March 31, 2025: Breakfast Beer, Anyone?

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In Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker talks about the REM-sleep-disrupting consequences of alcohol. He explains how the quality of your sleep is worsened when you drink. First, he says, alcohol fragments sleep, which will keep you from having a healthy amount of hours of continuous sleep. Second, he says, REM sleep is often suppressed if there’s alcohol in your body. So, you’ll dream less, which is not (and cannot be) a good thing… He also says that, when it comes to sleep and alcohol consumption, abstinence is the best advice he can offer.

And that’s sad news for all of us, isn’t it?

But he does (jokingly) say something interesting right before he concludes the part about alcohol, and I will quote it here:

“The politically incorrect advice I would (of course never) give is this: go to the pub for a drink in the morning. That way, the alcohol will be out of your system before sleep.”

And that’s a little good news, isn’t it?

Breakfast beer, anyone?

Review of Lebanese Wines by a top Lebanese Wine Reviewer: Chateau Ksara Le Souverain 2019

Lebanese Wines: Chateau Ksara Le Souverain 2019

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Name: Chateau Ksara Le Souverain 2019
Type: Red Wine
Grapes: Marselan, Arinarnoa
Year: 2019
Country: Lebanon
Region: Bekaa Valley
Date Consumed: March 21, 2025

I’m not very familiar with the grape varieties of this wine, but the spirit of cabernet sauvignon is in it, and I can taste it. Notes of black fruits, licorice sticks, and aphrodisiac spices come together to fill my mouth with poetry. I want more… but I don’t want to drink too fast.

I scrupulously enjoy and savor the wine, but I’m afraid I uncorked it too soon. The tannins are strong. I could have aged it a couple of years, and then I would have something much, much better. Much, much deeper.

Out of nowhere, I remember a sentence from Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus. It says, “If the world were clear, art would not exist.”

That’s why I sometimes blur the world with wine, I think — to make it less clear and be able to appreciate life as a work of art.

A clear, one-dimensional world is unfit for the soul of man…

Review of the wine of Bzommar, the Chateau

Lebanese Wines: Couvent Notre Dame de Bzommar Cuvée des Moines Chateau 2012

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Name: Couvent Notre Dame de Bzommar Cuvée des Moines Chateau 2012
Type: Red Wine
Grapes: Cabernet Sauvignon
Year: 2012
Country: Lebanon
Region: Keserwan
Date Consumed: March 9, 2025

Headquarters of the Armenian Catholic Patriarchate, Our Lady of Bzommar has a special place in my heart. It is the place where my parents got married, the place where I was baptized, the place where I got married, and the place I plan to baptize my son. Imagine then if I don’t speak well of this wine. The wine, too, has a special place in my heart. It is a wine that makes my soul smile. I uncork a bottle on special occasions. This time, the occasion was the birth of my son.