Archive for the ‘And Food’ Category
Missouri, Not Misery. There’s a Difference.
October 8th, 2010 by Tom Johnson
I’m torn between the competing ideas that wine is supposed to fun and that wine is something that should be taken seriously. Like a lot of things, I know it’s a mixture of the two, and that there are extremes that reasonable people avoid. Here’s one of the extremes: If you’re wondering what kind of [...]
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Does McDonald’s Do Corkage?
August 20th, 2010 by Tom Johnson
Sommelier Clare Shaheen from TriBeCa Grill tackles fast food wine pairings. Her thoughts on the Burger King Whopper: If you wanted a red wine, a sparkling lambrusco would be really good with this. Not anything like a barolo, those wines are built to stand up to a piece of meat you can barely cut through. [...]
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Jello Flights
May 20th, 2010 by Tom Johnson
A recipe for serving wine as a solid. I’m trying this tonight.
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The Valentine’s Day Chronicles, Volume 1: Wine & Chocolate
February 3rd, 2010 by Tom Johnson
For the next two weeks unimaginative media will pound Valentine’s Day to death right in front of us. My own, personal, grocery store has had racks of Valentine’s Day cards on display since they cleaned out the Christmas crap, and my email box is full of “helpful” ideas for how I can trade money for [...]
Tags: wine and chocolate
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I Know We’re All Having Fun Here, But Could This Be One Example of Why People Think Wine Is Too Complicated to Bother With?
January 10th, 2010 by Tom Johnson
Food matching is great sport and there is no intrinsic harm in Dr. Vino’s tongue-in-cheek debate over what wine goes best with 7-layer taco dip. I’m just thinking the obsession with matching food and wine is making the pleasure of wine seem more difficult than it really is. Everyone who gets a reputation for knowing about [...]
Tags: Matching Wine and Food
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The Original Napa Cuisine
December 12th, 2009 by Tom Johnson
There’s no doubt that Napa Valley has changed not only the way we think about wine, but also how we think about food. According to Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Napa, Sonoma, Lake and Mendocino, written by Campbell Augustus Menefee and published in 1873, Napa has always had a unique culinary outlook. The first European [...]
Tags: food, History, Napa
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The Hazard of Taste Descriptors
December 9th, 2009 by Tom Johnson
Napaman attempts to describe the aroma of white truffles: A fresh white truffle, not more than several days old, has an intense perfume of garlic, fresh hay, and mushroom, mixed with a delicate amount of the scent of slightly soiled undergarments. Which goes a long way toward explaining why they’re popular with the French. I [...]
Tags: 100 Point Scales, food
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Pumpkin Pie Chart: Thanksgiving by the Numbers
December 1st, 2009 by Tom Johnson
After all the fretting about what wine to drink with Thanksgiving Dinner, we have objective data showing what people actually drank. Via the invaluable Dr. Vino, we have Cellartracker’s report on what people pulled out of the basement to put on the table. The list sorts by brand, and the Top Five are: Turley, Louis [...]
Tags: Data, wine
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Tomato Wines #3: The Theory Collapses
August 17th, 2009 by Tom Johnson
With 15 pounds of tomatoes out of the garden in the last few days and hours spent searching for new things to do with them (tomato sorbet, tomato Spackle) I’ve got to report a failure of one aspect of my tomato wines theory: going cheap. As you may recall from my first tomato wines posting, [...]
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Tomato Wine #2: Nero d’Avola
August 12th, 2009 by Tom Johnson
Tomatoes continue to pour out of the garden, so tonight we improvise: risotto with tomatoes, basil and grilled chicken. This is not a particularly heavy tomato-based meal, but it breaks us out of the pasta and tomato rut so the kids will come downstairs for dinner. (Tomato Wine # 1 here.) Last night, they whined [...]
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