Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas from Benoit Lahaye, Brooklyn, and the Russian dolls in the house. Gorgeous wine, tart tart strawberry compote on the nose but so lemony and lean,,,,, did open up so nicely, great start to a new year.

To the Wedding

"He crosses the silver water, hardly reducing his speed when he corners, moving like mercury, seldom upright, often inclined as though listening to the earth, first on one side and then the other, bending over to listen with pity.

All I had to offer, old as the world, God-given, balm for pain, honey for taste-buds, promise for always, silken welcomes, oh to welcome, knees turned on their sides, toes extended-- all I had has been taken."
(John Berger, To the Wedding, 80-1)

San Fereolo Langhe 'Coste di Riavolo' Bianco 2006

RIESLING(70)/GEWURZ(30), Piemonte,IT

On the skins,,,, aged in oak, grippy. Honey and green straw nose, golden orange color, palate like crunching on green peppercorns, raw cardamom pods, eucalyptus, grapefruit pith. I love bitter but this one really takes the cake, riesling nose, but palate like juniper berries and the tiny tin cans of sour grapefruit juice my grandfather used to love for breakfast.

Confirming my suspicions: "ANGRY GREEN TANNINS"

San Fereolo Coste di Riavolo Vino da Tavolo Bianco :"a blend of Gewurztraminer and Riesling Renano, and is a deep brassy gold with brilliant reflections. The bouquet is powerful and frankly medicinal with mint and eucalyptus mingled with honey. Quite charged and quite particular. On the palate it's quite dry -- unexpected this is -- with bright almost brambly minerality supported by considerable warmth and some citric accents, and flows into a long warm mentholated finish with savory overtones. It was a great surprise, and is a wine some will love and others abhor."
(Kyle Phillips Wine Review)

EXACTLY.

new light

Roni Horn interview

Mimi Thompson: How did you end up choosing Iceland as a place to go?

Roni Horn: It’s a question that I’m always asked and I don’t have a real answer for it. I once looked Iceland up in the dictionary and it fell between ice hockey and ice skating. That’s pretty much as controlled a choice as I made. But having gone there, there evolved a relationship that I couldn’t separate myself from. Each time I’d go, there would be engendered the idea to go back and back and back. I guess the real reason is the relationship to yourself that is possible in a place like that. There’s nothing mediating it. There is nothing to obscure or make more complex a perception or a presence.

MT: And yet it’s highly dramatic.

RH: The drama comes from its youth. The landscape is unique in that the geology is very young. It’s like a labyrinth in the definitive sense. It’s big enough to get lost in, but small enough to find yourself. There is little erosion and, as a result, unexpected symmetries exist in unexpected places. America has everything Iceland has, but it’s ten thousand, twenty thousand, one hundred thousand years older, depending on where you look. Growing up in a very “old” landscape—New York City—it’s origins are secreted from the present. I mean that the geological aspect of the landscape in New York City can only be experienced theoretically at this point. In Iceland, you understand empirically exactly what this place is: its what and how. That accessibility effects the nature of one’s experience, the experience of the world. Any place you’re going to stand in, in any given moment, is a complement to the rest of the world, historically and empirically. What you can see in that moment, what you can touch in that moment, is confluent with everything else.

(from Bomb Magazine, Summer, 1989)

****(remembering living in Marfa was like living lit by sun-beams through a facetted cut piece of quartz, nowhere to go but yourself)****

December

(from Hugh Johnson's World Atlas of Wine, 1971)

Happy Bright Sun Food Day!

Waking up to magic light.

Isastegi Basque cider, prism light, good for breakfast drinking (on holidays) and while cooking.

Leeks!

Tarte aux poireaux.

Happy kitchen. My friends are doing all of the hard stuff this year, I got off easy with vegetable dishes and cider. Just had a long talk with my grandmother (turning 90 next week), who tells me she still misses waking up at 5:00 am to put the turkey in. I do too. She said she also wants to hug me 'til I pop, and wishes you could hug through telephones. I don't usually get sentimental around holidays, but she is an exception, also the smell of caramelizing carrots in my oven, and a browned leek-creme fraiche tart that is chock full of black pepper, and (as an old chef boyfriend of mine once said, somewhat lecherously, "full of love").

Drink good wine people, an drink it with funny and sweet friends.

"I Keep to Myself Such Measures...."

I keep to myself such
measures as I care for,
daily the rocks
accumulate position.

There is nothing
but what thinking makes
it less tangible. The mind,
fast as it goes, loses

pace, puts in place of it
like rocks simple markers,
for a way only to
hopefully come back to

where it cannot. All
forgets. My mind sinks.
I hold in both hands such weight
it is my only description.

(Robert Creeley, Words, 52)

Happy Birthday Brooklyn Guy

Vouette & Sorbee 'Blanc d'Argile' NV (2004) magnum!!!! Thanks to Peter Liem for bringing it from Champagne.

Aliseo restaurant in Prospect Heights!

stalking the "orange" wine

Does it even seem appropriate to call it orange wine anymore? With so much variance in method, region, and time of extended skin-contact, I am having a harder time lumping all of these very disparate wines together into one category.

Maybe it has something to do with the man who visited the restaurant I was working in last month almost every night for a week. He was from Fruili, IT and dumbfounded that I knew of so many producers from his tiny geographic area, but begged me to NOT call it orange wine, just white wine (and then proceeded to visit and beg the same thing for many nights in a row). He was strange and demanding, and horrendously appreciative all at the same time. His condescension made me angry, but his persistence about his point was compelling.

This is one of the serious debates my partner at my new restaurant and I have been hashing over. Should we single out wines as "orange", in a separate category, or call them macerated, or put them at the bottom of the white regions?

I have learned more about orange wines (and most New Yorkers have too), from the passion of a certain caustic-witted, lanky, talented sommelier named Levi Dalton, who hosted many gorgeous "all-orange" wine dinners at Alto restaurant in the past few years. I don't think I would even be wondering about their presentation on a list, or their changing roles for diners if he hadn't done so much to educate me and other brave wine lovers lunging for that extreme edge of palate. To think that "orange" has almost become a Brooklyn household term is astounding, exhilarating, and strange.

Is "orange" just is an applied American label, problematic because it prioritizes production technique over specific regionality? There are so many various characteristics within this group, so many different grapes and aging methods. (What about the Jura, or my all-time love sherry for that matter)? Are categories and terminology really that important?

Or should it just be the sheer tactile experience-- the multi-facetted sensations that set off chain reactions in your body like falling dominoes, telling every cell that THIS wine is good. Last night, my friend and I visited Masten Lake restaurant, where I used to work, and Marisa Marthaller poured us a glass of THIS:

Cascina degli Ulivi, Monferrato 'Montemarino' 2001 Piemonte, IT (Stefano Bellotti, Louis/Dressner)

Caramal through the middle, sea salt, bitter orange, dark orange, HEADY, all Cortese, aged in oak for 11 months on lees, gorgeous.

Old writings: Marfa, TX

This is a magical place to wake up. Windows open, birds calling from all sides. My yard backs up against the vastness of desert—when I water my plants in the morning, I get the smell of carob as the water hits the hard dry desert soil. The rosemary bushes have doubled in size since I moved in-- their tough skins and fleshy leaves have protected them through all hours of hot yellow sun.

When I water the tree with drooping leaves like a willow, the smell of wet dust rises up to my face. Here in the desert the smells are easily distinguishable, one from another—there is nothing between them in the air to confuse their origins. As I pour water into the dirt well of the tree I look down my block—one block from the edge of town—one block from an open vista of vast desert. It seems strange to go about daily business as if I did not have this piece of knowledge—a raised topographical sense that I am teetering precipitously on the edge of something wild and large.

On our block, perfectly gridded, there are houses facing a dusty street—the ocotillo cactus have orange blooms at the top, and the barn swallows swoop in elegant curlicues down from the wires, looking for nest sites. The hot smell of tomato leaves in the sun is another reason to get up early—to watch the slowest of births from green to yellow flower- to what? I haven’t seen any farther just yet—all of my exotic heirloom tomato seeds died in the withering heat of the laundry room.

There is a purity to the air here—a lack of sensory noise—a dryness and sparcity made of sagebrush, wet creosote, rosemary leaves, and wet earth. To me it feels like a place where I can be anything—a brain of clicking wires, a soft body, a capable body. I feel like the mechanizations of my thought are visible here. I can wake up in the morning, replay the nagging shard of an awkward interaction last night, but can move past it, somehow, by getting back to the soil. I turn around this morning and bury the incident in wet dirt. I can breathe it back into the wind that whips around dry bushes in the field. I can open myself to the sky like the overnight cactus bloom-- a bruised and torn blossom that appeared one morning, sprung up the sides of the fingered (widow?) cactus outside the back door.

Marfa is not a difficult place to write about, the difficulty lies in watching yourself act in such stripped and bare bones of a way-- in unshaded outlines of movement and thought.

Marfa is a beautiful filament of a place, a facetted piece of quartz or clear stone, a central point that focuses and frames light. It is a lens, like the shard of heavy glass that I found on my first week here; packed with dirt on one side, shining green in the window dusk of falling afternoon.


6/2009
Marfa, TX

Letter from Turkey

""Cagan and I stayed the night with a well-to-do farmer and his wife who lived near the field station. On learning that I was a writer, the wife gave me a volume of poetry written by her uncle during the end stages of his struggle with cancer. I opened it with some trepidation. The poems were about how interesting it is to be alive, about how you're never sure what nature is telling you, but it's definitely telling you something. There was a poem about the Aras River in spring, when the black stones tumble over like ghosts, and another about street vendors. The vendors shout, "There are tomatoes!" and "There are carrots!" They shout about the existence of many vegetables, and this annoys a woman in a late model car."

Batuman categorizes this as "eco-poetry", that represents humans and nature as "a dynamic, inter-related series of cyclic feedback systems, in contrast to traditional nature poetry , in which nature is merely a kind of backdrop to human activity. In fact, the very idea of "nature"-- implying something exterior to humanity and human culture-- may be inimical to true ecological thinking, which presupposes the interconnectedness of all things."

(by Elif Batuman, "Natural Histories: A journey in the shadow of Ararat." The New Yorker, Oct 24, 2011, 65)

Christmas Market on Les Lices

"Somehow I got across with a surge of people when a policeman held up his white mitten. It was all food, in endless stands on both sides of the packed walk. I have never seen so many kinds of sausages, meat pates and rolls, cuts of horse-cow-pig, dead rabbits dripping with blood into little paper cups tied over their noses, bunches of wild birds hanging like feathery grapes, more wild birds naked and tiny on white enameled trays.

I have never seen so many great wooden buckets of olives of every kind and size and color. There was one tub of green olives mixed with little pickled onions and slices of sickly-looking bitter orange. There were olives stuffed, smooth, wrinkled, shiny, dull. And there were spices, in packets-boxes-jars, aromatics from Provence, pepper from far places."
(from "About Looking Alone at a Place", As They Were, MFK Fisher, Marseille, FR, )

Jan Weenix, Dutch, Amsterdam, 1681-1719
Gamepiece with a Dead Heron ("Falconer's Bag")

Beautiful taskmaster.

Quiet drink @ Ten Bells.

Egg, BK

chenin

Marco de Bartoli, and comfort.

Fall is in the air, sweeping old and unnecessary things out of our lives, with scalloped curlicue winds and bracing blasts of cold air. The light that lays on my windowsill this morning is heavy. It is the light of growing up, it is the light that I try to explain as “nostalgic”, because I cannot seem to find a bigger word that encompasses all that I really mean. It is layered, made up of many years of windowsills, old lights, of deepening shadows and earlier dark.

Last night, in the dregs of poverty, I received an insanely decadent gift of assorted cheeses from someone very dear to me. The nine types of cheese were wrapped in blue and silver tinfoil, circles and triangles, glowing dully in their box, throwing windowsill light rainbows around my kitchen.

I was sad last night, and I received the gift humbly, the luxury of it could not be a bigger contrast to this certain, very poor moment in my life. To complete the luxury of the moment, I chose to open the most special bottle I have remaining on my shelf: an old Marsala by the Sicilian master Marco de Bartoli (Vecchio Samperi ‘Ventennale’), recommended by my friend. I made a dinner of sumptuousness that was finite, a dinner of gifts.

The Marsala was exquisite (Grillo/Zibbibo solera blend, from his Contrada Samperi vineyards in southwestern Sicily), like the best amontillado sherry I have ever had, maple-y, slightly sweet at first, all walnut shells and hazelnut skins on the nose, dry walnuts on the end and exactly enough rounding out of candied brittle or slight hints of toffee, (cut-stick palo cortado), caramel, nutmeg and anise. There was a kind of dry, unsweetened cinnamon stick that ran right through the center of my tongue, and then a complex softness and balance that I don’t think I have ever experienced, even in years of obsessive sherry collecting.

The cheeses were delicious, and creamy, fresh and bright. Two tiny perfect circle goat cheese crottins (FR), and a wedge of fromage de meaux (Brie-style cheese from Seine-et-Marne, FR), with rosemary crackers and a ripe white nectarine. The creamy sharp tang of the crottin paired perfectly with the nuttiness of the Marsala, the fromage de meaux lent more grassy, mild herbal notes, with a gamey and buttery, oozing bite.

When tragedies appear in our lives, they are sharp, and they stud the wash of usual days with pinpricks that are stop us in our tracks. These moments by definition are unexpected, unavoidable, and mark time in a way that is all their own. In fact they stop time, and give us precise coordinates of exactly where we are, NOW.

For me, the remedy of sorrow was in my unapologetic feast, a gift of memory I gave to myself, now etched as onto a copper plate. I chose to celebrate with food and wine, and friends, and to open my eyes to change, and the new wind-swept space under my feet.

Alpha and Omega

Andrea Calek 'Blonde' 2010
Honey, chamomile, and lemon curd in the Ardeche, beautiful and soft flowers, hay, round petillant natural wine.

Marco de Bartoli Vecchio Samperi 'Ventennale' Marsala (SICILY, solera).
Walnut skins, dry almond, cinnamon stick, anise, and one of the best and most complex things I have ever tasted. Reminds of the best amontillado sherry, with slightly rounder edges, soft but not sweet. Heavenly pairing with small perfectly round goat cheese crottin, the world is in order again.

Once in a lifetime wine, end of a chapter for me, thanks Levi Dalton for the recommend, please read more below from Levi on the subject:

http://soyouwanttobeasommelier.blogspot.com/2011/03/marco-de-bartoli-one-of-bravest-wine.html

And please look at what I hope to be a weekly post for the fabulous Diner Journal blog:

http://dinerjournal.com/blog/