Have a Good Time and Drink Some Cherry Wine

So I'm taking a wine-making class with my good friend The Fig.  It should be interesting, and pretty informational for me.

Things I know about wine:

- Some are red, some are white, and some sneaky ones are pink.
- People who write for wine labels have fun jobs that are mostly comprised of bullshitting.
- Corkscrews hurt when you screw them into your hand.
- If you're in college and don't own a corkscrew, you can use a pocket knife, regular screw, the angry shoe method, or a twist-off variety.
- Twist offs are fine, boxes are fine if you're doing Wine Olympics.

Despite my ignorance, The Fig recently spent a semester in Italy and so is obviously an expert on all things winey.  She knows how to tell what it is, how to smell it, how to taste it, how to swish and swill it, and how to spit it out again to taste it better.  (???)  I'm kind of a wine skeptic, but I'll give this a try, at least so I can pretend to be classy.

Though I'm ignorant, I like drinking wine - particularly with food, or in the evening curled up on the couch with a book.  The wines we'll be making in class will all come from non-grape fruits.  I'm guessing it's the cheapest and easiest way to make it.  My wine will, I think, be centered on berries.  This makes me hesitent, imagining a saccharine sugar monstrousity, but I will certainly try to withhold my misgivings and give it a chance.

In other news, my family and Boyfriend of the Wizard Beard went to the Science Museum today to see the Dead Sea Scrolls.  They were certainly neat, but I was a little more interested in the other artifacts found in the caves and the settlement of Qumran.  I loved being able to see things like hairnets and cosmetic bottles and bolts of woven fabric that have inexplicably survived thousands of years of weather, decay, and neglect.  Apart from the awesomeness of the text that the exhibit was centered around, I find something so fascinating in getting a glimpse into another time through objects that were never meant to last.  You wonder what sorts of impressions could be left - what shadows these objects hold of the lives of their owners.  You can imagine a settler's wife in the year 100, lining her eyelids with thick, dark kohl from a tiny glass bottle.  She finishes, closes the bottle, maybe puts it onto a table corner.  Time passes; she misplaces the bottle, her family moves away, she dies, etc.  And yet the bottle is still here, thousands of years later.

The neighboring exhibit contained pages from the St. John's Bible:  in my opinion, one of the best, most beautiful things ever.  Handwritten with ink on vellum, it's taken tons of people and tons of time to construct - just like any manuscript worth its salt in Ye Olden Tymes.


That's it for today.  Stay tuned for wine updates, cute puppy stories, and maybe some uploaded paintings.....?