Mouthing Off

Not surprisingly, the Food & Wine Classic comprises mostly of food- and wine-related seminars and tastings, but the event's singular spirits seminar was the most lively I attended this weekend. Yesterday afternoon in a jam-packed room at the Sky Hotel, tequila evangelist Steven Olson led a tasting of extra-anejo mezcal (mezcal is an agave-based spirit produced anywhere in Mexico; tequila is mezcal produced in one of five designated Mexican states), which included bottles that range in retail price from $175-$450 and are so scarce that mezcal geeks (a rapidly growing force) pay several times more online. The seminar was so sought-after that even legendary mixologist Dale DeGroff couldn't land a seat.
 
There was a huge mezcal buzz elsewhere in Aspen. Del Maguey, which produces several single-village mezcals, had one of the most popular booths at the Grand Tasting. Montagna sommelier, Richard Betts, who is a unabashed mezcal fiend, couldn't stop talking about the stuff. (Partly because he's launching his own mezcal label later this year). Betts, Olson and several other wine and spirits experts said this weekend that mezcal is the next big trend in spirits. After tasting about 20 fantastic mezcals this weekend, I think they're right.

Coming to you live from beautiful, sunny Aspen, Colorado, where we're celebrating the 25th annual Food & Wine Classic. The air is thin, the sun is very hot (and close) and the wine is way too free-flowing--not necessarily a great combination unless you exercise some self-control. But hey, we're talking about chefs here, so self-control and wine may be a bit of an oxymoron.
   
On the more educational (and less debauched) side of the wine experience here, Danny Meyer (the restaurateur behind top New York City restaurants like Union Square Cafe, Tabla and Gramercy Tavern) led a seminar on rose wines. But not before he opened the session with an Ethel Merman sing-along of "Everything's Coming Up Roses." The six wines he poured ranged in color from a pale peachy blush to a ripe, sexy crimson and varied in price from $15 to $75. I loved the $75 bottle (Billecart-Salmon Brut Rosé Champagne) but was way more into the $15 bottles (L'Aire du Rossignol Côte de Provence and R Ose Cabernet Sauvignon Rose McLaren Vale). I'm always happy to drink expensive wines, as long as they're worth it, but when you find a great bottle at a great price, it's worth the altitude-induced light-headedness (the spit buckets were also a little bit out of reach...).

I had barely made it as far as Denver when I ran into celebrity chef Masaharu Morimoto, who was also en route to the Classic--but unlike me, he was toting 75 pounds of frozen hamachi!
 
Once in Aspen, I hightailed it over to Laura Werlin’s awesome American farmstead cheese and wine pairing seminar, which she led along with Brian Duncan, the wine director of the spectacular Bin 36 Restaurant and Bin wine cafe in Chicago. Eight cheeses, seven wines, a lot to learn—delicious! For a taste, check out Laura’s James Beard Award-winning The All American Cheese and Wine Book.
 
Next I got to hang out with the ever-spirited and energetic, wildly gesticulating and inspiring José Andrés of DC’s Jaleo, Café Atlantico, Minibar, Zaytinya and Oyamel. His gave a paella tutorial with a mission—to get everyone across America making paella. One of the secrets of a fab paella—nora peppers! Who knew! José is very big on getting home cooks to “get the ingredients talking to each other” and he swears that using the smoked Spanish parika called pimenton regularly will change your life.This amazing ambassador of Spanish cooking has a PBS show called Made in Spain that’s coming soon, and he's launching a hotel next spring with Philippe Starck in Los Angeles called SLS.

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Thursday, June 14
 
8 am – Wake up to watch a wine-spitting contest on Plum TV (a local cable station) between superstar sommelier Richard Betts and cheese expert Laura Werlin--two big personalities at the Classic. Laura is the surprise winner in accuracy but Richard beats her in distance.
 
8.30 am – Line up for coffee at local hangout Ink! behind Top Chef judge (and co-worker) Gail Simmons. Thumb through Vanity Fair's awesome Africa issue and think that the cover of next year’s Classic tasting-notes booklet should feature different chefs whispering to each other (instead of Vanity Fair’s Jay-Z and George Clooney, F&W would have Mario Batali and Emeril Lagasse).
 
 
12 pm – Have lunch at Richard Betts’s house. He and his wife, Mona, and their gorgeous daughter Bella drag a huge table out onto their front lawn and we feast on radish and butter toasts, handmade beet-green-stuffed ravioli and Premier Cru white Burgundy. We decide it’s the best restaurant in Aspen. No one spits their wine.

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While most of my coworkers are in Aspen this weekend, I’ll be heading out to Water Taxi Beach in Long Island City, New York, for the first annual NYC Food Film Festival. Perhaps the only thing kookier than the festival itself is the process for ordering snacks: Click on the link to buy your “asparagus roll-ups” in advance and it directs you to TicketWeb, a site more often used for hearing The Cranberries than eating them. I love how TicketWeb uses the same template for ordering the food as it does for events—it says, “Water Taxi Beach Presents: Asparagus Roll-Ups.” (Incidentally, it’s not a bad name for a band.) In the field for "Type of ticket?" Roll-up, of course. A drop-down box lets you choose your number of tickets (er, roll-ups), and there’s no stuffy four-item limit here—you can buy up to 999 pieces if you like. Sadly, like concert tickets, there is a pesky service fee, but it’s such a small price to pay for being able to buy Monday night’s Apostle of Hustle tickets and Saturday’s asparagus all at the same time, right?

I’ll admit it: I choose wine for all of the wrong reasons. I’m lured by the cutesy animal labels and the exotic names of grapes. I buy the $10 value bottle hoping I’ll uncork a fantastic bargain rather than some undrinkable plonk. So when I heard Barefoot Cellars, a Modesto, California-based producer, teamed up with the Surfrider Foundation to help clean up our nation’s beaches I decided I’d support the cause by making it my go-to wine this summer. The wines aren't revelatory or super complex, but for $6.99 they're an affordable, very drinkable everyday wine perfect to bring to a casual summer BBQ.

The goal of the Barefoot Wine Beach Rescue Project is to clean up seven beaches and coastal communities by hosting a series of beach cleanup and restoration events from June through September. The events are free and open to the public and after a day of picking up trash you’re rewarded with wine tastings and live music performances. While I can’t make the kick-off event in Maui, I do plan to head out to New York’s Rockaway Beach on June 16. Check out events in your area.

Chandler Burr, author of Emperor of Scent, has carved out a niche that probably couldn’t have existed at any other journalistic moment in history: He's a perfume critic, with a column in T, The New York Times Style Magazine, in which he rates new scents according to a five-star system. It’s no small beat: Perfumes are now a multi-billion-dollar industry, with hundreds of fragrances debuting each year. Burr’s latest perfume gig? He’s working with Rosewood hotels on a series of Scent Dinners, collaborating with chefs to create a five-course meal of dishes meant to evoke specific perfumes. (Spanish chef Juan Roca has been doing a similar thing for a few years at his restaurant, El Celler de Can Roca, in Girona.) The Scent Dinners start June 18 at Manhattan’s Carlyle hotel, with more to follow at other Rosewood properties.
 
On Tuesday night I went, not unskeptically, to a press preview at the Carlyle. The dinner kicked off with Burr explaining that most of the sensation we experience when we eat is actually smell, not flavor: 95 percent smell, 5 percent taste, to be exact. Before each course, Burr passed around scented strips with smells like green mango or carrot or cedar and asked us to guess what they were, then had us sniff a designer fragrance based on those notes. Then chef Jimmy Sakatos brought out a dish inspired by that perfume. No one guessed what the saffron scent strip was—but we still got to eat Sakatos’s black sea bass with artichoke, fennel and saffron jus, his interpretation of L’Artisan Parfumeur’s Safran Troublant ("troubling saffron"), my new favorite scent. Brian Van Flandern, the new mixologist at the Carlyle's classic Bemelmans Bar, brought out a new vodka-based cocktail he invented called Light Blue, made with lemon and apple juice to echo the components of the Dolce & Gabbana fragrance it’s named after.

Did the dishes and drinks taste like culinary versions of the scents that inspired them? Not quite, but listening to Burr’s fascinating fragrance-industry arcana made up for that. For anyone with a perfume fetish, the best part might be the gift bags: All guests (not just press) get five or six full-size bottles of fragrances to take home.

About perfume criticism as a career: Nice work if you can get it? I’m not so sure. It takes more than a sensitive nose and a love of perfume. As writer Trevor White puts it in his gossipy new book Kitchen Con: Writing on the Restaurant Racket, "Perfume launches are bad for the soul." No doubt they are—but when it comes to gift bags, they beat restaurant launches any day.