Trying to Take This All In

Hey, hey, the clouds are wheyThere’s straw for the donkeysAnd the innocents can all sleep safelyAll sleep safely My, my, sun is pieThere’s fodder for the cannonsAnd the guilty ones can all sleep safelyAll sleep safely And all the world is football-shapedIt’s just for me to kick in spaceAnd I can see, hear, smell, touch,

Root, for Me

… the answer to the question: “Will you be having the root or the fruit?” Water the roots with tears of grief. Go back to your roots. Drink roots, not fruits. The root of all evil is a road, paved with pet intentions. When Jarred told me he was leaving Western, I went through the

Beer Homework: Photos

The beers pertaining to this food event are discussed here.

my … gosh

yes. This is the first thing I’ve ever tasted from this bottler. Spoiler: the contents of these pieces of glass will thrive for at least a day or two after opening–and maybe for weeks afterward. Bodegas Tradicion, Fino Tradicion No. 586, Saca de Mayo 2017 SRP $40 Color. I poured it after sunset. It’s dark,

Nuts

I’m glad I’m not a profiteer or a politician. If I were, craft would cause me to plant various wedge issues into the discourse. Like, for example, this one: What shall we eat: ingredients or precursors? The contrast was made tangible yesterday, as I struggled to eat a perfectly good, properly reheated frozen pizza that

Portos Four

Valdeón is on the table. It’s there along with a wedge of Point Reyes, and some walnuts. Quinta do Infantado Ruby (RUB181) $18 Boysenberry jam, cinnamon, black pepper, bay leaf. Lean, juicy, tannic. Roses, cedar, juniper, black slate. Tannins have closed their grip on what had once been an oily outrage of black figgy fruit

Jo Landron’s Muscadets

Trying to be science as possible about this. A bunch of long-awaited Landron Muscadet arrived this week. It just made sense to open them along with our best seller in the genre: Pépie. It’s been a best seller for a while now, all over the Detroit metro market.

Ribera del Duero

I have my own memories of Pesquera. It starts with that eye opening incident when I disgorged a bottle of 1991 at Casa de España, on Michigan Ave, in 1996. It was a BYOB, reservation-only restaurant. A repurposed firehouse, if you can imagine such a thing. It must have sat about 75 diners and everyone

Flooded Inbox

I have been inundated with taunts on mentally ill media to explain my supper tonight. No, I did not eat a meal directly from a can (not most of it, anyway.) Dinner was a room-temperature pasta salad. At the last minute I decided not to add mayonnaise to it. Ingredients: spaghetti, sardines, carrot, parsley, salt,

Pursuit: Gomez Nevado

Gomez Nevado, Pálido. 375ml Jose Pastor, Ilixir. $14 Available at Western MKT You’re a buyer. There are wines you accept and there are wines you pursue. A buyer without pursuits isn’t a buyer; he’s a stock filler. I’ve got my own list of pursuits, made mostly of odd scraps gathered over the years. There is

Detroit Needs Barbara Öhlzelt’s Verjus

Please sign my petition by posting a comment here. If it’s your first time posting, wait patiently for the safe, manual, and guaranteed approval. Verjus is part of a good life, and we care where it comes from. Garden Fort (always)–mixed with DZC #2 (a great product)

Brunch Yourself in the Face

Vom Boden, you undersold this wine: “The unanimous” is the Bazin’s entry level cuvee, an assemblage of 50% 2017, 50% solera. Up to 50 year old vines in the Premier Cru Villers-Marmery. Crisp and light, a slight oxidative note and stirn chalky minerality. Perfect champagne for any occasion and appeasing to all! After reading that

Yves Bretonnière, Detroit Loves You

UPDATE: We discovered some of the bottles taste completely different. Not flawed, but simply like a completely different wine, and decisively not as earth-shattering delicious. I am in the information gathering stages. Please reply if you have an experience with this item that you would like to share. 2017 Muscadet Trois Versants, Yves Bretonnière Imperial,

A Volatility Manifesto – The Response

Not really a response. More of a tasting note.   So-called natural winemaking is a good thing only insofar as it allows for the greatest possible expression of cultural wealth. Natural microbes and carbohydrates are part of that wealth. So too, it seems, is every contrast that you can perceive. So I declare here, that

Lombardy Is a Mind

Il Pendio, Brusato Rosa (L20113) Louis/Dressner, Veritas, $40 iirc Available at Western MKT I haven’t had a glass of wine in several days. How might this item taste to a burned-out, distracted mouth? I may never know!

Flooded Chardonnay Bottle

  California makes Chardonnay. What does it taste like? It tastes like cooled baking stones that were used in the production of lemon scones.

Rebuilding Civilization

In 1927, in Paris, rebuilding meant teaching a generation how to drink wine. The economy depended on it. Ordinarily they would have learned from their elder cohort, but those were lost. What was needed was a how-to book:

Store Bought Sauce

Depending where you are, half of them are trash. You’re better off with a can of tomatoes (plus fat, salt, pepper and acid.) Half of them are very good, even excellent. This is one of the latter. And you can find it in a lot of stores, including Amazon, and Plum. And at Western MKT.