Central Israel. A 3500 square-foot house. Five bedrooms. Full eat-in kitchen. Dining room. Children’s play area. Wireless internet. Local calling. Includes car. Cost for these deluxe accommodations and benefits for my month-long stay? Absolutely nothing.
So went my introduction to the world of house swap vacations.
Rewind six months as The Crime Traveller’s Wife and I were mapping out the possibility of visiting Israel for our summer holidays. With our children now aged seven and five, I felt we had finally entered the family travel sweet spot — when the children are old enough to enjoy and participate in travel activities while still not being so old that they have grown to hate travelling with their parents. I had to strike while the iron was hot.
As soon as I settled on Israel I also instinctively knew that nothing less than two to three weeks was going to be sufficient. I wasn’t going to mortgage my sanity for a 12-hour economy-class flight with two young kids to a country with a seven-hour time difference unless I knew I’d be staying long enough for the memory of the inbound flight to fade before I had to brave the return trip. The challenge then became finding an economical way to house my family of four for an extended holiday.
On Saturday, September 4, Vintages is presenting a new release of wines, with a focus on reds from the Southern Rhone Valley. At its best, the South Rhone produces rich red wines with the savoury character of herbs, game and earth. In the most traditional and rustic bottles, this earthiness ripens into a fecund aroma that most critics euphemistically call barnyard (having never stepped into a barnyard myself, I prefer the term scat).
In any case, you have to watch your step in this particular barnyard because the Rhone also produces a lot of mediocre table wine. So, here are the Short Cellar’s top picks:
Pierre Amadeiu “Romane Machotte” 2007 Gigondas($22.95, Vintages #017400) Gigondas is a high and hot sub-appellation in the Rhone. This terroir gives the wine a molten character that is developing a strong cult following among oenophiles. The 2007 Romane Machotte is a classic Gigondas with rich and spiky juxtapositions of flavour. The nose is like a peony dusted with freshly ground black pepper. The flavours are deep, coarse and complex, featuring a lovely cherry/blackberry fruit spiced with garrigue (the flavour of wild herbs and lavender). This is a perfect cellar wine and it will continue to improve toward 2018. 91/100
After the jump: More picks from the South Rhone, including the best of the bunch.
Beer and wine have the dubious distinction of being prehistoric — even a Paleolithic nomad can make himself such a tipple given the right rock to use as his open-air brewery. But if you’re like me, such rude pleasures are not always enough. After a day of acting like a Cro-Magnon to my subordinates, I want to feel like a gentleman at home. This is when I turn to the gin and tonic: the cocktail that tastes like civilization.
It took the rotten old British Empire to throw together something as perplexing as the G and T. Its strange flavours are a relic from the Victorian occupation of the malarial parts of the world — army officers combined harsh quinine (a pharmaceutical extract from Peruvian tree bark) with sugar and soda water to make it more palatable. The fact that gin somehow leaked into this medicine just showcases that special kind of ingenuity that the Brits used as they conquered a quarter of the world.
After the jump: Gin through the ages, and all you need to make the perfect G and T.
Jesus. Kangaroos. Fighter jets. All on the same trip. Think it’s impossible? You haven’t been to Israel.
When I think of historical travel opportunities in Canada, images of frocked women churning butter at Black Creek Pioneer Village come to mind. Send me to Europe and I might be able to revert back two millennia occasionally, like on the ancient cobblestone streets near Rome’s Colosseum. But I can’t help but be constantly in awe of Israel, where 2,000-year-old structures appear around every corner, marking a mere footnote roughly half-way along the timeline of the country’s preserved human civilization.
So, with this in mind, I boldly shoe-horned my wife and two children (ages seven and five) into economy-class seats at the back of a Lufthansa 767 on route to Tel-Aviv via Frankfurt. Israel is a tiny country packed with endless tourism possibilities. For example, you could stroll from Ashdod in the south to Rosh Hanikra in the north, lazing away weeks on world-class beaches — but you would miss out on an incredible array of unique sights and activities. Planning for the weather is also crucial, particularly when travelling during the hot and dry summer season. The lowest daily high temperature we experienced was 36C (not factoring in the humidex). In addition, advance reservations are necessary for many of the country’s best activities — especially if you require an English-speaking guide. For all these reasons, our itinerary was planned far in advance.
Cheeky scale models, fearless kangaroos, rafting down the River Jordan and more...after the jump.
Central Israel. A 3500 square-foot house. Five bedrooms. Full eat-in kitchen. Dining room. Children’s play area. Wireless internet. Local calling. Includes car. Cost for these deluxe accommodations and benefits for my month-long stay? Absolutely nothing.
On Saturday, September 4, Vintages is presenting a new release of wines, with a focus on reds 
Beer and wine have the 
Matthew Sullivan's Short Cellar column will now appear every two weeks on lawandstyle.ca. Watch for a new edition next Thursday.
