Well, as part of my ongoing attempt to achieve world media domination, I did another TV spot yesterday for local channel CW11, recommending a range of organic, green and etc. spirits and wines. It was much lower-key than the Today show gig, and it got me a chance to recommend Appellation Wine & Spirits, here in NYC, a cool store run by the equally cool Scott Pactor that focuses almost entirely on organic & biodynamic wines and spirits. It also gives me a chance to link over to some recent recommendations I made for organic & biodynamic wines that were an adjunct to my August article on wineries' green strategies (recycling, sustainable energy, using gerbils to power crusher-stemmers, that sort of thing), which I'm keen to do since the recommendations are a little lost on our site.

See? World media domination, but in a responsible way. I do my best to be a conscientious fellow.

So what if it's 95˚ in NYC, I say pull out a big ol' Sicilian red. Or, actually, a nicely structured and not-at-all-too-jammy Sicilian red, as well as a tasty Argentine white. To wit:

2007 Trivento Select Torrontes ($12) I'm sort of perplexed by this white, since neither the winery's website nor the importer's seems to have any info on it, but nevertheless it's in the market, so what the hey. Nice classic floral aroma, juicy melon-citrus fruit—it's not as over-the-top (nor quite as delicious) as Susana Balbo's slightly more expensive bottling, but it's a very appealing white for a fair price.

2006 Feudo Principi di Butera Nero d'Avola ($13) I wrote about this a few months ago, but had the opportunity to re-taste it with the winemaker, Franco Giacosa, a couple of days ago, and I'm still convinced it's a terrific value. The aroma is bright red cherry with a bit of tarry floral action, the flavor juicy and spicy but neither overextracted nor overripe. It's aged in big Slavonian oak botti—"no barriques, no French oak," says Mr. Giacosa. Kudos to him on that choice.

So, I don't know where I've been, exactly, but there are something like 2,700,240,000 of those new 2006 nickels in circulation, the ones with Th. Jefferson facing forward and staring at you with spooky space-alien eyes , and I hadn't seen one until today. I swear, it seems like every time I turn around our goverment has done something else to freak me out.

I calmed down by contemplating my meeting the other day with Jean-Michel Deiss of Domaine Marcel Deiss. Jean-Michel falls into the wise old elf school of French winemaking  (as opposed to the taciturn philosopher school or the passionate wild-haired youth school). He's cheerful and twinkly, while at the same time inclined to saying things like, "The concept of terroir is the concept of profundity."

To which I say, certainmente! (He also said, "What's superficial is just Hollywood. The trailer—sex and suicide—not the substance of the film." So, terroir is the essence, not the flash, oui? And now that I have exhausted all the non-profane French I know, we'll call it quits with the pseudo-clever exclamations.) Deiss had a number of intriguing things to say, in fact. He believes that terroir is a concept that was invented as cultivation of vines spread to northern Europe; in Mediterranean, sunny climates, he says, grapes grow easily and the personality of the wine is the personality of the grape. In the north, on the other hand, the personality of the grape is muted and the personality of the place is able to find expression. He also feels that root depth is absolutely critical if a wine is going to express terroir at all, and says that the vine roots in his Marbourg vineyard—which produces a wine that practically spits terroir in your face, like a vinous cobra—go down more than sixty meters. "Every plant has the fantasy that it will grow to the sun," I quoted him as saying the other day; the context for this is his additional statement that if you foil that urge, the plant instead propels its roots deep into the earth.

Believe Jean-Michel if you like (this northern/southern divide intrigues me, I have to say), but whatever you believe, the man is making terrific wines. The 2005 Marcel Deiss Pinot Blanc Bergheim suggests ripe peaches and apricots, with a dense, earthy texture and crisp, almost tannic note on the end.

Stepping up to two of his premier cru wines, you've got a test-case for non-believers in terroir. The 2004 Marcel Deiss Engelgarden Premier Cru has a smoky, savory aroma with a hint of diesel, and dense, complex, powerfully mineral flavors—there's appley fruit, but the primary sensation is of stones and earth, and tremendous length. On the other hand, there's the 2004 Marcel Deiss Grasberg Premier Cru. Much more fruit forward (and sweeter—44 grams per liter of sugar compared to 21), it's round and a mix of stone fruit and tropical notes, lush where the other wine is forbidding. But the two wines are made from the same grape varieties (Riesling and Pinot Gris, primarily, with some Gewurz in Grasberg and some Muscat in Engelgarten), with the same winemaking technique, from vineyards only 300 meters apart. Engelgarten, though, is cooler and planted on gravelly soil, while Grasberg is on limestone below calcarous/iron-based soils. And so they end up radically different wines.

I'm out the door, so the Mambourg Grand Cru will have to wait until tomorrow, as will Jean-Michel's theory of salivation as a test of wine quality. Can't wait, can you? 

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 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.

Now that our annual F&W Classic in Aspen is over, I finally have the time (and focus) to recap some of the highlights of the thing. First up, our sister mag Travel & Leisure's contributing wine editor Bruce Schoenfeld's annual pre-Aspen dinner. As always, a gang of sixteen or so wine folks—makers, writers, drinkers, etc—convened on the-restaurant-that-shall-not-be-named in Boulder on Tuesday night, preparatory to making the trek up to Aspen. And as always, everyone brought along fabulous—or at least would-be fabulous—wines. Here's the lineup of whites (reds tomorrow), with prices for those that are current releases. (And many thanks to my pal and fellow wine blogger Jeremy Parzen for the loan of his terrific photographs!)

2004 Domaine Joseph Cattin Hatschbourg Pinot Gris  Not a wine I'd had before, this was potent, off-dry Alsace Pinot Gris, with an oily, luscious texture, dusty spice and dried peach flavors, and an odd, slightly varnish-tinged aroma that made me wonder if it had a bit of VA floating around. "Intriguing" might sum it up best.

2006 Domaine du Vieux Telegraphe Châteauneuf de Pape Blanc Les Crau ($55) A blend of Clairette (40%), Grenache Blanc (30%), Bourbolenc (15%) and Roussanne (15%) from roughly thirty-five year old vines. The nose here was subdued, though some steely apple (yep, steely apple—only way I've figured out how to describe it) and floral notes crept out. The wine itself was full-bodied, lush, with pear and sweet spice notes. Very pretty stuff, and will be better with time, I'd guess.

2006 Zarate Albariño ($22) Crisp, as Albariño should be, with an appealing briny note, and surprisingly full-bodied. I liked this just fine, but it didn't strike me as quite as complex as Pazo de Señorans, say, or Fillaboa.

1983 Kirchmayr Gumpoldskirchner Cuvée Solist Konig Altwein My first reaction here was roughly, "What the hell is this stuff?" and my second was roughly, "Well, whatever it is, it's fantastic." Partly that's because at my corner of the table it was too dark for me to read the back label clearly. But because I am a skilled reporter, I stood up and walked over to a light. It was a blend of—wait for it—Zierfandler, Rotgipfler, and Neuberger; it was dark gold in color; and it was blow-you-away good, with deep resinous and stony aromas, a rich but focused presence, lingering stone fruit characteristics, and notes of minerals, honey, and nuts. 

2000 Lucien Albrecht Clos Himmelreich Riesling  Clos Himmelreich is a two-hectare monopole of Albrecht. I didn't love this as much as some people did, but I enjoyed its orange-rind scent and its power; it had an odd raspiness to the texture, almost tannic, that didn't thrill me.

1989 Lopez de Heredia Viña Tondonia Blanco Reserva ($45) Oh, those old Lopez de Heredia whites. I love them, even if they occasionally suffer from a certain amount of bottle variation (which, of course, all older wines tend to suffer from—more on this when I get to the 1988 Bordeaux tasting in Aspen). This blend of 90% Viura and 10% Malvasia hit all those notes that make old white Rioja so appealing: wax, resin, almonds, citrus zest (sort of lemon oil, here, actually), and still retained some green apple as well. Plus the winery has a fellow with a really excellent beard on its home page. 

OK. So here's how the first night of the annual Food & Wine Classic in Aspen feels if you're a wine editor:

 5:30 PM. Stop by Betts & Scholl wine party. Gawk at Dennis Scholl's extraordinary collection of modern art. Taste some B&S Hermitage Blanc, Aussie Riesling, Aussie Grenache and Côte Rôtie while munching on hors d'oeuvres made by James Beard award-winning chef Michelle Bernstein, of Michy's in Miami. 6:15 Jump into car, drive over to the big F&W welcoming reception. Exchange about fifteen words apiece with about two hundred people. Taste a rum cocktail that turns out to have lavender in it. Decide once again that lavender is meant for soap, not food. 7:15 Jump into shuttle bus, zoom over to the Wines from Spain shindig, where chef José Andrés is presiding over paella for three hundred people, which entails a paella pan literally big enough to seat four adults comfortably, if they wanted to be turned into paella. Taste Spanish wines, among them the 2006 Portal de Montsant Sant Bru Blanc, a fragrant blend of Garnacha Blanca, Garnacha Gris and Macabeo, and decide that yes, it was a good idea that you chose this particular wine to pour in your "Spain's Profound White Wines" seminar tomorrow morning.

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I think I'm going to reinstate my former "Two Under Twenty" Fridays, and concentrate on good, cheap juice that people can race out and buy for the weekend. I mean, I could write about the '45 Croft Port I got to taste earlier this week (beyond extraordinary), but what are you going to do, hit the Safeway and bring home a couple of bottles to open with burgers on the grill? I suspect not. No, that can wait until Monday, when you're oppressed by the thought of another week hitched to the harness of capitalism, plodding your way towards payday. Then, aye laddie, then the thought of a drop of '45 Croft will work like a spiritual elixir poured into you from a crystal beaker tipped by the light-filled hands of angels. OK, maybe not as effectively as an actual drop of the stuff, but, you know, such is life.

Anyway, enough of this blathering. Here are two under-$20 wines that will make your weekend mighty pleasant:

2007 Clos du Bois Riesling ($12) Winemaker Eric Olsen spent a lot of time up in Washington State making Rieslings at Chateau Ste. Michelle, something that shows in this cool-site white, all lime zest, crisp peach and zingy citrus notes. It is what Olsen calls "harmoniously dry," by which he means it's got 1.6% residual sugar, but you'd never notice it (in fact, if the wine were bone-dry it'd probably be austere as all get-out and hurt your teeth when you drank it).

2007 Martinsancho Verdejo ($20) I had the new vintage of this perennial value wine at a high-end Wines of Spain tasting, where it had to compete on the palate against crazy stuff like the 2005 Contador ($395) and the 2005 Clos Erasmus ($350). You know what? It may not be as extraordinary as those wines were (not just price; they both really were extraordinary), but the Martinsancho is a darn nice little Verdejo for the cash, with vivid grapefruit notes, a little hint of pepperiness, and truly refreshing acidity. Lovely summer wine. You wouldn't want to drink those others now anyway, right?

On my recent trip west, I tasted quite a few good Napa Valley wines, some of them discoveries (or discoveries for me, at least). I'd point people towards Jamie Kutch's silky, flavorful 2006 Kutch Russian River Valley Pinot Noir, for instance, if it weren't darn near impossible to find—still, get on the mailing list and who knows what will happen. Jamie makes his wines at the Deerfield Ranch Winery, and while I was there I also got to taste a pretty terrific Chardonnay from another fellow making wine there, Matt Wilson. The 2006 Sky Saddle Chardonnay ($30) comes from a small biodynamic vineyard in the Oak Knoll District; fourteen months of extended lees contact gives it a silky texture and depth that recalls Mark Aubert's Chardonnays, for instance, albeit at a lot less $$. Not very much of this around, but no one seems to know about it yet, either. Give the man a call.

You wouldn't cause yourself grave damage drinking the 2006 Rockledge Saralee's Vineyard Roussanne ($40), either, unless you liked it so much you inhaled the entire bottle and went zooming off in search of more—a risk, in fact. Pear and wildflower aromas, creamy texture bolstered by a firm mineral backbone, rich but not sweet. Fine example of California Roussanne. 96 whole cases made, so, again, act now. Or yesterday (again, best place to find this is by contacting the winery directly).

And I was happily surprised by the 2005 Wolf Family Estate Cabernet Franc 97% Cabernet Sauvignon 3% ($60), a cumbersome name for a graceful red that actually smells and tastes like Cabernet Franc, something a lot of California Cab Francs seem disinclined to do. From vines planted in the late 1970s—a whopping three-quarters of an acre of them—it's got pretty floral/violet aromas mingling with mocha and black cherry, and similar flavors ending on dusty, firm tannins. Where to get it? Yep, once again: call the winery. (Though if you're in CA, some retailers turn up on wine-searcher.com: check it here.)

Sherry doesn't get enough love. It's one of the great wines of the world, but no one understands it, and basically, in this increasingly wine-obsessed country of ours, Sherry is sitting around moping by the phone while everyone else is going to the prom. (Partly this is because its sleazy little sister, the American stuff sold in jugs and labeled as cream sherry, will date anyone, especially winos and doddering old cat-ladies). In any case, I'm recommending a terrific dry sherry, the El Maestro Sierra Fino ($15/375ml), in my July column (not up for another week or so). Everyone should go out and buy it right now.

If you want more—and less frivolous—inside info on some great Sherries, check out my friend (and former colleague) Peter Liem's latest posts on his blog. Usually Peter is roaming around Champagne, but he just spent a week in Jerez tasting more than 300 sherries at an odd event called Vinobile, a celebration of sweet wines that, thank God, they moved to May from July—when I was there a few years ago, I found myself trying to taste vintage port in a tent under a 105˚ sun. Anyway, Peter's got a great palate and his picks are worth noting.