s crush pad, only to be greeted with a water hose and 50-LB bad of tartaric acid… true story. I was dumbfounded to witness the “frankenstienization” of this once beautiful lot of fruit (about 18 days prior to picking).
What pushed me over the edge was when this wine was recently released… What a tweaked, manipulated, engineered version of Pinot… It was like a machine… This was not Pinot Noir. The viscosity was absurd, the alcohol found itself in the convenient “14.1%”- which really means 14.8-15%, the fruit profile was somewhere between flat cherry cola and macerated bowl of overly ripe cooked stewed fruit. Of course it received high scores.
I for one will be banning ALL Pinot Noirs over 14%. Period. To all those growers, you are getting screwed out of 20-25% weight ($), and for all the producers who proclaim their love for the variety and choose to be a number chaser (Speculator and Parker) over a Pinot Purist, WE HAVE YOUR NUMBER!!!
BAN ALL PINOTS OVER 14%!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!