Wine Enthusiast Magazine
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Archive for December, 2007
On Christmas Eve we had bubbly with our Dungeness crab salad and Cabernet with our malfatti in red sauce. They were good matches, and the bubbly especially was excellent, but it could have been a more sublime experience if I had been alert enough to serve it just right.
It reminded me of a few tricks to make the most of a good bottle of Champagne or other sparkling wine. I used to cover the wines of the Champagne region regularly and had the good fortune to travel there on several occasions and soak up not only a lot of great bubbly but also to learn how the natives enjoy their product.
Filed under: Connoisseurship, How to
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Northern California has its own culinary specialties and traditions. It’s only been inhabited by non-natives for about 160 years, so the traditions don’t run as deep as the East Coast, and of course there’s no comparison to Europe or Asia, from where most of California’s current inhabitants or their forebears migrated.
Our family likes to put a couple of regional traditions on the table on Christmas eve. These are malfatti, an Italian dumpling that has been identified with Napa Valley for generations, and Dungeness crab salad, made from the large, native Pacific crustaceans harvested from the deep cold water outside the Golden Gate and from points north to at least Washington.
Filed under: Food Pairing, Restaurants and Food
2 Comments
I’ve long harbored the fantasy, nightmare really, that a computerized wine tasting device would be created that could chemically analyze wine for aroma, flavor and finish as well as, and probably better than, any wine writer or master sommelier.
Never got to use the idea in a magazine article, but that’s the beauty of a blog. You can make it up if you want to. I pictured the illustration that would go with it. Kind of a 1960s style computer, with a large aluminum funnel poking out the top, great wheels of tape spinning on the front, and a long ribbon of yellow paper punched with the results streaming from a slot in one side.
Filed under: Critics/Competitions, Winemaking
7 Comments
What do Elizabeth Taylor, Tiger Woods and RoberMondavi have in common? It’s pretty hard to say. They’re all famous, of course. The first two are much more famous than the latter, however, even though “Robert Mondavi” might be the most recognizable wine name in the world.
The key is that all three are Californians, and they were inducted into the California Hall of Fame last night by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver. I might have also asked what does Robert Mondavi have in common with the other 10 inductees: Ansel Adams, Milton Berle, Steve Jobs, Willie Mays, Rita Moreno, Jackie Robinson, Jonas Salk, John Steinbeck, Earl Warren and John Wayne.
Filed under: Industry Issues
4 Comments
During a short stay in the Piemonte (Piedmont) wine region I met proponents of opposite sides of the ongoing debate over the use of small oak barrels for making Barolo, Barbaresco and the region’s other red wines. It’s a bit hard to believe that this philosophical battle continues after a generation, but it only shows how passionate Piemontese winemakers and connoisseurs are about the subject.
Filed under: Regions, Winemaking
3 Comments
