MaxH

Thank you chromedome for an interesting and constructive posting! I hope you will continue. Some ancient wine-producing regions have seen their ups and downs. (To give an example that is comparatively modern, Bulgaria was an old wine-loving country that, during Ottoman domination, experienced a Prohibition for nearly 500 years, 1396 to 1878. In contrast the US experiment 1919-1933 was a dabble.) It sounded as if you might be in Canada, chromedome, but wherever you are, could you say more about what firm imported these wines from the Transcaucasian republic of Georgia? -- Max N.B.: A dozen years ago in the US I was introduced to a young couple "from Georgia." So I asked politely, "Georgia as in Jimmy Carter, or as in Shalikashvilli?" (Then or a little earlier, a high US official had been an immigrant from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia.) "Shalikashvilli!," they responded with pride.

I posted a Potluck follow-up in the California subforum. -- Max

Yes indeed, through the late 60s too, as I recall. Also Brock's Bird Store (Shattuck Avenue near University, near the Potluck restaurant seminal to that town's gastronomic history, such as it is) offered horse meat into the 1970s. (That shop sold pet food, and I don't know if anyone was buying there for human use.) This touches on a bit of deep local history there, to Spanish colonial days (which is, however, waaay off-topic here, and would belong in the California forum, if anywhere). -- Max

I took a look in my copy and saw no mention of Japan in the bio sections. (Which are however anecdotal.)

I understood (from California) what chefadzi was getting at. There is some sensitivity, and some history, after all. The late Julia Child resenting French uninterest in being instructed on how to do their own country's traditional cooking (by a foreigner who began learning about it only when she was nearly 40) and her subsequent comment in the Washington Post that "French women don't know a damn thing about French cooking." (I should mention that I know Chez Panisse and have eaten there occasionally since it opened, and have good regard for it. I too expereinced referring people to it who didn't "get" what the restaurant was about. That problem is not unique to Panisse, either.) The Las Vegas parallel sounded like a different, or reverse, analogy. (Unless there is an ancient tradition of Las Vegas cooking I don't know about, that inspired the out-of-town chefs, who then came back to Vegas to show their own ideas. )

You can also try microwaving wines. An international news story several years ago described a "breakthrough" in China whereby the normal aging process was accelerated by exposing wines to radio or microwave energy. (I haven't heard anything about it since.)

Until catching up here I didn't realize that "tastevin" was a big deal. I've talked to many people in the US and France who use the word. In the US it is phoneticized sometimes like tat-uh-van with the last "n" mostly implied, as in the usual French vin. Pronunciation is even and staccato, rat-tat-tat. With the variation that some people pronounce the S. (In Yoxall's classic British book on Burgundy, which I mentioned in the wine forum, the S is silent.) That may not be the exact original but they understand it fine in France. -- Max

"Emeril" wines? God help us all. (But wait, they're "Classics.") By the way to the interesting testimonials here let me mention -- not about wine but along the same line -- the comment posted elsewhere by someone who met a celebrity Chinese chef and asked him about the menu for the chain of semi-fast-food restaurants, which were then opening, bearing the chef's name. According to the comment, the chef affably said that he really had no idea of the menu, he had little to do with it all.

When in Rome ... This place-name sounds to me (from French people) more like Rhhhannnnnzzz, with a gutteral aspiration in the Rhhh part, a flat prolonged short A vowell, and the N only implied. (That is similar to how US writers have phoneticized it in the past.) A few years ago when L'Académie française ("institution créée en 1635, chargée de définir la langue française") started defining "Franglaise" out of the language, and fining hapless engineers 100 Francs because they lapsed for a moment and wrote the same modern words everyone else writes, like "byte" and "computer," someone in the US -- in Atlantic Monthly I think -- proposed that, while they were at it, L'Académie ought also to finally rationalize the pronunciation of Rheims. (When those engineers remember themselves, by the way, they use words from the whole Newspeak vocabulary that had to be created in France -- respectively, "octet" and "ordinateur" for the examples I used above.)

Exactly. When I was learning about wine in the middle 1970s, Beaujolais Nouveau was a footnote in wine writing, a frivolous thing "consumed by the pitcher by the locals in the bistros of Lyon," not a wine to travel, or to fuss over In 1977 Narsai's restaurant in Kensington, California saw big fuss over a shipment by air of the Nouveau that year, at if I remember, $15 (1977 dollars, circa $45 today) per carafe. My introduction to the departure from the Nouveau's tradition, and the manufacturing of a new one. (Wine writers soon mentioned a new marketing campaign.) Excellent point. Life flourishes amid just such complexities and tradeoffs. -- Max “Santé, gaieté, espérance!”

Bravo Pedro, that last question says it beautifully. (We modern North Americans have an awkward relationship with food and we find our way in fits and starts, often changing direction. Give us a few hundred more years and we may get it right. :-)

Sounds about like what happened with Foie Gras. In my great great grandparents' time, people in California ate things like crabs, pigs' feet, and (if they wished) opium. (If anyone talked about banning foods because they were not approved, folks would have laughed.) How things have changed.

In the weird little classic movie Beat the Devil (1954), the large British actor Robert Morley finds himself in unknown foreign parts and declares to his fellow travelers that the first thing you must do with foreigners is to insist on speaking to them in English. That will let them know who is in charge. (Or similar words.)

(Hey, watch it. It's one thing to be helpful, but you don't need to spill the beans ... ) A little more Yoxall, by way of review and recommendation, if anyone is interested (especially anyone who followed this back here from the "24-carat" thread): There is a much-quoted Burgundian saying about Chambertin, that it is `like the Good Lord in velvet trousers, gliding down your gullet.’ This strikes me as one of the silliest among the many silly sayings about wine. But Chambertin is certainly velvety. ... A church dignitary of Conti’s acquaintance, to whom the prince had sent a sample, was the first, but by no means the last, to describe [Vosne-Romanée] wines as `at once velvet and satin.’ (No nonsense here about God and trousers.) ... There are two of the comparatively rare Burgundy châteaux at Chambolle-Musigny, neither very old and each called the Châteaux de Chambolle-Musigny, which is not very helpful. The older one has splendid cellars. ... I have paid out little money to better end than that which I have spent on sound burgundy. -- H. W. Yoxall, The Wines of Burgundy, 1968, ISBN 0140462007, or 2nd edition, ISBN 0812860918.

Out of print, but not off the market. No! On the recent "French Burgundy" thread here, where I recommended Yoxall for reading pleasure, I mentioned used copies starting at $1.90 on amazon.com if I recall right. (Internet commerce has done amazing things to the former concept of "out of print" -- sometimes the "out of print" and used books can be got faster than the new.)The "French Burgundy" thread is the right place for any more on that particular author. He had a particular angle on the question of this current thread, about "picking out things like wild, jammy, slightly risqué character." (Or raspberries, truffles, violets, and oatmeal.) By the way I do eat oatmeal, and I smell it in Meursaults.

One of the mainstream US wine writers a generation ago (Alexis Bespaloff?) quoted a local quip that three rivers flow into the town of Lyon, south of the Beaujolais region: The Rhône, the Saône, and the river of Beaujolais [wine]. (Meaning, then, mostly traditional or "real" Beaujolais -- the growth in marketing and production of the seasonal "Beaujolais Nouveau" still lay in the future.) -- Max

Yes that's the other famous one in Dutch. If you really hear natives pronouncing it fully, it is an alien thing to Anglophones, almost a cough. It is unphoneticizable in English. A food-fanatic friend (who is a professor of comp. lit., and functional in various tongues) insists that it is too much to expect native English speakers to use the Dutch pronunciation of van Gogh "if they are in good health." -- M

Wow! Vast thread. French has its irregularities but still seems much more consistent than English. Therefore many words are pronounced by regular rules. What I found interesting in the wine names are the irregularities -- which many people pronounce "wrong," even natives. In 1980 in Boston, having even less French than now, I attended a tasting. When the speaker said "Cos d'Estournel," sounding the first S, I asked about it. He said that the people there pronounce it that way, though of course "they could be wrong." GG mentioned "Montrachet," one of the famous. (Both Ts silent.) A nearby case is Aloxe-Corton, "Aloss" unlike the X of "fixe." (Probably we should not talk about these in public, because they are superb shibboleths for anyone who pretends false expertise of the wines, these words always give them away.) (Like "Scheveningen" in the second world war, or "Schipol." Years of practice with tolerant native Nederlanders are necessary [1]). Back to France, "Tastevin" is mixed: Some pronounce the S, some don't (even within a single well-known winemaking family, in Burgundy). (Hint: Starts with D.) Austrian wines are colorful: Grüner Veltliner, Blaufränkisch, Weissburgunder, Rotgipfler. They have regular German pronunciation. "Grüner" is somewhere between Greener and Gruner, veering to the former to my ear. "Veltliner" is felt-leaner in US phoneticization. Think of feeling leaner while you sip! The region where I live has many Vietnamese immigrants and thousands of Pho restaurants and I have always heard "fuh." (Of course, "they could be wrong.") FWIW! -- Max [1] Once there I naively pronounced the name of Gouda cheese as “goo-dah” with the hard G. This prompted incredulity, and many demands for encore. The Nederlanders had never heard such a word before, and would not believe my story that this pronunciation was common in the US. ("Must be French influence," they speculatd, "at least the vowel part.") To them the G was the strongly aspirated H sound of of loCH and Omar KHayyám; the vowel sound was OW, not OO.

"[Chambolle-Musigny] is said to smell of raspberries, as Echézeaux is said to do of truffles and Clos Vougeot of violets, but I must have an insensitive nose as I never catch these nuances; good wines of these communes just seem to me to have a lovely vinuous bouquet, with Echézeaux the most pronounced." ... "The great white wines of Meursault rank only after the Montrachet group and Corton-Charlemagne. They are very dry, yet ingratiatingly soft. Some ascribe to them a taste of oatmeal, but I don’t eat much oatmeal, fortunately, so am no judge. Others speak of their flavour of peaches, and here for once I am with them, for I can detect this ..." H[arold] W[aldo] Yoxall, The Wines of Burgundy, first edition (IW&FS), 1968, Penguin paperback ISBN 0140462007. Also in the second edition, 1978, ISBN 0812860918. Edit to mention: That was one writer's take on the taste-language issue that GG asked about at the start of this thread. (Yoxall, who was a soldier in the first world war, and wrote his very popular book on Burgundies 50 years later, and it's filled with flippant quips about things, from Siamese Cats to "nonsense about God and trousers.")

FYI a number of people have asked me about the 2002 vintage and I thought I'd repeat here what I know. (I was tasting them in bottle, there, in September and have worked through some few dozen more 02's since then via the co-operative tasting groups I mentioned above.) 2002 suffered a market quirk in being hyped by the press "from the moment the grapes were picked" as a long-time Burgundy expert put it to me. That factor drew unusual early interest which, with the big drop in dollar value for products sold initially in Euros, caused high early prices in the US. Some of them are coming back onto market now at more moderate prices. Of the cross-section of 2002 reds I've sampled (more C. de Nuits than C. de Beaune) there is a tendency to immediate charm that I did not see in 01 or 00. A notion is current among some wine enthusiasts that early charm implies a poor future. I don't expect that all of these people have very many years of early-tasting experience on which to base such a comment because if they did, they'd recall how the 1999, 1996, and 1985 vintages, which all stood out from the adjacent vintages for both solid structure (fruit-acid-tannin-mineral) and also early charm, have proven out as exceptional vintages of the last two decades. -- Max

Exactly! As a forthright Scotswoman put it to me in California a year ago, pointing to a bottle of typical SB, "It's the wrong color! It's not Sauvignon-Blanc-colored! You people in California are always over-oaking your white varietals!" (She was comparing to some of the excellent SB's from other countries.) SB need not be completely pale without heavy oaking, but it may have a greenish tinge that you don't see when it's highly oaked.

Strongly endorse Afghani House. (It's one of those many classy "ethnic" restaurants in Santa Clara County that I cite as a group from time to time.) Ali Tehari opened it in a former Mexican-restaurant location in (?) December 1994 and was immediately superb; I just returned recently and it was maintaining its standards. (Tehari was there, working hard as usual. He's the wise-looking gent with the beard.) Charcoal-grilled skewered marinated meats served with pilaf and green sauce of hot pepper and mint. Stir-fries with garlic and tomatoes. Exquisite little dumpling and turnover appetizers with yoghurt -- Bulanee, Mantu. Chelokebabi (sp?) is its Persian cousin a few blocks further into Sunnyvale, same street, a bit lower-key, again lots of savory courses with skewers and spiced meatballs &c. (Ludja did you know about the radical changes at Hardy's since he retired a year or so ago? It used to be one of my regular favorites also but it has changed.) Concerning bistros (brasseries would be more apt, technically, for what I will mention), yes Left Bank (a small chain) lately expanded with three new locations including San José (the Santana Row site mentioned here) and they have their strengths. Important! Not mentioned yet, that I could see, were the two creditable, independent true French brasseries (with the casual foods you don't see in many US "French" concepts) -- both run by youngish immigrants from France -- Brigitte's, right in Santa Clara next to a golf course, link here, and Le Petit Bistro in Mountain View, link here, both very worthwhile, very real, in my few visits each, and moderately priced.

What superb spirit in this thread! Excellent comments -- Brad B's best of wines / worst of wines, and the others. I'd like especially to endorse this one, from an obviously wise and experienced source: A liberating, empowering course of action. (After random friendly and commercial tastings, I got into a regular group in 1982 and it has been practical, enlightening and fun. Today I'm also in three others-- two fully and one partly for Burgundies. Probably too many, but they have their ways of becoming difficult when I move to pull out -- like some cults -- beware! ). Anyway, these are an excellent way of surveying new arrivals on the market, and deciding what to buy, even if you have lots of experience with the wines. If you want to have some fun, dig up a used copy (it's widely available, Amazon has editions for $1.90) of Yoxall's little paperback Wines of Burgundy (Two main editions were 1968 and 1978.) It's an old standard introductory book. Producer and style comments are obsolete, but the background info ("Some optional history / Some compulsory geography") is very concise, and also, Yoxall's wry wit is readable in its own right. (It was a thin introductory book, did for Burgundy what Ozias's All About Wine did for wines in general around the same time, in the US.

That is very interesting perspective. Could you repeat it more loudly, for the benefit of wine newbies across the Atlantic who've been heard (in recent years) on popular wine Web sites, demanding that the rest of the world fall in with varietal labeling so they can "know what is in the bottle?" (Until very recently, the solution to that problem was to learn about wine...)

Jeez louise. (As if engineers didn't have image problems already!) Engineering doesn't preclude interest in food of course. Don't overlook that the original public Internet food forums (of which this is one descendant) were launched by engineers (in the 1980s). In the 1980s also, one food fanatic, Steve Upstill (later of Pixar fame) sold the "-MU Recipe Formatting Macro Package," the first, or one of the first, of the document-formatting tools for recipes. Some engineers even combine food with wit, including the immortal Rube Goldberg (Berkeley, class of 1904): "No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney." -- Rube Goldberg (as quoted by Lee Roth in <1259@sousa.ltn.dec.com>, 1989)