The 2005 Auteur Shea Vineyard Pinot Noir is a fantastic wine. Probably the best wine I have drank all year. Shea Vineyard is one of the most prestigious vineyards in New World Pinot Noir, placing it squarely among the elite terroirs. Shea Vineyards consists of 140 dry farmed hillside acres located in Oregon’s sub-appellation, Yamhill-Carlton. Yamhill-Carlton is situated in a rainshadow where storms often miss, leaving excellent dry conditions for Pinot Noir. Our Shea is harvested from the fabled Back Block of Shea Vineyard, the only other producer to get this fruit is Dick Shea, the owner of the vineyard. The soil is characterized by shallow sedimentary Willakenzie topsoil over fractured sandstone subsoil. Willakenzie soils tend to display darker fruit with concentrated blackberry and plum highlighted with notes of earth, pepper and minerals.

Dark crimson in color, perfumed with lavender, slate, and marionberry cut with mineral, anise, almond, sassafras and graphite. The explosive, weighty palate is layered with bright red berry fruit beneath delicate layers of floral, carbon and mineral. Structured with generous and supple tannins, the finish is infinite.

You can buy it online from the Auteur website

Sony Mylo is the its first WiFi broadband communication and entertainment device to capitalize on the growth of wireless Internet access. The Sony mylo enables you to use Wi-Fi (802.11b) con nections found in your home, on your school campus, and at a variety hotspot locations to send e-mai l, chat across multiple IM conversations, and browse the Web. While it doesn't communicate via cellu lar networks, you can use the built-in Skype VOIP (voice over IP) software to make phone calls over the Internet via the integrated microphone or the included external mic.

This product is designed for people who use instant messaging as a primary form of communication and networking for their social life. The name mylo stands for “my life online” and the communicator lets you use instant messaging, browse the Internet, listen to music, send emails and view photos concurrently.Small enough for a pocket or purse, the slim, oblong-shaped device features a 2.4 inch color LCD (measured diagonally) with a slide out QWERTY keyboard for comfortable and quick thumb typing.

The mylo COM-1 has 1 GB of flash memory, a 2.4-inch LCD display with a 320 x 240-pixel resolution (Q VGA), slide-out QWERTY keyboard that's easy to operate, an embedded microphone and speaker, Memory S tick slot (PRO Duo) slot, and USB 2.0 port for connectivity to your PC and for charging the battery. The lithium-ion rechargeable battery provides up to 3.5 hours of Internet calling talk time, up to 7 hours web browsing, and up to 45 hours of music playback.

The device, available in black or white, comes embedded with popular instant messaging services: the Google Talk instant messaging service, Skype and Yahoo! Messenger. These services are free and the product does not require initial computer setup or a monthly service contract.

San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter gets a hefty does of Italian style this fall with the opening of The Keating’s 35 room boutique hotel. Italian designers like to use slick surfaces and low-slung furniture, but the Keating employs that style with particular aplomb– the designers are also the guys behind Ferrari and Maserati. While it’s not a car themed hotel, the Pininfarina team did take historical and ergonomic cues from Italian vehicles. Next year a signature restaurant and eight premium suites are set to open, but until then expect the in-room espresso machines, attentive staff and sexy underground lounge to get your motor running.

Picture Mate Flash is the ultimate personal photo lab solution. It gives you the power to view and print pro quality, 4x6 photos and save them to CDs with just one touch. Do it all yourself — without ever turning on your computer! With PictureMate Flash, you’ll enjoy all the features of a full-service photo lab, at home or on the go.

To backup your photos, use the 2.5 inch premium photo viewer to view and select the photos you want to save. Then, press the Save-to-CD button and the built-in CD burner does the rest. With one touch, you can preserve your memories — hassle free! It’s just as easy to view and select the photos you want to print. Choose photos from popular memory cards, digital cameras, mobile phones or CDs/DVDs. Then, do more with your photos, such as crop, remove red eye, add fun Disney frames and much more — all without a PC. You’ll get stunning prints with vivid colors, sharp detail and true-to-life skin tones — every time.

White Cube Gallery  is presenting  'Now is the discount of our winter tents', an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Neal Tait. For this exhibition, Tait has made a total environment, an installation with painted walls and a bench where visitors can sit and contemplate the works (a re-make of a distinctive 1980s design). The bench echoes the strange conjunctions of craft and technology that is a key concern in Tait’s paintings and the installation as a whole can be seen as a reaction to the inert nature of the ‘white cube’ or gallery space.

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Tait is interested in the way that themes and ideas can become redundant through their overuse and in the way that old stories or ideas can be reconfigured to open up space for new meanings and associations. For this exhibition, Tait has created a body of work which although treated with a certain lightness in both mood and spirit, carries with it a resignation to its own possible failure. These paintings, like much of the artist’s work, have circuitous themes without obvious single entry or exit points and are underpinned by a strange, almost absurd logic. Narratives and sub-narratives are implied through collaged visual elements that have the seamless fluidity of a dream or the rhetoric of a fairy tale combined with the perverse playfulness of surrealism.

The Outdoor Artisan Pizza Oven is hand fabricated entirely of stainless steel, with a painstaking double-wall insulated design. The baking surface is a professional composite baking stone. Its heat transfer performance exceeds that of natural stone, and it will never become brittle like quarry stone can after repeated heat cycles. The convenience of the 30,000 BTU stainless steel gas burner means the oven is always at the ready, while the integrated smoking drawer imparts the flavor of a wood-fired pizza oven. The 30,000 BTU stainless steel gas burner, integrated thermometer, liquid propane or natural gas, counter-top design for an easy fit into existing outdoor kitchens.

Available this October 2006 for $3,990

Designed by Barber Osgerby, this sophisticated coffee table sits low and is made of angled dual-walled ribbons of gray high-gloss molded polyester with a glass top. Items placed on the glass table top appear to be suspended in the air. You can buy this table at the MoMa store

L’Hotel du Nord is a slick new old restaurant with yummy plates and classic, white-tiled interior complete with wooden bar and uban atmosphere. If any of the places situated along the picturesque Canal St. Martin provide the perfect setting for a romantic dinner for two, then this is it. Also highly recommended for a late-night dessert on a balmy summer evening..

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Even if the adventure of the hotel du Nord officially started in 1885 its history cannot be separated from the Canal St Martin’s one. Created by Napoléon to feed Paris in water and to cut the large loop of the river Seine hardly navigable, this imitation of river is 4,5 km long. In 1825 it was surrounded by some docks, bargemen’s bistros and streetwalkers hanging their despair to the thin iron bridges. Through those precarious destinies of thousands of Parisians who have found far from its Majesty the Seine some new horizons on its banks, we can imagine that the Hôtel du Nord was the pied-à-terre, the meeting point for the workers and the landlubbers came to get some rest and comfort for a night or a meal. From reaches to locks, the Canal and its hotel tell us the story of a break in the city: between the fashionable districts from the west and the hard daily life of the eastern neighbourhoods. At that time the Hôtel du Nord was nicknamed “l’hôtel des poux Volants” ( “The Hotel of the flying louses”).

 102 quai de jemmapes 75010 paris