Sushi Seminar - with sabering!

Earlier month I had the pleasure of joining (the future) Mr. and Mrs. V at the New York City Food & Wine Festival. We attended two seminars, sushi and cheese. I’ll tell you about the sushi seminar first; stay tuned later this week for the cheese seminar.


The sushi seminar starts off with a bang-literally! Mark Oldman attempts to saber a bottle of bubbly and before he gets a chance, the cork flys out and shoots across the room! HA! Now, I’ve been lucky enough to see a couple successful saberings in my day, but I was happy that he decided to chill another bottle and give it another whirl later in the seminar. Note: Sabering can be very dangerous. The bottle must be very cold and you must hit the bottle at the exact spot, otherwise it can shatter and explode in your hand; I’ve seen the aftermath of that and it’s NOT pretty. Also, the force of the bubbles shoots the top – and the freshly cut glass ring-out ward, so make sure to point it away from anyone or anything. Here’s the video of the successful sabering: (I apologize for the bad angle- he was pointing the bottle towards the brick wall.

Ok, back to the food and wine. Here’s a copy of the menu. The pairings were perfect, wonderful – of course, some of the wines I didn’t care for without the food, but they were really very well paired.

And, here’s a door hanger that sums up Mark’s thoughts on wine – drink bravely. (so try something new, forge ahead into unchartered territory, pair things together that may not work, etc) LOVE IT!!!!

$50 in free wine - today only

Just got an email from Wine Enthusiast - Spend $50, get a $50 merchandise coupon....use code 50for50

Cheers!

Wino Road Trip in July

My wine club’s theme this month is “Wino Road Trip”. Its basically to encourage us to drink wines from the US that would not be in normal repertoire; so no wines from California, Oregon, Washington and no wines from Missouri or Illinois, since those are local to us. Since wine is made in all 50 states, this should be somewhat easy; of course not all states distribute and so it likely won’t be without some creative pre-ordering!
In my research, I found a blog post by Time Magazine’s Joel Stein: "Fifty States of Wine" in 2008 – you can find the article here. Its an old blog post, but funny:

“I'm not sure why my instinct, upon learning that all 50 states make wine, was to try one from each. If I found out that every state has a water park, I wouldn't try to go to each one. That's because water parks can't get you drunk.”

(he SO had me at this one!)
“I learned a few general truths. White is easier to make than red. Wines made at golf courses are not good.”…. “I also learned that you can make and apparently sell some truly disgusting wine: six of the bottles I tried with a dozen friends were unanimously deemed "undrinkable." But 11 of them were quite good”……

So, not counting Cali, Washington, or Oregon, the other states that had an “excellent” wine were: Colorado, Delaware, New Hampsire, Kentucky, Michigan, North Carolina, New York, Pensylvannia, and Texas. (For the record, the wine from Missouri was “good” and the wine from Illinois was “bad”, although its worth noting that the wines were selected at random AND the blog post was from 2008)

You can find the list of all the wines where you can filter out the best (or worst) here. 

Another more recent blog post can be found here. (and I apologize to the other five million wine bloggers, I don't have time to find all of your posts!)
So, I guess wish us luck, as we try some new wines out….and if you have any good recommendations, feel free to send them our way! Check back in August for the results!