MaxH

Copia I’ve spent little enough time in the Napa area in California despite growing up nearby, and visiting family on the other side of it, and that little time was, anyway, mostly before the shift from agricultural to recreational renown. By 1987 in Napa wine country, “one is treated as a tourist,” complained David Yee on a Bay Area Internet newsgroup (message 10276@cgl.ucsf.edu) which I answered that generally one IS a tourist, so where is the problem?. By 2003 a wine Web-site contributor would cite offhand “the hordes of tourists just looking to get schnockered on the weekend” along Highway 29 as justifying winery tasting-room fees. (Both were uncommon in times now past.) I was a tourist this weekend, with some friends of whom one was involved a little in the design of museum exhibits at the Copia center in Napa (www.copia.org) and she was eager to show us the place. (Also, it was her birthday.) I was pleasantly impressed viewing Copia, and would happily return. The grounds seemed serene and relaxing. (One of our group, arriving early, hiked for an hour on the trails behind the building.) The displays on US food and wine history, which could so easily have been shallow or commercial, actually reveal some of the complexities, the bite. Irony is not overlooked. For example the account of a Mr. Graham, a 19th-century preacher of the health benefits from whole grains and vegetarianism, giving the US the idiom “Graham flour” to fine whole-wheat (UK “wholemeal”) flour [1], ends with the unpolished reality that despite his own therapy, Graham remained sickly all his life and died relatively young. Classic US cookbooks appear in hands-on facsimile editions, starting with Eliza Leslie’s influential 1837 Directions for Cookery (still regarded by people who know it as one of the very best US cookbooks written) [2]. The display on wines does start with an introductory paragraph on wines being non-mainstream in US habits (labels unfamiliar to many people, sommeliers and rituals intimidating, etc.) but then the text makes as if to depart from this picture today, though I believe that many people would still call it apt. At the end of the exhibits, a visitor-comments display raises thoughtful and provocative points. We heard some inside bits about the displays (one of them has 144 forks, contractor staffers went out for fast food all over to get the wrappers in the wrapper display, the large wine bottle that serves as a video screen with selectable labels was technically hard). The building has two floors, with exhibits upstairs, and meeting and demonstration facilities scattered around. The large and partly volunteer staff, all of whom seemed enthusiastic on that day, were preparing for an evening function in the facility as the museum closed we left. Ogier Côte-Rôtie Even with California’s wine accomplishments, highlighted at Copia, US consumers can get wines of many countries and need not limit themselves. So too with the long wine list in a popular restaurant at dinner in nearby Yountville (whose chef was especially kind to my friend with the birthday). As designated wine geek at this dinner, I checked the list and marked prospects with the wooden clothespins lying around (they had been napkin holders). As I discussed wines for the meal, the sommelier too was enthusiastic about the 1995 Ogier Côte-Rôtie. And with reason, we all saw later. The nose was amazing even for a good Côte-Rôtie. Lush with wild raspberries, surprisingly Burgundian anise, and complexity. A wine to match the one in Rouff’s Passionate Epicure that “blew into the soul like a good ocean wind into a sail, all the sunshine it had stolen, all the fervour of that baked earth of the Rhone Valley, its spiritual mother-country, and which, in waves of enlaced tannin and raspberry, brought to the brain a marvellous lucidity.” I bought the 1997 of this wine when it was current in the market; how I wish I’d bought the 95 too. Details: [1] Among the dialect differences between US and UK English, most are more important and better known than “Graham cracker” vs. “digestive biscuit” -- the two are not quite equivalent, either -- but few have a longer history online. (An example is currently publicly archived here.) [2] Eliza Leslie’s book is readily available today new or used in the Dover facsimile edition as ISBN 0486406148.

What about gaffes in restaurant names? I didn't spot any mention of it yet in this thread, but for years, in the Los Angeles area, two local French restaurants had names that would make an editor wince. (Or any well-trained US high-school graduate from 1900, say.) One of the names had an article wrong (le vs. la) while the other meant, evidently, to name itself for the Bordeaux wine subregion St.-Estèphe, but deployed an acute accent rather than a grave one (as we say in English); the result sounds different. The signs with these names were displayed for years, I first saw them in the early 1990s. Don't forget the ancient (23-year-old) online caution (available in RFC1855) about the implications of correcting someone else's language in a posting. A restaurant sign, though, is a different thing, no? -- MaxH

Thanks slkinsey for a succinct synopsis of much of the current informed US thinking about absinthe. The feeverte.net site cited in your posting was also the information source that I mentioned in the dialog linked in my previous posting on this thread. That site has grown in activity in recent years. To the synopsis let me add a few personal observations. Some years ago (before egullet was active and feeverte was as conspicuous as now), a bibliography and partial summary of existing pharmacological sources, widely accessible to the general reader, was posted online by a staffer at UCSF Medical School named Baggott. I last downloaded it in 2000 and it was an evolving document but it has been on and off line, and I don't know its current status. (This is not the 1993 "Baggott absinthe FAQ" that has numerous recent links online, but a later compendium.) The subject is a specialized one, showing up (in depth) more in contexts like ethnobotany than in practical pharmacological texts that I have seen, such as the mainstream Goodman and Gilman. Also in 2001, I put some notes on amazon.com in connection with Barnaby Conrad's popular 1989 book on this subject (reprinted 1997). Updated observations from practical absinthes are in the very recent thread I linked in the previous message. The standard current explanation for an unusual subjective effect from this cordial concerns interaction of multiple herbs, it is certainly not from thujone alone, which as explained elsewhere is also the active component in sage. Absinthe queries are traditional on Internet forums, I remember answering one circa 1987. My first experience with commercial absinthes was in 1982. The last few years saw an explosion of interest in $100 imported absinthe products from people in the US (especially in their 20s). My own opinion is that many of these products are bogus (in the sense of departing from the spirit of the original Swiss-French Pernod product) but that does not stop people from buying them. (I also think that the stuff even at its best is mainly a novelty: For flavor, I'd always prefer a good single malt, which is apt to be better value too.) My two cents' worth. -- Max

Of possible interest re absinthes and thujone and further info sources. On the assumption that you have some patience, and further that this site doesn't mind an occasional cross-reference to another. (I've no connection there, other than supplying some of the absinthe info.) It was a recent and unusual thread on the WCWN wine site that began with meat stocks and moved to absinthe, with a segue via Beano and its many benefits and also the chemistry involved. (Frank D. is academic chemist in residence on that site. Many online wine fora, if not too large, seem to have their resident chemistry professor, it is a long tradition.) Here is a compressed link to the entire "stock" thread: http://tinyurl.com/5exv4 Absinthe enters at the bottom of the first "page," at least on my display. (This may not, though, address the original question here.)