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Harvey Steiman At Large
New law in California being challenged, flouted
Posted: July 12, 2012 By Harvey Steiman
I have been ambivalent about the foie gras ban that took effect in California July 1. It doesn’t affect my food choices, as I gave up the fatty delicacy years ago—a double whammy of high cholesterol and a tendency to gout on my part. And while I am generally with the animal rights folks when it comes to clubbing baby seals and exposing inhumane farming practices, I wonder whether this controversy should have risen to the level it’s reached.
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Harvey Steiman At Large
Kendall-Jackson's Durell Vineyard 1986 is still graceful and alluring
Posted: July 2, 2012 By Harvey Steiman
Rummaging around the cellar for something interesting for dinner with old friends, I brought up my last bottle of Kendall-Jackson Syrah Durell Vineyard 1986. It had held up beautifully, wowing everyone at the table.
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Harvey Steiman At Large
Barb Stuckey, author of Taste What You're Missing, discusses the subjectivity of taste over lunch at San Francisco's Wo Hing General Store
Posted: June 26, 2012 By Harvey Steiman
Barb Stuckey loves a glass of good Sauvignon Blanc, often at the end of a day in which she might be tasting everything but wine. She might be called upon to weigh in on the latest efforts at tortilla chips, cereals, processed garlic purees and inventive pizzas or, as required recently, analyze a few upscale chain restaurants, all in her job leading the marketing and consumer research functions at Mattson, a Bay-Area company that develops new foods.
When she started at Mattson, the business school graduate had no clue what the food experts were talking about as they dissected the food they tasted. But she learned, and soon what she knew about tasting made dining in her nonprofessional life a more satisfying experience. That was the impetus for her book, published this year: Taste What You’re Missing: The Passionate Eater’s Guide to Why Good Food Tastes Good (Free Press, 407 pages, $26).
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Harvey Steiman At Large
Some of America's best practioners of "foreign" cuisines aren't very foreign at all
Posted: June 21, 2012 By Harvey Steiman
When a foreign cuisine first wowed you in a restaurant, was it in a storefront run by a recent immigrant, or did it happen in a fancier place created by an American chef or restaurateur passionate about a cuisine that at one point was just as foreign to him or her as it was to you?
Some of the best-known practitioners in the U.S. of Thai, Mexican, Chinese and other “foreign” cuisines are Americans with no familial ties to the cultures in question. Andy Ricker recently opened branches in New York of Pok Pok, his hyper-successful Portland, Ore., Thai restaurant. Ed Schoenfeld of RedFarm, a stylized Chinese restaurant, and Alex Stupak of Empellón Cocina, a Mexican restaurant, have also wowed New York critics and customers. Rick Bayless of Chicago restaurants Frontera Grill and Topolobampo is acknowledged to be America’s master of Mexican cooking. All of them were referenced recently in a New York Times story, which asked who should best represent ethnic cuisines in the public’s mind.
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Harvey Steiman At Large
Oregon's 2010 and 2011 Pinot Noirs offer pleasant surprises
Posted: June 11, 2012 By Harvey Steiman
After a week in Willamette Valley tasting Oregon’s 2010 and 2011 Pinot Noirs, I am impressed. If delicacy is what you crave, these vintages provided the framework for it. If you love rich wines and think delicate Pinot Noirs can’t have ripe flavors, these vintages might persuade you otherwise.
My enthusiasm comes with a couple of caveats, however. One is the weather, which posed serious challenges in both vintages. Unlike 2008, when making exceptional wine was pretty much a no-brainer, negotiating the cool, rainy conditions of 2010 and 2011 required skills that only those who had experienced them before could muster. As a result, you can’t just pluck a bottle off the shelf. A significant percentage of producers missed. Some missed by a wide margin.
News & Features
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What We're Drinking Now
Tikal Bonarda-Malbec Mendoza Patriota 2009
Posted: June 7, 2012 By Harvey Steiman
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Harvey Steiman At Large
A rock of reason in Barolo
Posted: June 4, 2012 By Harvey Steiman
I had not seen Aldo Conterno, the legendary Barolo producer, in more than 20 years. I had made an appointment to visit him at the winery outside the town of Monforte d’Alba while on vacation with my wife. We drove up to the hilltop building on a showery Monday morning in April. Aldo’s son Giacamo met us and conveyed his father’s regrets that he could not be there. He was in a hospital recovering from pneumonia.
Late last week, when the sad news reached us that Aldo was dead at 81, I flashed back to a sunny day in the late 1980s when I first visited him at the winery. We sat in the warm courtyard after the obligatory tour of the cellar and a drive through the vineyard, and talked about the revolution that was under way in Piemonte.
News & Features
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Wine Tips
Three new titles for your summer reading list
Posted: June 4, 2012 By Thomas Matthews, Harvey Steiman, Kim Marcus
May 31, 2012 Issue
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Dining Out
Posted: May 31, 2012 By Harvey Steiman
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Harvey Steiman At Large
We used to know what they meant
Posted: May 29, 2012 By Harvey Steiman
Few things make me grumpier than encountering words that have been twisted to mean something other than their original intent. Wine is apparently not immune to this scourge. And I’m not talking about innocent confusions, such as acidic (the tartness of grape acidity) vs. acetic (the flavor of vinegar). Or the wholly unnecessary distinction that wine textbooks make between aroma (that part of a wine’s smell that comes from the grape) and bouquet (from winemaking), a technical nuance useful to winemakers but not really to those of us who just want to drink and enjoy wine.
