Jim, here are the brief notes. I thought it was great fun, no bad wines and
good food. A nice variety.
The theme was red and whites with a lighter touch for the warm weather.
Pink wines and sparkling was also encouraged. We were sequestored in the
back room at Muffuletta.
Billecart-Salmon NV Champagne / led off the evening and I kept a bit in a
glass until the end. It was very nice, creamy and mature but not at all
tired. "one of the most dependable NV champagnes available" ... for $27
Pine Ridge 2003 Chenin Blanc (81%) Viogner (19%) / Some tasters sensed
the presence of the Chenin in this nicely balanced, restrained wine. Some
guessed old world.
Omaka Springs 2002 Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc / wow, green pepper that
never softened. Crisp and very lively but a bit sharp.
Mankloof Wine Collection 2003 South African Chenin Blanc / varietal had
most of us stumped but after pulling the bag we could see a similarity with
the Pine Ridge. Sweet fruit flavors and little acidity, seemed very warm
blooded.
Dr. Konstantin Frank 2001 Johanisberg, Finger Lakes Riesling / seemed old
world to some (a good thing) pungeont nose and dancing acid. A well
proportioned reisling.
Lawson's Dry Hills 2004 Marlborough Pinot Noir Rose / We all liked this
pretty, deeply colored rose wine. Strawberry and raspberry fruits in nose
and flavor with charming, nearly dry finish. Why do we not drink more rose?
go to Solo Vino for a vast selection.
Louis Tete 2001 "La Tot" Beaujolais Village / this one has appeared on
previous Thursday evenings. A true country French wine with an edge of
gravel to temper its soft approachable fruit.
Mas de Gourgonnier 2002 Le Baux de Provence / perhaps the darkest wine of
the night, not heavy though, with some earth and floral notes along with red
fruit and texture on the palate.
August Kesseler 2002 Spatbergunder Rheingau "Cuvee Max" troken / the wine
of the night if only because it was such a welcome surprise. We sensed Pinot
but the bottle shape was wrong (silly us). Some spice and dill notes, proper
acidity and a lingering herbal red fruit finish. Good with the salmon and
dashi.
Monsanto 2000 Chianti Classico / several picked up on the Italianate
nature of this red but we missed Tuscan origin. Be aware that wild boar is
on the Muffuletta specials sheet and this wine made the best match with
that. very balanced and elegant with no indication that its ready to quite
being very good.
Greetings,
Our friends at the MN Craft Brewer's Guild put on a great event.
Expect over 100 hand crafted beers and meads from 30 regional
breweries. It's also your chance to meet w/ the brewers.
Tix available on the web site.
Cheers,
Jim
----- Forwarded message from David H Berg <bergbrew(a)juno.com> -----
To: mcbg(a)mncraftbrew.org
Date: Thu, 18 Aug 2005 07:53:19 -0500
Subject: ABR Update
How many new breweries will we have this year? It's anyone's guess, but
how's this for starters:
Arcadia
Avery
Breckenridge
Great Divide
Lakefront
Surly
I'm still waiting to hear back from a couple of others. But I'm noticing
that a lot of people I know will attend have not purchased tickets yet.
Why not? Why wait? The constant waiting/procrastinating of Minnesotans
is the main reason events get cancelled. If I had half a brain, I would
have cancelled the event when our partner dropped us. Looking at the
number of tickets sold to date, I should have my head examined for not
cancelling now. So, if you plan on attending, buy your ticket now. Tell
all your friends to do likewise. Let's make sure there is an ABR next
year.
David Berg
Head Brewer, Bandana Brewery
President, Minnesota Craft Brewer's Guild
http://www.mncraftbrew.org
----- End forwarded message -----
--
------------------------------ *
* Dr. James Lee Ellingson, Adjunct Professor jellings(a)me.umn.edu *
* University of Minnesota, tel: 651/645-0753 fax 651 XXX XXXX *
* Great Lakes Brewing News, 1569 Laurel Ave., St. Paul, MN 55104 *
FYI. Looking for extras. 40% off during the taping.
----- Forwarded message from "Louise A. Stich" <Louise.Stich(a)mci.com> -----
Date: Wed, 17 Aug 2005 16:13:24 -0500
From: "Louise A. Stich" <Louise.Stich(a)mci.com>
Subject: FW: Rachel Ray's Tasty Travels
Ok to spread the word...
Louise
_____
From: Mary Leonard, Chocolat Celeste [mailto:mary@chocolatceleste.com]
Sent: Wednesday, August 17, 2005 4:07 PM
To: mary.leonard(a)prodigy.net
Subject: Rachel Ray's Tasty Travels
The Food Network's latest show called Rachel Ray's Tasty Travels wiill be
visiting Chocolat Celeste tomorrow from 5 to 6:30 PM.
We are very excited about the visit. During the hour, we need customers to
be on film and in the background.
If you are in the neighborhood or you would like to make a trip over, we
will be sampling our new truffle flavors with wine.
All purchases made during the filming will be a 40% off.
Spread the word.
Thank you.
Mary Leonard
Chocolat Celeste
2506 West University Ave.
St. Paul, MN 55114
651.644.3823
"The Official Chocolatier of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra"
A 2004 nominee for - BEST AMERICAN ARTISANAL CHOCOLATIER
______________________________________________________________________
This e-mail has been scanned by MCI Managed Email Content Service, using
SkepticT technology powered by MessageLabs. For more information on MCI's
Managed Email Content Service, visit http://www.mci.com.
______________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________
This e-mail has been scanned by MCI Managed Email Content Service, using Skeptic? technology powered by MessageLabs. For more information on MCI's Managed Email Content Service, visit http://www.mci.com.
______________________________________________________________________
----- End forwarded message -----
--
------------------------------ *
* Dr. James Lee Ellingson, Adjunct Professor jellings(a)me.umn.edu *
* University of Minnesota, tel: 651/645-0753 fax 651 XXX XXXX *
* Great Lakes Brewing News, 1569 Laurel Ave., St. Paul, MN 55104 *
Mostly an update:
----- Forwarded message from "Jim L. Ellingson" <jellings(a)me.umn.edu> -----
Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 16:16:47 -0500
From: "Jim L. Ellingson" <jellings(a)me.umn.edu>
To: wine(a)thebarn.com
Subject: Italian at Al Vento
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.4i
X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by mail.enet.umn.edu id j7FLGlv6036723
Greetings,
Muffuletta was wonderful. Excellent, creative food.
This week, we're going to Al Vento. See the review below.
Wine du jour will be open Italian. Ringers always welcome.
Yeses and guesses:
Warren/Ruth
Bob
Bill
Jim
Louise
Lori
Karin
Nicolai
----- Forwarded message from Bruce Adomeit <badomeit(a)startribune.com> -----
Subject: City Pages review of Al Vento, this month's Cork&Fork venue
? Vol 26 ? Issue 1259 ? PUBLISHED 1/19/2005
Red Sauce Reverie
Southern Italian food goes over gangbusters in Southern Minneapolis
by Dara Moskowitz
Al Vento
5001 34th Ave. S., Minneapolis
612.724.3009
www.alventorestaurant.com
What does Jonathan Hunt, the charming 29-year-old behind the long dark locks, the South Africa-raised, Miami-trained, teetotaling son of missionaries know about Southern Italian food? Enough to pack the house at his new far-south Minneapolis restaurant Al Vento every single night.
I mean packed. Like a can of sardines in a Tokyo subway car in Times Square at midnight on New Year's. Packed.
Seriously. Try to get a table. I dare you.
These days they book about two weeks out, and for me, I've frittered away hours of my precious and ever-more-fleeting youth cooling my heels at the bar at Al Vento, staring longingly at tables filled with people looking gorgeous beneath the dim orange lights, and flushed with unusual Italian wines.
So what, besides the buzz, is the big draw? Bruschetta topped with olive tapenade. Caesar salad. Spaghetti with meatballs. Pizza scattered with sausage crumbles. New York strip steak with mashed potatoes. Tiramisu and cr?me br?l?e. Sound like a revolution to you?
Me neither, but, evidently, a sturdy neighborhood Italian joint holds as much magical appeal in this part of town as a SpongeBob Band-Aid has for someone with a booboo.
So how's the food?
It's pretty darn good! You can start your meal with bruschetta, those little slices of olive oil-gilded toast, topped with a fresh chopped mixture of tomato and basil, a spoonful of tangy caponata, that marinated eggplant salad, or mashed olives in a tapenade spread. A plate bearing one of each costs $4. Baked mushroom caps filled with a nubbin of Italian sausage, breadcrumbs, and such, are fine. Crab cakes-- yes, crab cakes--are embellished with two sorts of aioli, one made with basil, the other sweetened with roasted red bell peppers, and have all the light, creamy, and crispy appeal of well-made crab cakes.
An almost totally charming appetizer is fashioned from slices of cold smoked salmon twirled around a spoonful of mascarpone cheese and festooned with fresh pomegranate seeds. The dish has texture to burn, with the silky fish, slick mascarpone, and popping pomegranate, and tastes fleeting and joyful. That is, as long as you skip the super-hard rounds of toast that lurk beneath the composition, which I found to be nearly too crisp to eat.
Giant blue prawns wearing wide belts of kataifi, that shredded phyllo dough, were good when the restaurant was slow (or rather, when I dined quite late): fresh and crisp, as dynamic with their potato-chip-crisp outsides and sweet insides as any sweet shrimp from a sushi bar. When the place was slammed, though, those same shrimps were served cold and shriveled, and cold cooking oil poured from their shells. I couldn't tell you why the things were served in a small dish of chilled caponata on either occasion.
All the salads I tried were very good. The Caesar ($6) was a particularly craveable version, in which nice, whole, young leaves of romaine were dressed with a perky, garlic-laced, but very creamy dressing, the composition enhanced by lovely thin planks of crouton and golden sheets of very good-quality Parmesan. Pizzas are all made on a sweet, rich crust: The fennel sausage one ($10) was scattered with chubby chunks of sweet sausage separated from one another by pools of melted goat cheese; the simple basil-tomato one topped with mozzarella made fresh at Al Vento, was as sweet, homey, and pleasant as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Pastas are the restaurant's most reliable menu section, and please note that chef Hunt and his staff make them all fresh everyday, even the spaghetti. Two of the best dishes I tried in all my visits to Al Vento were pastas. The first was a simple spaghetti tossed with tomato sauce, the pasta mounded over two big veal meatballs, each piquant with plenty of parmesan cheese, and meltingly tender ($12). The other standout was a variation of fettuccini in clam sauce ($15) made with pleasantly al dente fettuccini, allowed to stand on its own and not drowned in oil or butter, just touched with the right amount of garlic and oil, surrounded by lots of pink curls of well-cleaned shrimp and tender clams lolling prettily in their shells. It might have been the best fettuccini in clam sauce I've ever had in Minnesota.
--
------------------------------ *
* Dr. James Lee Ellingson, Adjunct Professor jellings(a)me.umn.edu *
* University of Minnesota, tel: 651/645-0753 fax 651 XXX XXXX *
* Great Lakes Brewing News, 1569 Laurel Ave., St. Paul, MN 55104 *
August 10, 2005
Tipped Off
By STEVEN A. SHAW
WHEN Thomas Keller, one of America's foremost chefs, announced that on Sept. 1 he would abolish the practice of tipping at Per Se, his luxury restaurant in New York City, and replace it with a European-style service charge, I knew three groups would be opposed: customers, servers and restaurateurs. These three constituencies are all committed tipping - as they quickly made clear on Web sites. To oppose tipping, it seems, is to be anticapitalist, and maybe even a little French.
But Mr. Keller is right to move away from tipping - and it's worth exploring why just about everyone else in the restaurant world is wrong to stick with the practice.
Customers believe in tipping because they think it makes economic sense. "Waiters know that they won't get paid if they don't do a good job," is how most advocates of the system (meaning most everybody in America) would put it. To be sure, this is a seductive, apparently rational statement about economic theory, but it appears to have little applicability to the real world of restaurants.
Michael Lynn, an associate professor of consumer behavior and marketing at Cornell's School of Hotel Administration, has conducted dozens of studies of tipping and has concluded that consumers' assessments of the quality of service correlate weakly to the amount they tip.
Rather, customers are likely to tip more in response to servers touching them lightly and crouching next to the table to make conversation than to how often their water glass is refilled - in other words, customers tip more when they like the server, not when the service is good. (Mr. Lynn's studies also indicate that male customers increase their tips for female servers while female customers increase their tips for male servers.)
What's more, consumers seem to forget that the tip increases as the bill increases. Thus, the tipping system is an open invitation to what restaurant professionals call "upselling": every bottle of imported water, every espresso and every cocktail is extra money in the server's pocket. Aggressive upselling and hustling for tips are often rewarded while low-key, quality service often goes unrecognized.
In addition, the practice of tip pooling, which is the norm in fine-dining restaurants and is becoming more common in every kind of restaurant above the level of a greasy spoon, has gutted whatever effect voting with your tip might have had on an individual waiter. In a perverse outcome, you are punishing the good waiters in the restaurant by not tipping the bad one.
Indeed, there appears to be little connection between tipping and good service. The best service in the Western world is at the Michelin three-star restaurants of Europe, where a service charge replaces tipping. As a customer, it's certainly pleasant to dine in France, where the menu prices are "service compris," representing actual totals, including the price of food, taxes and service.
Tipping is hardly the essence of capitalism. Actually, it would seem to have little to do with capitalism at all: it is - supply and demand be damned - a gift, a gratuity decided on after the fact.
Waiters and waitresses also believe it is their right to be tipped. A tip, while a gift, is a strange sort of gift in that it is a big part of the server's salary. In most states, servers don't even get paid minimum wage by their employers - there is an exemption (called a "credit") for tipped employees that allows restaurants to pay them just a token couple of dollars an hour (as low as $1.59 per hour in Kansas and $3.85 per hour in New York City). They are instead largely paid by tips, to the tune of $26 billion per year.
When you talk to servers, you'll find that most believe they make more money under the tipping system than they would as salaried employees. And that's probably true, strictly speaking. The tipping system makes waiters into something akin to independent contractors. And in most any business the hourly wage of a contractor is higher than that of an employee. Yet in most businesses, people choose to be employees.
That is because those who wish to guarantee their long-term financial security sacrifice a little bit of quick cash for longer-term benefits like health insurance, retirement plans and vacation pay. But, of course, most servers see themselves as transient employees - waiting tables before moving on to bigger and better things.
Still, this may not always be the case. The large number of waiters I see in their 40's, 50's and 60's put the theory in doubt. While kitchen workers trade low wages and no tips for a future in the business - the opportunity to rise in rank, to one day run a kitchen - what calculation do waiters and waitresses make? Under the tipping system, it seems, they're trading a little extra now for the promise of nothing later. With his announcement, Mr. Keller has sent a signal to his culinary colleagues that there just might be a better way.
For their part, restaurateurs believe it is their right to have consumers pay servers, so they don't have to pay their employees a living wage. They prefer the current system because it allows them to have a team of pseudo-contractors rather than real employees.
But that too is shortsighted. Over time, as in any service-oriented business, waiters loyal to the restaurant will perform better and make customers happier than waiters loyal only to themselves.
In this, the world's most generous nation of tippers, most restaurants don't even offer service as good as at the average McDonald's. While it lacks style, service at McDonald's is far more reliable than the service at the average upper-middle-market restaurant. This is not because the employees of McDonald's are brilliant at their jobs - it's because they are well-trained and subject to rigorous supervision.
And come to think of it, at McDonald's there is no tipping.
Steven A. Shaw is the author of the forthcoming, "Turning the Tables: Restaurants From the Inside Out."
August 15, 2005
What, No Tip? Service Charge Faces Struggle at Restaurants
By PATRICK McGEEHAN
Is the right to stiff the waiter as American as apple pie?
Thomas Keller, chef at the extravagantly priced Per Se restaurant in the Time Warner Center in Manhattan, does not think so. Indeed, he is taking tipping off the table at Per Se starting next month and replacing it with a flat service fee of 20 percent.
But in doing so, he is trying an approach that chefs and restaurant managers say has never caught on in this country for a simple reason: American diners relish the power of the tip to reward or punish their servers, and the servers want them to have it.
"He's taking a high-risk approach," said Danny Meyer, owner of the Union Square Cafe and several other restaurants in Manhattan.
Mr. Meyer was not warning that Per Se's customers might balk. After all, they have been begging for a chance to pay $175 or more for a single dinner there - and on average they tip at a rate of 22 percent.
No, he meant that Mr. Keller might face a mutiny among his waiters, who might not stand still for Mr. Keller's plan to divert a larger portion of the service charge to the people in the kitchen.
Mr. Keller said he was making the switch to head off an exodus of cooks and kitchen workers who had complained that they did not earn enough. He said he had already lost one talented young cook and that another had asked to become a waiter temporarily so that he could pay some bills.
"We realized the imbalance of earnings and that a change needed to occur in order to provide everyone in the restaurant an opportunity to pursue their dreams," Mr. Keller wrote in response to questions from a reporter.
"Some of the dining room staff is understandably concerned," he added. "They're going to be compensated in a new way that they're not used to."
Instead of worrying about how much they take home on a particular night, the waiters and all the other employees will earn steady wages, even for weeks when the restaurant is closed, Mr. Keller said. He said the system worked well for more than seven years at French Laundry, his restaurant in Yountville, Calif., which charges 19 percent for service.
Mr. Meyer said he understood the instinct to opt for a service charge because he had it more than a decade ago.
In 1994, Mr. Meyer said, he was all set to assume more control over how each member of his Union Square Cafe staff was paid by de-emphasizing tipping. He planned to build the cost of service into the prices on the cafe's menu, then pay the waiters' salaries out of the total, as is commonly done in France.
"At that point, I was impassioned about abolishing the tipping system because I felt it created a false servant-master relationship between servers and guests at the restaurant," Mr. Meyer recalled in an interview. Receiving a small tip or no tip at all, he said, "would just make the staff member feel really horrible, as if they had done something wrong."
He would not have been the first owner of a top-flight New York restaurant to take that approach. The Quilted Giraffe, once one of the more expensive and innovative restaurants in Manhattan, pioneered the use of the service charge in the 1980's, automatically tacking on a 15 percent charge to meals that cost a minimum of $75. (Although automatic service charges are rare for couples and small groups, they are customary for parties of eight or more.)
But Mr. Meyer was surprised by the resistance from his waiters at the Union Square Cafe, who wanted to preserve their chances of raking in some really big tips. "What I heard was that the incentive that a tip provides really energizes the servers to go perform," he said.
Diners seem to notice, said Tim Zagat, chief executive of the Zagat Survey. About 80 percent of people surveyed say that they prefer to decide how much to tip their servers, he said.
They reserve the discretion to give a very big tip or no tip at all, though they rarely do either, he said. Three out of four respondents say they have never left nothing, and the average tip has been rising steadily, he said. The average amount diners said they left last year was 18.6 percent, up from about 16 percent in the early 1990's, he said.
Few restaurants are likely to follow Per Se's lead because few are confident enough of the quality and consistency of their food and service to get away with it, Mr. Zagat said.
"If you're a restaurateur, you've got to be careful when you say, 'I'm going to take 20 percent more from a client,' " he said. "You're asking for trouble. You're asking for angry clients."
At Per Se, tips average 22 percent, Mr. Keller said. So, he said, there is a risk that although diners will not be discouraged from leaving more, they will decide the automatic 20 percent sounds fair. Plus, the service charge is subject to the 8.25 percent sales tax, bringing it to almost 22 percent of the price of the food and wine.
How many customers, faced with more than $100 in taxes and service charge on a $450 tab, will lay down a little extra because they liked the service?
Gilbert E. Pilgram, the general manager of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., said that would not be unusual. Alice Waters, the founder and owner of Chez Panisse, instituted a 15 percent service charge more than 16 years ago and has rarely received a complaint, Mr. Pilgram said.
He said he did not hear a peep after the charge was increased to 17 percent less than a year ago. The increase to 17 percent covered a 25 percent increase in the cost of providing health insurance to the staff, he said.
Many customers leave more, Mr. Pilgram said. Indeed, if anybody leaves a tip of more than 5 percent, he said, a waiter will ask if the customer understood that he had already been charged for the service. If not, it is returned. The waiters are free to keep all intentional tips and to split them with the rest of the staff as they choose, he said.
Mr. Pilgram said that he and Ms. Waters want the experience of the customers and waiters to be as democratic as possible.
"We cannot completely ignore the fact that the market for whatever reasons pays a waiter more than a cook," he said. But he added, "If Mr. Big Bucks comes to the restaurant and drops 20 percent and in comes Mr. Non-Big Bucks and leaves 17 percent, I don't want the waiters at Chez Panisse giving Mr. Big Bucks better service."
--
------------------------------ *
* Dr. James Lee Ellingson, Adjunct Professor jellings(a)me.umn.edu *
* University of Minnesota, tel: 651/645-0753 fax 651 XXX XXXX *
* Great Lakes Brewing News, 1569 Laurel Ave., St. Paul, MN 55104 *
Greetings,
Muffuletta was wonderful. Excellent, creative food.
This week, we're going to Al Vento. See the review below.
Wine du jour will be open Italian. Ringers always welcome.
Yeses and guesses:
Warren/Ruth
Betsy
Bob
Bill
Jim
Louise
Russ
Karin
Nicolai
----- Forwarded message from Bruce Adomeit <badomeit(a)startribune.com> -----
Subject: City Pages review of Al Vento, this month's Cork&Fork venue
? Vol 26 ? Issue 1259 ? PUBLISHED 1/19/2005
Red Sauce Reverie
Southern Italian food goes over gangbusters in Southern Minneapolis
by Dara Moskowitz
Al Vento
5001 34th Ave. S., Minneapolis
612.724.3009
www.alventorestaurant.com
What does Jonathan Hunt, the charming 29-year-old behind the long dark locks, the South Africa-raised, Miami-trained, teetotaling son of missionaries know about Southern Italian food? Enough to pack the house at his new far-south Minneapolis restaurant Al Vento every single night.
I mean packed. Like a can of sardines in a Tokyo subway car in Times Square at midnight on New Year's. Packed.
Seriously. Try to get a table. I dare you.
These days they book about two weeks out, and for me, I've frittered away hours of my precious and ever-more-fleeting youth cooling my heels at the bar at Al Vento, staring longingly at tables filled with people looking gorgeous beneath the dim orange lights, and flushed with unusual Italian wines.
So what, besides the buzz, is the big draw? Bruschetta topped with olive tapenade. Caesar salad. Spaghetti with meatballs. Pizza scattered with sausage crumbles. New York strip steak with mashed potatoes. Tiramisu and cr?me br?l?e. Sound like a revolution to you?
Me neither, but, evidently, a sturdy neighborhood Italian joint holds as much magical appeal in this part of town as a SpongeBob Band-Aid has for someone with a booboo.
So how's the food?
It's pretty darn good! You can start your meal with bruschetta, those little slices of olive oil-gilded toast, topped with a fresh chopped mixture of tomato and basil, a spoonful of tangy caponata, that marinated eggplant salad, or mashed olives in a tapenade spread. A plate bearing one of each costs $4. Baked mushroom caps filled with a nubbin of Italian sausage, breadcrumbs, and such, are fine. Crab cakes-- yes, crab cakes--are embellished with two sorts of aioli, one made with basil, the other sweetened with roasted red bell peppers, and have all the light, creamy, and crispy appeal of well-made crab cakes.
An almost totally charming appetizer is fashioned from slices of cold smoked salmon twirled around a spoonful of mascarpone cheese and festooned with fresh pomegranate seeds. The dish has texture to burn, with the silky fish, slick mascarpone, and popping pomegranate, and tastes fleeting and joyful. That is, as long as you skip the super-hard rounds of toast that lurk beneath the composition, which I found to be nearly too crisp to eat.
Giant blue prawns wearing wide belts of kataifi, that shredded phyllo dough, were good when the restaurant was slow (or rather, when I dined quite late): fresh and crisp, as dynamic with their potato-chip-crisp outsides and sweet insides as any sweet shrimp from a sushi bar. When the place was slammed, though, those same shrimps were served cold and shriveled, and cold cooking oil poured from their shells. I couldn't tell you why the things were served in a small dish of chilled caponata on either occasion.
All the salads I tried were very good. The Caesar ($6) was a particularly craveable version, in which nice, whole, young leaves of romaine were dressed with a perky, garlic-laced, but very creamy dressing, the composition enhanced by lovely thin planks of crouton and golden sheets of very good-quality Parmesan. Pizzas are all made on a sweet, rich crust: The fennel sausage one ($10) was scattered with chubby chunks of sweet sausage separated from one another by pools of melted goat cheese; the simple basil-tomato one topped with mozzarella made fresh at Al Vento, was as sweet, homey, and pleasant as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Pastas are the restaurant's most reliable menu section, and please note that chef Hunt and his staff make them all fresh everyday, even the spaghetti. Two of the best dishes I tried in all my visits to Al Vento were pastas. The first was a simple spaghetti tossed with tomato sauce, the pasta mounded over two big veal meatballs, each piquant with plenty of parmesan cheese, and meltingly tender ($12). The other standout was a variation of fettuccini in clam sauce ($15) made with pleasantly al dente fettuccini, allowed to stand on its own and not drowned in oil or butter, just touched with the right amount of garlic and oil, surrounded by lots of pink curls of well-cleaned shrimp and tender clams lolling prettily in their shells. It might have been the best fettuccini in clam sauce I've ever had in Minnesota.
While the menu as a whole is printed anew almost every day, in practice much has remained the same since I started visiting Al Vento in November (they opened in October, and I kept delaying my review waiting for the hype to die down; now I have concluded it may never). The entr?es are the most often changed part of the menu, and also vary the most in quality. I recommend avoiding the New York strip ($20) which was, when I tried it, slices of gristly meat in an overly salty brown sauce, paired, oddly, with small button mushrooms filled with grainy spots of melted Gorgonzola. Meanwhile, medallions of pork were elegantly treated, seared till they were crisp outside but still pink and tender within, served on a bed of translucent strips of sweet oven-roasted rutabagas and turnips, topped with wedges of grilled pears, and surrounded on the plate by two sauces, one a balsamic with pomegranate molasses, the other an orange-Champagne sauce. It was a sturdy, well-prepared, utterly likable composition.
And yet, on that same comparatively slow night when the prawn appetizer mentioned above was dazzling, the seared scallops were very good. Here, herb-marinated dry-packed scallops were grilled till they were russety and crisp without and translucent and delicate within, and each was paired with a simple salad of shredded fennel, pomegranate seeds, parsley, oil, garlic, and red wine vinegar, and presented beside a mound of saffron risotto, deeply infused with cream and Parmigiano-Reggiano.
"I know cheese doesn't traditionally go with seafood in Southern Italian cooking," conceded Hunt, when I spoke to him on the phone for this story, "but I like Parmigiano-Reggiano, and I'm not going to serve a risotto to people without cheese; they wouldn't really like it." Ditto, he says, for the pizza with potatoes: "Potato pizza might look like it's California cooking, but I had that in Sicily [and] no cheese. You couldn't get away with not having cheese on a pizza around here, so I adapt it to what the customers want." And thus the red potato, spinach, and Gorgonzola pizza was born.
Giving customers what they want is very much in evidence in the brief dessert list: a buoyant tiramisu, a rich chocolate ganache tart, a trio of the greatest hits of creamy, creamy cr?me br?l?e (chocolate, vanilla, and pistachio, when I've had it), and a simple polenta cake.
Well, I should say that it used to be a simple polenta cake. In November, when I first went to Al Vento, the cake was dry, plain, and understated, one of those cakes that, like an American coffee cake, is meant as a sturdy, anytime foil to a beverage, in this case a sweet dessert wine, and perhaps an espresso as well. The last time I went to Al Vento, though, the cake had been cut in half and layered around a giant scoop of ice cream, and was getting to look like a strawberry shortcake: less sophisticated, more likable. If you told me the restaurant's next step was to offer free car washes, neck rubs, and cans of whipped cream with every dinner entr?e, I wouldn't be at all surprised. Hunt simply has a bone-deep understanding of how to create a menu and restaurant that is likable, affable, and approachable, and thus, busy.
Let's just hope it doesn't kill him. "I went to the hospital with all of this," Hunt confessed when I caught him on what must have been his fourth month without a day off. "My prep cook works 160 hours every two weeks--he's the guy who rolls out all the fresh pasta, and makes all the stocks and sauces. We both ended up in the hospital. We were so busy, we weren't eating. The sous chef walked out on a Saturday night, it was...well, it doesn't matter. It's a lot of stress. The hardest thing has been turning people away. All this buzz--it's crazy. The phone won't stop ringing, even now in January. I just keep telling myself that all these reviews will die off, and the hype will die down."
"When is this coming out?" Hunt asked. I told him. "Well I guess I'm not going to Italy in February," he sighed. "Anyway, I know when all this hype dies down I'm going to be relying on the neighborhood to keep us going. I just hope we're making the neighborhood happy while we get through this craziness."
? ? Vol 26 ? Issue 1259 ? PUBLISHED 1/19/2005
----- End forwarded message -----
--
------------------------------ *
* Dr. James Lee Ellingson, Adjunct Professor jellings(a)me.umn.edu *
* University of Minnesota, tel: 651/645-0753 fax 651 XXX XXXX *
* Great Lakes Brewing News, 1569 Laurel Ave., St. Paul, MN 55104 *
Off to Al Vente next week, in the former Marimar space.
Wine style is Italian.
Great food, interesting wines and discussion at Muffy's.
Thanks to Warren and Ruth.
Here's an interesting editorial on the economics and sociology
of tipping.
August 10, 2005
Tipped Off
By STEVEN A. SHAW
WHEN Thomas Keller, one of America's foremost chefs, announced that on Sept. 1 he would abolish the practice of tipping at Per Se, his luxury restaurant in New York City, and replace it with a European-style service charge, I knew three groups would be opposed: customers, servers and restaurateurs. These three constituencies are all committed tipping - as they quickly made clear on Web sites. To oppose tipping, it seems, is to be anticapitalist, and maybe even a little French.
But Mr. Keller is right to move away from tipping - and it's worth exploring why just about everyone else in the restaurant world is wrong to stick with the practice.
Customers believe in tipping because they think it makes economic sense. "Waiters know that they won't get paid if they don't do a good job," is how most advocates of the system (meaning most everybody in America) would put it. To be sure, this is a seductive, apparently rational statement about economic theory, but it appears to have little applicability to the real world of restaurants.
Michael Lynn, an associate professor of consumer behavior and marketing at Cornell's School of Hotel Administration, has conducted dozens of studies of tipping and has concluded that consumers' assessments of the quality of service correlate weakly to the amount they tip.
Rather, customers are likely to tip more in response to servers touching them lightly and crouching next to the table to make conversation than to how often their water glass is refilled - in other words, customers tip more when they like the server, not when the service is good. (Mr. Lynn's studies also indicate that male customers increase their tips for female servers while female customers increase their tips for male servers.)
What's more, consumers seem to forget that the tip increases as the bill increases. Thus, the tipping system is an open invitation to what restaurant professionals call "upselling": every bottle of imported water, every espresso and every cocktail is extra money in the server's pocket. Aggressive upselling and hustling for tips are often rewarded while low-key, quality service often goes unrecognized.
In addition, the practice of tip pooling, which is the norm in fine-dining restaurants and is becoming more common in every kind of restaurant above the level of a greasy spoon, has gutted whatever effect voting with your tip might have had on an individual waiter. In a perverse outcome, you are punishing the good waiters in the restaurant by not tipping the bad one.
Indeed, there appears to be little connection between tipping and good service. The best service in the Western world is at the Michelin three-star restaurants of Europe, where a service charge replaces tipping. As a customer, it's certainly pleasant to dine in France, where the menu prices are "service compris," representing actual totals, including the price of food, taxes and service.
Tipping is hardly the essence of capitalism. Actually, it would seem to have little to do with capitalism at all: it is - supply and demand be damned - a gift, a gratuity decided on after the fact.
Waiters and waitresses also believe it is their right to be tipped. A tip, while a gift, is a strange sort of gift in that it is a big part of the server's salary. In most states, servers don't even get paid minimum wage by their employers - there is an exemption (called a "credit") for tipped employees that allows restaurants to pay them just a token couple of dollars an hour (as low as $1.59 per hour in Kansas and $3.85 per hour in New York City). They are instead largely paid by tips, to the tune of $26 billion per year.
When you talk to servers, you'll find that most believe they make more money under the tipping system than they would as salaried employees. And that's probably true, strictly speaking. The tipping system makes waiters into something akin to independent contractors. And in most any business the hourly wage of a contractor is higher than that of an employee. Yet in most businesses, people choose to be employees.
That is because those who wish to guarantee their long-term financial security sacrifice a little bit of quick cash for longer-term benefits like health insurance, retirement plans and vacation pay. But, of course, most servers see themselves as transient employees - waiting tables before moving on to bigger and better things.
Still, this may not always be the case. The large number of waiters I see in their 40's, 50's and 60's put the theory in doubt. While kitchen workers trade low wages and no tips for a future in the business - the opportunity to rise in rank, to one day run a kitchen - what calculation do waiters and waitresses make? Under the tipping system, it seems, they're trading a little extra now for the promise of nothing later. With his announcement, Mr. Keller has sent a signal to his culinary colleagues that there just might be a better way.
For their part, restaurateurs believe it is their right to have consumers pay servers, so they don't have to pay their employees a living wage. They prefer the current system because it allows them to have a team of pseudo-contractors rather than real employees.
But that too is shortsighted. Over time, as in any service-oriented business, waiters loyal to the restaurant will perform better and make customers happier than waiters loyal only to themselves.
In this, the world's most generous nation of tippers, most restaurants don't even offer service as good as at the average McDonald's. While it lacks style, service at McDonald's is far more reliable than the service at the average upper-middle-market restaurant. This is not because the employees of McDonald's are brilliant at their jobs - it's because they are well-trained and subject to rigorous supervision.
And come to think of it, at McDonald's there is no tipping.
Steven A. Shaw is the author of the forthcoming, "Turning the Tables: Restaurants From the Inside Out."
--
------------------------------ *
* Dr. James Lee Ellingson, Adjunct Professor jellings(a)me.umn.edu *
* University of Minnesota, tel: 651/645-0753 fax 651 XXX XXXX *
* Great Lakes Brewing News, 1569 Laurel Ave., St. Paul, MN 55104 *
Mostly an update.
I'll be off line most of tomorrow.
C,
J
----- Forwarded message from "Jim L. Ellingson" <jellings(a)me.umn.edu> -----
Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2005 15:42:29 -0500
From: "Jim L. Ellingson" <jellings(a)me.umn.edu>
To: wine(a)thebarn.com
Subject: Summer Wines At Muffey's, Wine Chemistry
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.4i
X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by mail.enet.umn.edu id j78KgUv6078723
Greetings,
This week, we've been invited to Muffuletta. 6:30 pm on Thursday 8/11.
Muffuletta Cafe
2260 Como St. Paul, 55108
St. Anthony Park
651-644-9116
Style du jour is "Summer Wines". The thinking here is wines
that will match up well with the summer menu. E.g. Sparkling,
Whites, Rose's and Lighter Reds. Ringers always welcome.
Yes
Warren/Ruth
Jim
Annette S.
Guess:
Lori
Nicolai
Russ/Sue
Karin
Roger
Bill
Janet
Directions: Take Hwy 280 to Como, go east up the hill and then to the
second light (Carter).
Alt: Take Snelling to Como, West to Carter.
Cheers,
Jim
http://www.latimes.com/features/food/la-fo-calcook10aug10,0,1398361,full.st…
THE CALIFORNIA COOK
Shades of summer
Ros�s may be pale and pretty, but with the season's vivid flavors they're bold and beautiful.
Russ Parsons; Leslie Brenner
Times Staff Writers
August 10, 2005
PINK is such a pretty color . so frilly, so delicate. It's the color of fragile flowers and fading sunsets. You probably don't think of it as the color of wine to serve with robust foods, but you should. Sometimes it takes a pale wine to stand up to strong flavors . which is why ros�s are a mainstay of my summer meals.
Here are a few of the big summer dishes I've served with ros� wines over the last couple of weeks: quick-cured green olives with oregano and lemon peel; thinly sliced spicy salame; almonds dusted with red chile powder; bruschetta topped with confited tomatoes and garlic; a smoked salmon salad made with mayonnaise and capers; kale and wild greens braised with potatoes and topped with shards of Parmigiano-Reggiano; even smoked tri-tip alongside a fiercely garlicky green bean and potato salad.
The ros�s I was drinking . a broad geographical sampling from the outstanding 2004 vintage . didn't just stand up to all of those dishes, they positively danced around them.
For those who love ros�s (and our numbers are steadily increasing), this will come as no surprise. Look at where they come from, for goodness' sake. The cuisines of Provence, Portugal and Spain aren't exactly made for shrinking violets.
A good ros� has fresh fruit . think strawberries, raspberries and cherries . with just a rumor of sweetness. It has crisp acidity that leaves your palate ready for more. Floating above it all, there are layers of herbaceousness, spice and minerality that would do credit to any red wine.
In fact, I think of ros�s as having the best characteristics of both reds and whites . the juicy complexity of the former and the refreshing, palate-cleansing qualities of the latter.
Because of this, there is probably no friendlier food wine on the planet. And given the kinds of deeply flavored dishes we eat during the summer, that effect is squared. With its sweet fruit, ros� pairs naturally with dishes that are sharp, salty or spicy. Tart green olives, capers, cornichons, dried red chiles . nothing fazes it. The crisp backbone cuts straight through smoke and fat. Ros�s go great with tomatoes, which turn most wines thin and acrid. And they love garlic almost as much as I do. Is there a summer ingredient I haven't mentioned?
Center of attention
MOST people seem to regard ros�s as hot-weather aperitif wines. Granted, there is nothing wrong with serving a glass of chilled ros� alongside a plate of almonds and olives to get a meal started. But limiting yourself to that is selling the wine short. Instead, make an entire menu based on ros�s, ranging from appetizers to dessert.
I suppose you could even pair specific courses with specific wines, but to tell you the truth, the idea kind of gives me the creeps. It seems to me to be missing the entire point of ros�s, which is uncomplicated pleasure rather than analytical examination. Instead, find a couple of wines you really like, then fill an ice bucket with them. Your only consideration should be when to open more.
Start out with crostini topped with a rich, smoky eggplant pur�e that you've spiked with tart diced tomatoes and fresh rosemary. Roast the eggplant whole as you would for baba ghanouj, and then chop it and stir it into a rough paste with a wooden spoon. Pur�eing it in the blender makes it thin and soupy.
Follow that dish with stuffed zucchini and tomatoes, a classic summertime dish that is too often neglected these days. But have you noticed all the billiard ball-sized tomatoes and round zucchini at the farmers markets? To me, they beg stuffing and baking. Because this is going to be an appetizer and not an entr�e, keep the filling light . nothing more than bread crumbs crushed with basil and garlic. Bake the vegetables until they're melting in a tart tomato sauce studded with capers.
For the main course, grill swordfish steaks and top them with a salsa pungent with green olives and pickled red peppers, perfumed with crushed fennel seed. Swordfish is one fish I prefer to have cooked thoroughly through. Cut the steaks thin and grill them over high heat . they'll be done in minutes. For the salsa, just chop the olives and peppers and season them with garlic and fennel seeds you've crushed in a mortar.
If you want to continue the theme, finish the meal with sliced peaches or nectarines and a plate of lightly sweetened fresh ricotta dusted with ground cinnamon. Try dipping the fruit in the wine left in your glass (for fastidious guests, bring out little bowls of fruit they can pour the wine over).
Though ros�s may not be overly serious, they are seriously fun. Most wines I buy by the bottle; ros� I buy by the case. Some wines are meant to be sipped and savored; ros� is a wine to revel in.
Rather than dabbling in different ros�s through the summer, I tend to find one I like and then buy a bunch. I mark my summers by which ros� I was drinking. The first wine I remember buying this way was Paso Robles vintner Gary Eberle's Ros� of Counoise, a wonderfully spicy wine from a little-known Rh�ne grape. It was my summer wine and I drank it for years until he stopped making it in 2000 . apparently nobody was buying it but me and even though I gave it my best effort, it wasn't quite enough to keep an entire winery running. (Eberle now makes a very nice ros� from Syrah.)
There followed a couple of summers of Swanson Rosato from the Napa Valley . a lovely strawberry-scented ros� made from Sangiovese. Then a couple of years ago it lost its Southern California distribution (you can still order it from the winery, but at $18 a bottle, it's getting pretty dear), so I moved overseas. My summer dinner guests and I have been enjoying Morgues du Gr�s, a crisp, herbaceous ros� from the Costi�res de N�mes in the Rh�ne in recent years.
This year's spring and early summer were unusually cool, and I put off choosing a successor. So, when the hot weather suddenly came, I was ros�-less and on the first blistering weekend, I had to run out and pick up half a dozen or so different bottles to audition for a dinner party . all of them under $15.
It was an interesting experiment. In the first place, the current 2004 vintage seems to be uniformly strong for ros�s, particularly those from Europe. When ros� falls down it is most often due to a lack of acidity, which can leave the wine flat and simple. Every 2004 we tasted was fresh and crisp.
A palette of pinks
ALTHOUGH ros�s are generically referred to as "pink," that's not really an accurate description. The colors of the wines I tasted ranged from a delicate pale salmon to a pronounced plum red. And though it is tempting to relate color and flavor intensity, there is no connection. A pale color does not necessarily equate to delicate taste and neither does robust color mean hearty flavor.
Neither style is inherently superior to the other. The Commanderie de Peyrassol and the Ch�teau de Pampelonne from Provence were subtle and detailed (at least for a ros�), with notes of slate and crushed herbs. The Garnacha-based Muga from Rioja and the Guappo from Puglia (mainly something called "Uva di Troia," Sangiovese and a dash of Primitivo) were as big and juicy as biting into a ripe plum.
Perhaps the biggest surprise was Robert Sinskey Vineyards' Vin Gris of Pinot Noir from the Carneros, a wine I have enjoyed many times in the past. But the 2004 is something else. A salmon so pale it is almost clear in the glass, it nonetheless packs an astonishing amount of fruit. If you were to taste this wine blindfolded, you would swear it was a well-crafted regular Pinot.
The hard work done, it was time to eat. We gathered around platters of spicy, salty, smoky, joyful summer food at a picnic table under an arbor of blazing bougainvillea and drank in the ros�s and the sweet, cooling evening breeze in roughly equal proportions.
*
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
With this vintage of ros�s from France, you can't go wrong
As long as winemakers have been bleeding the skin of red grapes to make pink wines, France has been producing many of the best ros�s in the world. Today, delicious ones come from Provence (where Bandol is queen, producing marvelous ros�s from Grenache and Cinsault) and the Rh�ne Valley, but the Loire Valley also turns out lovely examples . crisp and dry and delicious enough to make us forget the sweet and insipid Tavels of yore. The 2004 was superb; grab just about any French ros� you see from that vintage and you won't go wrong. Here are a few standouts:
2004 Ch�teau de L'Escarelle Coteaux Varois ros�. From a sub-region of C�tes de Provence comes this clear, coral-colored wine with generous red berry aromas. Silky, well-balanced, light and delicious, with gentle fruit and a little complexity. At Du Vin in West Hollywood, (310) 855-1161; Malibu Village Wines in Malibu, (310) 456-2924; and Wine House in West Hollywood, (310) 479-3731, about $11.
2004 Domaine Tempier Bandol. Tempier is the Mercedes-Benz of ros�s . well-made, well-known, racy, delicious and expensive. A lovely clear salmon-color, with apricot and strawberry aromas. Well-balanced; crisp yet luscious, with an almond finish. Available at fine wine stores, about $28.
2004 Verget C�tes du Luberon. A clear coral-pink wine from an appellation within Provence. Simple and delicious, with intense ripe cherry and apricot blossom aromas; perfectly balanced. The screw-top makes it a great picnic wine. At Colorado Wine Co. in Eagle Rock, (323) 478-1985; Liquid Wine & Spirits in Chatsworth, (818) 709-5019; Wine Country in Signal Hill, (562) 597-8303; and the Wine House, about $10.
2004 Ch�teau Revelette Coteaux d'Aix en Provence. Pale salmon-pink with a pretty raspberry nose. Crisp, delicious and refreshing. At Liquid Wine & Spirits; Twenty-twenty Wine Merchants in West Los Angeles, (310) 447-2020; and the Wine House, about $14.
2004 Domaine Sylvain Bailly "La Lou�e" La Croix Saint Ursin Sancerre ros�. A very pale salmon-colored wine with bright citrus and strawberry aromas. Silky and crisp, terrific Sancerre acidity and a lovely finish. At the Cheese Store of Silver Lake (323) 644-7511; Mission Wines in South Pasadena, (626) 403-9463; Wine Country; and Woodland Hills Wine Company, (818) 222-1111, about $18.
2004 Parall�le "45" C�tes du Rh�ne ros�. A clear ruby-pink ros� that's more serious than its price would suggest: It has perfect balance, restrained but delicious fruit, some complexity, and a long, berry finish. At Liquid Wine & Spirits; Wine House; Malibu Village Wines; and the Wine Room in Irvine, (866) 585-9463, about $10.
2004 Domaine de Fondr�che C�tes du Ventoux "L'Instant" ros�. From the southern Rh�ne, a salmon-pink wine with a straight-on strawberry nose. Juicy and delicious, bone-dry and crisp with happy fruit and a pleasant finish. At Liquid Wine & Spirits; the Wine Exchange in Orange, (714) 974-1454; and Wine House, about $12.
2004 Ch�teau Grande Cassagne ros�, Costi�res de N�mes. This deep, clear, watermelon-pink wine comes from an appellation in the Languedoc. Round, fruity and juicy, with good acid and sweet plum aromas, it's drinkable and fun. At Duke of Bourbon in Canoga Park, (818) 341-1234; John & Pete's Fine Wines & Spirits in West Hollywood, (310) 657-3080; Mission Wines; and Woodland Hills Wine Company, about $9.
WINE OF THE WEEK
2004 Ch�teau La Canorgue C�tes du Luberon
S. Irene Virbila
August 10, 2005
Before Peter Mayle wrote "A Year in Provence," the Luberon was a relatively sleepy place, treasured for its wildly beautiful landscape of hill towns and ochre cliffs, vineyards and lavender fields. Part of the scene since the 17th century, Ch�teau La Canorgue produces one of the summer's best ros�s. Dedicated to the idea of producing wines naturally, the Margan family farms their terraced vineyards organically and biodynamically. The vines aren't young, so the production is naturally low. The result is a lovely, coppery ros� lightly perfumed with strawberries and flowers. Dry and fruity, it goes down very easy, leaving behind an impression of fruit and earth.
It's a wonderful food wine, easily bridging the gap from aperitif to the table. Serve it with olives and salame, with soupe au pistou, pissaladi�re and salads, even roast chicken and bouillabaisse.
*
Quick swirl
Region: Provence
Price: About $13
Style: Dry and fruity
Food it goes with: Olives, soupe au pistou, salads, bouillabaisse
Where you find it: Mel & Rose Liquor & Deli in West Hollywood, (323) 655-5557; Wine Country in Long Beach, (562) 597-8303; and the Wine House in Los Angeles, (310) 479-3731.
*
Garlic and herb-stuffed tomatoes and zucchini
Total time: 1 hour, 15 minutes
Servings: 6
Note: Salted anchovies are available at Nicole's in South Pasadena, Bay Cities in Santa Monica, Market Gourmet in Venice and Surfas in Culver City. Canned anchovies in oil may be substituted.
2 tablespoons olive oil, plus extra for drizzling (optional)
1 onion, minced (about 1 cup)
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 (28-ounce) can crushed tomatoes
1/2 cup white wine
3 tablespoons capers
Salt
1/2 pound baguette
1/4 cup loosely packed, coarsely chopped basil leaves
2 cloves garlic, chopped
4 salted anchovy fillets, rinsed, bones removed and chopped
1/3 cup toasted pine nuts
3 (8-inch) zucchini
12 small round tomatoes (about 1 1/2 pounds)
1. Heat the oven to 400 degrees. Cook the olive oil and the onion in a large skillet over medium heat until the onion softens, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic; cook until fragrant, about 3 minutes. Add the crushed tomatoes, wine, capers and one-half teaspoon salt. Simmer until the sauce thickens, about 20 minutes.
2. Trim the crusts and cut the bread into cubes. Place in a food processor or a blender with the basil and garlic and grind to fine crumbs. Pour into a bowl and stir in the anchovies and pine nuts. Set aside.
3. Cut each zucchini in half lengthwise and use a melonballer to carefully remove some of the flesh from the center to make a "canoe." Leave about one-fourth inch at the sides and ends and a little more at the bottom. Season the inside with one teaspoon salt, and steam over rapidly boiling salted water until just tender, about 10 to 15 minutes.
4. Cut a slice from the top of each tomato. With the melonballer, gently remove most of the pulp. Season insides with one-fourth teaspoon salt.
5. Pour the tomato sauce into a lightly oiled 5-quart gratin dish or substitute two smaller gratin dishes. Spoon the breadcrumb mixture into the zucchini and tomatoes, mounding slightly on top. It will take 1 to 2 tablespoons for each zucchini and 2 to 3 teaspoons for each tomato. Do not press the breadcrumbs or they will become pasty when cooked. Arrange the zucchini and tomatoes in the gratin dish. Drizzle with olive oil if desired.
6. Bake until the vegetables have softened and the tops of the breadcrumbs have browned, about 30 minutes. (Time will vary for the smaller dishes, so start checking after 15 to 20 minutes.) Serve hot or at room temperature.
Each serving: 308 calories; 10 grams protein; 42 grams carbohydrates; 7 grams fiber; 12 grams fat; 1 gram saturated fat; 2 mg.cholesterol; 648 mg. sodium.
*
Eggplant bruschetta
Total time: 1 hour, 20 minutes
Servings: 6 to 8
2 (1-pound) eggplants
2 teaspoons minced garlic
1 teaspoon minced rosemary
1 tablespoon fruity olive oil
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1 tomato, diced (about 1/2 cup)
1 baguette
1 oz. Pecorino Romano cheese
1. Heat the oven to 400 degrees. Pierce the eggplants in 2 or 3 places with a sharp knife and place them on a jelly roll pan or in a baking dish. Bake until the flesh is soft and the eggplants have collapsed, about 1 hour. Remove from the oven and cool.
2. When the eggplant is cool enough to handle, peel away the skin and coarsely chop the flesh. Put the eggplant in a bowl with the garlic, rosemary and olive oil and stir briskly with a wooden spoon so that the eggplant shreds and breaks apart into chunks but does not become a smooth pur�e. Stir in the salt, vinegar and lemon juice; taste and adjust seasoning. Gently stir in the diced tomato.
3. Cut the baguette into one-half-inch thick slices. Toast in a broiler or on the grill until browned on both sides. Spoon on some of the eggplant mixture and use a vegetable peeler to shave a small slice of Pecorino Romano on top. Serve at room temperature.
________________________________________
Each of 8 servings: 152 calories; 6 grams protein; 24 grams carbohydrates; 4 grams fiber; 4 grams fat; 1 grams saturated fat; 4 mg. cholesterol; 561 mg. sodium.
*
Swordfish with green olive salsa
Total time: 30 minutes
Servings: 6
1/2 pound green olives
5 tablespoons chopped roasted and peeled red bell pepper
1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1 clove garlic
Salt
1/2 teaspoon fennel seeds
Olive oil
3 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1/2 cup chopped parsley
2 pounds swordfish, in 2 or 3 pieces
Freshly ground pepper
1. Start a fire in a grill or preheat the broiler.
2. To pit the olives, place them on a cutting board and crush them with the side of a chef's knife. Pull them apart and discard the pits. Gather the olive meat in a pile and chop it coarsely. You should have about three-fourths cup.
3. In a mixing bowl, combine the olives, chopped red bell pepper and crushed red pepper flakes. Place the garlic clove in a large mortar with about one-fourth teaspoon salt and the fennel seeds. Crush into a paste. Slowly add two-thirds cup olive oil, stirring constantly with the pestle.
4. Pour the olive oil mixture over the olives and add the vinegar. Stir several times to turn the mixture into a rough, loose paste. Taste and adjust seasoning, adding more vinegar or salt if necessary. Stir in the chopped parsley and set aside.
5. Pat the swordfish dry with paper towels and season with salt and pepper. Rub both sides lightly with a little olive oil. Moisten a paper towel with olive oil and lightly moisten the surface of the grill or broiler pan. Immediately place the swordfish on the grill and cook just until lightly browned, 3 to 4 minutes per side. Swordfish should be cooked through, but don't let it dry out.
6. Place the swordfish on a platter. Stir the salsa one more time and spoon it over the fish. Serve immediately, passing any leftover salsa on the side.
________________________________________
Each serving: 457 calories; 30 grams protein; 4 grams carbohydrates; 1 grams fiber; 36 grams fat; 6 grams saturated fat; 55 mg. cholesterol; 837 mg. sodium.
* Dr. James Lee Ellingson, Adjunct Professor jellings(a)me.umn.edu *
* University of Minnesota, tel: 651/645-0753 fax 651 XXX XXXX *
* Great Lakes Brewing News, 1569 Laurel Ave., St. Paul, MN 55104 *
Greetings,
This week, we've been invited to Muffuletta. 6:30 pm on Thursday 8/11.
Muffuletta Cafe
2260 Como St. Paul, 55108
St. Anthony Park
651-644-9116
Style du jour is "Summer Wines". The thinking here is wines
that will match up well with the summer menu. E.g. Sparkling,
Whites, Rose's and Lighter Reds. Ringers always welcome.
Yes/Guess
Warren/Ruth
Jim
Lori
Nicolai
Russ/Sue
Karin
Roger
Bill
Janet
Annette
Directions: Take Hwy 280 to Como, go east up the hill and then to the
second light (Carter).
Alt: Take Snelling to Como, West to Carter.
Cheers,
Jim
>From the "Blander Wine Through Chemistry" department:
August 7, 2005
The Chemistry of a 90+ Wine
By DAVID DARLINGTON
One day last September while Leo McCloskey was driving to the Chappellet winery in Napa Valley, he telephoned a client in the neighboring valley of Sonoma. ''I'm looking at your metrics,'' McCloskey said. ''They're pretty beefy. If you have that at midferm, you're already there. You need 50 percent as a 4; I think drain-down-sweet is the name of the game this year. Let's do what they do at Lafite -- come out shy of tannin, and we'll add tannin. I want to encourage you to move more aggressively than you normally would.''
He listened for a few seconds. ''You're golden,'' McCloskey said. ''Beautiful -- you got a statue in the quad. Hey, I gotta fly.'' He ended the call and turned to me. ''If you're in Sonoma, you have to rearrange Mother Nature to match the beauty of Napa and Bordeaux,'' he said. ''Napa cabernet is the only New World wine ruler that's being used internationally. Sonoma is an also-ran.''
McCloskey steered onto the Silverado Trail, entering into Stags Leap, the area that produced the cabernet sauvignon that won a famous Paris tasting in 1976, heralding the international arrival of California wine. ''They picked too early,'' McCloskey said, gazing at acres of grapeless vines on both sides of the road. ''We have a weekly online bulletin that tells people when to pick. On Sept. 13 we said not to, and people who picked anyway drained down at 87.1.''
McCloskey could say this because his company, Enologix, takes grape samples from clients and extracts the juice to measure some of its chemical compounds. Then, using software developed by McCloskey, Enologix compares the chemistry of the projected wines with that of a benchmark example. The outcome is a score on a 100-point scale, analogous -- not coincidentally -- to those employed by critics like Robert Parker of The Wine Advocate and James Laube of Wine Spectator. McCloskey boasted that his ''thinking is in tune with Parker, Laube and Helen Turley'' -- the latter a California winemaker notorious for favoring big, fruity, intense wines.
Not everyone shares this taste, however. Many oenophiles argue that -- owing especially to the influence of Parker, who has been called the planet's most powerful critic of any kind, in any field -- wines all over the world have become more and more homogenous. The jammy, oaky international style is largely free of the tannins that mellow and lend flavor as a wine ages but can make it taste bitter or astringent when young. Yet these wines often lack a sense of terroir, or regional distinctiveness, celebrated by so many wine aficionados. Parker's most lamented impact is his popularization of the 100-point scale that is now employed by most wine magazines. The so-called Score has been described as America's main contribution to the wine business: a democratic, no-nonsense way of jettisoning the elitist jargon that veils quality from the consumer. It is also maligned for turning wine buyers into mindless puppets and vintners into sycophants seeking the favor of King Parker and King Laube.
But Leo McCloskey is unfazed. ''The wine world is so big today that without ratings it would be chaos,'' he says. ''The consumer doesn't need to know about terroir. He just wants to know whether a wine is worth $28 or whatever he's paying for it.''
In the 15 years since McCloskey went into business for himself as a wine consultant, the number of California wineries has increased from 800 to 1,700, roughly speaking. The market share of foreign-made wines in the United States has doubled over the same period. With so many wineries now under the bottom-line control of corporations -- Constellation, Bronco, Beringer Blass, Brown-Forman, Kendall-Jackson, Diageo, the Wine Group and the longtime kingpin, E. & J. Gallo -- it is easy to see the appeal of Enologix, with its promise of ''metrics that assist winemakers in . . . boosting average national critics' scores.'' But McCloskey doesn't stop there. He insists that high-scoring wines can, through chemical analysis, be scientifically proved to be the best wines on the market. In other words, there is accounting for taste.
The low-slung Enologix offices are situated in a mini-business-park in the town of Sonoma. When I visited McCloskey there, he said that he has a database containing records of 70,000 wines, including information about soil, climate, prices, winemaking techniques, grape-growing practices and critical scores. While traditional wine science focuses mainly on primary chemicals -- things like sugar, alcohol and acidity, which determine whether a wine meets basic standards of acceptability -- McCloskey looks at secondary chemicals (like terpenes, phenols and anthocyanins), which, in affecting more nuanced characteristics like texture, aroma, taste and color, are more closely associated with quality.
To analyze an individual wine, Enologix runs a sample through a liquid chromatograph (and for white wine, a mass spectrometer) to separate and measure chemical compounds. McCloskey says he has identified about 100 that can affect a person's response; to compute a wine's ''quality index,'' the ratios -- not just the amounts -- of these compounds to one another are compared with those of bottled wines previously judged and scored by groups of vintners, growers, owners and critics. McCloskey publishes his findings in his magazine, Global Vintage Quarterly, alongside a separate National Critics' Score, which represents an average rating compiled from five publications: Wine Spectator, The Wine Advocate, Wine Enthusiast, Stephen Tanzer's International Wine Cellar and Connoisseurs' Guide to California Wine.
Enologix divides wine into four categories. For reds, Style 1 is pale in color and low in tannin, like most pinot noir or French Burgundy; Style 2 is also pale, but higher in tannin, like Italian Barolo; Style 3 is dark and tannic, like a great many cabernet sauvignons and first-growth Bordeaux; Style 4 is similarly dark but only moderately tannic. This last category, McCloskey told me, represents ''the vast majority of successful, flagship mainstream wines, the most elegant and popular wines in the world.''
Fermentation, the foundation of winemaking, occurs when yeast converts grape sugar into alcohol. Harvesting fruit late yields more intense flavor, though higher sugars result in higher alcohol levels; ''draining down sweet'' -- separating the juice in a fermentation tank from its crushed grape skins before all the sugar has been transformed -- means that less harsh-tasting tannin will find its way into the wine, with the side effect that it may age less well. According to McCloskey, these techniques (guided by Enologix chemistry and his winemaking expertise) can yield the Style 4 qualities -- rich, concentrated flavor and a soft, velvety sensation in the mouth -- that contemporary critics value most.
McCloskey claims that by using his system and the 100-point scale, winemakers can predict their own average critical scores within two and a half points with 95 percent accuracy (one and a half points with 80 percent accuracy). He says that the typical winery signing up with Enologix realizes a five-point rise over its previous years' average scores for red wines -- six for white. McCloskey's emphasis is on the luxury cabernet market in which wineries can afford Enologix's average annual service fee of $20,000. The company's revenues (which vary between $1 million and $1.4 million) flow from such prestigious names as Beaulieu, Benziger, Diamond Creek, Merry Edwards, Niebaum-Coppola, Ridge, St. Francis and Sebastiani. According to McCloskey, 39 Enologix wines scored 90 points or higher in a recent issue of The Wine Advocate.
The Chappellet winery is hidden in a grove of oaks backed by open slopes of grapevines, high among the rugged hills on Napa Valley's eastern edge. Founded in 1968 by Donn and Molly Chappellet, the company won early acclaim for its cabernet sauvignon, but as consumer tastes shifted toward softer textures and juicier fruit, it acquired the aura of a has-been. To turn things around, the owners hired a young winemaker, Phillip Titus, in 1990. He began working with Enologix in 1996, and in 2004 Connoisseurs' Guide chose a Chappellet cabernet as the Wine of the Year.
After parking the car and entering the winery's cavernous interior, we were greeted by Titus, now 49, who drew a foaming sample of merlot from a stainless-steel fermentation tank. As we tasted the wine, Titus recited its levels of tannin and complex anthocyanins -- in parts per million -- from the Enologix chemical report. ''In my tasting group, they can't speak this language,'' Titus said. ''Unless you're an Enologix client, you don't talk about complex anthocyanins.''
Soon we were joined by two more of McCloskey's clients, Sam Spencer and Wendy Roloson, who were making 5,000 cases of wine at Chappellet. With the first fruit he had picked, Spencer had pressed the wine off its skins after fermentation was finished. ''But when we looked at the results,'' McCloskey said, ''quality was low because tannin was high.''
''I wasn't able to drain down into a Style 4,'' Spencer confirmed.
''Your grapes are growing at Style 3,'' McCloskey told him. ''That's the pitch your terroir is throwing you. But Parker, Laube and the consumer are at Style 4, so you need to ask yourself, How can I get my wine stylistically in the right ballpark?''
The answer was that Spencer would have to press his remaining grapes earlier this time and aim to produce a successful product through blending. ''You need to be so low in tannin that you're going to feel really uncomfortable,'' McCloskey warned.
Later, Spencer told me that Enologix at first ''seemed like a luxury. It wasn't exactly forthcoming about how the system works -- you have to sign a nondisclosure agreement to see how the metrics add up, and I wasn't convinced. But now I think it's a tool that every carpenter ought to have.''
Not all of McCloskey's clients are so complimentary. Several I spoke to declined to be quoted, apparently owing to a fear that being identified with Enologix would suggest that they have gone over to the dark side and are chasing the Score. (McCloskey calls this ''the cover-up,'' when winemakers refuse to acknowledge their use of modern technologies at odds with romantic marketing images.)
Joel Peterson, co-founder and general manager of Ravenswood (a noted zinfandel winery where I once worked), told me that after Ravenswood's brief experience with Enologix, he thought the company provided information only for making one style of wine. ''It's a very narrow definition of taste,'' Peterson says. ''Part of the charm and beauty of wine is its idiosyncrasy, but when everybody tries to hit the same sweet spot, it's like making soda pop.'' And when all wines taste alike, he says, ''as a consumer you have to ask what you're paying for.''
Although McCloskey is fond of proclaiming that ''the consumer is king,'' sales don't figure into the Enologix Index. In lieu of formal studies or statistics, McCloskey (like most of the rest of the wine industry) accepts the axiom that buyers obey critics, whether or not the average consumer's palate agrees with that of the average wine writer.
The common objection to the Score is that wine is too complex a beverage to be summed up in a single number. The way in which someone responds to a wine depends on myriad variables: stylistic preference, mood, the accompanying food and the state of the wine itself after shipping and storing and aging -- not to mention the prejudices and expectations that attend a wine's reputation and price. For the same reason that a thundering symphony or screaming guitar solo may not make the best dinner music, wines that do poorly in competitive tastings sometimes fare better with meals than those attention-grabbing ones that impress judges in isolation. Hence, by keying his chemical evaluation system to critical scores, McCloskey makes the (not uncommon) assumption that intensity is tantamount to quality, when it's often equivalent only to extravagance.
''The prevailing critics can't distinguish real quality,'' says Randall Grahm, the winemaker at Bonny Doon Vineyards (like Ravenswood, a former Parker favorite that fell from grace as it grew). ''They're easily fooled by fakery because the only thing they're looking for is concentration. That probably can be correlated with chemistry -- but I would argue that while it can be an indicator of quality, it's not the only one. It doesn't speak to balance, for example.''
Roger Boulton, a professor in the department of viticulture and oenology at the University of California, Davis, is critical of the fact that Enologix's analytical methods aren't available for outsiders to verify. ''If Leo is so sure about these things,'' Boulton asked me, ''why are they hidden?'' Others agree, complaining that McCloskey's proprietary system constitutes a ''black box'' impervious to academic and professional scrutiny.
''I'm not in the tenure-track business,'' McCloskey retorts. ''I followed the academic rules and published papers for a while. I found it was insanely slow. If you walked up to Steve Jobs and asked him to reveal everything, he'd say, 'Get out of my face.'''
McCloskey, interestingly enough, grew up in San Francisco and Cupertino, Calif., the home of Jobs and Apple Computer. Upon graduating from Oregon State in 1971 with a degree in general science, he returned home and got a job painting barrels with mildicide at nearby Ridge Vineyards; within a year, he had taken over the winery's lab -- such as it was -- and by the time he was 25 had published new methods for measuring alcohol and malolactic fermentation (both now essential to wine analysis). In 1976 he helped to found Felton-Empire, a winery whose first vintage riesling won the Sweepstakes Award at the Los Angeles County Fair.
Paul Draper, the now celebrated vintner who arrived at Ridge shortly before McCloskey, recalls that Charlie Rosen -- one of the winery's founders and then head of artificial intelligence at the Stanford Research Institute -- considered McCloskey a genius, and Maynard Amerine, a noted U.C. Davis professor who helped to classify California's wine regions by climate, suggested that McCloskey get a doctorate at Davis with the aim of joining the faculty. But Rosen and Carl Djerassi, a Ridge investor and the inventor of the birth-control pill, advised McCloskey to study ''things like chemistry and mathematics, which actually have principles,'' McCloskey says. ''Enology is more like a social science.'' While remaining a paid consultant at Ridge, McCloskey attended U.C. Santa Cruz, and there he met his future wife, Susanne Arrhenius, a Swedish-born grad student whose lineage included two Nobel laureates in chemistry. Following Arrhenius into the field of chemical ecology, which analyzes the relationships between organisms and their environments, McCloskey completed his Ph.D. while continuing to consult with private clients and serve as president of Felton-Empire.
''Chemical ecology says that a wine's flavor, color and fragrance are expressions of its ecosystem,'' McCloskey told me. ''Wine scientists thought grapes were more complicated than any other plant system. But we found out that Vitis vinifera produces a relatively simple list of flavors. Grapes are really rather primitive.''
Soon after McCloskey left U.C. Santa Cruz, Felton-Empire was sold. Along the way, he noticed that the U.S. wine industry was becoming more businesslike and less entrepreneurial. ''Critics were starting to control the value chain that went from the winery to the distributor to the retailer and restaurateur to the consumer,'' McCloskey says. ''By 1990 everybody was discrediting the Score, but I saw that the critics were going to win because Americans wanted to reduce their risk of purchase and winemakers weren't filling the information void.''
That year, 1990, McCloskey met with Dick Graff, then chairman of the Chalone Wine Group. McCloskey told him that although winemakers always seemed surprised when their efforts didn't pan out, chemistry could actually predict critical performance. Graff arranged for McCloskey to taste Chalone wines with all the company's vintners, after which McCloskey assembled the results and analyzed the wines' chemistry. Later the winemakers were presented with 12 wines, and asked to rank the 6 best and 6 worst. While others tallied the votes, McCloskey produced a sealed envelope containing his chemically based predictions: he correctly guessed the group's Top 3 and Bottom 3 choices, in the correct order.
After that, Graff introduced McCloskey to the owners of Chateau Lafite Rothschild, the famous first-growth Bordeaux estate that had a financial interest in Chalone. When McCloskey analyzed the chemistry of Lafite's vintages from the previous decade, his quality index exactly mirrored their economic performance. McCloskey continued to work with Lafite for the next four years, over which time he gained a dozen more clients. In 1993 he trademarked the name Enologix.
A week and a half after the meeting at Chappellet, Sam Spencer visited the Enologix offices with samples of wine he had pressed according to McCloskey's instructions. Studying its numbers, McCloskey said, ''That's a home run.''
''I literally baby-sat the fermenter,'' Spencer said.
Later, in the privacy of his office, McCloskey told me, ''My goal is to make my customers self-sufficient so that metrics alone can solve all their problems.'' Toward that end, he is now creating a thousand proprietary documents that will include all of his winemaking knowledge. Ultimately, he said, ''I'll be replaced by customer-management software.''
And if McCloskey has his way, descriptions of a wine's terroir will be replaced by reports on its levels of tannin and complex anthocyanin.
David Darlington is the author of ''Zin: The History and Mystery of Zinfandel'' (originally published as ''Angels' Visits''), among other books, and writes the Short Finish column for Wine & Spirits magazine.
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* Dr. James Lee Ellingson, Adjunct Professor jellings(a)me.umn.edu *
* University of Minnesota, tel: 651/645-0753 fax 651 XXX XXXX *
* Great Lakes Brewing News, 1569 Laurel Ave., St. Paul, MN 55104 *
Greetings,
Late notice, small group. Spanish wines at Oddfellows.
Oddfellows / Boom
401 E Hennepin Minneapolis, MN 55414
612-378-3188
Yes: (mostly guesses)
Bob
Bill
Betsy
Roger
Nicolai
Karin
Russ
Cheers,
Jim
Spanish wines make a splash
Tim Teichgraeber
Special To The Star Tribune
Published August 4, 2005
These are exciting times for Spanish wine. Spanish winemakers are rediscovering the great potential of their own vineyards in regions like Priorat, Bierzo, La Mancha and Jumilla, and American wine drinkers have been quick to appreciate the country's unique regional wines and their modest price tags. According to some industry figures, sales of Spanish wines were up an impressive 24 percent in 2004, despite the weak value of the dollar against the euro.
Spanish wines have managed to modernize without becoming homogenized. There are stylish, zesty whites from Rias Baixas and Rueda, and a tremendous variety of regional red wines from Spain's extremely rocky, mineral-rich soils. Those crisp mineral flavors that often appear in Spanish reds distinguish them from most American wines, which generally come from earthier, younger soils. Here are a few suggestions to get you started on your exploration of Spanish wine.
. 2004 Martinsancho Verdejo Rueda ($16). Rueda's crisp white wines are dynamite with seafood, but they also often have surprising depth and body to them. This is one of my favorites, with lovely green apple and lemon-lime flavors that are pure, fresh, crisp, but with a richer, melony center that adds a bit of weight. *** 1/2 (Grape Beginnings)
. 1996 Marques de Caceres Reserva Rioja ($24). A classically styled reserve wine from a great Rioja vintage with deep blackberry, black cherry, cedar and toast aromas, a plush mouthfeel and cedar, licorice, chocolate and tangy black cherry flavors. It's heavily oaked, but shows the quality of the vintage. *** 1/2 (The Wine Company)
. 2003 Guelbenzu "Azul" Ribera del Queiles ($15). A neat blend of cabernet sauvignon, tempranillo and merlot with spicy cherry, pepper and cinnamon aromas and sturdy, tangy cherry, plum, cedar, dried herb and spice flavors that possess a distinct Spanish character. *** (Grape Beginnings)
. 2004 Carchelo Monastrell Jumilla ($11). A popular favorite made from old-vine monastrell (also known as mourv�dre) grapes with splashes of merlot, syrah and cabernet for juicy, youthful cherry, plum, anise and dried sage aromas and flavor with hints of limestone and raisin on the finish. *** (Grape Beginnings)
Poorly kept secret
. 2004 Marques de Caceres Rioja White ($9). Made from 100 percent viura grapes with mellow pear, cream and citrus aromas and flavors. It's not too flashy, but a nice straightforward fresh white for seafood or other light fare. ** 1/2 (The Wine Company)
Local distributors
Local distributors willing to take calls are listed at the end of each review. They can refer you to retailers who carry these wines.
.Grape Beginnings, 952-933-7290
.The Wine Company, 651-487-1212, www.twcwines.com
**** Exceptional
*** Highly recommended
** Recommended
* Satisfactory
Tim Teichgraeber, formerly of Minneapolis, is a San Francisco-based wine writer and entertainment attorney. He can be reached online at tim(a)timskyscraper.com.
� Copyright 2005 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.
----- End forwarded message -----
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------------------------------ *
* Dr. James Lee Ellingson, Adjunct Professor jellings(a)me.umn.edu *
* University of Minnesota, tel: 651/645-0753 fax 651 XXX XXXX *
* Great Lakes Brewing News, 1569 Laurel Ave., St. Paul, MN 55104 *
