New Pack! Movie & Wine Kit

 This week we debuted two new packs available for delivery. One comes from the vignerons Marie and Vincent Tricot in the Auvergne in France, including their rosé of Pinot Noir and their fleshy but fresh white wine called Désiré. The other is my movie pack, two wines I recommend drinking while watching two particular films. They are generally wonderful wines, one white and one red, that don’t require any media to make sense, it’s just for fun. There’s a white wine, Le Temp Faits Tout blanc from Remi Poujol, and O Trancado from La Perdida. 

I sort of thought everyone who likes wine also drinks wine while watching movies and am starting to realize it’s not the case. It has become a ritual in my house for a few reasons. If you have the right wine with the right movie it enhances everything -  it makes action seem more swift, jokes funnier, monologues more profound. I think it’s the same reason a lot of people drink socially, at least according to a set of novelty cocktail napkins someone gave me once, which, rather grimly, read I drink to make the people I’m with more interesting. Yikes. You can take it too far with wine and media, if you wind up just getting too intoxicated and crying at the monologues in Pirates of the Caribbean 3, say, for instance. While I still find those moments cathartic, I feel hollow when I remember the touching line the next day, and it doesn’t have the same resonance. I recommend you always drink water, too, if drinking wine. 

For me, making a movie and wine match is about energy,which is similar to pairing food and wine. You can go for contrast or complement. If the movie is playful and light, a fresh and direct wine might be good. If it’s a dark movie, like literally dark or dark in tone, you can have something deeper, dusty. You don’t want to double down too much on matching the character of the movie and the wine, however, or it can feel over the top, and you wind up falling asleep watching Underworld with a glass of old vine Sangiovese still in your hand. In that instance, I was reaching for a smell-o-vision style pairing of a sanguine wine with a vampire flick. Much like 4DX, this came up short. 

I asked my husband what he considers when it’s his turn to select a wine for a movie we are watching. His concerns were a little more practical than mine. He goes for something that will last and be interesting to drink for at least the duration of the film, but also something that you can drink two glasses of and not become very drunk. For him, the wine must always be refreshing. “It’s dry work watching a movie,” he said. 

 

I can’t summarize Top Gun better or more concisely than A.O. Scott and Manohla Darghis in their viewing club piece for the New York Times, and I won’t try. 

A story of boys, toys and sunglasses, “Top Gun” was a shiny, noisy, dumb hit. When it landed in 1986, it launched Tom Cruise into the superstar stratosphere and his decades-long action-flick flight plan. Depending on your point of view, the Tony Scott-directed “Top Gun” was harmless (mindless) fun, a gung-ho commercial for the military-industrial complex, a perfect distillation of the Reagan era or — with its sweaty, bare-chested high jinks — the most delectably homoerotic movie to come out of Hollywood, maybe ever.

I was skeptical that I would enjoy Top Gun. To those of you who are also skeptical, I understand. But in March 2020 my husband and I sank into the couch with our two cats, who seemed to also be watching the movie - I had a theory they thought the planes were flies on the monitor. Or maybe like me, the cats just loved the spectacle of stunning aerial photography and non-stop synthesizer-heavy tracks. We re-watched Top Gun this week in preparation for the release of the long-awaited sequel. I went to the fridge for a pulpy, cold wine with verve, and found it in Le Temp Fait Tout. 

It’s hard to talk about Remi Poujol’s wines without addressing the man himself. I’ve never met Remi but have heard many stories about what a generous and wonderful champion he is for natural winemaking. He is an advocate and a teacher, who has evolved his farming and winemaking practices alongside a community of like-minded vignerons in the neighboring area like Joe Jeffries, Julien Peyras and Bernard Bellahsen. He’s a member of Association des Vins Naturels and one of the initial five principal vignerons of the BRUTAL!!! movement. I’ve written about the star text of the vigneron previously - I think in reaching for a wine from Remi I was thinking of the powerhouse he is, in comparison to Tom Cruise, a reliable performer who has come to embody the tentpole of Hollywood action stardom. 

Thinking about movie wine as refreshment, there’s nothing better to drink while watching the iconic sweaty sunset volleyball scene than Le Temp Fait Tout. It’s a leesy and uplifting white wine made mostly from the grape variety Ugni Blanc. Rainbow received this wine last year and have kept a few bottles to see how it grows and changes. We wanted it to settle a little bit, when it first arrived it seemed really quiet. It’s now a little more expressive, but, just like when it arrived, it changes quickly. I like drinking this wine that has its own sense of locomotion along with a film that is essentially about speed. Together they make for a pleasant rollercoaster ride.  The brightness of the wine quenches movie thirst while the steely, stoney minerality matches the sleak machinery on display. 

Ok so the second recommendation is also for something of an action movie, albeit a science fiction one - Escape from L.A. the 1996 film co-written, co-scored and directed by John Carpenter. It is the sequel to Carpenter’s Escape from New York, which he made in 1981. Both take place in a post-apocalyptic America The year is 2013, and after just one of many ongoing earthquakes, L.A has been turned into an island-prison for the entire country. You go in but you can’t get out. Kurt Russell reprises his role as Snake Plissken, a former soldier who nearly got away with robbing the Federal Reserve. If Snake is to survive his death sentence, he needs to rescue the president’s daughter from L.A. Along the way he evades many dangerous face offs with various gangs and crews, including vampiric plastic surgeons in what used to be Beverly Hills, where he has to save his own flesh from being cut up and used in their underground skin shops. 

I really enjoyed drinking the remarkable wine O Trancado from winemaker Nacho Gonzalez while watching this wild film. Nacho Gonzalez is one of the most progressive natural winemakers in Galicia, Spain. He actively seeks out vineyards that are isolated and remote. O Trancado comes from an old vineyard which Nacho inherited from his grandmother, named after the area it’s planted within, and the Garnacha Tintorera & Mencía vines yield less than 1kg of fruit per plant. 

As Carpenter tours us around his dystopian L.A. worlds, there are vibrant colors, lots of reds, blues and purples. It kind of feels like a carnival. I found the flavors of this wine also so vivid and rich - gleaming, juicy cherry fruit, crunchy violet and tart red currant. It’s a wild and rustic adventure of a wine, opaque and deep, a little dirty tobacco savory thing like the ash from the pyre that is this future California coast. Like Carpenter’s film, there’s a lot going on without anything seeming too distorted or too circusy, it all just comes together, even if at times they are viewed and drunken through a fun house mirror - one moment the texture seems too heavy to have without food. My suggestion is in fact to first start drinking the wine with dinner, a little piece of meat is very nice, then finishing it with the movie afterwards. 

You can check out the pack in our store. Please don’t hesitate to email me with your own thoughts about movie and wine pairings, I’d love to know! Our address is Rainbowwinechi@gmail.com. 

natural wine folk science pt ii

 This week’s blog is about dinner table tripping, natural wine theory of relativity:

On Monday I was walking to Le Bouchon to meet some old friends for dinner. It’s funny timing, I’m already feeling nostalgic, which I’ve attributed to seasonal change.

Now I’m at the restaurant and we’re having some Chardonnay from Julien Labet and catching up. The conversation feels very familiar and comfortable, enacting the past in which we all know each other more intimately. This isn’t reminiscing, we’re not talking about the past we’re talking as if it were 2014 or something.

But we’re also drinking some natural wine and in my body is the natural wine feeling. Something we’ve sort of shared in together, but not often and not in a nice restaurant. So while I’m saying something old out loud at the table, something I might not bring up with more present company, my bodily feeling is very much defined by my present. And being acknowledged only privately by me. Still working on getting that sensation out of the iykyk category. But have been listening to the song Cowboy Take Me Away a lot and think it’s the best way to describe it, the natural wine feeling. Both lyrically and the sensation of the sounds in your ears. 

Already I am feeling physically stretched across time, between past with these friends and the present cowboy in my life but I think wine can show you the future too. In flavors saved my life pt 1, over a year ago I referred to one of the German words for experience, Erfahrung. Which we account for in a definition of experience, but for them it is distinct enough for its own word, Erfahrung serves as your understanding of your past and the perception which shapes your present. Though in your moment of experience you are grazing the future, creating the opportunity to change your perception. I don’t think I always understand wines that are refined, like nice Jura white wine, but in appreciating them without a full grasp I feel closer to that change.

How nice and how hard and how special to sit still, so temporally fucked.

I wouldn’t argue that it’s exclusive to natural wine, but I want to submit it to the folk science archives because I think it is special about the wine. I’m reminded of this poster we made at Cellar Door for our last wine school (February 13, 2020). Everyone went around and said something that defines natural wine and I wrote a simplified version on butcher paper, it hung in the restaurant for a couple weeks after that. Someone on staff (sorry if you know it was you please text me!!!) suggested that there is a tension, natural wine is “how wine used to be/connection to history” and “ALSO helps us look forward”. The past and the future colliding in glass, for us to drink now, fresh & feel. 

apéro

We are hosting an apéro afternoon - evening this Sunday at Tusk, at 3205 W Armitage, from 2 - 6:30pm. We will have glasses of wine and snacks available for sale. Hope you can join us! 

 I first learned about apéritif in Chicago, which is very much not a city known for this European ritual of gathering for a drink and bite in the pre-dinner hours. Happy hour might be the closest we get culturally to apéro, and Happy Hour was outlawed here until just a few years ago. 

When I worked at Red & White I met my friend Nadim Audi, who grew up in Paris and is now a partner at the importer Selection Massale. I think it was because of Nadim that this concept became part of my social life. And also because of Mac Parsons, who is also an importer now, at El Rancho. Em says she didn't know what apero was until hanging out with the likes of Mac and me, when we’d invite her over and she’d ask what time to come by and we’d say something like ‘apero is at 7’ which indicates a loose time frame, and means dinner will be ready when it’s ready. Em actually added something more like, “because you people don’t know how to serve dinner on time,” in a very loving way. 

I recently asked Nadim about apéritif, and if it needs to take place out at a bar, or if it must be a specific type of spirit or drink. He said that apéro is apéro as long as you’re drinking before dinner. The place doesn’t matter, so stopping somewhere for a drink on your way to a dinner reservation is apéro, but drinking a bottle of wine in the kitchen while the host cooks before sitting down for dinner is also apéro. Sometimes you get invited to ‘apéro donatoire,’ which, he told me,  just means whoever is inviting you over doesn’t really wanna cook and you’re about to get drunk and nibble on cheese. He added that after apéro donatoire you might wind up at the McDonald’s in Paris on St. Lazaire. 

Apéro is also something you can enjoy on your own, or with just the people you live with. My friends from outside Montreal, Sophie and Isabel, told me that their grandparents always, always had a little apéritif and a digestif, it was fundamental to their dinner meal. Apéritif whets your appetite for food, and the digestif helps - well - digest the meal. Over in Spain, alcohol is commonly used to prepare for eating a meal, including at lunch. La Hora del Vermut, meaning “the Vermouth hour,” is a specific time to drink vermouth. Drinking vermouth is a treasured tradition, particularly in the city of Madrid. Traditionally, la hora del vermut was just before lunch. The idea was to drink a vermouth before eating to wake up your appetite. The vermouth, paired with a good tapa, would prepare your stomach for lunch.

I use apéro to mark the end of my work day. Once I’m having a little glass of vermouth, some olives, a carrot stick, maybe a slice of pecorino, I’m signaling to my mind and body to relax, and slow down. This is where apéritif doesn’t feel very American to me. Shutting down the work day, decisively turning towards quiet time or social time. There’s no rule that apéro be consumed standing up, but it’s most common, whether out at a busy bar, with friends standing around the kitchen, or solo, hovered over a little plate of snacks. The fact that you still feel like standing, still have energy, but are winding down the work day, as opposed to working yourself to the point of collapse and falling into a seat as dinner is on the table, feels like a statement of values to me. 

In her cookbook Old World Italian, Mimi Thorisson, who lives in Italy but was raised in France, describes aperitivo, the Italian word for the same concept. “Torino is the city of aperitivo. It seems like every evening at around 6 o’clock, the whole town gathers for a drink and something to eat, whether salty or crunchy or cheesy. I love to do it, too, but I can’t do it every day, so shakerato is my salvation. You meet friends in a cafe or bar and they’ll have a Negroni or spritz and sometimes I’ll join in, but other days, I'll order my trusted shakerato, which is shaked black coffee with ice. It’s served with the same ceremony as a Bellini, in a high glass, delightfully foamy, topped with three coffee beans.” The three coffee beans symbolize the holy trinity from Catholicism. This seems a little more American, and a nice option without alcohol, a delicious shakerato. 

Cocktail hour is distinct from apéro. Both involve making a beautiful display, but canapés are more work. Apéro snacks are also fairly calorie dense but involve little or not preparation. The apéro beverage is typically not a cocktail. In France the old tradition is to have a liqueur like Pastis, Picon, Pineau des Charentes. Something you can just pull from the fridge or pour over ice. You might have a Champagne cocktail or kir, but generally the only thing you need is a bottle of one thing. For our friends, this is just opening a bottle of wine. Rosé and dry white wines are a broad category but always work. I think of Lulu’s Provencal Table, by Richard Olney, a cookbook that covers the kitchen of Lulu Peyraud, part of the family at the iconic southern French Domaine Tempier. The Tempier vin rosé remains one of the most coveted pink wines, and a solid apéritif. For every menu Olney lists, Lulu starts with apéritif. In summer it’s bagna cauda, octopus confit, grilled mussels, fried eggplant, and artichoke fritters. Year-round there are olives from the Peyraud farm, anchovy puffs, tapenade, salt cod purée, dry cured sausages. Olney writes, “When there are few guests, and the weather discourages an out-of-doors apéritif, Lulu and Lucien love to serve vin rose at the kitchen table, accompanied by sea urchin and violets.” 

I keep food in my pantry and fridge for company. Food for company that you can break into yourself if needed out of hunger or spirit - opening the box of crackers, jar of olives, unwrapping a nice salami. Although I do try to resist opening these things, like Sebastian Maniscalco’s mother who always had a store-bought cake on hand but insisted “the cake is for company only.” My go-tos are a saucisson sec, a hard cheese, generally sheep’s milk, kept very well wrapped, a jar of olives in the pantry, with a package of crackers and - importantly - a bag of chips. 

In preparing this post, I thought it might be fun to make some fresh chips myself. While apero is all about ease, and it doesn’t get easier than popping a bag of Great Lakes, making chips turned out to be fun and feel special. I also really like that you can season them yourself with some spice that really works with some wine and welcomes the dinner to follow. 

Spiced Potato Chips 

Makes about 2 quarts 

Adapted from Toni-Tipton Martin in Jubilee

Tipton-Martin tells us of the history of this snack in Black foodways. “According to legend, George Crum was head chef at Moon’s Lake House in Saratoga Springs, New York, in 1853. One evening, a guest complained that Crum’s French-fried potatoes were cut too thick, so Crum very thinly sliced another batch, fried them very crisp, and seasoned them with salt…After that, he served the crunchy snack as an hors d’oeuvre in baskets in his own restaurant for thirty years.” 

Chips 

2 pounds russet potatoes 

2 teaspoon salts, or to taste 

Quart of Peanut Oil 

Seasoning

Any 2 teaspoons of your favorite spice blend (I like Old Bay, Baharat, Shichimi Togarashi) 

2 teaspoons lemon juice 

Method 

Using a mandoline, or a vegetable peeler, or a sharp knife, slice the potatoes into ⅛ inch rounds. Place in a large bowl. Rinse with cold water until the water runs clear. Cover the potatoes with ice water and refrigerate 1 hour. 

In another small bowl, prepare your spice blend. Set aside. 

Pour oil, enough to rise about 2 inches in a cast iron skillet, dutch oven or frying pan. Heat to 350 degrees, over medium-high heat. (Without a thermometer you can flick a few bread crumbs, if they sizzle immediately but don’t burn instantly the oil is ready). Adjust the heat to maintain this temperature. 

Drain the Russet potatoes and thoroughly pat dry with towels. Working in batches so as not to crowd the pan, fry the chips until golden, 3 - 4 minutes per batch. Use a slotted spoon to remove to a wire rack or paper towel-lined plate. Season them immediately, while still very hot. Let stand for 10 minutes to allow the chips to firm up. Serve with your apéritif and enjoy. 

(just because it is gray/cold does not mean it's not spring)

 In it

I have a joke with myself, it is a list of situations in which I imagine having a glass of wine would be relaxing. The list is very short, two things long: 

1) after a long flight plopped down in a bar in a new place 

2) while shucking beans with my friends (ideally around a picnic table in Bolsena).

The brevity is the joke because I’ve watched a lot of TV where wine is the catalyst for relaxation. I even know about TV I haven’t watched like Kerry Washington’s character on Scandal. And my favorite is Kirsten Cohen from The OC relying on the notion too much, struggling with alcoholism and a shitty dad yelling at him, “I may like my Chardonnay but I’m not gonna die alone and that’s more than I can say for you!” 

Anyway me and my friends have been sick lately. Friends that I haven’t even seen in months. And everyone agrees that it sucks. I was in bed a lot and taking little walks on the same paths as two years ago. It felt so familiar even though I rarely walk for leisure these days. At the end of the day Mac would offer me a glass of wine to have in bed. I felt relaxed. I watched Girlfriends, Lynn had just found work as a bartender without any skill. She offered white wine for free, I love to do that. And my little glass of Chasselas felt free (Mac bought it). Felt for a second like the Covid bed was where I wanted to be or at least I could accept that it’s where I was.

also had red wine

Out of it

So I’m better and my friends are better which is nice, a relief. But we’re not the same as we were, no one is “back to themselves”. We’re reunited at the Rainbow backyard party last week, everyone reports exhaustion. The party is warm and subdued, I hope they slept all weekend. I slog my way through my brain foggy weekend.

Until yesterday I hadn’t cooked a meal since April 11th, the process feels abstract I am reading about salt in order to summon a feeling for cooking. Salt is a feeling itself, tasting food that salt is added to feels like it heightens the emotion. It’s one of the ways our touch is expressed in a finished dish, to me it feels like it ties the touches together. I was reminded of this the first time reading The Passion According to GH (a gift from my friend Ari) the narrator confronts a cockroach managing disgust tries to imagine its humanity through salty excretion:

The roach is an ugly and sparkling being. The roach is the other way around. No, no, it doesn’t have a way around: it is that. Whatever is exposed in it is what I hide in me: from my outside being exposed I made my unheeded inside. It was looking at me. And it wasn’t a face. It was a mask. A diver’s mask. That precious gem of rusted iron. Its two eyes were alive like two ovaries. It was looking at me with the blind fertility of its gaze. It was fertilizing my dead fertility. Would its eyes be salty? If I touched them–since I was gradually getting more and more unclean–if I touched them with my mouth, would they taste salty?

I’d already tasted in my mouth a man’s eyes and, from the salt in my mouth, realized he was crying.

In Margaret Visser’s chapter on salt in Much Depends on Dinner she weaves hard science and folk science together to offer a dynamic image of salt in our lives/on our tables. She explains the salty eye this way: “It is usually thought that we are salty–our blood, our sweat, our tears, our urine, our saliva (the word derives from sal, Latin for “salt”), are salty–because life began in the sea. We are walking marine environments and the appeal of the taste of salt for us is in our natures.” I feel it’s important to add humans are not the only salty, salt loving creatures, my dad’s girlfriend’s Rottweiler Edgar loved his salt lick and the salt on your skin so much.

Visser also writes “Salt is weird, powerful, dangerous, and ‘extra’” which reminds me of wine as well as some of my favorite people. These meet for me in Anders Frederik Steen’s published journals, Poetry Is Growing in Our Garden, for him salt is a key. To balanced wine and to nailing a blind. Since salt is the only rock we eat it’s the best taste reference point for the rocky soils that give life to vineyards. He shares his approach to blind tasting: “First, I concentrate on the acidity and minerality. These two things can stand alone quite strongly. Relatedly, I can ask how salty it is and how characteristic it is of the region where it’s produced.” In the past I’ve thought of salt not as a quality from the earth itself, related to a rock but as a spray that settles on a grape. Salt is harvested from the sea but it’s also mined, so it’s of the land as well. He did quite nearly guess the wine (Gamay Beaujolais) from that passage. Not a sea wine obviously, but clearly a specific salt imprint in addition to the other qualities.

Yesterday I cooked, I wanted to put the salt meditation into practice cooking a recipe with very few ingredients. My friend Kim’s zucchini soup came to mind. I think she said she learned it in Spain. Another gift. You sweat chopped onions and zucchini in olive oil until soft and then blend them together adding a bit of water until it is your desired texture. I paid careful attention to the seasoning, I used a very salty salt and a delicate hand adding in stages knowing the flavor would deepen over time. It held my attention for the simple recipe, I didn’t really leave the stove, the perfect amount of demand for a tired body. We ate it for dinner with a tuna escarole salad and some goat’s cheese. Perfect with a springy wine, which is any wine.