by Christina Waters | Apr 21, 2007 | Home |
In our house, Green & Black’s preternaturally intense combination of dark chocolate, currents and hazelnuts, is considered the ne plus ultra. It rules. Granted this is a chocolate experience with so much gravitas that you really cannot multi-task while you experience it. Your full attention and nothing less is required by this perfectly balanced creation of organic cacao, fruit and nuts. Welcome to our jungle — where the finest sweets can make the difference between existential darkness and going toward the light. Chocolate at once bitter and voluptuous doesn’t come along every day. Luckily it has come along in our lifetime. Not for everyone, it will appeal to those for whom personal preference borders on fanaticism. You know who you are.
by Christina Waters | Apr 21, 2007 | Home |
Another one of my addictions – Chocolove’s 55% cocoa-rich dark chocolate bar laced with a secondary layer of bitterness in the form of orange peel. This beautiful indulgence ($2.99) is consistently bittersweet all the way through, from intense-yet-accessible start, to smooth, clean finish. The hint of orange peel adds a subtext of tropical midnight, like Angostura bitters embedded in the aroma of night. Orange wrapper. Try it.
by Christina Waters | Apr 16, 2007 | Home |
Think of the Manet painting – the Barmaid at the Follies Bergere – as you consider this view of Katie Cater, sommelier and oenophile at Ristorante Avanti. With Cater’s guidance, I chose a soft, ripe Fuentespina Ribera del Duero 2001 to accompany a recent dinner of flawless chicken cacciatore. I’ve been ordering this dish at Avanti for a decade, and it has never been better than it was last week, succulent braised thigh and leg burnished with red wine, rosemary and top note of sage. There’s always some tangy green – broccoli rabe, endive, chard – that accompanies the chicken, although I confess that the soft pillow of polenta that soaks up those juices is pretty much the prime reason to order this dish. Perfect with the Spanish wine. Cater knew that.
by Christina Waters | Apr 16, 2007 | Home, Wine |
Take a careful look at this label. Memorize it. Now go out and find one just like it and bring it home. This is your new best friend, oenologically-speaking. It is Bonny Doon Vineyards‘ 2004 Syrah Le Pousseur, loaded with meaty tones of spice, cassis, some indefinable berry and a top note of eucalyptus. Maybe bay leaves. Whatever. This is a wine to delve deeply into, or simply to enjoy while thumbing through your dog-eared copy of The Three Sigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Already this wine — another star from the intergalactic consciousness of wine auteur Randall Grahm — is ample and complex enough to match any rack of lamb, molecule for molecule. Given a few more years it will be able to enter any Rhône intensive in the northern hemisphere. Well under $20 but drinks like a whole lot more.
by Christina Waters | Apr 16, 2007 | Home, Wine |
Vitiphiliacs and Bonny Doon Vineyards wine club members gathered at the winery last Saturday, for a dinner of rustic elegance wrapped around some sensational wines. Convened by BD founder Randall Grahm, the dinner helped to introduce the latest oenologic from the irrepressible impresario du vin. Sure enough, the “David Bowie of wine” is reinventing his vintage dreamscape once again, only this time instead of a predictable expansion, Bonny Doon Vineyards is in the midst of a surgical down-sizing. Way down. Determined to return to the roots of his personal vision, Grahm is transitioning from mega-winery (450,000 cases last year), to a micro, hand-made, biodynamic, all-Santa Cruz Mountains estate facility. With the re-configuration of priorities, comes a new marketing strategist, Burke Owens, recently of Napa’s Copia, and former sommelier at Masa’s….But back to the dinner.
Randall explained to me over chilled Erbaluce di Caluso spumante and crisp baguettes topped with alderwood-smoked salmon that he was aggressively seeking new vineyard property in the Santa Cruz Mountains. And a renewed quest for terroir baby, terroir. And after years of making his reputation as a leading Rhône Ranger, thanks to BD’s wildly successful Syrah, Grenache, Mourvedre and Roussane blends, Grahm is once again slouching toward Burgundy. “I really feel that pinot noir is something I want to try in a new way.†So the focus is now intensified. (more…)
by Christina Waters | Apr 11, 2007 | Home |
Purists beware! I love this stuff even though it lacks the required shade of political correctness, the highest possible cacao content and the appropriate “save the world” branding. It’s just killer Swiss dark chocolate that comes in tiny plump squares filled with impossibly succulent chocolate truffle creaminess. Mouthfeel and then some. I have two of these after lunch and my IQ soars, I love everybody and I attack my mammoth workload with a positive (okay, at least not negative) attitude. Lindt Chocolate Truffle bar – under $3. Life-affirming chocolate. Ummmmm.
