that's exactly why I enjoy them

Thanks.

Only gotta get those cookies when you're stuck, helps even out the losses. You got two 50 cent royals, so cookies aren't quite as necessary. I should have taken the whole plate.

Kabuto was super solid this trip and some good seasonal variation. Maybe I'll put the fish in blind next time and you can guess

CRAPS? Not a bad idea, but I'm definitely gonna lay everything.

Yeah, it sucks, but there are many worse things that can happen. The food and wine are always good to cheer me up.

Great, I will keep it going then.

Excellent trip report TF. Thanks again.

Those $500 cookies are delicious but sometimes I prefer a $4 box of frozen Thin Mints and the absence of empty rubber bands. For the variation mind you.

Sorry about the bottle of Schrader. I'd half encourage you to try again and 55% encourage you to give up. We'll be having an '05 CCS and an '04 T6 Derby weekend. I sent these out to Vegas in part because Clarkmeister loves them and in part because we had three at home that weren't very good, one of which was the '05 Old Sparky, a 25th anniversary magnum which was Ho-Hum at best. May have been the prior storage since I bought it on the secondary market but it did not taste cooked. Then we had one during March Madness that was quite good, and now I am looking forward to the next sampling. Overall, not worth the price IMO/IME given the variance, but should you ever come across an uncooked '07 Old Sparky I suspect you'll fall in love.

Have you tried any Kapcsandy?

Thanks for the heads up on the Jaleo lunch menu. Will head back there in May for lunch.

Hey Riverdog,

Have not had any Kapscandy, thanks for the advice on Schrader. Love the 55% give up. Sounds good. Give me a point of reference as to what your favorite napa cabs are and then I'll have an idea of your style preference.

Maybe I should go for $4 thin mints. I wonder if my host will give me some

Kabuto is the nuts.

Hi TF,

I have not had Harlan or Colgin and assure you I have drank far less Napa Cab than you have.

I own a fair amount of Pride Mountain Reserve Cab and find it delicious and a bit too sweet if that helps.

My parents were collectors from way back. Of their wines, standouts at various price points included several 1980's and 1990's Spottswoode, Elyse, BV for blends, a couple Rutherfords but cannot remember which years or which Rutherford offhand, Chapellet before they more than tripled in price, and the occasional Domaine Carneros and Etude. I have always thought that Opus One and Plumpjack were way overpriced and that Caymus serves a purpose but is overpriced. I have been disappointed in general in Joseph Phelps Insignia but would not feel that way at $45/bottle. Silver Oak also has a place and it's not bad but not a go-to $70 bottle. I like Outpost True Mountain and for reference own a lot of Quilceda Creek. I buy liters of Caymus mainly to bring to parties and never drink them myself alone. The 2013 Beringer Reserve Cab is lovely as was the 2010 Poyfrere we had with it. The '09 Gallica was fantastic as have been a couple of the Schafer One Point Fives. The '07 and '08 Kapcsandy grand vins are excellent.

I like the lower alcohol and absence of fruit bomb of many Bordeaux but find some of the yeast smells like classic strong Brettanomyces repugnant and so get the stink eye from those in the know. I also do not like Ridge Montebello. There may be no hope.

I also enjoy Pride, and often find it on the sweet side too. Overall very good stuff and a cool winery in that it lies on the Sonoma/Napa AVA line so you get a mixture of fruit, similar to Cardinale.

Opus is for sure overpriced, crazily so. I have had a decent number of them, and really enjoyed the 94 through 96 vintages of it, but have never bought a single bottle on my own dime.

The other wines you mention are some of the cooler old school Napa's, and I don't really have any experience with BV at all. Older Spottswoode has been hit and miss for me, but I do enjoy it when good.

Quilceda Creek is a whole other beast, one friend owns a ton of it, so I have had them with some regularity. I find them often to be closed, but they are massive, structured wines. A 2004 I had this year was fantastic though, really a standout in a lineup of other stellar wines. Also had a 2006 Quilceda Merlot (the last year they made this I think) and it was similarly excellent.

I also have about 3:1 Bordeaux to Cali cab, but stylistically they have become much bigger in the Michel Rolland era, and some of them border on Cali fruit bomb levels and alcohols often run 14.5% now, rather than the old 12.5-13.5%.

Brett is definitely an issue in some wines, a function of poor cellar cleanliness for sure. I find old Barolo can have serious brett problems, same with the rhone. In low doses, I actually like brett, but at high concentrations it obviously destroys everything. Dunn in Napa actually purposely inoculated their wines with brett in a portion of the early 90s because he thought it added complexity. I learned this from Randy's daughter when I visited a few years back. Kind of neat.

TF,

How much of that stuff re: vintages and vineyards are you writing from memory vs looking at wine notes?

Not to brag at all, but I somehow can remember almost everything about wine and it's 100% from memory. I probably know more about wine than almost any topic, and have tasted easily 10-15 thousand wines in the past 13 years, written notes, and blinded wines to vintage and producer. If I wasn't an MD, I'd for sure be an MW.

What’s the “best” wine that I can buy for under 50 bucks from a grocery store/Trader Joe’s/Walmart/etc? I know it’s an individual preference, but I want to go try a wine that a “wine person” thinks is really good.

Surf,

There are so many excellent wines for under $50, but which ones will depend on what’s available where you are. Also, in my experience, you’re much better off going to a good wine store and asking them for a recommendation of a certain type and price of wine. Where do you live?

TF,

I find that so amazing. I have friends just like you. I tend to remember varietals and wineries, but I just never end up remembering vintages and vineyards. I suspect I’d get a lot better at that if I took notes after every wine I had, but I’m much better at drinking than note-taking.

+1 to El Diablo's comment, that's the way to go. I've always told my wine enthusiast (but not nutjob) friends that if you are willing to spend up to $50 on a bottle of wine, you will find a ton of great wines in the world, and all the best QPR wines. Once you go past the $200/bottle mark, the increases in quality are like splitting hairs, and you will often be disappointed by many of these wines when you compare them to one another and great wines in the $50 price range.

Where you live and what you have access to really helps. I buy from all over Canada and the US, and have learned that wine selection and price varies enormously by state.

I live in southern USA, ideally looking for something I could get at Publix/Walmart/Costco so would probably have to be quite mass marketed.

Man, I wish there was an opportunity to sit you down with these two douchebag former colleagues of mine. They're the type that make a point of using things like wine to display wealth rather than bc they like it. Renting lamborghinis in Vegas, etc. Some quotes I've heard them say verbatim-

"I refuse to drink any wine that's less than 100$"
"I always just order the most expensive bottle a place has" (I would have loved to take them to a truly legit Vegas restaurant just to see if they'd put their money where their mouths were and drop 5-6 figs making good on their promise. I bet they'd have come up with some excuse)
"I would never go out in less than a 1000$ outfit"

It'd be sweet to watch them try and get all pretentious on you and then watch you crush them with your actual knowledge vs appearance douchebaggery.

Ha, so true. I've had this experience in my life too. The real wine nuts of the world will try any wine and acknowledge full well that there are great wines at every price point. Douchebags won't give a certain wine the time of day because of lack of prestige or cache. The best wines may still be very expensive, but for every one of those, there are many very expensive wines that are not great and will disappoint.

The best example of this are the first growths of Bordeaux and DRC in Burgundy. I had two DRCs in one night last year, and have had all of the first growths many times. That said, 1st growths in particular are mass produced 13000 plus annual case wines and in bad vintages, are just not very good wines. In good/great vintages, these are absolutely great wines, I don't refute that for a second.

At the end of the day, winemaking is simply farming, and great wines come from great growing seasons, just like a perfect crop of a vegetable. There is nothing that a winemaker can do (aside from impart a tremendous amount of oak) that will save a wine from a season of hail or drought or aphids or rot.

Where am I going with this? Great wine producers (eg. Dal Forno, Quintarelli), some German producers, and many others, will cut yields dramatically in these terrible years, tossing 70% of their grapes (eg. picking off all the outside of a cluster that has been affected by rot or wrecked by hail, and just using the inner, undamaged grapes) so that they can maintain a standard of quality that reflects their principles.

1st growths don't really do this. There will be 13-18000 cases of Lafite, Margaux, etc. every vintage even when it's total garbage like 2007 or 2012. They might cut the price by a few percent, but nothing to make up for the fact that their wine from that vintage is trash for $500+.

Unfortunately as I now have a pretty decent income, I am surrounded by more and more of the type of people that you describe. They drink giant expensive napa cabs, or the most expensive wine on the list, but have no point of reference as to what the wine is, who made it, what the vintage was like, etc.

I basically spent a 200K med student line of credit on wine, tasted every week, held tastings at my house every Sunday and started with the best $15 bottles of wine I could find. Nowadays I drink and post fancy pictures of wine in this thread, but those are wines that I appreciate, and purchased for a lot less than restaurant prices. For example the Cheval-Blanc was like 2K a bottle on the Carnevino list, I brought that from home, and said it was very good, but nowhere near a legendary bottle of wine. It was outshone by the other wine next to it that night. Right now as I write this, I'm drinking a bottle of 2009 K The Beautiful Syrah, which I bought for $30 on sale. It's every bit as good as the 4 bottles of $250 wine I had with a friend on the weekend.

So yeah, those douchebags are the worst, I even had to defriend one person because that's all they did. He would just chug fancy wines and open 10 1st growths a night to show off to people on Instagram. The need for adulation was comical, but ultimately infuriating and pathetic.

Leon,

It’s always fun to do blind tastings with those people.

Also reminds me of one time at this great tequila bar here. Guy next to us orders “a top shelf margarita.” Bartender “any specific tequila?” Guy “no, just one of your best tequilas.” Bartender “ok this one’s my favorite, it’s $500 a shot.” Guy “oh, uhhhh, what else do you have?”

I will order a Cadillac/top shelf margarita (if only to trick myself into thinking that it’s less awful for me than the one that uses the big jug of mix in the well) but that is lol

This pretty much sums it up in one sentence.

If there's a public reveal at the end that exposes ignorance, that'd be fun. The two guys I know of go out of their way to avoid having their ignorance exposed. I doubt they'd ever attend a blind tasting; more likely I'd hear a story afterwards about how they attended one (completely unverifiable) and they identified the "best" wines (whatever that means) with 100% accuracy.

take this wine **** to EDF! Back to gambling !!

Im only kidding, I just got excited when there were new posts

Haha I agree. More gambling needed. Next trip at end of May!

Might be filling the space with food and wine between now and then.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

+1 to being super impressed with your wine memory TF. You should visit Kevin Vogt's shop next time you're in Napa. He owns Wine Country Connection in Yountville and is the master somm who opened Delmonico at the Venetian.

Back to gambool!

Long time, no Vegas!

I stopped in for a short bachelor party trip for a friend last weekend, and took a couple of pictures and played a little poker, so figured I'd update the thread. This won't be a fully detailed TR, just a brief entry to whet the appetite before next week's return trip to degen at VP and play the Monster Stack.

This trip was not a heavy VP degen trip, in fact I was purposely trying not to play at Cosmo as I wanted to save the BR for the trip with wifey in 2 weeks.

Here are a few highlights from the trip.



Landed in Vegas Thursday evening and headed out with Big Papi, Scott Davies, for some sushi. We went to Sen of Japan for some late night nigiri, the happy hour menu after 10:30 is the nuts.


Sen of Japan - Black snapper with garlic olive oil on right. I always just load up on this, one of my faves. The rice is definitely less good than I remember, but for a few bucks a piece, this is crazy value.


Unagi - Decent, nothing special.


Black cod in lettuce wrap - Solid black cod dish about a 6/10.

Overall Sen was good/very good, the value during happy hour is outstanding, and it's open really late. If I were paying full prices, I'd be a bit disappointed to go that far off strip though, and would probably just stick to somewhere closer.

Checked into a renovated room at Harrah's for the night and after a long week of conference organizing back in Calgary, fell asleep for 8 hours like a baby. First time I've ever gone to Vegas and not gambled on night one.

The newly renovated Harrah's rooms are way nicer than the old ones and the bed was super comfy. Since we were checking into Mirage the next day, I decided on the free Harrah's night so I could walk across the street in AM.







Across the street to Mirage the next morning to check into 2 bedroom tower suite for the Bachelor party.





The next three days were a blur, a complete and total **** show. The group was 13 guys, including the groom, his brother, his work bosses, his dad and a bunch of friends from school. For the most part it was cat herding, just getting them from place to place for dinner, strippers, etc. I won't post any pics of this at the bachelor's request (a good choice IMO).

There were several stories that I can't say on here, so it was obv a pretty wild party. The first night we ended up at Palomino, and I think the guys probably racked up an 8-10K tab there, and then did more damage at Sapphire's the next night.

Some funny stories that I can post:
1-After closing down Palomino on Thursday night at 5 AM, we went to the Sapphire Pool at noon on Friday. We had two cabanas and a bunch of booze, which nobody wanted because we were wrecked from night one. The strange thing was that everyone who showed up was topless at the pool, meaning all the customers. And they were mostly 35+ year old couples. There was the occasional decent looking one, but for the most part just 500 naked normal people.

Asking if this was the norm, we found out that it just so happened today was the "World's biggest orgy" day in Vegas,

For about 500 of the people planning on participating in this 1000 person orgy, they made the Sapphire pool party their daytime activity. We just happened to rent a cabana the same day, which made for a pretty strange party. The people participating in the orgy had pink wristbands to identify themselves as orgy members. We were basically the only people without pink wristbands. A few orgy-goers did end up in our cabanas though, with one lady asking for a bukkake session from all of our group, and other people who were being pulled around with neck collars and leashes.

One of the guys in our group ended up buying all the alcohol and our cabana became the life of the party, particularly for the strippers. There were only about 6 strippers working the pool that day, and pretty janky ones at that, because the party was all orgy people anyway. They would come drink our booze and then peace out when the booze was all gone.

One of our group members did manage to get involved in the orgy and disappeared later that night to participate in a fetish. His new nickname is Cuckles McChuckles if that allows you to figure out what happened. Fortunately he didn't get raped or killed either.

Here's a link https://nypost.com/2018/05/11/swinge...-biggest-orgy/

2-JR Smith - FML
The first night we watched GSW vs. CLE at Twin Peaks, the bar up above PHo. First off, that place is a bit hard to find. Second, it was a perfect bachelor party place, being a mountain themed Hooters. Considering game 1 of the finals had gone under the last three years in a row, I put a few hundred on the under at 216.5. Lol at the feeling when JR Smith didn't shoot and it went to OT, guaranteeing the over. Thanks JR.

Our other meals during the bachelor party were:

Yardbird - really like their fried chicken and waffles. It's becoming a regular stop for me.

Scarpetta - Always great if you stick with spaghetti, agnolotti and stromboli bread.

Carnevino - It's closing in July because Batali couldn't keep his greasy mittens off the staff, as are the other Batali restaurants in Venetian.

But I was able to get one last 3 inch, 220 day aged rib eye, and it was glorious!


220-day aged rib eye. I was sharing, but the $344 price tag for one steak was definitely the most of my life, so far

During a washroom break mid-dinner I was able to almost freeroll my steak though.


Can't fight the VP itch.

Post bachelor party

After a heavy weekend of drinking, partying, etc. I was super happy to be staying in Vegas just to chill out and play a bit of poker before heading back home. After the guys headed out Sunday afternoon, I checked into the Rio and then promptly headed over to Aria to play the $470 mix triple draw event (A-5, 2-7, Badugi)

Admittedly I haven't played much of these games in a few months, and A-5 is not my strongest game, but I've played enough online 2-7 and Badugi to know that I can hold my own in those two.

My starting table included Aria poker floor and nice guy Sean McCormack (@thepokerboss), another Aria dealer named Mark, a female dealer from Wynn/Bellagio and one rec player. For the first 7 levels I took a few hits (almost all in the A-5 rounds) and pretty much hovered around half of starting stack. By the end of late reg, I had recovered to exactly starting stack, strong play

2 of the 4 players at this table were limping into pots all the time, including UTG, and one of these players told me they were on a freeroll playing this tournament.

There is also very little if any snowing in live Badugi/TD, so combining this with the passive play in general, it was time to ramp up the aggression and bluffing frequencies.

By the next break things were looking up.



I think 100% of bluffs got through in this tournament, which was pretty amazing. At one point I got a K773 badugi snow through which sounds like suicide, I know. But this was fit or fold badugi all the way.

I don't have all the HH's, but I made a wheel in 2-7 at the right time, got some bluffs through in badugi and tightened up my range in A-5. Things ultimately went pretty well and I decided to just ship the tourney for 5K.



The tournament was a ton of fun, good chat with all the tables from the start right to the end, awesome dealers, just a great time.

The next day I played the $470 NL 2-7 SD at Aria but couldn't get much going and busted shortly after late reg when I bricked an 8742x draw against a 9 draw that hit.

Also played a few STTs at the Rio and chopped one of them for $750 a piece, so another little bink.

Walking around the Rio, WTF is with this pic of Jesus? They put some dogs in the pic to make us hate him less I think.



I also threw in a Kabuto meal (no pics) and it was actually one of the more disappointing Kabuto trips ever. The kuruma-ebi tasted borderline dirty and both my chu-toro and o-toro were metallic. Other pieces were very good, but even the servers and chefs asked me if something was wrong when I stopped at 15 pieces.

Other meals:

Ichiza - Solid late night poker food, best dish was agedashi tofu. The black cod was very salty and the char siu roll is a bust.

Ping Pang Pong - Ate here twice, once after triple draw tourney and once before leaving. Day time dim sum is def solid.

Mian - Really enjoyed their noodles, with the dumplings and mushroom dish also being very good. Some people found this too spicy though, so ymmv. The mung bean soup is very cooling though.

They also have the best placemats - Step one: Take a picture of your noodle





On returning home, I received this freeroll offer from TI, it's apparently only for pit game players and with 25K up top, I am pretty tempted to go play in this.



Overall a short but successful trip, made a little cash to donk off at the VP next time with Mrs. Ferguson. The only bummer was that I didn't play the $1500 DC at the WSOP because I had to leave on what would be day 2.

The next trip will actually have some type of structure to it, and I'm pretty excited as we'll be doing Robuchon, Kabuto, staying at Cosmo and playing the Monster Stack. Unfortunately most of the mix game tourneys will be over by then, so prolly gonna grind some STTs in my spare time.

For those of you who missed out on wine pics this trip, here are some wines from dinner when we got back


Double mag of 01 Solaia, 05 Tondonia, 06 La Conseillante and 89 Alzero were highlights from this night.


Brunello tasting
01 Soldera, 06 Poggio di Sotto, 01 Valdicava Madonna del Piano, 01 Terralsole Normale and 01 Tenuta Nuova were highlights from this night. 04s were just not ready in most cases, though still great wines.

Cheers,

TF

Fantastic. Any pissed off wives?

Wow, great one post TR. The tourney bink and the orgy pool experience!

That picture of Ferguson was changed. His original picture had FTP logo in it, so they gave him a new one, probably to save on cleaning costs from people throwing their beers at it.