Craig Camp

Winners! Dateline: Montrachet - there is no town of Montrachet, France - only a vineyard. The two towns of the area are Chassagne and Puligny, both of which have hyphenated the name of the famous vineyard onto their name. At the end they do finally say the restaurant is in Chassagne.

hint: 1st paragraph

Apparent plans to reconstruct the medieval hilltop village Montalcino as a resort in Napa killed by planners.

Can you spot the mistake???? The wine prices and food look good though.

Right on the heels of a $365,000 offering of Château Latour in Los Angeles, a 77-lot consignment of Latour brought in $439,450 (inclusive of the 17.5 percent buyer's premium) at a NYWinesChristie's sale in Manhattan today. The massive offering was consigned directly from the château by François Pinault, the owner of both Latour and Christie's auction house. The sale total exceeded pre-sale high estimates by 65 percent, and the lots were 90 percent sold.

6 bottle cases have been popular in Europe for a long time. It is a convenient size for retail sales and for restaurants with little storage, but the warehouse people in the USA hate them. It is also a great pack for highly allocated wines. That way you can get your 6 bottles in a nice box with a logo instead of an old Vodka box.

Trouble maker. Do we really need to lower the tannins and open the fruit of BN? Beside the Wine Clip seems a little pricy to buy for $6 wine.

Most carbonic maceration wines are very tasty with pizza, which contrary to popular belief can be a difficult wine match. A chilled nouveau, packed with fruit, can be a refreshing compliment. I will also think of it as the fast food wine of choice: Kentucky Fried, Big Macs, Taco Bell and Italian Beef sandwiches are also natural matches and Rick Bayless' Burger King chicken sandwich must be perfect although I have never had one.

The Domaine des Terres Dorees is an absolutly beautiful wine - bottled elegance and refinement. Here is a tasting note on another great gamay: Touraine, Clos Roche Blanche, Gamay, 2001, Organically grown Ecocert Certifed C. Roussel et D. Barrouillet Brilliant ruby/purple. Fresh cherry/raspberry aromas with an underlying touch of spices. This lovely wine is absolutely alive on the palate. The fresh acidity makes the bright flavors of dark wild fruits - cherry and plum - just explode on your palate. The amazing blend of delicacy and lightness on the palate combined with the literally singing fruit flavors have to be tasted to be believed. An extraordinary wine that will challenge palates deadened by over-extracted wines laden with alcohol and tannin. Drinking this wine is like watching a ballet.

Is fun allowed at wine tastings? Have you ever been Paris Hilton's date at a wine tasting? No, but he keeps trying to take me.

Gee, that was always my thoughts about Gamay... more than six months in the bottle and it was gone. Joke alert: The thing about keeping nouveau for your kids was humor. Aging your nouveau for more than six hours is at your own risk. Beaujolais Nouveau goes through an important change after aging in the store for six months: it drops in price by 90%. The Wine Forum apologizes for the confusion.

Is fun allowed at wine tastings?

I am a huge fan of gamay in the hands of great producers. These wines have nothing to do with nouveau which is more a product of a fermentation method (carbonic maceration) than a particular varietal. You have not tasted gamay until you have tasted the Loire and Beaujolais selections of Joe Dressner at Louis/Dressner Selections. You can find out more information about Louis/Dressner HERE Or you can also breeze through the tasting notes of Florida Jim, resident fine gamay expert by doing a search Here

Have you tried some of the Italian stuff? That's been very good recently. However, no Italian is being distributed around here this year. I was at a large supermarket last weekend at there must of been twenty different brands of Italian nouveau stacked up. Prices started at less than Euro 2 - a fair price I would say. I resisted the urge and went home and drank a gutsy wine from Puglia to clear my palate from even the idea of drinking one.

Piper-Heidsieck, the Grande Marque of Champagne, has made a notable introduction to the wine and spirits market this month. Cuvee Sublime, Piper-Heidsieck's much-anticipated new premium demi-sec Champagne, has arrived on shelves across the country just in time for this year's celebrations.

“It’s a delicacy,” said Hubert Laverriere, president of AOC Beaujolais, the wine certification board.

At the annual Hospices de Beaune auction on Nov. 16, optimistic Burgundy merchants paid a surprising 21.4 percent more for the 2003 wines than they did for the red and white Burgundies of the high quality 2002 vintage, auctioned last year.

I have a beat up old moka, but the bar two minutes walk from our house has a espresso machine that I think cost more than an Ferrari - and looks almost as good. I let them make my espresso.

Very cool - and this was extremely cool

I know this will come as a shock to everyone, but I like to add grappa. Not that ultra-modern clean stuff like Nonino, but good strong old fashioned stuff. Caffe correcto - as it is called in in Italy - warms up everthing.

You must of gotten this recipe from the "Heart Association Cookbook". The amount of cheese vs. rice is astounding. I don't see how this could be called a 'risotto' as the flavor of the rice must be buried under all that cheese. However with all that gorgonzola, parmigiano and butter it could be a great cheese dish. Also - 1. Only 2 cups of stock for 1lb. rice? It just doesn't sound possible to cook the rice to even an al dente stage. 2. Why do you use olive oil for the soffrito and then follow it up with all that butter. For me the olive oil makes the risotto too - well oily.

Great stuff Andre, fascinating. Thanks for sharing this information which would certainly be difficult for most of us to find or experience.

Howard's Wine Cellar on Belmont in the city has a small, but well chosen selection. Howard Silverman, the owner, is one of Chicago's top German wine experts.

I very rarely drink white wine. A sip gives me an instant headache. Since I'm often cooking with white wine for my family only, what do I do with the rest of the bottle? Given that I am almost always using it only for cooking purposes, can I freeze it? How long does an opened bottle last in the fridge? Many large liquor stores sell the small 187 ml. size bottles - like the ones used on airplanes. These are only produced by large commercial wineries and are not too expensive. The perfect size for cooking.

maggie - If you listen carefully you should be able to hear a painful scream. I am sure it carried the 4,000 miles and should be getting there just about now.