crimulus-dot-com » wine

Sutter Home California White Merlot 2007

Jeremy — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 01:35:46 +0000

This is easy!

My rating? 1.5 stars out of 5

As shortly as 8 months ago, the thought of a sweet wine made my eyes roll without even thinking about it, but I’ve really begun to develop a taste for sweet, fruity homemade wines.

I was looking for just that the other night — something similar to a grapy, sweet homemade wine. There were plenty of choices in the store, perhaps too many, but none that looked like a good match with a price I was willing to risk.

So, I found this 2007 Sutter Home California White Merlot for $7.50 … I figured at least it wouldn’t be as harsh as a typical Merlot because of the white. Little did I know it was pure “rotgut.”

It has a quite yeasty flavor, and the white touching the red gives an ever so blaring hint of vinegar …

Chilled, it does have a tolerable flavor, but only because it is overloaded with sugar. In fact, I believe it is just enough to trick you into thinking it’s sweet, but still manage to steal any character that the original merlot may have brought to the bottle …

Not likely to take a risk on ANY Sutter Home wine in the future …

GoDaddy Webmail eMail Notifier Under WINE in Linux :)

Jeremy — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 18:12:59 +0000

I use GoDaddy email for my work email, and it is a pain having to remember to check every so often to see if I got mail, especially when I only have new mail about 1 in 20 checks.

I have a notifier for my personal gmail account, and that is very handy — saves me a lot of time checking to see what has come in.

GoDaddy only offers a prepackaged notifier for Windows, however (although they supply a Mac executable if you try to download the notifier under Linux).

I checked the FireFox plugins for a generic webmail notifier, but the best one, WebMail Notifier does not have native support for GoDaddy (email.secureserver.net), and I didn’t feel like spending the time writing a custom script, especially since there is forum activity on this exact subject dating back 2 years, with no easily findable script.

Lo and behold? The windows notifier works under WINE.

Just download the Windows installer (it was wbensetup_PL.msi for me). Then in a terminal run msiexec /i /wbensetup_PL.msi

Follow the instructions, and, at least in my Gnome toolbar, a notifier appeared.

Nice.

I should note that my current setup is Ubuntu 8.04 with OpenBox as my window manager, running the gnome toolbar.

Black Swan Vineyards 2006 Shiraz & Merlot 70%/30% Blend

Jeremy — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 01:09:50 +0000

So this particular saturday night I ended up with a bottle of the 2006 70% Shiraz, 30% Merlot red wine blend from Black Swan Vineyards, southeastern Australia.

My rating? 4.5 stars out of 5.

It is excellent at a slightly elevated, Virginia summer room temperature. An incredibly velvety smooth berry and grape texture, followed by just the hint of a pointed tart and a molasses laced finish note and a subtle enough smoky bouquet that you can ignore it if you like. After all, the smoked barrel lost its edge about 20 years ago. (-0.2 stars).

The major down side? Nothing amazing (-0.3 stars), but it’s perfect for this night.

Cecily says it goes well with Fudge Stripe cookies.