MaxH

My parents would serve Ouzo sometimes in the 1960s, I remember the strong "louche" [sp?] of the insoluble oils turning the water a milky white. In my experience it's much more of a "licorice" spirit than the absinthe substitutes (which have a broader herbal flavoring). I remember an engineer in Berlin consuming it once while holding forth to several visitors about the recent reunification of Germany (this was in the early 1990s, at a conference there). At an outdoor café on a busy commercial street (Ku'damm maybe) in the late afternoon if I remember. He was in the daily habit of an Ouzo an hour or so before dinner. The spirit arrived in a plain glass, with a container of cold water on the side, added to taste by the customer. (I think he smoked a cigarette also -- it would not be unusual for the time and place.) "Not many countries in Europe," he intoned with a sweep of the hand, "could afford to buy another country, as we in West Germany have done..."

Thanks Mary for that cogent summation. I have the impression that not just "terroir" but terroir controversy is perceived differently by different folks. My perception of French terroir view comes mostly from informal contact with winemakers in only one region (Burgundy). Its vineyards have been cultivated for an interval in the low thousands of years, sometimes by the same family for several hundred years. These people express devotion and humility, likening themselves (repeatedly) to midwives. In earlier times they might have said "God makes the wines, we just try to clear the way." Obsessively they fine-tune their cultivation of grapes matched to the land over centuries [1]. History, and perpetual optimization on small land plots, surely contribute to the sense of "place" there which (FWIW) I hear in terms much like yours: "comparing wines only a few miles, or even feet apart." If Mark were here, he (rather than we) could elucidate his brief comment. It reminded me not of what might be wrong with it, but of expert comments that aren't very controversial and could have underlain it. Bob Thompson examined California vintage history (what's wrong and right in the old industry slogan "every year is a vintage year" there). First citing glaring exceptions, he then mentioned "a climate that ripens grapes for winemaking more reliably than in any part of Europe, including such sheltered districts as Italy's Piedmont, or France's Rhone." Maynard Amerine (hardly hostile to California wine!) punctuated a comparison of old- and new-world growing zones with comments like "Hail is rare in California" and "winter killing of vines is not a problem." 30 years of reading such comments instills sympathy for others consistent with them. Ain't it the truth. Growing up in California (and long appreciating its wines) but living also in other parts of US I am used to distant people projecting, say, New England geography intuition onto a much larger state. Los Angeles and San Francisco are separated roughly like Boston and Baltimore, yet some people suppose them suburbs of each other.[1] "In Europe, a region and a grape variety are substantially synonymous." -- Bob Thompson.

Thanks Karen. FYI, here are the other three that I omitted because I thought it was long enough. I use all of these and have done for many years. Julie Sahni, Classic Indian Cooking. Horst Scharfenberg's internationally popular Cuisines of Germany. Waters, Curtan, and Labro, the "Pasta Pizza and Calzone" cookbook from Chez Panisse Café, 1984, ISBN 0394530942. Each contains recipes that will just knock you on your butt (thus meeting the aforementioned criterion of value).

Some favorite durable US cookbooks, and a durable sandwich misconception. By the standard that a few outstanding practical recipes justify getting a cookbook, the Gourmet Cookbook (1950) abundantly delivers. (Supplements followed its publication -- I have a small collection -- and lately a new book under its venerable title. But this is the original Gourmet. Quirky, ubiquitous, and at last count the dominant mention under its name in Internet archives.) Recipes in it such as herb-stuffed broilers, English herb cheese, various desserts and mushroom dishes demonstrate why this is so. Elsewhere I've often recommended an appetizing underground classic: Louis Pullig de Gouy's Sandwich Manual for Professionals (1939), more readily available in the 1980s reprint, The Ultimate Sandwich Book (Philadelphia: Running Press, 1982, ISBN 0894711636 or 0894711644). Variations on the hamburger now forgotten (or "discovered"). 63 pages on "Club, or Three-Decker" sandwich recipes at several per page. De Gouy emphasized that the person Sandwich himself (18th-century playboy earl) is important for naming, not inventing, it. De Gouy cited Greek, Roman, and Babylonian taste for "a wedge of meat between two slabs of bread" but traced the modern sandwich to a popularization by the teacher Rabbi Prince Hillel after 70 BC with residue in symbolic Passover custom (unleavened bread with bitter herbs and haroseth, chopped nuts and apple). "This is to prove that sandwiches are as old as bread and cheese, and Romans and Danes and Saxons and Normans must have eaten them from one end of England to another." (That's highly abridged in the 1982 reprint.) Despite these publications, people continue eagerly to mix up the inventing of sandwiches with the naming. (With added vigor via Internet, Wikipedia, etc.) Marcella Hazan's two books that introduced much of US to northern Italian cooking also indirectly helped spur the original Internet food forum 25 years ago, which quickly became popular. Though participants didn't dwell on that connection, they did cite Marcella's books and The Romagnolis' Table, whose durable pragmatic pasta ideas I still use. Kenneth Lo, expatriate Chinese writer, teacher, and cook, is credited as a mentor by some US Chinese-émigré chefs. He wrote popular English-language cookbooks in the 1970s including Chinese Regional Cooking (ISBN 0394738705, "used and new from $1.55" recently on amazon) and Chinese Cooking on Next to Nothing. I posted about the first title to rec.food.cooking in 1988 (some people have copies of the posting but it's not currently in public archives). Lo, writing mostly in England, owned and partly translated the 11-volume 1963 edition of the national cookbook (Famous Dishes of China, Peking: Ministry of Commerce Foods and Drinks Management Department). Eloquent evocations of China itself, attention to underlying principles and folk recipes, condemnation of shortcuts like MSG (Lo was hardly the only Chinese chef to disparage MSG). I have several other titles. For some reason, some later and British editions have a different tone, and I spot also a different view of Lo among some British readers -- would like to understand this story better sometime. In the late 1940s, many mainstream US cookbooks seemed bent on eradicating savor and subtlety (in favor of canned soups and green food coloring and "Thousand Island" salad dressing [1]). The 1943 Joy of Cooking (already a "brand," remote from the original book) even demonstrated that it was possible to season a cookbook full of savory dishes with exactly salt, pepper, and paprika. Into this scene, Morrison Wood brought wine and garlic and spices and life, remaining a minor mainstream classic for 30 years (plus supplements and spin-offs). More, posted 1992. -- [1] "Thousand Island" is a mayonnaise sauce appearing in US cookbooks by 1948 (de Gouy's Gold Cook Book for example, revised edition; Wood lists it also), commonly used on lettuce salads. In original recipes it's a very mild "Russian" dressing with further mayonnaise and whipped cream. As discussed periodically, it sometimes appears on Reuben Sandwiches, though some prefer the more robust classic "Russian Dressing." (If the ages of humankind are accountable Stone, Bronze, Iron, etc., then the ages of the US can be further subdivided. The last half of the 20th Century was the Age of Mayonnaise.)

At least one Laundry regular has been known to have both lunch and dinner there -- a long lunch, only a little time to recover between them. (Even the staff remembered it later.)If you have a chance, you check out also the Chez Panisse Café (the upstairs, oven-and-grill-based casual venue). Please identify which, if you post about either. (Lately people eat for the first time at CPC, sometimes exclusively, then write all about their experiences at "Chez Panisse," which is a miscommunication. It can be hard to convey to new visitors why that seems so incongruous to longtime CP fans, but I get some astonished looks when I tell those fans about it happening.) It was the restaurant that made the name known. The Café is somewhat younger. And produced a genuine classic, very useful, cookbook in its own right (in the 1980s when Panisse was so "hot"): the Pasta-Pizza-Calzone cookbook, ISBN 0394530942. Other recent writing notwithstanding, Alice Waters's essay about Panisse's vision and early history is in a food-writing collection cited recently in the Cookbooks forum here, and readily available as ISBN 0880012765 or ISBN 088001346X.

1. MS, 13Nov03: "French grapes struggle with bad weather, no irrigation, hungry crows. California grapes are pampered with water, sun, heat. There is no question why French wines have more local personality than California wines." 2. RR, 27Mar06: "According to [posting above], French wines will always be superior to Californian because they're, well, French." 3. MH, 12Apr07: "I don't read [comment above] to claim French wines are 'superior to' California wines ..." 4. RR, 12Apr07: "Hmm. So bad weather, dryfarming and crows only exist in France?" 5. MH, 12Apr07: "I don't take the comment that way at all." 6. RR, 12Apr07: "It is a pretense that only France 'suffers' and therefore experiences more 'character' in her vineyards." I confess. I'm lost here. I'm not Mark Sommelier and I don't argue for him or necessarily agree with him. I do wonder how to get [2] from [1] above, or to read an assertion of "only France 'suffers' " in any of the above, without bringing in assumptions "not in evidence." (As also in the separate case I cited, of turning the 1976 Spurrier tasting into a question of terroir identification.) Bonus data: RR, 28Jul05: "Ten years ago, only a handful of California wineries bothered to make vineyard-designate wines." I checked my wine inventory from 23 years ago. Of 24 California bottlings kept, eight had vineyard designations. A minority (reflected also in the published comprehensive reviews of current California wines in those days, which I also could show you) but not all that rare, and this was much more than 10 years ago.

I don't take the comment that way at all. I take it to reflect well-known data. Here's one facet, for example: Geisenheim (Rheingau), 1709 Fahrenheit degree-days annually Tirer (Mosel district), 1730 Beaune (Burgundy), 2400 Healdsburg (Sonoma County), 2918 Livermore, 3260 Fresno, 4680 (For anyone new to this, it's a basic measure of cumulative annual exposure of grapes to temperatures above the ripening threshold of about 50 deg F. Grapes are sharply sensitive to this, different varieties produce good wines in different degree-day ranges). Those numbers (from a popular book 66 years ago, Schoonmaker and Marvel, with Lichine etc -- same folk who established "varietal" labeling) led to prescient predictions of which parts of California would make the most subtle wines, and warnings that delicate German-style Rieslings, for instance, would prove harder in California because the climates predispose those grapes toward higher-alcohol wine. The Côte d'Or has ghastly sleety winters and autumn hail, compared to the districts (I know them well, I grew up nearby) producing the most comparable wines in California. All that Mark Sommelier cites is that California is quantitatively easier for wine grapes than some old-world districts are, and I've seen many writings from California saying the same. He then speculates in his upshot that these greater stresses induce sharper local differences. That's all I take from it, anyway.

Odd...Pastis available here is 45% alcohol.Here too. What Pastises have you encountered at 25%, eje? I know that Pastis is generic in Europe for a class of herbal spirits including anise, served diluted with cold water (and said to be at their best consumed in a warm breeze off the Mediterranean). My US-bought Pernod is 40%, Granier 45%, Absente 55%, Versinthe 45%. Note that the Pernod firm was the original popularizer of absinthe and built for that product. Today's Pernod evolved after the absinthe ban in many countries in the 19-teens. All of the spirits I listed came sweetened but undiluted. These also are described in US cooking and drink recipes as "absinthe subtitutes" (they make amazing classic shellfish dishes too, for instance, used to steam fresh mussels with some citrus zest -- served with a basket of crisp French fries). But I have the impression that bases for European "Pastis" drinks embrace more than absinthe substitutes and absinthes.

Greetings and I'm glad to hear you come around to that view, because I was thrown by the earlier assertion pointing to an original (Post 9) where I found the poster commenting only on a theory of (emphasis added). I don't read that comment to claim French wines are "superior to" California wines (nor read the same into your own recent comment above, which isn't inconsistent with Post 9). Post 9 seemed to me, rather, to suggest why a relatively small region, like the Côte de Nuits, has such sharp local differences, even between nearby vineyards with the same grape.Which it dramatically does: I've had that demonstrated unforgettably when a director of a firm in that same region challenged some American visitors to identify a wine's vineyard (and year) blind, and an amateur who likes the region's wines but seldom plays that "guessing game" even in tasting groups (yo!) did so. No one was more surprised than I (who had never tasted that vineyard's wine from that producer and rarely from any producer). I'd say I've had more trouble identifying wines from far-flung regions I don't know, than from compact regions I do. JohnL keeps asserting about "the famous (infamous) tasting of 76. If 'experts' can have difficulty discerning wines from grapes grown thousdands of miles apart then where does that leave us mere mortals?" I don't know where the assumption comes from. My reading of the 1976 Spurrier tasting (especially in years soon after it, when the event was often reported in more nuance and detail than recently) was that it was a straight quality ranking, not a challenge to sort terroir, making the comment a straw man.

There also were related threads in recent months with slightly different brief: the one raising distinction of "food writers" vs. writers on food-related subjects; the "Cookbooks as Literature" thread (in the Food Literature forum, note). Thanks Carrot Top for the kind words. I'm not specifically interested in the literature so much as in food and wine (which leads to reading some literature). At the same age Multiwagon's postings mention, I discovered I was very interested in food (that was a while ago, and not in the US, and led among other things to a memorable case of food poisoning). Seeking good info and sources has entailed finding the occasional book. (Actually to your separate "Books that age gracefully" thread, I could mention a few, but hope at least to have time to list there some favorite cookbooks meeting the call.) Separately to Russ Parsons, I'll engage a little about the Hesses because of my impression (if I may so say) you are another who reads the literature, as well as holding opinions on it. People in the past have sometimes summed up the Hesses' book via elements they disliked: indignant tone or whatever. That I believe is uneclectic, characterizing the book from one facet, tossing the baby with the bathwater. Seldom do the same people express what they thought about its history of US cookbook evolution, its correction of historical misconceptions (by quoting 17th through 19th-century popular food writings, the Hesses demonstrate, not just assert, that some US cooking "innovations" of late 20th-c. were actually rediscovery of principles common in the past). Like other serious polemical writing, the book concentrates vast data for its case; the data make it a useful sourcebook. Karen Hess, remember, is also the food historian instrumental in some old classics being reissued in inexpensive modern facsimile, and illuminating contributions to US cooking from native and African cultures. I've also sent people to The Taste of America just for its long annotated historical bibliography, fairly unique among US food books of its (or this) era.

There's some Marcel Rouff stuff in earlier threads, for example a description of it Here, and others if you search the site for that (unusual) name. I perceive Rouff as less about cooking than some of these, it's fictional food-related parables. Touched on in one or more threads in the separate Cookbooks forum (though I've gotta admit, some of these topics and books overlap between that forum and this one, which doesn't make for easy choice). Interested people reading either forum should also look at the other, in my opinion.

Yes, Brillat mixes different kinds of material but is quite a classic. Anecdotes of the curate's omelet, and the stop at the inn, are unforgettable. Here are some other books at least 30 years old (oldest first): Fredrick Accum. A Treatise on Adulterations of Food. Philadelphia: Abraham Small, 1820. Mallinckrodt facsimile edition 1966. John Doran. Table Traits (two volumes). Boston: Francis A. Niccolls &Co., 1855. (Sort of an English Brillat, originally published 18 years later, 1854, in England.) Alexandre Dumas (the prolific adventure writer ). Dictionary of Cuisine, 1873. English edition by Louis Colman, Simon and Scuster, 1958. Belle Lowe. Experimental Cookery. Third edition, Wiley, 1943. A food-science text with further references. Betty Wason. Cooks, Gluttons, and Gourmets: A History of Cookery. Doubleday, 1962. John and Karen Hess. The Taste of America, Viking, 1977, ISBN 0670693766. Reissued 1999, ISBN 0252068750. May be the chief critical work on late 20th-century US food culture (and some of its spokespeople); also unusually concentrated historical and bibliographical content in a single source.

The Cracknell/Kaufmann is the standard English translation of 4th (1921) edition of Le Guide Culinaire, sold under that title also for English-language readers. (5012 reference recipes from "Brown Stock" to "Vin à la Française.") Writers often refer to the book in English as the Guide Culinaire, so if you see references to that title, it's the same book (the standard reference book by Escoffier). For some reason I haven't yet seen explained or discussed, recent printings call it alternatively Escoffier: The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery. That uses the title-page subtitle of a the Cracknell/Kaufmann translation of Guide Culinaire sold earlier (and still available used) as Guide Culinaire. (Could it be part of the recent trend that moves authors into title lines? For example movie titles like Jack London's Call of the Wild? This sometimes frustrates or confuses people looking under the established title.) Edited to tighten up and offer further confusion. Publication history: GC (French), editions 1903, 1907, 1912, 1921. A Guide to Modern Cookery, English, editions 1907, 1909. (Also editions in Danish and German.) So if you encounter blurbs citing The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery as a revision of A Guide to Modern Cookery, that may be a little confusing because they were separate translations of Escoffier books of different editions. (Sources: Edition of Cracknell/Kaufman titled Le Guide Culinaire, and Bitting.)

The historical essay about Delmonico's, Ranhofer, Wenberg's introduction of the dish and later expulsion, controversial publication of The Epicurean, and early context of US restaurants, is "Delmonico's," by Evan Jones, 1992. It's one of the entries in The 1992 Antaeus food-writing anthology. Details in the linked report. Bibliographics repeated below. Both versions are readily available used. Note that some writers spell the lobster dish Newburg, even inconsistently. Recipe in The Epicurean (#1037, under "Mollusks and Crustaceans") is "Lobster à la Newberg or Delmonico." -- Max Antaeus, Not for Bread Alone: Writers on Food, Wine, and the Art of Eating. Daniel Halpern, Editor. Number 68, Spring 1992. Published April 1992. Ecco Press, Hopewell, New Jersey. ISBN 0880012765. Back matter includes contributor notes and advertisements for other literary periodicals and books by Betty Fussell, Waverly Root and Richard de Rochemont, etc. Re-issued 1993 as Not for Bread Alone: Writers on Food, Wine, and the Art of Eating. Daniel Halpern, Editor. Ecco Press, Hopewell, New Jersey. ISBN 088001346X. Includes 1993 introduction by Daniel Halpern.

Yes: in extreme cases, dilettante dining critics (DDCs) can even be a public hazard. I cited at least one debacle earlier here. Note also Carroll's Law (below). Let me add something, based on watching this from the Internet (by direct connection) most of the last 30 years.* Some years into the history of popular discussion fora, some contributors began labeling their informal comments "reviews" (I think I have the exact date). Others reserved that phrase mostly for professionals. -- Carroll's Law is named for a newspaper columnist who edited a regional magazine in the 1970s and described a deluge of unsolicited applications from people offering themselves as restaurant critics, with notions of their qualifications (and expected perks). He concluded basically everyone alive assumes themselves qualified as a professional restaurant critic. The validity of this observation is demonstrated regularly in the aforementioned small publications, not to speak of the Internet. *By official pronouncement, the name moved from ARPAnet to Internet in 1980. January, I think.

Old delight at perusing (printed) newspapers has degenerated (sorry: "specialized") in my case to specific sections in them, which led to arranging to get (for instance) the single issue each week of dailies carrying food or wine sections. (One food editor marveled at this when I happened to mention it recently.) The following surfaced however in the book section of today's New York Times, March 11, 2007, which (you'll now understand why) I have no online link for. Kim Severson reviewed Barry Glassner's new book The Gospel of Food. Glassner is a sociologist in Southern California. If nothing else, the following may evoke interest here: Severson reports Glassner skewering "an obnoxious subgroup of the culinary world he calls food adventurers, people who populate online communities dedicated to ethnic cuisine" and eager to try the latest ethic trend. Also, Glasser reports having some of his most memorable meals at "one of L. A's best-known restaurants" when accompanied by recognized food writers, but sub-par treatment in their absence. Severson says that he generalizes this into a rule, though my own experience differs. I've had some of the best meals of my life the last 30 years, in numerous regions, without benefit of celebrities or even knowing the restaurant.* Most of these, it's true, are less famous than top L.A. restaurants, but some are far more so. Glassner may be reading a lot into one restaurant. This is not just my guess: Severson describes "a loose observational approach based on what sometimes seem like personal hunches." (Thank goodness he's the only recent author doing that! :-) She says he jabs trade organizations for promoting news that, for instance, watermelons are found to have an important antioxidant -- what??! -- the quotation from the book comes across as contrived, witty only from a very narrow point of view. (What a target to choose, at a time when food advertising is full of boasts that foods are free of things no one ever associated with them -- what The Atlantic in a famous article once parodied as the low-cholesterol light bulb.) But I haven't seen the book itself yet, I'd be interested in comments from anyone who has. * I don't know if that counts as "food adventuring" because it entails going to the regions where the food is eaten, not local ethnic restaurants.

The "Gourmet," or GCB (Rand-McNally, 1950), benchmark US cookbook edited by Earl MacAusland with many later supplements and revisions, still populates kitchens, used bookstores, and Internet food-forum quotations. Millions were printed. In modern years it was cited in journalistic pieces about major US cookbooks (and especially, how few dealt with high cuisine). Apropos of this thread are GCB's diverting epigraphs. The poet who composed a salad and ate it. Sauce chapter intro: "There is no truth, or almost no truth, in the French-promulgated calumny that the English have a dozen religions and only one sauce. And there is little truth, if any truth, in the rebuttal that sauces serve the French instead of a state religion." [but -- it continues -- sauces and religion are legitimately linked, because sauces need devotion and reverence.] People who know the book won't forget these quips. Many of the dishes are good too. I posted a past experience with one simple but lavish recipe Here. The dish vanished quickly. The GCB pointedly uses oven-temp categories in about 25-degree increments (the original books just use words, not degrees, within recipes). For a conventional oven, that's about as fine as is physically meaningful even today. Also, in this decision the GCB bucked the US trend. Popular US cookbooks I have from the decades before GCB gave numerical temperatures routinely. On the other hand Mrs. Dull (born 1864) clearly belongs to a different era. Her oven instructions quoted above read like those in popular 19th-century US cookbooks. I looked at some of those and found oven instructions lacking consistent language (as well as lacking temperatures): "quick," "moderately brisk," etc. Probably this just shows again that there are a few useful oven temp ranges.

Side topic raised in scottie's excellent list: Is it old-fashioned, or just realistic? That's actually an important question. Budding cooks now see "18 minutes at 455 F" but don't always understand the reality (i.e., limitations) behind these precise-looking numbers. (I've seen ovens vary widely in actual temperature and cooking behaviour, and they routinely cycle up and down by 50 degrees F or more anyway, when opened and closed, when thermostat cycles, etc. Thermostats normally are what control engineers call bang-bang or on-off servomechanisms: they regulate temperature by turning a power source on and off -- not adjusting it finely -- and relying on thermal mass to slow the resulting termperature changes.) Experienced cooks therefore learn the oven and go by results. Some wise cookbooks bring out this point . The original Gourmet Cookbook -- itself a bit of literature, a point eclipsed by the recent edition -- was explicit. Preamble chapter explained what "cook until done" means, and why overprecise formulae mislead. It also sorted oven temps into about as many ranges as can be realistically distinguished -- moderately hot, hot, etc. -- and gave a table of corresponding degree ranges.

I appreciate the style and penetration of those reports, Busboy. (It's easy to see online that everyone is alike in having opinions, but different in what goes into them.) Incidentally, some of you might be surprised just how spontaneous schematic diagrams can be. Max

Sounds interesting. Can you give more info about the tasting in general? (I've been to various tastings of Burgundies over the years, "en paulée" -- it's a standard format -- though not that particular one.) -- Max

In long tradition the Ridge winery (Santa Cruz Mountains, California) shows the new wine publicly yesterday and today. This is the usual first-blend March tasting, "about three-quarters final" this time. Second showing (May 19-20) will sample final assemblage. The winery also poured two separate 2006 components from barrel (Cabernet, Merlot), 2004 Monte Bello (releasing September at $135), 1994 Monte Bello for comparison after age, and the very concentrated Monte Bello Chardonnay. In this 2006 snapshot I smelled a strong Port-de-Salut note in the nose as sometimes in this wine (97 notably) and tasted a riot of concentrated raw flavors. Compare 1990-2002 magnum notes, posted here and there. 2006 berries were small despite yields highest in a decade at 1.75 ton /acre. Ridge projects finished wine quality comparable to 2005's with its contrasting lowest yields in a decade (1 ton/acre). The earliest of this wine I've had was the 1964 (not yet labeled Monte Bello then), brought to a dinner by another winemaker and tasting friend (Ed Kurtzman), doing well at 40. (Both.) For decades, you could taste the final Monte Bello assemblage in May before deciding to order futures (the first time I did so, 1980 vintage at $15, futures remained on sale through summer). Last year (2005 vintage) saw anomalous early demand, selling out futures late March, surprising their 80 or so regular customers. I asked the winemakers yesterday why, but they didn't know -- it preceded the "30th-anniversary Paris tasting" publicity. Spillover from 2005 Bordeaux interest? More information at www.ridgewine.com . As usual, tasting indoors at US wineries -- which haven't yet cultivated public spitting -- it's handy to bring your own spit cups unless you are a sharpshooter with a spittoon. (Ding!) Cheers -- Max

A couple more years on this thread, a couple more years of colorful, sincere, often harmless folk therapy. Might be time to repeat the one important, potentially lifesaving advice. It's repeated at every opportunity* but still doesn't always "take." Avoid taking acetaminophen (in pain relievers or other medications, under various brand names) with alcohol. See Post 16 of this thread. Or Web-search on the word pair acetaminophen + alcohol and read for yourself. Wrote one biochemistry professor and textbook author: "The lethal dose of a drug divided by its effective dose is the Therapeutic Index (formerly Therapeutic Ratio). We are happy if that number is something like 1000. We are not happy if it's 2 or less, a narrow T.R. means people are going to get hurt. With Acetaminophen, if someone has a bit of liver impairment, the T.R. can approach 1. Drinking uses up certain cofactors in the liver and makes the problem worse." -- Max * Believe it or not, otherwise sharp editors fill their periodicals' inevitable pre-new-year issue with witty folk remedies but omit this famous public-health warning. It's important, because (same biochemist again): There are still "people around who haven't heard of this." Proof in this thread.

Thanks ned. I hadn't looked at the Wiki entry before; it gives a brief "Wenberg" summary similar to my summary above, and links to a relatively recent posting by Joe O'connell (2003, first entry 2001) which also gives a brief version and cites (that I spotted) no references. I remembered more detail and from the previous decade. I've now located that article -- the source is excellent -- will follow up with info.

Thanks for the comment. Though I can imagine that the upshot could be true in some broad sense, it contradicts my own experience of 1996 reds in a couple of ways. Luck isn't to be disparaged, but selective buying entered here too of course, as is often important. Wines I mention here were chosen for buying after tasting them (when new on the market) or with considerable knowledge of the producer, by experienced Burgundy fans. I tried a few score of them when new, and bought some. Other people that I taste with did likewise. We try them occasionally, including (as above) in group tastings. (Including a large tasting a couple years ago merging multiple tasting groups; Allen Meadows attended that one.) Given all of this, with 96 reds I've tried in recent years the issue was rarely that they didn't last (in fact, surprisingly, I have a Bourgogne-Rouge, cost around $15, drinking very well, and some village wines only slightly more expensive; again, they were not random). Rather, the issue especially in denser wines has been long "closed" or hibernating intervals. Some of them may stay comatose; who knows. (Some people are still waiting for 1988s to "come around" and it is getting to be a long wait ...)

Here's more, from memory, on the standard story I cited in previous hasty posting. I don't report this as precise history, but as the common account of it, fairly widespread for a couple of generations in late 20th century US. Morrison Wood gives a simplified version, and I've seen more detail in scholarly writing. "Newburg" is a synthetic name created after a falling-out between one of the Delmonico restaurants and a regular customer of the 1860s, Wenburg, honored by the dish (Ben Wenburg, in Wood's book, and a ship captain if I remember right, from elsewhere). There was a fight or a brawl, after which the restaurant kept the dish but reversed part of the name, to Newburg.