Dueling Gin: Plymouth vs. Sapphire

It was a long day at work. And evil birds attacked my garden. And I brought home a thousand pounds of wood flooring -- give or take a few hundred. And there are two top shelf varieties of gin in the pantry. Solution? A taste test.
Up to this point, my reigning favorite gin has been Citadelle. It's a good gin, and it makes a good martini. But it's important to try new products and see if you've been missing something, so a while back I picked up a bottle of Plymouth Gin, reputedly the favorite of Churchill, FDR, Hitchcock, Ian Fleming, and for many years the official supplier to the Royal Navy.

Plymouth is definitely a good gin. It doesn't mask its Juniper taste, but the Juniper is not overpowering, as it so often is in a bottom shelf gin. There's a very slight hint of an herbal-ish sweetness to it, but it's still quite dry. And it does indeed make a good martini. I don't think it's quite as good as Citadelle when drunk straight up, though. What, you never drink gin straight? Well, one has to do it once in a while if one wants to understand how the gin itself tastes.

The other day I stopped on the way home from vespers to pick up a new bottle of gin -- two in fact since I was out of the bottom shelf Burnett's which is used for Gin & Tonics around here. And since I can't recall that I've actually bought a bottle of Bombay Sapphire before (though I've stocked their London Dry Gin) I decided to pick a bottle of that up.

The Sapphire is fairly different from the Plymouth. Plymouth is a classic gin. It doesn't fool around. It's smooth and well made and classy, but it doesn't really attempt to be more than a gin. Sapphire is 6% stronger at 47% alcohol, but still quite smooth when sipped straight -- something of a feat, I'd say. The flavor is much more balanced and soothing. There's juniper in there, yes, but it's roughly equal with the other herbal notes.

As I think about it, it strikes me more and more that Sapphire tastes very much like a mixed martini tastes when made with a more traditional gin like Plymouth. (My martini consists of 1.5oz gin, 0.5 oz vermouth and one dash of orange bitters. With the olive, of course.) Perhaps this works ideally if you're one of those sorts who believes a good martini is the "very dry" variety where you mist the glass with vermouth, or swirl the vermouth around and then pour it out. To my mind, however, it's not right to simply drop an olive in gin and call it a martini. The vermouth is definitely a part of the drink -- as is the rounded, icy taste that comes from a good shake with ice.

I'll have to mix up a martini to see how Sapphire holds up under those conditions. Right now, I'm wondering if it will seem a little timid in martini form. But if you like to shake gin over ice and drop an olive in, Sapphire is clearly the way to go. Still, with my standard recipe, I think Plymouth would be a good addition to the cupboard, or I may simply go back to Citadelle, after my time wondering far and wide.

(And if you think a martini can be chocolate or apple flavored, my buddy Dante has a place for you...)

Lost, lost, lost

My first really big tomato was just starting to turn red. And then along came a bird. the first day just a few peck, from the look of things. I hoped that somehow it could finish ripening without rotting out and I'd still be able to eat some. And then here's how it looked last night.

Update: I caught the culprit yesterday -- on camera. He's not dead yet, but he's on borrowed time.

Vampire Rights

Here's thought-fodder for a busy day: Should vampires have rights?

National Review writer Jonah Goldberg takes on the topic:

[I]t seems to me that the founding fathers would unequivocally say that vampires do not have rights because rights come from God (or our creator). Vampires are undead and exist solely thanks to satanic or other demonic forces. They shy from God and God's love and therefore do not deserve the protections all of God's creatures are entitled to.

Now, the interesting question would be, do atheists think vampires have rights? I think I'm safe assuming that most atheists ground their understanding of rights and citizenship as stemming from sentience, consciousness, etc. Well, vampires have all of those things in their favor. Presumably, an atheist would reject the premise of the question. They would argue that vampires either do not exist at all (strong case there) or that vampirism is a biological state, a disease of some kind (backed up by many sci-fi portrayals of vampires). In which case, I assume they would argue that vampires do have rights because having a disease does not amount to a surrender of your humanity or rights....

Want Sustainable? Try a Family

I'd picked up a couple books from the library about growing vegetables and small scale farming -- something to go with my enjoyment of growing a vegetable garden this year. One that I've mostly enjoyed is It's a Long Road to a Tomato: Tales of an Organic Farmer Who Quit the Big City for the (Not So) Simple Life by Keith Stewart, a New Yorker who at forty sold off most of his retirement investments to buy an 88 acre farm three hours north of the city and grow organic produce, which he sells in the New York farmers' markets.

The book consists of essays which Steward wrote over the period from 2002 to 2005 about the last twenty years he's spent running this farm. The parts about farming and a city dweller taking to the rural life I've enjoyed, but as you'd expect with someone who grows organic produce as a matter of principle (I suppose ours is at least mostly organic, but that's a matter of practicality and cheapness) on the occasions when he goes off about culture and politics he does so in a way that I have little sympathy for.

I paused to read a chapter before heading off to work this morning, and was annoyed (though not surprised) to run into a side bar in which he bemoaned the "over population" of the world, and wished that his species would stop taking up an unfair share of the globe.

This is ironic, because one of the worries he expresses elsewhere is what will happen to his farm when he becomes too old to work it. He's already in his early sixties, and he and his wife decided never to have children (something which he makes a point of mentioning elsewhere he has no regrets about.) However the 88 acres he works have gone up in real estate value from the 200k he paid for them to over 800k in the last twenty years. If someone bought the land for that price, they wouldn't be able to pay off the mortgage with the money generated from farming. The only option would be to develop it.

He discusses, in a chapter on making sure that the small farming lifestyle doesn't disappear, his desire for the state to buy up development easements on small farms like his, so that future buyers could only keep it as it is, and could not purchase development rights. That's a big, expensive, state imposed solution to the problem. But there's also a much simpler one: Historically, farms have not been the provenance of modern DINKs, they've been kept by families. And the value of the land doesn't matter as much if its simply passed down from parents to children.

For someone so concerned about "sustainable" agriculture, the idea that the most sustainable social and economic unit in existence is the family seems to have eluded him.

Note from MrsDarwin: As I noted last year, if only people knew what caused population growth!

A bigger laundry room

The "ideal house" category is our place to catalog our hare-brained ideas and dreams for the house that we'll maybe build one day, as well as a forum for venting frustrations about the lame building and design choices of our current suburban box.

My bedroom is covered with clothing. Part of this is an aesthetic choice -- my room is the one part of the house that I keep closed off from visitors at all times, so if there's laundry unfolded it gets dumped in row of baskets in front of the dresser. But it's also a storage necessity. As I fold clothes, I sort through them and pack away any that the girls have outgrown and store them in boxes -- which live in my room so that I don't have to schlep down to the garage with every t-shirt or skirt that needs to be put away.

My current laundry room is about five feet square and just big enough to allow the washer and dryer to be opened and to hold a folded up ironing board, and a trash can. In my ideal house, the laundry room would be big enough to contain boxes of clothes in storage and a table for folding clothes. And a rack for hanging drip-dry items so I didn't have to balance hangers on the door frame or use the shower curtain rod in the bathroom. And a window would be nice.

I do like that the laundry room is upstairs so that I don't have to haul everything downstairs.

Examined Life examines Doug Kmiec

For those who have been following the Doug-Kmiec-endorses-Obama drama, Scott Carson of Examined life weighs in with typical rigor and style.

Got House?

A constant refrain in the Darwin home is, "When we build our own house...." Over the years, we've accumulated so many features and design choices we want to incorporate that we'll never remember them without a list. I'm going to start a blog category called "Ideal House" for jotting down these items whenever they spring to mind, so that whenever we're ready to build we can just show our list to an architect and watch him laugh hysterically.

But I guarantee that our ideal house will not include an ice room so that we can sit in a whirl of artificial snow, six stories worth of parking garages, or cost $2 billion:

Like many families with the means to do so, the Ambanis wanted to build a custom home. They consulted with architecture firms Perkins + Will and Hirsch Bedner Associates, the designers behind the Mandarin Oriental, based in Dallas and Los Angeles, respectively. Plans were then drawn up for what will be the world's largest and most expensive home: a 27-story skyscraper in downtown Mumbai with a cost nearing $2 billion, says Thomas Johnson, director of marketing at Hirsch Bedner Associates. The architects and designers are creating as they go, altering floor plans, design elements and concepts as the building is constructed.

...The home will cost more than a hotel or high-rise of similar size because of its custom measurements and fittings: A hotel or condominium has a common layout, replicated on every floor, and uses the same materials throughout the building (such as door handles, floors, lamps and window treatments).

The Ambani home, called Antilla, differs in that no two floors are alike in either plans or materials used. At the request of Nita Ambani, say the designers, if a metal, wood or crystal is part of the ninth-floor design, it shouldn't be used on the eleventh floor, for example. The idea is to blend styles and architectural elements so spaces give the feel of consistency, but without repetition.

Wonder what $2 billion looks like?