Pouring over wine lists before meals is the ultimate public foreplay. In advance of fine dining reverie, the hunt for favorites, values, rarities, ultimates, and classics is my secret little indulgence. It’s a moment of truth that determines the tone of an evening’s meal. I remember the same jittery excitement stepping into Coney Island’s Luna […]
Saumur, Champagne, and a Little Giant
I have been eating and shopping for wine in New York City this past week and will share a connected vignette of a Saumur-Champigny shopping find, a transported Champagne note, and a wine friendly restaurant. This week’s quick holiday in New York, where my wine and personal roots run deepest, produced unfavorably opposite impressions on my wallet […]
Revisiting Cambridge’s T.W. Food
Walden Street floats in unremarkable limbo somewhere between Harvard’s and Fresh Pond’s respective square and roundabout. I managed to discover the street in the autumn of 2007 checking out Tim Wiechmann’s newly opened T.W. Food, and immediately returned for a second confirming fix of Wiechmann’s brilliant and individually styled french country cuisine. Because it was […]
2005 Clos Rougeard Les Poyeux and Menton Boston
In both cases, drinking 2005 Clos Rougeard (click for review) and luxuriating over dinner at Barbara Lynch’s Menton (click for review) in Boston’s Fort Point extension last week were opportunities for critical return visits. I first tasted the entry level 2005 Clos Rougeard Saumur-Champigny a couple of months back and made my one and only previous visit to […]
Clos Rougeard Saumur-Champigny 2005: Best Wine This Year
I am fortunate to taste more than one man’s fair share of special wine every month. Tonight, in the context of a business dinner at Momofuku Ssam Bar with a young, smart, scrappy, web marketing guru from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, we experienced the most compelling red wine I have tasted this year, and most probably one […]