125 drafts -- and extremely easy fish

Watching a movie about a food blogger inspires one to blog about blogging, which is probably not a good idea. (We all had a swell time last night savoring Julie and Julia again. I really must make a hollandaise very soon.) So I will be brief.

When Ye Olde Wine Shoppe closed down two years ago, I decided I had better begin photographing and making notes of the dinners I cooked, so that I would still have things to blog about even while my wine knowledge might atrophy just a bit. Access to the industry does help. Then for a short time I wrote as "Chicago Baking Examiner" for Examiner.com, supplying four short articles a week on cookies, cakes, ingredients and so on. When I quit that little job, I transferred most of those pieces here, and here they lurk behind the scenes under the tab "edit posts."

Then I was lucky enough to be able to re-enter the wine business, with the result that (I flatter myself) my wine knowledge has atrophied less than I feared. But I've still kept on photographing and making notes of my dinners and my baking, because that turned out to be fun. So the upshot of it all is that I now have 125 drafts, mostly on food and not necessarily on wine, waiting to be finished and "served forth" as ancient cookbooks say. 

Something's got to be done with them. It seems wrong to delete them. Will anyone object, therefore, if I dose you all with more of the "soops and messes" I've fed the family for two years? Think of it as a sort of time machine: you'll get to see last November's stews or breads, or the "extremely easy fish" from the May before that. If the angle of the light in certain photographs looks awfully bright for winter, or rather dolorous and gray for summer -- not that I require anyone to notice -- well -- well, now you know.

We may as well begin with Extremely Easy Fish. I like fish, but rarely cook it because it seems ridiculous to expect to get good fish so far from any ocean. And it seems one always hears stories about how no fish these days is what it is claimed to be. Even in a restaurant, I'm told, if you think you are really being served "red snapper" or "orange roughy," don't be so trusting. Years of commercial overfishing has insured that some other finned creature is very likely being quick-thawed for you. Indeed, my last experience of fish in a good restaurant was unpleasant. Do you suppose "cod" even exists anymore? 

However, occasionally you do get lucky when you venture to the frozen fish section of the grocery store. (It's odd. Fish is a little like vodka. The whole point is that it should not smell or taste like itself.) If you do have such luck in your next voyage, try this.



Melt 4 Tbsp butter or olive oil, or a combination, in a heavy saucepan. Saute in it some aromatics -- a chopped onion, a diced stick of celery, a diced carrot, a chopped leek, or any mixture of those you like. When they are softened, after five minutes or so, stack in one and a half or two pounds of frozen fillets of white fish. Pour on about 1/4 cup of wine or broth, and cover the pan with a lid. The fish will steam, thaw out, and cook in about half an hour or less. The general rule of thumb, which professionals may dismiss but which I still use, is that fresh fish needs 10 minutes of cooking time per inch of thickness, with half again that time added on if you begin with the frozen product. If the result can be overcooking and dryness, in this case I don't worry too much about it. The recipe produces so much liquid that you will have plenty of sauce for your platter anyway.



Strew on some parsley at the end, and serve it forth, with the buttery sauce set aside in a gravy boat. Rice, a vegetable, and any white wine are the perfect accompaniments.

There. Nothing fancy. And only 124 more drafts to go. 

(I'm sure it's good) -- 2008 Fogdog chardonnay

I'm sure it would have been good -- a morsel of gourmet caramel candy, following a whiff of banana, and then a long, intricate, freshly acidic finish that made the mouth water for more.

Alas, my bottle was corked, so I tasted moldy, flooded basement and wet cardboard before and along with anything else. But I'm sure.

As for the name, Fogdog, let me quote the back label's explanation for you. "Fogdog. n. A bright or clear spot that appears in a breaking fog. (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition.)"

That's all. This is a wine from Joseph Phelps, whose reputation is such that he need say nothing else. I must say I prefer my old Webster's New World dictionary's definition of fogdog, because it's clearer: "a bright spot sometimes seen at the horizon as a fog starts to dissipate."

Retail, about $30-$35.

Freestone Vineyards

Pork and apple pie, 1885

I would love to hear a foodie, a chemist, or some other wise soul explain to me why pork and apples are such a perfect combination. Or why they were. Perhaps, in earlier generations when pigs were fatter than they are now, the juicy acidity of an apple offset all that luscious grease, making a sensuous logic that everyone understood and crafted recipes by. Nowadays, when you cook a pork-and-apples dish using a modern, lean, and approaching-flavorless loin or chop, you might wonder why you would not do just as well with a nice dry chicken breast. Yet somehow you -- we -- don't do just as well, do we? Somehow the mental image, or if you prefer the racial culinary memory, of the taste of chicken and apples isn't quite as compelling as that other delicious pair of eatables.

Luckily La Cuisine Creole (1885) has preserved for us a nineteenth-century New Orleans recipe for pork and apple pie which is the most unusual treatment I have ever seen of this meat and this fruit. Scholars and other wise souls tell us La Cuisine Creole, though published anonymously, was the work of Lafcadio Hearn, of whom I will dare to say this. If you know him at all, I'll guess that you know him for the same reason I do -- because you grew up with the 1970s edition of The Golden Treasury of Children's Literature, within whose pages you found the delightful story "The Boy Who Drew Cats." That's (Patrick) Lafcadio Hearn. If later in a big city bookstore you also found and bought a copy of Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, that too was our friend Hearn.

Really, he led an extraordinary life. Born of an Irish father and a Greek mother on the Greek island of Lefkada (hence his name), he grew up in Ireland but made a career as a newspaperman first in Cincinnati and then in New Orleans. In time he moved to Japan, married a Japanese woman, and took Japanese citizenship. It seems -- more wise souls say -- he is very much responsible, through his writings, both for the popular understanding of New Orleans as an exotic, half-European, half-Caribbean city, different to the rest of America, and for the Western world's Belle Epoque mania for all things Japanese. 

La Cuisine Creole may not have jumped out at you from a library or bookstore shelf yet, but nor did it jump out at me. I found the recipe collected in The American Heritage Cookbook and Illustrated History of American Eating and Drinking (1964). The editors there credit the cookbook, but make no mention of the man.

The dish is very simple, especially if you choose to buy your pie crust dough rather than make it. (I made mine, which is not meant to be a boast but more an anxious explanation for why the photograph above looks like that.)

You will need:

• pastry for a 2-crust pie
• 4 "greening" apples (I used Granny Smith)
• 2 pounds lean pork, cubed
• 1/2 tsp dried thyme
• 2 Tbs sugar
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp pepper
• 1 Tbs butter
• 1 egg, beaten

Line the bottom of a deep pie dish with a sheet of pastry. Peel, core, and slice the apples. In a small bowl, mix the thyme, sugar, salt, and pepper. Layer half the apples and then half the pork cubes atop the pastry. Sprinkle half the thyme and sugar mixture over. Repeat layers of apples and pork. Add remaining thyme and sugar. Dot with butter.

Cover with the second sheet of pastry, crimp and seal the edges, and slash in several places. Brush "lavishly" with egg. (The pie is going to bake a long time, so the dough needs this extra protection.) Bake in a preheated 350 F oven for one and a half to 2 hours. You may want to cover the pie with tin foil after the first hour, to ensure that even with its eggy coat it does not overbrown.

Further instructions stipulate that the pie must be served either lukewarm or cold, but not chilled and not piping hot from the oven. This makes it a good choice for something to bring to a Thanksgiving or Christmas buffet -- set it down on your hostess' sideboard and forget about it. An accompaniment of fresh grated horseradish and sour cream is said to be an acceptable "departure from tradition."

And by the way, in what sense is this pie notably Creole? It strikes me as much more redolent of cool, autumnal New England farms and orchards than of crawfish, jazz, humid nights, wrought iron balconies, and "the gateway to the tropics."

Regardless, it's very good. Cubed pork chops or pork stew meat, which might have cooked up rather tough in other preparations, stay tender with long simmering amid the apples, and the apples themselves cook down to a delicious mush. At least, I thought so. Thyme and sugar, too, are happy partners. Who would have thought it?

And after all, why not chicken? Chicken and sugar .... Chemists could perhaps rush to explain why that just seems wrong, but before they do, the racial culinary memory forestalls them with a sort of collective shudder.

Thank you, Koizumi Yakumo (Lafcadio Hearn). I must go and look up "The Boy Who Drew Cats" again, by way of tribute.

Yet more new things

My goodness, how do we keep up with all the news? You might like to know that Kevin Zraly has now partnered with The Juice, a newsletter emailed from the site Local Wine Events, to create brain-teasing wine quizzes in each weekly issue. Kevin Zraly is one of the very major persons in wine education -- think Jancis Robinson or the wine blogs Vinography or Dr. Vino -- so his quizzes should be fun and put everyone on his mettle.

And, as of today another major person in all things culinary, Lidia Bastianich, will launch a new line of cookware on the QVC network. The Lidia’s Kitchen broadcast debuts on QVC October 24, 2010 at 7 PM (ET), and the products will be available on QVC.com, while supplies last. I turn to Lidia, you know, for my risotto recipe, and (though it's a bit of a non-sequitur) I would be interested in what look like those giant knives and cleavers of hers. They look positively scary. Are they kitchen implements, or prehistoric weapons unearthed by an archaeologist from warlike Latium?

Did I mention the Wine Spectator's new iPhone app, called VintageChart+? With a few touches of a fingertip, the wine lover may stand right in the liquor aisle and call up the magazine's recommendations on grapes, vintages, makers, and best values. I saw the application in use a few days ago. A customer actually came in requesting 2007 Napa or Sonoma chardonnays, only, because "my computer told me they're the best." I thought perhaps the gentleman was d'un certain age and was giving computers, miraculous though they are, a little too much credit for independent thought. The more fool me. He had the Spectator's app. a-going in the palm of his hand, and I watched him summon forth the very suggestions he had just mentioned. Even better, it all inspired him to buy two bottles of chardonnay in the $35 price range, which is quite unusual for anyone to do sight unseen. Memo to Groth and Stag's Leap (Karia): he wanted a screwcap, too, but you are still using corks.

It's all right. As Lina Lamont would say, "Bless! you all ...."

Image from Siffblog

Incidentally, in the "Who knew?" file: there seem to be two wineries along the Silverado Trail, named for stags leaping about. They are separated only by an apostrophe and the numbers on the mailbox. The aforementioned Stag's Leap, the more famous place, is at 5766 Silverado Trail. Stags' Leap, less famous but boasting a plurality of possessive stags, is at 6150. I do wish they would stop trying to confuse us.

Reading Mark Oldman's Brave New World of Wine

Here's a delicate subject. The kind people at W. W. Norton asked me if I would like a copy of Mark Oldman's new book, Oldman's Brave New World of Wine. After contemplating the offer for about a second I replied, Yes, I'd be delighted to have a look at it.

I read it in an afternoon. Mr. Oldman, television host, educator, and wine writer for Everyday with Rachael Ray, is good; he lays out brief descriptions of over forty wines presented as unusual and economical alternatives to the same old things many of us safely buy and drink, or to the very grand things that, chances are, we'll never buy and drink. Each chapter is followed by a chart summarizing most of that chapter's information, grouped under short headlines like "Bravely Said" (a pronunciation guide), "Label Logic" (answering the grape-or-place question), or his trademark "Poosh it!" (being a small, interesting  detail on the wine). Each chapter ends, and the major sections of the book begin, with a unique invention, namely scatterplots tracking where various dots representing particular wines fall on an X axis showing price, and a Y axis showing adventurousness. 

I learned from him, in short easy doses. Moschofilero (mos-ko-FEE-la-roh), a Greek white that is not retsina, and Txakoli (choc-OH-lee), a Spanish white that is not albarino, were both new to me. And there were more. But naturally much of what Mr. Oldman considers "brave new pours" are a matter of personal preference and the luck of experience. Depending on where the reader is in his explorations of wine, the book may seem indeed deliciously adventurous or way too advanced or just random. For example, I happen to know Mavrodaphne, a sweet Greek red which he does not approach because he thinks it too obscure for anyone to find on a grocery store shelf (we carry it). And I am surprised to see him devote a chapter to New Zealand sauvignon blanc, as an "Audacious Alternative" to sauvignon blanc and pinot grigio. This is a wine which I should think even newer drinkers know. The same reaction applies, of course, to those unique and inventive scatterplots. Why is an Australian riesling necessarily low in adventurousness while a madeira is high? It all depends.

These are minor quibbles. What most impresses me about the book is the way it is so carefully and painstakingly arranged as a tour de force of wine-publishing marketing. Brave New World was assembled for a purpose, and I have the distinct sense that Mark Oldman, while certainly the face of the little world that assembled it, the chief ambassador you might say, is not remotely the entire diplomatic party. When a book credits a Production Manager (Devon Zahn, here) in the fine print on the back of the title page, you may be sure you are holding in your hand the fruit of more than one man's mind.

I salute them. Wine publishing is tricky. There is a big audience out there comprised of "wine newbies" -- I absolutely consider myself one -- who want good-looking, cheerful books that give them correct, "insider" information on this complex topic. More importantly, this audience also wants its bedside reads to reassure them that wine is not complex. A paradox, no? No matter. We like to know that experts disagree with one another on the way wines taste and should taste, and on what foods go with them. We appreciate a reassuring story about an expert sloshing ice into her glass, albeit only for the four seconds needed to dilute some of the alcohol (see Chapter 26, on Lettie Teague doing this to her Cotes du Rhone "at New York's acclaimed Eleven Madison Park"). My old paperback friends The Wine Avenger (by Willie Gluckstern) and Fear of Wine (Leslie Brenner) gave me that same reassurance and encouragement, in the same flip style, when I first began borrowing wine books from my local library.

But Willie and Leslie muscled their way into print back in the '90s, which is tantamount in publishing to the late Cretaceous I suppose. They may have had reason to thank some people in their acknowledgments, as opposed to Mr. Oldman who generously thanks a small army, but on the whole their books still seemed the result of one writer sitting down with his ideas, a word processor, and perhaps a great, clunky cordless phone. Brave New World, with all its bells and whistles, is different, very much a la mode. It makes me wish I had been a potted plant in the room -- so much nicer than being a fly on the wall -- during the brainstorming sessions when it was all planned, when ideas were offered, decisions taken, projects allotted to people in cubicles at Norton, Hollywood publicists contacted, and balls got rolling. I don't doubt that the original rough sketch may have been Mr. Oldman's, but beyond that surely it had to have been quite the team effort. Only a committee could think of dividing food pairing recommendations into the two tiny little, at-a-glance categories "Loveable Feast" (general good matches) and "Locally Lusty" (what Greeks eat with moschofilero). The hundreds of celebrity quotes alone cannot have been items the author himself solicited, collected, filed, and then retyped in pleasing order in lengthy blocks throughout his manuscript. (We're glad to know Jodie Foster likes Chateau Petrus when she visits her sister in France.) And we have not even reminded ourselves of the summarizing charts, the scatterplots, the page-devouring appendices at the end laying out most of what was said before. All of it must have demanded -- what is the a la mode, cubicle word? -- major facilitating. 

Of course I could be wrong. Mr. Oldman himself may have done it all, and really lived through every story, including the one about racing to a restaurant through gangland Sao Paulo in the car with the bulletproof glass. At any rate surely he is responsible for Brave New World's prose.

That, regrettably, is a problem. There's not much of it -- perhaps half or even just one third of the book is actual writing. Facilitators seem to have kept him firmly to four or five paragraphs per wine. Reading everything through for the first time, I concluded he missed his true calling, which was to have been a gag writer for the Tonight Show, preferably in Johnny Carson's mid-'70s heyday. Enjoy him, or try, on the difference between chardonnay aged in oak and that not aged in oak: "Vintners hijack the pink Cadillac that drives so many warm-climate chardonnays and switch out its sheepskin seats for the spare elegance of cold leather." On txakoli: "... all in all, a spritzy, pleasantly sour rush that will revive you faster than Eskimo-kissing a round of smelling salts." On merlot which is too jammy and aged in oak too long: "Expensive merlot can be the opposite: overripe, sun-baked fruit plagued by more wood than a foreclosed Miami condo."

And this goes on and on, almost every sentence it seems another wisecrack, all of them adding up to a production (memo to Mr. Zahn) about as leaden as the Tonight Show has been for fifty years. Any good writer will recognize a pattern like this and put a stop to it. Or his editors will. If you haven't got an editor, you've still got Samuel Johnson, whose 18th-century advice remains priceless: "Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out."

There is much Mr. Oldman should have struck out. But stop. Even if you do lose patience, give him a second chance. Go back and read him again. He is rich in wine knowledge, and when he unbends and stops being too cute for words, when he stops being a personality and an ambassador for an excellent marketing project, which I hasten to say is not a bad thing to be, he can write plain English and pass on to adults some of the richness he has mastered. It's no coincidence that he rises to it when he faces either the Everests of the wine world -- Burgundy, chapter 18, Bordeaux, chapter 23 -- or something truly obscure, like the strange Napa winery called Scholium Project ("a cult favorite among in-the-know sommeliers"). He calms down then, and tells us useful things. Even his paragraphs get longer.

It's also these few passages that have a bit of, if not quite the eternal in them, then shall we say at least a little age-worthiness. For the rest of it, Brave New World can only be a book you'll dip into a half dozen times, looking up temporary novelties. You will soon exhaust its whirligig treasures, and for knowledge's sake will probably want to invest instead in a good, inexpensive paperback encyclopedia like Ron and Sharon Herbst's New Wine Lover's Companion.

Nevertheless I look forward to Mr. Oldman's next book (not only because I'd hate to be denied access to any future delicate subjects but also) because I think he can do far better. The wine publishing world is obviously athirst for material, and with these 283 pages plus appendices, a good team has produced a topical triumph. Bravi. Incidentally all readers seem to adore it, as they uniformly adored his first book. The weight of very favorable responses for him, not only from the great critics but even among the anonymous souls at Amazon.com, is downright startling. Brave New World boasts 19 reviews there, all of them five-star. His previous Guide to Outsmarting Wine, called "perfect" by the Wine Enthusiast, has 45 reviews, no less than 43 of them five-starred.

Yes, bravi from the potted plant in the conference room. Only as I stand eavesdropping I wonder -- what could Mark Oldman do entirely on his own?

Palate, palette, pallet

I have had it in mind to do this for a long time, and it may as well be now.

A pallet is an open, portable wooden platform that holds stacks of goods on the receiving dock of a grocery store.(This spelling of the word also has many other definitions we won't explore this minute.)

A palette is the little plate with the hole for the thumb, that artists use to hold daubs of paint while they work.

Your palate is your general sense of taste, plus it means physically the roof of your mouth.This is the spelling wine writers really should memorize.

Wines of Chile blogger tasting -- a day (or more) after

There were eight wines -- or for me, seven, as I accidentally broke one -- selected for the Wines of Chile live blogger tasting on October 13th. All were red blends, the last four syrah-based. Since wine writers will usually include, at some point in their books or newspaper columns, the standard article or two about "how to read a wine label," I thought I would lay out what confronted me below, with a little visual aid in the form of italics and underlines. These Chilean labels seemed as daunting, in their own way, as anything French or German.

2005 Valdivieso Eclat, Maule Valley (a carignan, mourvedre, syrah blend)

2006 De Martino Single Vineyard Old Bush Vines "Las Cruces," Cachapoal Valley (malbec and carmenere)

2008 Estampa Gold Assemblage Carmenere, Colchagua Valley

2008 Montes Limited Selection Cabernet Sauvignon/Carmenere, Colchagua Valley

The underlined words are the names of the wineries -- Valdivieso, De Martino, Estampa, and so forth. After that, some of the wines have what you might call pet or marketing names. Think "Fat Bastard," although none were so silly. Valdivieso's "Eclat" is one example among the first four. Among these, you'll notice also how frequently carmenere repeats. Carmenere is of course a grape, formerly used in Bordeaux blends along with better known varieties, cabernet sauvignon, merlot, cabernet franc, malbec, and petit verdot -- and incidentally, note how often all those grapes show up in this collection, too. Carmenere was gradually "phased out of Bordeaux winemaking in the 20th century," according to the New Wine Lover's Companion, but has been eagerly taken up in Chile, as malbec has been taken up in Argentina.

The next four, heavy on the syrah, were: 

2006 Maquis Lien, Colchagua Valley (a blend of syrah, carmenere, cabernet franc, petit verdot, malbec)

2008 Hacienda Araucano Clos de Lolol, Colchagua Valley (syrah, cabernet franc, cabernet sauvignon, carmenere)

2007 Emiliana Coyam, Colchagua Valley (syrah, cabernet sauvignon, carmenere, merlot, petit verdot, mourvedre) -- this is the one that slipped out of the freezer where it was chilling atop its fellows, crashed to the floor, and broke in one of those slow-motion kitchen tragedies that you can see but not prevent. It smelled good.

2007 Casas del Bosque Gran Estate Selection Family Reserve, Casablanca Valley (syrah, merlot, pinot noir)

Above we find more secondary or marketing names, or simply explanatory ones. (Maybe this would be a good time to recommend that Wines of Chile take a page from WineSur's book, and start telling their "Wine Stories" in 100 words or less.) Maquis' "Lien," for example, has a reason for the silver lizard on its label. For its part, Hacienda Araucano's "Clos de Lolol" comes from the Lolol Valley; Casas del Bosque's "Gran Estate Selection Private Reserve" amounts to a string of English words that even I can understand.

As carmenere repeats in the first list, so Colchagua repeats throughout. The Colchagua Valley lies just about in the exact center of the long strip of land that is Chile, sited as it were only a little to the left, towards the Pacific. It happens to be the source not only of five of these eight wines but of a number of others which we see fairly often on liquor store shelves. Casa LaPostolle, Santa Helena, Cono Sur, and Terra Andina all come from Colchagua. Other commonly seen place names on Chilean labels are Maipo Valley (Concha Y Toro comes from here) and Casablanca Valley (William Cole, Casablanca) in the north, and Bio Bio Valley in the south. Remember if your bottle says Mendoza, it's from Argentina. In that case, think WineSur.  

And how did everything taste?

Very good, but to answer any more keenly, I feel obliged to circle back to preliminaries. Of course I scribbled hasty notes Wednesday night, and looked at other bloggers' comments streaming live as I poured, swirled, sniffed and sipped, listened to the live comments from Master Sommelier Fred Dexheimer, and enjoyed the wine-and-mushroom risotto made from the recipe supplied in the tasting kit. But really -- reactions like "silky," "potato peel," "needs a creamy meal," "hot, cedar," or "getting some eucalyptus now," do not the slightest justice to the wines or to their makers.

I could tell then, and can attest now, only that everything I tried was a classy, complex, and probably strongly masculine offering from a winemaker (pick one) who served a decades-long, roving apprenticeship all over the world before settling in Chile to farm. To take one example, Maquis "Lien" of the silver lizard comes from vineyards managed by "world renowned viticulture consultant Xavier Chone," who numbers among past clients Opus One, Cheval Blanc, and Domaine de la Romanee Conti. That's all.

I can also tell that these wines were beautifully made enough to start out perhaps a bit odorless and ungiving, tasting more like the sum of their parts, green peppery and tannic and acidic, than like wholes. In time, though, all were beautifully made enough to knit themselves together, and become something different from what they had been when first poured out and hastily if eagerly sampled. "Softness," fruitiness, caramel, cedar, chocolate, and "pepperiness" regularly entered my secondary scribbles, along with quick musings on the meals -- grander and grander, I envisioned -- they deserved. I must say "hot" was there all the time too, since for most of them, alcohol levels topped 14 per cent easily. The one I lost was 15 per cent.

It's this opening up and changing in the glass that commonplace wines do not do and are not intended to do. We recall that previous generations understood wines simply as "noble" or "common," exactly as they understood human beings as noble or common, though that part of the equation now offends us. Are there people who are finished growing up at sixteen or seventeen, and really don't go much further? It sounds so judgmental. Are there wines like that? Clearly, yes. Anyway it was as the simple realization dawned, these are surely very good, that I returned to preliminaries, to the technical information and biographies included in the tasting kit, and read about apprenticeships and consultancies in Napa or at Romanee Conti. And marveled, oh -- is that all.

One more small help to my comprehension of these wines' quality was the risotto recipe mentioned above. It's a creation of one Camila Moreno of Puro Chile, a New York based company and retail store which promotes Chilean products, culture, and tourism. (Wines of Chile is a member.) The dish is a rich one, calling for chicken stock, onion, red wine, olive oil, butter, wild mushrooms, shallot, Parmesan cheese, cilantro, and a full teaspoon of the smoky-peppery Chilean spice called merquen or merken. I made it, enjoyed it, and thought, what kind of wines do they think will be flattered by all this? Surely very good, complex wines will be, noble, masculine, and -- what did I manage to scribble, by the time we reached number 8? -- "mysterious -- all one." Not much help to someone else's perceptions, true, but then the same handful of fruit basket metaphors are not much help either. And, true, Casas del Bosque's Gran Estate Selection Private Reserve having an SRP (suggested retail price) of about $50 did help add to impressions of nobility.  

Now one more small thing. About merken. In the rush of getting ready to shop, cook, chill the wine, open it all, log on, plus clean up Number 7, I had failed to observe the two little packages wrapped in white tissue and tied with green ribbon, nestled all this time at the bottom of the shipping box. I had already done a bit of quick research into "merquen" or "merken," however -- you may know the word has a very unappetizing definition in the Urban Dictionary -- and so by a combination of a little cayenne, cumin, coriander, paprika, and salt, was able to reproduce, I hope, a fair translation of the spice's smoked hot pepper flavor.

Then, the next day, I found those two little packages. And a corkscrew, mind you. So generous. And what should be wrapped in tissue and dressed in green ribbon? A bottle of Frantoio 1492 Chilean olive oil, and a jar of Etnia merquen. So now I have them. So generous.

Wines of Chile live blogger tasting -- winding down

The live feed from New York and Santiago seems to be permanently gone. I've had to skip wine no. 7, which you'll remember exploded all over the floor, and am now savoring no. 8, the 2007 Casas del Bosque Gran Estate Selection Private Reserve. It's the bottle that weighs about a ton, has a punt three feet deep, and has the embossed thing-y on the label. Front and center, below.

Completely delicious. Black-purple in color, and all chocolate and cedar and tingly pepperiness. You do realize, after three plates of mushroom risotto and seven wines, I still have to mop the floor (see reference to wine no. 7 above).

Very enjoyable blogging experience. Thank you, Wines of Chile. Thank you also to dear Family, who helped clean up the spill.

Wines of Chile live blogger tasting -- more

Unhappily, my computer is losing the feed from both New York and Santiago quite often, so I am doing a lot of the tasting on my own. And I wonder, is there some psychological reason why the first wine in any tasting always seems most memorable? Is it because one is most sober then?

Wines of Chile live blogger tasting

I am having a delightful time savoring my red wine-and-mushroom risotto and trying the delicious wines of Chile, live under the tutelage of sommelier Fred Dexheimer. Wait till I tell the story of, alas, Wine no. 7 crashing out of the freezer (where it was chilling in a hurry) and exploding all over the kitchen floor.

Bon Appetit's lime tart

From the June 2010 issue. The original recipe calls for the tart to be covered with perfectly arranged blackberries and blueberries, glazed with melted blackberry jam for a "pastry shop presentation." Alas, I did not get around to making this tart until a summery warm day in October, a time when seasonal berries are no longer to be had. I substituted a few grapes, mostly for show. 

And now seems as good a time as any to relay the saga of my Bon Appetit subscription, and of how I am in a bad odor with the billing department there. I was surfing about the net idly one night last April, and happened to look into Bon Appetit's website. An ad for an inexpensive subscription popped up, and I thought, why not. So I clicked yes. I also fatally clicked "bill me."

A few days later, another subscription solicitation arrived in the mail, by chance addressed to my husband. Its offer of a year's worth of issues was even cheaper. I thought, why not, I'll opt for this one instead. So I wrote out my check and mailed it off, and prepared to take in the magazine in his name.

It began to arrive fairly punctually, but so did the reminders about the subscription I had taken out in my own name. I ignored them, reasoning that surely somebody in the bowels of the billing department would figure out that the check in my name, to pay for the subscription in his name, amounted to the fact of the bill being paid. We were not getting, and never did get, two copies of every issue.

No luck. Reminders of the unpaid bill kept coming. By June I was (enjoying the magazine and) writing on the invoices, "Paid," with the April date of my check and the check number, and sending them back at the cost of a stamp mind you, not once but twice.

Now I am receiving sinister yellow envelopes in the mail, blaring "final notice," and learning that my credit is not in good standing with the magazine until this invoice is paid. Still, it keeps coming, and now I, in the guise of my husband, not only get cheery renewal reminders for a subscription which will end next summer, but similar un-looked for offers to take in Allure, Vanity Fair, and I don't know what else.

I do regret being thought a deadbeat by these nice people, but the problem seems already Dickensian enough -- or would Kafka be the better literary analogy? -- without my going to any further efforts to make all clear. Herewith, then perhaps, a peace offering: dear things, I made your lime tart.

You can too. For the entire, "white tie and tails production" as the old Joy of Cooking said about Galantine of Turkey, you will need:

• 7 eggs, 3 of which you will use whole -- for the other 4, only the yolks are required
• 1 cup plus 1/4 cup sugar
• 3/4 cup fresh lime juice (about 5 or 6 limes)
• 14 Tbsp butter (1 stick, at room temperature, plus 6 Tbsp., cold)
• 1 and 1/4 cups all purpose flour
• 1 large pinch salt
• fresh fruit for the topping -- to follow the recipe exactly, use 1 (6 oz.) container fresh blueberries, 2 (6 oz.) containers fresh blackberries, and 1 Tbsp blackberry jam for a glaze

Start by making the lime curd. Set a fine mesh strainer over a medium sized bowl and set it aside. Whisk 3 large eggs, 3 egg yolks, and 1 cup sugar in a medium metal bowl to blend. Whisk in the lime juice. (I didn't have a metal bowl, so used a Corelle bowl and hoped against hope it wouldn't break while sitting in a pot of simmering water. This will be important shortly. ...It didn't.)

Set the bowl over a large pan of simmering water. Don't let the bottom of the bowl touch the water. Whisk the lime mixture constantly until the curd thickens and an instant thermometer inserted into it sideways -- be sure to bury the thermometer deep or nothing registers -- reads 175 to 180 degrees. This will take 6 to 10 minutes.

Pour the curd through the waiting mesh strainer into its new bowl. Add 6 Tbsp cold butter, and let stand one minute. Stir until blended and smooth.

Now press plastic wrap directly on the surface of the curd, covering it completely. This prevents a skin from forming on it while it cools in the refrigerator for the next four hours. (Note, in the background of the photo below, a view of the finished berry-covered lime tart in the pages of Bon Appetit. One should always have an ideal to strive for.)

Next, make the crust. In a medium sized bowl, mix 1 stick of butter, at room temperature, with 1/4 cup sugar until well blended. Add the egg yolk and beat to blend. Add 1 and 1/4 cups flour and a large pinch of salt. Mix until everything resembles large peas (this is a very rich pie dough or shortbread crust, so if you have ever made either of those you will know the hand-feel you are waiting for.) Knead the crust "just until it comes together," but not too much -- it is almost pure butter and will get greasy in a hurry.

Put the dough into a 9-inch springform pan, crumble it, and press it out and up to the sides of the pan. Cover and chill one hour.

When you are ready to bake, preheat the oven to 350 F. Uncover the dough and bake "until golden brown, about 35 minutes."

I should say not. Thirty-five minutes is much too long for this delicate little pastry, and I don't think my oven's temperature calibration is so far off that my burned tart crust is all my fault. Perhaps "35" in the magazine was a typo for 25 or even 15. At any rate, check your crust for doneness early, and figure it will bake completely in about 20 minutes or so. I checked the dough after 15 minutes and was pleased, and then got overconfident and did not check again until the 30 minute mark, by which time disaster had occurred.

Which is why you can't see a picture of the tart's bottom. (Ha ha.) I will show you my version of the finished product, grapes and everything, because after all one soldiers on, not wanting to waste all the effort, plus the limes and the butter and the eggs.

Once your crust cools, it remains only to assemble the tart. Spoon on the lime curd, arrange some fruit on top -- some sweet fruit is needed, since the curd is very tart -- chill to firm, and you have your June-worthy party dessert. If you can remove the frame to the springform pan, and present your tart seductively nude to the world just like in the picture on page 95, then I salute you. Bon Appetit.

More new things -- "My wine story" at WineSur

WineSur is a fairly new (since 2007) website based in Mendoza, Argentina, set up to promote awareness of Argentinian wine around the world. Go there -- I mean to the site, not Argentina just this minute -- and you will find you can navigate the home page rather as you would have navigated the front page of a newspaper in bygone times. You can glance down and swiftly choose what to read first, judging by the headlines. Two long columns are subdivided into neat squares, titled "Top News," "Awards," "Exports," "Business," and so on, each offering the opening sentences of one or two longer stories. Looking at WineSur tonight, for instance, we learn that Jancis Robinson has recently written an article for the Financial Times on the wine business rivalry between Argentina and Chile, and that the Wine Spectator 's September issue wrote up several Argentinian selections as "smart buys" and "best values."

The splashiest section of WineSur is its contest called My Wine Story. You might think that this contest solicits entries from anyone who is ready to get all dewy-eyed about his first superb glass of the juice, first visit to a vineyard, or a revelation on when he in general "got it." Not so. With this promotion, WineSur has been asking Argentinian wineries to submit a summary of their product, their history, the reason behind a name -- any background information of interest to the public -- in one hundred words or less. You and I, WineSur's cyber visitors, may then vote for the story we like best.

Top of the list as the most recent entry is Zorzal's 2008 Climax malbec. Climax' makers ask, sensibly enough, "what other explanation can there be of the perfect wine? Thought of something else?" The most voted entry so far -- although it doesn't have the most comments -- is Cuarto Dominio's Felo, which simply explains that its Varietal Reserve is named for the maker, Rafael Martinez. Personally I like the label for and the story behind Espiritu de Argentina. The cool blue, Art Deco-meets-Knossos bull is meant to represent the essence of Argentina as the consumer, polled for opinions in five "countries of relevance," defined it. I also like Mendel Wines, frankly admitting "it has a problem" with its quality fetish. No fewer than eighteen aficionados from around the world responded. "J' suis un grand fanatic de ce vin." A few got so enthusiastic that "Mensaje moderado por el administrador."   

"My Wine Stories" are fun to read, but the concept is seriously refreshing, too. I suppose you could say WineSur has challenged the trade to relax and 'fess up about its marketing strategies, or at least to seem to do so. And marketing means a lot. So often, what little background you read on a website or on the back of a label is so contrived, especially for California wines whose makers seem anxious to elevate what they do to the point of a religion. (The people behind My Wine Stories, I'm informed, would like to see vintners all over the world take up this 100-words or less challenge eventually. That would be a very helpful thing for consumers who are new to the complexities not only of California but of Burgundy, Italy, or Mosel.) Positively a religion: passion, commitment, thousand-year-old vines and artisanal crafting, yes, yes. Tell me, instead, that Trapezio is so named because the 10-hectare property is shaped like a trapezoid -- and I'll understand, and more importantly, remember the wine. Smart thinking.

Something new -- Wine Club Zone

Wine Club Zone is a new site unique on the web as far as I know. It aims to be, eventually, an index of all the wine clubs in the United States, whether they are online themselves or not.

This is a good idea. Ever thought of joining a wine club? How do you pick one? Suppose you are interested in local wines, or wines from somewhere unusual -- Oklahoma maybe, instead of the abundantly serviced Napa and Sonoma. Where do you find information on a club that suits your budget and tastes?

Wine Club Zone opens the door. The site is cleanly laid out, its home page highlighting featured clubs plus a column each of constantly updating wine blog posts and wine event news from around the country. Five supplementary pages are devoted to finding wine clubs by region, to more events and activities by region, and to networked blogs, posts, and finally wine club reviews -- the place to go for advice and opinions on a wine club's selections, prices, and service.   

You might think of Wine Club Zone as a sort of national Yelp for this part of the retail wine business, albeit a better-looking, less cluttered, and more thoughtful Yelp. Once you log in, you can submit a wine club -- say you know of a great one in Oklahoma, or say you own a winery there and you want to publicize its club -- or add a review to one that you are familiar with. As of this writing, for example, the long established California Wine Club has not yet been rated at WCZ, although it has its own entry ready to be filled in. Incidentally, a very handy Zone feature is the "Visit Wine Club" button at the upper right of every club's rating page, which you can click to go to that club or winery's own website.

All in all, a useful tool -- and a great big shining example why HR 5034, which would put a stop to all this nonsense about law abiding citizens being free to shop for wine online, is such a pernicious piece of legislation. Remember, if Congress passes the "CARE act," written and sponsored by the wholesale distribution part of the industry, then Wine Club Zone and wine clubs in general could all become moot. We could in time be free only to buy whatever wines our local distributors bother to sell, wherever it is convenient to them to sell it, and that's all. All for the farce of Protecting the Children from crawling to their parents' computers and drunkenly ordering cases of 2006 Oakenshield WineWorks Paso Robles Primitivo, guzzling it all on the quiet and sinking thereby into irremediable degeneracy. 

Vote. Contact your Congressman. And do pay a visit to Wine Club Zone.

Everyone needs a Cognac cocktail recipe app for his iPhone ...

...or his iPad or iPod Touch, because you never know when you might need a good Cognac cocktail recipe on the run. And you can download the app free. It's called Cognac Summit, and it comes to us via the good people at Apple and at B.N.I.C, the Bureau Interprofessionel du Cognac.

We'll pause right away, and remind ourselves what cognac is. It is "the best of brandies," according to The New Wine Lover's Companion, a brandy being a distilled wine: meaning that a finished, fermented wine (typically made from trebbiano grapes) has been boiled up and its alcohol content collected (as a vapor) and then condensed, saved, and aged in oak casks. Brandy can be distilled anywhere a base wine is made that is not particularly distinguished for drinking. This is why you see such a thing as a California brandy on your liquor store shelves. What you will not see beside it is a California Cognac.

This is because Cognac, capital C, is made only in and around the town of that name, located in western France about a hundred miles north of Bordeaux. Six grape-growing regions lap out, in the manner of concentric circles, from the town. The two innermost circles (confusingly called Grande Champagne and Petite Champagne) are judged best for local grape-growing, the outer four successively less so. These outer four are called Borderies, Fins Bois, Bons Bois, and Bois Ordinaires. Note the French plurals, bons, fins, ordinaires, to match the -- in this case -- plural bois, woods.

Memory refreshed, let's say now you have a glass of Cognac in one hand and your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch in the other. After you hit the download button, Cognac Summit will lead you through some more introductory material. You can explore a timeline of the liquor's history, and learn its use in nineteenth-century American and English mixed drinks like the "Brandy Crusta" and the mint julep, which latter I had believed to be strictly a bourbon-based treat. Then, you can try mixology with the help of video demonstrations on cocktails like the Cognac Sour (cognac, fresh lemon juice, and brown sugar), Pink Love (cognac, champagne, and raspberry liqueur), and the aptly named Summit (an old creation, made of cognac, lemonade, lime, and ginger). All this schooling taking place on your iPhone means you can send the recipes and videos by email or share them on Facebook, and "surprise your friends with something new this season."

I'll say. I love this idea, for one thing because it encapsulates every cliche I have ever heard about French frivolity. Who needs this, you ask? -- why, what difference does that make? Who really needs wine or Cognac or any fun at all? And I love it because I love the mental image it presents of sophisticated people, say at a holiday house party or gathered at a chic bar gleaming with polished wood and zinc countertops -- it is usually zinc, isn't it, that is so Parisian? -- all eagerly hunched over the glowing little slivers of technology in their hands, and thumbing away at the Summit app. I see them calling and laughing happily to each other, and then turning to the bartender about a new find, while the music pumps and the lights glow, and gorgeous women shake their hair over their shoulders as they sip and learn. The men sip too, and gaze appreciatively at the women's glittery holiday miniskirts. All that the scene might lack would be hats and noisemakers, though I suppose such childlike excesses would not be very French.

What fascinates also is the fact that the Internet, which we enjoy so blithely while scarcely  understanding one-thousandth of the way it works, can be used for terrifically unnecessary and delightful purposes like this one, driving sales and enjoyment of a luxury product, -- and can also be used to create the Stuxnet worm. This is a far different affair.

Stuxnet, you will have heard lately, is the cyber worm which is designed to override computer safety programs at industrial plants, causing, say, important pipelines to blow, or vitally chugging pistons to jam. Not at Cognac distilleries, we hope. It's the worm which, since its first uploading or "birthday" on February 3, 2009, has stealthily infected an eerily large number of computers at nuclear power plants, mostly in Iran. The very last part of the code actually reads DEADF007, which would seem to be a grisly joke to mean "dead f ---ers" and to reference the cipher famously signaling James Bond's license to kill. "'After the original code is no longer executed, we can expect that something will blow up soon,' " warns one Ralph Langner, Stuxnet's "most prominent sleuth," quoted in Jonathan V. Last's report in the September 30 Weekly Standard ("How Stuxnet is scaring the tech world half to death"). Where did the worm come from? Who benefits from a paralyzing computer problem at, oh, say Iranian nuclear plants?

I daresay we all do. Anyway the rest of this story must wait, either for a thriller novelist to whirl up into blockbuster melodrama right now, or for a historian to soberly chronicle a hundred years from now. For our small purposes it may seem merely grotesque to mention something so serious in the same breath with news about spiffy cocktail recipe downloads. Still -- it seems plausible that our thriller novelist, or our future historian, will conclude that the Stuxnet worm was created by heroes who intend to stop in their tracks the sort of villains who don't want us to have this.

The sort of villains, I say. Men in underground labs in Iran struggling now with Stuxnet obviously haven't scribbled "hack C. Summit app" in Farsi at the top of their to-do list. Nevertheless for them and their fellows who take seriously -- and let us venture for a moment into very serious matters -- Islam's command to spread the true and perfect faith through worldwide jihad, that small task is still there. It would have to be. Even something this frivolous is part and parcel of everything else -- liquor, miniskirts, men and women mingling at parties, Times Square, infidel tourists (we were warned to expect a "Mumbai-style" terror attack this week), infidel European cathedrals. Israel. It's an odd thought, as you softly swipe a fingertip across a glowing little screen, not understanding a thousandth part of why this works, and call up a video demonstration on mixing Pink Love. You think: in another universe, right now, this is not allowed. The great 19th century historian Jacob Burckhardt wrote:

The strongest proof of real, extremely despotic power in Islam is the fact that it has been able to invalidate, in such large measure, the entire history (customs, religion, previous way of looking at things, earlier imagination) of the peoples converted to it. It accomplished this only by instilling into them a new religious arrogance which was stronger than everything and induced them to be ashamed [emphasis in original] of their past.

Ashamed? To quote an old corporate logo, Blackwater's I think -- not today. And who was it who gave us a quick lesson in Cognac, when he sniffed his glass, grimaced and cocked a thick eyebrow, and complained under exasperated questioning that the sample before him was "I should say a 30-year-old Fins, indifferently blended, with an overdose of Bons Bois"?

Image from shatterhand007.com

But of course. In the middle of all these things, serious and frivolous, I do wait for some bright soul to invent a new drink called oh, say the Stuxnet. Cognac optional.

Chocolate pecan bars

From the Nestle company's Perfect Endings: Chocolate Dessert and Beverage Cookbook (1962). You'll need a 15 x 10 x 1 inch jelly roll pan. The recipe claims you need not grease it, but I took the precaution anyway. These cookies are nice for people who don't like sweets too sweet, especially chocolate lovers who don't like chocolate too sweet. And they are easy to make.



Preheat the oven to 325 F.

First, make a topping of

• 1 cup pecans, finely chopped
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 2 tsp hot water (I used coffee -- rum or whisky would be good, too)
• 1/4 tsp salt

Mix together all these ingredients and set aside.

Then, melt together:

• 1 (12 oz.) package semi sweet chocolate chips
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter

... in a small heavy-bottomed pan over very low heat. Stir until fully melted and smooth.

Blend in:

• 1/4 cup sugar
• 2 eggs (one at a time)
• 2 cups sifted flour

Combine thoroughly and spread in the jelly roll pan. (The batter will be thick.) Sprinkle the reserved pecan topping over all, and bake for 20 minutes. When cool, cut into 2 x 1 bars.

Eat. Oooh.