I was on Today this morning, mixing up some Labor Day cocktails with Hoda Kotbe and Kathie Lee Gifford. It was, as is usual for the fourth hour of the show, a rather, um, freewheeling segment. We didn't exactly make it through both drinks, though I did get kissed on the lips by KLG, much to my surprise (this was cut from the video on the Today site, but a number of friends emailed right after it happened with comments like "OMG!", so evidently it did air). ANYWAY.

The cocktails we actually demo'd were a very pretty one from our 2008 Food & Wine Cocktails book (buy it here) called the Belle de Jour, which was invented at Eastern Standard in Boston. It's a Champagne cocktail—a touch of Benedictine (I subbed B&B at home last night practicing it, to no ill effect), Cognac, grenadine and lemon juice, then top with Champagne. Then we did a white wine and sparkling cider sangria from Steven Raichlen, which is great for parties; it's floating around in our summer drink slideshow. Both are tasty, and if you increase the proportions on the Belle de Jour, you can actually whip out quite a few of them quickly, a key requirement for Labor Day cookouts and whatnot.

Sometimes it's easy to lose sight of how radically wine lists in restaurants have changed over the past, oh, fifteen years or so. I've been on a sort of Italian-resto-spree lately, and I'm coming out of it thinking that I'm either dreaming or I'm living in a golden age of Italian wine and food here in NYC.

Example One: Scarpetta. I've been a fan of Scott Conant's cooking since the first bite I had of his luscious polenta with wild mushroom fricassee at L'Impero, a dish which, I'm thrilled to find, he's replicated on the menu at his new restaurant, Scarpetta. I've been here a few times in the past month or so, and it's quickly becoming one of my favorite spots in the city, partly because it seems like Conant has finally landed in a place where the ambience of the room is of a piece with the character of the food. I loved L'Impero, but it was a tad formal for my taste; Alto was like watching Cezanne try to paint like Tintoretto or something; Scarpetta nails it. And besides the presence of things like Conant's signature capretto (roasted baby goat, and mighty darn good it is), there's also the smart, adventurous, and fairly priced wine list. We drank a terrific white, the 2006 Vadiaperti Fiano di Avellino, about which I know nothing but that it's packed with flavor and focused all at once. Next, a bottle of the 2006 Hofstätter Lagrein. Its bright acidity played foil to its dark, chewy fruit, and both went ideally well with Conant's rich duck-and-foie gras ravioli, not to mention his fall-apart-tender short ribs.

Example Two: Bar Milano. First off, if you're lucky, then partner Tony Abou-Ganim is going to be behind the bar mixing drinks here, as he was the night I stopped in. I asked him to make me something interesting with rye. He replied with a Rattlesnake, which, according to the 1947 edition of Trader Vic's Bartender's Guide is one ounce of rye, two dashes of Pernod, a teaspoon of lemon juice, a half-teaspoon of powdered sugar, and half an egg white, shaken with cracked ice and (in my case) strained onto rocks. Sublime on a steamy evening, and a good lead-in to poking around Bar Milano's all-Northern-Italian wine list. I bypassed the exceptionally weird 2005 Movia Lunar—I love Ales Kristancic's wines, but this stuff is odd to a fault—and instead settled on a bottle of the 2006 Grosjean Freres Cornalin from the Valle D'Aosta. This is the kind of wine that never, ever, in a million years would have appeared on a wine list back in, say, 1985 or even 1995. Utterly obscure, it was also mighty darn delicious—bright red fruit, potent but not weighty, distinctive and very fresh. Good with duck, you might think. I did, and it was. Plus the duck itself was superb, the skin crisp to a just-so toothsomeness, the meat tender and deeply flavorful (Pekin from D'Artagnan—good to know), the rhubarb compote that came with it a nice tangy-sweet touch as were the earthy, savory lentils.

Example Three: Dell' Anima. One thing I like about this place is that practically every bottle that wine director Joe Campanale offers probably wouldn't have appeared on a wine list back in 1995 (with maybe the exception of some of the Tuscan & Piedmontese wines). The list is like a playground for Italian wine fanatics. In the mood for a little Fumin? A glass of Cesanese del Piglio? Or maybe some Petite Arvine—I was, for the latter, since I was still on my Valle d'Aosta kick. The 2006 Grosjean Freres Petite Arvine (those guys again!) was unctuous and rich; lots of texture, lots of minerality, and very good with avocado & preserved lemon bruschetta, a snack which wasn't exactly Italian but somehow very much was, all at the same time. Next up was a 2007 Romano Clelia Fiano d'Avelino "Colli di Lapio", about the best Fiano I've run across (including the Vadiaperti, much as I liked it). Melony, aromatic, and long, it was substantial enough to go with chef Gabe Thompson's intensely woodsy Garganelli with mushroom ragu (a died-and-gone-to-heaven dish for mushroom fanatics) yet graceful enough to also go with something as evocative of springtime as Thompson's farfalline with asparagus, ricotta salata and hen-of-the-woods mushrooms.

And I forgot to mention: we started off at Dell'Anima with a bottle of white Lini Lambrusco, which is made from red Lambrusco Salamino grapes, just to make things even a tad more complicated. It was like drinking lightly sweet flowers.

Man, this Italian wine-list thing. Esoterica everywhere. But it sure is fun.

The weird wine highlight of this morning has to be this just-released video of Belgian customs officials using some sort of giant metal mechanical claw to destroy 3,200 bottles of André sparkling wine—or, as wine-giant Gallo prefers to label it, André California Champagne (you can download the wmv file here). Man, those pesky E.U. laws protecting names of origin (e.g., anything labeled Champagne has to come from Champagne in France; laws of this sort have been the center of some very thorny trade disputes between the U.S. and the E.U., though a sort of agreement was reached in 2005)! Break one, and you get smashed to bits by a 1,000 pound robotic claw! The video was ever so generously provided to the media by the Office of Champagne, USA, which is the lobbying arm of the Comité Interprofessional du Vin de Champagne, which would be the trade organization of France's Champagne region. Hm. No big surprise there.

Personally, I'm in favor of such laws; Napa Valley Cabernet should in fact come from Napa Valley, not, say, China; anything labeled Champagne ought to come from, well, Champagne. Otherwise, call it sparkling wine. On the other hand, the Champenoise are sort of stuck—just as Kleenex and Xerox have found, once the culture at large accepts your brand name (which the word Champagne might as well be) as the generic term for something, it's very hard to reverse the tide. Even if they get André and Korbel to give up using the word Champagne on their labels, people are still going to call any wine with bubbles Champagne. 

Anyway. What I'd really like to see would be the Belgians destroying 3,200 bottles of André because the stuff is just plain awful. But I suspect that will be a long time coming. 

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.

A week or so ago I went to one of the odder lunches I've been to in a while, for the launch of the 1999 Dom Perignon. It was up in a strange suite in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, furnished in a way that could best be described as "site of kinky sex crime on Law & Order"—lots of black lacquer, and expensive, stylish but ultimately somewhat icily impersonal furniture. In any case, the lunch was hosted by Richard Geoffroy, the chef de cave of DP, who's given to a kind of alternately diffident and intense hyper-intellectual wine discourse that only the French, and the northern French at that, seem to be able to get away with. ("Minerality in wine can be as much the sea as the earth. Iodine, oyster shell...on the other side it's the earth, the smoke, the peat, all of those characteristics," said with fervor, followed by a wave of the hand and, "Voilà. It is what it is.")

But among the particular pairings of this extremely particular meal—each designed to flatter one aspect of the wine—I was particularly struck by how bizarrely well the DP went with nothing more than thin slices of culatello. Champagne and cured ham isn't most people's idea of the perfect match, but in this case the culatello brought out the spice and earthiness of the DP, while the wine accented the deep porkiness (yes, that is a word—back off, you pedants) of the culatello. Then, as all those darker tastes vanished, you were left with the lingering grapefruit and tangerine notes of the Champagne. 

This, of course, is me overthinking things damn near as much as I've just claimed winemakers from the north of France are apt to do (no one can hold a candle to Jacques Lardier at Jadot for this sort of thing), but it's worthwhile in that you can at least quasi-replicate it at home. Get a bottle of Champagne—the 1999 Dom P. is a fine choice, if you're feeling flush—get some good prosciutto, and see how they go together. If this tasting was any indication, the results should be stellar.

However, don't try and pair Champagne with a yuzu sorbet sprinkled with espelette chili powder. In theory that was supposed to bring out the pineapple in the wine; instead it pretty much stomped it dead. Of course, where on earth you could find yuzu sorbet with espelette chili powder other than a weird room high up in the Mandarin Oriental hotel, I have no idea....