Speaking Of Old Things...

Off the top of my head (an unfortunate metaphor, perhaps, in context of anything even vaguely connected to Paris...) the world's most expensive wine is the Royal Tokaji 2008 vintage. At $40,000 a 1.5 liter bottle.

Once again we have Louis XIV 'the Sun King' implicated in another wine legend, since he did in fact call the Hungarian Tokaji 'the wine of kings and the king of wines.'

I have had different editions of Royal Tokaji, not the new highest-priced one, and the brand and name never went for such elevated prices (at least not in relatively recent times) prior to a decided effort by the winemakers to deliberately re-establish the wine at the very top of the world's clearly and widely esteemed styles and names.

I mean they are entitled to position the wine there - it is certainly good enough.

But there are a number of 'oldest, best-est,' and 'most expensive-est' wines, especially when it comes to the matter of Napoleon cognac.

We have spoken of the Remy Martin Louis XIII not long ago, and this contains an amount of 100-year old authentic Napoleon liquors in the total blend. We are talking $35,000 a bottle there. And there are those auction house show-stoppers that claim the Guinness Record now and then for 'the most expensive' or 'the oldest' bottle ever, or ever found...

You have to be careful though and not equate apples with oranges because sometimes the old bottles are close to a gallon in size/quantity of liquor!! When cut back to the same volumes, per volume, it is the Royal Tokaji that is the most expensive.

Cuvee Leonie Cognac - oldest, most expensive individual bottles...

I can tell you about another brand of though - Seppeltsfield in Australia. This is consistently rated 100/100 by a large number of world-famous wine experts.

You can easily buy a Seppeltsfield 100-year old Para Port wine any day, for about $150 for around 700 ml., and around $35 for a 'Grand Tawny' Seppeltsfield and maybe $500 for the

major 'Vintage Tawny.'

Now, it's worth remembering that these Port wines - virtually all Port wines as far as I know - contain brandy or cognac in them that stops the continuing fermentation of the grape juice, thereby preserving the freshness and some of the acidity.

So... ...if you buy a Seppeltsfield 100-year old Port, it will contain 100-year old brandy or cognac in it.

What's the difference in taste and taste experience? The Seppeltfield Tawny is much more tart than you would suppose, given it is a Port wine - which is meant to be very sweet. It is of course, sweet but it is also complex with all kinds of other flavors that come through.

The 100-year old Vintage is even more complex with slightly less of a tart profile. 

With either of them, you get a real sense of antiquity and yet also esoteric and complex beauty. They are highly pleasurable experiences, either wine.

And I am sure so is the Royal Tokaji. I wouldn't turn one away from the door.

LOL ...Not saying anything!

Chef, We Burnt The Steak

Was posted on Sunday, 17 March:


Actually I hesitated to even approach what I need to talk about, because it was with a heavy heart and much misgiving that I was about to talk about certain things claimed to be 'in short supply' but which really are not. You see, if I talk about them, there is a chance that picture will change about their pricing and so on, and I'll readily admit I have an interest in exploiting lies people tell, if I happen to know they are lies.

Chef - we burnt the steak!

I don't really go around with this sense of moral duty to 'loudly proclaim the truth in the market square...' LOL

Now d'you see what I mean? I don't wish to save the people from anything. Not all of them, anyway. But I do wish to preserve the great ideas and technologies and texts and things like that, in case of flood. Although they do say 'the fire next time.'

Are we here yet?

We're here.

Sunday, 17 March 2019

Keep The Stack Of Books Tight Under Your Arm

The highest point of humanity, the peak chapter of the cycles of the human race, is this precise moment, when some person, young or old, man or woman, runs across a town square (such as it may be, for instance, in ancient Tyre or Sidon, or Alexandria when it was burning to the ground - which happened several times of course) with a small pile of books or texts under their arm, their cloak flailing in the breeze and tumult swirling around them.

If it were not for some of these incidents, I assure you we would not know Euclid as we do today, nor Al Kindi, nor several other incalculably valuable masters, that is to say, their written works.

Macron told journalists that he would govern like the Roman god Jupiter, and then he told the same journalists that they would not have the intellect to understand the complexity of what he was saying. Macron is of course Nero, and not Jupiter - the Roman poet Titus Calpurnius Siculus having likened Nero to Jupiter... Nero, as you know from the folklore (because nowadays the history books try to deny it as having been a fact in the first place) being the criminal dictator who burned down buildings when the owners resisted paying him protection money, and then claiming the glory of 'saving' the buildings from the worst of the fire when he 'sent' brigades to put out the fires (that he himself lit or caused to be lit). 

A Predictive Approach

This is the start of the Autumn Opera Season in Europe. Yes there is opera almost everywhere, but I am picking out Europe at the moment because that is where modern narrative dramatic singing we call 'opera' began after all. And for this post I wanted to look at something to do with large structural architecture associated with opera.

Now there are many things one might conclude about examining modern design as compared to design approaches of the past but I want to focus on the impact of computer-generated hypothetical visuals. In this mode, the human design decision-maker or design manager, matched what they saw with some internal aesthetic template, and then says 'yes' to one visual image in a vast series of them; 'we'll adopt that one...'

Inside the very modern Bastille Opera in Paris

In the past, the human designer internally considered an imagined concept against a different set of templates, which were not all visual alone, but consisted of idea frameworks and intangible base principles, not just iterations of pictures be they multi-dimensional or simple two-dimensional drawings.

What I would suggest is that the way in which humans think becomes characteristically different depending on such differences of approach - and that also includes the ability, or inability, to think using words alongside or instead of graphical images.

I could suggest that one reason that the upcoming schedule of appearances by the Russian-Ukrainian Anna Netrebko at the new 'Bastille Opera Building' rather than say the older Garnier Opera Theater, is to do with security issues.

The Bastille Opera was designed by the Uruguayan architect Carlos Ott.

And he is right at the top of modern architecture and designs very beautiful buildings. Without putting any pejoratives on it, the fact remains that modern architecture lacks the small detail and tiny intricate, perhaps ornate, design elements that old styles possessed - although one has to add that with the great modern exponents, you are looking at some considerable intellectual interplay of ellipsoids and regular polygons and clear, clean-faced surface geometry which seems to be a characteristic of this era's leading buildings.

New Ferrari Sp 38 -
an obviously computer assisted design.

My contention though remains that the approach endangers human thinking processes and limits them in what they are able to think and to predict - and the reason building architecture is possibly less fragile to the problems of computer-generated iterative approaches is that buildings are not moving in the way that cars, planes, pens, and similar kinetic mechanisms are. Yes, gravity, mass and void space also are considered in terms of 'dynamics' and conceptual motion, but the eventual product is a static thing like a statue, rather than a mechanism that creates friction due to actual motion. Buildings allow for a different pace of thought inside the mind of the architect and designer.

I say that modern people cannot predict their near-term future.

I say that they have missed the bleeding obvious and by a long way.

What happens in the future...?

Take the example of China - here we have an ego-driven dictator (quickly passed a law installing himself for life), running with the economic momentum of people who established the direction well before him, and whose mind he does not understand at all. It's entirely possible that with the death of Lin Biao in 1971, and the death not long afterwards (1976) of Zhou Enlai, that China has been in the hidden grip of a power-mad elite that bubbled along beneath the optimistic surface presented by people like Deng Xiaoping. ...Because the factual reality of Beijing politics is that all we have seen has been nothing but internal purges and fighting among themselves at the top, and a system that drove away clearly competent academics like Zhu Rongji from the top positions.

Today we have state-run propaganda and an obvious 'cult of Xi' afoot in China.

The end game to this story is crystal clear. It's a story that we are thoroughly sick of, having witnessed all of human history up until this moment - but, like any bad gambler, Xi no doubt thinks, 'but it will not happen to me.' We are beset by these types of characters walking the political stage, in such a way as they never have before; in the past, such people were more circumspect - Macron actually publicly equated himself to the Roman 'Jupiter.' 

I haven't heard Xi do similarly but then, I don't get as wide a range of reports from China, as I do from Europe. There is an ancient saying whose origin nobody knows - it is this: 'the god brooks none but himself to (show) overweening pride.'

Jay-Z Crowds Out The 'Luxury' Market

There has been a massive pull-back in the expenditure the big connected boards are making in the 'luxury market' scene - we saw how a few months ago Rolex drastically cut back their annual output of watches down to an anemic 600,000 pieces, and this has been followed up across the whole luxury brand vista, with advertisers pulling out of sponsoring big events, pulling out their money from television networks with respect to the annual commercial time 'buys.'

DJ Khaled backs D'usse Cognac, a 'Jay-Z' brand
...Happens to be a very good cognac, by the way.

There is a roaring whisper about the Shanghai/Beijing luxury market as well, which bodes ill for everyone in the rest of the world.

There will be a few excuses made to do with the uncertainty of 'Brexit' but the message we need to take is about underlying problems with a lack of purchasing interest by the so-called affluent consumer class.

It has long been an aphorism among chief executives who operate in the luxury market space that the consumer spend is tied closely to the Wall Street Index on general equities.

And so, on the surface of things you would not expect senior executives and the luxury manufacturing leaders to be making the kinds of investing decisions that they currently are making.

D'usse Cognac - pronounced 'dusay...'

What do they know or suspect that the rest of us do not know about or 'feel...?'

Nothing. They have no clue.

Period. And bank it.

For one thing, the subject they really have no clue about is actual 'luxury.'

Keiser Karl just passed away and he was pretty much the end of it all as far as genuine, authentic quality in design elements for the Western fashion world. David Tang passed not too long ago as well, so that was it for the old 'Empire Far East.' Lagerfeld's mother came from the old Paris 'Salon' world and the genuine wealthy Bohemian displaced aristocracy. Tang was sufficiently borderline close to the real China 'Tang' family of ancient times and ancient wealth and class...

I mean I appreciate that 'Bacardi' (a HUGE, global house) is still a family-owned business, but it is industrialized and megalithic - it makes play into the upper class's luxury consumable world, but to do so it has to go to small French estates and re-brand what those small houses have been making for decades and still make under their own names, and sell for vastly less.

So is it really true that because Jay-Z backs something all of a sudden that 600,000 'strong' list of rich people all goes and buys the 'up-branded' product at ten times the usual price?

God those rich people must be stupid. That's why they're rich; because they are stupid.

Huh?!!

This is an actual rum distillery, and only a tiny part
of the whole industrial plant and facility, which covers 100's of acres.

The Greatest Ever

As a lot of the readers here will know - the racehorse Winx just ran her final professional public course race in the 2019 Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Randwick Racecourse in Sydney, Australia.

Winx is the greatest Champion racehorse I'll see in my lifetime. She retired undefeated, having won 33 races in a row, 25 of them at 'Group 1' level which is a world record.

Winx is by Street Cry from Vegas Showgirl.

I might note, just for personal reasons - and my wife and close friends can attest - that I backed her at her very first start, which she won by ten lengths going away from a good field.

There will be controversy from the overseas pundits and sports writers but the reality is there was never a better horse and there never will be, certainly not in our lifetimes. And as I always underline, European owners and trainers do not genuinely care about their animals as far as I'm concerned, taking exorbitant risks with them often, and always with those people, it's just about the money.

Australians love their animals and racehorse people (by far the majority of them) love their horses and look after them superbly.

The trainer of Winx Christ Waller broke down and was visibly in tears after the race, probably from relief as much as anything else; it's an incredibly stressful position that he has been in, with expectations far beyond the ordinarily 'high' and many people on the outside of course, just snarling and gnashing, who always wish to see tragedy happen to anything successful. Never did happen in this instance, however, and the horse has entered the history books forever.