“And
I sacrificed a goat to St Urbain, the Patron Saint of Wineries.”
Daniel
Speck, owner of Henry of Pelham Winery
Keeping
ones sense of humour in light of adversity is always sound judgment.
Certainly Daniel’s levity underlines a serious concern for the
Ontario wine industry — two years running which saw vines damaged
by frosty temperatures dipping below the -20˚C mark. The
disagreeable conditions led to reduced crops in table wines, but more
importantly Icewine, for both 2003 and 2005.
When
we have big family dinners, we never seem to pick wines that please
the whole clan. Can you recommend some choices with universal appeal?
A wise
man once said, “You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick
your relatives.” And I know from experience that nothing fans the
flames of smouldering opinions like a big family food-fest. Whether
it’s your sister’s know-it-all husband (the expert on everything)
or the mother-in-law who never met a pause in conversation she
couldn’t fill, you should realize right now that nitpicking will
always be more important to some people than finding satisfaction
with what’s put in front of them to drink.
I’m
new to wine and am still having trouble coming to grips with what
tannins are and where they come from. Can you help?
Though
I wasn’t much of a chemistry student (too much time spent with a
calculator and not enough with a Bunsen burner), tannins are pretty
straightforward. If you’ve ever taken a sip of over-steeped tea or
twisted the stem off an apple with your teeth and felt that
astringent, bitter impression on your palate, you’re already well
on your way to a doctorate in tannins.
Tannins
are natural chemical compounds found in the skins, seeds and, yes,
stems of fruit and in other organic materials like tree bark and tea
leaves. Though white wines rarely come into contact with
tannin-carrying compounds during their making, the juice for red
wines is exposed to the grape skins for extended periods of time
(that’s where the colour comes from, kids) and, during pressing, to
the seeds and stems.
It
seems only fitting that the country producing both the greatest
quantity and the greatest variety of wine in the world should also
host the globe’s largest wine show. Over 4,000 wineries and 100,000
wine lovers gathered in the literary home of Romeo and Juliet for an
event that is frequently billed as “another love story in Verona.”
Primarily
a showcase for Italian producers, the five-day April extravaganza
could be expanded to last a whole month and it still would not be
enough time for the avid wine geek to experience the multiplicity of
varietals and wine styles this regionally diverse country has to
offer.
I’m
lucky. My passion is also my profession. But wine and food are not my
only passions. Great music also elicits the same strong emotional
responses. Unfortunately, I am void of any musical talent. Growing
up, I took the requisite piano, guitar and drum lessons, and while I
could hear the music in my head and feel the music in my soul, it
never quite sounded as good when delivered by my fingers. Oh yeah, I
can’t sing either.
Not so much starving as hungry. Well, not so much hungry as dying for something to eat. I can’t really say I’m lacking in something to eat … Let’s just say, I need more.
Not more on my plate — I’m sure you can agree we all have too much on our plates — but simply something exciting. A restaurant is more than a place to sit, eat, drink and be. Not a culinary adventure around every corner but a respite from our everyday. We break from the norm of cooking at home, living in our cocoons.
The belle époque is an era France loves to remember. Known as the golden age of Paris — and recollected in painstaking detail by Proust, immortalized in the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec — this period of prosperity before the First World War is hailed as an island of time during which life was good. France was enjoying a surge in industry, the arts as well as a brief well-earned peace between herself and her neighbours. And with leisure now a pursuit rather than a privilege, the cabaret was born — a venue for the audience and artists to unleash bourgeois inhibitions for an evening of wine, women, song and spectacle. A far cry from the stiff-lippedness of traditional theatre, its emblems were a black cat, a nimble rabbit, a womanly wedge of thigh flaunted in a series of skyward kicks. France does well to recall it fondly if only for its tourist trade. But one wonders if, over a century later, authentic spectacle still lurks in the City of Lights? Or is a night at the cabaret simply a Proustian exercise in nostalgia, a remembrance of things past, a tired ghost whored out to the bleary-eyed tourist for a depressingly ludicrous price?
Standing among the sun-drenched vineyards of the beautiful coastal Maremma region of southwest Tuscany (derived from mare, Italian for “sea”), you have to wonder how Dante could have written so negatively about the area. He professed that even the wildest beasts would find La Maremma uninviting. It is only recently, though, that this largely uninhabitable mosquito- and malaria-infested swamp was transformed — through extensive dredging and soil reclamation — into the lushly forested, villa-dotted destination for the Roman and Florentine cognoscenti.
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