Mouthing Off

When last we saw Belinda Chang, she was accepting a James Beard Award for Outstanding Wine Service at The Modern in NYC.  When last we left the Monkey Bar, also in NYC, it was celebrity-studded, with those amazing Ed Sorel murals, but no significant food or wine to speak of.

Now let's celebrate the fact that Chang is back, as the new GM and wine director at—you guessed it—the Monkey Bar! Chang has big plans for the place. "We're going to turn things around, the wine list, everything, is going to be super fun," she says. "The Monkey Bar is a place where
you feel like you're going out, like you're special; the list will feel like that, too." So she'll introduce magnums of as many wines as she can think of, including special ones, made just for the Monkey Bar, served by the glass. She'll also have wines picked out for some famous names who might show up. "For Lady Gaga, I'll serve her some crazy Italian spumante. Maybe an older Erbaluce, which is nutty and voluptuous and decadent. I think she'd love it," says Chang.

Next, look for a notable chef to take over the kitchen, sometime soon.

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

 

The hotel lobby is probably not the most memorable experience of most trips, but the Le Méridien hotel chain is changing that with its new LM100 program,  which taps creative minds to rethink the lobby experience through food, wine and art. Each hotel will feature a bar called Latitudes—by day, a coffee bar staffed by protégés of 2002 World Barista Championship winner Fritz Storm, and by night, a wine bar with tasting classes curated by sommelier and author Linda Grabe. For the morning menu, NYC chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten has developed signature breakfast dishes like espresso-steamed eggs to serve with “eye opener” juice shots like Cherry Lemon Black Pepper. Creativity reigns, right down to the details: International artists such as Sam Samore and Hisham Bharoocha have created pocket-size artworks for each key card, making them unique, collectible art pieces. Le Méridien Barcelona is the first hotel in the chain that features the new lobby program, which will begin rolling out to hotels worldwide this fall.

 

It’s frigid here in New York City, and with the long holiday weekend ahead, I plan on holing up and cooking my favorite comfort foods, drinking some great wines and watching a lot of college football. I recently heard about a new wine bar in Texas that combines all three things. Max’s Wine Dive opened in May in downtown Austin with the philosophy of "Fried chicken and champagne? Why the hell not?!"

With its local team, the University of Texas Longhorns, playing for the national championship on January 7, the bar should be packed with fans eating not just fried chicken with Champagne but kobe burgers with Cabernet and oyster nachos with premier cru Burgundy.

Until I find my own NYC version of Max’s, I’ll be replicating their comfort-food-and-wine pairings with ideas from Food & Wine.

Midtown Manhattan this time of year is one of the more frenetic places one can find oneself, but I've found an excellent escape hatch. Go to the I. M. Pei-designed Four Seasons Hotel on 57th Street, go through the revolving doors, up the stairs, to the right, and you'll find yourself at the hotel's new Garden Wine Bar. It's an oddly serene space—you know you're in a hotel, but because the wine bar is elevated above the main entrance, the main thing you perceive are the enormously high ceilings of the marble-pillared lobby and the leafy branches of the trees that decorate the bar; what you don't perceive is the bustle of people entering and leaving the hotel.

That would be nice but not worth a mention except that the Garden also has a terrific wine list, with almost all of the 200 selections available by the glass or by the bottle. A few examples: at the low end, a crisp 2007 Pra Soave Classico ($12 glass/$48 bottle); in the high-middle range, Slovenian cult producer Movia's fantastic 2003 Veliko Bianco ($25 glass/$97 bottle); and at the truly high end, a gorgeous 2006 J. M. Boillot Puligny Montrachet 1er Cru Champ Canet ($40 glass/$150 bottle). Also, unfinished by-the-glass bottles are passed along to other venues in the hotel, which means that once something is opened, it's effectively guaranteed to be poured through within a day or so, an important consideration when you're talking about $40-a-glass wines. 

Admittedly, those prices aren't bargain basement, but this is the Four Seasons, hardly known for a bargain basement sensibility. Throw in impressive cheese and charcuterie offerings—including some terrific, spicy Nduja from Boccalone in San Francisco—as well as a good small plates menu, and you've got an ideal place to take a vinous break before heading out into the maelstrom of last-minute shopping again.

The Garden Wine Bar
Four Seasons Hotel
57 West 57th Street
New York, NY
212-758-5700

 

The coolest new place to take in great design, food and wine is MADCrush . This new pop-up bar appears for the first time tonight at NYC's great new Museum of Arts and Design. Restaurant design genius Stephanie Goto created the space largely from recycled wine boxes and crates and it will appear on the museum’s seventh floor every Thursday from 5 to 10:30 p.m., until the end of August. The menu: wines by the taste, glass and bottle from Crush Wine & Spirits. Del Posto’s Mark Ladner is cooking for opening night. Future guest chefs will include George Mendes of Aldea and Scott Conant of Scarpetta.

Friday evening found me hanging out at the Lower East Side wine bar Ten Bells with a couple of friends who were in from Paris and with the wines of Chablis producers, Alice and Olivier de Moor. This pair has been making wine together in Chablis since 1994, striving to makes wine in the most hands-off way possible by using organic grapes, pneumatic presses to squeeze the grapes, gravity to move juice from one phase of winemaking to the next and without the addition of sulfur. Strangely enough, we didn't try any of their Chablis, but ordered three of their other wines, which led to an impromptu investigation into what else they can do. Each was dramatically different from the next, but all had clean, driven acidity and graceful balance, as might be expected from people who are experts at Chablis. Here was the line up:

2006 Alice & Olivier de Moor Bourgogne Aligoté ($23; find this wine)
In Burgundy, the grape variety Aligoté is often overshadowed by Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, but this wine, with its ripe green-apple zip and stony minerality, shows that it has some potential of its own.

2006 Alice & Olivier de Moor Bourgogne Chitry ($25; find this wine)
The de Moor's Bourgogne Chitry comes from a region just beyond the Chablis appellation. This chardonnay is long and streamlined with delicate sweet citrus fruit and peppery baking-spice notes.

2007 Alice & Olivier de Moor Sauvignon de Saint-Bris ($22; find this wine)
This region to the southwest of Chablis produces old-vine sauvignon blanc that tends to be much fuller and more lush than in other regions like the Loire. This vintage from the de Moors keeps giving and giving bright candied lemon flavors with intriguing salinity.

These all were nice accompaniments to the garlicky baby eel salad, thick brandade, salty boquerones, and grilled octopus and potato salad that we had with them, making for not only a study in de Moor wines, but in all things seafood, as well.

When I was in Los Angeles recently, I had the good fortune to stumble upon what should be my favorite new winebar (it was sort of directed stumbling, in truth; Minneapolis Star-Tribune food critic Rick Nelson's uncle is the chef, and he sent me toward it). In fact, the only thing keeping it from being my favorite place for a quick glass of vino is that it's about 2,400 miles from my apartment. But that aside, Lou is a nifty little place located in an unlikely corner of a strip shopping center on Vine just north of Melrose, adjacent to a laundromat and about seventy feet from a Thai massage joint. It's relatively unmarked—even though there's a sign saying Lou, I kept thinking I wasn't in the right place—but once you step inside you're in an appealingly low-lit nook full of appealingly low-key-yet-hip Angelenos, most of them holding glasses of wine and noshing on cheese, charcuterie and larger dishes (Chorizo with black lentils, garlic confit and fried egg, for instance) off the menu, under a chalk drawing on the wall of a pig holding a glass of wine.

Lou focuses on small-production, organic/biodynamic/post-organic (whatever post-organic means) wines, thirty of which are available by the glass at any given time, and is "unabashedly Eurocentric," as the website says. If you're into that sort of thing, you'll recognize or at least be intrigued by offerings like the 2006 Guy Breton Morgon for $14 a glass, 2007 Clos Roche Blanche Sauvignon Blanc for $8 a glass, or Huber & Bleger Crémant d'Alsace Rosé NV for $10 a glass...though it may well be that those choices have changed since I was there. Regardless, I still think they're providing plates of "pig candy," which is essentially candied artisanal bacon, for five bucks. Candied pork? Uh-huh. I'm in.

Not long ago I was eating dinner at a tiny winebar called Cantina Do Spade, in Venice, when a German woman at the table next to me made a request for parmesan on her risotto nero. "I can give it to you. But you will ruin your meal," the woman who was serving her said. Her tone suggested that ruining the chef's risotto would be a very unwise thing to do. (Risotto nero, of course, is black thanks to cuttlefish ink, and as any good Venetian will tell you—evidently quite directly—fish and cheese don't go together. At least when in Italy.)

I feel like a Venetian restaurant proprietor when it comes to Sauvignon Blanc and oak. Why would you want to ruin such a spritely grape by slathering it with a bunch of oak? But, oddly enough, again while I was in Venice, at the Ristorante Lineadombra (which I heartily recommend), the proprietor effectively insisted we drink a magnum—there were six of us, so it wasn't that extreme—of the 2003 Inama Vulcaia Fumé Sauvignon ($30). And I thought it was just terrific.

This is what fixed ideas are for, I suppose: to be zapped out of existence. Anyway, the Vulcaia Fumé still had the citrus notes characteristic of Sauvignon Blanc, but it also had a savory, leesy depth that was surprisingly appealing, and a silky textural richness that was very un-Sauvignon. Of course, it was also several years old, but even so I had to rethink my absolutes. The wine is fermented in 25% heavily toasted barriques, then given battonage every six weeks for about eight months. It ought to be appalling. Instead it's delightful. And it was very good with the large and, thanks to my rudimentary Italian, somewhat mysterious-of-species roasted fish we had with it.

Anyway, I got back to the states, and decided I ought to taste the 2007 Inama Vulcaia Sauvignon ($23) just for comparison. (Inama, by the way, is in Soave, close to Venice.) Fermented and aged in stainless steel, it's still a fairly rich style of Sauvignon, probably thanks to the malolactic fermentation it undergoes. But it's more familiar in its bright grapefruity citrus character and tart finish. And it's also mighty fine; a pleasure to drink. Unfortunately, neither of these wines are the easiest to find, but if you contact the importer, DallaTerra, they may be able to help.

A few hours of sleep and a run in Hyde Park revived me after nearly eight straight hours of eating and drinking, and had me anticipating breakfast at Daylesford Organic’s flagship London store. I have long been waiting for Britain to export Daylesford Organic to the States. The Martha Stewart-meets-Blue Hill at Stone Barns philosophy stems from Sir Anthony and Lady Carole Bamford, who 20 years ago turned their 6,000 acres of farm land in Gloucestershire and Staffordshire organic and started raising free-range poultry, Aberdeen Angus beef, making their own milk and cheese and growing their own produce. The family even produces wines and olive oils from its vineyards and olive groves in France. I experienced the Daylesford trifecta in London’s Pimlico neighborhood: At the café, breakfast at the long wooden communal table included an expertly prepared cappuccino and poached eggs and mushrooms on thick, toasted homemade whole-grain bread. Up the street is Daylesford’s garden store, a greenhouse style shop that sells flowers, garden supplies and country-chic home furnishings and antiques. And across from the café is Daylesford Butcher, where the farm’s organic, sustainably raised meats are sold. (Before I left London I got one last Daylesford fix at the just opened Notting Hill store. The upstairs has the same country market feel of the other stores with shelves of artisanal foods and just-picked produce. Downstairs is something completely new: a raw food bar.)

The rest of my day was dedicated to Marylebone High Street where I  browsed Sir Terrance Conran’s design mecca, The Conran Shop; ducked down Moxon Street for lunch at the café in La Fromagerie, one of the most amazing cheese shops I’ve ever visited; explored the shelves of Daunt Books, a 19th-century book shop that organizes both its fiction and nonfiction by geographic region – a travel junkies dream. I was still on the same street come dinnertime so I grabbed a stool at the communal table of The Tapa Room, the casual sister restaurant of the elegant, pricier Providores, which is just upstairs. For less than $25 I had one of the most satisfying meals of my trip. I ordered a glass of Mt. Difficulty Bannockburn Pinot Noir from the New Zealand-focused wine list and two small plates: a pan-fried Manouri cheese with black fig and pea shoots and a paprika roasted sweet potato topped with caramelized onion, edamame, Greek yogurt and arugula. Bob Marley and Tom Petty played from the speakers and the young couple next to me insisted I try their mochi-wrapped banana and caramel ice cream dessert that was topped with Thai puffed rice and strawberries — amazing!

I couldn’t leave London without visiting a British pub, so I made a late night trip to Waterloo for a pint of Wells Bombardier cask ale at The Anchor & Hope, London’s version of the Spotted Pig - a very proper ending to my first whirlwind tour of London.