Unfiltered

Sipping Spanish wines at Fashion Week, Gordon Ramsay gets burned, Gladys Knight sings for Staglin's good cause, quaffing wine contaminants at Copia and Nick Lachey moves beyond Chicken of the Sea

Posted: September 12, 2007

• It's that time of year again, when the oh-so-fabulous return to New York—from their 51 weeks of vacation on some Mediterranean island—for Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week. Why, you might ask, was the so tragically unfashionable Unfiltered invited? Same reason as last year. The wine producers of Rioja were among the sponsors, trying to inject a little taste in the one place its levels rise and fall so dramatically: inside the exclusive tents erected in Bryant Park. Strikingly tall models—all of whom Unfiltered is convinced were on stilts—dressed in the colors of the Vibrant Rioja campaign, offered Fashion Week attendees sips of different red and white Riojas each day (Sierra Cantabria on the night Unfiltered was invited), with full-size pours over at the bar. Among the celebrities spotted by Unfiltered throughout the evening included Tim Gunn of Bravo's Project Runway, Ivana Trump, hotel queen Kathy Hilton and Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi, wearing what looked like two yellow Post-It notes sewn together and held up, barely, by two pieces of spaghetti. Come to think of it, perhaps it actually was spaghetti. Snacks can be hard to come by around all those models.

• If you're a big-time celebrity chef, how will you know when you've truly arrived? Will it be when you refuse a table in your restaurant to Madonna, and kick out Joan Collins? Or when you trick a wine producer into trashing his own product on your television show? Maybe it's when you're invited by Queen Elizabeth to join the Order of the British Empire. Unfiltered thinks that Gordon Ramsay should know he's arrived by the number of international press outlets that printed stories about his latest kitchen accident. Last week, newspapers and blogs in the U.K., Germany, New Zealand and the U.S. breathlessly (and dare we say, gleefully?) repeated the story that Ramsay told the Daily Mirror about having burned his right testicle while cooking commando at a hot stove. The punch line is that Ramsay's wife has now come forward to say that it was all just a joke—one more prank to keep the chef and TV star in the spotlight. We look forward to his upcoming fake gunshot wound, fashioned from ketchup, sweetbreads and Cabernet.

Left to right, Shannon Staglin, Brandon Staglin, Shari Staglin, Gladys Knight and Garen Staglin all posed before the show.

• No doubt music legend Gladys Knight has sung "Heard it Through the Grapevine" hundreds of times in her career, but on Sept. 8, she sang it in Napa Valley, surrounded by actual grapevines to help raise money for mental health research. The 13th Annual Staglin Music Festival for Mental Health raised nearly $4 million this year, bringing the 13-year total to more than $45 million. The festival began with a symposium highlighted by a talk by University of London's Dr. Shirij Kapur, followed by an afternoon reception in the Staglin winery caves featuring wines from more than 70 high-end producers, including Screaming Eagle, Harlan, Bond, Colgin, Scarecrow, Sloan, Lewis and others. At the concert, Gladys Knight sang along with a 34-piece band and a solo Pip, her brother Merlad "Bubba" Knight. The Staglins created the festival after their son Brandon was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teenager.

Choose your contamination!

• If you recently visited Copia: The American Center for Wine, Food & the Arts in downtown Napa, hopefully you came across 10 new machines, each a four-bottle automated wine tasting station, installed this past June to help boost Copia's wine-education program. Each station has a different theme, such as "Guess the Grape Variety." There's also "Oak Gets in Your Wine," which compares wines aged in French oak, American oak, stainless steel and using wood chips. Our personal favorite, though, is "Finding Fault With Your Wine," which dispenses a wine tainted with the spoilage yeast Brettanomyces, another affected by the dreaded 2,4,6-trichloroanisole known as TCA (cork taint) and another wine with volatile acidity, better known as VA for short. So far, the reception has been positive, according to Copia's senior vice president Peter Marks, who estimates that nearly half of the 16,000 monthly visitors try out the tasting stations. At the wine-faults stations, a 1-ounce taste ($1) is the limit, and only sniffing—not consuming—is encouraged.

• In October, Luxor Las Vegas, the pyramid-shaped hotel and casino located at the south end of the Strip, will be the spot of the latest food-and-celebrity pairing to hit Sin City. Former 98 Degrees singer Nick Lachey, hotel heiress Nicky Hilton (the one not recently in jail) and That '70s Show star Wilmer Valderrama are all investors in Company American Bistro, a 10,000-square-foot restaurant specializing in fish, chicken and chops. The restaurant is owned and operated by Pure Management Group, the same company that owns the PURE Nightclub at Caesars Palace Las Vegas with celebrity investors Celine Dion, Shaquille O'Neal and Andre Agassi. For this venture, executive chef Adam Sobel, formerly of Restaurant Guy Savoy at Caesar's Palace, will serve up various selections of surf and turf a la carte, and patrons can select from additional sides and sauces. Unfiltered has to give Lachey credit for teaming up with Valderrama, since he's an investor in several Los Angeles restaurants, including Hollywood hotspot Geisha House. Obviously he learned his lesson about who to work with in the food world after ex-wife Jessica Simpson wondered out loud if Chicken of the Sea tuna was tuna or chicken on their MTV show Newlyweds.