La Subida: Friuli Venezia Giulia Taste Soloist

Walter Filipitti’s book The Taste Soloist, heavily supported by Stefano Scatà’s photography, will lure you closer to a Friuli Venezia Giulia visit and witnessing a powerful expression of ancestral driven wine and food culture.  Photos, recipes, and tales featuring a cooperative of the region’s best knife, cheese, prosciutto, vinegar, wine, and artisan food makers are perfect [...]

Noma: New Normal In Perfect Dining

It is important to walk to Noma over city bridges and along waterfront streets to embrace Copenhagen’s bone chilling winter.  February Noma meals are miraculously conceived outdoors; natural bounties harvested, pickled, smoked, or dried in step with a harsh Scandinavian winter calendar. Only then are they skillfully nurtured into a series of intellectually compelling courses [...]

Noma Copenhagen 2/20/13 Playlist

Noma is Copenhagen, Copenhagen is Noma. They are intertwined the way musicians reflect root and spontaneous influences. For us, we are in the middle of both; five days of frosty, windswept, Nordic Copenhagen and two meals at its geographic mirror called Noma.  All of it feels severe and subtle, cozy and edgy, intellectual yet simple, [...]

Pretty Cerasuolo And Ugly Halibut Ravioli

It is apparently fine to drink pretty wine with ugly food.  Combining **** $30 2008 Cos Cerasuolo di Vittoria with home made halibut ravioli proved that out.  Just back from Alaska with sixty pounds of halibut and lingcod fillets in tow, the flavorful white fish has been figuring into meal after meal.  As deliciously addictive as fish [...]

Wine Cellar Celebration at AKA Bistro

Bordeaux improves through cellaring; nothing new about that. A long time ago I joined a group dinner to taste claret with Clive Coates and he drew something like this to explain a cultural gap in patience, along wines’ life trajectories, between British and American wine enthusiasts: At a very recent dinner I hosted for a group of business [...]

AN/2 & Cosme Palacio Blanco 1894 at Barcelona

The world is better off for places like Barcelona.  Wines such as Anima Negra AN/2 from Majorca’s red callet grape and Bodegas Palacios Cosme Palacio Blanco 1894 from Rioja’s white viura variety don’t make it onto just any wine list.  But at Barcelona Restaurant and Wine Bar, ten minutes off of I-84 in (of all places?) West Hartford’s [...]

Roagna Paje Barbaresco 2003 and Grindhouse Burgers

Last week I paired a really ugly hamburger with an indisputably pretty wine.                       The burger was just as delicious as it was ugly.  The wine, on the other hand, was as graceful, balanced, and pretty as folks have come to expect from a Luca Roagna [...]

The Wine and Food Culture Divide

I’ll admit to spending more time than it’s probably worth thinking about nuances in wine and food culture.  For example, I ponder how obvious it is that most of us Americans act with righteous self confidence buying, ordering, and cooking the foodstuffs and ingredients we prefer. We’ll ask questions freely when shopping or ordering to [...]

Clos de la Roilette & Ramps

Despite spending the better part of this weekend in Ontario tasting through a couple hundred Niagara wines, I woke up this morning with ramps on the brain. Not Pinot, Riesling, or Chardonnay…..just ramps. Each spring I’ll  trip over an early seasonal ramp at some “farm to table” spot and turn fanatic securing a personal stash [...]

Kitchen A Trattoria BYOB and 2009 Domaine la Garrigue

Eventually you find Kitchen A Trattoria discretely tucked away off a main street in St. James, Long Island.  Worth the momentary measure of driving confusion, the restaurant delivers a top BYOB opportunity to pair Long Island’s most impeccably crafted, mouth watering, rustic Italian fare with your cellar’s treasures.  Hundreds of miles from my own wine cellar, [...]

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