“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” ― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

"The Island." 

(DreamWorks Pictures; Warner Bros. Pictures)

In Norway, Kisses, Not Dances, With Wolves

"WolfLodge is rented per night, with a private chef, if desired... the head wolf trainer, spoke to us about the upcoming potential encounter."

7 JULY 2016       PURSUITIST       SUSAN KIME

TROMSO, NORWAY (Pursuitist) -- ... As we observed and took pictures of this encounter, I thought about a great essayist, and Cultural Anthropologist, Loren Eiseley. He had written a profound essay called The Angry Winter, in his book, The Unexpected Universe. Part of this essay dealt was a story about his dog, Wolf, a German Shepherd. One night when Eiseley was working at his desk, he absentmindedly placed a 10,000 year old Bison thigh bone from his desk to the floor. Then, Wolf, his domesticated pet of many years, picked it up, growled, and wouldn’t let it go.

Eiseley imagined Wolf telling him that, essentially no matter how much of a house pet he was, there was still a wildness in him that transcends the civilized life of pets, and that bone reminded him of it, of his place in nature, and of Eiseley’s. Those of us who own dogs, and even cats, understand this: no matter how loving, and tame, there is an instinctive degree of caution we must always exercise. 

This was, surely, the unspoken reason my colleague and I stayed behind — that somehow Stig the trainer had this sense of caution also, and understood, that on the periphery of the wolf’s mild kisses, lies a wildness of 100 centuries. 

Eiseley once commented in a lecture, “ One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.” As I observed my colleagues happily crouching and kneeling, on eye level with the wolves, I sensed the wolves thinking, “Now we can look into your eyes, and though you smell a little different, you are on our level, and seem more like us than we thought. How about a kiss?” Read More

The Best Casa Noble Tequila

"... [O]ne of the small-volume craft Tequila producers helping to raise Tequila’s image beyond the margarita is Casa Noble, a brand whose history dates back to the 1700s."

7 JULY 2016       PURSUITIST       ROGER SCOBLE

Casa Noble, which produces about 150,000 litters of Tequila of different ages each year, produces from a holding of about 3,000 acres of blue agave, about one-tenth that of Tequila giant Jose Cuervo (curve also buys blue agave from other growers). And Casa Noble’s blue agave fields are mostly on slopes and hillsides, which stresses the plant, and the company believes produces a more complex tasting agave plant.

Another difference in Casa Noble’s process to set it apart is the three distillations to which it subjects its spirit–traditionally, Tequila is distilled twice. 

If the taste of Casa Noble’s Tequilas seems deeper and slightly more complex than other brands, one of the reasons, says owner Jose “Pepe” Hermosillo, is the slow cooking of the blue agave “pineapples” before the juice is extracted. Some larger scale Tequila producers cook the agave in just six to eight hours in an autoclave, which works like a pressure cooker. Hermosillo compares the 36 hours or so of slow cooking in stone ovens to slow-cooking beans overnight in an iron pot versus using a pressure cooker. “Anyone can tell you the slow-cook method imparts a deeper, slightly smoky and sweet flavor that you can’t achieve in fast cooking.” 

The majority of all reposado (aged Tequila) is aged in second-fill American Bourbon barrels. But Hermosillo says the charcoal on the inside of Bourbon barrels is too much for the flavor profile he is going for. Casa Noble uses new French oak barrels with a very light char on the inside. The distillery’s Anejo Tequila spends two years in the barrel before bottling. Casa Noble Black spends five years in oak. 

Tequila that is to become Anejo (minimum 1 year aging) goes into new casks. The Reposado (2 months to 1 year aging) goes into refilled casks. (More often at other distilleries, they will use newer casks for Reposado Tequilas and older ones for Anejo so that the wood affects the spirit more in a shorter time for the Reposado.) They refill the casks for Reposado 7 to 8 times. 

It’s important to remember that one year of aging in the Jalisco region of Mexico where all legitimate Tequila comes, is like five years of aging in Scotland because of the much warmer climate in Mexico. Indeed, most distillers say more than nine years of aging, unless it is done in hyper-controlled temperatures, sends the Tequila over the edge with too much wood in the flavor profile and mouth feel. Read More

Ferrari takes the top off the LaFerrari

7 JULY 2016       PURSUITIST       HARVEY BRIGGS

Ferrari again is teasing us mere mortals by showing us something we can’t have. Yesterday they revealed the first photographs of a limited-edition convertible based on the LaFerrari.

The new Ferrari convertible is available with both a removable carbon fiber hard top and a soft top. It is built on the same platform and uses the same powertrain and mechanicals as the original LaFerrari. This droptop will be the king of convertibles when it comes to acceleration, handling and top speed. The 48-valve 6.3-liter V-12 makes 789 horsepower and is combined with an AC permanent magnet synchronous electric motor that produces 161 hp for a total of 950 horsepower. That’ll take you from 0-60 in 2.5 seconds and to 100 in under 5! 

... Ferrari has not released the price nor the name for the new convertible, we’ll have to wait for the Paris International Motor show for that. It hardly matters, however, because the entire production run has already been sold out to existing Ferrari owners who were given a special preview. Proving once again that the best way to get a new Ferrari is to already own a Ferrari. Read More

The 1,600-year-old skeleton of an upper-class woman found near Mexico's ancient Teotihuacan wore a prosthetic lower tooth made of a green stone known as serpentine (AFP; INAH/AFP / HO)