Blame it on Rioja

“Vendimia con comportones en 1920.” Photo courtesy Bodegas R. López de Heredia Viña Tondonia.

In just a matter of days, CIAprochef.com, the Culinary Institute of America’s online home, will launch “Rioja: Tradition and Innovation at the Frontiers of Flavor,” a webcast/DVD that represents the culmination of nearly fourteen months of collaborative effort between CIA Greystone in Napa and Vibrant Rioja, and a production to which I am proud to say I made a significant creative contribution.

One of the most painstaking but ultimately most rewarding tasks I was assigned was the sourcing of still images to use as cutaways during the voice-over narration between interviews. Countless individuals, governmental organizations, and bodegas sent us a treasure trove of visual material, enough to turn our humble two-hour production into a multi-part Ken Burns-style video document if we had the time and resources to do so.

As befits a wine region with such a storied past, the most compelling images were largely those captured long ago.

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SECONDS BEFORE A LEMON SQUEEZE: Fluke (foreground) and Black Sea Bass at Artie’s South Shore, with lovely accompaniments, July 2008.

A few weeks back I revisited Artie’s South Shore Fish Market and Restaurant in Island Park, New York, just over the bridge (or one train stop in) from Long Beach.

It was one of those perfect summer days, a Tuesday, and my friend Lily and I decided to turn it into a perfect beach day. With the exception of its “no dogs allowed” policy, Long Beach is an ideal one-day getaway destination for New Yorkers. The beaches are clean and well monitored, and diving into the rolling salt water surf made me feel like I was in a 19th century novella, out taking the cure by the sea.

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Every so often I come across a blog that’s such a joy to read, so lovely to gaze upon, that I find myself lost in the minutiae of things I had no idea I gave a damn about–the cyber-version of a really good, really random New Yorker magazine.

Last night I checked out a blog called Fedification, written by former Martha Stewart Living producer Mari Uyehara, who’s traveling around Thailand for the next several months and has recently started sending tasty dispatches out into the ether, posts on mangosteens and kao soi (egg noodle curry soup) and the difficulty in getting a proper cocktail in Bangkok, accompanied by vibrant and, yes, sexy photographs of liquid refreshments, freshly ravaged fruit, and hot chili-speckled pools of curry-colored deliciousness.

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Lisa Abend reports this week in Time Magazine that Barcelona’s Institute for Electronics recently unveiled a so-called e-tongue capable of discerning grape varieties as well as vintages, the idea being that science could provide a tool useful in the detection of wine fraud, a concern that seems more and more top-of-mind as prestige wine prices skyrocket on the ever-more-popular wine auction market.

Details were few (this is a weekly news magazine, after all, a news vehicle sadly on the brink of becoming a marginalized medium), but the implications on the surface seem pretty far-reaching.

Kind of reminds me a little bit of Tab’s bid to unseat Coca-Cola in the 1970s.

In the first half of 2003, the formidable New York art cinema house, Film Forum, held an extended run of a newly restored 1970 film written and directed by Jean-Pierre Melville called “Le Cercle Rouge,” starring Alain Delon, Gina Maria Volonté, and Yves Montand. By the time I got around to heading across town to see it, it was spring, a Sunday as I recall. That was the weekend of Sakura Matsuri (Cherry Blossom Festival) at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, one of the most soul-soothing spring exercises a New Yorker can experience in a public space, and I headed immediately to Brooklyn after catching the first showing of Melville’s film.

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Had the privilege of enjoying ripe local tomatoes twice this past weekend, first at Chanterelle, where I had lunch with two friends on Saturday, and again last night at Dressler in Williamsburg, where giant tomato disks are stacked together with hunks of watermelon, a summer perennial that’s getting a lot of play these days on both restaurant menus and on the glossy pages of fancy food magazines.

The appearance of tomatoes in local markets (and of corn and peaches) defines late summer for a lot of folks like me, and like with every seasonal bounty, there is always a quest to see how many different ways we can use them at home.

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Hugh Crickmore in 2006. Photo: Carol Hartsell

One of these days someone should devote some serious research time looking into why so many people who are really into wine (and food) are also really into music, either as aficionados or musicians.

It probably has a lot to do with the sensually transportive nature of food and wine, the appreciation of which is largely driven by the olfactory sense, and how a great gastronomic experience in the right company can turn a simple human necessity into an emotionally gratifying moment far removed from the daily grind, or even from the simple passage of time.

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