In-flight wine review

I’m typing this aboard Lufthansa flight 455 from San Francisco to Frankfurt; I’m actually on my way to Finland for a week’s worth of meetings.  I had hoped to try out the “FlyNet” service and blog this live from the air, but they are using an old plane for this flight, so there’s no FlyNet, and when the guy in front of me reclines, I only have a couple of inches of legroom (it could be far worse — I could be in coach!).

Fortunately, the food and wine didn’t suffer from using an old plane; the meal was nothing special, but it was pleasant.  I tried all of the wines on offer (the glasses are small, and what the hell, I’m not driving anywhere for a week!), and thought I’d write up my thoughts while they’re fresh.

The first wine I tried (before any food arrived) was the 2004 Sonnenwind Riesling Spätlese trocken from Weingut Motzenbäcker in Germany.  I liked it; it was sweet, but not too sweet, with a definite flinty character. 

I had an Austrian wine with my salad, a 2004 Grüner Veltliner Spiegel, from Weingut Sonnhof Jurstchitsch.  The first taste was sweet, but it had a very strong mineral aftertaste.  I liked it less with every sip, and didn’t finish it.

They had two red wines available, and I tried a little bit of both with my main course (even though it was chicken).  The first was French, a 2001 Cháteau Castéra Cru Bourgeoise Médoc.  It was fruity and pleasant, but very simple.  One sip was all I took; instead, I tried the German red, a 2003 Dornfelder Classic, from Wingut Anselmann.  This was a winner — complex, fruity, with quite a bit of tannin.  Very drinkable, so I had a full glass, and would happily buy a bottle to drink at home.

I was shocked when I saw the desserts — there was no chocolate.  Fortunately, they remedied the situation by passing out little boxes of Peters pralines, which I’d never had before.  I would have preferred dark chocolate (these had mixed dark, milk, and white chocolate coatings, and the dark chocolate is only 59% cacao), but it’s a long way to the nearest See’s.

I should arrive in Frankfurt about 10am German time; my flight to Helsinki leaves about 2, so I hope to have time to do a geocache at the airport (there’s only one that I could find in the terminal).

Now it’s time for me to sit back, relax, and read something.  More later.

Yak shaving for fun and profit

Today started with an experiment; since I didn’t have any meetings in the morning, I decided to work out immediately after taking Jeff to the JCC instead of trying to squeeze it in between work and dinner.  So I spent the 90 minutes between 6 and 7:30am “at work”.  And that led to the first bout of yak shaving for the day.

One of the tasks I had to accomplish during that time was to talk with a colleague in Belgium.  I had hoped to find him on Sametime, but he wasn’t logged on.  And I didn’t really want to call him on my home phone and have to deal with filing an expense claim for a few dollars (nor was I willing to subsidize IBM by not filing a claim if I did make the call).  Instead, I wanted to use the Cisco softphone on my laptop to call Belgium; that way, the call would originate from my desk, and the billing would be handled properly.

But if I was going to use the softphone, I was going to be stuck with using the Thinkpad’s built-in speakers and microphone, which doesn’t lead to great sound quality.  Instead, I wanted to use my Bluetooth headset.  But I’d just reinstalled Windows XP, and the only services that showed up when I paired the headset with the computer were virtual COM ports, not audio.  I vaguely remembered having had problems the last time around, so it was off to Google.

It took a little digging, but eventually I discovered that the problem was that the Windows XP SP2 Bluetooth stack is crippled; it only supports mice, keyboards, and COM ports.  I had to uninstall its driver, which let the Widcom driver supplied by <strike>IBM</strike> Lenovo take over (once I told Windows that I really wanted to use an evil unsigned driver).  And then I was able to properly use the headset and even do file transfer to and from my phone, which had failed earlier.

With that accomplished, I phoned my colleague, who was busy.  But he phoned me back a bit later, and we had our conversation; then I rushed out the door, took Jeff to the JCC, did my workout, and finally drove to the office, where the hallways were mostly deserted.  I’ll give this schedule another try on Thursday and see if it’s really viable — it sure felt good!

There were other yaks to shave later in the day and after I got home; perhaps tomorrow, I can stay on track a bit better.  I can only hope.