by Gabrio Tosti
One of the few true things spoken in the movie Sideways was when Virginia Madsen said "the wine is alive." While wine might not meet all the criteria required by science to be a life form of its own (it doesn't reproduce, but it would be nice if it could) it certainly exhibits some of the phenomena of life. Properly interpreted, wine grows, adapts, and responds to stimuli. It seems to me that wine even has memory. Those memories have roots in wine's early life as a plant: weather conditions, adversities, soil content, aging of the plant, invisible qualities in the air, and everything, everything that happened to the vines in the vintage year leaves indelible organic imprints on the fruit. Wine grows, too, once the fruit leaves the plant. Like a child that needs to be watched (and...
by Tracy Anderson
(as seen in Edible Cape Cod, July 2005) There’s no better time than summer to uncork a bottle of great wine. But for those of us who favor a big, lusty red, the warm weather might seem daunting when pairing our favorite wines with the season’s best foods. But although most people think white wine in the summer, there are actually many reds (both light and full bodied) that pair wonderfully with a variety of foods and occasions. In thinking about our summertime pleasures on Cape Cod, barbeques, clambakes, weddings and outdoor theme parties come to mind. Ice-cold beer and Margaritas are of course, always welcome, but there’s always room for some interesting wines that will turn a standard barbeque into a memorable culinary event. One of the great things about wine is that...
by Jennifer Rosen
"Drink your precious wine until you puke your guts out and the sweeping staff carry your carcass away." "Use the buffet line and keep your yap shut." Just some of the nicer responses to the column I wrote about overeager servers. Frustrated customers outnumbered irate waiters three to one, but sparks flew from both sides. Diners were fed up with over-intimate waiters interrupting, annoying, "Killing us with service," as well as with "Wait staff who want to become the star of your evening." One diner writes: "I don't really care what your name is—I assume you will be my waiter as you are standing next to my table with a pad and pencil waiting to take my order." Another concludes, "If a waitperson can't tell when a customer is through, perhaps a career change is in order." M...
by Jennifer Rosen
You've seen those wine cellars with travertine counters, cleverly interlocking zebra-wood racks, and age-tracking software. All that money could go into wine! Don't they get it? It's a cellar! You know, as in cell? It's for roots and coal, spiders and snakes. This is where you lock bad children. Pity the naughty little wine snoblings, reduced to screaming, "Let me out, Mommy! There's white Zinfandel in here!!” Europe does cellars right; ancient, dank caves where you don't need the aim of William Tell to spit. One Old World winemaker lifted a hatch in his cellar floor and showed me shrimp swimming around, inches below our feet. Talk about damp! Another cellar had a foot of mold covering the walls and ceilings. In it, glimmering randomly like mosaics at Ravenna, were coins from eve...
by Jennifer Rosen
Judging by my e-mail, an alarming number of you have quit drinking red wine because it gives you a headache. Do not go gentle into that good night! As inventions go, red wine ranks right up there with indoor plumbing, novocaine and the wheel. More than a great pleasure, it’s been shown to prevent heart disease, osteoporosis, cancer, memory loss and memory loss. (Note to self: drink more red wine). I’ll bet people nag you, "Oh, come on, try a little. You’re just being hypersensitive!" At last, you are vindicated, because now your condition has an official name. If you’re one of those folks who gets a pounding headache, perhaps with nausea and flushing, within an hour or less of drinking even a small glass of red wine, you have Red Wine Headache Syndrome. Since RWHS research has ...
by Jennifer Rosen
The media just adore knocking the stuffing out of wine snobs. Last year they pounced on a study claiming that blindfolded, you couldn’t tell red wine from white. This week they’re thrilled to inform us that wine and cheese, that staple of gallery openings everywhere, don’t really go together. “Cheese Spoils Fine Wines - So Stick to the Plonk!” screams one headline. “Wine and Cheese Incompatible,” squeals another. And, “Cheese and Wine in Worst Possible Taste.” A study by Hildegarde Heymann, professor of viticulture and oenology at the University of California, had eleven trained tasters evaluate a variety of red wines with cheeses ranging from mild to stinky. They concluded that, across the board, cheese mutes flavors and aromas in wine, canceling out oak, berries...
by Jennifer Rosen
My ex-husband, Mike, has the same five CDs in his car he had when we met twelve years ago. I can recite his grocery list like the pledge of allegiance. When Mike establishes a habit, Katrina-like force could not breach his levies. The other night, we’re having dinner at his favorite Chinese restaurant, an upscale place, with no splinters in their chopsticks. Mike starts to order his usual wine, an oak-beglobbed red, once the epitomy of high-status, now a sad cliché. Not to mention that Ovaltine would do a better job washing down the sweet-sour, firecracker-hot food in front of us. But, Mike always orders it because it’s the most expensive wine on the list and therefore the best, right? It’s a logical strategy. He’s is a suave guy. His shirt-cuffs are monogrammed. He stands up w...
by Jennifer Rosen
How many of you have ever fed a two-year-old, or been one? Then you’re familiar with the old “Open up the hangar and in flies the aero-spoon!” maneuver. I never fell for it. It occurred to me quite early that if I closed my mouth tight, no one could put another spoonful of creamed spinach in there as long as I lived. Which is not to say that people haven’t tried. At wine tasting dinners I’m often plied, for instance, with cheese, which I don’t happen to eat. Whether this is because I’m: a) lactose intolerant, b) health conscious, or c) a founding member of the Bacterial Rights Movement, is hardly relevant. Yet my refusal doesn’t sit well, and people continue to push. I simply must try this Stilton with the Port. People are quite certain what ought to give you pleasu...
by Jennifer Rosen
My cousin Christian, who wields a mean saber, has decapitated some 200 bottles of bubbly. Done correctly, the procedure involves impressive flourishes, as well as dubious historical stories of galloping Cossacks, and jokes about performing a bris. Most important, though, is that the bottle be Champagne. Champagne has more bubbles than other sparkling wine. According to Bollinger Champagne fizzicist Tom Stevenson, around 250 million little pearls of CO2. When the top is whacked off, bubble pressure shoots both neck and cork across the room, hopefully not into someone’s soup or cleavage, although Christian says that happens. Too little pressure and you risk glass dropping into the bottle. Higher pressure also dictates thicker bottle glass, which breaks off more cleanly than thinner st...
by Jennifer Rosen
Is nothing sacred? Thanks to Switzerland’s Cybox Company, we now have the square wine barrel. I guess it was bound to happen. Traditional barrel shapes were doomed the day France adopted the metric system, and couldn’t figure out how many hogsheads to the deciliter. Barrels have been getting a bad rap lately, anyway, what with some chardonnays going better with the dining room table than with the food upon it. More and more wines proudly proclaim their un-oaked status. In some cases this is a slightly disingenuous selling point, along the lines of: CORNFLAKES: NOW - 100% SNAIL-FREE! Some wines, in fact, have always eschewed wood. Others are only aged there after fermenting in steel. Still others, like the students at my high school who took drivers- and sex-ed in the same car, ar...
