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...
by Jennifer Rosen
As a babe of three, I liked sitting on my mother’s naked stomach and playing a game I called “Does This Hurt?” She didn’t much care for it, but I had burning questions to answer, like, “What happens if you twist these?” Curiosity is still my master. I’m a founding member of Googlers Anonymous. My interviews are compared unfavorably with the Spanish Inquisition. But it serves me well in restaurants. Ask the right questions, I’ve learned, and you need never settle for wine you don’t love. My table ends up a forest of glasses; I taste dozens of wines that never appear on the check. “Sure,” you say, “but you’re a wine critic. What about the rest of us?” Actually, most of the world, including, I suspect, the newspaper I write for, has no clue who I am. The routi...
by Jennifer Rosen
“Your prescriptions are ready, Ms Rosen. Just wait while I wrap your leeches and fungus in this squirrel pelt.” Absurd? No more so than sealing an expensive, fragile liquid with a chunk of tree bark. Brilliant new technology in 1640, corks could compress to fit in a bottleneck and then expand to keep out air. They ushered in an era of elegant, age-worthy wine and made possible the bottling of another new invention: Champagne. But today, in this age of onboard GPS and solar-powered nose-hair clippers, isn’t it time for a change? Consider the problems: corks only seal when moist. Stand the bottle up and they shrink and let air in. Even lying down, they dry out eventually. That’s how the cork crumbles. They harbor all sorts of wildlife, like the hole-boring cork weevil. Worst c...
by Jennifer Rosen
King’s Ransom was the brand of scotch my great uncle Jascha loved best. He’d pour a little on his hands, rub his palms together and sniff them. “It smells just like perfume,” he’d say. This really pissed my father off, because he found the gesture pretentious and the scotch expensive to keep on hand. Besides, his experiments confirmed that any scotch, applied this way, smelled like perfume. One day he filled an empty King’s Ransom bottle with Black & White and served it to his uncle. Sure enough, after anointing himself, Uncle Jascha pronounced it aromatic as always. This “gotcha” pleased my father immensely. Wine lovers are probably the number-one target of gotchas. They are seen as pompous and elite, and there’s nothing quite like knocking them off their pedes...
by Jennifer Rosen
This May, for the very first time, Bordeaux did something extraordinary – it came right out and acknowledged a part of its history that it’s done its best to hide for centuries. Gee you hate to kick her when she’s down, but how the mighty have fallen. Bordeaux, once the Mecca of great wine is getting her ass routinely kicked by little upstart nations. No matter; a Mouton, Lafite or Margaux is still good currency anywhere in the world. Whatever else they may be, Bordeaux wines are respectable. But there’s a decidedly un-respectable facet to the Bordeaux story that domain owners would just as soon sweep under the rug. That they’re still closed-lipped on the topic, some three hundred years later, is something Americans would find hard to understand. Most of us are lucky to tra...
