The Deacon Trashes Pillitteri Event!

Yo and wassup to my fans and all you mofo crackerdine monkey-peckers who keep on comin' back for more! And why wouldn't you come back when you're gettin' the real dope on all the lurchest wine news?

Your humble Deacon just got back from a weekend in Niagara with the Deaconess where we attended an invitation only release party for Pillitteri's new i baci wines. And I gotta tell y'all that I was extremely disappointed...Disappointed that there was nothing to criticize! The whole evening was fantastic! Having just been on a tirade, slagging the Turin Olympics Opening Ceremonies, my knife was sharp and I was out for blood and loaded for bear. And then the good folks at Pillitteri Estate Winery provide a first-rate event and I gotta go back to Fresh Manor with my Glock unfired!

The evening was great from the get-go. I made my usual dramatic, professional stunt-driver style entrance by lockin' the brakes on the candy-apple Caddy and doin' a 4 wheel power-slide into the packed parking lot. The Deaconess and I entered in style, having hired a piper for the event, and there wasn't a dry eye in the place as we sashayed through the doors, resplendent in purple mink. The purpose of the evening was the unveiling of the i baci series of international wines. You may remember that Niagara was hit hard by one peckerjank winter that left much of the region with a short crop in the 2005 harvest. In the past, Pillitteri had released an "International Series", blending the wines of Italy, Chile and Argentina with the Niagara product. These proved to be lurch indeed and lots of loyal customers wanted more. So now the i baci label replaces the former series and does so with a brand-new look. I baci is Eye-Tie for "the kisses", as is readily apparent from the vibrant, erotic look of the new labels, designed by contemporary Montreal artist, Niko. (One of the highlights of the evening was the unveiling of the original paintings which drew an appreciative round of applause).

We were handed glasses of bubbly and began to work the room. It was great to finally meet Italian-Argentinian lurchbabe and Marketing Manager Gabriela at last. She made us very welcome and provided your Deacon with a informative CD on the new releases. As a Brit, I personally apologized for the 1982 Falklands Conflict and she thanked Britain for treating the Argentine conscript POW's so well. We buried the hatchet and got our pictures taken together to immortalize the historic meeting. Everybody lubs the Deacon...

We all headed upstairs for a sampling of the i baci collection, along with a good array of cheeses, salami, bread, olives, etc. You gotta hand it to the Italians! Nobody does it better. We hooked up with everyone's favourite blonde, Winegenius Sue-Ann Staff, the brains behind the Pillitteri product. I axed her who she'd fight in the Octagon but she's not sure yet. Then we met Uberchef Michael Pataran who's takin' on the Executive Chef position at Niagara on the Lake's Prince of Wales Hotel. He's a very cool and lurch man and he became the Deacon's official source of sake information. He'd love to fight Pat Quinn in the Octagon, but I think it would be better if he took on his doppelganger, Steven Seagall! Now that's a fight I'd like to see...Perhaps it could be the preliminary bout when your Deacon fights William Shatner in the not-to-distant future...

The i baci wines were interesting indeed. My fave was undoubtedly the Cab/Merlot blend, combining the offerings of Italy, Chile and Niagara. This is a very nice house wine and sips well, even without food. After some more meeting and greeting ("Oh! You're the Deacon! So wonderful to finally meet you!") we did the compulsory tour of the winery; the cellars being the real high-point. Pillitteri boasts the largest single wine cellar in Canada. The combination of Old World tradition and New World stylings are impressive indeed. Imagine a poured concrete table, over 500 inches long as the centrepiece of the room. Think of an extremely attractive and lengthy morgue-slab, surrounded by Romanesque arches and stainless steel chairs and you get the idea. The cool thing about the chairs is they're hung from the walls, creating a planet Krypton court-room feel that's quite amazing. The entire room is designed numerologically around the number 23 and would make Dan Brown proud. It's a very cool place where the entire Pillitteri Family can dine together with a ton of close friends.

So yeah, the title of this piece was ironic indeed. Congrats to Sue-Ann Staff and the Pillitteri family for engineering some great wines and a highly lurch event!

Check out their website:

http://www.pillitteri.com/

You heard me.

Deacon Dr. Fresh

Winin' and Dinin' with the Starz

Turino Olympic Opening Ceremony Sux Bigtime!!!

Yo Homeys, Crackers and Sports Fans Everywhere!

Right upfront let me tell you that I always love the Olympics. I love the pageantry, the slogans, the colour, the blood-doping, the wondering whether Osama Bin Laden will show, and the general festivities. The Olympics, both summer and winter are a huge deal at Fresh Manor. The Deaconess and I always grab a bottle of bubbly and a big tray of assorted finger-foods and settle in for the long haul while the rest of you mofos are at work bein' Type A Driven Lunatix.

Today we did our usual and opened a bottle of Remy Pannier Sparkling Chardonnay, served along with Middle Eastern treats from Arz Bakery, such as olives, hummus, bread and pastries. Now to let you know where this is headed, I think that the Eye-Ties should have spent less on security and a lot more on production values, rehearsals and actual content. These opening ceremonies sucked big-time and were Jank with a capital "J". What the fying fluck were these mofos thinking? I just watched 4 hours of the most pointless drivel I've ever seen.

Brian Williams is obviously obsessed with the whole NHL / Wayne Gretsky gambling thing and can't stop frickin' talkin' about it. He goes on to wonder if it will stress out the athletes of the world so much, worrying about Wayne and Janet, that they'll be unable to concentrate and put in a mediocre performance.

Hey Brian: The only person who's stressed-out by this and whose performance is being negatively impacted is YOU! Stop talkin' about it! It's the Olympics, for cryin' out loud.

The opening show was so all over the map, flat and pointless, that it's hard to critique it adequately. The whole arena was shaped like an enormous police badge (!?) and the festivities began with a bunch of people sticking their hands and feet through it, as though they were doing synchronized swimming; which in case you haven't noticed, has ZERO to do with the Winter Olympics. Some other crackers made a huge figure of a skier that was supposed to look like he was jumping, but since it took forever to get everyone moving into position, by the time it was said and done, I'd already figured where it was all going, and lost interest. Then a bunch of skinny people in white leotards wobbled across the arena with GIANT white balloons fixed to their heads, as though they'd been attacked by Rover from the 1967 TV show "The Prisoner". The Parade of athletes was incredibly bland and annoying; the entire event overlayed by completely inappropriate 1970's American disco music. It's not as though they haven't had time to put a soundtrack together! The crackers have known the starting date for years and yet it seemed as though they'd hired DJ Disco-Jank Rocco at the last minute. And the athletes national garb...What has happened to fashion? I love watchin' the parade because the Mongolians always look so frickin' Mongolian in their Mongolian hats, but even they couldn't rescue it for me. The low moment had to be the women from the Bellorusse contingent, who were dressed like disenfranchised, refugee, bag-ladies fleeing an invading Panzer Division. And speaking of the Germans...they were eye-slashingly, brilliantly garbed in green and orange, which was a welcome change from the mediocre quality of most of the uniforms. The Americans are now dressed by Roots and decided to wear Canada's costumes from a previous Winter Olympics. Some moronic teams apparently forgot all about the 20 million colour palette our eyes can discern and opted for sensible beige. A pleasant diversion came from America's Rottweiler, Great Britain, who actually dressed in Don Corleone-style, black fedoras and long black overcoats in a cheerful nod to the host nation. As usual, Britain's brilliant humour was lost on the mofos commenting.

The Italians did look the best in fur-trimmed metallic garb, which only served to emphasize the jejune lack of quality in the other mofos' outfits. We suffered through more terribly dated songs, including James Brown's "I feel good", and an Italian version of "Gloria" which propelled the festivities securely into the "who cares and best forgotten" file. Talk about Jank!

The show went on and on, with huge cows and mountains pulled around the field to more un-memorable music. Some peckerwood pranced around with a red plastic Mohawk and a white body-suit with stapled-on veins and arteries. Then a bunch of roller-bladers with fire roaring out of their heads came out...and then left again... Some acrobats in white hung on a giant peg-board and attempted to form a Dove of Peace with soft wings, which unfortunately looked a lot more like a pouncing American Eagle with enormous talons...Then Yoko Ono showed up (why?) and told us to "Just think peace" and it will happen. Well you can't make things like that occur by just wishing. There's millions of people worldwide who've been wishing Yoko would go away for years and she's still here. Then Peter Gabriel sang a lackluster version of John Lennon's "Imagine", but at least we didn't have to suffer through the usual photo-op appearance by that lubricious, political sycophant, Bono.

You got's to understand; I'm a connoisseur of Opening Ceremonies. This stuff matters to me! When you have billions of dollars and years to prepare, a bland performance is simply unacceptable. One brief redeeming moment was the lighting of the cauldron, which was right up there with the flaming arrow of a previous year. The torch was touched to a receptacle by three-time skiing gold medalist Stefania Belmondo. The fire flamed and roared around a circle and up the tower in an extremely lurch moment. But that one moment out of 4 hours was not sufficient.

Pavarotti, looking a lot like a painted hand puppet (despite the fact that he's lost 270 lbs. and is still the size of a Fiat) emerged next, only to blatantly lip-sync one of his celebrated arias. Some CBC commentator evidently thought his own microphone was off too, and was heard to say "He's not singing that!"

I hated it all and took to lying on my side on the couch feeling ill and disappointed, while the Deaconess kept telling me I couldn't leave and had to sit up and watch the whole thing.

It sucked with a capital "UCK".

The Remy Pannier Sparkling Chardonnay was pretty good though...

You heard me.

Deacon Dr. Fresh

Because wine is always better than sports