Slate eBook Club - Best of 2003

by Slate. com

  Many cheese consumers have also bought into a certain agrarian romanticism, the sense that farming may be, as Benjamin Franklin asserted, "the only honest way" to make a living. Dairy farming, which implies the care—not the killing—of animals (vegan objections notwithstanding), comes off as especially wholesome. Organizations like Slow Food and publications like Saveur have helped promulgate this notion, profiling traditional food-makers and elevating them to the status of folk heroes. Most Americans aren't looking to start their own farm, but purchasing a lovely farmstead cheddar makes it possible to nibble on someone else's salt-of-the-earth nobility.

  To convey this sense of agrarian craftsmanship, the food press and retailers have popularized the word "artisan" (as in the French adjective "artisanal") as a catch-all for food products made in a low-tech, highly skilled manner—crusty breads, homemade jams, small-batch olive oils, and cheeses. Retailers have used the term, often conflating it with the organic label, to coax high prices from conscientious food consumers. But there are no rules comparable to organic standards that allow a product to be called artisanal, which means that big food corporations are already beginning to use the term to describe decidedly uncraftsmanlike products. At the convention, cheese-makers voiced growing concern that the wholesome appeal of craft cheeses might soon be co-opted by the likes of Kraft.

  What's slightly ironic, of course, is that when it comes to cheese, not all of the work is controlled by human hands. Like beer, wine, and sourdough bread, good cheese derives its complexity from the action of microbes—bacteria, yeast, and mold—on milk. One technique and set of cultures will result in a sharp, long-aged cheddar while another will result in a white-rinded, oozy cheese that ripens from the outside in (think camembert and brie). The microbes are usually purchased from "culture houses" that isolate and grow microbes in a laboratory environment, but if you're really bold and low-tech, you can try to work with microbes already present in the room where the cheese is being made. I'm told that some American cheese-makers, looking to France as the gold standard in cheese-making, have smeared classic French cheeses on the wall of their plants in an effort to introduce the Gallic molds into their operations.

  In addition to choosing the microbes, there are a thousand other judgments involved in making good cheese; chief among them is the kind of milk to use. Sheep, goat, or cow? Farmstead or outsourced? Organic or not? Pasture-fed or silage-fed? And, most controversially, pasteurized or raw? Milk must be heated to be pasteurized, and heat unravels proteins, which in turn affects the flavor of the cheese. Cheese made with raw milk is consistently described by cheese aficionados as more "alive" than its pasteurized cousin: The flavor of milk, and thus the cheese, the argument goes, is full of the fragrance of the herd's food and also full of microflora specific to the farmland. Pasteurizing milk, to make a bad pun, homogenizes its flavor. (There is also the as-yet unproven argument that consuming microflora in raw milk products helps habituate human bodies to microbes and thus boosts immunity.) But the options for selling raw-milk cheeses in this country are limited. By law, unpasteurized cheeses on the market in the United States must have been aged at least 60 days (aging cheese changes its chemistry and makes it less friendly to pathogens). Farmers who make younger cheeses often try to pasteurize their milk in a slower, lower-heat manner in order to disturb its proteins as little as possible. It's worth noting that a lot of good cheeses are made with pasteurized milk, including the prizewinning Red Hawk.

  At the conference, the raw-milk issue was not as pressing as it had been three years ago, when the FDA seemed poised to require all commercial dairy products, even aged ones, to be pasteurized in an effort to prevent food-poisoning outbreaks. Today, there is still a general sense that the right to work with raw milk may be threatened, but serious scientific studies are also being done—at the University of Vermont, for example—that suggest that aged raw-milk cheeses are not inherently more dangerous than pasteurized. The few outbreaks of listeria in aged raw-milk cheeses can be traced to poor handling of cheeses after they left the cheese-maker's hands.

  So, let's ask the obvious question: Why on earth would fermented foods like cheese be enjoying such a wave of popularity at a time when microbial anxiety is running so high? The threat of bioterrorism lingers in the back of our minds, new diseases like West Nile virus and SARS freak us out, and antibiotics that have kept us healthy for years seem to be losing their efficacy. Perhaps the thought of microbial cultivation, a sort of micro-agriculture, is comforting. Cultivating microbes confers an idea of control: It reassures us that we've lived with microbes for a long time and always found a way to manage them.

  In a presentation at the cheese conference, Sister Noëlla Marcellino, a cheese-making nun with a doctorate in microbiology, explained how bacteria and fungi in her abbey's raw-milk cheeses helped not only to develop the flavor of the cheese but also to inhibit the growth of pathogens. Her PowerPoint presentation was delivered with scientific objectivity, and yet I imagined good microbes duking it out with listeria in a microscopic struggle for the soul of the cheese. As long as good cheese is available, it's a battle that's won at cocktail parties every day.

  Grape Deceptions

  Why most wine collectors are also compulsive liars.

  By Mike Steinberger

  Posted Friday, May 23, 2003, at 8:21 AM PT

  One of the wine world's dirty little secrets is the apparently vast number of wine lovers who harbor dirty little secrets. The amount of time and money wine collecting consumes can be hell on a relationship. Determined not to see their hobby cause friction at home, many oenophiles keep the peace not by limiting their buying (an impossibility), but by going to enormous lengths to conceal it. To get the vino, sometimes you have to sacrifice the veritas.

  Presumably, most serial sneaks would prefer to be honest about their profligacy, but coming clean is simply not feasible—not when their spouses insist on treating wine like a mere beverage and believe that spending hundreds of dollars a month on fermented grape juice is irresponsible and asinine, possibly even immoral. This is the regrettable attitude many wine buffs confront.

  Making matters worse, the partner not besotted with wine is often the one in charge of household finances. (Stockpiling huge quantities of wine requires a certain impracticality and insouciance, attributes that do not readily lend themselves to mundane tasks like balancing a checkbook.) This is a problem. Prices for Bordeaux, Burgundies, Rhones, Napa Valley cabernets, and other blue-chip wines have soared in the last decade as more Americans and, to a lesser extent, Asians, have become serious oenophiles.

  At the same time, the market has been saturated with stellar vintages. The Southern Rhone in 1998. The Northern Rhone in '99. Bordeaux in 2000. Germany in 2001 … and on and on. (Only now is this glut, combined with the sour economy, beginning to weigh on prices; expect some steals in the months ahead.) There is just no end to the must-haves these days. For all but the most affluent buyers, it has become increasingly difficult to maintain a respectable cellar and placate their parsimonious spouses. Something has to give, and it is their significant others who are doing the giving. They just don't know it.

  Hiding the extent of one's habit can take a variety of forms, off-balance-sheet transactions being the most common. These are usually done in cash, but many wine nuts establish separate credit card accounts and have the bills sent either to the office or to a postal box. But paying for the wine is one thing; smuggling it into the house is another. Some don't even try, opting instead to rent space in wine warehouses. Others take delivery at the workplace and keep the bottles there until it is safe to sneak them home and into the basement.

  To get a sense of how prevalent these shenanigans are, I rang a friend—let's call him Johnny—who owns a popular Manhattan wine shop. He agreed to cough up some stories, but only if I wouldn't print his name (and discretion is exactly what you want in an enabler). "Lying is rampant," he told me, "I see it all the time." He spoke of one regular who comes in severa
l nights a week and inevitably walks out with two bottles: an inexpensive, quotidian wine and a gem. The former is paid for with plastic and goes into a store bag; the latter he buys with cash and buries in his briefcase, presumably to be squirreled away somewhere later that evening.

  With some clients, Johnny takes an active role in the deception. In fact, he recently helped pull off one of the great snookerings of his career: A customer who frequently makes purchases behind his wife's back came into the store, spouse in tow; with just a few signaling winks and nods, Johnny and his client managed to execute a costly sale while keeping the wife completely in the dark.

  Another retailer shared with me his most cherished tale of deception. He had a client with deep pockets and a passion for Burgundies (a passion that requires deep pockets). According to the merchant, this customer never purchased a wine under $100 a bottle. To mask his extravagant buying, he obtained a debit card and began storing wine in an empty office down the hall. Over five years he accumulated some 300 cases, all of which he stashed in the spare office. (There are 12 bottles in a case; if every bottle was $100, the total works out to $360,000. Given that many of the wines were far costlier, the price tag was probably well above $500,000.) The long-running ruse came to an abrupt end when his wife paid a visit to the office and opened the wrong door. For some time thereafter, the marriage was evidently on the rocks. However, the couple eventually worked out their differences—so successfully, in fact, that she was next seen helping him organize his wines.

  Not all wine-hiding tales end so happily. Jeff Zacharia, owner of Zachy's, the great wine emporium in Scarsdale, N.Y., told me of one former customer (former because he isn't allowed to buy wine anymore) who amassed a collection worth around $20,000 without his wife's knowledge. She eventually found him out, and Zacharia's client was given a choice: Sell the wine or see me in court. He sold.

  There is, of course, a common thread here: It is men—husbands, usually—who are doing the lying. When it comes to wine collecting and concealing, there is indeed a gender gap. Preferring to open bottles, not cans of worms, I won't speculate as to why this is so, and in any case, the gap seems to be narrowing. At a recent dinner, I found myself discussing cellar strategies with a female executive from Los Angeles who ruefully admitted that because her husband is a penny-pinching beer drinker, she does her buying on the sly. I was of two minds about her. I was glad to learn that wine is capable of driving women to deceit, but I was also glad she wasn't my wife. As far as I'm concerned, there's only room in a relationship for one wine cheat.

  As you may have suspected, I do have some experience in these matters. Wine has caused pain in my marriage. My wife, an editor at a food and wine magazine, has more than a passing interest in chardonnays and Vouvrays, but for her, wine is not an obsession. She thinks of wine collecting chiefly in terms of opportunity cost, while I think of it chiefly in terms of opportunity lost—if I don't buy a particular bottle, I might come to regret it. (That said, I've got a very modest cellar—150 bottles, give or take 200.) As a result, we have endured our share of long evenings and near-divorce experiences on account of credit card charges and receipts I neglected to burn.

  Our most recent wine spat was two years ago, when I was hit with an unexpected $300 excess-baggage fee for several cases I was carrying back from France. On the flight home, I finally decided to put myself on a budget. (It is a modified budget, in that only wines meant for cellaring count against it; wines for immediate consumption are paid for out of my wallet.) I have done a fairly good job of adhering to my self-imposed limits. Since my son's birth in 2001, most of my purchases have revolved around his needs. To mark his 10th birthday, for instance, he'll need something better than a Bud Light, so I recently preordered a bottle of 2001 Haut-Brion, the least expensive of the Bordeaux First Growths but also the best (the wine hasn't reached stores yet; it is now being sold on a pre-arrival basis).

  And obviously, he'll have to go to college; I can no longer count on the stock market to fund his education, so, as a form of insurance, I am now accumulating wines that are likely to have significant resale value. Will I resell them? Not a chance, but it is good to have the option and useful, too, to have a more convincing explanation for any displeasing items on the Amex bill. Actually, wine can be a stellar investment: The 1982 Chateau Petrus, to give just one example, has delivered substantially higher returns than the S&P 500 over the past two decades. Among spendthrift oenophiles, pointing out wine's investment potential is a popular means of deflecting irate spouses. It's much better than the lesser-evil argument (marital infidelity being the most frequently cited alternative) because not only does it not sound defensive; it sounds downright prudent. In a bear market, who can dispute the need for appreciating liquid assets?

  The Marvelous Michelin Man

  Don't blame the top restaurant guide for a French chef's suicide.

  By Mike Steinberger

  Posted Tuesday, March 4, 2003, at 1:20 PM PT

  Reacting to the suicide last Monday of fellow culinary kingpin Bernard Loiseau, Paul Bocuse and other top French chefs skipped the shock and went straight for the scapegoating, blaming his death on merciless, mercurial critics. They claimed Loiseau's recent demotion by GaultMillau, a popular restaurant guide, led him to make a date with the business end of his rifle. But the principal object of their ire was the all-powerful Michelin Guide, whose coveted stars can make or break a restaurant (the loss of a star will generally cut a restaurant's turnover by at least 25 percent). They said the pressure of trying to perennially please Michelin drove Loiseau, one of just 25 three-star recipients in France (Bocuse is another), to the brink. They also blame Michelin for making haute cuisine an impossibly difficult business. Talk about biting the hand …

  Michelin exercises the influence it does because restaurants matter in France and because the guide, with its army of anonymous inspectors, has proven itself over the years to be a rigorous, honest, and generally excellent judge of them. The "Red Bible," as it is known, is a symbol of French culinary achievement and a guarantor of French culinary standards. It has long been a springboard to fame and riches for chefs, and the importance they attach to Michelin stars has only magnified the guide's importance to restaurant-goers. Nowadays, when top-flight cooking is increasingly homogenized and the French no longer boast a monopoly on gastronomic genius, what mystique French fare and French chefs retain is chiefly attributable to Michelin.

  It's not a little ironic that Bocuse has been doing most of the finger-pointing during the past week, since no one has prospered more than he from Michelin's imprimatur. Initially awarded three stars in 1965, he was the first chef to use the guide's stamp of approval as a ticket to universal celebrity, becoming a globe-trotting icon with lucrative consulting and endorsement deals. The fact that Bocuse is now 77 years old and some three decades removed from his last big flash of inspiration at the stove—he was one of the godfathers of nouvelle cuisine—yet still holds three stars and is still the world's most famous chef is emblematic of Michelin's ability to catapult chefs to stardom and keep them there.

  Loiseau's life ambition was to mimic the success Bocuse has enjoyed. He once said he wanted to be to gastronomy what Pelé was to soccer. When his obsessive pursuit of a third star—the subject of a superb book by American journalist William Echikson titled Burgundy Stars (Loiseau's restaurant, La Côte d'Or, is located in Saulieu, a somniferous town at the northern tip of Burgundy)—finally bore fruit, Loiseau used the critical acclaim to assemble a mini-empire. There were TV shows, cookbooks, a line of frozen foods, a boutique, a handful of bistros in Paris, even a listing on the Paris stock market. Some of the postmortems have suggested that Loiseau did all this moonlighting out of necessity—to keep La Côte d'Or afloat. In fact, he did it chiefly because he craved the spotlight.

  True, operating the restaurant was a huge and growing financial burden, and at the time of his death Loiseau was sinking into debt. Bocuse and other Michelin-bashers have blamed his money
woes, and those of other three-star chefs, on the guide, which they contend requires budget-busting levels of opulence.

  Michelin does have high expectations, but so do its readers. When you go to a three-star, you generally expect an obscenely lavish, memorable meal—pristine ingredients, flawless execution, impeccable service, baronial surroundings. Putting on that kind of show requires a serious investment these days, and not just because foie gras and caviar don't come cheap. French labor laws—relatively high wages, generous benefits, the 35-hour work week—have pushed operating expenses for three-star establishments into the stratosphere.

  The restaurants now find themselves caught in a vicious cycle: They pass on the added costs by raising prices—the going rate for lunch or dinner at a three-star is around $200 a head these days (20 percent of the tab is thanks to that other business-deflating institution, the value-added tax)—and as the prices increase, so do the expectations.

  Several marquee chefs, including Alain Ducasse, are now working out of hotels because they have concluded that running a top-notch stand-alone establishment is no longer feasible or desirable. The biggest culinary star in France at the moment, Marc Veyrat, nearly went bankrupt several years ago; a little mercy from his bankers kept the lights on.

  Loiseau had those same financial difficulties, but unlike most of his peers, it seems he had no outside backing (save for the investors in his stock). Moreover, three-stars now cater largely to foreigners, and Saulieu is not exactly a hot destination. Had La Côte d'Or been in, say, Dijon, things might have turned out differently.