Wine Parties at the weekend (2)

Here’s good news for those who don’t have any knowledge or any interest in wine!

When you feel like drinking some wine, you should do nothing but just care about the shape of glass you're use. I think that’s easy for you to remember .

If you feel like drinking some red wine, you should use a large, wide-mouthed glass. It makes you face front to drink it. On the other hand, when you try to drink some white one, you’re better to choose a slender glass. And you can realize you face up then.

I recommend you use glasses like this!

As you might know, red wine has an astringent taste. But you can experience a good taste rather than astringent if you keep red wine on your tongue. A large, wide-mouthed glass helps you keep wine on your tongue easily because of the weight and the shape.

As for white wine, it has a vinegary taste. But we can sense a sweet taste from it, so all you do is put white wine on the tip of tongue. If so, you can feel just sweet and deep taste rather than vinegary one.

If you compare drinking from an appropriate glass with a wrong one, you can definitely tastes the difference. It’s like a magic!!

Riedel, the wine glass company in Austria , helds a wine seminar last Sunday, and I joined it and tried wine tasting by comparing the glasses.

Though I don’t have the sensitivity of wine at all, I’m sure the Riedel glass makes the taste of wine better…it was an amazing experience for me.

Wine Parties at the weekend (1)

I joined 2 wine parties last weekend. Both were pretty nice. So I'll post they were like today and tomorrow.

- Friday, November 16 : Beaujolais Nouveau party in Ginza
As you might know, November 15 was the Beaujolais Nouveau release day this year. In Japan, a lot of enthusiastic parties are held at the release day every year because Japan might be the first country in the world to be able to drink Beaujolais Nouveau– I guess there was a big, weird party once, which was held at the international airport (or a hotel around there) and the participants started drinking at midnight.

Unlike such loud parties, our party was organized by the owner of a restaurant and we tried 4 kinds of Beaujolais Nouveau with our dinner. We normally buy Beaujolais around 1000 to 2000 JPY, but we had a little expensive one (between 3000 to 5000JPY) this time.

The wine list (in the order I drank them) was:
1. Domaine CHATELUS: Beaujolais Nouveau
2. Henri Fessey: Beaujolais Villages Nouveau TRADITION
3. Frederic Cossard: Beaujolais Villages Nouveau PRIMEUR Les Lapins
4. Leroy: Beaujolais Villages Nouveau PRIMEUR

They were very nice, but my favorite is Leroy. According to the Internet, Leroy is a famous wine "negociant" in France (“negociant” means shipper in English). Leroy’s wine is generally expensive but it is sells out pretty quickly. I think I know the reason too, the flavor is really like old wine even though it is NEW! So you can enjoy Leroy’s Beaujolais Nouveau around a year later as well as the release day.

How about the effect of INSTANT WORD POWER?

I know the necessity of increasing my English vocabulary for increasing my English skill, but I can't have memorised a lot of words with using an English vocabulary book written in Japanese!



So I've changed my mind - I shouldn't use a book written in Japanese but in English, and which is for English native students. It should be the fast way for me to improve my English!!!



And I've found what claims to be the best vocabulary coach among Amazon.com..."INSTANT WORD POWER"!!!







According to this book, to learn about the Greek or Latin roots, prefix and suffix called etymology is very important. It might be popular among the Western students, but I've never tried to learn like that.

Actually there are nothing but the words I've never seen before - biped, centennial, bifocal, bicuspid, impede, expedite and so on (you might recognize which prefix I've learnt). So this method has impressed me, and thankfully, I've enjoyed learning a lots of new words very much because I generally can't remember many new words as easily.


But I have a little problem - I don't have a chance to use these words in my real life so far. How would you say anything with using "bicuspid" in your life??

Short stories in the weekend

Yesterday I was out to get a couple of colorful sticks like this .

Do you know what they are? These are the incense sticks. Basically we Japanese are very familiar with incense sticks very much because we are used to offer them at Buddhist alters or burn the mosquito-repellent incenses in the summer.

Unlike the incense which is offered to Buddhist alters or to "debug", these smell like flower, wood or fruits.

In the picture above, "LULLABY" smells like lotus. However, I really don't know about the smell of lotus - but it's nice. The next one "SUNNY", which is my favorite incense, smells like cypress. This smell always makes me calm down. Finally I chose 9 kinds of scent, and have got 50 sticks in total.

By the way, when I chose the incenses at the store, there were 3 or 4 other customers at the same time. Surprisingly, they were all men and they seemed to take choosing the incenses very seriously. However, I've generally only seen a few men before who seemed to be there with their wife or girlfriend - each of the men this time were alone. It looks the number of men who care about their room fragrance is increasing.

The sequel to the HOT match

As I mentioned before, the HOT match in Japan between Habanero to Jolokia resulted in Jolokia's winning (in my opinion anyway).


But now, new faces have joined this exciting match from the US - their names are Habanero chips and Jalapeño chips!!

However, the Japanese Jolokia and Habanero are much better than new ones because the new chips aren't as spicy as the Japanese ones (additionally, Jalapeño tasted and smelled like REAL green pepper...was that a snack?).

To add more credibility, this latest match was held in my office and not only my colleagues but also the president of my company were looking forward to see the tide of this battle - work hard, you guys!!

Cooking class - Round one "Christmas dinner"

There're two things I've started doing in this year - one is writing my blog in English, the other is joining a cooking class!!!

The cooking class is held on the first Tuesday night of each month. I could put the recipes on this site correctly in English but I guess that isn't so interesting for you..., so I'll introduce the name of dishes and some points about then.

First dish - Quiche with a few kinds of mushroom and spring onion

Basically, we have to make a piecrust from the beginning (but we used a ready-made one because this is just 2 hours class). I believe the most difficult thing about making quiche is preparing the flacky piecrust. In this case, "preparing" means thourghly mixing the ingredients together - flour, butter, sugar, salt and eggs.

So I'm not sure whether I can make it successfully at home, I might use the ready-made frozen piecrust then. Anyway, it tastes pretty nice and it costs less than the one which is sold at department stores. That's really nice.

Second dish - Creamy potato and cauliflower soup

This soup is made from just the vegetables - potatoes, cauliflowers and onion. We don't need to use milk or fresh cream. So I was surprised that it was very thick. I like the decoration on this dish. The red dots are some pieces of red bell pepper.

Third dish - Steamed chicken with onion and olive

...I can't see the chicken, it's a bad picture. The two other item on the plate behind the chicken aren't made by ourselves, but just garnish. The left one looks like a Christmas tree, doesn't it? This is made of boiled spinach.

This was my dinner on Tuesday. I had a lot of fun at this class and every dish can be made easily but looks so nice. After all, I think to take dishes' pictures, which look tasty, is the most difficult part of the class for me!

The Uber-tyrant vs the Great satan

Now, a very HOT battle has started in Japan - That is "Habanero, the uber-tyrant vs Jolokia, the great satan" - the Japanese snack match, which is made from the spiciest chili peppers in the world?

Habanero chili is well known as the spiciest chili pepper, however the Naga Jolokia pepper is newly certified as the world's spiciest chili pepper by Guinness. And now Tohato, the Japanese confectionery company, has released new spicy snacks at the same time which use these hottest chili peppers so people can decide which is the hottest snack. "Habanero, the uber-tyrant" and "Jolokia, the great satan" are the names of the each snack.

How do they taste? - I've tried Jolokia first...that's pretty good. It is not only spicy but also good taste. And how about Habanero...yeah - very spicy, excactly. It irritates the nasal passage, but it isn't as spicy as I expected.
After trying them again and again and again, I think the spicy taste isn't too different each other, but Habanero is a little bit spicier(ish) than Jolokia. Basically I could lose my sense of taste at this point.

Finally, I prefer Jolokia to Habanero because Jolokia has some other good taste to it as well as the spicy flavor. Well, I'm going to have one more Jolokia....

Legacy gadget!? (just my thought)

I started new English lesson yesterday. The name of class is "Listening and Speaking," and (as the name suggests) the lesson aims to expand English listening and speaking skills. The instructor, who comes from Australia, fixes our wrong expressions over and over again, so I think this lesson will be really useful for me.


We also train by listening to English phrases using audio CD, and we can copy the training materials as we like. According to a school staff if I bring a new MD I can copy them---MD!?!?


Exactly, MD (Mini Disc) was popular among many people in Japan until a couple of years ago, and I've also used it before. But now, I guess iPods or some other portable audio players with harddiscs are much more popular and useful than MD. And I have no MD players, just an iPod...

Looking at a few websites most MD players aren't so cheap. Additionally, I' ve found one which can be connected to PCs. Unfortunately it's so expensive (over 30000JPY) though I think very useful.

So should I get a MD player just for listening to the training material? This is a big problem for me.