Posted 03/31/2009 at 11:41 AM by Cathy
Full disclosure: I have never met a Rhône wine that I like.Just like I have never met a wine from Paso Robles that I like.It's nothing personal, and it is certainly not for lack of trying. It's just that my palate somehow doesn't accommodate the wines from these two regions. My initial reaction to the wines has not been that they are fruity or pleasurable; my initial reaction has been that they are dusty.Obviously I've been missing something. So when the opportunity arose to hear Master of Wine ...
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Posted 03/30/2009 at 02:01 PM by Cathy
A few weeks ago I received a book in the mail, unsolicited, from a publisher who thought I'd be interested in the subject matter. I am interested in the subject matter – it being wine and all – but a few minutes of page turning told me that I was not interested in the book.It looked, well, boring. And it looked like material I could get from any of the too-many books I already had on my shelves. So that's where it's going to stay – on the shelf – until the next time I spring clean my library or ...
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Posted 03/29/2009 at 12:44 PM by Cathy
I showed up for my lunch with T. with a bottle of 2006 Pouilly-Vinzelles from the Bret brothers, rising-star winemakers and negoçiants from the Mâcon.That turned out to be a good choice.I know this to be true, because when I left I was carrying a mason jar of wild rice that T. had harvested with his own hands – and his own paddle, apparently – as he shuttled his canoe through the paddies near his summer cabin in Minnesota. It was a precious and generous gift. Ricing is an old Native American tra ...
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Posted 03/27/2009 at 09:11 PM by Cathy
A friend of mine opened her home-goods store with a modest wine collection, but she was insistent that the wines she carried would all be "hand-crafted" and "small production" and "estate bottled" and she would have a personal connection to as many of the winemakers as possible. In other words, they would be wines she was proud to carry.That was the plan.And at first it worked very well. She developed – and still continues to nurture – a devoted clientele who trust her opinions, on wine and on g ...
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Posted 03/25/2009 at 08:02 PM by Cathy
Think of wine from New Zealand and you're likely to think Sauvignon Blanc, or Pinot Noir.But how about Syrah? Once in a while.Or a Bordeaux blend?Uhhh....Pinot Gris? Gewurztraminer? Riesling?Not so much.That – namely, sampling many, many wines outside the typical New Zealand cache – was the beauty of the tasting hosted by the New Zealand Winegrowers at BiNA Osteria in Chinatown yesterday. Like the 2008 Dry River Craighall Riesling from Martinborough, whose assertive minerality-laced finish boded w ...
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Posted 03/24/2009 at 09:18 AM by Cathy
[Note: This article ran in the business section of today's Gloucester Daily Times.]Number of restaurants who participate in Boston's Winter Restaurant Week: 227.Number of those restaurants on the North Shore: 1.What does the Grand Café at the Emerson Inn in Rockport know that no one else on the North Shore knows?That even in a recession – or maybe especially in a recession – the hospitality industry needs to keep moving forward.That an economic downturn is actually the right time to expand a res ...
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Posted 03/23/2009 at 11:50 AM by Cathy
Sometimes you do get the whipped cream on your hot chocolate. Sometimes you do get the bagel toasted, with extra butter, thank you very much.Just like sometimes you order the Kir Royale rather than just the Kir.You do it... just because.It was the same way this week during lunch at L'Espalier. I did order the Belgian Malinois Cocktail, not because the Belgian raspberry-infused beer wasn't enough (it always is), and not because the Champagne by itself wouldn't have been enough either (it certainly ...
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Posted 03/22/2009 at 10:30 AM by Cathy
A local restaurateur invited me to a small tasting this week with a sales rep from one of the major distributors. We'd be trying wines from two vineyards, both in California, from primarily two varietals – Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. And it was going to be at 10:30 in the morning.Wine for breakfast! My favorite way (almost) to start the day.It was, at least, until they started pouring the Pinots from Sonoma. Something was off. It wasn't that I was expecting the Pinots from Sonoma to taste like Pi ...
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Posted 03/20/2009 at 04:08 AM by Cathy
You find the darndest things at BRIX. Or else, they find them – or special-order them – for you.Canton, said to be the world's first premium ginger liqueur, is infused with VSOP Cognac and baby Vietnamese ginger, along with a little ginseng just for good measure.It's a clever combination, drawing on the appeal of the exotic (Domaine de Canton is a ginger estate in French Indochine popular during colonial times), the classic (French eau de vie, Grande Champagne Cognac), and the vaguely homeopathi ...
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Posted 03/19/2009 at 11:19 AM by Cathy
Suzanne Pirret does not follow many of the rules.You'd know this if you happened to see her noon-time cooking demonstration at Northeastern University yesterday. No one actually cooks wearing a dress like that, just like no one is allowed to make chocolate cookies like that that have the consistency of fudge, are rolled in sugar, topped with sea salt, and then dunked – as Pirret advises at the end of her no-ingredient-list-only-prose recipe – in a glass of 2004 Vin Santo del Chianti Classico fro ...
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Posted 03/18/2009 at 01:26 PM by Cathy
[Note: This article ran in today's Gloucester Daily Times.]Champagne, especially from premium houses like Charles Heidsieck and Krug, is a pricey endeavor. It helps to share, both the experience and the expense. Which is what I plan to do with my book club next week when we meet at Cornerstone Books in Salem to discuss our pick of the month: The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It. Each month the club comes together to sip wine that is somehow relevant to t ...
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Posted 03/17/2009 at 07:12 AM by Cathy
Looking over Congress Street from Sportello's second-story window is like watching setting for the Boston version of a situation comedy. Storylines pass at the rate of four per minute.It's early evening. A young mom and her son wait in their cherry-red low-to-the-ground sports car for the dad – dressed in baggy jeans and black sweatshirt – to come out of work. He gets in, she slides over, the child tumbles into the back seat.A middle-aged professional woman catches a cab to the airport. The cabb ...
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Posted 03/16/2009 at 01:44 PM by Cathy
No where, perhaps, more than France is the tradition of wine appreciation more integrated into a culture. From a young age, we hear, French children are introduced to wine little by little – wine diluted with water is given to young people at meal times under the watchful eye of parents, grandparents, and other adults interested in passing on France's cultural and oenological heritage to the next generation. Romantic? Sure. But even so, the idea was not to drink a lot. The idea was to taste and ...
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Posted 03/13/2009 at 10:20 PM by Cathy
Age, it turns out, does matter.Not that this comes as a surprise to anyone – in wine, in technology, in love – but when the truth of it resounds so powerfully twice in the same week, as it did for me this past week, you tend to take notice, especially since in both cases I was tasting relatively young wines from Napa. Napa has its age-worthy wines – most notably, in my opinion, Clos du Val – but given Napa's climate-blessed ability to produce wines of consistent measure, variations in vintage ar ...
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Posted 03/12/2009 at 05:29 PM by Cathy
A friend of mine does this all the time.He travels back and forth between Boston and New York with the sole purpose of attending wine tastings and events in both cities. (He also lives in Connecticut, which makes the trips much more manageable for him.) When the opportunity arose for me to attend a special Napa-themed event in New York tonight, I channeled my itinerant friend and before I knew it I was gassing up the Prius and turning onto 95 South.It was a trip ripe for all of the clichés. The ...
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Posted 03/09/2009 at 06:07 PM by Cathy
WSET – which stands for Wine and Spirits Education Trust – has a standard "checklist" for evaluating a wine. The evaluation begins with whether or not the wine looks clear, then it cycles through the intensity of the aroma, and finally it moves on to the wine's alcohol, tannin, acidity, and overall acceptability on the palate.The technique is especially useful for sharpening sensory observations of a wine since the same checklist is used for each wine regardless of the wine's vintage or origin o ...
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Posted 03/08/2009 at 06:25 PM by Cathy
"It makes it taste like cherry cheesecake," the beer specialist at Formaggio Kitchen's South End store said to me this afternoon.I was skeptical. What he wanted me to do was taste a cheese called Charmoix, and then immediately take a sip of beer called Kasteel Rouge. That combination, apparently, amounted to more than the sum of its beer-cheese parts, namely, cherry cheesecake.It wasn't that I was unwilling; I was in the South End, in fact, for the sole purpose of participating in the Belgian ch ...
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Posted 03/07/2009 at 05:29 PM by Cathy
The drinks list at Fugakyu restaurant in Brookline is anything but timid, no matter which tradition you call home.White wines? Choose from light-, medium-, and full-bodied.Red wines? Medium-bodied, Rhône-style, or full-bodied. Take your pick.Or go for Champagne, sparkling wines, or rosé.Then there's plum wine, sake, and Sho Chu.Or martinis, "special cocktails," and beer.Whoever said Japanese cuisine was a challenging food-wine pairing has not met Fugakyu's beverage director. And whoever goes hom ...
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Posted 03/06/2009 at 09:44 PM by Cathy
My job for the next 90 minutes was to give 25 college students an overview of the six main varietals.It wasn't daunting exactly. I'd taught college students before, and I was comfortable with the six wines we'd chosen for the exercise. They were nothing fancy, because the premise of the class was introductory.Still, I wanted them to see the difference between a Sauvignon Blanc and a Riesling, between a Merlot and a Cab. Not so they could go and show off in a blind tasting. Just so they knew – th ...
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Posted 03/05/2009 at 06:12 PM by Cathy
To view these photos, click Photo Essays on the top of this page, then Cooking with Wine. ...
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Posted 03/04/2009 at 06:12 PM by Cathy
[Note: This article ran in today's Gloucester Daily TImes.]When it comes to food and wine, frugality is the new black.These days, when budgets are tight and time is even tighter, food and wine lovers all over town are finding ways keep the pleasure without sacrificing the taste.Like any trend, there are some rules. And like any good spokesperson for a trend, Rosalie Harrington takes a how-to approach to demonstrate the rules' best applications.Cook it once, use it twice. Harrington, cooking behi ...
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Posted 03/02/2009 at 11:25 AM by Cathy
The menu for the Duckhorn Wine Dinner tonight was fairly by-the-book.Pinot Noir from the Anderson Valley with pan-seared duck breast for the first course.Merlot (from Napa) with short rib ragout, and Cab (also from Napa) with sirloin.Then Zinfandel with a bittersweet chocolate pavé for dessert.Except for the dessert course, all the pairings were right on. The Pinot Noir with the duck, especially complemented by the mushrooms in the risotto, was a natural fit. The Merlot would have been, for me, ...
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Posted 03/01/2009 at 10:08 AM by Cathy
The thing about wine drinkers in Boston is that relatively few of us "do" wine for a living.Wine drinkers belong to any number of professions but, this being Boston, certain wine-loving clusters can be more easily identified in industries like academics, medicine, bio-tech, designers, law, marketing, and pharmaceuticals, to name a few.What's increasingly noticeable are those instances when the enjoyment of wine overflows into a wine drinker's professional life. Like when the academic incorporate ...
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