What’s ~4.6 billion years old, sometimes referred to as a “dwarf,” 93 million miles away, really hot yet still can’t melt a flake of snow in Alaska?
Hint (fill in the blank): Mama always told me not to look into the sights of the ___. Oh, but mama, that’s where the fun is!
It’s always uplifting this time of year. Right around my birthday ol’ Sol begins the Sisyphean climb back to its Zenith and our spirits are restored. Praises be. I’ve always said that it isn’t the winter cold that makes me moody so much as it is the short days. But not to worry, before long we’ll once again stow the bottle of Vitamin-D in the cabinet and look forward to months of midnight Sun.
Nothing lasts forever though
The Sun is roughly middle aged and has not changed dramatically for four billion[b] years, and will remain fairly stable for another four billion years. However, after hydrogen fusion in its core has stopped, the Sun will undergo severe changes and become a red giant. It is calculated that the Sun will become sufficiently large to engulf the current orbits of Mercury, Venus, and possibly Earth.
Can you say Sunburn? When this day arrives it’s gonna make present-day global warming seem like a mild hot flash.
We’re hosting a dinner party tonight. Roll-up lasagna, salad topped with oven-roasted sweet pecans, and who knows how many bottles of fine red wine. I retrieved a couple of beauties from our cellar I hope will show well. “Pinot Bill” will be here; he’s a good friend and former colleague now living in Texas who’s up here visiting for a couple weeks. Bill knows more about Pinot Noir than anyone else I know. Actually, he knows more about wine generally than anyone else I know.
One time he and I along with two other friends split a bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, one of the finest (French) burgundies in the world. We’re talking like a few thousand dollars a bottle, ordinarily, but somehow Bill manged to get a sommelier at a fancy restaurant here in Anchorage to sell us one for $575 (if memory serves me correctly; this was over ten years ago, when oil was >$100/bbl). It was an especially good vintage, too (1990?), making it all the more remarkable. One bottle is four healthy pours of wine, so ~$145/glass for each of us (less a small pour we shared with the sommelier; the proper thing to do). After the sommelier decanted the wine the four of us just sat there staring at that garnet beauty for what must’ve been ten minutes or more. The floral aroma rising out of our glasses was so striking even a passing waitress paused to wonder what kind of wine we were drinking. We were all super careful not to make any sudden moves or do anything that might spill a glass. We laughed about that. Eventually, one of us, I don’t recall who, carefully lifted his glass by the stem, did all the usual swishing and sniffing one does with a good wine to judge its legs and nose, and then gently tilted the glass back to take the first delicate sip. Given the transcendent aroma of this wine that enveloped our table it was unlikely it had been corked (spoiled), but aroma alone is not always diagnostic, so the rest of us were like breathless, transfixed on the expression of the first sipper, anxious to witness his first impressions of the wine. I could hardly wait, Please oh please, I thought, don’t let this bottle be corked. Well, once that first sip finally washed over his back palette his eyes rolled back and his mouth was agape like someone who’d just had an orgasm. Hooray, we’ve got a winner! Over the next two hours you’ve never seen four happy grown men savor a single glass of wine so slowly. I’m not exaggerating when I say that was the finest wine I have ever experienced.
By comparison the wines tonight will be more pedestrian, a twelve year Barolo and ten year old Caymus Special Select are my offerings. Who knows what other bottles our guests will bring. It’s always fun to decant the wines and have people taste them blind, and then try to guess the grape type, vintage, and region. As you might imagine, correct answers are inversely proportional to the number of glasses imbibed. Should be a fun soiree tonight. Looking forward to seeing everyone.
Can you tell from my mood the dwarf is back?