Chinese food and wine. This article from the Chicago Tribune suggests that, with Chinese food, even red meats go better with white wine -- for reasons the writer articulates in great detail. The best bet is to ditch the reds -- even lighter reds like Pinot Noir -- in favor of Sauvignon Blancs, Rieslings, Albariños and Gewürztraminers, which go with a broader range of Asian foods.
     Interestingly, these results mirror what we found in our Thai Food Experiment last year. Like us, the Trib guy finds not just that bad pairings of wine and Asian foods aren't just unharmonious, but that they make the wine (and sometimes the food) taste downright lousy.
     That's why G. and I tried to bring a Gewürz to a liquor-licenseless Thai-Malaysian place in Atlanta. But we never got a chance to test the theory, because there, unlike here, you can't BYO at a restaurant without a liquor license.
 :: posted by Dante Ramos at 2:27 PM
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Überglasses. At one point last summer, I linked to an article touting the benefits of designer glasses but expressed some doubts about the concept. Robert, Grady and John came to the defense of these glasses -- or at least their aquarium-sized bowls.
     Since then, I've done a taste test. Over the course of December, two different friends had brought bottles of the '03 Georges Duboeuf Beaujolais Nouveau. We drank one bottle in regular glasses in mid-December, and the wine was nearly a blank canvas. For Christmas, though, my sister gave me six big-bowled (but reasonably priced) glasses that she'd found at a store somewhere. Last night I opened the other bottle of the Nouveau. And there was a lot more to it than I'd noticed the first time around; it's still a light, uncomplex wine, but it had pleasant candied fruit flavors, and it went down easily.
     In more ways than one. One downside of the überglasses is that they have an unfortunately high center of gravity, as I learned while OxyCleaning Beaujolais out of the rug during the climactic scene of "Terminator 3."
 :: posted by Dante Ramos at 4:57 PM
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Multimedia wine tasting. Maybe they've done this before, but the latest tasting on the NYT Web site has a multimedia feature. You can hear their panelists going on about various Washington reds.
     I don't have the technical know-how to put together multimedia presentations on our tastings. And if I did, we'd have a lot more shameless mugging for the Web site. (This means you, Chip. Heh.) But I would like to hear, say, Joan's riff on Thanksgiving sex wines just by clicking a mouse.
 :: posted by Dante Ramos at 4:09 PM
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