TASTEBUD
SO MUCH TO TASTE. SO LITTLE TIME.Archive for wine
Reel Food
Molto Sirio
It’s a rare film about haute cuisine that manages to come down to Earth and stir deep emotions, too; Big Night is an easy exception, but there are many more misses than hits in the ouevre. And great documentaries about food are rarer still. So I was pleased to see the excellent documentary LE CIRQUE: A TABLE IN HEAVEN on the schedule for HBO on Monday, December 29th. Completed in 2006, the film, which debuted at IFC’s Stranger Than Fiction series in April of 2007, documents the rise-and-fall-and-rise-again of restaurateur Sirio Maccioni and his famed eatery, Le Cirque, once the most celebrated restaurant in New York. Catering to celebrities, Presidents, and, famously—thanks to Sirio’s legendary hospitality—seemingly anyone who walked in the door, Le Cirque became a symbol of the good life, dreams achieved, abbondanza.
Sardinian Red [Instant Cred]
A positive side effect of the big, bad economic slowdown is a greater focus on value when it comes to wine. Most of us aren’t in the market for first-growth Bordeaux, anyway, right? On the cheap side, anyone can throw down $5 for a flabby syrah at Trader Joe’s, but it takes a little more creativity to really score a wine worth talking about. On that note, the good people over at Tasting Table point out a great deal on a Sardinian wine I heartily second: Argiolas Perdera, a robust red made with monica grapes, an ancient varietal found only on the Mediterranean isle that’s similar to Côtes du Rhône. And it’s only $15 bucks. I visited Argiolas during this year’s harvest for a day, touring the winery with a member of the Argiolas family, and managed to get lost in the cellar, of course. Bring one home for turkey day.
Here, some out takes from my too-short visit to Sardinia’s most noted producer, including crates of just-picked nasco, a white varietal that’s also unique to Sardinia.
Reading For The (Self-Administered) Apocalypse
Everyone has a preferred hangover helper (mine’s a steaming hot spicy bowl of pho noodle soup, aspirin, and ‘Rushmore‘). Others go for hair-of-the-dog, spa treatments, cheeseburgers, or, hell, all three at once. But such methods fail, a story in today’s Times points out, to address symptoms beyond the usual nausea and exhaustion—the much worse ones based in existential darkness, self-loathing, and regret. To a certain sort, such side effects from revelry require more than folk remedies (see Joan Acocella’s recent gem in The New Yorker, A Few Too Many) they require a good long read. One that takes you to a deeper, more despondent place, in fact, so your return to personhood can be felt even more satisfyingly. Enter ‘EVERYDAY DRINKING: The Distilled Kingsley Amis’ (Bloomsbury). Three of his long out-of-print books on the art of drinking have been compiled into a single volume with the added kick of an introduction by another legendary prude, Christopher Hitchens. Here’s a few choice excerpts thanks to Dwight Garner’s review, the first on diets:
“The first, indeed the only, requirement of a diet is that it should lose you weight without reducing your alcoholic intake by the smallest degree.” On why serious drinkers should own a separate refrigerator for their implements: “Wives and such are constantly filling up any refrigerator they have a claim on, even its ice-compartment, with irrelevant rubbish like food.” On the benefits of sangria: “You can drink a lot of it without falling down.”
See you at the bar, friends.
EVERYDAY DRINKING
The Distilled Kingsley Amis
By Kingsley Amis
302 pages. Bloomsbury. $19.99.
Smith: Restaurant Row? More like Liquor Lane
With a name like “THE JAKEWALK”, there’s already good reason to look forward to the latest addition to Smith Street, fast becoming more a street for boozy haute cocktail-soaked pub crawls than leisurely dinners (though you can find me happily hiding out in with a minute steak in Bar Tabac often enough). But with the (coming-soon) Clover Club, the timeless Brooklyn Inn, Brooklyn Social, and winebar Black Mountain, I’m going to pronounce Smith Street Brooklyn’s favorite lane for drinking as well as eating. And hell, when you cast your gimlet-eyed gaze on the fair borough of Brooklyn as a whole, the arrivals of Weather Up, Beer Table, 4th Avenue Pub, Pacific Standard, Cherry Tree, Radegast, and so many more make for a rosy picture indeed.
