Blame it on Rioja

I guess Dr. Vino and I are not the only ones with outdoor summer drinking on the brain. I woke up this morning to find an article in the New York Times about just that, called, summerily enough, “Ah, the Heat, the Crowd, the Park, and the Booze.”

“New York City is somewhat of a drinker’s paradise year round,” reporter Cara Buckley writes on the first page of the Metro section, “but a certain extra layer of permissiveness seems to infuse the city in the summertime, along with a wellspring of opportunities to get sloshed, slightly or mightily.”

Although I don’t remember seeing the following paragraph in the print version of the article this morning, a parenthetical disclaimer of sorts touches on the legality question we discussed yesterday:

“The official line from the city’s parks department is that alcohol cannot be brought into city parks, though in the summer of 2003, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg suggested that drinking wine at concerts in Central Park was O.K. At Bryant Park on July 7, a security guard said he turned a blind eye to booze on movie nights, ’so long as it is covered, like in a bag.’”

I remember a Swiss friend of mine in Spain making fun of having seen gainfully employed Americans carrying open bottles of wine in brown paper bags at outdoor events to elude the authorities, “like the hobos you see in the old movies, ahahaha…”

Laugh all you wish, Hans. Tonight, as I settle in to watch Bamako at the Socrates Sculpture Park Outdoor Cinema Series in Queens, and pop open a paper-shrouded bottle of 2001 Sierra Cantabria Gran Reserva whilst digging into a plate of lamb tagine cooked up by the folks at Mundo Cafe in Astoria, the summer sun setting over the East River and a nearly full moon on the rise behind me, I’ll drink a toast to you, my good man, wherever you are.

One of these days I will use the word “summer” as a verb, and at the end of that sentence will be someplace–Shelter Island, the Catskills, Andalucia–that conjures up lazy afternoons and high-end seasonal foodstuffs, but until that day comes, I make it a point to compile a list of cool outdoor summer activities that take place in the city, which is where I’ll be summering this year.

Two of the season’s best outdoor events involve film and food, are both just a stone’s throw from the East River, and began last week: Socrates Sculpture Park’s Wednesday night Outdoor Cinema Series and The Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy’s Thursday night Movies with a View,a few miles downriver.

Each summer Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens, teams up with curators from the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, and a handful of local restaurants and musicians or DJs, to create internationally flavored theme nights. Each week, weather permitting, they’ll have music and dance from a specific locale, food from the same part of the world, and at sunset, a movie similarly themed. On my personal event docket are Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 classic The Red Balloon on August 6 (I don’t think I’m the only American with special memories of watching this film on 16mm in elementary school) and one of my favorite movies ever, Fellini’s 8 1/2, on August 13.

At Movies with a View at Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park, films are also preceded by music, and food is provided by Rice (a restaurant group with a branch in DUMBO that began back in the mid-1990s with a hip tapas bar called Ñ 33 Crosby which is still there). On August 21, I will be there for Hal Ashby’s Being There. Best known for having written and directed Harold and Maude, Ashby was also the director of the politically charged Coming Home, which has the crazy sad scene that still ranks as one the top marriages of music and cinema in film history: Bruce Dern’s beach dive and Tim Buckley’s “Once.”

But back to the East River: Check out Dr. Vino’s NYC wineshop map to find a wine shop nearby to find a bottle to accompany your meal; just be discreet. As Dr. Vino mentions in his latest post, it’s not technically legal to crack wine at public parks, but the consensus is that as long as you are not obvious about it, the authorities are inclined to look the other way.

View from Finca Valpiedra, September 11, 2007

Tuesday, September 11, 2007
3:30pm
On the road to Cenicero

Lachlan Cox at Finca Valpiedra was admirably accommodating with us today, a big relief as logistics become harder and harder to juggle. I saw an opportunity to have both groups, production and sommelier, coincide at Valpiedra at 12:30 p.m. today, which is all well and good except for that fact I had to ask Cox if we could cut into his time with the sommeliers so that we could pull them out one by one and interview them on Valpiedra’s front patio, with the Ebro River in the foreground and the Sierra de Cantabria in the background.

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You might recall that in last week’s post on “The Marriage of Wine and Cinema,” I referenced the restaurant double-date scene in Sideways, calling it the most accurate depiction of anxiety-fueled wine overindulgence in the history of cinema.

What a nightmare to be haunted by a lost love, to feel awkward in some forced-upon-you blind date, and to decide that rushed, four-ounce slurps of fine wine might be the only way to make the desperation of that single moment possibly more palatable.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

No, wait. I’m not bitter. (more…)

I really liked Sideways, Alexander Payne’s twisted California Wine Country road picture, which came out in 2004. I loved Virginia Madsen’s character; when she talked about wine on screen, I wanted shout out, “Marry me, please!”—how’s that for suspension of disbelief? The restaurant double-date scene still haunts me to this day, joining the likes of the “Sister Christian” scene in P.T. Anderson’s 1997 Boogie Nights on my short list of favorite movie scenes in the last decade. Seamlessly cross-cut between dinner and its drunk-dialing outcome, the double-date scene is surely the most realistic depiction of anxiety-fueled alcoholic overindulgence in the history of cinema.

Museo de la Cultura del Vino Dinastía Vivanco

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