Matching wine with music. At a tasting last summer, Steph paired Eliot and Laura's rosés with Roxy Music to great effect. Beyond that, though, you read a lot about matching wine and food, but not so much about matching wine with music.
     Fortunately, Mike at Sub Rosa sends along this item on the nexus between music and winemaking -- a nexus that seems to consist of jam bands. I can't quite get into that, but I do like his list of songs that go with Champagne cocktails. (Click on any of his links to listen to the songs in QuickTime.) Mostly it's the kind of stuff you hear in twenty-dollar-martini bars, but it'd work well with leaner reds, too.
     Personally, I like the idea of drinking a tight, focused but quirky wine -- say, a Lemberger from Washington state -- while listening to chilly Eurotrash trip-hop remixes. But for some reason, the occasion never arises.
 :: posted by Dante Ramos at 6:21 PM
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WINE BLOGGING WEDNESDAY #9: TICKLED PINK. A site called Becks & Posh is asking people to sample rosés. Fortunately, it's prime season in New Orleans for a cool, dry, pink wine. Once the daily high temps head up into the 80s, even those of us who prefer reds to whites are looking for something with a little less weight.
     I've got a pretty specific idea of what a rosé ought to be like, and the 2002 Tablas Creek Vineyard Paso Robles Rosé, about $20, isn't too far off. It's 57% Mourvèdre, 29% Grenache and 14% Counoise, and its color -- deep ruby red with a bit of caramel mixed in -- is almost as dark as some (red) Beaujolais I've seen.
     In the nose I got a bit of strawberry and a lot of some other berry -- marionberry, maybe. Also a fresh, spicy note. First I thought menthol, then I thought cloves, then fresh sage. This wine also has a decent body. It's try, and it leaves a nice, lasting tingle in the back of your mouth. It's fruity but not cloyingly so, and there's a mild but zesty undertone. (Black pepper?) I pretty much dug this wine and would give it, say, 15 on a scale of 20.
     For what it's worth, I also built a meal around it. I cooked some thick pork chops on a skillet, and then made a sauce with a poblano pepper, fresh sage from the backyard, shallots, mushrooms and some of the Tablas Creek rosé. (We had a bunch of produce that I needed to use up.) I'd roasted some asparagus, too, and also served a salsa cruda made of mango, avocado, grape tomatoes and Vidalia onions as sort of a fruit/vegetable side.
     This made for a busy plate. Note to self: Leave out the mushrooms next time. But the Tablas Creek pulled the whole meal together, because it's a great choice for early summer.
 :: posted by Dante Ramos at 9:30 PM
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RESTAURANT ADVENTURES IN MIAMI... When my sister and I met up in South Beach a few weeks back, I was looking forward to checking out the restaurant scene. "Floribbean" was all the rage the last time I visited that part of Florida; maybe that fad was too twee to last, but you could do a lot worse if you like flavorful but healthy food.
     In the end, none of the restaurants we tried gave us the full mango-salsa treatment. But we did eat at a terrific place called Wish, which served one of the best meals I've had in a long time. My starter was a crab napoleon; the crabmeat came between layers of fried won ton and avocado with a guava-habanero sauce on it. My entree was a piece of snapper with grilled shrimp, jasmine rice, Chinese sausage and a "Vietnamese tea foam." Wasn't sure what to expect of the foam, which turned out to be an unobtrusively tasty little accent. I forget what Kim got, but we matched it all with the 2004 Kim Crawford Sauvignon Blanc.
     The restaurant itself is beautiful; it's located in a hotel called The Hotel (try Googling that), with an interior designed by Todd Oldham. We got there way early and sat outside, next to a fountain. The great atmosphere and ethereal food made up for the culinary debacle we'd endured the night before. For more on that, read the next couple of posts below.
 :: posted by Dante Ramos at 9:04 PM
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...AND MISADVENTURES... If it weren't for Wish, I would have left South Beach disappointed. Even places with decent reputations had clueless, indifferent service.
     Because lots of tourists visit from countries where tipping is unusual, restaurants across the city routinely add a 15- to 17-percent gratuity to on every bill. So to the extent that waiters and waitresses look after you at all, they do so only up to the point when it's clear you're not planning to order anything else. Then they disappear until you hunt them down. And when the check comes, they hover over you until you pay. ("Are you ready?" "Um, no. And could you give me some space?")
     I'm not sure why this is. Maybe they're trying to prevent you from leaving without paying. But you were planning a chew-and-screw, wouldn't you skip out during the half hour when your server is nowhere to be found?
 :: posted by Dante Ramos at 7:21 PM
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...AND THE MOST TRAGIC RESTAURANT EVER. Or at least in the tiny part of South Beach my sister and I visited. It's located on Washington Avenue -- a couple of blocks off Ocean Drive outside the main tourist zone. It wasn't in any of the guidebooks, but it was crowded, and we figured we'd give it a try one Monday night. The name's not important. (Though I'm happy to disclose to anyone who's interested.) The point is that we should have heeded the warning signs:
     1. Freaky waiters and waitresses. After we sat down, three members of the waitstaff walked by us and made eye contact. After 15 minutes, one of the people who'd looked at us came up and said he hadn't noticed us until then.
     2. Deceptive menu. The menu posted outside of the restaurant -- a common practice there -- showed classic Italian entrees for reasonable prices. But when we looked at the appetizers were outrageous. Ever paid $8ish for a spinach salad in a place where a veal entree is $15? Me either.
     3. An absurd wine list. If an Italian restaurant has an all-Italian wine list, that's not surprising. But you should worry if six of eight wines on the menu are from the same obscure winery in the region outside Venice (just as you would if a restaurant only featured wines from, say, Pennsylvania); and seven of them are billed as "Merlot," "Cabernet Sauvignon," "Sauvignon Blanc" and other non-Italian varieties; and the only Italian wine is a "Chianti"; and if all the wines cost about the same amount (in this case, $8ish a glass or $28 a bottle).
     Now, I've been to holes in the wall that have decent food but meager wine offerings. Kim and I didn't want to be the kind of people who make tracks because of an effed-up wine list. At the same time, my favorite advice columnist often talks about a book called The Gift of Fear; the author's basic schtick is that we all have an intuition about dangerous situations, and he suggests that we ought to listen to it. Well, at this particular restaurant in Miami, I began to wonder about the Gift of Snobbery.
     4. Bad wine. Despite the weird list, each of us ordered a glass of wine. It was abysmal. But it was hard to send back. The wine probably wasn't corked; it just sucked.
     5. Garlic powder. And then the "bread" came. This consisted of flavorless rolls -- like frozen rolls from Sam's Club but not as good -- seasoned with iodized table salt and garlic powder. I'm not sure I've been to an Italian restaurant in a major American metro area that still uses garlic powder conspicuously. At this point, we'd ordered entrees but were trying to figure out how to extricate ourselves.
     6. Bizarro antipasto. Who knew someone could screw up a Caprese salad? But the basil was fetid, the tomatoes were flavorless, and the fresh mozzarella was dry. (And again with the table salt!) This was when we realized it wasn't going to get better.
     Now, I've never walked out on a movie. I sat through "Death to Smoochy" and even "Battlefield Earth." But we hunted down our waitress, pretended to have received an urgent cell phone call and cancelled our entrees (not without some resistance from the waitress). We ended up taking out from a nearby pizzeria and washing it down with wine we bought at a liquor store. And we learned a valuable lesson: Don't go out of your way to be a snob, but when you see a crazy wine list, believe your own gift of fear.
 :: posted by Dante Ramos at 6:45 PM
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