Oh, wait -- this is Illinois

Good news for those of us who look longingly at the website for K & L Wine Merchants, and only wish we could buy unusual and new wines from this "well-known California retailer" which also operates the "best online wine site in the country." Of course, we in Illinois used to be able to buy from K & L, and other out-of-state stores and internet shippers, up until June of 2008, when a new law sponsored by representatives and a governor counting campaign contributions from wine industry wholesalers went into effect denying us this right.

Happily, the Illinois Wine Consumer Coalition has announced that Representative Julie Hamos (D-Evanston) has introduced HB 2462 into the Illinois legislature. This bill is intended to rescind the recent ban on out-of-state retail wine purchases, and to return to Illinois consumers the right to shop for wine anywhere. (Imagine a state law denying the right to shop Amazon or eBay, because those retailers offer the consumer products that do not go through state wholesalers' warehouses, nor augment their fiscal health.)

If you live in Illinois, sometimes get a little tired of grocery store wine, and would like to have access to the inventory of a place like K & L, especially on these cold snowy winter days when online shopping is so toasty-warm and convenient, then I encourage you to visit the IWCC website. With a few clicks of the mouse, they will help you contact your state representative, sign the petition to all the state's representatives, and just generally get moving in the direction of choice, knowledge, pleasure, and maybe even a few good bargains for your cellar. It's a great big world out there, much bigger than just Illinois.

The Illinois Wine Consumer Coalition

Hey M...

Hey Mambo Sultry Red, 2007, vinted and bottled by The Other Guys, Don Sebastiani & Sons, California. $12.99. Chocolate-covered blueberries.

This is an all-over-the-road blend that I suppose could only be typical of California. Its grapes are, as the label orders them, syrah, barbera, zinfandel, petite sirah, malbec, and alicante bouschet (this last is a crossing of a grape called petit bouschet with the better-known grenache, and named after the botanist who bred it in 1866, Henri Bouschet).

I found Hey Mambo in a grocery store and grabbed it, remembering it was popular for good reason at what I should probably call from now on Ye Olde Wine Shoppe. The aroma of chocolate wafts up from the neck of the bottle as soon as you open it. I eagerly poured a little, tasted, and thought, yep. That's Hey Mambo. By the way, I vote No on the closure, which is an annoying plastic-capped plug difficult to get a grip on.

The flavors are everything that many people like about the California style of red wine, and are conversely everything that puts wine-drinkers with longer memories in a state of, not quite despair, but frustration. The wine is "jammy," thick-tasting, spicy, and full of fruit-sweetness. This is not sugariness, but a mouth-filling sensation which is not acidic, not bitter, not salty, not tannic. What's left? Sweet-ness: not Coca-cola sweet, but not stony dry either.

It's a mouth-filling sensation which is also the opposite of what those experienced wine-drinkers who lament California reds are looking for. They want finesse. And they want "drinkability," an odd thing to miss in a wine like Hey Mambo, which my ex-customers and I found delicious. What's undrinkable about chocolate-covered blueberries? Michael Broadbent, in Vintage Wine, explains:

...things have gone too far. Red wines are being produced which seek primarily to impress. The current vogue is for deep-coloured reds, full of fruit and flesh, sweet and easy to taste. They win gold medals. They are written about by wine writers who are always on the lookout for something new. The 'critics' on both sides of the Atlantic heap praise on monumental, small production, over-priced wines which are scarcely drinkable. The newer cult wines have no track record; will they ever come round?

...alas, it is even happening in Bordeaux. Dare I say it, the wines of many chateaux are becoming more alike in style, and the once stark differences between the various appellations are less distinguishable. European classics should be appreciated for their variety, their finesse, their ability to age gracefully and their sheer drinkability. Instead, we are being knocked off track by the outrageous, the obvious, the fashionable and the bland.

Hey Mambo is very tasty, but that mouth-filling sensation is after all a simple one, and in most cases simplicity, too, is a characteristic the opposite of finesse. And drinkability? What Mr. Broadbent means by that, as did our old friend Willie Gluckstern in The Wine Avenger, is suitability with meals. What meal do you pair with a drink, however delicious, of chocolate-draped blueberries?

And having learned this, just think what more there is to learn. Sipping a glass of Hey Mambo, unaccompanied, while reading about voguish, obvious reds, will be an experience just slopping over with finesse.

Trebbiano

Sometimes wine writers will startle you in the opening sentence of a chapter or a book by asking whether, supposing you're tired of chardonnay or merlot, you might like a glass of rkatsiteli, or perhaps a nice sip of airen. What in the world are these? Nothing much -- only two of the most widely planted grape varieties in the world. Airen, in fact, takes the prize as the most widely planted variety, period.

Both airen (grown in Spain) and rkatsiteli (grown in Russia) are white grapes, from high-yielding vines that sensibly love good soil and a lush, friendly summer climate. That spells trouble already, at least in terms of quality. Strangely, fine-wine grapes, perhaps none too bright in the plant world, do best under slightly stressful conditions, including iffy weather and poor, rocky soil. A high yield on flat, rich land under sunny skies means many many grapes of little flavor, and therefore a bland wine -- a wine that will wash down many an ordinary meal, a wine serving its purpose as the inexpensive and safe alternative to water that ordinary people in vine-growing regions have needed and enjoyed since prehistory.

Those characteristics, drinkability and miles of it -- think of all those thirsty people -- are shared by other humble grapes, among them trebbiano and French colombard. These are also white varieties. (Are there high-yielding, lush-climate reds that still turn out bland? That would seem what is loftily called nowadays "counterintuitive.") French colombard for example, thriving in all its mediocre glory in hot, sunny California, goes into our big old American jug wines. Trebbiano, planted all over Italy in such profusion as to compel Oz Clarke to call it that nation's "least avoidable" grape, goes into Soave.

Here we begin playing name games, or traipsing down memory lane, or both. Let's hope we don't get too confused. Soave is one of those wines that somehow stands up and shouts "1970s!" You can almost hear a transistor radio playing "Mama told me not to come" while you celebrate the first day of summer vacation and eat a popsicle, circa fourth grade. I have vague recollections of the grown-ups then mentioning Soave, but I can't remember whether it was as a de rigueur party purchase ("get something decent"), or as something definitely to be shunned ("just don't get Soave"). What it actually is, to my surprise, is a place.

Soave is a legally defined wine-producing region in Italy, a denominazione di origine controllata or DOC, centered on the town of Soave near Verona. Therefore, the trebbiano grape is to Soave as pinot noir is to (red) Burgundy or sauvignon blanc is to (white) Bordeaux. It's the grape name that the locals have never bothered putting on the label, because they knew it was there, and anyway the stuff is a blend of other things. Forty years ago, when Frank Schoonmaker was writing his Encyclopedia of Wine, trebbiano was one of the main varieties in Soave, "an excellent dry white wine, among Italy's best." The other main variety in the bottle was the somewhat higher quality garganega.

Then, it seems, Soave took off, and not necessarily in a good way. Karen MacNeil in The Wine Bible notes that it was in the 1970s that Soave became a "commercial, bland, cheap jug wine" made largely not just from truckloads of trebbiano but from truckloads of a poorer-quality type of trebbiano -- yes, there is more than one -- called trebbiano Toscano. The wine also became Italy's "best known exported white wine," especially as produced by a company in Verona called Bolla. So automatic is the word association "Soave Bolla" that many consumers, according to Ron and Sharon Herbst's Wine Lover's Companion, think Bolla owns a brand called Soave, or vice versa. I did.

And for a long time, our dull white friend trebbiano was even a required element in Chianti, that piquant Italian red which always reminds me of raspberries, olives, and horses. In a good way. It was required to be sloshed in with Chianti's sangiovese because, for decades, Chianti's growers already had a jungle of trebbiano vines on their properties. Grapevines are to Italy what the green lawn is to America, in short, everywhere, Karen MacNeil says. And the growers were "disinclined to uproot" the humble, easy, high-yielding stuff merely because it didn't add much to Chianti's quality. So Italian wine law bowed to business practice and said okay, keep it there -- it's "required." Oz Clarke tells this story and adds the happy news that progressive wine producers in Italy have more recently not only stopped adding trebbiano to their Chianti blends, but have gotten this law off the books anyway. (We might be excused for adopting here a puzzled frown. Are these Italians, so charming, never satisfied?)

Now humble, high-yielding trebbiano is also retreating even from Soave. In Frank Schoonmaker's day, it partnered with garganega. By the time you were listening to "Mama told me not to come," it overwhelmed garganega, and made that cheap, juggy liquid. Now, Soave must be at least 70% garganega, with the remaining 30% comprised of "other varieties," like chardonnay, pinot blanc -- and trebbiano (the Wine Lover's Companion). I put it all down to the market, and to lots of thirsty people all over the world learning more about wine and being able to afford wines more flavorful and more difficult to produce than the old, blessedly abundant water-substitutes of the past.

The name game continues. Trebbiano is also known as ugni blanc (white ugni, I suppose) in France, where it is the most important white grape in terms, once again, of yield and use. Yes, there is an ugni noir (black ugni), also called aramon -- and eureka! it's a high-yield, bland red! Interestingly, the French also call this last grape the pisse-vin, which might literally translate to "wine-spout," but also surely carries the colloquial connotations we think it does.

All so exciting. Anyway, because ugni blanc, our white trebbiano tastes plain and very acidic, it is the wine distilled into brandy, including the very fine Cognac and Armagnac. I think it does the soul good to see it reach such heights of class in this way. (No wonder Europeans name wine after places. We don't want an elegant snifter filled with pisse-vin, do we.) Some enterprising Russian grower will surely think of a similar fairy-tale treatment for rkatsiteli, very soon.

Wisconsin cheddar spoon bread

This dish, from Savoring the Seasons of the Northern Heartland by Beth Dooley and Lucia Watson (Knopf, 1994), is of course a basic polenta -- corn meal cooked in boiling water, with cheese added, or perhaps a sauce on the side. If you have never tried polenta and think that creating a dinner of cornmeal and water sounds about as exciting as a dinner founded on wet cardboard, do please think again. It is delicious.

I first came upon a polenta recipe in the book Country Tastes (HP Press, 1988) by the heartland-born Beatrice Ojakangas, who incidentally is mentioned as a source in this very Scandinavian-immigrant flavored Savoring the Seasons. So, is polenta Scandinavian? The name is Italian, the corn American; but French recipes are also delicious and, may I say, by far the least onerous to prepare. Italians stir the stuff endlessly, for fear of lumps forming. The French simply put it into a casserole and bake it and then go off and relax in their frivolous French way, it seems.

This version follows a sort of middle road, requiring some whisking but not much. Then you bake it. It is not difficult.

You begin by buttering a small 1 and 1/2 quart casserole. Then, in a saucepan, bring 2 and 1/4 cups water to boil. (Precise water measurements are important.) Add 1 teaspoon salt, lower the heat to a simmer, and then add 1 cup of yellow cornmeal, slowly, in a thin stream. I like to use stone ground cornmeal, as very fine-ground meal makes for a pappy, insipid texture. Stir with a wire whisk so that no lumps form.

Continue to cook and stir just for a few more minutes, until the cornmeal is smooth. Then, remove the pan from the heat and stir in a half teaspoon of pepper, 2 Tablespoons of butter, and 1 cup of milk.



When you have stirred the mixture smooth again, add 4 large eggs, well beaten, and mix them in. Then add 1 and 1/2 cups shredded cheddar cheese and 3 Tablespoons chopped scallions (they really make the dish).



Pour the mixture into the buttered casserole and



bake in a preheated 400 oven until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.


It comes out fluffy, moist, crunchy, rich, and piquant with onion. Savoring the Seasons recommends it as a main dish accompanied by a salad, or as a side dish with ham. It also goes well with tomato soup, or might perhaps take the place of a corn bread with a meal of fried chicken or barbecued ribs.

The wine? I would guess that almost anything, except anything sweet, would do justice to this American-Italo-Scandinavian-French --and really utterly simple and humble -- dish. A jug wine from the bottom shelf of your grocery store might be just perfect.

Wine with ... nationalized health care?

"Wine has certain properties that mattered much more to our ancestors than to ourselves. For 2000 years of medical and surgical history it was the universal and unique antiseptic. Wounds were bathed with it; water was made safe to drink.

"Medically, wine was indispensable until the later years of the 19th century. In the words of the Jewish Talmud, 'Wherever wine is lacking, drugs become necessary.' A contemporary (6th century BC) Indian medical text describes wine as the 'invigorator of mind and body, antidote to sleeplessness, sorrow, and fatigue ... producer of hunger, happiness, and digestion.' Enlightened medical opinion today uses very similar terms about its specific clinical virtues, particularly in relation to heart disease. Even Muslim physicians ... risked the wrath of Allah rather than do without their one sure help in treatment."

Hugh Johnson, Vintage: The Story of Wine

Well, at least we have that. (Read the socialized health care provisions adapted from Tom Daschle's book -- among them, "slowing the development and use of new medicines and technologies," and promoting the acceptance of "hopeless diagnoses" and death, especially for the elderly -- in the stimulus bill.)

Daschle, of course, is the man who can't technically be Health and Human Services secretary because he didn't pay his taxes. And oh yes, Congressmen get their own health care, provided by the government (taxes).

Maybe we need to decide on a non-celebratory drink, as champagne is the drink of celebration. Skim milk possibly?

Cheers.

Wine in the coming Ice Age

When I was growing up -- think the Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan years -- I seem to remember that the Russian newspaper Pravda was understood to be a laughing stock. Of course, it was a mouthpiece of the Soviet state, and so its articles were only quoted in the American press as examples of official Soviet whitewashing of domestic problems, or conversely of the trumpeting of faux Soviet triumphs in this international sphere or that.

Today, while the newspaper's American equivalent, The New York Times, is something of joke in itself, you can go on-line and look at Pravda in English. It carries in its sidebars the kind of things that would probably have done its '70s ancestor proud: pictures of gorgeous Russian models next to teasers for breaking news about useless American weapons systems, for example. A few weeks ago, however, it carried a story on a very topical subject which seemed to be based on good science. I lack the credentials to say what constitutes good science, so I should rephrase. It carried a story based on scientific information that I had never heard of before, which seemed plausible, and whose effects I or anyone can see repeated in daily life. It was also science referenced largely from British and American journals, if that helps.

The three-page piece was all about the coming ice age. If you grew up when I did, you might remember that that phrase was once bandied about in capital letters. Pundits, and maybe even people, genuinely talked about The Coming Ice Age. For a while, it had a sort of stepchild called Nuclear Winter. Years ago when I was doing amateur research for an essay I wanted to write on Betty Friedan, I remember coming across the information that her editors at McCall's magazine had asked her, in the early 1960s, to write an article for them about this Coming Ice Age. She demurred, because she had just gotten some interesting results back from a questionnaire she had submitted to her fellow alumnae from Smith College on the occasion of their fifteenth reunion, and she wanted to write about that. (Perhaps she demurred, also, because she had already written on icy climate change for Harper's in 1958.) So she wrote about her college friends instead, and you might say the coming ice age had another and momentous stepchild, called The Feminine Mystique.

Anyway, the pertinent article from Pravda tells us that the AGW theory -- Anthropogenic (man-caused) Global Warming -- is full of holes, largely because it is only based on climate data from the last thousand years. More proper collections of data, such as deep Arctic ice core samples and ocean sediment samples, show that the earth goes through regular, even rhythmic, warming and cooling cycles about every 110,000 years. Warming and cooling seem to be caused, in turn, by natural, tiny changes in the earth's orbit around the sun, which expose it to more or less radiation.

And here is where the relation to daily life comes in. As the planet -- which is mostly water, we forget -- warms, the oceans warm. Warm liquids release carbon dioxide to the air more readily than cold liquids. This is why we keep pop, beer, and fizzy wines cold, so they don't lose their CO2 and go flat. The warm oceans release CO2 naturally into the atmosphere, and because now we can keep track of it we panic, think we put the CO2 there first, and yell for the most high lord Government to Impose Standards. In fact, Pravda suggests, not only are we probably at the end of a warming cycle, with maybe eight hundred years' worth of ocean-spewed "greenhouse gas" in the atmosphere, but when Ice Ages do return, be warned -- they return quickly. Problems result. And how's the weather in your neck of the woods?

And what does this have to do with wine? Wine is agriculture, so it has a lot to do with it. When I think Ice Age, I think of cave men hunting mastodons atop glaciers, a mile thick, smothering lands once called Bordeaux or Burgundy. Decanter happens to carry a recent article about the possibility that Bordeaux wine growers may soon get permission to plant small quantities of syrah, zinfandel, and chardonnay for experimental purposes, to see whether or not these grapes do as well as some of the other varieties that have long been planted as "accessories" to the cabernet sauvignon, merlot, semillon, and sauvignon blanc which are Bordeaux. Interestingly, syrah and zinfandel particularly are hot climate grapes. The results of these plantings, says the mellifluously and so French-ly named Veronique Barthe of Chateau la Freynelle, "may also be useful in terms of potential climate change. We can look into which grapes may be able to adapt to and withstand greater temperatures."

To which my riposte must now be, as I blink at all this information, Oh honey. Read your Pravda. You might want to plant ice-loving riesling, and just pray like mad for that.

Porcupine balls (you know you want some)

These are actually "Porcupine meat balls," but the other sounds so much more fun.

The recipe comes from an old classic of American cookery, the famed Settlement Cookbook. I had always wanted to have a look at this, and a few months ago I found the 1976 revised edition at a library cast-off book sale. The introduction tells the simple tale of Milwaukee's Settlement House, a place for new immigrants to learn English, cooking, sewing, and citizenship around the turn of the 20th century. Upstanding volunteer ladies from the community taught the cooking classes, and one of them, Mrs. Simon Kander, decided to put all the recipes together in a booklet, both to sell and so raise funds for the House, and to relieve students of the need to copy down all their meal instructions from a classroom blackboard. The first edition of The Way to a Man's Heart ... the Settlement Cookbook was published in 1901; by 1909, profits from the cookbook's sales "were able to provide the site for a new building" for the institution. My edition, seventy years on, is the thirty-third.

This cookbook, therefore, shows its provenance from page one. It is filled with recipes that were tasty enough and simple enough to be taught, shared, and eaten by multitudes of working families over the course of many years. "Mrs. Kander," it seems, insisted "that every recipe be tested not once but many times by committee members in their own kitchens." It makes the cookbook an invaluable one, and completely different from those wonders, so preponderant on bookstore shelves, which are created as works of art in themselves -- notice how often cookbooks have a theme -- by professionals whose (delicious) recipes are also works of art, but whose delicious recipes end up being usable sometimes only as an afterthought. Or as a performance.

Porcupine meat balls are an example of something I doubt we would find in a cookbook with a more artistic pedigree. They are not pretty, they are simple and the first ingredient on the list is something from a can. Nevertheless -- well, judge for yourself:

You begin with a 10 ounce can of tomato soup, diluted with a half cup of water. Put this in a large saucepan, and bring it to a boil. You will use this to simmer the meatballs. (Since commercial soups are full of gluten, I substituted two cans of stewed tomatoes.)

Make the meatballs: you will need 1 and 1/2 pounds of ground beef, 1/2 cup raw rice, 1 Tablespoon minced onion, 1/2 teaspoon allspice, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1/4 teaspoon pepper. Mix all ingredients and shape into small meatballs. Drop them into the simmering soup or tomatoes. Let them simmer for 2 hours, stirring occasionally. The long cooking time is required to fully cook the raw rice. If the liquid boils too violently, the rice will plump up too fast and a lot of it will loosen from the meatballs and fall into the sauce.



The "porcupine" name comes from the way the rice sticks out from all over the meatballs. The cookbook doesn't explain this, but you see how bright I am. And their delicious flavor is owing, I think, to the combination of tomatoes and allspice. Two hours later, we ate them with mashed potatoes on the side.

The wine we poured was a Bolla valpolicella ($7.99), from Italy by way of the local grocery store. My notes for it say:

• Day 1: light -- dark red color -- little fruit -- very acidic (as Italian wines tend to be -- they are meant to make the mouth water for more food)
• Day 2: mellower, richer
• Day 3: salad dressing? (think vinegar -- not a good sign)

A sweeter wine might have been a better complement to the acidic tomatoes in this dish. What would Mrs. Simon Kander have served? In the "Beverages" section she -- or one of her committee ladies -- writes a brief half-page on wine service, acknowledging that "wine makes even the simplest meal taste better" and suggesting the traditional, unfussy pairings of a previous era: sherry with soup, sauternes with fish (again!), claret with beef, champagne with everything. Far more space here is devoted to cocktails. Some previous reader has put an enthusiastic checkmark next to the recipe for Pink Lady, a tipple that calls to mind glittery 1930s romantic comedy movies. (It does sound good. Gin, apple brandy, lime juice, grenadine, and an egg white.)

And is this the same reader who actually, selfishly cut out six pages of chicken recipes from the book? Everything from pages 308 to 315 is gone. I hope, in some terribly hot kitchen in the next world, Mrs. Kander is giving her what for.