Now, my local (jealous) friend Neil has pointed me to this Charlie Rose interview with David. I suppose it might just be that much harder to get a table now, which is too bad. But I wish Momofuku every success.

from Consolation Champs

Charlie Rose Interviews Chef David Chang

I have to admit that since then, the underdog WineLog seems to have closed the gap considerably, and maybe even pushed ahead. While Cork’d attracted a lot of the web design/blog crowd who enjoyed the work of designers/programmers Dan Cederholm and Dan Benjamin, there seem to be fewer, well, wine people there, and I find the site harder to actually use, especially when searching for wines. I still think the biggest challenge involved in making sites like these useful is formatting the information consistently and weeding out redundancies. Which is why I still generally use Cellar Tracker over the upstarts. But it’s fun to keep track of how these projects are developing.

from Consolation Champs

Wine-ing on the Web

It’s all in the pursuit of good “word of mouth” marketing and to be fair, you should blog if the wine is crappy as well as if it’s good.

Let me know if you take advantage of this. I’m curious.

from Consolation Champs

Free Wine for Bloggers!

All that as prelude to this: here’s a really good article in the latest issue of Mother Jones magazine, about an organic farmer in Virginia who refused to FedEx the writer one of his chickens. The article is actually an excerpt from author Michael Pollan’s new book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which looks fascinating.

from Consolation Champs

Mother Jones on Organic Farming

Although I do consider myself a wine lover, I’m not obsessive, and the thing I liked most about the film is that it’s not particularly about wine at all. It’s about life, with all its disappointments and its pleasures. And it’s about the crazy broken people who live it.

UPDATE: About an equal number of people get it and don’t get it on the eGullet Forums. When someone says the movie isn’t believable because a “true wine geek wouldn’t…”, I just had to roll my eyes.

from Consolation Champs

Wine Geek Insecurity

Review

Wine Report 2005, by Tom Stevenson. (Dorling Kindersley, 432 pages, 2004). $20.00.

This annual guide was one of my favourite finds last year. Its aim, as described by editor Tom Stevenson, is to “provide a one-stop update on what has happened in the world of wine over the previous 12 months.” In my review of last year’s guide, I likened it to “a compendium of the best magazine writing of the year on wine.” In this, its second year of publication, Stevenson has reassembled his gang of experts to send in their reports on all the world’s wine regions, along with their opinions on the local issues affecting the wine industry in each place. There have been a number of changes, the most significant being the addition of two more regional chapters, one for Luxembourg as well as one for Belgium, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. Future editions will see additional chapters on Morocco and Algeria, and even unknown wine producing countries such as Zimbabwe, Malta and Ireland are promised, if and when Stevenson can find the experts.

Though this just arrived less than a week ago, I know I’ll be immersed in it for many months. This would be an ideal “stocking stuffer” for the not-quite-novice wine enthusiast who is curious about more than just what bottle to buy. At the end of each regional chapter, each expert lists the best wine producers in their region, as well as the up-and-comers, along with lists of “Best-Quality Wines,” “Best Bargains,” and most interestingly, “Most Exciting or Unusual Finds”. It’s refreshing to read an annual guide that’s not solely focussed on discussing specific wines. Instead, this dense little book is content to educate and let the reader explore the store shelves, restaurant wine list, or agent’s price list(!) on their own.

from Consolation Champs

Book Review: Wine Report 2005

Review

A Tale of Two Valleys: Wine, Wealth, and the Battle for the Good Life in Napa and Sonoma, by Alan Deutschman. (Broadway Books, 221 pages, 2003). $22.95.

With such an unwieldy title, I feared that this book might turn out to be an impenetrable sociological treatise. Fortunately and unfortunately, it’s more breezy and gossipy than that. It begins rather more ominously, though, warning of a coming plague.

The glassy-winged sharpshooter is a small insect that feeds on, and kills, vines. It had been ravaging vineyards in the southern part of California and was now moving north. The people of Sonoma and Napa were preparing for the onslaught and it seemed to stir up grievances, between the rich newcomers drawn by the lure of more riches in the wine business and the “townies” who had lived here for generations.

Alan Deutschman was in a unique position to observe life in the two valleys, staying with wealthy friends over the course of a year. But I’m not sure that he’s aware that this very fact tends to compromise his apparent sympathy with the “regular folks” against the rich newcomers.

Where the book is most entertaining is in its comparison of the cultural differences between the two valleys. Sonoma has long been a bohemian-friendly place where rugged individualism is tolerated, even admired. One telling example is near the beginning of the book when the Sonoma town council has to decide what to do about the large number of chickens freely roaming around the town square. Napa, by comparison, is the playground of the rich and the corporate. While Sonoma farmers grow a number of other crops (mostly fruit), their Napa brethren seem to have torn out everything else to plant wine grapes. Napa hosts many more wine “entrepreneurs”, people who want to make a lot of money and who don’t care much for anything or anyone that might remind them that making wine is basically just a type of farming.

But of course, with success comes compromise. Sonoma is changing, and Deutschman planted himself in the middle of a number of political battles that seemed to be about what Sonoma would become. Of course, the most important was how to deal with the glassy-winged sharpshooter. Most of the people who actually lived in Sonoma year-round were opposed to a plan to dump massive amounts of insecticide on the crop, but their victory (in the name of preserving their way of life, and their health) could mean devastation for the very commodity that keeps their economy afloat.

This small book gives the reader a glimpse of the wine country that the visitor never sees. When the tasting rooms are closed and the tourists go home, the residents of these idyllic places are engaged in a struggle with their own “success”. The insect problem almost seems a blessing in disguise to some of them. A Tale of Two Valleys scratches the surface of some very important issues facing tourism and the wine industry worldwide. As more and more business people and tourists flock to Napa, or Sonoma, or Tuscany, or New Zealand, or any number of other picturesque wine spots around the world, those places lose a part of their souls. The glassy-winged sharpshooter is at least a more honest predator.

from Consolation Champs

Book Review: A Tale of Two Valleys

Review

Adventures on the Wine Route: A Wine Buyer’s Tour of France, by Kermit Lynch (HarperCollins, 288 pages, 1988). $24.00

Kermit Lynch is in the same business as Lifford. He imports and sells wine. Except that Kermit travels around France and personally chooses the blends and barrels of wine that he wants to import and sell to his customers. This is considered unusual, and Kermit definitely has the air of a curmudgeon about him. Except that he is curmudgeonly only because of his passion for wine. He has very strong opinions about the state of the wine industry, how corporations have crushed the small winemakers and homogenized the flavour of the product. So he seeks out the tiny producers, those cranky farmers who refuse to sell to him until after several meetings and then only in minute quantities.

He passionately believes a number of things about getting the best wines to his customers intact: he only ships wines in refrigerated containers, he is adamantly against filtering of any kind, and he has an innate mistrust of tampering with traditional methods. His championing of refrigerated transport sets him apart from many of the low-tech (or no-tech) reactionaries, but his views are in large part similar. He values wine in all its forms, as long as it is well-made. He disparages the modern wine culture’s monomania for big, rich wines and its blind reliance on numerical “scores”.

At the same time, the book is a fascinating travelogue, guiding us around some of the most famous (and least famous) vineyards in France. He profiles many of the rugged individualists he admires, from Gérard Chave, maker of fine Hermitages, to Auguste Clape who makes Cornas in the Northern Rhône, to Alain Roux in the unsung Languedoc. The personalities of these men are directly related to the way they make their wine, in Lynch’s view, and his relationships with them form a large part of his enjoyment of their wines. In the same way, his enthusiasm has helped sell some previously unknown wines to his many customers.

Each chapter is named for a region, and some (Beaujolais, Chablis) merely function as jumping-off points for Lynch to lambaste the entire population of growers of the region for ruining historically great wines. He refers to the production of Beaujolais as overchaptalized and overalcholic. He laments the lack of real Chablis even in Chablis: “Chablis that tastes like Chablis is so hard to find even in the cellars of Chablis that I have trouble working up any sympathy for the French howls of noble outrage when they begin raving about our supermarket jugs of Chablis and even Pink Chablis.”

The only weakness to this book might be its age. Because it was published in 1988, it’s hard to know what might have changed since then; who might have died or retired, which wineries may have been bought out by corporations or closed their doors. Even though Kermit Lynch continues to sell wine, he has said that he won’t write another book. But how about at least a new introduction or an afterword? Something to either give us hope that things are changing for the better, or to confirm Lynch’s worst fears. I suppose the next best thing is to read the monthly mailers that Lynch still writes and sends out to more than 15,000 customers. You can get on the mailing list by writing to Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 1605 San Pablo, Berkeley, CA, 94702.

from Consolation Champs

Book Review: Adventures on the Wine Route

Review

The World Atlas of Wine, Fifth Edition, by Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson (Mitchell Beazley, 352 pages, 2001). $75.00

As I was reading Kermit Lynch’s book, I realized just how indispensible a wine atlas has become. It’s fine to know vaguely where Burgundy and Bordeaux are located, but when authors (and wine critics) start dropping the names of microscopic plots of land, you’ll need a solid reference book to find them. Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson’s beautiful volume, first published in 1971, is much more than just a collection of maps.

There are fine introductory sections on the history of wine, growing grapes, making wine, and even enjoying wine. Next follow the maps, with France taking up a hefty 100 pages. The maps are extremely useful, showing not only the location of leading producers, but details such as elevation lines and actual vineyard boundaries. The text accompanying the maps goes into admirable detail concerning the soil types, sun exposure and other aspects of terroir that are impossible to determine from a wine label.

Despite the hefty price, this is a book that will pay for itself over and over for the wine lover eager to move from Beaujolais to Beaujolais-Villages to Moulin-à-Vent, or who wants to know exactly where and what Chateau Pichon-Longueville de Baron is, and not just the price or what score Mr. Parker gave it.

from Consolation Champs

Book Review: The World Atlas of Wine, Fifth Edition

Review

The Hachette Guide to French Wines 2004: The Definitive Guide to Over 9,000 of the Best Wines of France. (Mitchell Beazley, 1,019 pages, 2003). $50.00.

Boasting over 9,000 entries, the annual Hachette Guide is one of the most comprehensive wine guides to this most intimidating of wine producing countries. 900 wine experts make the selection of wines from over 30,000 entries during blind tastings. Though the editors note the omission of several well-known producers, it is not clear whether their absence is due to elimination by the judges or simply a failure to supply wines for the tastings, which may be the book’s largest weakness. Nonetheless, the guide’s breadth and depth more than make up for any omissions.

Some very helpful introductory material includes a summary of the life cycle of grapevines, how to read French wine labels, and a “What’s New” section with vintage reports for each region. In addition, there are almost 50 maps detailing the appellations of each region. Though not wine atlas material, these are useful for locating producers in relation to each other.

As with all guides of this type, each entry is densely-packed with information that is often difficult to cipher out. Some simple rules here make sense. If an entry is accompanied by a photo of the wine’s label, it is an indication of a strong recommendation from the committee. The rating system is a simple system of one to three stars, indicating wines of good, excellent and exceptional quality. Each entry also has a vintage guide, with the best vintages circled, good vintages in bold, and the text colour indicating which vintages should be kept (black) or drunk (red).

This guide is undoubtedly valuable for lovers of French wine, but unfortunately for us in Ontario, only a tiny percentage of these wines will ever make it to the LCBO’s shelves. Some of the wines listed will be available through consignment agents like Lifford, but you may have to search the web to find out if the wine is represented in Ontario and by whom. Of course, this isn’t the fault of the fine people who assemble this guide each year, and it doesn’t prevent me from recommending it as a great source of information particular to France, particularly if you want to discover some tiny (ie. less than 1 hectare of vines under cultivation) producers of quality. Getting the wines in Ontario will be your particular quest, but this is the treasure map you’ll need to get you started.

from Consolation Champs

Book Review: The Hachette Guide to French Wines 2004

Review

The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America, by Michael Ruhlman. (Henry Holt, 305 pages, 2001). $23.95.

Although I’ve never seriously considered becoming a chef, I must admit to a certain fascination with the profession. After reading Michael Ruhlman’s book, I hesitate to even call it a profession any longer; it’s more of a vocation. Many of the people he meets during his stint at the Culinary Institute of America actually seem to have a culinary calling. In no way does this mean that hard work and extensive training aren’t necessary. On the contrary, it’s only by passing through the fire, so to speak, that these stars of the kitchen can take their rightful places.

Most interestingly, at a certain point in his “research,” Ruhlman himself feels a bit of the pull toward the chef’s life. After being given special permission to attend classes without the required restaurant experience, he finds himself wondering if he could actually become a working chef. His descriptions of the rigorous CIA curriculum and his fellow students are both entertaining and at times a bit overwhelming. Culinary terms like mirepoix and confit are thrown around from the first page, sending me running to my trusty Penguin Companion to Food for answers. This was only slightly distracting, though, and overall I found I couldn’t put this book down until I found out whether Ruhlman would end up as a writer/chef or a chef/writer.

from Consolation Champs

Book Review: The Making of a Chef

Review

The Accidental Connoisseur: An Irreverent Journey Through the Wine World, by Lawrence Osborne. (North Point Press, 262 pages, 2004). $36.00.

What is taste? Is it the physical sensation of something passing over the tongue? Or is it the character trait of aesthetic discernment, as in having “good taste”? The truth is that when it comes to wine, taste means both of these things, causing us no end of insecurity.

The Accidental Connoisseur begins with Lawrence Osborne undertaking a somewhat tentative journey to discover what “taste” actually is. Tentative because it soon becomes clear that the author is uncomfortable with, even contemptuous of attempts to describe the taste of wine. Over and over, he struggles to say something that will be acceptable to his hosts. He almost winks at us when conveying their responses. Empty platitudes, he seems to be saying. Very early in the book he confesses, “I do not trust my own taste.” It’s understandable then that he would be suspicious of anyone who claims otherwise. Unfortunately, this makes for a sometimes uncomfortable journey.

In places, Osborne’s tone just drips with condescension. Of course, as an Englishman, he seems filled with a certain Old World cynicism, not necessarily a bad trait when approaching an industry as huge and commercial as today’s wine industry. And he’s clearly trying to tread carefully among all the pitfalls involved in reporting on a product that many people still consider a luxury. He’s uncomfortable among the fabulously wealthy, but also among the customers of the “wine malls” of Napa, for both of whom wine seems to be simply an indicator of status (taste?). Osborne clearly delights in describing both his discomfort and his disdain. A common thread is his lampooning of the way wine is marketed and the way in which corporations are creating a wine monoculture, not just in North America, but worldwide.

In one unforgettable passage, he’s visiting a Napa winery and tasting wine with the winemaker and the PR director (a telling combination):

“[M]y drinking companions were conducting a chorus of self-praise which I felt sure they had sung before.

‘Real nice tropical influence—’
‘Mangoes, yeah, pineapples—’
‘It’s a Southeast Asian fruit market!’ Goldstein finally cried.
‘Seduction? Oh yeah!’
I too felt myself getting carried away.
‘A Bangkok paddy field!’ I whooped.”

Like the best kind of satire, this made me laugh and then feel miserable. The fact that the story is true made me feel even worse.

Osborne also visits with a Napa wine consultant who advises several wineries how to adjust their wine to obtain higher scores from critics like Robert Parker and the Wine Spectator. He uses a giant computer database and software that can suggest changes to the winemaking process at the touch of a button. That this soulless technician then claims to be on the side of the “traditionalists” is the ultimate irony. This man makes his living because winemakers are slaves to “quality metrics”. It seems that they too cannot trust their own tastes. At least where business is concerned.

Osborne does find some hope among the “garagistes” for whom winemaking is still an art and not a business. Among these eccentrics, he relaxes and can simply enjoy wine as a pleasurable experience. He refers in this section to Kermit Lynch, whose landmark book Adventures on the Wine Route was reviewed in our June 2004 newsletter. This made me smile:

“I remember reading Kermit Lynch’s Adventures on the Wine Route for the first time and laughing at the photograph in which a young and raffish American importer is standing in a cellar with the Rhône vignerons Robert Trollat and Gérard Chaves. They look like a gathering of anarchist bomb makers loitering in a sooty cave. And Lynch’s delicious book is delicious precisely because of its atmosphere of Cold Comfort Farm, with absurdity, squalor, and sublimity harmlessly mixed into Dionysian alchemy.”

Osborne has written a thought-provoking book, one that is by turns maddening and charming. Not unlike the world of wine, I suppose.

from Consolation Champs

Book Review: The Accidental Connoisseur

Review

The New Italy: A Complete Guide to Contemporary Italian Wine, by Daniele Cernilli and Marco Sabellico. (Mitchell Beazley, 224 pages, 2000). $60.00.

This gorgeous book tackles the most exciting developments in Italian wine one region at a time. Sprinkled liberally throughout with photos that will have you reaching for your travel agent’s phone number, The New Italy is more than a coffee-table curio, however.

Italian wine journalists Cernilli and Sabellico lead the reader through the contemporary wine scene in each region, discussing general developments as well as noting producers who stand out. Excellent maps break down each region several ways and make sense of the DOC and DOCG designations. A glossary of terms specific to Italian wine round out the package, making this book an excellent country-specific resource for the wine lover and a fine addition to the always reliable Mitchell Beazley catalogue.

from Consolation Champs

Book Review: The New Italy

Review

Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture, by Patrick E. McGovern. (Princeton University Press, 365 pages, 2003). $42.00.

Have you ever wondered how the human race figured out how to ferment grapes into a liquid that gives us such profound pleasure? Patrick McGovern did, and his years of archaeological and historical research have led him to some interesting conclusions in this fascinating book.

One of the more interesting research experiments recounted in the book is McGovern’s attempt to recreate (through molecular archaeology) the beverage served at a feast held by King Midas almost 3,000 years ago. Partnering with a local microbrewer, McGovern came up with something quite unique: “not a beer, not a mead, not a wine—but a combination of all three, with layers of muscat aroma and a saffron taste that caught at the back of your throat and drew you back for more.” The beverage was served at a recreation of the feast in September 2000, and was even marketed commercially as “Midas Touch.”

McGovern’s stringently scientific approach may be a little dry for some, but the combination of history, archaeology, philology and even chemistry makes his conclusions all the more compelling. This meticulously-researched book is a rich resource for anyone curious about the mystery of wine’s origins.

from Consolation Champs

Book Review: Ancient Wine

• Langres – this was a soft and rather pungent cheese, and it went well with our sparkling cava and the other white wines. It is actually made in the Champagne region of France.
• Fougerus – another soft cheese from the Brie family, wrapped with a fern leaf, giving it a distinctive flavour. Good with our red wines.
• Mimolette – a very distinctive looking cheese, with a hard outer rind. This is a northern French cheese closely based on Dutch Edam. The wheel of cheese looked like a cross-section of canteloupe, with a bright orange colour. Very dry and tangy, like very old cheddar. My favourite, especially with bold red wines.

I was in charge of both the wine and cheese, while Brooke was in charge of the sweets. Ask me about how the cookie budget actually surpassed the wine budget this year…

from Consolation Champs

Christmas Cheer and Cheese

from Consolation Champs

Me? A Wine Snob?

The movie was fine, but marred I think by some odd casting. Bette Davis is great, but playing opposite her was some rube named Richard Travis, who was absolutely wooden and boring. It’s no wonder he was limited to B-movies for the rest of his career. And Jimmy Durante? Well, it’s a good thing his screen time was limited to about 15 minutes, as that’s about all I could take. I love screwball comedies, but there are many finer examples than this. From this era alone, you could take His Girl Friday (1940), or The Philadelphia Story (1940), or any of Preston Sturges’ films (The Lady Eve (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), Sullivan’s Travels (1942)). It’s true that they don’t make films like this anymore, and The Man Who Came To Dinner would be a great film if released today. It’s just not that great when compared to some of the other greats of its time.

By way of contrast, this morning I watched a recent Bollywood blockbuster, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998). Unbelievably corny, and filled with impossible plot twists; nevertheless, I was completely absorbed. The chemistry between the two leads was very real, and the emotions were genuine. Well before the predictably happy ending, I was reaching for the Kleenex.

from Consolation Champs

Movie Night

from Consolation Champs

Billy’s Best Bottles