Tag: Montreal

Rosemont Montreal Whisky

I’m no stranger to doing things “for a bit of a lark”, especially when alcohol is concerned. I don’t drink much anymore but I do cook, and it so happened that for about a week now I’ve wanted to make Poulet Vallée d’Auge but needed some Calvados as the recipe calls for it. Of course my local spirits store didn’t have it, so I thought I’d check out the web site, and it turns out that calvados is pretty expensive. Cheapest I found was something like $84 a bottle, and I didn’t feel like spending that much, so I looked for an alternative. I could have settled for a mickey of Cheminaud brandy but that didn’t tickle my fancy. I started to look at whiskys and this one caught my eye.

Rosemont Whisky bottle

Of course as someone who tends to like all things Montreal, this had my curiosity.

Surprisingly for a Canadian whisky, this is not a rye. It is made from 80% corn, 10% wheat and 10% barley from St-Constant, on Montreal’s South Shore. It’s not a single malt, it’s a blend, and it’s a bit pricey for a blend ($48.25 for a 750ml bottle). However, at this point I felt it was worth a try for the curiosity if nothing else. Frankly I was only picking up booze for cooking, and if this is sold at the SAQ it can’t be so bad that I couldn’t use it for cooking. The 3 years barrel aging had me a little skeptical, but again I felt it would probably do the job for the dish, and, well, a native Montreal whisky was worth trying. If only for a bit of a lark.

Buying this kinda reminded me of April 2013. On March 31st I had begun to walk the West Highland Way with my great friend Jay. I had spent months preparing for this, as much as I could do after my fire-related accident and skin graft. In fact I had prepared for this walk so well that I had greatly weakened my right heel, to the point where at some time during the hike it fractured. We weren’t able to do the whole walk and used a combination of a train and a lift from a very helpful man we met at the bothys near Ardlui who took us to Crianlarich to remove 30km from the route and, to be honest, compensate for my bad planning. The estimations I had made to determine where we were going to stay along the way were horribly, horribly off for the first two days of the hike. We took a train from Crianlarich to Tyndrum to shorten the trip and the 3 remaining days of walking went as scheduled… but the whole time my right foot kept getting more painful. I had picked up some diclofenac in Switzerland on the way in and I was taking triple doses just to deal. By the time we reached Fort William I could barely walk, but we were done with the hiking and heading to Ireland for a car tour so I just dealt with it.

Anyway, one thing we hadn’t done while we were in Scotland was visit a distillery (!), but there is one in Fort William at the end of the Way, the Ben Nevis distillery. At the time for some reason they weren’t doing tours but we went to the shop and I saw bottles of Loch Lomond Scotch Whisky. I knew I had to get a bottle of that. I taught myself to read at 5 with Tintin comics, and if you’re also a fan you’ll remember that Loch Lomond whisky is Captain Haddock’s drink. He’s always drinking the stuff. I wasn’t impressed by the “8 years aged” marking but it was quite cheap. And it was a bit of a lark. Well it was pretty awful and just tasted unfinished, but that didn’t stop Jay and I from drinking the whole bottle a week later in Belfast the night before we flew back to our homes.

What’s the point of this whole story? To be honest I kinda lost track of that early in the anecdote. This whisky (Rosemont) has me “feeling ways about stuff” and I feel that’s an important quality in a decent whisky.

And, well, Rosemont is a decent whisky. It’s quite smooth even when drunk neat. In fact, if I’m quite honest, it tastes a little light. However it does not have that “unfinished” taste that I detected in the Loch Lomond. It is not peated and reminds me of a highland kind of whisky. Strong hint of vanilla with a caramel finish, no unpleasant aftertaste. It has a relatively dark robe.

A glass of Rosemont Whisky, next to the bottle

This one has my seal of approval. This is not a mind-blowing whisky, but it’s also not priced like one, and if you’re looking for something Canadian that tastes pretty good and won’t break the bank, I encourage you to give it a try.

Montreal, QC

The ultimate “fuck you” from the City of Montreal

Imagine this scene – it’s 11h30pm and you just got home, you were supposed to be about 500 miles away except for an incredibly frustrating car issue (more on that in a later post). So you park in the drop-off area in front of your apartment building because you need to take your daughter and your dog to your apartment before looking for a proper parking spot. So you wake up the little dear, leash the dog, grab as much luggage as you can, head upstairs, put the youngun to bed and make sure the K9 has food, take a leak, then get back there. You’re up there maybe 5 minutes before you head back down to find a place to park the whip.

Only when you get there there’s something on your windshield… a parking ticket. At 11:35pm on a Thursday.

And then it strikes you that there is a bunch of data entered on there and do a bit of math in your head, and realize that the parking warden must have seen you wrangling with the kid, the dog and the luggage, and then swept in, issued the ticket, and disappeared again like The Flash.

That pisses me off.

I’m not saying that people should be expected to help me out when I’m struggling with something, but when it’s clear that I’m just taking care of the fam and dropping people off it seems like bad faith for some asshole to just sweep in and deliberately kick me when I’m down. And if that’s the kind of people that the City of Montreal hires to monitor street parking, well, that just sucks.

I’m really curious to see exactly who it is that would be such a jerk, so I’m thinking that maybe I should establish exactly who it is by taking and posting photos  — I have a front-facing apartment so that shouldn’t be so difficult — and maybe one day confront this person and tell them about my concerns about how they’re doing their job.

Anyway I’m still pissed off. Maybe I should let my dog poop on the City Hall lawns and not clean it up… I really feel like I need to get some retribution here, $102 worth of it. That’s potentially a lot of poop.

When this did become acceptable?

This video is astonishing. It was taken earlier today when during student protests in Montreal. In it a police officer points his tear gas grenade launcher squarely at a protester — almost touching the guy — and fires it, with the clear intent of harming the protester and making no effort whatsoever to arrest him for anything! This is absolutely, completely unacceptable and unless the sadistic officer involved is identified and disciplined in a serious way it will be difficult to take the SPVM at all seriously.

A note to the people at Microbytes…

Y U NO Y U NO CALL CUSTOMER WHEN ORDER IS READY?

An open letter to a Montreal cyclist

To the Chinese man on a bike who nearly plowed into my car this morning: what the fuck is wrong with you?

Seriously, I was waiting at a red light for at least 30 second with my turn indicator on. Meanwhile you were riding next to the sidewalk, hidden from my view by a number of large roadworks cones. You did not stop. You did not slow down. In fact if it weren’t for the fact that I, yes I, was paying attention to my blind spot when I turned in, you would have been seriously hurt. Especially since you weren’t wearing a helmet. I suspect that’s because you don’t have much to protect up there.

And then you had the balls to yell at me, you dumbass inbred motherfucker. I flipped you the bird and honked my horn at you because frankly I did not feel it would have been appropriate for me to turn off my engine, get out of my car, and give you the shit-kicking that you absolutely and definitely deserved. I was in the middle of the road and had a job to get to, you stupid cunt.

Watch where the fuck you’re going you moron. I hope you burn a red light and get hit by a semi or a bus. Why that choice of vehicle? Because either of those can run you over and not be overly damaged or cause another accident as a result. You are a fucking menace to everyone on the road and the sooner you are forced off it the better off this city will be.

Location, location, location

As I walked back from the bar in -16C windy weather having spent the last week in the Caribbean (more on that later) I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a way for me to get back to St. Maarten…

MB makes a value proposition.

This article drove down the street to http://ambitiousbutrubbish.com/2008/01/mb-makes-a-value-proposition-with-the-all-new-c230/… update any bookmarks you may have.

The tyranny of low expectations.

The City of Montreal swears it will have the streets cleared of snow. By Christmas. Seriously, that’s the official story. Christmas is the 25th, and thus 9 days since last Sunday’s snowstorm, which only dumped 30cm of snow in the city. How pathetic is that? 9 days to clear 30cm (40 if you count the dusting we got yesterday)… What will happen if we get a 60cm storm? Will the city close down? I used to laugh at New Yorkers who couldn’t deal with a bit of snow, and it turns out that Montreal isn’t really doing any better.

Thoughts on winter driving in Montreal.

When I was a kid, when it snowed local authorities would actually deploy equipment to take the snow off the streets. However that seems like an enchanted and mystical time never to be seen again. We had a snowstorm in Montreal on Sunday, and three days later the streets are still lined with snowbanks — some several feet high — and even the highways are covered in the stuff, stretching 20-minute commutes into two and three hours. What exactly are we paying taxes to the useless assclowns at the city and provincial levels for, anyway?