Unfiltered

Wolfgang Puck cooks at the Oscars (for celebrities who don't eat), a wine competition for women, the Yquems return home and Hitler's wine finds a new one

Posted: February 21, 2007

• This Sunday, the likes of Penélope Cruz, Forrest Whitaker and Meryl Streep may end up clutching Oscar statuettes made of gold, but their wines will be solid Sterling. For the fourth consecutive year, Sterling Vineyards will provide the wines for a number of Oscar-related events, including the Governor's Ball, a lavish dinner party catered for the past several years by superstar chef Wolfgang Puck. Although Puck's gone all-organic with the menu this year, which should please the health-obsessed L.A. crowd, Unfiltered has to wonder how many plates of mini cheeseburgers with remoulade and cheddar, potato gnocchi gratin with gorgonzola, and black truffle risotto will be left over once the skeletal starlet crowd shuffles off to the after-parties.

• Wine for women seems to be all the rage nowadays, with low-carb or low-alcohol brands showing up on store shelves with more frequency. But instead of being told what wines women should like, a nonprofit group called Women for WineSense is taking it upon themselves by presenting the 2007 National Women's Wine Competition, March 13-15. The competition has already received 1,500 entries, all of which are eligible for gold, silver or bronze medals, being judged specifically on the wines' appeal to female judges. So what's a gold medal-winning wine in this competition? One that won't make a mess, doesn't hog the remote, doesn't teach the dog to fetch a beer from the fridge, is honest about where it's been all night, and truly, honestly understands who you are and what you're feeling at that very instant in time. So, in other words, all the wines are winners.

$1.5 million for wine no one can drink. What're the odds all the hotel's rooms have TVs you can't watch?

• Some French treasures held in England for decades are finally coming home. Last week, 135 bottles of Château d'Yquem, the Sauternes sweet wine, were purchased at auction for $1.5 million by the Grand-Hotel du Cap-Ferrat, located on the French Riviera. The auction was held by U.K.-based Antique Wine Company and featured a bottle from every consecutive vintage from the Château from 1860 to 2003. The collection also included nine empty bottles, signed by the director of d'Yquem, to represent the years when no wine was made due to adverse climatic conditions. The wine is housed in two walnut wood cabinets designed by royal furniture maker David Linley, the son of the late Princess Margaret. "We are very proud to own the finest Château d'Yquem collection in the world and to be bringing it back to France," said Michel Galopin, general manager of the hotel. But he said the wines will be hands-off to hotel guests--they're for viewing purposes only. Which is probably a good thing, since a late-night whim could turn into one headache of a room-service bill in the morning.

The man himself was bitter, and chances are the wine is too.

• It's an uncommon practice for the birthday boy to give gifts, but Adolf Hitler was not a common person. He wasn't a particularly good person either, and apparently if you were a senior member of the military (which means, you, too, were a bad person), he gave you a bottle of "Fuhrerwein" wine on his birthday. One of those bottles, from 1943 and bearing the Nazi leader's likeness on the label, was auctioned off in England for $7,794 last weekend. The owner, who was from Devon, said the bottle was a gift from a friend in France, and it isn't known how many more bottles like it still exist. Auctioneer Paul Keen of the Plymouth Auction Rooms said the rarity of the bottle is what caused a furor of bidding, which concluded when the high offer came in via phone from an anonymous bidder. Just like the man on the label, the wine inside the bottle is believed to be unpalatable (after its years of storage in a garage), though Keen said its likely appeal was to collectors of war memorabilia.