The other night I was at the most recent semi-regular meeting of the semi-official group of sommeliers and editors that I'm part of—our agenda at these meetings is to drink great high-end wine while eating great low-end food—when I made one of those prodigious leaps of insight that happen from time to time to all of us (or most of us, at least). This occurred at Fuleen, in Chinatown, which is the first place I've run into since visiting Nanjing that serves duck tongues, though my colleague Emily Kaiser assures me that you basically can't walk through a restaurant down there without tripping over a bowlful of the things.

But why, you might wonder, would anyone want to eat duck tongues? (In fact, if you're me, the first time you had them you might pause to consider that you never even knew ducks had tongues, much less that people ate them.)

Well, well! The main reason would be because if you deep-fry them with a little batter, they're sort of like really short pick-up sticks with teeny amounts of succulent duck meat on them. Since they tend to come in a large mound—it takes a pretty alarming number of ducks to produce one platter of duck tongues—they're even more like pick-up sticks.

Anyway, the fascinating insight I had is kind of two-fold, part (a) being something along the lines of "hm—you never know when you're going to come across an amazing pairing," and part (b) being that it turns out that the absolute perfect accompaniment for fried duck tongues happens to be a bottle of 1998 Jermann Vintage Tunina, which was lush, satiny, and drinking just beautifully. 

Laura Maniec from B. R. Guest, who was sitting to my left, and Arnaud Devulder of Lever House, who was on my right, will vouch for this. You can ask them. Really. And if you are hungry for a little langue de canard à la chine, scoot on down to 11 Division Street. Tell them Ray sent you. They'll look at you blankly, but still, tell them I sent you.

NBC Today surprised me once again by throwing an unexpected guest into my segment (on wine & chocolate pairing, of course, this being Valentine's week). Susan Lucci. Never seen All My Children, but she's been on it for 38 years straight, apparently, playing Erica Kane—who, according to abc.com is "not merely a woman, but a force of nature." 

Man. I want some major broadcast media site to write something similar about me. "Not merely a wine critic, but a raging tornado of tumultuous vino-opinion." "Not merely a man, but a wine-obsessed alien from the planet Zorbon dressed in a lifelike humansuit and bent on destroying the earth in between glasses of Chateauneuf-du-Pape." Or something like that.

Anyway, Ms. Lucci herself was entirely charming, the segment went well, and you can see it here if you weren't sitting around watching TV at 10:53 this morning (scroll down past the truly alarming picture of Marco Canora's undoubtedly very tasty bolognese sauce).

Luxist had a truly bizarre little item a few days ago about a pair of Berkshire pigs that were fed  barley-soybean meal soaked in 200ml of ice wine a day for forty days, before they were butchered and served up to 82 hungry (and slightly crazy, I'd say) folks at a restaurant called Hillebrand in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Evidently this was supposed to make the pigs tastier—eiswein swine, mm-mm-good!—albeit in some fashion that eludes my rather rudimentary sense of animal biology.

What I love is that if you dig a little deeper, say by tracking down this article in the St. Catharine's Standard, you find out that the idea came from the pig farmer's wife—a veterinarian wine aficionado. Now, maybe I'm odd, but it seems to me that vets aren't really supposed to be in the business of thinking up new ways to make their patients more, um, delicious. But maybe I'm just drawing too close a connection between vets and md's. And, of course, the vet in turn did get the idea from a bunch of Australians, who fed red wine to their cattle to tantalize the Japanese restaurant market.

Me, I'm going right to the pet store, buying a hamster, and uncorking that magnum of '77 Graham's port I've got stashed away in the cellar. Gonna be some mighty fine dining around my house in about two weeks or so... 

Having had more than my fair share of the crispy duck necks from Trestle on Tenth that my colleague Kristin Donnelly on the food side blogged about last Friday, I can say with authority that, in terms of outré finger foods, there's nothing better to pair with Pinot Noir than these little guys. The Superbowl's over—they were being featured as a take-out special—but conveniently Ralf Kuettel (Trestle on Tenth's chef/owner, who also used to manage NY's Chelsea Wine Vault, which may be why Trestle's wine list is so remarkable) always has them on his dinner menu. Hie thee hence, hop a cab or a bus or a plane to TonT, and chow down on some of these intriguingly flexible snacks along with, say, the '05 Jean-Marc Bouley Volnay Vieilles Vignes that's on the list there right now at an appealing $69 a bottle.

It's unlikely that many people reading this will end up at Kasper's Meat Market in Weimar, Texas anytime soon, which is a shame, because the bbq brisket they serve up each weekend is mighty good stuff (their dry sausages are great, too, and you can get those any day of the week). I had it on New Year's Eve, thanks to my father & stepmother, whose farm in Schulenburg is a fifteen-minute drive away. And, since it's my purpose on earth to explore oddball pairings when the opportunity presents itself—admittedly a weird purpose on earth, but as my five-year-old daughter is wont to say, "you get what you get and you don't get upset"—I opened a bottle of Deutz Brut Rosé 2002 ($75) with the meat. One doesn't normally associate rosé Champagne with bbq, but I have to say it worked pretty darn well; the Champagne was forceful enough to hold its own with the meat, its red berry flavors actually working better than Kasper's sauce (I love everything about Kasper's—not least that they raise and butcher their own cows—but their bbq sauce is a weak spot. On the other hand, as John Ruskin noted, the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art, so what the hell.) Anyway, you may not get to Kasper's and you may not have a bottle of '02 Deutz on hand, but if you've got some rosé Champagne and some bbq close by, don't be held back by the seemingly awkward high-low matchup. Pop the dern cork and start eating.

Lunch at Casa Mono today, which is New York's (and chef Andy Nusser's) interpretation or perhaps channeling of an ambitious but classic Barcelona tapas place...or maybe more like Cal Pep filtered through the lens of two or three or five other influences. Regardless, Casa Mono is one of the best destinations in the city for top-notch Spanish-influenced cuisine, not to mention wine.

OK. So, one thing I ordered is a must-have for anyone who either enjoys eating food (many of us) or likes eating food while drinking wine (also many of us). A perfectly cooked sunny-side-up duck egg sitting atop a stack of halved fingerling potatoes, bolstered by three shaved pieces of mojama (basically a Spanish tuna prosciutto), and the whole thing dotted with shaved black truffle. You fork the yolk on the egg, the yolk runs down into the stack of potatoes, you eat the bites of truffle-egg-potato-mojama and basically you think you've died and gone to heaven except that the whole thing is so damn earthy that you clearly haven't left the mortal plane. And is it good with red wine? Yer darn tootin' it's good with red wine.

But my surprising discovery for the day is that what's also mighty fine with red wine is duck fries, which, to the more literal-minded among the audience, would be duck testicles. Now, I didn't really know that ducks had testicles, nor that they were, um, substantial enough to make more than a morsel out of. But life is for learning, yes? Nusser sautées them (they look like little off-white kidneys, basically) and serves them with yellow lentils, pickled watermelon-radish matchsticks and grainy mustard, and I am here to tell you, duck fries are a much better food option than the rational side of one's brain might suggest. Think sweetbreads merged with weisswurst, in a kind of duckishly reproductive way. And they pair incredibly well with a bottle of 2004 Pintia ($65), which is Vega Sicilia's project in Spain's Toro region: plush and powerful, full of black-red fruit that coats your tongue but also bright acidity, with sharp tannins that rather than alarming your palate serve to buffer the richness of the fruit. Standout red...and by far the best duck testicles I've ever eaten. Which is saying, well, something. I'm just not sure exactly what.

I had the interesting experience over the weekend of being the guest wine speaker for an all-chocolate brunch that the immensely talented Andrew Shotts, of Garrison Confections in Providence, put on at the James Beard House. 

Generally speaking, I think chocolate and wine go together miserably. People seem to want to believe that a big intense Cabernet or Zinfandel will go wonderfully with a hunk of high-quality chocolate; in fact, they want to believe it so much that they ignore what's going on in their mouth, which is usually the chocolate obliterating the taste of the wine. Dark chocolate (the chocolate worth eating, I think) is tough: it's intensely flavorful, it's bitter, sweet, fruity, complex, and also fairly alkaline. It can work very nicely with sweet wines—Bual or Malmsey Madeira is the absolute, top-o-the-heap, A+ chocolate-pairing wine, in my experience—but for dry wines the stuff is usually a disaster.

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Continuing in this week's restaurant vein, one of the more enjoyable meals I've had recently was, somewhat to my surprise, at Wild Salmon in Manhattan. I've been trying to figure out why a restaurant entirely dedicated to salmon seems like such an oddball concept, especially when you can't walk down the street in Manhattan right now without tripping over (so to speak) a restaurant entirely dedicated to beef. But, regardless of that—and regardless of the fact that WS is owned by the controversial Jeffrey Chodorow, and regardless of the additional fact that the restaurant occupies a cavernous, formerly-restaurant-killing space over on Third Ave. that was once home to an insurance company—Wild Salmon is mighty darn good. (I know I've just lost cred with my foodie friends, who love to hate anything Mr. Chodorow touches, but whatever.)

For me the restaurant's success is due to the quality of the fish itself (terrific) as well as the quality of the Northwest-centric wine list (also very good). My charming wife, who once spent a college summer canning salmon in Alaska and knows her cohos from her kings, similarly proclaimed the fish terrific. Since she's not one to issue proclamations without reason, unlike me, WS deserves all the more credit. That said, the restaurant isn't exactly hurt by the presence of an impressively talented chef, Charles Ramseyer, who most recently cooked at Ray's Boathouse in Seattle.

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I headed out to the wilds of Astoria the other night to check out Athens Tavern, a new Greek (no—really?) restaurant whose kitchen is being overseen by Yannis Baxevanis. And who, you might ask, is Yannis Baxevanis? Well, in Athens the man gets to polish his Michelin star when he's not foraging his own wild herbs, and for Athens Tavern he's recreating that herb-driven approach to Greek cuisine by foraging at the Union Square Greenmarket instead. 

Greek wines are a fascination of mine at the moment, and Baxevanis' cuisine serves as an ideal showcase for them. His baked fish with aromatic greens (psari fournou me aromatika horta, if you want to impress your friends), stuffed with a tangy green tangle of sorrel, lovage, fennel and dandelion greens, was a great foil for a floral, citrusy yet lushly textured 2004 Vatistas Athiri ($23). (The Athiri grape variety is native to Santorini, though it is also found in other regions. It is, as far as American wine buyers are concerned, as obscure as you can get, but it's so appealing that someone really ought to fix that.)

My favorite dish, though, was a signature of Baxevanis', rabbit that's first quickly deep-fried, then sauteed with onions and bergamot (the fruit, rather than the rind); the tender meat in its rich, lightly tangy sauce is then served with some pretty darn delectable mashed sweet potatoes. It's perfect Autumn food, essentially, and the restaurant paired it a perfect Autumn wine, the 2005 Pavlou Kappa P62 Xinomavro/Syrah ($30), a robust red full of black cherry fruit. It had Xinomavro's classically elegant aromatics (reminiscent of Nebbiolo), yet with the Greek variety's sometimes harsh tannic attack given a velvety wrapping by the plush Syrah fruit. I've decided that this is without question my new go-to wine anytime I'm presented with a nice plate of sautéed bunny.  

Astoria might be a hike for most Manhattanites (and certainly for readers in Dallas, say, or Denver), but if you make it to NYC in the first place, the additional few minutes on the subway getting to Athens Tavern are more than worth it. 

Athens Tavern, 23-01 31st Street, Astoria, NY; 718-267-0800; no website yet. 

Actually, the whole quote is "Born in the woods, raised in adversity, aged with fire and smoke." I'm not sure exactly what that refers to, but it's the motto of Smith's Log Smokehouse in Monroe, ME (actually the smoke part makes sense; it's the adversity bit I'm unclear on). My suggestion, regarding Smith's, is that you get on over to their website and order a "whole log," as they put it, of their intensely smoky, porky Soppressata–it'll run you under twenty bucks, and, from recent personal experience, it goes amazingly well with both Zinfandel and Barolo. While you're at it, a slab of their blackstrap bacon (processed with molasses instead of sugar, and no nitrates) won't hurt your tastebuds either.