Food, Wine, Good (and Evil) Spirits

Here's the thing I hate about wine, the attitude. You know what I'm talking about. Wine should be something we enjoy and yet it easily slips into something that intimidates instead. Of course it's not the fault of the wine. It's the people who write about it, sell it and pour it who use it as a weapon against the unsuspecting. I haven't actually met any intimidating winemakers, although it may just be a matter of time.

In my quest to learn more about wine I have been attending wine events, reading up on wine but mostly tasting, as you might imagine. Reading about wine sounds like the most boring thing in the world, but as with anything else if the the writer is talented the subject turns out be fascinating. Two recent books have utterly delighted me in this regard – Lettie Teague's book Educating Peter: How Anybody Can Become an (Almost) Instant Wine Expert and Rick Kushman and Hank Beal's A Moveable Thirst: Tales and Tastes from a Season in Napa Wine Country. They actually have quite a bit in common. Both are conversations between a wine novice and an expert.

The more wines you try, the more you'll develop your palate-it's that simple.  And how you try them makes all the difference.  I know when you see wine tasters doing a lot of curious slurping it seems like a highly mysterious activity...but it's not.  Swirl, sniff and spit, that's all it is.  So why do we swirl?  What are we looking for exactly?  What is acidity?  Tannin?

The first step in wine tasting is to fill your glass until it's about a third full.  Take a good look at it.  Tilt it slightly against a white background or hold it up to the daylight to see the range of colors from the center to the rim.  Older red wines start to fade at the rim with a browny, tawny color.  Red wines from hotter climates and gutsier red grape varieties have the deepest colors.

“The Long Goodnight” 

Lady Restylane was a carnivore, a notorious coquette who left lipstick marks like business cards. But when men followed up, expecting the innuendos to lead to escapades, their calls were seldom returned. To Lady Restylane, it was all about the dance. Genuine intimacy scared the hell out of her.

There were times when her game left her so exhausted that she’d give anything just to have a normal evening. Just to have dinner with a friend. And on one ill-fated night in the City of Angels, I was that friend.

We made plans to meet at the Bicycle Shop Café, a Westside eatery that had bicycles hanging on the walls. Not exactly artwork, unless you prefer Schwinn to van Gogh.

It was half past fashionably late when Lady Restylane arrived, wearing a little black dress and stilettos that could have doubled as steak knives. She said she wanted to leave the act at home, but she couldn’t do it. She just couldn’t do it. As soon as she made her entrance, she went on a flirting binge – targeting two guys at the bar, the bartender and our waitress. After that, I stopped counting.

The email was very cryptic: “The Blindfold Dinner, April 24, 2012, at Osteria Mamma”. There wasn’t even a time, let alone an explanation. But still, how could we resist? After all, Osteria Mamma is our favorite Italian restaurant and the email is from Filippo, one of Mamma’s two sons who I became friends with first while taking an Italian Wine Specialist course and then from endless dinners at their restaurant. I hit the “reply” key on the email and write “Peggy and I will be there. What time?”

As the dinner approaches, we start to wonder exactly what will happen. The questions we keep coming back to are: (i) will it just feel silly to be blindfolded while sitting in the middle of a restaurant? (ii) will the blindfold really affect the flavor of food and our experience of it?, and most importantly, (iii) how do we avoid spilling our wine all over the people next to us? We find out that this is to be Osteria Mamma’s second Blindfold Dinner, so Peggy looks up the first on the internet and discovers that after a course is served and been experienced blindfolded, you can finish the dish with your sense of sight. (That’s when we decide to just not drink anything until we can see so our fellow dinners will all be safe.)

We get to the restaurant and are led to the back room that has a long table set for about fifteen guests. In addition to Filippo, our other host for the night is Giammario Villa, a wine educator who was one of the teachers at my wine class. Giammario is also an Italian wine importer and he is pairing the wine for the night. (At this point Peggy and I quickly reconsider and decide Giammario’s wines will be more than worth any possible risk to the clothes of those sitting next to us.)