by Steve De Long
Statistically, Airén is the most outrageous wine grape the world has ever known. Many wine guides and sites still refer to it as the most widely grown wine grape in the world, although it has been recently surpassed by Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot (surprise, surprise!) Still, it’s the most widely grown white wine grape but this owes more to the reduction in Airén acreage than to the international ascendancy of Cab Sauv and Merlot.* Amazingly enough, Airén isn’t grown anywhere else but Spain and in Spain isn’t really grown outside of the arid plains of La Mancha. To be sure, most people haven’t heard of this bigger than life eccentric as they have La Mancha’s other bigger than life eccentric, Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The most widely grow grape varieties are determined b...
by Eve White
The smell of food wafting in the air, the sound of upbeat rhythms from the white-canopied bandstand, and the taste of North Carolina wine await on the lush green expanse known as Symphony Park. Welcome to The Great Grapes Wine, Arts & Food Festival in Charlotte, North Carolina, an all day consumer tasting where North Carolina wines are showcased against a backdrop of cooking demos, food booths, crafts and the laid-back music of jazz and blues. The white tents dot the park-like setting and although the ground is soggy from a few days of heavy rain, it does not dampen the spirits of wine lovers making their way across the manicured lawn, to buy local artwork, grab a bite to eat and sample the fruit of the vine. Eager tasters line up in front of the tents of nineteen participating North C...
by Jennifer Rosen
Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, 1869: “Noted horse-tamer Professor D. Magner was introduced to a horse belonging to the Omnibus Company - a most vicious brute, with the habit of biting and striking with his forefeet, this large and powerful bay once killed a man by biting and trampling him and recently bit the hand almost off a person. In about twenty minutes Mr. Magner reduced this brute to perfect subjection - the former furious beast being as docile as a kitten.” This sort of news item was more common when horses were crucial to our economy, but the “horse whisperer” is still around. Having spent years training horses and training people to train them, I can vouch for the existence of these types. They often make a living teaching their “system,” but the truth is, the se...
by Jennifer Rosen
When I was 12, I did something all embarrassed preteens dream about and few outside the witness protection program ever get a chance at: I reinvented myself. Fed up with my shoddy grades, my mother uprooted me from a uniformed girls’ academy, where status was a coefficient of your dodge-ball velocity and midterm math grades, and sent me to a kind of new wave experiment in learning where you went around in bare feet and called your teacher Bob. Unless his name was Sally. Best thing that ever happened to me. Along with the terrifying and enchanting presence of boys, came the beauty of starting with a clean slate. No longer the non-joiner who slept through math and found diagramming sentences a complete waste of time, once transplanted, I became a popular, vivacious biology whiz, adm...
by Jennifer Rosen
When my sister and I were 9 and 10, we started a club called Bush-Hide. It had no mission statement, but the initiation rites rocked. They ranged from undignified (rolling in leaves and screaming) for grownups, to daring (you show me yours…) for boys. Clubs, even pointless ones, remind us of our atavistic need to belong or die. There’s nothing worse than being out. Just ask the shunned cannibal, declared by his tribe persona au gratin. You’re either on the bus or off the bus, said Ken Kesey. I prefer a unicycle, but I’m still curious about what goes on inside. I’ve always wondered about those ancient and royal organizations; for instance the mystery of the Mason (not to mention the mystery of the mason jar: how the hell do you get that lid off?) So I accepted with great plea...
by Jennifer Rosen
Can you separate oak tannins from seed tannins in a single sip? Know whether that’s tartaric or citric acid prickling your tongue? Find some wines undrinkably bitter or sharp, while those around you drink on unaware? Well, let’s hope you look good in tights; you may be a Supertaster. If you can’t do those things, don’t toss the Thighmaster yet. You still might have super powers; but it takes training to unleash them. In experiments dating to the 1930s, scientists defined three categories of how people taste. Fifty percent of the population are tasters who perceive flavors in a normal way, twenty five percent are non-tasters and miss out on a lot, and the other twenty five percent are super-tasters. Prepare to accept your lot. How well you taste is determined genetically...
by Jennifer Rosen
It’s a decent little Sushi joint; still, we have to wedge a coaster under one leg to keep the table from going ka-chunk when we lean on it. My friend Richard orders iced green tea. He takes a sip, then says to the waitress, “This probably isn’t right, but could you bring me some sweetener?” But that’s exactly right! The tea is high in tannin and acid – he knows instinctively that sugar would complete the balance. In wine, “balance” sounds like an esoteric concept like Feng Shui or Sinn Fein (whatever - I can’t pronounce or fathom either one), the sort of thing that only people with more finely tuned sensibilities than yours can appreciate. Actually, it’s as simple and instinctive as mixing iced tea. Or wedging a wobbly table, except instead of legs to even up you...
by Jennifer Rosen
“Your wine glass is on the right, water on the left. Bon appetit.” That’s all they say before leaving us in the dark, or, in this case, Dans le Noir, a restaurant in Paris that gives new meaning to the concept of blind tasting. Enter the brightly-lit bar, crammed with young trendies, and you could be in any urban restaurant. Except there’s an alcove for seeing-eye dogs. And they confiscate cell-phones, watches and anything else luminous and suggest you visit the john now or forever hold your piss. We order before entering the dining room. My date opts for the surprise menu. Then our waitress emerges from within. Caroline has beautiful chocolate skin, meticulous cornrows and eyes that roll up in her head. She’s blind. “Put your hand on my shoulder and follow me,” she sa...
by Jennifer Rosen
Help! I’m a prisoner in a French cliché! They’re slowing my internal clock and force-feeding me leisure the way they fatten local geese for foie gras. I didn’t plan it this way. Normally, the minute my suitcase hits hotel-room soil I achieve wi-fi and get to work. But they seem to have hijacked my brain and marinated it in herbs de Provençe. I’ve lost all interest in the story I was doing on the French wine market-share crisis, because, well, there’s dinner to plan. I’m lodged in the sort of moss-paved stone farmhouse whose perfect balance of breathtaking views and broken-down plumbing makes travel writers salivate. As French houseguests begin drifting in, I imagine a nice, grisly murder, after which we all gather in the parlor and banter wittily until the future convict a...
by Jonathon Alsop
As I was packing recently to leave on a tour of the vineyards and wineries of the Rhine in Germany, I struggled to decide what shoes to bring. Sandals? No, not sandals, not to efficient, practical Germany, I thought; pack sensible shoes for Germany -- that sturdy hand-made Canadian pair -- and save the sexy man sandals for Spain, France or Italy. And then it hit me: my ideas about the people I was about to meet, the wines and the food, even down to the choices of what I was going to wear carried within them a distinction between sophisticated worldly Roman Europe -- Italy, France and Spain -- and Germania, the untamed eastern part of Europe the ancient Romans never managed to subdue. The Rhine is the geographical boundary between these two historical worlds, and the river represe...
