You know the rest of that line, right? Well, it's with some small amount of sadness that I am saying that about this blog: It must come to an end. I've had a terrific time writing it, but we've decided that in the end it's a bit strange, for a magazine that's all about bringing together food and wine, to have separate blogs on those topics.

So, from here on out, any wine blogging that I (and Megan Krigbaum, Kristin Donnelly, and various other stalwart folks) do will instead appear in F&W's primary blog, Mouthing Off. No less wine coverage, just a different venue. See you there.

Ray Isle

© Aman Resorts
Sommelier Kavita Faiella.

When Kavita Faiella told me she’d passed up an offer to become the sommelier at England’s legendary Fat Duck so that she could move to India and oversee the wine program at the new Aman Resort New Delhi hotel, I thought she was crazy. (The talented young Aussie had also been interviewing with the French Laundry.) Why would a sommelier who had worked in Sydney with chefs like Neil Perry decide to move to a hotel in a very non-wine drinking country, where sommeliers are an anomaly? According to Kavita, the country’s only female restaurant sommelier, India is a sommelier's dream. Here, her top three reasons:

1.    While working at restaurants like Rockpool in Sydney, Kavita would place bets with servers on who could sell something other than a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. "In India, people don’t come in and flip to a certain page of the wine list," she says. "They don’t have a wine style, so it’s just as easy to sell an Albariño as it is a Sauvignon Blanc."
2.   "There is absolutely no pretention around wine in India. People don’t feel embarrassed or intimidated by not having a wine background. "
3.    Kavita likes the challenge of curating a wine list that appeals to both wine geeks and wine novices. "At the hotel, the wine list has to appeal to the group of people who are very globally savvy and have traveled a lot, as well as to people who are interested in wine but may not have been exposed to it. That means I need to create a list full of secrets and quirky information that wine people will know and get, but also have explanations and stories that will entice experimenting among those who don’t have a wine-drinking background."

For such a small city, my hometown of DC is packed with a lot of good wine experts, from Andy Meyers at CityZen to Inox' John Wabeck and Proof's Sebastian Zutant. This is old news to regular readers of DonRockwell.com, DC's pioneering chatboard on food and wine. But I owe Don a debt of thanks. For our January Judges Issue, he helped me recruit three of DC's fastest-rising talents to judge supermarket brands of foods sommeliers often cite when describing wine: grapefruit juice, raspberry jam and red wine vinegar. Kathryn Morgan (Citronelle), Jill Zimorski (Café Atlantico and Minibar) and Kat Bangs (Komi) were amazing, blind-tasting the oak aging in Colavita's tasty red wine vinegar and discerning the corn syrup in Smuckers. The results surprised us all; check them out here.

Because I'd been away for a while, spending a placid few days kayaking on the waters of Maine's Somes Sound, it seemed to me (for some lunatic reason) like the proper way to effect a New York re-entry would be by attending a cocktail vs. wine pairing smackdown at Nios, a new midtown wine bar. This is a regular event there, in which home-team sommelier Emily Wines takes on challengers in a battle of who-pairs-best, using chef Patricia Williams's tasty food.

Her opponent this time was bartender extraordinaire Jim Meehan, the man behind the drinks at New York's excellent PDT (and also the co-editor of Food & Wine Cocktails 2009, our pretty dern nifty cocktail book).

First up, to go with Williams's risotto of corn with chanterelles, confit pigeon and castelmagno cheese, Meehan poured his "Imperial Silver Corn Fizz." Brave is the fellow who'll make a stiff drink using corn water, I say (Meehan enlisted chef/pal Wylie Dufresne for corn-water-making advice). But, surprisingly, this concoction of Bourbon, corn water, honey syrup, egg white and Champagne worked incredibly well with the risotto. Wines fought back with a somewhat over-oaky 2007 Gary Farrell Russian River Valley Chardonnay, to no avail. Meehan, wearing a sparkly purple luchador mask with a kind of small-savage-animal pelt attached to the top, took the round.

Next course was a beautifully cooked rack of American lamb with grilled figs and fingerling potatoes wrapped in jamón serrano. (I've decided, based on this dish, that I'm just going to wrap everything I eat in jamón serrano from now on. There's just no reason not to.) This time Wines came out strong, pouring a smoky, plummy 2006 Gai'a Estates Agiorgitiko from Greece. It was a terrific match for the lamb, and Meehan's "Señor Smackdown"—blanco tequila with lime juice, Dry Sack sherry, Benedictine and a bar spoon of fig jam—took it on the chin. The drink was scrappy, but tequila and lamb are just a rough combo. Could be Meehan was affected by the heat under that vinyl mask.

Finally, dessert: rose petal panna cotta with pomegranate foam. Wines appeared holding glasses holding a splash of rosewater and some floating pomegranate seeds, then topped them with light, berry-sweet NV Patrick Bottex Cerdon de Bugey "La Cuille," an off-dry sparkling wine from France's Savoie region. Meehan countered with his "Raspberries Reaching:" an ounce and a half of Trimbach Framboise eau-de-vie, an ounce of 5 Puttonyos Tokaji Aszú, and a half-ounce of Pama pomegranate liqueur, plus three drops of rose flower water, stirred and strained into a chilled coupe, and garnished with a peach-colored rose petal. This drink blew me away, and I thought the title was destined for Meehan. But I was in the minority; when the votes were counted, Wines was the champion of the evening.

Nios will be holding these smackdowns once a month for the rest of the year, so check it out. Viva la lucha de vino! 

I've been to Fonda del Sol a few times now—it's just down the street from our office, conveniently—and it seems to be on an ever-inclining curve towards extreme tastiness. That's not a surprise to me. When I first met the restaurant's chef, Josh DeChellis, at the culinary festival Madrid Fusión a few years back, he was wandering around gnawing on a black truffle the way one might an apple (the thing was about the size of an apple, too). To my mind, any chef who eats truffles as if they were apples is a man after my own heart. At FdS, DeChellis is channeling his inner Spaniard, perhaps aided by the fact that he was born in Colombia, with impressive success.

The other night I particularly liked a silky scallop tiradito—disks of sweet scallop with shards of hot chilies, dabs of briny sea urchin, and grace notes of cilantro—which wine director Nicholas Nahigian paired with a sympathetically citrus-minerally 2007 Do Ferreiro Albariño (one of the better Albariños around, in fact). Later on, I also enjoyed an incredibly tender Colorado lamb chop aromatized (as it were) over toasted hay and served with tangy sheep's milk yogurt and a lovage puree. In an earlier incarnation of this dish, the lamb was cooked in an earthenware vessel over the hay, the vessel sealed with a bread crust—in that case, the hay, lamb and yogurt were all from the same farm. With the newer version, a 2004 Fratelli Revello Vigna Conca Barolo, surprisingly generous given its intense concentration, and somehow elegant despite that, tasted great.

The pairing that may have worked the best, though, and that was certainly the most surprising, came when Nahigian brought out glasses of Victory Brewing Company's Prima Pils (which, oddly enough, I just used for my 4th of July segment on summer beers for the Early Show) to pair with DeChellis's Alaskan rock fish a la plancha with salsa moluscada de verano, a Catalan (I think) sauce involving surf clams, mussel jus, squid, octopus, tomato water, clam jus, basil and cherry tomatoes (whew). The fish was expertly cooked, the sauce something between a light seafood stew, a sauce, and a sublime essence of ocean, and the crisp, gently bitter Pilsner was perfect with it—and also extremely refreshing, sandwiched as it was, course-wise, between a fairly substantial white Rioja—a 2003 Marqués de Murrieta Capellania—and the even more substantial Revello Barolo.

And there was dessert. But by then, do you really expect I was taking notes?  

Go figure-it seems to be a Savagnin moment. Not more than a few days after I blogged about my experiences with this oddball Jura grape variety, following the terrific meal I had at the new midtown Italian offshoot of Hearth, Insieme, here comes Moira Hodgson at the NY Observer, reviewing Insieme and writing about the same darn Puffeney Savagnin that Paul Grieco recommended to me. Paul! Are you starting a movement? What's going on here?

Anyway, as a 19th century Englishman might say if he were to write the next phrase, the stuff's deucedly difficult to find, but if your interest has outpaced your inertia, try going to wine-searcher.com and searching for Savagnin. And if the Puffeney doesn't turn up, consider the Rijckaert-also a mighty fine wine.

One thing about Paul Grieco, co-owner of Hearth, in the East Village, and the newly opened midtown spot Insieme, is that he can suggest the most peculiar wine-food combinations, make them seem entirely reasonable, and then—voila!—it turns out they are entirely reasonable. I don't know if this is good wine service or something more on the order of a kind of vinous prestidigitation, but either way it's impressive.

The other night I went to Insieme and said to Paul something along the lines of, "We're going to have the linguine con vongole [stupendously good linguine with clams-Marco Canora must have signed a deal with the devil on this one], the culingiones con fave [potato ravioli w/ fava beans, pecorino, fennel and mint; a true essence of springtime dish, and probably more effective than Prozac at lifting lingering wintertime depression], the cacciucco [a tomato-based fish and shellfish stew w/ spicy peperoncini, ideal cuisine after a ten hour shift on a fishing boat off the Atlantic coast, but tasty in midtown Manhattan, too] and the lamb [saddle, breast, chop & sausage, all surrounded by thumb-sized morels-and anything served with an abundance of thumb-sized morels is OK by me]." After which I took a breath, because it was a very long sentence indeed. 

Paul said, "Great."

I added, "Oh, and we want to drink something white. That would go with all of those things."

Paul said, "You're having lamb and you want to drink white?"

I explained that Cecily, my wife, who in all other respects embodies her family's general attitude that to be game for anything is to have one of the highest character traits found in humans, is laid low by red wine. It gives her migraines. She handles this bleak fate with grace, but is nevertheless stuck with a largely red wine-less life.

Paul said, "What about the 2002 Savagnin from Jacques Puffeney?"

Which gets me to the point of this ramble. I'm trying to think of a cognate outside the wine world for the basic outré-ness of this suggestion. It's sort of like a car salesman saying to you, "Well, of course I could sell you this Toyota Camry, but I really think you'd prefer a 1953 3-wheeled BMW Isetta. Like this one." The thing is, Puffeney's Savagnin really is an odd wine—oxidative in style (typical for Savagnin from the Arbois), with a lightly bleachy, nutty scent recalling fino sherry as much as it does any other white wine, incredibly focused stone-fruit flavors and fierce citrusy acidity, and a weird facility for seeming both quite old and quite young simultaneously. Pour it for your friends without warning them first, and they'll holler at you, "What's with this crazy juice, you freakin' madman?" Trust me. They will.

And yet, in this instance the Puffeney was, as Paul had suggested it would be, bizarrely successful with the equally odd range of dishes in our dinner: dense enough for the lamb, zesty enough for the cacciucco, light enough for the culingiones, and—oh man—just plain perfect with both the plump, sweet, briny clams and the subtle bite of garlic and hot red pepper in that transcendent linguine con vongole.

Someday Jacques Puffeney will be living in a palace and riding in a golden chariot while the masses sing wild praise of his remarkable wines. However, that may be a while. Until then, I'd suggest heading over to Insieme and ordering a bottle off the list, myself.

The other night I went to Anthos, the new haut-chic-Greek midtown spot from chef Michael Psilakis and restaurateur Donatella Arpaia. As about fifty other bloggers and restaurant reviewers have noted, high-end Greek food seems to be having its flavor-of-the-month moment—witness the arrival of Barbounia, Parea, etc. (I'm still waiting for the cuisine of ancient Babylon to make a comeback—bring on the dried fish and date cakes!—but that's just me.) What's interesting about this Greco-proliferation, though, is that it's one of the few restaurant trends I've found where the wine got there first.

Greek wines have been impressing sommeliers for several years now, and for good reason. If you're curious as to why, Anthos wouldn't be a bad place to start, as it has one of the most comprehensive lists of Greek wines I've run into—I can't think of many other restaurants that would offer seven different vintages of Tsantali's Cabernet-Limnio blend, for instance.

The other thing Anthos has in terms of wine is a hell of a sommelier, Mark du Mez. This is my idea of great wine service: at one point in the evening I asked Mark about a Chassagne-Montrachet premier cru he had on the list. (The list, by the way, is extensive and has a good Burgundy selection, too; our table started with Greece and moved on to France, sort of like the Romans circa 130 B.C.) Regarding my choice Mark said something along the lines of, "Well, it's definitely good. But with what you've ordered, I really think you'd enjoy this more." This was a 2002 E. Giboulot Côte de Beaune La Combe d'Eve—which, outside of the fact that it turned out to be a beautiful, minerally, silky-textured white Burgundy that went perfectly with our meal, cost thirty dollars less on the list than the wine I'd asked about.

Since then I've tried to think of the number of times I've had a sommelier suggest a wine priced that much less than the one I planned to order. The number I've come up with so far is zero. That's not really a surprise; in some sense, Mark's suggestion cost the restaurant's bottom line $30. But what he also did, far more lucrative in the long run (and just plain better service, too), was instantly create a return customer.

Wine service aside, the other thing that will bring me back to Anthos is Psilakis's cooking. Highlights of the meal included the supremely good taramasalata (very garlicky, very un-fishy, completely addictive), a pillowy sheep's milk ricotta dumpling topped with a single, succulent pan-seared Botan Ebi shrimp ("You may suck the head, if you like," stated our waiter—good advice, in fact, if somewhat unfortunately phrased), and a crisp-skinned piece of perfectly seared red mullet atop a luscious, bacony bed of lentils.   

Anthos has no website yet, but reservations can be had by calling 212-582-6900.

Had dinner last night at Telepan with Bill Hunter, the owner (along with Billington Imports, in some capacity) and winemaker at Chasseur. Bill's a bluff, friendly, no-nonsense sort of guy who happens to make some pretty extraordinary Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs. The standout last night for me was his 2004 Chasseur Durrell Vineyard Chardonnay ($48). Unfined and unfiltered, the wine is slightly hazy (not a problem) and its texture is a physical incarnation of that veil-like appearance; it's the kind of white that wins you over on texture alone, before you realize how good it tastes (think white peach and other stone fruits, brioche, and a faint, appealing note of butterscotch). It achieves that supple richness partly because Bill believes in leaving the wine on its lees well into the new year, creating the conditions for the kind of autolyzed yeast notes most people are familiar with from Champagne. He poured it next to a bottle of John Kongsgaard's 2004 Napa Chardonnay that he ordered off the list at the restaurant, an act that took a substantial amount of winemaker-cojones, given the level of acclaim Kongsgaard has received for his (admittedly terrific) Chardonnays. It was close to a dead heat in terms of quality, but in the end I gave the edge to the Chasseur, which surprised me.

Also, just a side note about Telepan. Bill Telepan is a wonderful chef, and he's cooking at the top of his game right now; everything I had-down to the slightly absurd but in-your-face delicious foie gras "donuts" that appeared as an amuse bouche-was superb. Of particular note were some nearly ethereal ricotta gnocchi, served with a small forest's worth of wild mushrooms, coin-sized discs of potato and toasted pine nuts, with small shavings of ricotta salata scattered on top; the definition of the flavors here was remarkable, with no ingredient vanishing under the weight of any other. It's hard to imagine a dish more suited to the style of Chardonnay we were drinking (though a kind of deconstructed lamb cassoulet went very well with the Pinot we switched to afterward, too). Aaron von Rock's wine list is adventurous and extensive, too, full of things I wished I could have ordered, But, you know, there's only so much one can experience in a single night.