Aecht Schlenkerla Eiche Doppelbock

Today’s happy hour: Aecht Schlenkerla Eiche Doppelbock

Jen thinks: “Fall, earthy, burning leaves, firewood, summer camp. Distinctly smoky smell. Long smoky finish.”

Which is all a fancy way of saying what the guy at the beer store said: “It tastes like fuckin’ bacon.”

It’s fair to think of it as a bacon beer — a lot has to do with smell but also the feel on the palate. But it’s not as intensely smoky as other bacon beers — as smoky as you want it to be.

Jen notes the beer’s medium amber color. Jen also notes that there’s almost no head. Neither of us knows whether this matters.

Jen thinks this could be a session beer (actually, at 8 percent alcohol it wouldn’t fit that definition, but you could also add that this certainly doesn’t taste like it has 8% alcohol). Jen thinks that she could drink this beer with eggs — recommended if you like the taste of smoke in your alcohol — like a peaty scotch.

When Government Protects Businesses, Businesses Become Corrupt

The people fighting sensible liquor reform laws in New Jersey are the ones with the most to lose:

[T]he reforms in New Jersey have been met with protests from liquor retailers and wholesalers, who worry that new ways to buy alcohol threatens their livelihood.

. . .

The booze battles have caused an uptick in political spending from the industry. Lobbyists representing the beer and wine industry spent $640,500 in New Jersey last year, up by 15% from the $556,900 spent in 2010, according to an analysis of state Election Law Enforcement Commission records. The industry also made $500,325 in contributions to individual lawmakers and state political committees last year, the records show.

The largest chunk of the lobbying money was spent by associations representing liquor retailers and wholesalers.

Wine In Supermarkets

If you’ve ever traveled to a state that doesn’t have some goofy post-Prohibition-era restriction on selling hooch in grocery stores, you know what a thrill it can be. People in New York are trying to allow supermarkets to sell wine, a cause that doesn’t get the attention it deserves in the zero-sum world of commercial entities arguing over who stands to make or lose money. In short, New York wine makers want to sell more of their product while mom-and-pop liquor stores want to restrict other businesses.

The idea that it’s more convenient and probably cheaper for a consumer to be able to go into a supermarket and buy wine doesn’t seem to come up. Or at least “consumers” don’t in and of themselves constitute a constituency that anyone wants to lobby for. Sure, we feel “bad” for the mom-and-pop liquor stores, but the role of government isn’t or shouldn’t be to prop up certain storeowners.

The frustrating thing is that most of the reporting about this issue tends to be skewed toward the urban liquor store owners, where there’s a built-in Shop Around The Corner good guy/bad guy narrative. You don’t get the other side of the story, where people who live in rural areas might actually benefit from having more than one place to buy hooch within however many miles.

But even if you focus on the urban storeowners’ arguments, there’s a logical inconsistency:

[The owner of a] wine shop [who] has run wine stores in Little Italy for more than 24 years, says letting supermarkets get into the wine business would push out small stores.

“They’ve already taken away the fishmongers, the butchers and the bakers — and now they want the wine people as well,” [he] said of supermarkets. “I don’t understand why they need more profit.”

He said he goes out of his way to stock New York area wines and that if given the chance, supermarkets wouldn’t. “I carry 30 wines from New York,” [he] said. “Supermarkets will sell the most generic crap they can make money off of. It will be a very pedestrian wine selection.”

Again, no one’s talking about the consumer — if supermarkets sell cheap “pedestrian” wine, doesn’t that open up the mom-and-pop stores to expand their selection? If supermarkets stock the big sellers, suddenly the mom-and-pop shelf space won’t have to be taken up with generic or otherwise pedestrian crap. I never understood this part in particular. And if you want to even playing fields, take the extra step and allow liquor stores to sell food — that way they could really cater to a high-ticket clientele . . .

Man, Oh, Manischewitz!

The hottest new varietal is moscato:

In the opening to the video to his new single, “Country Ass Nigga,” Nelly takes a healthy slug from a wine bottle, grimaces ever so slightly, and wipes his upper lip clean as he savors the fruit-juicey kiss of the first rapper-branded Moscato (“Freaky Muscato,” marketed by his hometown crew, the St. Lunatics). Moscato, if you didn’t know, is a white-wine varietal, and Mr. Hot in Herre isn’t its only notable partisan in the hip-hop firmament; it’s also been extolled by Drake, Soulja Boy, and Gucci Mane. Those plugs have accelerated a full-blown Moscato boom: According to Nielsen, sales grew about 73 percent in 2011 after doubling the previous year. It is the fastest-growing varietal in California — E.&J. Gallo, California’s top bulk winery, has introduced five new Moscato products over the last two years. Growers in California have been frantically planting Muscat grapes (the kind used in Moscato) to keep up with demand, marking the first known occasion in which rap has directly affected the biosphere.

The whole thing sort of reminds me of Manischewitz’s 1960s-1970s ad campaigns that targeted novice or beginning wine drinkers. (You can see tons of them at the National Jewish Archive of Broadcasting at the Jewish Museum; they’re a hoot.) Check out this one of Sammy Davis, Jr., for example:

Now if Gallo used Nelly as a spokesperson, the wine and spirits industry can finally atone for the sins of the Cristal people.

One Magnum of Pinot Blanc Begets Two Tarts, a Kugel, and a Pile of Choucroute

Some friends generously gave me a magnum of Robert Sinskey Vineyards Pinot Blanc for my birthday, and I decided it was only fair to offer to share the bottle with them sometime at Sunday dinner chez Clink. Knowing that they like French food, I decided to riff on some Alsatian recipes in two cookbooks I like a lot: Joan Nathan‘s Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous and I Know How to Cook by Ginette Mathiot/Clotilde Dusoulier. The tangy, salty, cheesy, porky dishes that ensued were a nice complement to a wine that was as acidic as Anthony Bourdain’s tweets and as lightly floral as your old Laura Ashley bedspread…yet far more fresh and pleasant than either of them.

Weekday Dinner Drinking: Burgenländer Rot

Burgenlander Rot

First, let’s answer the obvious questions: I can tell you that “rot” means “red” in German (and it rhymes with “goat”) and that Burgenländ is a renowned wine region in Austria. Now that’s out of the way, and here are five reasons why we liked this wine.

It’s a blend of Blaufränkisch, Zweigelt, and Pinot Noir, which means it’s equal parts familiar (Pinot’s berry fruit, medium acidity and body) and exotic (spice and tannin and cherries from its Austrian pals).

The label says “I’m hip” but the screwcap says “I’m easy.”

It’s from a biodynamically farmed vineyard, so eco-points are duly awarded.

Much like your neurotic roommate freshman year, it’s a little tart and not so great at being alone. When you put some food on the table though – for example, dark meat chicken pot pie, slow-cooked elk in tomato sauce, black beans with rosemary and chorizo, or even gingerbread cookies – it’s a wine you could take home to mama. “Easy drinking,” as a hang tag in a wine shop might say.

It’s only $13 for a liter.

Pittnauer Burgenlander Rot 2009, 1 L, $12.96 at Astor Wines in NYC

A Soothing Cocktail for a Snowy Evening

Ingredients

Hey, clouds, enough with the snow already. If I liked this much snow, I’d live in Quebec.

Speaking of Quebec, they make kickass apple brandy there.  Here’s a way to use such ambrosia to take the edge off a cold winter’s night.  Calvados will do just fine if you’re not close to an SAQ.

Soothing Cocktail (a tweak on the “Soother Cocktail” in Mr. Boston Official Bartender’s Guide, 2009 Edition)

1 oz VSOP Armangac
1 oz Apple Liqueur
1 oz Triple Sec
2 oz Lemon Juice
1/2 oz Simple Syrup

Shake with ice and strain into two martini glasses.

Proving Yet Again That Money Can’t Buy Taste, By Which They Mean It Literally Can’t Buy Taste

Alex Halberstadt extracts some great stories from Manhattan sommeliers for The Faster Times:

After two gangsterish Russians downed several thousand-dollar bottles of champagne, they switched to ’89 Mouton Rothschild, just under $2K per bottle. They emptied one bottle, then another; when I opened a third I realized it was corked. I had more of the wine downstairs and when I headed there one of the men barked at me and demanded to taste from the bottle in my hands. I explained that it was corked, but either he didn’t follow my English or didn’t know what “corked” meant. He sipped the wine and smiled. “The best one yet,” he declared. “The others were too fruity.”

(More, please — these stories are awesome . . .)

Sherry Followup From A Fellow Tippler

Apropos of our recent sherry tasting, Humpday Tippler Craig passes along this field report . . .

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After indulging in seven sherries at the Humpday Tipplers club last week, I was inspired to break out a bottle of special sherry I had been saving — Alvear Fino Montilla:

I bought it a few months ago at Astor Wine after finally spending some time in their extensive sherry section. In Granada earlier this year we tasted a lot of sherries, but we were too busy enjoying the free tapas to take notes or pay too close attention to the details of the nose, taste, etc. It tasted good and went great with food, so that’s all we needed to know. Plus, at 1.20 Euro a glass it’s easy to get a little drunkypants, so who has time to keep track of how it feels on your palate? Here’s some tapas of tiny omelets with a couple of glasses of sherry at Bodegas Espadafor in Granada:

But after tasting the whole range of sherries from Fino to Amontillado to Oloroso at the Humpday survey, my palate is much more tuned in to the subtleties of this excellent drink. The Alvear Fino Montilla from Astor was crisp and extremely dry like most Finos with a very quick finish. It had a fruity aroma with a hint of funkiness. It was a little different than anything we tried with the club, it but still had that distinctive Fino essence. And as an aperitif, it was perfect with a few bites of Marcona almonds, olives, and cheese.

So I’m officially sold on sherry. From now on our bar will always be stocked with a bottle of top quality sherry at all times. You never know when that tapas craving will hit.

–CN

Humpday Sherry

Only vaguely familiar with Harvey’s Bristol Cream, I was skeptical of how our sherry tasting would turn out. My interest was piqued when Jen said that it was a wine that had a lot of enthusiastic fans and that restaurants have been adding sherry to wine lists, but I can’t say I was completely converted by the end of the evening. I probably had some preconceptions that it would all taste like raisins, but only one really had a raisin-y quality — the Lustau Pedro Ximénez, which was the sweetest sherry we tried. This Humpday definitely changed my general perception of sherry, so it was successful in that respect.

To me, tasting sherry is different than tasting wine. First off, swirling it in the glass doesn’t seem to do much beyond releasing the extra alcohol in the wine — after all, this is basically fortified hooch. In that sense it seemed like tasting spirits to me — you don’t swirl tequila because you’ll just get a big whiff of alcohol. The tasting part was strange, too — for me, each of the lighter sherries had a big almost grappa-like quality to them, followed by a finish of nuttiness and in one case (the Alvear Asuncion Oloroso Sherry) a distinct maple taste. It was fascinating, but so different than most wine, which to me tastes more balanced from beginning to end. Some of the sherries seemed to “settle down” on subsequent days, losing some of the grappa taste.

I spent a lot of time on the food, hoping that we’d get it right — sherry seemed like it would need more thought than, say, a steak and Cabernet required. The pairings were definitely interesting, and some of it was really good (not my doing — I just tried to follow different recommendations), but I still can’t see ordering a sherry with a main course. I’d of course try some more sherries — maybe we just didn’t get the right ones for me.