Capaneus

Thanks for sharing James. I'll try to be more earnest, as per your thoughtful admonition. Now, do you have an opinion about the actual, you know, wine? I liked it, a couple of others here liked it. Oh, and RM Parker liked it, and he and I don't often agree. How about you?

I thought it might be... less wasteful, maybe, to start a general topic rather than one for my narrow little inquiry, so here it is and there you have it. Before I was a cranky old man, I was a cranky old child. In that childhood I lived in Lisbon, and in Lisbon I was very fond of a fruit we called, in our quaint foreign tongue, "nesperas". Well, after twenty years of whining about missing them, I finally used Google to determine said fruit is more widely know as a "loquat", and is native to Southern China. Which makes me think I might find loquats in Chinatown, or possibly on Washington Ave. Anyone remember having seen these, and if so where? And when: I'm not sure of season and such.

The Pinot Noir was a 2005 Guillaume, from Franche Comte. Not a wine I'd ever seen, or even a region I know anything about, but it was quite nice. All the wines were outstanding, and the food was every bit up to the challenge. I will say that, while I ordered the traditional choucroute, I thought the duck version was the night's standout: the braised red cabbage and duck confit were an amazing combination. The seafood version, while tasty, depended on whatever the creamy stuff was to make it work: the cabbage was hardly a factor. That, in my view, disqualifies it from competition. Not that I would mind a couple of platefuls, mind you. But I'd still pick the duck. I'll add my thanks to Jim Tarentino and Chef St. Martin, if I may, and to the very attentive staff as well.

Exactly. That's the most maddening aspect of the whole kerfuffle: one ot the very first things I was warned about, when I started venturing into vinous matters, was to never trust the little printed shelftalkers and posters. Misquoting reviews, mentioning scores given other vintages, generally misleading the unwary, are all practices endemic in the industry, I was told. Against this, we might put the LCB's ill-advised - but to all appearances not deliberately malicious - MSRPs on the CS bottlings. MSRPs that furthermore seem to have been arrived at with input from the wineries. And now the rabid weasels in Others Forums act as if this is a perversion, a debauchery, an atrocity unheard of in our unsullied profession. They are shocked!, shocked! to find there is gambling going on here. Feh.

I thought it was very good: a fair bit riper and more extracted than I expect Chianti to be, seemed almost like a Cal sangiovese, but having said that it had more than enough fruit and acidity to balance out, and was very tasty with Melograno's papardelle tartuffato. Bought a half-case myself.

Because they can sell 800-1200 cases in one shot at a guaranteed price and free up their warehouse inventory space for the incoming vintage. It's a no brainer for them. Not having to carry the inventory or have to mark it down later and sell it piecemeal if it doesn't sell. Now it's someone else's headache to sell it off. Not theirs. ← True, but in addition to that you have to factor in the fact that the '05 Californina vintage was just huge, and fairly high-quality in spite of that. Many producers are going to have a great deal of juice left over, unless they want to up bottlings to dangerous numbers. Making a special bottling for the PLCB is bound to be a better option than selling it in bulk to negociants. And if you read carefully, it is pretty obvious (at least to me) that this is not a "different take" on their premier release. It's referred as coming from "young vines" (which usually yield inferior grapes) in several descriptions, and in any case I think it would be idiotic for the winery not to hold onto the best juice for themselves. Finally, when you put all the various statements together, I think what happened is simply that the various parties decided to put the best spin on the releases, for the sake of marketing, without realising that there was such a deep pool of ill-will towards the LCB in some quarters that this would draw the disproportionate response it has.

Who says the PLCB bureaucracy doesn't listen? The Forthcoming CS site just listed a number of small Bordeaux Chateaux. Nice enough. But what caught my attention is that, instead of "Suggested Retail", or "Quoted At", they now mention an "Average Web Retail". How 'bout that? Wonder how accurate those are? Hope they don't screw up. They'd be crucified by the Usual Suspects. On the downside, there are still a number of "CS Special Cuvee" releases in the pipeline - and they still have "Suggested Retail" prices quoted. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that that program will be allowed to die, though.

What philadining and I (already) said. This is actually a strong area in Philaddelphia. ← Maybe relative to elsewhere in the US. But not most of Europe. Bars, even the best of them, aren't particularly convivial places, I don't think. Even pubs are better, and the cafes and holes-in-the-walls of the Continent are, to my mind, much better yet.

Yeah, approval of the System is a different matter. I don't, in the abstract, I suppose. But I'm not in Abstract very often, and in Philadelphia, the PLCB actually does work for me: much as we may like to pretend New Jersey doesn't exist (only in the context of this argument, of course!), the fact is that I do have Canal's and Total Wine in easy reach. And then I have the stuff I find at the PLCB, mostly Chairman Selections, but some, like the Barbe Rac, apparently randomly. Taken together, my Booze Budget, modest as it is, stretches much further than it would if I had to limit myself to either. As to pricing... well, sometimes I've found that the price of a particular selection isn't much better than I can find online - the bottle price, that is, because then you have to factor in shipping, unless that retailer happens to be nearby. This happens most often with some of the lower-priced wines. I have to say, I haven't yet seen a quoted price that was lower than the CS price, but I may be half-unconsciouly pre-selecting for stuff I know will be good value. In any case, with access to the PLCB website and something like WineSearcher, it's easy to determine just how good a deal is. I buy the good ones, leave the poorer ones alone. I feel bad for the poor winelovers in Western Pennsylvania, but I think we herabouts are doing darn well.

That's the biggest bunch of nonsense I've ever heard on an Internet forum. I wish I had an award for this. You need to at least give me a link with some data backup for that statement before I'd even begin to acknowledge that as possibly true. How does it control alcohol consumption to have six packs of beer available on every street corner but not available by the case or from an alcohol warehouse? Oh great, the guy who just bumed a quarter from me is now buying a flask of vodka from the wine & spirits store or a 40oz from the deli down the street... So much control of alcohol consumption. What, we outprice the alcoholics? What kind of wishful thinking is that? It makes no sense other than in the light of state government greed and antiquated laws. ← Thank you for the award. I hope you can forgive me for not putting you up for the Reading and Comprehension Merit Badge. I didn't say it did control alcohol consumption, I said it was meant to control alcohol consumption. The point of not allowing distributors to sell anything smaller than a case is that they are meant to sell wholesale, not directly to consumers. My best guess is that both the sale to consumers and the retail sale of six-packs are later loosenings of the law. Consumer pressure did I suppose achieve that, like it has achieved Sunday sales at PLCB Stores. But in many of the less urbane portions of the Commonwealth the notion of keeping Sin at bay carries more weight than does their grief at your inability to find the right Pouilly-Fuisse at the right price. So there's a limit to how much change Harrisburg can sell these good folks at any one time. As in much else (and not just in politics), actual effectiveness is beside the point. Perception is all.

Just grabbed a bottle of the Barbe Rac at the Wine and Spirits Store between 12th and 13th and Chestnut. It was definitely the last one in the store. ← Well, there you go: never trust just the website. We did leave one behind, but when I couldn't locate it with the online search, I assumed it was gone. I should do a SKU search just to make sure...

Well, he's certainly a lawyer in the best position possible to know about this. Just wonder what the statutory basis is.

Interestingly, just now there isn't a law, as far as i can tell: the statute on the books was invalidated by last year's Supreme Court decision, and the State has yet to mend matters. Normally, decisions of this sort carry an automatic injunction, keeping the current statute in force for a given length of time to give the Government time to pass new law. This one pointedly didn't. So individuals should be on safe ground on personal import. In fact, the only bar to mail-ordering is that most sellers are so unsure of what the heck is going on they still won't mail to Pennsylvania - just in case. Or at least that's my take on the matter. Someone more fully versed in the law might know better.

PaniniGuy: "But still, I've yet to hear an understandable, logical, financially-rooted rationale for why beer is sold by the case only." I'll leave the rest alone, but this I can answer: there isn't one; there isn't meant to be one; the system is in place to control alcohol consumption, not to maximise sales. Avowedly so. And most of Pennsylvania likes that. There are other priorities - good and bad - in a rational society, besides profit. Really. Look it up.

I have no particular information as to your species. To the (very limited) extent that I had any specific individuals in mind, they are actually participants in an entirely different forum, where vitriol is spewed with much greater abandon. Not sure why you felt personally insulted, but sorry nonetheless to have touched a nerve. As to the letter, I had no knowledge of its contents until you just quoted them, and it stands in direct contradiction of everything I've seen, from the winery, from the PLCB, from individuals here... If you have issue with it, I would advise you to pursue your correspondent's malfeasance in the appropriate venue, but I've seen no evidence to make me think it is anything other than someone's blunder. Personally, I find enough to bother me with the official version of events.

Glad I'm not the only one emotionally scarred by this. __Jason ← And the question I would now have is whether they would be willing to turn back the clock and do the original menu as a special-event, by-appointment-only sort of thing. An omakase or kaiseki? Maybe as a DDC dinner, or as a smaller eG party?

Don't hold your breath on that one. The Whitehall Lane stunt was not the Chairman's finest hour. In fact, it was downright trickery in my book - however innocent the sentiment may have been. ← Can someone explain to me why people so upset about this Whitehall Lane thing? I'm genuinely asking the question. I think I may not have the full story. What I understand is that there is a Chairman's Selection that is a Whitehall Lane bottling specifically blended for PLCB sales. People are upset that it was quoted with a retail price? But does anyone take these retail prices seriously? .... Everyone knows that wineries produce different bottlings every year. There was no secret made of the fact that this was a special bottling for the Chairman's Selection program. It, um, says it on the label. ← Well, it bothered me, and I'm not normally a knee-jerk antagonist of the System. The fact that they went to well-known wineries, with proven track records, which people might have heard of, that they asked them to produce a blending that - bottom line - is inferior to their regular bottlings, and then mentioned prominently a "Suggested Retail Price" that is a) entirely fictional; and b) high enough to suggest the contents must be of comensurate quality... that's sailing awfully close to some foul winds. For what it's worth, I feel virtually everything else I have seen of the Chairman Selection program has been something I was comfortable cheering on. This was a bad misstep. Not so much because you or I might be fooled, but because I feel it's very likely many were. And because it ultimately trades on the goodwill built not only by the producers, but by the Chairman Selection program itself. And finally, because it allows all the strident, unreasoning critics of the PLCB, who had for years scrabbled spastically for something, anything, to criticize, with even a faint glimmer of fairness, to at long last seize the high ground, and from it drop the contents of the chamber pots they carry where their brainpans should be upon the entire program, good and bad. Stupidity is finally the unforgivable sin, and these offerings were very very stupid. I don't think they were malicious, mind you, but try to prove that to the circling jackals.

Less than distributors will. They're a single-issue lobby, and this issue is nowhere near central to food retailers. Given that the LCB is both a money-and-patronage-generating machine and popular (well, approved of, anyway) in much of the Commonwealth, there's no chance the system will be overhauled anytime soon.

Done did do dat. Pa General Store keeps John and Kira's stored away, with little hint of their existence, so you'll have to ask for them. Someone has told me that they do retail out of their West Philadelphia digs, but I have nothing else on that, not even an actual address.

Hooligan, huh? I am so gonna dress you in green and throw you into the wrong end of a Celtic-Rangers tie... For your own education of course. I would derive hardly any gratification from the ensuing antics. And you got "Football", "Futbol" or "Futebol". Get it right! I did and still do prefer Jubille. As I reflect upon it, it wasn't so much a matter of intensity, or even clarity of flavor. It was a certain... organic, maybe? quality to the infusion that just made the whole candy seem more seamless than Eclat's, coupled with the glorious creaminess of the ganache. Mind you, these were all very fine chocolates. The slight difference might be entirely due to the fact that the selection I actually got to try was more to my liking. Further research clearly imposes itself. Jacques Torres, you say?

For the most part, I'm not paying corkage. I go to BYOBs, I go to restaurants that have fairly-priced wine lists, and I go to BYOB nights at many of the rest - a development which I am just sure our great-hearted local restaurant nabobs would have instituted without the prod of BYOB restaurants, by the way. They just never thought of it before. Corkages are usually designed to place a bar on most of the wines I can afford, anyway. Though that is changing as well, as restaurants realize that a BYO butt on a chair is more profitable than an empty chair. Taking many people surprisingly long to figure this out, though. And NY has better lists than Philadelphia, yes (though we're getting better), but that is in many ways not our restaurants' fault: NYers pay wholesale. What puzzles me is why there are no restaurants anywhere in the US that follow the everyday European model I've mentioned above. It's possible there's a practical reason, but I'll be darned if I can think of it.

I do believe BYOBs would vanish if the bar to licensing went away overnight. The cost of a liquor license is what forces those who want a restaurant but have limited capital to open with no drink service. On that, Vadouvan and I are on the same page. In fact, I agree with everything he says above (I know, I know - no one is more surprised than I). Where we differ (shoe #2 dropping) is in our perspective: like most in this forum, V. seems to me to view the issue from within the business. I absolutely agree that the disappearance of the LCB-related costs would make running all restaurants, good and bad, much easier. But this wouldn't necessarily mean more adventurous restaurants: the key there, I believe is the size of the market. Not population, mind you, but the density of individuals with the means to treat dining as a frequent, entirely frivolous experience. And in that we lag all the cities which are mentioned as being "better" than us; but we do very well otherwise, among all those cities we are comparable to. That's even more remarkable when you consider how much of the wealth in this region is actually located in urban-allergic suburbia. Ultimately, there just aren't enough adventurous eaters in this city to support a thriving, diverse, high-end experimental food scene. We might be able to if someone found a way to establish one at low-cost, but that's tough to imagine. Certainly, Django, Marigold Kitchen and a few others prove that people are hungry for that, no matter whether or not you think they are successful in their ambitions. And the failure of Salt and a few others conversely hints that the economics are very fragile. But again, this strikes me as missing the point of BYOBs. It really is simple: there are many of us who can afford them who cannot afford even just the additional cost of a reasonable wine markup: slackers like me, the young, the underemployed artsy. The fact that we throng to BYOBs seems to have given license-holding restaurateurs the illusion that if only BYOBs went away, they would reap the benefits. They wouldn't: many many of us would just have to drop out of the eatin' scene, by and large. In fact, I think the BYOs have provided an entry point to connoisseurship for many people, and we contribute to higher-end bottom-lines by (infrequently) venturing into that more rarefied air. That effect might just go away. Certainly, that is very much the state of the Philadelphia dining scene immediately before the BYOboom (quoted without permission), and I think it is entirely possible that economic forces would return us there posthaste if BYOs disappeared. Mess with the little people at your own risk.

Well, no. They exist nowhere in this country I've been able to find, except possibly San Francisco, and the reason, I think, is the American discomfort with alcohol, which I believe is the reason the $1 glass of wine does not exist in this country. And that is why BYOBs may be the only way we get there, because by circumventing the liquor-licensing laws, and the restaurant wine-pricing traditions that dictate markups that start at 100%, they may allow for precisely what I want: to enable Americans - or at least Philadelphians, to afford wine in a public space. And that's why they're so darn successful. There's a hunger out there for readily-accessible places of public convivium, and anything that approximates feeding (so to speak) that hunger is successful. But we seem not to understand the causes of that success, so we blame BYOBs for not meeting what was never their objective and should never be their objective. So geddoff the BYOBs! I wuvs 'em! ← interesting. JohnL has a point, though. the current situation seems to have resulted in a world where you either have a cutesy byob that has to charge $20 plus for its entrees because it has no liquor income, or you have to have the $$ to afford a liquor license, and therefore you sort of have to run a bigger more restaurant-y place. if anyone could afford a liquor license, maybe people could open up restaurants where people could dawdle over cheap glasses and inexpensive dinners without having to worry about that extra $100K hit right when they open. maybe there isn't a place for the bistros and whatnot in the restaurant economic climate that exists here now. or not. who knows. ← I happen to think it could conceivably work, but you don't have a template in this country for it to work from, so everybody would probably freak: the banks would look at your business plan and harrumph you right off the premises; neighborhood associations would look at your projected traffic and your one-dollah wine and start screaming "Think of the Children! Will no-one think of the Children!"; then there would be zoning boards, temperance organizations, the Fourth Estate... You'd get crucified. Selling huge amounts of booze to large crowds for cheap scares Americans. Possibly with good reason, given your rates of gun ownership . You are generally right that the LCB price structure limits the kinds of places that open, because of the elevated financial risk. And that is why BYOBs have happened, because they are a way underfinanced folks with a yen to open their own place can do so. But the whole BYO-kills-creative-food brouhaha is a canard, a red herring, a straw man. Possibly also a stalking horse, but the Cliche Police is pounding down my door.

I could no more disagree with this sentiment than I could march in the Anti-Puppies-and-Kittens celebration, held annually in the city of Evilsville. We're all looking for that Great Good Place. But I kinda don't buy the idea that there's something about the Philadelphia BYOB model that's inherently better at providing that ideal, or even a simulacrum of it, than lots of other models. Especially when most of those BYOBs are following a trend, not setting one. So I'll stick to my guns: I'd prefer more Roman or Sicilian or Emiliana or Provençal or Austrian restaurants in this city. Because that would be more interesting than what we've got. ← Well, you get those in Sicily, Provence, Emilia-Romana. Others in Belgium, some in Kyoto. You get the point. The more relevant point is that you are still talking about food, good food, and I'm not: I'm talking about a socio-economic phenomenon, or a business plan, but what you slot into the "food" and "drink" spaces in the model is nearly irrelevant. What is needed is that shlubs like me can go there and eat and drink with friends as often as possible. And any place where the wine begins at $5/glass, $30/btl ain't makin' it. Oh, it's affordable - once a week, comfortably. But it won't be an everynight place. And even that price point is nearly impossible to find hereabouts. Every one of those areas you mention, and almost every other place on Earth, has those: public meeting-places built around food and drink. For bizarre reasons, the US doesn't. BYOBs aren't it, not really. For one thing, the business model involves a small space and food that is too expensive. You need more room to be able to make enough of a profit on cheap, plain, hopefully tasty food and drink. But they're the only places many, many of us ("us" clearly not referring to eGulleteers, from the available evidence) can afford to eat and drink often and reasonably well. That is why they succeed. The fact that some of them have culinary aspirations is besides the point, though fortunate. This isn't an either/or proposition, as far as I can tell. Oh, there's been pressure on licensed restaurants to reduce prices on drink, and restaurateurs who for years have been marking up a bottle of wine 400% are grousing about having to mark it up only 200% in the market that's been created. But they'll still be financially viable. And the new places, like Gayle, Amada and Ansill, have clearly heard the Good Word, and have drifted closer to sanity on their wine lists. The thing is, there's a market for food-as-art, for creative, innovative, cutting-edge chefs. But the market is small, and always will be. For the same reason art films are small, and blockbusters by-and-large blow. If you look at most of the cities that trounce us in terms of their food culture, everyone of them simply has more dollars overall being spent on food - NY gigantically so, Chicago considerably so, and San Francisco because it has a disproportionately wealthy population. I'm betting this will be true of every city you can name which is "better" than Philadelphia in the sense you are considering. But the BYOBs aren't to blame for the size of the Extreme Eating local population, nor are they to be chastised because they don't service us in that particular way: it is, once more, not what they do. And that's fine. Did I mention it was a '99 Chapoutier "Barbe Rac" CdP? And that you can't have any?

Well, no. They exist nowhere in this country I've been able to find, except possibly San Francisco, and the reason, I think, is the American discomfort with alcohol, which I believe is the reason the $1 glass of wine does not exist in this country. And that is why BYOBs may be the only way we get there, because by circumventing the liquor-licensing laws, and the restaurant wine-pricing traditions that dictate markups that start at 100%, they may allow for precisely what I want: to enable Americans - or at least Philadelphians, to afford wine in a public space. And that's why they're so darn successful. There's a hunger out there for readily-accessible places of public convivium, and anything that approximates feeding (so to speak) that hunger is successful. But we seem not to understand the causes of that success, so we blame BYOBs for not meeting what was never their objective and should never be their objective. So geddoff the BYOBs! I wuvs 'em!