Best Food Writing 2017

by Holly Hughes

  So, do these experiments in extreme brewing still qualify as beer? At what point do they turn into something unrecognizable—and, more importantly, not worth the risk? Inspired in part by my conversation with Jarnit-Bjergsø, my good friend Alex and I decided to do a tasting (this might be the place to state, for the record, that I’m not a craft beer fetishist). I went to St. Gambrinus Beer Shoppe in downtown Brooklyn and spent just over $100 on what struck me as an interesting, albeit highly unscientific, sample of what’s out there these days. Then we drank everything. The result? Suffice it to say our tongues are in stable condition, and we’re told we’ll be able to drink beer again one day.

  It might be useful to examine the term beer. According to the Beer Academy, a UK-based group of fermentation enthusiasts, beer is “an alcoholic drink brewed mainly from malted barley, hops, yeast and water.” From a historical viewpoint, it would seem, the beverage is relatively easy to define—but not so fast. The Beer Academy goes on to state that “other sources of fermentable carbohydrate (e.g., maize, wheat, rice) and other natural ingredients may be added to create different styles and flavours.” This begs the question of where the boundary lies between beer and not-beer. Peanuts are a source of fermentable carbohydrate; so are plantains, yuca root and beans. Maybe the only reason we aren’t drinking bean beer at our local football stadium is that beer drinkers, at least in the US, have traditionally been a pretty conservative bunch. Thanks to the craft beer craze, however, that attitude is changing quickly.

  “I remember being at a brewer’s convention in 1994,” Garrett Oliver, the editor of The Oxford Companion to Beer, told me. “IPAs were considered an almost forgotten, historic British brew at that time—few breweries were making them. Now you can get an IPA in any decent bar in America. Change can happen rapidly, but you do want to be careful. As they say in one of my favorite movies, This Is Spinal Tap: ‘It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.’”

  Many craft beer devotees would claim, by way of rebuttal, that the array of styles and flavors now on offer is less a voyage into the unknown than it is a return to brewing’s wild and storied past. Our understanding of what beer is, they argue, has been narrowed over the course of the modern age by a domestic brewing industry that’s encouraged mass production and a drift toward monoculture. As anyone over the age of 30 can attest, in the recent past, beer essentially meant lager; even a Belgian wheat beer like Hoegaarden or St. Bernardus qualified as exotic.

  To fortify our courage for our tasting, Alex and I started things off with a brew that probably wouldn’t rate as strange, much less extreme, to most craft beer cognoscenti: Oude Quetsche, a lambic beer that’s brewed with plums at Gueuzerie Tilquin in Belgium. Craft-brewing fanatics have been geeking out about sour beer in recent years, and in an era in which high-acid, unoaked white wines are all the rage, it’s hard not to see a correlation: Sour brews tend to be tart and bright and wonderfully unsentimental, with a funkiness that calls to mind natural wine as much as it does lager.

  Alex and I were expecting great things from Oude Quetsche, and we weren’t disappointed. Far from introducing any sweetness to the experience, the plums create a particular spike of sourness in the middle, just at the moment the sip you’ve taken clears the back of your palate. Alex compared it to sneaking into a farmer’s orchard and filling your mouth with not-quite-ripe-yet plums; I had to admit, there was something almost illicit in the pleasure this beer gave us.

  The next beer we sampled, though, was unquestionably extreme. Higher Math, from Delaware’s well-known Dogfish Head brewery, is a golden ale made with both cherry juice and chocolate, and described by the brewery as a “luscious chocolate-cherry birthday cake in liquid form.” This should have been warning enough to proceed with caution—ditto the fact that it was 17 percent alcohol, right around the level of, say, Night Train Express—but we were still giddy from our happy experience with Oude Quetsche. Our judgment may have been clouded. “Smells like Russian black bread,” Alex said cheerfully, taking a sizable gulp.

  Before I could follow his lead, Alex gave a kind of grunt and set the glass down very carefully, like someone backing away from an angry gorilla. Ignoring his look, I took a small sip of my own. Something had gone dreadfully wrong in the making of Higher Math; that much was clear to us both. I recall the sensation of having my mouth stuffed with drugstore bonbons steeped in cherry-flavored schnapps. “Ah! That’s so bad,” I said, but it was Alex who summed it up best. “This is the worst bottled beverage I’ve ever tasted,” he said. “And I’m including sour milk.”

  Still reeling, we opted for the relative safety of Bozo Beer, an Evil Twin imperial stout “with coffee and with natural flavors added.” It became clear that Jarnit-Bjergsø is far from infallible. Because stouts tend to be so sweet and robust, brewers tend to regard them as particularly useful when experimenting with outlandish ingredients. That may be the case, but the one-two punch of Higher Math and Bozo nearly wrecked us. Bozo is the foie gras goose of beer, so packed with flavors that it seems a moral outrage. I managed to work my way through a small glass; Alex did not. “Molasses, chocolate, almond, hazelnut, oak spiral, chili, marshmallow,” he read from the ingredient list, then added a few of his own: “air freshener, candle wax, Old Spice soap on a rope from 1976.” In fairness, Bozo Beer describes itself, right on its own label, as “made for bozos.” We found out later that Jarnit-Bjergsø had originally intended it as a parody of the excesses of the experimental brewing craze. Looking it up later that night on beeradvocate.com, we found that it has received a rating of 91—“outstanding.” The world of craft beer is an eldritch one.

  The final beer in our tasting was Rogue’s Beard Beer. We approached it, as might be imagined by this point, with deep circumspection. I poured no more than a knuckle’s width into two mason jars—mason jars seemed safer, somehow—and we stuck our noses in and sniffed like sommeliers. Unlike sommeliers, however, we weren’t after subtleties in the bouquet; we were smelling for danger.

  “No red flags yet,” said Alex, and I had to agree. All we smelled was an agreeably sweet and wheaty aroma. We mustered our courage and drank. For all its hype, Beard Beer proved to be a mild-mannered ale with blessedly few quirks. Sweet at the beginning, very much like a Belgian blonde ale, it tapered to a subtly tangy finish. Wild though the yeasts may have been, there was virtually none of the potent funk I’d come to expect from spontaneously fermented beers, which use whatever yeasts are present in the air. This was a beer brewed to please. Which made me think that those in the true vanguard of craft brewing are less interested in finding out what they can do with chocolate or habaneros or prairie oysters than they are dedicated to creating beers you’d want a second bottle of.

  How Much Is Too Much for a Glass of Wine?

  BY RAY ISLE

  From Food & Wine

  As Food & Wine’s executive wine editor, Ray Isle is well aware of the world’s top wines, and the prices they usually command. Even he is bemused to see restaurants more and more frequently offering those noble vintages on a per-glass basis. Is it a bargain, or proof that the world has gone mad?

  Not long ago I was with my wife at a restaurant that had a $190 glass of wine on its list. My wife, who is also known as the voice of reason, observed that this was—if I can get her words right—“just ridiculous.” I pointed out that the wine in question, a 2004 Château Rayas Châteauneuf-du-Pape, was one of the great wines of the world. She replied that she didn’t care if it was made by magical elves—paying $190 for a glass of wine was still ridiculous.

  Yet in the past few years, more and more restaurants have started offering surprisingly expensive wines by the glass. I’m not going to say my wife was wrong—in fact, one of the fundamental rules of journalism is, Don’t say in print that your wife is wrong—because I feel that the vast majority of people would agree with her: $190 seems like a crazy amount to pay for a glass of wine. But at the same time, more and more people are buying, spending anywhere from $25 to $400
a pop.

  Michael Ploetz created the by-the-glass program at The Peninsula Beverly Hills’ restaurant The Belvedere. He recalls, “Immediately, we began selling a lot of high-end Chardonnay, like $40 to $50 a glass—Paul Hobbs, Peter Michael, that sort of thing. And not really to wine-geeky people; more our regular customers.” Ploetz’s regular customers do live in Beverly Hills, which isn’t the lowest-rent district around, but he doesn’t feel that the casual profligacy of the .01 percent caused the shift. “I really think that what people are after is the experience. It’s like, ‘I know Chave is a great Hermitage producer, and I’ve never had the wine—for $83, let’s give it a go.” I have to admit, I felt the same tug with that $190 glass of Château Rayas, a wine I rarely, if ever, get to drink.

  Paolo Meregalli, owner and wine director of New York City’s Mulino a Vino wine bar, calculates that almost 40 percent of his customers are buying wines that are $25 to $50 a glass—Brunellos, Barolos, Amarones. “We have some customers who will come in and have a glass of 1998 Sassicaia with a plate of pasta Bolognese. A couple here on a date shared a glass the other night.” A glass of ’98 Sassicaia is $145 on Meregalli’s list; the pasta Bolognese, $18.

  Pouring a single glass of a pricey wine is now financially practical for restaurants thanks to a device called the Coravin, launched three years ago. Created by a medical device inventor named Greg Lambrecht, the Coravin uses technology inspired by tools developed for biopsies. It drives a thin, Teflon-coated needle through the cork in the bottle; then it pumps in argon, a neutral gas that doesn’t affect the flavor of wine (as opposed to oxygen, which will). The increased pressure pushes the wine out through the same needle. The result is that a sommelier can extract a glass of an incredibly sought-after wine from a bottle without ever removing the cork or damaging the remaining wine. Over 700 restaurants in the US use the device at this point, and more are adopting it. That said, there’s also a small Luddite faction of sommeliers who remain steadfastly anti-Coravin, but I’ve tested the thing over multiple blind tastings, and as far as I’ve seen, it works exactly as advertised.

  Still, the fact that you can pour a $400 glass of wine without problems doesn’t necessarily mean that people will buy a $400 glass of wine. Yet, despite what may seem to be the demands of common sense, people do. That, to me, is where this shift becomes truly interesting.

  To get a handle on this development, I spoke to Z. John Zhang, the Murrel J. Ades professor of marketing at the Wharton School. As Zhang said, “It’s about making the product divisible. The classic example is the Encyclopaedia Britannica. If you bought the whole set at once, it was, like, $1,500. So marketers came up with the idea of allowing you to buy one book per month. You think, Well, I can afford $50 a month, no problem. Even though you end up paying the same amount in the end, or more. Time-sharing with vacation houses works the same way.”

  In other words, if you want that beach view in Boca Raton badly enough but can’t afford the whole house, you’ll settle for one week a year. Similarly, if you want to try Domaine de la Romanée-Conti but don’t relish paying for a whole bottle, a glass might do the trick. The Belvedere offers a six-ounce glass (a fourth of a bottle, essentially) of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti’s 2005 Romanée-St-Vivant for $406. The cost of a full bottle there is exactly four times as much. At most restaurants, customers generally pay proportionally more when buying wine by the glass than by the bottle, but Ploetz opted not to follow that rule. “I tried to price the high-end glasses at an advantage to the customer,” he told me. “So, weirdly enough, that glass of Romanée-Conti’s actually a great value.”

  A $406 glass of wine is still a rarity almost everywhere; most high-end pours are anywhere from $25 to $50. While that’s not exactly cheap, it does offer people the chance to taste wines they might never have the opportunity to buy. At The Village Pub in Woodside, California, a glass of the Aubert Ritchie Vineyard Chardonnay costs $44. Pricey, sure, but the wine is one of California’s most prized Chardonnays, and there’s a multiyear wait to get on the winery’s mailing list. This approach also attracts customers who want to try several high-end wines during a meal, as Thomas Pastuszak of New York City’s NoMad restaurant notes.

  The NoMad is where my wife and I saw that $190 glass of Château Rayas on the list. I admit I thought about going back later to try it. Why wouldn’t I? I mean, it was Château Rayas. How often do I get to drink Château Rayas? Almost never! And I’m a wine writer! Surely a glass of Rayas would be a more worthwhile experience than, say, a new pair of shoes? But as my wife pointed out, shoes are a necessity—even very, very expensive shoes. Wine is not. Imagine, she added, if one person were to purchase an expensive glass of wine and thus deprive another person—a very deserving other person—of a new pair of shoes. Ridiculous even to think about it.

  And because the fundamental rules of journalism demand it, I think I’d better state right here that, as always, she is absolutely right.

  Wine Pairing with Jill Mott

  BY STEVE HOFFMAN

  From Growlermag.com

  There’s a reason to trust experts, as Twin Cities food writer Steve Hoffman discovered at a dinner set up by website/magazine The Growler, which celebrates craft in food, drink, and the arts. Everyone at the dinner knew the “rules” about what to drink with red meat. A wine guru’s picks surprised everyone.

  Earlier that afternoon, just outside Jon Wipfli’s patio door, an entire boneless leg of lamb had twirled slowly on a string suspended above a hardwood fire for six hours or so, dripping occasional runnels of fat into the coals, and wrapping itself gradually in a cloak of char.

  Now, on the cutting board in front of us, through the loose netting that held the roast together, the dark-sheened, coarse-textured crust made promises about smoke, and salt, and rose-colored, fat-rimmed slices of lamb, and because Jon Wipfli may know as much about roasting meat as anyone in the Twin Cities, when his first slice fell sideways onto the board, all of those promises came true.

  We were faced with one of those food moments near enough to perfection that you start to examine your own character. “Here I am,” says the food moment, eyeing you up and down. “Looks to me like you’ve got some living up to do.” I felt an impulse to tuck in my shirt, and check my fly.

  It was also one of those moments when liking wine, if you do, becomes something you are just so damn grateful for. A slice of perfect leg of lamb, just on the rare side of medium rare, is for the most part an unenhanceable thing. There is nothing you can really add or subtract that will make it, or the experience of eating it, any better than itself—with the possible exception of a glass of wine.

  We were here to experiment with wine pairing, and that is the simple premise behind it—that what you drink can interact with what you eat, and actually change the experience of eating it, whether by complementing the food, or contrasting instructively with it, or fending off boredom with it, or clearing the sensations in your mouth to taste more of it. At its best, the right pairing can take something merely perfectly crafted, and turn it into a kind of ephemeral art.

  But there’s a problem, and the problem is precisely that we’re talking art, not science. There are a few pairing principles, and a handful of rules, but just as you and I can’t paint a Rembrandt, or improvise a jazz riff, we mostly lack the combination of knowledge, practice, and intuition to pair a wine to a particular dish, much less pair an evening of wines to a coursed meal.

  Fortunately, tonight, we count Jill Mott among our delicately salivating crew, and Jill is just the wine artist we need.

  In fact, she is sort of a wine Renaissance woman—scouting and advocating for natural wines around the world, importing some of her favorites to the Twin Cities, curating and serving the wine selection at GYST Fermentation Bar, and teaching classes to laypeople, restaurant staff, and aspiring sommeliers.

  She has paired three wines with our otherworldly lamb.

  If there are classic pairings with lamb, they might include a red wine from th
e southern Rhône valley, or maybe a Provençal rosé. The former to sort of join hands with the lamb in mutual ovine funkiness. The latter to do the opposite—to apply acid and a little dry fruit, as a way of refreshing a mouth coated with salty lamb fat.

  The three bottles Jill has set in front of us are a white wine from the country of Georgia, a red wine from an obscure terraced hillside west of Bilbao, Spain, and a sparkling red from coastal Slovenia. Wines that, combined, would be the consensus choice of perhaps zero other sommeliers in the country.

  So what is Jill doing? Can we minor leaguers even get a bat on these sophisticated knuckleballs, or is she just toying with us? Well, let me take a few swings.

  For one thing, she is introducing us to natural wines, because she believes in them, and they make her happy. “Natural wine,” meaning as little intervention by the winemaker as possible—little or no added yeast, sulfur, temperature control, or acidification; it’s a little like organic farming—a seemingly recent development that is actually a way of reclaiming very old, pre-industrial methods of growing and making food.

  So there’s pairing rule number one. Does the wine you’re going to serve make you happy? Do you love its story? Did you spend a California afternoon tasting it in a cool cellar beside a vineyard? Did you drink it on your first date with your wife? Serve it. Tell its story. Everyone at the table will love that wine.

  What else is Jill doing? Well, despite the rule-bending nature of her choices, she is actually following some basic and reliable guidelines.