Food/Wine Pairing Tasting Notes

Here is a question I often ponder. If you are going to suggest a wine to go with a particular dish (or vice versa), why would you just write a regular tasting note and not reference the dish? That thought crept into my mind again as I noticed this post on Personal Wine Buyer, whose author will be suggesting wine pairings for Design*Sponge. (And I only single him out because I just read his tasting note; I can’t think of the number of times I’ve seen this.)

Here is his write-up of the wine he chose to go with Matt Armendariz’s Sautéed Beet Greens with Sun-Dried Tomatoes and Pancetta:

Beautiful golden straw in color. Not extremely forward or exotic on the aromatics — a bit subdued on the nose. On the palate, this wine shows beautiful grapefruit and citrus, nice apple with some butter and almonds. Really nice minerality with great weight, balance and acidity with a nice crisp finish. This is a good value at about $18 a bottle — and just a really nice wine. Recommended.

Sounds like a wine I would like. But why, exactly, did he choose it to go with Matt’s dish? It doesn’t matter if you agree with him: Why that wine?

In my wine writing, I try to also be a wine educator. I want people to finish my pieces and think, “Hmm. I learned a little something.” I can and do write adjective-heavy tasting notes, but I don’t kid myself about the number of people who actually read them: very few, I think.

To me, his tasting note and its siblings in the bulk of the wine press are wasted opportunities. The author could have talked about how structure, weight, acidity, and flavor led him down that road. He could have given readers something to think about: a better way to think about wine than as a bag of descriptions. He could have empowered them in the wine shop. What happens when the average reader goes to their local hooch supplier and can’t find the wine? He’s stranded them: They have no way to articulate what they want. Furthermore, he hasn’t given them a language they can use in the future. He has described a wine and failed to give it any context. I, too, have done this in my professional writing. That doesn’t make it right.

Give a man a fish, the saying goes, and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and feed him for a lifetime. As wine writers, we owe it to our readers to teach them to fish.

Judging The American Wine Blog Awards

After Tom Wark announced the finalists for the American Wine Blog Awards, there was a lot of grumbling about who made the cut and who didn’t. This is inevitable; I judge the relevance of any award by the amount of controversy it causes. Few people care that they didn’t get an award they didn’t know about. But as bloggers and their readers grouse, I thought I’d offer my perspective as a judge.

The judging process was straightforward: Anyone could nominate a blog in any of the categories, and when nominations closed, Tom sent each of the judges a spreadsheet with all the nominees. As far as I know, every nominated blog was on the spreadsheet, except for the ones written by the judges and the ones that didn’t meet Tom’s eligibility requirements. Each of the six judges ranked five finalists in each category, and then Tom combined all those to come up with the top four finalists he presented to readers.

My Judging
Judges could use any criteria we wanted for deciding our top five. I gave 50 points for the “so what?” factor, which varied based on the category. For the Single Subject category, for instance, my “so what?” translated into a simple question: If I wanted to learn about your subject, would your blog be a good way to do it? Then I gave 40 points for writing ability: Can the blogger communicate in a logical way? Does s/he demonstrate good knowledge rather than knee-jerk, poorly considered opinions? Finally, I gave 10 points for mechanics: Does the blogger know that it’s and its are separate words? Does s/he drop words from sentences? I gave this little weight in the total because most blogs don’t have copy editors. (For the graphics awards, I just gave a single score.)

I read the front page of entries for each site, and then all the posts from last September — sometimes people beef up their posts at awards time. I took notes on each blog. Brutal notes, too: I summed up one site with “blah blah blah” and another with “who nominated this site?” It didn’t matter if the site’s author was a real-life friend, a social-networking “friend,” or a total stranger. I tried to be as objective as one can be in a subjective context.

Is This The Best We Can Do?
Tom wrote of the finalists, “The collection of finalists … is a stellar example of all the things that are outstanding about the wine blogosphere.” As someone who pored through all the nominees, I had the opposite view: Is this the best we can do? There were one or two categories where I wished I could submit just three finalists, not five. In my scheme, not one site scored above 90 points (though there was at least one 89).

I am guilty of many of the sins I noticed on other blogs. I’m not sure how I would grade OWF if I were looking at it through the objective lens I turned on the WBA nominees. So I used my Web-wide jaunt as a reminder about what I could do to improve this site.

Some of you may find these little discoveries interesting. Some of you may tell me to take a hike (or, you know, some other phrase). That’s fine, because I want to preface these comments with one bit of advice: Write your blog for yourself. Writing for rewards and recognition is a sucker’s game. I have felt the sting of being overlooked for awards, but I finally remembered that I write OWF for my own benefit; my readers seem to keep coming back, so who cares if I don’t have a little badge in my sidebar?

What I Learned From The AWBA Nominees
Context matters. If I want to read page after page of "berries-cherries-flowers" tasting notes and irrelevant scores, I’ll pick up one of the big wine magazines. If I want to read uneducated, fawning press about some new health effect of wine, I’ll turn to newspapers. As bloggers, we can tell our readers why a given wine matters (or doesn’t) and where it fits in the world. We have the ability to talk about how it moves us (or doesn’t). We can wrap news stories in our own opinions and research. We can take a reader farther than the magazines can. We can teach and inform.

Personality matters. As bloggers, we don’t have to adhere to a dry, third-person editorial voice. We can be ourselves. We can use the first-person perspective that few feature wells allow. Of course, too much personality can grate on the reader, but too much is better than none at all. When I read a blog post, I want to get a sense of the person who wrote it. I want to care enough to click on the “About” link at the top of your page. We should let ourselves shine through a bit more.

Writing matters. I’m not a prescriptivist about grammar, despite what you may think. But you don’t need to memorize Strunk & White to communicate ideas in a useful way. Writing is a craft before it’s an art, and almost anyone can learn the craft. Magazines and newspapers have hard-working editors who clean up a writer’s prose: We have to rely on ourselves. I gave some advice about this in an earlier post — and I would add A Writer’s Coach to my list of recommended books — but I think many blogs would benefit from a few hours between writing and posting and one last careful read before the author hits Publish.

We have the opportunity to transform the way people look at wine. Our readers bond with us, learn about our lives, and trust our recommendations in ways most wine writers can’t imagine. We can introduce our readers to something beyond the mass-market bottles and the everyday grapes. We can show them that high quality doesn’t only come from a big magazine.

Relying On Tools

I like to believe, despite the many boxes our friends packed and moved, that I am a minimalist about kitchen gadgets. A good knife, a solid whisk, a handful of wooden spoons, a few bowls, and a couple pots and pans are all a cook needs for most tasks. At least, that’s what I tell myself and anyone who asks.

It turns out that I take my gadgets for granted.

I can finally cook simple food in the kitchen: There are still drop cloths everywhere, but there is now a small work area next to our recently-uncovered refrigerator and stove. I was able to make a simple dinner of pan-seared sausage atop rice that had been cooked in Champagne and beef stock with carrots, celery, and onion.

The problem came the next night.

I had leftover rice, so I decided to fry up rice cakes and serve them atop a simple salad. When I’ve done this before, I’ve puréed some of the rice in my food processor to release the starch left in the grain — this is regular rice, not risotto rice, which hemorrhages starch into its cooking liquid. Where is the food processor? That I know: In an open box. But where are all its parts? I don’t know. I could combat the problem, I figured, by using my other trick: packing the rice into a circle mold. Where are my circle molds? I don’t know. Where is the large spatula I needed to flip the cakes? I don’t know. Where are my whisks so that I could make a vinaigrette? I don’t know: I used the “shake oil and acid in a bowl” approach. Where are my bowls so that I could dress the greens? I don’t know. (Though I did find a ginormous bowl that sufficed.)

I stressed and fumed and ranted as my rice cakes fell apart, all because I couldn’t find the gear that I quietly rely on in the kitchen. Maybe I’m not such a minimalist, after all.

What Is Bimbo Break?

I was trying to solve a puzzle in the latest issue of The Enigma, the monthly publication of The National Puzzlers’ League, and I decided the answer might be one of the Coca-Cola brands. I haven’t memorized them, of course, so I looked them up. Holy cats! They own everything. This isn’t a surprise — America’s favorite soft drink company is a sprawling mass of a corporation — but the list en masse is quite a sight.

Here’s one to ponder: What is Bimbo Break? It’s listed in their brands, but I’ve never seen it. Maybe I just don’t shop in the right stores. Or maybe, you know, Coca-Cola decided that that brand isn’t quite ready for market yet.

I’ll tell you what Bimbo Break isn’t: the answer to the puzzle. I did manage to figure it out, though.

Pardon Me, Turkeys

Want a safe topic for the family’s Thanksgiving dinner chatter? Snopes tracked down the history of the presidential pardon for turkeys. Who was the first president to issue a pardon for birds headed to the slaughterhouse? It may not be who you think.

And don’t miss their other Thanksgiving entries. Turkey doesn’t make you sleepy, and the day after Thanksgiving isn’t the biggest shopping day of the year.

"Power Boil" Burners

We bought a nice, one-year-old stove off of Craigslist, and this weekend we hooked it up in the new house. This stove, like other modern stoves, has a “power boil” burner with more flame and a “precise simmer” burner with less. This drives me bonkers. Why not just make all the burners go from the lowest temperature of precise simmer to the highest temperature of power boil? Why force me to put stocks on my back right burner and stir-fries in the front?

It reminds me of the famous dialog between Nigel Tufnel and Marty DiBergi in This Is Spinal Tap:

Nigel Tufnel: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and...
Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?
Nigel Tufnel: Exactly.
Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it's louder? Is it any louder?
Nigel Tufnel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?
Marty DiBergi: I don't know.
Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven.
Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.
Marty DiBergi: Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?
Nigel Tufnel: [pause] These go to eleven.

My friend meriko mentioned that they probably just have different sizes of pipes running into the burners, which prompts the question: Can I hack those pipes to install new, bigger ones to all the burners? I’m already planning to make a pizza oven by removing the lock that kicks in for the self-cleaning mode. Maybe I could swap in new pipes as well. Anyone know how to do that without blowing up the house?

Paul Levy Opts Out Of Bad-Boy Writing

In Slate today, Paul Levy articulates the ennui that I feel about macho food writing, which is either derivative of or popularized by Anthony Bourdain. Everyone has to swear and shock. Neither of these are really problems, but do it all the time and you become tiresome. Is anyone shocked by a Bourdain tirade anymore? Good writers use any trick with care so that it doesn’t lose its effect.

Or maybe I’m just yelling “Get off the damn lawn!” to the neighborhood kids. What do you think about the “shock treatment” of modern male food writers?

Plant Vines In Sweden!

It’s time for another article about the effect of global warming on wine regions. Next they’ll tell us that rosés aren’t all sweet fruit punch drinks. This time Salon is sounding the alarm. Unfortunately, the interesting news angle appears only briefly at the end of the article: “But he refuses to grow complacent or forget that his good fortune is an omen. That's why he and many of his colleagues in the Oregon hills have joined to make their wine industry the first ‘carbon neutral’ one in the country.” Wait. What was that again?

Sex and the Simple Red Wine

Melissa and I have been working through the Sex and the City DVDs. I like the show, but something about it irks my inner wine geek.

Whenever one of the four main women orders a cocktail, she goes into specifics: "Get me a Cosmopolitan" or "This is a Staten Island Ice Tea." But when she orders wine, she's vague: "I'd like a glass of red wine" or "Over a glass of white wine and some salmon, Charlotte listened to Trey talk." I can understand why they'd avoid specific wines, but why don't they order merlots and chardonnays? (They often drink Champagne, but I assume the writers, like most people, believe that it's a generic term for sparkling wine.) The four women dine out at nice places. Does a sophisticated woman in New York order "red wine" or "white wine" in tony restaurants? Is that even possible?

I could see that Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie might order wine by the color, but Cynthia Nixon's Miranda, a partner at a law firm? I don't think so. And Kim Cattrall's Samantha is a devoted hedonist; shouldn't she know something more than red and white? (I like that the show has them drinking red wine; there's none of the "women only drink white wine" nonsense.)

Is this vinous ignorance commonplace on TV? Melissa and I never watch it, and our favorite DVDs tend to have the name Joss Whedon on them, so maybe this is standard fare. Or does the show paint an accurate portrait of a thirtysomething single woman in Manhattan during the late 1990s?

And finally, for SatC fans out there, what type of wine would you pair with each character?

Sweet Corn Ice Cream

Two weeks ago, Melissa and I went to the Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market, and I saw them: the Brentwood corn farmers who perch their table at one corner of the building and sell out of their stock within just two hours. Their ears of corn, which have the color of a delicate custard, are among the sweetest I've ever had. (Modern eating corn has been bred to extreme sweetness to compensate for the fact that its sugars begin their path to flavorless starch as soon as you lop the ear off its stalk.)

I bought four ears.

They weren't destined for the pot or the grill. They were headed straight for the Glace-A-Tron 6000. My friend Tom had mentioned the sweet corn ice cream he saw on a trip to New York last year, and I filed the idea away for months, waiting for the season's bounty.

Neither of my ice cream books have a recipe for corn ice cream, and I forgot to ask Tom for details about the ones he sampled in New York, but I had a good idea of how it would work. Eggs will transform just about any liquid into custard, so I swapped some of my baseline recipe's half-and-half for the "corn milk" I got from pushing the fat kernels through a food mill, about 1 cup from the 4 ears. One taste of the pale, sugary liquid and I reduced my normal sugar proportions from 3/4 cup to 1/2 cup . Finally, I added an extra egg yolk to adjust for the fact that I had removed some of the total fat when I replaced half-and-half with corn milk.

The result was almost perfect: Intense corn flavor trapped in ice cream. But it wasn't quite right. Think of arcing your spoon through a scoop of ice cream. The frozen cream curls off in a smooth line. On my scoop, the cream sheared off in large chunks. And while the corn flavor was intense, it was also one-dimensional. It tasted of pure corn but lacked depth.

A week later, Melissa and I shopped at the Berkeley farmers' market. I saw ears of corn and snatched up another four.

Did you know that at Chez Panisse, they don't use any prep cooks? The evening's cooks prep their own ingredients and adjust the final dishes based on the quality of the produce. It seems like an odd idea—how much do they really change in midstream?—until you're faced with four ears of corn that have nothing except a name in common with the four you bought the week before.

When I ground the kernels in my food mill, I ended up with two tablespoons of juice, a far cry from the 16 I had used the week before. I couldn't imagine the meager amount affecting the final taste. I didn't have time to go back to the market for more, so I improvised. I pureed the kernels with a bit of water and poured the lumpy, squishy mess onto fine-mesh cheesecloth. I gathered the corners to make a sack and began wringing the corn purée, squeezing first with my hands and then twisting the cheesecloth down and down, trying to make a diamond out of the rough goo. Finally, I had a cup of liquid.

This batch of corn milk didn't need a sugar reduction—a different breed, or a relatively long time since harvest? I did, however, replace the half-and-half with cream, and I added cayenne pepper to give the ice cream the depth that its spiritual ancestor had lacked. In fact, I added too much. But other than that, the ice cream was exactly what I wanted, with a perfect texture and a rich, corn flavor that had some kick.

I rarely publish recipes here at OWF, as I've said before, and the corn ice cream illustrates the reason. Recipes provide a template, but they can't know your ingredients. Cookbook authors publish individual experiences, but even when they've been tested by others, they don't represent a universal truth. Which corn ice cream recipe should I print? The one that assumes you have sweet, juicy ears, or the one that assumes you have drier, less sweet ears? You have to understand what a recipe wants to achieve in order to fit your ingredients and your tastes. That's cooking.

In Search Of Real Food? Skip Yahoo

The other day, I got a press release that serves as a case study in trying to trick potential customers. Hellmann's (or Best Foods for those on this side of the country) has partnered with Yahoo! Food in a campaign they call The Search For Real Food.

Hellmann's. Real Food. No, I just can't make the math work. I don't have a problem with Hellmann's as a food product—none apart from a general stance against flavorless, chemical-laden industrial foods, anyway—but is there any food less real than the preservative-laden spread? Just as megaproducers have co-opted the terms organic and natural and the bucolic imagery they conjure, Hellmann's has tied itself to a term that has traction among modern shoppers. Even if they don't approve or edit the content—and I assume they do—every visitor to that site will conflate Hellmann's and real food. At the very least, they'll believe that Hellmann's actually cares about it.

The PR person who sent me the link mentioned that they'd be looking for good "real food" blog posts to highlight. Here's my recommendation: how to make your own mayonnaise at cookingforengineers.com. Taste the real thing, and you'll wonder how anyone considers Hellmann's to be mayonnaise. The real sauce is a snap to make, especially if you use a food processor. It only keeps for a week in the refrigerator, instead of the months and months that Hellmann's will hold up, but which expiration date sounds more like real food?

Brilliant McDonald's PR

According to the Chicago Tribune, McDonald's will allow six moms to investigate restaurants in the chain, work in the restaurant, and then blog about their experiences and their discoveries.

Who are these moms? I'll bet McDonald's didn't choose top-notch investigative journalists. While pundits quoted in the article say the move could backfire, I think McDonald's has come up with a brilliant idea. Let these women ask "pointed" questions, and then spin them a comfortable answer that they'll post for all their readers to see.

McDonald's will give them tours of the hamburger plant and apple orchards. How very open and transparent of them. I didn't see anything in the article about tours of pork farms for the bacon, slaughterhouses, or shantytowns where slaughterhouse workers live. Will they get to sit in on the meetings where the attendees discuss ways to make advertisements that get children into the restaurant? Will they get to look at the company's financials? And do you think McDonald's will let these women visit the plants and apple farms unannounced?

When I started to blog, and even when I started to write professionally, I found it hard to resist marketing spin. There's a reason none of my clients consider a P.R. person or a marketing rep a valid source. "Your wine won a gold medal? That's great!" "Oh! Alcohol levels don't matter because you balance the wine? Interesting." "You make your wine in the vineyard? That sounds reasonable." Everyone seems so sincere. Several years into this, I'll nod politely and groan inside when I decide not to call them on this pap: If it's not relevant to my article, I don't care what lies they want to tell me, but if it's part of the piece I know enough to ask pointed questions. (Some of my favorites: "So you weren't making balanced wines with low alcohol? Oh, you were? So why up the alcohol?" "Do you think they go well with food?" "If you make wine in the vineyard, why don't you use natural yeast?")

Will the McMoms fall prey to this spin? Maybe not. But six moms with who-knows-what backgrounds against a corporate giant with a well-funded and adept marketing group? My money's on the Golden Arches.

via Chow, which asks good questions about how deep the nutritional analysis will be.

To Brine Or Not To Brine

I used to be a fan of brining meat: immersing it into a salty liquid and letting osmosis carry the salt deep into the flesh. Cook's Illustrated has championed the technique for years—they may still—and that's where I first learned of it.

But I've debarked from the brining boat. Brining is useful because industrial producers have stripped the fat and flavor from their animals, breeding instead for lean meat and animals that handle stress better. Put the meat in salty water, however, and you add back flavor and moisture.

But you're not bringing out the natural flavor of the meat; you're adding an "artificial" taste of kosher salt and water. I first moved away from brining when I ordered heritage turkeys in 2002. Marian Burros's famous 2001 New York Times article, the one that brought these birds into the public light, mentioned that the heritage birds had an actual taste, and I thought of a scene in The Soul of a Chef where a cook gets a good piece of meat and says, in effect, "Why would I get rid of that flavor with a brine?" As I bought more quality meat, brining seemed like an unnecessary insult. Of course, Bay Area shoppers have the choice to buy this kind of meat. If I lived elsewhere, I might still brine the meat I could easily get.

As I moved away from brining, I noticed that brined meat was almost too juicy. Chicken, for instance, has a slippery, jelly-like consistency that doesn't feel quite right. Brined pork doesn't suffer from this, but you're still adding juice because commercial pork is too lean and doesn't contribute its own. I've heard cooks complain that the salty juices can't be used for a sauce, but I've never had this problem.

I do season my meat before I cook it. I rub salt on it 24 hours—ideally—in advance, a technique that I first saw in The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, but which I've since seen in other places. The "perfect roast chicken" mentioned a few issues ago in The Art of Eating uses this technique, and of course pre-salting is nothing more than a dry rub, something that grillers and barbecuers do right now.

Do you brine? Pre-salt? None of the above? I wonder if brining is still alive and well, or if it's beginning to die out.

The New York Times On Dinner Parties

The New York Times has a close-to-home article about foodie dinner parties. Modern hosts worry about serving the best food, finding the most local ingredients, using the best china, hand making everything, receiving judgment about their food, and so forth. (I love the line, "his and her subscriptions to The Art of Eating;" I imagine Ed will also laugh to see his quarterly love letter to the traditional food of the world—often the product of rural frugality—cast as a must-have bourgeois accessory, though the demographic is probably accurate.)

Too bad the author could only find hosts who care more about the impression they make than the joy of friendship; these people sound dreary. Our dinner parties sit far to the right on the bell curve, but I don't cook the way I do to impress people: I cook the way I do because I enjoy it, and I want to do something special for our friends. I get to try out dishes I probably wouldn't do for Melissa and me. I buy special ingredients or hand make them because they taste better, not because I want to pass muster with my guests. We like chatting with our friends over good food and wine, and where better to do so than the comfort of our own home?

I stress about dinner parties, but only because I want the food to taste good, not because I'm worried that my friends will think less of me if something isn't perfect. I could probably name a dozen things I wasn't happy about for Clotilde's dinner party—from subtle flavor quibbles to components that never made it out of the kitchen—but I don't imagine that any of the guests went home thinking, "Well, too bad that didn't work out." Of course, as I've said before, the real secret is to not tell your dinner guests what went wrong. If you're not going to fess up, why stress?

Is the article sketching a difference between New Yorkers and Bay Areans? Or just me and other foodies? How do you feel when you host a dinner party? Are you out to impress? I'd love to hear what you think of the article.

One last thing: I agreed with the idea that foodies who throw fancy dinner parties don't get many invitations in return. Our friends are often intimidated to have us over. But, really, you could order Domino's and beer and we'd be happy guests; the point is to hang out and enjoy each other's company.

via Ethicurean, whose digest writer and husband were actually at Clotilde's dinner, where I did in fact serve home-cured olives.

Where Are The Snobby Wine Professionals?

I recently noticed this quote in Amy's review of Educating Peter. She voices a sentiment that I think many people share:

Here's the thing I hate about wine, the attitude. You know what I'm talking about. Wine should be something we enjoy and yet it easily slips into something that intimidates instead. Of course it's not the fault of the wine. It's the people who write about it, sell it and pour it who use it as a weapon against the unsuspecting. I haven't actually met any intimidating winemakers, although it may just be a matter of time.

I think at this point I know a good number of wine professionals. I've interacted with wine writers, sommeliers, retailers, importers, and distributors. I've met asses, hypocrites, and wackos.

I've met plenty of wine snobs, too: all of them have been wine consumers who want to show how much they know. I've never met a wine professional who tries to intimidate consumers about wine.

It just doesn't make sense. Those of us in the wine industry—at least every person I've met—entered it because the passion for wine grabbed us and wouldn't let go. We want to share that passion like newly converted zealots. On a practical level, we don't want to intimidate wine drinkers because they are our bread and butter. More drinkers equals more reasons to hire wine writers or sommeliers.

The image of the imposing sommelier is a fixture in our minds, and I'm sure they exist. Somewhere. I don't doubt consumers feel intimidated by wine: Everyone has this silly notion that they should know something about wine before the sommelier approaches. Before I became interested in wine, I always just said, "Hey, I don't know what I'm doing; I'd love to hear your advice." I still say that, when faced with a wine list I can't breach, like the Italy-heavy list at Incanto. Every sommelier and wine merchant who hears me pounces on the opportunity to educate me. Education is what we writers and those who work face-to-face with the drinker always want to provide.

So where are the intimidating wine professionals? Have you met any? Have I just been lucky? Or am I oblivious to the intimidation? No need to name names, but I'd love to hear your stories. I think the intimidating wine professional is a myth in this day and age. Prove me wrong.

Do I Love Wine That Loves?

My friend Phil reminded me about the Wine That Loves line of wines. The idea is that you buy a bottle of wine to go with the food you're eating. The labels show you the food that the wine loves, with bottles for pizza, chicken, steak, pasta with tomato sauce, and fish.

At first I liked the idea. It might entice infrequent drinkers to explore wine more. It would take the fear out of pairing wine and food, and would remind shoppers that wine belongs on the dinner table, not in the isolation chambers of tasting notes in wine publications.

But I wonder if these wines dumb down shoppers. A Wine That Loves bottle doesn't give the buyer the tools to pair wine with food. It simply says, "Here's the answer." Where is the education? How does the shopper grow from Wine That Loves Chicken to ordering another, different bottle later? Does Wine That Loves Pizza love ham and pineapple pizza as much as it does peppers, olives, and sausage? Of course the Wine That Loves company would probably be happy with you buying more of their bottles, and not expanding your knowledge.

On top of the dumbing-down problems, I disagree with their sommelier's choices. A white wine with grilled salmon? I'd choose a light, fruity red, unless the sauce steered me back towards a weighty white. Pinot Noir with salmon is the classic counterexample to the tired "Red wine with meat, white wine with fish" mantra. He also goes against the wine experts who have taught me about acidity, saying this about Wine That Loves Pasta With Tomato Sauce:

The right wine for this acidic dish needs to be low in acidity. If the acidity is too high, the wine will clash with the food resulting in an unpleasant sour or tart taste.

I've always learned that your wine should have more acidity than your food, lest the acidic food make the wine seem flabby. That's why it's hard to pair wines with salads and pickles. And he fails to mention that tomato sauce has sugar in it as well. How does that factor into the Love?

Has anyone tried these? Are the wines any good? Did they go with the food as well as they promised? What are your thoughts about wine and food pairings?

Awful Offal?

Over the last couple of weeks, I've noticed a number of foodies pronouncing offal, the organs and whatnot of animals, with a long o. Like "oaffal." I've heard it from enough savvy people that I began to alter my own pronunciation—a rhyme with awful—assuming I had been wrong all this time. Today, I looked it up. My dictionaries only list the "awful" form; they flag the "o" as either the -aw sound in paw or the short-o sound in pot, a distinction of length and harshness but otherwise hard to hear.

So why the sudden rise in the long-o form? Is it a regionalism? Or does some celebrity chef use it? Most of you know by now how much I enjoy language, so I'm curious about this shift.

I assume many see the newly-trendy word, think of its association with French food, and guess that the word uses French's softer, longer vowels. (The term has been around since Middle English, but it has an Old English root.)

But maybe this is a subtle campaign. Puns that take advantage of the rhyme are legion and tiresome. Perhaps this new long-o form is a way to get the term into people's heads without the rhyming connotation of "really bad." Maybe it's a way to make the food sound more elegant, so that people don't immediately veer away when they read it in a trend piece. Could that work? Maybe I'll keep the long-o pronunciation after all.

How do you pronounce this word? And if you use the long-o pronunciation, where did you hear it? I'd love to know.

Pruning at Meadowood: A Writing Exercise

Note: Prior to the Wine Writers' Symposium, participants had the option to prune some vines in the Napa Valley Wine Reserve, the 50-acre vineyard at the entrance to Meadowood. Members of the Reserve can participate to whatever extent they like in wine making—sort of an upscale Crush Pad. The winery's caves even have carved-out spaces where members can store their wine libraries.

After the pruning lesson, we went inside for a writing exercise where we talked about the morning. This is mine, and I've left it unedited except for what we did in the session.

I mean no offense to the Meadowood staff or the many hard-working folks in Napa. I actually enjoyed myself and found the exercise educational, but I was struck by the observation that the posh life was never far away. I couldn't avoid the obvious metaphor. Alder, who writes better first drafts than I, shared the more common view of the morning.

Snap. My pruning shears squeeze shut, a branch falls off the vine, and a glistening drop of sap oozes from the wound. The vineyard manager walks up and eyes my work. "Not bad," he says, "but cut this shoot a little closer because you want the one that's nice and straight, not the one that's crooked."

I pretend, for just a moment, that I'm learning the secrets of grape growing and wine making from polished experts. The sun is shining, it's a cool-but-not-too-cold day, and I'm deciding which shoots to prune from a Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon vine, a plant that will in a few months produce the country's most expensive wine grapes.

But in fact, I'm a modern-day Marie Antoinette, playing in a little garden outside a palatial retreat, my Versailles the luxurious Meadowood resort in St. Helena. I'm just one of countless would-be wine makers who tromp through these 50 acres, working as much or as little as I choose to produce a custom wine.

The Disneyland atmosphere tints the day. My pruning shears glisten with a suspiciously new sheen; the staff, waiting out of sight like the Magic Kingdom's security guards, will clean the tool after I leave. The fruit I've helped shape will be brought into a winery so clean you could dine on the floor, so manicured that the stainless-steel tanks have been custom designed to mimic the large, conical oak fermenters in the next room. Should a drop of rain threaten my city-dweller's garb, the voluptuous Meadowood umbrellas cluster by every door. I'm half-surprised there aren't animatronics or little trolleys that we can ride in.

Perhaps it's not Disneyland after all, but just Napa, an area where migrant pickers pluck the fruit owned by dentists and movie directors who used their fortunes to become winery owners, who "make" wine by hiring knowledgeable staff. Perhaps my morning of wine making was an authentic Napa experience after all.

A Healthy Debate? Or A Healthful One?

At the end of November, Shuna of eggbeater posted a handful of her food writing pet peeves. Among them, she distinguished "healthful" from "healthy." "Food is not healthy," she wrote, "people are."

Poised to type "healthy" one morning in early January, I remembered the peeve but not the details. Are people full of health, and thus healthful, or are bran muffins? I reached for the reference closest to my keyboard, Fowler's Modern English Usage, a guide to British English. The book has an entry for healthy/healthful, but only so the author can ask why Americans care so much about the difference—"The currency of the disliked use in America is not clear to me."—and point out that "healthful" is considered old-fashioned by major British dictionaries.

Expecting an explanation about the two words, Fowler's head-scratching tone surprised me, and I fished other reference books from my shelves. My main dictionary gives "healthy" as the second definition for "healthful," though the first definition is "beneficial to health of body or mind," the sense that Shuna intended. (A similar meaning occupies the third slot for "healthy.") Among The Chicago Manual of Style, Strunk & White, and The Associated Press Stylebook, none mention the topic. Maybe this isn't an issue after all?

The American Heritage Dictionary finally provided a surprising usage note for "healthful" and "healthy." Authorities pronounced them distinct only in the late 1880s, while "'healthy' has been used to mean 'healthful' since the 16th century." The usage panel, whom I imagine as masked nobles meeting in a secret room, seems amused by the claims of the "healthful" camp.

"Healthy food" isn't wrong; neither is "healthful food." Use the one you prefer and ignore naysayers. As with most style choices, be consistent so that you don't confuse your readers. Personally, I agree with Fowler that "healthful" sounds awkward. Besides, who wants to remember another usage rule when the default word choice is fine?

Note: Thanks to Shuna for letting me use her post as a springboard for discussion.

Varietal Is The Spice Of Life

When I started writing about wine professionally, an editor corrected my use of "varietal" as a noun, preferring "variety" instead. My computer's dictionary also considers "varietal" to be an adjective and not a noun.

But it's not hard to find the noun in the wine press. Farmers grow this or that varietal. Wine makers blend varietals to create a wine. I recently saw an example of the usage, and wondered about its evolution.

I wrote to Harvey Steiman at Wine Spectator, asking if the magazine allowed the noun and when it gained acceptance in the style guide. He answered with an explicit definition for the noun, one backed by Merriam-Webster and The Oxford Companion To Wine, which I think most writers forget: "A varietal wine is named after the predominant grape variety used to make it." If your local winery bottles a wine and calls it "Pinot Noir," then the wine itself is a varietal. It's not made from the Pinot Noir varietal.

But a bottle of red Burgundy, made with Pinot Noir, is not a varietal because the grape's name isn't on the label. It's the marketing of the wine that matters, not the ingredients. German wines and their kin are often varietals, and I suppose blanc de blancs transforms a bottle of Champagne into an all-Chardonnay varietal.

And of the generic usage, The Oxford Companion To Wine snaps, "The word is increasingly misused in place of vine variety."

When did the noun appear? Merriam-Webster dates it to 1950, but without a citation, while the Oxford English Dictionary lists John Storm's 1955 Invitation To Wines as the earliest instance. No matter who first moved "varietal" from an adjective to a noun, nobody argues about who brought the term to the public's ear. In the 1950s, says Steiman, The New Yorker ran articles in which wine expert Frank Schoonmaker "encouraged California wineries to quit marketing their better wines as 'Burgundy' and 'Chablis' and instead market them as 'varietals'." The argument was only new to the general public: He was saying what Maynard Amerine of UC Davis had said to California vintners since the 1930s.

Five decades later, that advice has split the world of wine. American and other New World consumers want to know the grapes in the bottle. If the wine isn't a varietal, we expect to find, somewhere on the label, the percentages of each grape in the blend. Meanwhile, France's wines have suffered in part because New World consumers who define their tastes by grape variety struggle when faced with most French labels. Wine drinkers who love Sauvignon Blanc don't want to learn that Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé will provide them with their favorite grape.

Be careful, then, when you change an adjective into a noun. You might just change the world.

Foie Gras Without Force-Feeding?

In a post at The Ethicurean, I noticed a link to an article describing a Spanish foie gras that received the Coup de Coeur award for innovation at the Paris International Food Salon.

The surprise here isn't the country of origin: Spain, like Belgium, produces a small amount of foie gras. Look instead to the farmer's technique.

The producer claims he made the foie gras without force-feeding the birds, relying on their tendency to bulk up for migration. If he's got the real thing, he would be the savior of the foie gras industry. Animal activists focus on the force-feeding; take it away, and their argument disappears. Of course I felt the urge to comment.

It's always been possible to produce high-fat livers without force-feeding the birds through gavage (using a tube to feed the birds, a practice that dates back to Roman times). But consumers have never accepted the product as foie gras. Well, not for a couple hundred years. I note that the article doesn't mention how the innovate foie gras tastes next to traditional foie gras.

Geese, which Pateria de Sousa uses, might adapt to "free range foie" more than ducks would. Geese sometimes eat more on their own than they get in a foie gras feeding, though they don't sustain that eating habit as long as gavage lasts.

But geese cause headaches for foie gras producers. You can't artificially inseminate them, so a farmer can only sell fresh foie gras during the winter season, when Spring's goslings have come of age. And they stress more readily than ducks. When the stoic Mulard breed came on the scene in the 1970s, it transformed the industry overnight. Fifty years ago, 90 per cent of the birds for foie gras were geese. Today, only 20 per cent are.

I'm skeptical of the Sousa product; if it were that simple to produce good foie gras without force-feeding, someone would have done it. As I say, non-force-fed foie gras is the Holy Grail, and everyone's looking for it. Still, if anyone has more information, I'd love to hear it.

Not About Food: Becoming a Better Writer

I invest a lot of time and effort into my culinary knowledge. Most of you know this, because this site chronicles the self-education I've pursued for the last few years—from competent cook to opinionated gourmet, from occasional wine drinker to wine educator.

But in the last two years I've also focused on becoming a better writer. Perfect writing may be an impossible dream for me, but I nonetheless dream it every day. Compare this entry to my early posts and I hope you'll see a difference. Some of you have written to me and asked for advice on enhancing your own writing skills, and I decided to put my private answers into this public forum. These thoughts come from my own experience; add your suggestions in the comments so that we can all benefit from the knowledge.

You need internal motivation to effect change in your writing. Careful writing is hard work, and there's no promise of fame and glory for competent wordsmiths. Indeed, given the large number of sloppy writers with legions of fawning fans, I might predict the opposite. I can only offer personal satisfaction, a lifetime of annoyed spasms whenever you see obvious mistakes and slipshod grammar, and a background irritation about published text that would be a notch better with one pass of red ink.

Get a Second Opinion
Find someone who knows how to write and will give you an honest opinion of your work. Everyone likes praise and flattery, but if a friend always says, "This is really great," you won't learn anything. A good editor—not all of them qualify—fills this role, but so does a writing group where the members speak freely, pointing out the good and bad in each other's work. Thoughtful editors don't just move and cut words. They tell you when you need to flesh out one topic or whittle down another. They identify problems in tone and style. They see the problems you don't. They represent all the readers who will have the same questions and reactions when they read your piece. Negative comments sting, but they make you a better writer.

Shape Your Text
Understand that "writing well" means "rewriting a lot." I edit and revise countless times before I submit any text, whether it's a full-length feature, a blog entry, or a 100-word assignment. The only exception to this rule is a post for my casual blog OWEE, where I edit and revise just once or twice.

When I rewrite, I focus on clarity above all else. Text should communicate. If your readers can't figure out what you're saying, you've let them down. A word-geek friend of mine sent around a line from an ad for a show called Wine Country: "Why beer might just go better with chocolate than wine." I couldn't have constructed a better example of a muddled sentence. The show wants to point out that beer may trump wine as a partner for chocolate, but you'd be forgiven for thinking they meant that beer and chocolate works better as a pairing than beer and wine. (As an aside, this blanket statement annoys me—some beers go well with chocolate but so do some wines.)

When I edit a sentence, I ask myself if every word has a clear meaning. I check my pronouns to make sure any reader could figure out the nouns they replace. Consider the sentence "Jane wanted to meet up with Sue, but she couldn't fit it into her schedule." Whom does "she" refer to? What does "it" replace? I push my main point to the front or end of a sentence where the reader will notice it. I try to keep all related words together in a sentence and all related sentences together in a paragraph, tricks I learned from Ed. I give specific examples if I think I've made too broad a statement and try to use the most specific word for a given context. "Lassie jumped through a metal hoop" works better than "The dog jumped through an obstacle."

I also strive for brevity, which often coincides with clarity. I smile when I figure out a two-syllable word with the same meaning as a four-syllable word in my text. I thrill when I cut words from a sentence. I give a mental cheer when I remove a sentence from a paragraph. Don't get attached to your words; nix them when they're pointless. As you edit, examine each word and phrase and ask what it adds to the text. Some critics suggest you cut all your adverbs, which I find too pat a rule. Many writers lean on adverbs, and the constant "-ly" sound wears on a reader, but they do have a place in the English language.

I try to add color, or flair, to my writing, though I'm not great at spotting drab text. David Kamp, of The United States of Arugula, and Rowan Jacobsen, from The Art of Eating, both have a controlled flamboyance in their writing that I look to for inspiration. My original draft of the Vinovation article mentioned natural yeast "drifting through the vineyard like morning fog," which my editors liked but didn't fit after we cut that debate from the piece. We left in my description of microoxygenation: "bubbles that tiptoe through the adjoining stainless-steel vat."

Books I Like - Writing Philosophy
When I set out to improve my writing, I couldn't articulate what I meant by "good writing." I knew it when I saw it—reading sits high above food and wine in my pantheon of hobbies—but I couldn't always explain why one sentence worked and another didn't. Fortunately, thoughtful writers like to write, and many have published books that will teach you to identify and explain these very concepts.

On Writing Well - William Zinsser
One editor described this to me as "the bible for modern nonfiction writing," and I'm sure other Zinsser devotees would agree. He writes in a warm, humorous style and gives example after example to illustrate his points. He covers writing in general but also focuses on specific nonfiction genres: sports writing, criticism, and more.

Writing Fiction - Janet Burroway
Don't let the title fool you. A story is a story even when the characters are real people and the events actually happened. Burroway discusses plot, character development, dialogue, and every major element of fiction writing. After reading through her book, I spotted and admired those elements in nonfiction pieces as well as the short stories I was reading at the time.

The Art And Craft Of Feature Writing - William Blundell
It's about time for me to re-read this book, based on Blundell's time as a feature writer and editor for the Wall Street Journal. He discusses every facet of features, from coming up with ideas to structuring your text for the best effect. Read it once, read it twice, read it often.

Books I Like (And One Podcast) - Mechanics
Art requires craft: Painters need to mix colors, woodworkers need to understand wood grain, and writers need to use proper grammar. You probably can't memorize all the rules, but once again, books come to the rescue. Got a question? Look it up.

Grammar Girl
About once a week, the Grammar Girl podcast presents a five-minute episode that clarifies some confusing grammar point, whether it's the difference between "affect" and "effect" or the reason for the unusual predicate in "Joy to the World, the Lord is come." I discovered the show a few months ago, and I've since downloaded all the back episodes. I just wish that new episodes came out more often.

The Chicago Manual Of Style
Style guides give all the usage rules that the authors thought to include. For my bacon toffee post, I used the Chicago Manual of Style to determine if I should write "1970's" or "1970s" (the latter). I get the sense that choosing a style guide is the writer's equivalent of the text editor battles among programmers, but I allied myself with the Chicago camp the same way I became an Emacs user: It was the first one I got to know. I own the competing AP Style Guide, but I always go to the big orange book first.

The Elements of Style - Strunk & White
If you think I'm a curmudgeon, try flipping through this tiny treatise. E.B. White touched up his university writing instructor's guide for students, and the result is a blistering assault on lazy writers that rings true decades later.

Books I Like - Inspiration
Writing is like any art, a swamp of disappointment and frustration lit up by will-o'-the-wisps of success and idealism. You need inspiration and hope, and these books provide it.

Best American Essays
(Note: If you clamber far enough up my company's corporate hierarchy, I work for the publisher of this and the other Best American books.)
Whenever I see the newest edition of Best American Essays, I buy it and bump it to the top of my bottomless reading queue. Essays are my favorite nonfiction genre, and the annual collection never fails to provide samples that intrigue, inspire, and instruct. The 2006 collection has an essay entitled "Why I Write" that regrounded my goals as a writer. I toyed with submitting some work to the James Beard Awards this year, but this essay pushed me back over the fence.

Bird By Bird - Anne Lamott
At some point, every would-be writer gets a copy of this book. Lamott talks about the reality of writing: It's hard work, the rewards are scant, and constant hopes mean constant disappointment. But few activities are more rewarding on a personal level. Knowing that a well-regarded novelist goes through all the same pain as I somehow makes it easier for me to bear.

The Writing Life
If Anne Lamott's musings aren't enough, this book collects essays from 50 writers who have contributed to the Washington Post's Book World. Each author gives insight into the weird world of writing. Ups, downs, lefts, rights, overs, and unders all find their way into this book.

Talking Tryptophan

A mini-rant from my inner culinary curmudgeon. Think you felt drowsy yesterday because of all the tryptophan in your turkey? Well, you're wrong. Tryptophan only causes heavy eyelids when you eat a huge amount on an empty stomach.