Top of the List
Tomorrow night—May 1st—more than 100 wineries will descend on The Metropolitan Pavilion on West 18th Street for one of the most exciting wine events of the year: Wine & Spirits Magazine’s Annual Top of the List.
What’s on the list: The wines that made the Restaurant Top 50 of our 24th Annual Restaurant Poll, plus some of the most popular sparkling wines and pinot noirs, cabernets and Ports; wines from France, Italy, Spain, Argentina, Greece and more. Wines you know well, and wines that somms have picked as their favorite new discoveries.
Bob Lindquist of Qupé
Rub shoulders with winery owners and winemakers—David Adelsheim from Oregon; Ken Coopersmith at Merry Edwards, Jay & Tobin Heminway from Green & Red, Bob Lindquist from Qupé, Michael Terrien from Obsidian Ridge and John Wurdeman of Pheasant . . . Continue reading →
De-Vine Intervention
John Ragan MS
Several months after Hurricane Sandy hit New York, many restaurants still remained closed—places as revered as The River Café and as legendary as the Bridge Café. Some, like Brooklyn’s short-lived but much-acclaimed Governor, will never reopen. In response to the continued challenges the hurricane left in its wake, Danny Meyer, of the Union Square Hospitality Group, and Master Sommelier John Ragan, wine director for the group, have called on the local restaurant community to launch DeVine Intervention, an online wine auction. Gathering wines from reputable restaurants and collectors, they are offering 250 lots with no buyer’s premium, and donating 100 percent of the hammer price of each lot sold to the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City in support of Hurricane Sandy recovery efforts. A taste of what’s on offer: a 2001 Bartolo . . . Continue reading →
A Laurel for Tara
Tara Q. Thomas, our intrepid executive editor, fell in love with Greece when she staged at a restaurant in Athens while studying at the Culinary Institute of America. When she joined the magazine in 1997, she immediately set her sites on reporting the renaissance that was happening in Greek wine—a modernization of winemaking practices, certainly, but also a concerted effort to clarify the astonishing terroirs and palette of indigenous grapes that had been there all along. Recently, she’s brought to our attention Santorini’s precise, mineral assyrtikos, and traced the emergence of malagousia as one Greece’s rising-star grapes.
In recognition of her efforts to educate Americans about Greek wines, the Greek wine industry recently awarded her the first annual Greek Wine Industry Award. They created the honor “to acknowledge outstanding contributions to . . . Continue reading →
Frank Prial — a Remembrance
Frank Prial and I were in an elevator together, on our way out of a wine event. This was years ago, when he was still actively writing about wine for The New York Times. Prial was cordial and a bit gruff as we chatted uncomfortably. He had the gravelly voice and the gumshoes of a beat reporter on his way to a crime scene. And he had little time for effete interactions with a wine writer.
In fact, Prial had written a back page story in the New York Times Sunday Magazine lampooning what he considered the ridiculousness of our food and wine writing (a disdain Times reporters seem to share…our having been lambasted recently for absurdly specific wine and food pairings in our tasting notes by Eric Asimov, the current Times wine . . . Continue reading →
Vegetable Terroir
While compiling our special Fall 2012 issue devoted to the topic of terroir, we began to wonder why the word never comes up in the context of other foods. Odessa Piper, the former chef/owner of L’Etoile in Madison, Wisconsin as well as the wife of wine importer Terry Theise, posited that fermentation is an important part of the equation: “The distillation, and concentration that wine goes through makes it possible to taste its minerality and amplifies vintage effects,” she posits. “Cheese is a non-vinous example: The grass is distilled by the cow into milk, then concentrated through separation of the whey and evaporation. Many cheese tasters recognize the place, method and breed behind a cheese.”
Even without the concentrating effects of fermentation, she can recognize the flavor of Eliot Coleman’s carrots from . . . Continue reading →
