Food, Wine, Good (and Evil) Spirits

Though I love wine, I don’t own much wine paraphernalia. Good glassware and a sturdy corkscrew is pretty much all anybody needs. Carafes are nice for entertaining. Aerators a possible necessity if you’re drinking a lot of young red wine, but I generally spend my wine dollars on wine. We have a fairly large cellar and once people find out how many bottles we have - enough to survive a year without buying more, not so much we couldn’t drink it in our lifetime - the first question is always “how much do you drink?” Let’s just say there are two of us, usually one bottle a day…you can do the math.

Leftover wine is rarely an issue in our house. Yet not everyone has a nightly wine buddy and some people just like to have a glass with dinner. Others like to try several different ones at a time. How do you make sure the wine stays as fresh as possible? Once you pull that cork oxygen begins it’s hack job trying to turn your luscious vino into vinegar. I’ve found the “re-cork it and refrigerate it” method works pretty well with most red wine, since - except for very old ones. Most reds could use a little opening up and many are better the next day doing this. However, if you’re not going to get to the wine for a few days you’re really taking a gamble. Especially if you really LOVED it the first night. (Our advice when that happens - drink it all. Seriously.) When it comes to white wines or rose, you’re pretty much guaranteed to be disappointed the next day if you don’t take some precaution against oxidation other than refrigeration.

When I got the chance to try the Savino, I figured why not give it a spin?

When you live, breathe, eat and sleep food, it can sometimes be hard to muster excitement. This doesn’t mean I’ve grown weary of food and all it involves, it just means that it takes a little extra or a tiny bit of sumthin’ sumthin’ to really knock my socks off. Not that they need constant knocking off. They don’t. I’m happy with plain most of the time.

The pleasures of food and discovery happen when you least expect it. I can remember a moment 20 years ago when I had my first Meyer lemon and I thought the earth would swallow itself. My mind was expanding with each taste of that glorious citrus and I knew life would never be the same. The same can be said of having Jamon Iberico de bellota, a proper supplì, even Wisconsin cheese curds for the very first time. I can count those moments on one hand.

Last month in Italy I had another one of those moments at dinner. It was a fish dish with a very simple aioli––or so I thought. It turns out that the aioli was made with Colatura, an extremely flavorful Italian condiment made from fish and salt. My eyes must have given my excitement away as our dinner neighbor Fabio looked at me and said “It’s Colatura. There’s Colatura in here.” He explained how it’s made, telling me fish sauce has been used for thousands of years in Italy.

A coffee farmer shared with me that the most injury prone job picking coffee involves climbing.  When one hand is holding the tree and the other a machete--what are you left with to swat the bugs?  

Last March I traveled to a coffee plantation in Nicaragua to help run a volunteer medical and dental clinic for the workers, their families, and the villagers.  The team set up shop in an open-air church and saw 1,200 patients in a week.  Babies with distended bellies from parasites, respiratory infections, decayed teeth, dehydration.  Patients lined up.  Machete wounds were common.  One involved a bee.

I was overwhelmed by the emotion of it--watching some brave person getting teeth pulled, barely betraying their pain.  I would walk out to the rainforest and indulge in a good cry.  I expected the week to be hard--what surprised me was the joy.  Despite the intense emotions, I also laughed harder that week than I could remember doing for a long time.  (Sometimes because the very earnest nurses were so bad at Spanish.  Also there was a broken toilet seat incident.)  It's no secret.  Volunteering feeds the soul.  

The other day I took a walk through Wally's, my local wine emporium's autumn sale and was bottle shocked by the number of kosher wine choices on display—Ninety-seven Jewtique labels. From Israel to Australia to the Valley of Napa, there are rabbis rendering grapes right for Jewish tables the world over.

Although pleased as wine punch that my brethren can sip with confidence from so many vineyards at all the holiday tables to come, I felt drowned in a sudden wave of nostalgia, for, over in a less popular corner, I spied some "Man Oh Manischewitz – What a Wine" languishing, neglected for a mere $4.99 in its own dust.  

And a flood of bittersweet tasting memories ensued…of my parentally enforced Prohibition.  The years of my youth when I was served Welch's grape juice in a grown up glass at the holidays to placate my longing for the real deal.  I sipped the faux, while the elders were slurping Manichevitz, the manna of the God, the only choice in that era, with lip-smacking satisfaction.  I'd lift my grape laced goblet, toast and boast—'Lookit! Lookit how fast I can drink it!"