OK, so I'm not even going to pretend that this is a late entry for Wine Blogging Wednesday, but on one of those random loops through Google I fonud the following link to my lovely father writing on Riesling which was last WBW's theme. And in another shameless plug, I'm going to recommend to you all his fantastic book A Pike in the Basement, recently republished in a beautiful new edition by Eland Books (seems to be only available in this edition in the UK Amazon but here's a link to the US site with used copies of the original available. It's a fantastic Christmas present for anyone interested in food, travel or wine - and because he never sold very many copies, it's unlikely that you'll be duplicating anyone else's present. He writes about travelling worldwide, from sheep farms in Australia to Las Vegas to the Turkey-Iran border, eating and drinking and getting into scrapes along the way. Each chapter ends with a recipe and a recommended wine, and it has great woodcut illustrations. The title story, well, you'll just have to buy it - but it involves naked women....
A couple of mini rants
This campaign to stop architects working on prison designs (via Design Observer ) seems rather inconsistent to me. OK, so prison might not work very well and for sure there are too many people locked up. But I would bet a lot of money that the kind of architects that would sign up to this boycott have never been asked to design a prison in their lives, and I am sure there will be no shortage of people willing to sign off drawings for new prisons, given that I can't see clients starting to boycott architects who design prisons. Hell, there are probably architects who only design prisons. Surely we should be actually looking for better prison designs. Will Alsop has, I have seen, being working on precisely that, with prisoners themselves. Isn't this a more intelligent and clever way to turn the prison paradigm around into something positive, using the power of good design to make an environment that allows prisoners to see some hope, experience some creativity and be stimulated ...
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