Smoking Loon Cabernet Sauvignon 2005

Date: 03JAN08

Name: Smoking Loon

Label:

Winery: Smoking Loon

Region: California

Website: smokingloon.com

Varietal: Cabernet Sauvignon

Vintage: 2005

Price: ~$7

Appearance: Dark, nearly purple with a hint of magneta on the edge; full- to medium-bodied and very clear.

Nose: Caramel, spice and blackberry.

Taste: For the first time I seem to taste toast, maybe a smidgen of tobacco, a little oak, and then some fruit which I would guess is blackberry. Nice richness and a pleasant complexity I wasn’t expecting. Everything is in balance, and the finish is pleasant and of medium length. Certainly a wine I enjoyed and look forward to having again.

Tellings: This is another wine that was recommended to me, and I must say that it’s appealing, and especially so for the price. Absent is that “hot” burn that some of the cheaper wines I’ve had leave me with; this speaks to the wine’s nice balance. I sampled this wine and then jotted my notes down before looking at any other reviews, but did notice that of the reviews I read, no others mentioned caramel as a component of the nose. It’s very clearly there for me when I ”nose” this wine. I’ll revisit this Smoking Loon again tonight and give it another sniff to confirm.

I’m still working on reading and researching wine and vinification, and still plan on writing a longer critique coming up that will focus on a select slice of the wine world and discuss it in modest detail, but I haven’t yet devoted the required time for the task. Which leads me to a ramble…

…there’s just not enough time in the day to do the things you want to do. There’s the job, and right there is a big chunk of your 16-or-so waking hours. Let’s call it eight hours, though I’m more fortunate than some since I have a schedule that I can set however my clients and I like. For easy math, though, let’s say your job takes eight hours each weekday.

If you have children, you want to spend time with them. Either my wife or I pick our child up from preschool anywhere from 3:30 to 4:30 Monday through Friday, and have about a 15 minute drive to our house. From then until our child goes to bed, our time is nearly 100% devoted to her. I think this will change as she gets older and starts spending more time in self-directed activities such as homework, though there will very likely be more time on our part driving her to various activities. At not quite yet four years of age, those soccer mom days have not yet arrived. We try – very unsuccessfully, I might add – to get our daughter to bed at around 6:30 to 7:00, but it’s nearly impossible, so I’ll say that by 8:00 on most days she’s sleeping. So from 4:00 to 8:00 we’ve invested time in a wonderful way, but have used up another four hours. That’s leaves another four hours to do with as you please. This is simply not enough.

As a University of Kansas basketball fan, gamedays set me back at least two hours. Surfing the Internet and writing blogs and other such nonsense takes up another hour or so. I like to read – aim for 100 pages a day in whatever combination of books I’m reading – and this takes a few hours, at least. I try to practice piano some each day. At least 30 minutes to an hour, maybe three days a week. There’s marital duties – and not just the one that springs to mind – that must be attended to. There’s simply spending time with the spouse; they need to talk about their day just as much as I do. And when can you find the 45-60 minutes it takes to prepare for, take, and then shower after a 30-minute walk?*

*Note: I live in San Antonio, and down here you’re covered with sweat if you merely walk from your house to the car in the summer. There’s a reason that San Antonio and Houston consistently rank among the fattest cities: you try walking down here in oppressive heat and freakish humidity. It’s often just not worth it, if not outright dangerous. 

There’s more, too. If you have varied hobbies, the time crunch can really hit hard. Learning a new language, learning about wine, painting, fixing old cars…these things take time and if you have a family, try to read, try to do everything you want to do…forget it.

It’s a sad revelation to me that I must choose to do a smaller handful of things than I would if given unlimited time. This is an obvious point, as I’m sure every living person over about two hours of age has longed for more hours in the day. Yet I’m talking about being able to do diverse things, rather than more of the same. With the internet and the massive ubiquity of information it facilitates there’s just so much access to ever-specialized interests, hobbies and pastimes that everything seems doable, attainable and within your grasp, if you only have the time. Therein lies the rub.

You only need to spend five minutes a day flossing your teeth. Only “30″ minutes a day walking. Twenty minutes for crunches to tone that belly, and stretches to keep you young and limber. Only thirty minutes a day practicing Swahili verb conjugations. A quick half hour on the piano, maybe another half hour on the guitar. This meal can be whipped up in just thirty minutes. Who’s doing the math? Who’s fooling who?

While it’s becoming ever easier to be a generalist, now more than ever you must be a specialist to succeed. It’s fun and exciting to do a bit of everything, but everything is just too much. It’s odd that at 38 years of age I still haven’t whittled down to the tasks I can stick with; now it’s photography I’m into, now it’s exercise, now it’s Russian literature. I find it hard to pick something and stay with it. I’m quickly realizing this is not the best method of time management.

For the record I didn’t time how long it took to write this Critique. Life’s too short and there’s too many things to do to spend brain power or even more of that precious commodity to time everything and take the soul right out of living. So until I figure out a way to manufacture more time than I currently have, I’ll continue to ramble about my lack thereof. Hey, it beats sitting around doing nothing. Who has time for that?