Last night I was depressed, worried, and frustrated at the state of the world, and so I broke out one of my favorite Cognacs, 1989 Grosperrin Bois Ordinaires de L’Île d’Oléron. This is a very rare 26-year-old brandy from Cognac’s least-known cru, coastal Bois Ordinaires—specifically from the Atlantic island of Île d’Oléron. “It is 40 times more difficul…

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“Maybe you wine people have a point after all,” says Davit, the rich Georgian businessman, the villain in season two of Drops of God, the popular wine drama on Apple TV. Davit is drinking Château d'Yquem along with Camille and Issei, the internationally famous wine experts who share the same father, whose twisted inheritance tasting competition pitted the two as rivals in season one. As skeptical as Davit is, in this scene he’s got to admit the legendary noble-rot wine tastes pretty damn delicious.

Davit is the villain because he intends (due to some complex family bad blood) to rip out the vineyards of his sister Tamar (whose wine from the rare hybrid herbemont grape is the most exquisite nectar in the world, says everyone who takes a single, near-orgasmic sip) and to build a golf course. Camille and Issei (who by now have made up as brother and sister) are trying to buy the property to save the vines. Davit, with questionable intentions, invites them to a soirée at his mansion where he’s asked the two to dazzle a potential business partner who happens to be a wine snob.

“I’m thinking maybe you could come over tonight,” Davit says. “I don’t know, impress her with wine…sisulele”

“Sisulele?” asks Camille.

“Bullshit,” says Davit.

Villain or not, Davit likely speaks for the many non-wine people who presumably are watching Drops of God. Since the first episode dropped in late January, many of these non-wine people—namely my friends and family—have been asking me what I think about Drops of God.

Well, frankly, Drops of God is a mostly spot-on depiction of the wine world. Uncomfortably so, to be honest. Or at least, what it gets right far outweighs what it gets wrong. Yes, yes, there are certain details that we can nitpick as slightly off, and the show occasionally leans too heavily on certain ideas and themes for dramatic effect (the specialness of pinot noir is talked about too often, for instance). And sure, Camille and Issei at times speak about wine as if they are mystic yoga instructors, and at other times like they’re high school teachers gassing up a class of gifted-and-talented students. But in broad strokes, Drops of God gets at the essence of the wine world’s various pressures, its petty rivalries, its ethical dilemmas, its gatekeeping, its pay-to-play, and how all of that is so often driven by individuals’ insecurities.

The inciting quest of Drops of God season two happens at Camille and Issei’s birthday dinner, when they are presented a mystery wine with no label, along with a letter from their dead father, the famous wine critic Alexandre Léger, a sort of Robert Parker-esque figure whose guides are the lodestar of the wine industry.

Despite his influence in the world of wine, it’s already well established in season one what a terrible father Alexandre was to Camille and Issei (who was his mistress’ child). It’s repeated over and over that Alexandre’s only true love is wine. His terribleness persists after death with his cruel challenges from the grave.

Despite this, their father’s post-mortem challenge to identify the mystery wine (which he claims is the greatest wine he ever tasted) sends the two on a quest to Spain, to Greece, to the grapevine archive at the Domaine de Vassal experimental vineyard in Montpelier, France, and ultimately to the Republic of Georgia—where they get themselves much too deeply involved in the drama of the family who makes the mystery wine.

Drops of God is a fascinating show in that its two main characters, Camille and Issei, are not particularly likeable. In Issei’s case, we can see his deadpan, detached, possibly-on-the-spectrum demeanor as a trauma response. But Camille (though also traumatized) is as an objectively bad person, much like her father. In season two, she’s basically an anti-hero, which is certainly a staple of quality television. But here’s the thing: the public already has a negative view of the shady worlds and industries that Tony Soprano (the mob) or Walter White (meth dealing) or Don Draper (advertising) inhabit. The idea of an anti-hero in wine should be fairly unsettling to those of us who inhabit this world.

Camille and Issei’s quest to find the mystery wine quickly becomes a crusade to save the wine from being destroyed by the villainous Davit. But Camille’s plot to save it is hatched from the worst aspects of wine culture: Namely, attempting to artificially create a coveted demand for a unicorn wine by cutting deals and cheating at a tasting competition. This is when things go off the rails. In her campaign to save the obscure Georgian wine, Camille ends up trashing her reputation, the credibility of her wine guides, her ownership of her winery, and—most of all—her relationship. For what exactly?

Even Issei becomes skeptical of her efforts. “We got involved in a story that’s not ours,” he says. “The wine is beautiful, and it’s going to be lost.”

Camille won’t hear it. “Come on,” she implores. “We saved the wine.”

But is that enough? Is it enough to justify the chaos that Camille causes all the people around her? Even the winemaker who makes this mystical wine, in the end, doesn’t want it saved. Without spoiling too much, even bigger tragedies abound.

“You’re selfish just like your father,” Issei tells her.

“You’re bored to death as soon as you have to stay in the same place for three minutes,” Camille’s fiance Thomas tells her. “You don’t even think about the impact it might have on other people.”

As someone who’s doggedly gone after my own quests for obscure wines and lost causes, often to the detriment of my own loved ones, I have to take a step back from my own viewing of Drops of God, and self-reflect. Not gonna lie, it hits uncomfortably close to home.

The tragic flaw of the characters in this show is that they care about wine too much. And this is what Drops of God gets absolutely right. High-level wine culture attracts obsessive, hyper-sensitive, emotionally stunted people. The characters in this show—like many of us—give wine this power over their lives. Maybe it’s because we don’t know where to put our emotional weight. Or maybe it’s something else. In any case, it eventually starts to feel more important than it is. Or at least that’s how it comes across to people who are not in our world.

This comes across in scenes where wine people are dealing with those who are not wine people. At one point, the unreliable Camille is teaching Davit about how to taste wine, and tells him, “Wine is like music. It connects you to your emotions. It repairs wounds.” He remains deeply skeptical—as he should be—about all this sisulele.

In a scene near the end, over some cheap rosé at the beach, Natasha, the diving instructor and Issei’s love interest, sums up what might be the outsider’s view of all this: “So, you basically betrayed your friends…and your father-in-law…and the love of your life?” What’s left unsaid, in her quiet judgement, is this: Over wine?

Yes, over wine.

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As you know, I’ve been thinking about ‘acquired tastes’ this week. And I’ve been thinking about how many so-called acquired tastes I write about here—whether it’s eaux de vie or aquavit or sherry or whatever—that will never be popular. But then, I’ve already explored the idea that I may be the opposite of an influencer. (I’d love to hear about your acquired tastes by the way.)

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Anyway, I’ve been thinking about goat cheese. There are likely two kinds of people in the world: Those who enjoy goat cheese, and those who don’t. If you’re in the latter group, I feel sorry for you, and would suggest you open your mind to a world of adult pleasures.

I have written in depth about my cheese tour of the Loire Valley, the world capital of goat cheese. But even at home, goat cheese is part of my regular life. When my motivation to cook sags, dinner can often be some kind of homemade dip, a simple salad, and goat cheese slathered on a piece of bread—that dense creaminess, slightly nutty, slightly salty, slightly fruity, slightly tangy, full of nuance, complexity, and deliciousness. And I often pair it with goat cheese’s best friend: sauvignon blanc.

But before we get into that specific pairing: What is it exactly that’s stopping goat cheese haters from loving an ash-covered log of Sainte-Maure de Touraine, or a wheel of Selles-sur-Cher, or a truncated pyramid of Valençay?

Perhaps my personal favorite is the famed Crottin de Chavignol, made in the same place as Sancerre wines. Crottin de Chavignol was originally named in the local dialect for a small clay oil lamp—though since crottin in French also means “dung,” and perhaps because of Crottin de Chavignol’s aroma and resemblance to a pile of . . . well anyway, the name stuck.

So, ok. I guess maybe I can see why some may be squeamish about goat cheese. A cheesemaker in France’s Loire Valley once described the difference between Sainte-Maure de Touraine and Selles-sur-Cher as thus: “Sainte-Maure de Touraine is more fruity. Selles-sur-Cher is more acidic. And you have more of the taste of the goat.”

“And how exactly do you describe the taste of the goat?” I asked.

He chuckled. “Strong,” is all he said. Later, in my tiny hotel room, as I unwrapped his pungent Selles-sur-Cher, I fully appreciated what he was driving at. Regardless, it was still delicious.

Perhaps it’s a matter of language. I have a friend named Madame Fromage who is a sort of cheese sherpa. In her book, Madame Fromage (aka cheese expert and author Tenaya Darlington) has a more colorful way of describing Crottin de Chavignol as “dainty toadstools” that turn “peppery and a little angsty” as they age. Valençay she describes as suggesting “patio parties, spring flings, and magical thinking” and “were Harry Potter to wave his wand and develop a cheese, it would no doubt be black and shaped like a stunted sorcerer’s cap.” All of this is, perhaps, a nicer way to talk about goat cheese.

I see similarities in the way many people react to sauvignon blanc. It’s currently the fastest-growing grape variety in the U.S. (while sales of chardonnay and pinot grigio remain flat). Yet sauvignon blanc will always have its haters. As I said in my piece on Sancerre last year: “Wine people reserve a special sneering attitude for what’s come to be known as Savvy B.”

But a part of that hate—as with goat cheese—comes because of certain telltale aromas. For many newbies, the grassy, herbal notes are a turnoff. And then there’s what Wine People with politesse will describe as “gooseberry” or “boxwood.” But we can smell it for what it is: cat pee. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Which often brings this question: “Why would we want to eat or drink things with weird and stinky tastes?” It’s a reasonable and valid question. Look, I tell people, if you’re happy and content with fruity, pleasurable, glou glou reds redolent of berries and cherries or zippy, easy-to-drink whites with tangy lemon-lime and green apple . . . well, then that’s what you should drink without feeling any need to move beyond that. Wine should be, foremost, about pleasure. Pleasure is personal.

There’s a reason why Netflix dating shows, Carly Rae Jepsen, Kraft mac & cheese, High Noon iced teas, weighted blankets, and soft pajama pants remain popular. But if we think more deeply about pleasure, we realize it isn’t always so straightforward, or even comfortable. After all, why do so many of us love sad poems, disturbing horror films, or intense, subtitled psychological dramas?

With other aspects of culture, we inherently understand that without the darker, more confounding elements, there can be no light. Wine is no different. Just as in novels or films or musical compositions, the more complex and ambitious the wine, the more unique and potentially strange aromas, textures, and flavors we’ll find.

Anyway, folks, that’s my best humanties-student argument for giving stinky goat cheese and sauvignon blanc a try. A good Sancerre works well, and I mention three of my favorites below. But I’m going to take things a step further and offer four other sauvignon blancs a little more off the beaten path—from Austria, Alto Adige, and even Catalonia.

Take the cheese and the bottle outside and enjoy the weather.

Seven Serious Spring Sauvignon Blancs That Stand Up to a Stinky Goat Cheese

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On the January evening in 2020 when Chinese authorities first shut down Wuhan due to the coronavirus, I wandered the ancient streets of Chinon, in the Loire Valley. I’d spent all day with winemakers touring their 15th-century limestone caves, then tasting dozens of wines I was supposed to review on assignment. I had to get up early and do it all over again in the morning, but I was restless.

My Airbnb rental stood just down the winding cobblestone path to Chinon’s 11th-century castle, about a hundred meters from where a 17-year-old Joan of Arc arrived in 1429, after hearing heavenly voices. She’d traveled to meet future king Charles VII, who would give her an army to fight the English in the Hundred Years’ War; two years later, she’d be captured and burned at the stake in Rouen, then declared a martyr, then canonized.

My own visit to Chinon wasn’t as noble or epic as Joan’s. That night, I ended up at a bar in the town square, where a local guy bet me that I couldn’t identify, blind, the very bitter herbal spirit he set before me. He lost that bet, but it was still more like the rake’s progress than the hero’s journey. It started to flurry on the cold walk back home.

All of which is to say that I have a deep relationship with France during the cold months. While France is certainly beautiful in spring and summer, my own travels there have, more often than not, happened during the winter or late autumn. Whether I’ve been barrel hunting in Cognac in February or chasing a boar hunt in the Ardennes forest in November, it’s rarely swimsuit season. I’ve watched my Eagles in the Super Bowl starting at midnight on French television, celebrated La Flamme de l'Armagnac, the annual winter distilling season in Gascony, met the goats responsible for Sainte-Maure-de-Touraine cheese on foggy, damp mornings, and seen my breath countless times in chilly cellars from Bourgueil to Alsace to Gaillac.

Due to this odd tendency toward off-season travel, I tend to associate certain elemental French things with winter. The richer dishes I cook at this time of year tend to be French in origin. And so, as I posted about early this week, I generally start my new year with Loire cabernet franc on the mind.

If you don’t believe me, why don’t you try cabernet franc with the winter veggie recipe below and get back to me? I’ve also included recommendations for a few more great Loire bottles.

Meanhwile, for today’s newsletter, I’ve decided to liberate several of my cold-weather French dispatches from the paywall so all my readers, free and paid, can enjoy them.

Four French Stories From the Colder Months

More Loire Cab Franc Recs + A Winter Recipe To Pair Them With

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You are likely already aware of this, but Rosalía’s new album, LUX, is pretty amazing: majestic, avant-garde, genre-bending, recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, including a cameo by Björk, and with lyrics sung in 13 different languages. The Catalan superstar’s latest is “an operatic lament for a new generation, an exquisite oratorio for the messy heart,” as ol’ Pitchfork calls it (8.6 lol).

Perhaps you also know that one of the most popular songs on LUX is “Sauvignon Blanc.”

My immediate thought upon first hearing “Sauvignon Blanc” was…uh oh. I figured we’d soon be seeing facile wine commentary on how Rosalía’s lyrics about Savvy B showed “how to make wine cool and fun again for Gen Z.” The album’s only been out for a little over two weeks, and I’ve already heard this sentiment floated casually by a number of middle-aged observers.

A friend in Spain sent me a popular food-and-drink podcast, with Spanish wine critic Santi Rivas mentioning that sauvignon blanc sales are up since LUX was released. However, much of the podcast is the middle-aged critic mansplaining to Rosalía how she should pronounce “sauvignon blanc.” He also insists sauvignon blanc is one of his least favorite grapes, singling out Spanish versions of the grape as “low quality” and New Zealand’s sauvignon blanc “quite awful.”

Apparently, it is widely known among Rosalía fans that she loves Sancerre (allegedly introduced to her by Pharrell Williams). “I love this wine,” she said in a viral video back in 2023. “Anyone who likes white wine probably already knows it. And for those who like white wine but don’t know it, well, it’s the only one I’ve tried and liked.”

Which is very interesting, and telling, because that means Rosalía came to her sauvignon blanc love the way so many other wine drinkers have. As I wrote about earlier this year in my piece “Savvy B, 4 Eva”:

How do people discover the wines they like, anyway? Deep in the wine bubble, we pretend to believe that critics or sommeliers or wine educators are the ones who stimulate the drinking public’s desires to try something new. But we know that’s not true, and Sancerre is a classic example.

No one in the wine bubble ever evangelized for Sancerre. It’s not a darling of the natural wine movement, or collectors, or influencers. Nor, to be fair, has it become a caricature or gained a vaguely trashy reputation, like pinot grigio or Prosecco. Sancerre just sort of exists. It’s generally crisp and refreshing and—as French words go—it’s relatively easy for Americans to pronounce. Normal people just like it.

The public’s love for sauvignon blanc has always driven Wine People a little crazy with sneering disdain. More than a decade ago, Sancerre blew up because it was among the favorite wines of Christian Grey—the notorious main character of the steamy, erotic, wildly best-selling romance novel, Fifty Shades of Grey. A certain type of wine gatekeeper simply hates it when people find the wines they like on their own—via pop culture—without needing a sommelier or critic’s help.

Which brings us to Rosalía’s lovely song “Sauvignon Blanc.” Which, if you listen to the lyrics, is very clearly about renouncing worldly luxuries for some kind of ascetic, quasi-religious existence with her beloved. She sings that she’ll burn her Rolls-Royce and that she doesn’t want pearls or caviar anymore. To my God, I’ll listen / My Jimmy Choo’s, I’ll throw them away / My porcelain, I’ll let it fall / And I’ll give away my upright piano. As Spencer Kornhaber says in The Atlantic, “Rosalía, like many of us, is asking herself what she’d be willing to give up to save her soul and thereby, in some small way, the world. Her autonomy? Her convenience? Her Jimmy Choos?”

You know what Rosalía is not willing to give up? Yep, her sauvignon blanc. I don’t need anything else / sauvignon blanc / at your side / my future / it will be golden.

In interviews, Rosalía has cited the influence of Saint Teresa of Ávila, the 16th century Carmelite nun and mystic who renounced her wealth for the convent. Teresa of Ávila wrote of “divine intoxication,” or spiritual ecstasy, and used the metaphor of a “wine cellar,” where God invites the soul to drink deeply of “divine love.”

Whatever Rosalía means by bringing sauvignon blanc and a 16th century mystic nun into all this, it’s very different than Drake mentioning moscato or Jay-Z name-checking Cristal or even Taylor Swift (also a Sancerre fan) and her many lyrical wine references.

In Rosalía’s operatic world of LUX, sauvignon blanc is not a luxury to be bragged about, but rather a fundamental, everyday metaphor for a humbler, less material, more spiritual, more loving life. Sauvignon blanc isn’t a wine poured for status, but rather, plentifully, for the soul.

I don’t believe we’ve seen or heard wine presented this way before in popular culture. And I hope the wine industry doesn’t take away the wrong message, as it usually does. It’s not about “making wine cool and fun again” like I’ve seen suggested recently. I’m not saying wine doesn’t need to be fun, but people also want something more right now. We’ve already been influenced, memed, brain-rotted, and overwhelmed into an algorithm-induced digital coma of “fun.”

What Rosalía is driving at transcends generational marketing. In her interview with the New York Times, she was challenged: “Are you asking a lot of your audience to absorb a work like this?” Her response:

ROSALÍA: Absolutely, I am. The more we are in the era of dopamine, the more I want the opposite. That’s what I’m craving. Sometimes I’m able to make the exercise of just shutting everything down and watching a movie in a dark space in my room.

NYT: Even that can be hard without looking at your phone.

ROSALÍA: It’s so hard. But that’s why I’m like, there has to be something that pulls us there. I don’t know if this is going to be that, but at least there’s the desire of being something that pulls you to be focused for hopefully an hour where you’re just there. You’re just here. I know it’s a lot to ask, but that’s what I want.

We can ask the same thing of our wine audience, even of the youngest wine drinkers, who are also craving that escape from the dopamine cycle. I’ve written before about how wine can offer that escape, how taking the time to enjoy a wine can be a small act of resistance. Wine can pull us there.

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Life is a combination of magic and pasta. In food circles, this oft-quoted line by Federico Fellini has achieved nearly “Live Laugh Love” status. Perhaps it is hanging in your kitchen? Well, just because the sentiment is framed and sold on Etsy doesn’t make it any less true.

As you may be aware, my obsession with pasta nearly matches my obsession for obscure grapes or niche spirits. Earlier this summer, for instance, I wrote a very long memoir about my three-decade relationship with marubini.

Still, my love affair with pasta is rather polyamorous, and I regularly have infatuations with other dishes. The other day I wrote about my love of pasta al limone, the traditional lemon pasta of Sicily. The past few summers, as eggplant season arrives, I’ve been chasing another sultry, sensual Sicilian dish, pasta alla norma (recipe below).

Yet my eye still wanders. Every year, when I see broccoli rabe in the farm market, I have a fling with orecchiette con cime di rapa. I’ve talked at length about my turbulent relationship with pesto in my essay “God and Pesto are Dead.” For a while, I was also obsessed with perfecting another traditional Ligurian dish, salsa di noci , a walnut sauce that should honestly be just as famous as pesto (that recipe is also below).

Then there are kinkier dalliances. A few years ago, when I was working as a clickbait chronicler of food trends, I became briefly infatuated with a dish called called Dirty Martini Pasta, which had gone somewhat viral on TikTok at the time. As I explained in my article:

Just like everything bagel seasoning or bourbon-flavored stuff, “dirty martini” has become a super popular flavor descriptor for food beyond cocktails. We’ve seen the rise of dirty martini salads and dirty martini deviled eggs, for instance. So dirty martini pasta just makes sense.

Despite a catchy name, Dirty Martini Pasta (recipe below) at least has its basis in classic pasta flavors—olive, lemon, garlic, parsley, oil, butter. The only element that might make an Italian mad is the optional crumbling of blue cheese—or perhaps the de-glazing of the saucepan with gin.

During that period of my life, I was writing about all sorts of mashups or hacks that had several millions views on TikTok: crispy sushi rice waffles, vodka butter, cowboy butter, Dr. Pepper cupcakes, olive-cream cheese sandwiches, cheese-wrapped pickles, kimchi grilled cheese. There were plenty of viral pasta mashups, some good (creamy miso pasta) and some not so good (lasagna soup). One mashup from that era, which I actually really enjoyed, was One-Pot French Onion Pasta (recipe below).

I have a thing for onion pastas in general. For example, I am obsessed with a very simple recipe for bucatini alle cipolle. Well, it isn’t really much of a recipe:

Thinly slice six yellow onions. In a saucepan or pot, cover them in olive oil, and cook gently over low heat, being sure to keep an eye on them and stirring often. Be patient. After about 35-45 minutes (or more), when the onions are very soft but still hold their shape, you cook the bucatini, drain, and then toss the pasta with butter, a “generous amount” of Parmigiano, and then add onions. Serve with a “generous amount” of ground black pepper.

I got this recipe for bucatini with onions from Vincenzo Buonassisi’s The Pasta Codex, his 1974 masterwork, finally translated into English in 2020. “Obviously this is a sauce for onion lovers only,” Buonassisi writes. “This dish takes rustic and simple ingredients and elevates them into a dish fit for royalty. It is truly fantastic.” I completely agree.

If you’re a pasta lover and you don’t know The Pasta Codex, you should get to know it. “Is it a vicious lie that pasta makes you fat?” Buonassisi asks in his introduction. He delves into who invented pasta (likely “primitive man”), explicates the Roman poet Horace’s beloved “tagliatelle” with leeks and chickpeas, dismisses the myth of Marco Polo bringing spaghetti from China, muses on the taste for sweet pastas during the Renaissance, and notes a document from 1041 in which the word maccherone is used to insult someone as “a bit of a dope.” We learn that the first forks were brought to Italy—to make pasta eating easier—from Byzantium in the late 11th century, that a 1792 American cookbook erroneously suggested pasta be cooked in water for three hours, and that Lord Byron “connected pasta with erotic themes” offering, in his Don Juan, an aphrodisiac of vermicelli, oysters, and eggs. As to whether pasta is unhealthy, Buonassisi dismisses the notion, insisting instead that pasta is “a way to rebel at the table against a lifestyle that oppresses humanity at every turn,” that a dish of spaghetti “can provide a pure and simple boost of optimism,” and that “pasta remains a good friend to all.”

And this is all just in the first dozen pages. What follows then are 1,001 recipes, beginning with a simple spaghetti aglio e olio and ending with maccheroncini col ragu di cammello (“Camel is featured on the table frequently in Africa, but you must seek out a young camel—no more than three years old”). There are historic recipes, such as the 18th century Neopolitan dish thought to be the first pasta recipe that calls for tomatoes, a pasta with honey dating to the Middle Ages called sucamele (“honey-suckers”), and an ancient Florentine chickpea pasta dish, strisce con i ceci. There are curious regional variations, such as buckwheat noodles from Valtellina in the Alps, gnocchi from Trieste stuffed with plums or apricots, and knödel from German-speaking Alto Adige. There are even appearances by non-Italian “pastas” such as spätzle, pierogi, kreplach, and tagliatelle cinesi (ie. Chinese noodles).

All of which is to say that The Pasta Codex might be one of the most delightful cookbooks I’ve ever come across. It was a labor of love for Buonassisi and the capstone of a career that includes many years as a food and wine correspondent for Corriere della Sera and La Stampa, as well as the host of numerous cooking shows on Italian television. He died in 2004, long before seeing his work translated into English.

Given the context of this post, perhaps we can call Buonassisi’s The Pasta Codex what it really is: the Kama Sutra of pasta.

Recipes: Four Pastas of Passion

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Pasta all Norma

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The German cultural critic Walter Benjamin once wrote, “I would like to write something that comes from things the way wine comes from grapes.”

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For those who celebrate, it is Easter Sunday and I’ve decided it was time to dust off this favorite piece of my food writing, which The New Yorker published on Easter Sunday 2016. Some of the news and Philly references are a bit dated (Osteria’s ownership has changed; D’Angelo’s butcher shop closed in late 2016; my son is now a sophomore in college). But I think this essay still works and is relevant in 2025. Certainly, the issue of whether or not to eat rabbits in America has not evolved any further in a decade. The New Yorker has graciously allowed me to reprint this. Happy Easter!

On a recent evening, I was in the meat department at a Whole Foods in Philadelphia’s Fairmount neighborhood, pondering what to cook for Easter brunch. Last year, I bought two rabbits from a nearby branch and served a peppery and aromatic main course of roasted rabbit with fennel. At the Sunday meal, though my niece and nephew did exclaim, with nervous laughter, “You cooked the Easter bunny!” my family members were not particularly scandalized by the dish. No one accused me of being a “bunny boiler” like, say, Glenn Close, in “Fatal Attraction.” There was general agreement that the meat tasted a lot like chicken.

Thinking I might do a bunny encore this year, I searched Whole Foods’ refrigerated and frozen cases for rabbit meat. Finding none, I asked the young woman behind the butcher counter where it was. “We stopped selling rabbit because of all the protesters,” she replied. I’d never seen a protester at any of the Whole Foods where I shop in the Philly area. “Protesters at this store?” I asked. “Yeah,” the woman said. “They used to come with bullhorns and pictures of rabbits and everything. I think people maybe stopped buying the rabbit because of the protesters.” I looked around at shelves stocked with the meat of cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, geese, quail, lamb, bison, deer, and other animals. “Why did they single out rabbits?” I asked. “I guess because they’re cuter than cows?” she said.

I tried a second location, near my home, in the suburbs, and a meat-department employee there told me the same story. When I returned home, empty-handed, a quick visit to the Whole Foods Web site confirmed that the company had put an end to a short-lived pilot rabbit program that had launched in the spring of 2014. The program was, according to Whole Foods, the culmination of several years spent researching humane farming and butchering practices. A ten-page report on animal-welfare standards emphasized that the chain’s rabbit suppliers must minimize suffering and offer quality living conditions, and use no antibiotics or genetically modified feed. “Rabbits must be caught calmly and with a minimum of chasing,” the document stated. Farmers had to allow the rabbits to socialize and play. In a statement released when the meat was introduced, Whole Foods said that “lots of customers have requested that we carry rabbit,” but acknowledged that “this product won’t appeal to everyone.”

Among the latter category were groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and House Rabbit Society, which quickly targeted Whole Foods stores as “bunny butchers” and held demonstrations at dozens of locations across the country. Online, the protesters mobilized under the hashtag #savethebunnies. After only slightly more than a year, Whole Foods reversed course, quietly removing rabbit from its meat selection at the end of 2015. To explain its decision, the chain posted only this brief statement: “Whole Foods Market was pleased to have worked with a small group of farmers to create a rabbit growing system that met our quality standards, unlike any other in the industry. However, the pilot ultimately revealed the sales volume did not justify the continuation or expansion of the pilot to a national program.” (When I contacted Whole Foods for further comment, its communication team e-mailed me the same statement.)

For those of us who enjoy eating rabbit, its presence at Whole Foods had felt like progress. A common and coveted ingredient in many global cuisines—French, Italian, Chinese; in Szechuan province, the head is considered a delicacy—rabbit meat has always been somewhat of a hard sell among American diners. Just about the only era when rabbit captured the attention of American home cooks was during the privations of the Second World War. Along with encouraging the planting of victory gardens, the U.S. government entreated citizens to raise rabbits in their back yards for food.

A January, 1943, article in Life, “Rabbits: Raising Them For Meat Is Now a Helpful Patriotic Hobby,” advised, “Domestic rabbits are one of the few pets that can be enjoyed dead or alive. Stewed or fried, they have the flavor of white chicken meat. As pets, they are friendly and decorative.” Issues of Gourmet from the nineteen-forties published rabbit recipes, even the occasional one crafted in witty holiday verse: “Although it isn’t / Our usual habit, / This year we’re eating / The Easter Rabbit.” Then the war ended, and people went back to eating cows and chickens and pigs.

Over the past decade, though, high-end chefs in the United States have been embracing rabbit meat. At Osteria, [formerly] Marc Vetri’s northern Italian restaurant in the Fairmount neighborhood of Philly, the menu features rabbit casalinga, a dish of rabbit legs and saddle meat pan-roasted with butter, pancetta, sage, and rosemary and served on a bed of polenta. Though the comparison to chicken meat is apt in many ways, rabbit has a slight gaminess that, combined with its delicate size, lends the experience of eating it a faintly primal air.

On a recent visit to Osteria, I began eating the casalinga daintily, with a knife and fork, but by the end was gnawing at the bones. Jeff Michaud [now Osteria’s chef-owner] learned the dish from his wife’s grandmother in Lombardy, in northern Italy, where she made it every Sunday. (Casalinga means “housewife.”) He told me that the restaurant sells at least thirty rabbit dishes per week. “Rabbit is an underutilized animal,” he said. “Bringing ingredients like rabbit back into the public is good all around. You don’t want that product to disappear from the food world.”

Indeed, food activists often point out that rabbit farming has a number of advantages over other kinds of livestock. According to a frequently quoted figure from Slow Food USA, the quantity of food and water required to produce a single pound of cow meat can produce six pounds of rabbit meat. Rabbit is higher in protein and lower in cholesterol than beef or pork. A 2013 article in Modern Farmer, sensing a mainstream breakthrough, asked, “Are Rabbits the New Super Meat?”

In this country, however, serving bunny on a plate tends to conjure up cartoon images of Peter Rabbit or cute little Thumper. An even bigger challenge is the pet factor. I can empathize somewhat with this problem—my family kept two bunnies, Ernie and Bert, very briefly when I was a child; we mistakenly believed they were both males, until, one day, Bert gave birth to a half-dozen babies. But it’s not going to stop me from serving rabbit for Easter.

So on Tuesday afternoon I paid a visit, along with my eleven-year-old son, Wes, to South Philly’s famed Ninth Street Market (aka the Italian Market), which is home to a half-dozen butcher shops. Our destination was D’Angelo’s, a store specializing in game meat which has been open in the Italian Market since 1910. At D’Angelo’s, whose walls are adorned with furs and taxidermy heads, you can buy pheasant, antelope, wild boar, alligator, kangaroo, and even python filets. A sign in the window advertises “boneless rattlesnake.” The owner of the store, Sonny D’Angelo, is a third-generation butcher who is famous for his gruffness (the Philadelphia Inquirer has referred to him as “the dark prince of the Italian Market”). In a self-published cookbook titled Are You Game?, he offers this assessment of animal-rights protesters: “It’s easy to pass judgment and be indignant, when you go home to your house in the suburbs.”

D’Angelo was out when Wes and I visited. An older man behind the counter identified himself as D’Angelo’s brother. When I asked for a rabbit, he emerged from the refrigerator with a huge animal, at least three feet long, covered in bright white fluff. I have to confess that, after buying my Whole Foods rabbit already skinned, the floppy bunny ears and bushy tail came as something of a shock. It looked like it could have woken up and hopped away. But Sonny’s brother made quick work of the carcass with a knife and cleaver. (Wes, fascinated, recorded a video on his phone.) We tried to engage him in small talk, but all we learned was that the rabbit came from a farm in rural Pennsylvania that uses “no antibiotics or steroids, or anything like that.” When he had finished, he plopped the carcass on the sagging butcher block and asked, “Do you want the head?” We said no thanks. With a quick final whack, the head parted ways with the body, and Sonny’s brother wrapped our rabbit in butcher paper. We paid in cash. No receipt.

That evening, I got a head start on Easter preparations. I cut the rabbit into six pieces, separating the legs and the saddle meat, then slathered them in a mixture of olive oil, salt, and lots of pepper and fennel seeds. I thinly sliced four whole fennel bulbs and spread the pile, tossed with salt and pepper and more oil, across the bottom of a pan. After giving the vegetables a head start in the oven, I laid the meat on top and let it roast for around forty minutes, flipping the rabbit pieces midway through to help them brown. By the time the rabbit was done cooking, the kitchen was overwhelmed with earthy aromas of meat juices and anise. I grabbed one of the legs and took a bite. It tasted elemental and herbaceous, like early spring itself.

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Friedrich Nietzsche came to Genoa in the 1880s, ailing and syphilitic, and declared, “God is dead.” Italy’s ancient Mediterranean port city inspired Nietzsche to write The Gay Science, his ode to freedom and a new future for humanity (and heretical at the time): “Individuals and generations can now fix their eyes on tasks of a vastness that would to earlier ages have seemed madness and a trifling with Heaven and Hell. We may experiment with ourselves!”

More than 125 years later, I arrived in Genoa, syphilis-free but guilty, in the eyes of the Genoese, of a heresy almost as serious as Nietzsche’s. In the year prior, 2016, I’d written an article on pesto for the food section of the Washington Post that extolled the virtues of free thinking and breaking with tradition. I suggested recipes for inauthentic pesto made with arugula, pumpkin seeds, and Gouda; pesto made with mint, parsley, pistachio, and Manchego; pesto made with Swiss chard, dandelion, hazelnuts, pecans. I even included a Pesto Generator, a chart with three columns so readers could choose one of six greens, six nuts, and six cheeses at random to create (along with garlic, salt, and oil) a bespoke pesto. “Choose one each from Columns A, B, and C,” I wrote. “Tradition be damned.”

The people of Genoa were not amused. For those who live in the spiritual home of pesto, the sauce must only be made from the following ingredients: special Genoese basil that’s only grown in Liguria, special garlic that’s only grown in the small village of Vessalico, Parmigiano Reggiano and/or Pecorino, extra-virgin olive oil, salt, and pine nuts.

My alternative recipes met with some anger. “These are problems for us Ligurians, since we have pesto in our blood,” wrote one food blogger named Guilio Nepi. “We are attached to our habits like snails on a rock. Pesto is Genoa, and on certain things you don’t mess around.” Nepi was particularly incensed by the Pesto Generator, “made on purpose to buck tradition, to oppose the tradition. Indeed, ‘tradition be damned.’ A fuck-you to tradition.” Someone on Twitter attacked me for using rigatoni in one recipe, a pasta that apparently no self-respecting Ligurian would ever use for pesto. A writer for the food website Scatti di Gusto, Valerio Pagano, called my take on pesto “sacrilege” and a “crime.” Pagano wrote, “How to ruin the pesto in six thousand ways. Jason knows how to do it.” He added: “The pesto can be done in one and only one way. No distractions are allowed.”

So it came as a surprise when, a year later, I was invited to speak at an international pesto conference in Genoa. The organizer, Roberto Panizza, also runs the biennial Pesto World Championship and owns a trattoria called Il Genovese, which for many is the high temple of pesto. When I’d met Panizza the year before, and told him about my arugula-pumpkin seed-Gouda pesto, he replied: “It sounds like a nice sauce. But it is not a pesto.” Panizza wanted me to speak at the conference as a sort of devil’s advocate. My topic: “Breaking With Tradition: Il Pesto All’Americano.”

Regardless of how the city’s gastronomes feel about me and my pesto, I love Genoa very much. Beyond the food, I enjoy Genoa because it’s the antithesis to the usual touristic Under the Tuscan Sun thing, a working city that’s gritty and beautiful and melancholy. Historically, its heyday was during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, when this maritime city-state, Christopher Columbus’ hometown, did a robust spice trade with the Middle East and beyond.

When I arrived, I immediately strolled through the medieval quarter down to the old harbor and ate a breakfast of onion focaccia with a cool glass of pigato, one of the local white varieties. After that, I had some farinata, the famed chickpea torte, and then a lunch of two pastas, one of ravioli made with cuttlefish ink and the other, corzetti, paper-thin and stamped in the shape of old coins, with salsa di noci — a classic Ligurian walnut sauce that, to be honest, should be as famous as pesto.

After lunch, I was asked to appear on a local radio show with one of the organizers of the pesto conference. I thought I was doing pretty well chatting away in Italian about my crazy American ideas on unconventional pesto, at least until the radio host turned to me and said, “We can speak in English if you want to.”

That night, I had dinner at Il Genovese, where Panizza plied me with Rossese di Dolceacqua red wine and huge plates of pesto-smothered trofie and testaroli. Testaroli are fluffy trapezoids that fall somewhere between pasta and pancake, and may or may not date to the ancient Etruscans, a sort of ur-pasta. Panizza’s pesto has a velvety, rich texture that one can only get from a mortar and pestle — Il Genovese has a marble mortar the size of a bird feeder and a pestle the size of a baseball bat.

The word pesto derives from pestare, meaning to pound or crush. On a previous trip to Genoa, I’d bought a beautiful mortar and pestle, but admitted in my article that I rarely use it, preferring the ease of the food processor. Panizza told me that the theme of the entire conference the next day would be “Mortars and Pestles in Food Cultures.” I laughed and said this whole thing was starting to feel like a setup. Panizza graciously said he looked forward to my talk, but joked: “There may be some people who will make sure you don’t leave.”

When I arrived the next morning at the Palazzo della Borsa, the place was swarming with carabinieri. Overnight, Donald Trump had ordered missiles to be fired into Syria. The defense minister of Italy, born and raised in Genoa, had been scheduled to give some remarks at the pesto conference. Because of this, there had been an early-morning bomb scare. The police quickly determined this was a false threat, though the defense minister did send her regrets that she could not attend “because of current events.” I couldn’t help but reflect on Panizza’s joke from the previous evening.

The day began with panelists calling on UNESCO to safeguard traditional Ligurian pesto, made with mortar and pestle, as an intangible cultural heritage. “This battle we have been fighting for 10 years,” said Sergio Di Paolo, one of the event’s organizers.

There seemed to be some debate over how to best present the history of pesto. A professor from the University of Genoa seemed to endorse the idea that pesto evolved from the city’s role as a cosmopolitan port with foreign influence. “Our city has always been a gateway, a place of trade and exchanges with the outside world,” the professor said. Meanwhile, the president of Genoa’s chamber of commerce seemed interested in downplaying the outside influences on his city’s cuisine: “I want to dispel the idea that pasta was brought back from China.”

Panizza bemoaned the “globalization of pesto” and painted a picture of people from Germany to Japan to Australia who “eat a panino with pesto as if it were natural” without ever knowing the real, authentic thing. “Pesto used to be a niche product, but now it is a mass product,” Panizza said. “For the Genoese, we are losing our culture. The word ‘pesto’ has become a marketing word. We feel this is wrong. I don’t think we will win this battle, but we need to say it.”

I wasn’t the only non-Italian on the agenda. There were demonstrations of mortar and pestle foods from other cultures: Japanese gomasio (a sesame salt condiment), Lebanese kishk (fermented and dried bulgur-yogurt powder), and Mexican guacamole. All of which fit pesto into the context of traditional methods from around the world.

When it was finally time for my panel, we decided it was best I deliver my talk in English, with translation. As the translator looked through my PowerPoint slides, she said, in a rather accusatory tone, “You know, your president has bombed Syria.” I shrugged and said I was aware, but that he wasn’t really my president.

The first presenter on our panel was a food writer and historian named Sergio Rossi, the author of Pasta in Liguria, among other books. “I’ll try to be as brief as possible since I don’t have much time,” Rossi said. “So, starting in 1574…” He insisted that the Genoese traded in wheat, that wheat was Italian, and that pasta dates back at least nine centuries, before Marco Polo. Testaroli, he noted, was older than the Middle Ages.

Finally, it was my turn. I shared my recipe for arugula, pumpkin seed, and Gouda pasta, along with my mix-and-match Pesto Generator. I saw and heard audible gasps of horror from some older people in the audience. I presented a very brief history of pesto in America: the first published recipe in a 1946 issue of Sunset magazine; the first mention in the New York Times food section in 1974; the exploding popularity of pesto in the 1980s; the unfortunate addition of sun-dried tomatoes to American pesto in the 1990s; the rise of pesto on the menu at Subway, Quizno’s, and McDonald’s in the 2000s. I made the case that, in the U.S., we don’t have access to the same basil, garlic, and pine nuts as in Liguria, and so we have to improvise. And I tried to fit pesto into the context of other mashup Italian-American dishes such as spaghetti and meatballs and fettuccine alfredo.

Paolo di Croce, the secretary-general of Slow Food International, once said to me: “What is Italian food anyway? When you think of Italy, you think of pasta with a tomato sauce. But tomatoes are not Italian.” Tomatoes don’t appear in an Italian pasta recipe until the early 19th century. So tomatoes, in Italian cuisine, are a classic case of “cultural contamination,” something the Italians themselves appropriated from elsewhere. “Without contamination, there is no tradition,” says di Croce. “Knowledge exchange is at the base of everything. We need to be flexible and learn from each other.”

I could see that about half the audience was not buying my shtick. So I sighed and said something like: “Please understand. We Americans do these things to pesto because we love pesto. We love pesto so much that we want to make pesto our own. Arugula, pumpkin seed, and Gouda pesto is not an act of culinary terrorism. Yes, you might say it’s a case of cultural appropriation. But really, it’s an act of love.”

I am happy to report that I received polite, if tepid, applause. Pretty much the reception one might get at any scholarly conference. Nothing bad happened afterward. Most people simply went to lunch. Rossi, the food historian, told Panizza that he loved my Pesto Generator. Panizza looked glum, as if he’d kind of been hoping the crowd might have thrown tomatoes at me.

“Maybe it’s just a matter of naming,” I said to him.

“Yes, but it’s too late now to change it,” Panizza said.

At the end of a long day, following two dozen presentations, Panizza invited a group to participate in a pesto-making contest using the mortar and pestle. He seemed exceedingly disappointed, irritated even, that I declined to take part. “Is it because we have no food processor?” he said.

The contestants ground away with their pestles and the air filled with the wonderful aromas of basil and garlic. As I watched, a young man approached me and introduced himself as Guilio Nepi — the writer who had passionately called out my article the year before. As so often turns out, Nepi was super nice and offered to take me on a food tour of Genoa the next day.

When I met him in the narrow alleyways of the medieval quarter the next morning, my first question was: “Where is the best focaccia in Genoa?” After all, I’ve had plenty of mediocre focaccia, which is plentiful back home, available everywhere from Panera to Trader Joe’s.

“Ah, this is an impossible question,” Nepi said. “Do you like crusty or not? Oily or not? Salty or not?” Nietzsche, who often delved into matters of taste, would have liked this answer. As he famously said, “All of life is a dispute over taste and tasting.”

“Focaccia,” Nepi said, “actually depends a lot on the weather.” On that particular spring day, it was sunny and warm. “Today,” he said with a smile, “the weather is perfect for focaccia.”

And so — even though God is dead and even though people like me may have ruined pesto — Nepi and I happily wandered the same streets that Nietzsche did. We ate a lot of focaccia on that day. All of it was good.

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We’ve been hearing a lot of negativity in the world of wine lately. The wine industry is in crisis! Neo-prohibitionists want to outlaw drinking! More people are smoking weed than drinking wine! But perhaps the biggest whine in wine right now is that young people hate wine and aren’t drinking it—with everyone pointing fingers over why. Waaah, wine is too exclusive and gatekeepy! Waaah, wine education is too boring and uncool! Waaah, wine media is boomerish and out of touch! Waaah, wine is too snobby and complicated!

Combine all this with the ill winds that have blown across America, culturally and politically, over the past six weeks—and let’s just say I’m grateful that I’ve had the chance to remove myself from this negativity loop for weeks at a time.

Over the past year or so, I’ve been spending a lot of time in Logroño, a small, buzzing city in the heart of Spain’s Rioja region. Logroño is known for some of the best tapas in all of Spain. Every evening, I walk a few blocks down to Calle Laurel or Calle San Juan, two narrow cobblestoned lanes crammed with dozens of tiny bars, each with its speciality pintxo (what they call tapas here).

At Bar Soriano, I get grilled wild mushrooms in garlicky sauce and topped with a skewered shrimp. At Bar La Travesía, I eat amazing tortilla española topped with a spicy pepper sauce. At Bar Donosti, I order a bite-sized dish of quail egg, chorizo, and pepper called cojonudos (which means “ballsy,” which is a compliment) followed by grilled foie gras on a slice of bread. At Bar Lorenzo, I get the famed Tío Agus, a skewer of spicy grilled pork on a bun with a secret green herb sauce. At Bar Sebas, I get the pimiento relleno de carne. At Bar El Perchas, I get either pig’s ear in a spicy sauce, or a fried pig’s ear sandwich (the only two items on the menu). At Tastavin, I eat quail escabeche or rabo de toro wrapped in puff pastry. At Bar Garcia, there’s always a plate of cecina or panceta curada. All along Calle Laurel and Calle San Juan, there are endless small plates of paper-thin jamón ibérico or grilled piparra peppers or skewers of olives and tinned fish.

You get the picture: Logroño is tapas heaven. On most nights, the street is thronged with people eating with hands and toothpicks, standing at the bar or at small tables in the street, casually throwing their used napkins on the ground. And most people—young and old—are drinking wine. At every stop there’s the same basic question: tinto or blanco? If your answer is red, there is one more next question: “joven (young) or crianza (aged)?” That’s it. That’s all you need to know. You take your wine and pintxo and join the crowd.

In a place like Logroño, wine isn’t as complicated or exclusive or as riddled with issues as it is at home. For many Americans, wine tends to be something to stress about, to study, often to lose their minds over. People in Logroño have a much easier relationship with wine. Wine is not a status symbol. It’s not a topic you need to gain a certification in. It’s not a short-cut to adult sophistication. Wine is just something that’s made a few kilometers away. Wine is just something you drink.

This idea of “something to drink” too often gets lost in our wine talk. I was recently interviewed by a Polish academic who is doing a study on the way people communicate about wine. He asked me, bluntly, “Why is most wine communication so bad?” It’s a good question! I believe most wine communication sucks because, on a fundamental level, wine talk does everything it can to remove the idea of drinking from the equation. For people deep in the wine bubble, it’s an aspect of culture, akin to art, design, or music. I respect that, and I don’t disagree that wine appreciation pays back your attention.

But if we’re really being honest, we also like the intoxicating state of mind that wine puts us in. As the philosopher John Dilworth suggests—in an essay from the anthology Wine & Philosophy: A Symposium on Thinking and Drinking: “The alcoholic content of the wine provides a kind of permission, or entry ticket, into a parallel world in which—in the terminology of Immanuel Kant—a free play of the imagination can take place.”

Simply, put: We like the alcohol, and what it does to us. I’m not saying we always like being drunk, but we like drinking. This is the third rail that can almost never be acknowledged among wine people. To talk of drinking—for the sake of, you know, drinking—is to risk compromising wine’s perception as an object of status and culture. I also respect this impulse. But the resulting wine talk will then always have an underlying falseness. When we talk to normal people who are not in the wine bubble, when we try to explain wine to them, they can feel that falseness.

I’m not sure how to overcome this. But as I join the evening crowd of people in the streets of Logroño, stuffing our faces with pintxos and wine, I feel like leaning into just drinking—and the simple joy of it—might be the way forward.

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I don’t pray anymore. But some mornings, I still make pour-over coffee. Those seven or eight minutes are as close to sacred meditation as it gets for me. I know that pour-over coffee seems like one of those passé affects of the last decade. Like many others, I now own a push-button coffee machine that uses pods, a more instant form of gratification.

But as I limp into the final weeks of 2024, somewhat unmoored, maybe I’m seeking some sort of practice or ritual to help make sense of what’s felt like a lost year. Relatedly, I’m daily (and unironically) consulting an astrology app. One recent morning the astrology app told me: “Pay close attention to everything.” So I decided to skip the Nespresso and go back to pour-over coffee.

I always follow the same steps: I fill the gooseneck Japanese kettle with water — from the Brita and not the tap — and set it on the burner. As the water boils, I decide whether to use my single-cup ceramic Hario v60 coffee dripper, from Japan, or my full-sized Chemex, the classic midcentury glass pot, essentially a tricked-out Erlenmeyer flask that reminds me of high-school chemistry lab (its design is included in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection). Because I drink anywhere from 4 to 7 cups of coffee per day, I generally opt for the Chemex.

I pour fresh whole coffee beans into my burr grinder, the one I bought years ago because some expert said it was the best. I always grind the beans to “a coarseness resembling sea salt,” because I once read on the Blue Bottle Coffee website that this is ideal. If I’m feeling particularly ascetic and devout, I may even grind the coffee manually in my Japanese hand grinder, turning the crank clockwise more than 75 times. As the water nears a boil, I unfold a thick, square paper filter into a cone and place it into the Chemex’s funnel. I rinse a little hot water from a gooseneck kettle to dampen the filter (to “free it from any debris,” as I’ve read) and then dump the water into the sink. I fill the paper cone with the sea-salt-resembling grounds.

When it’s time to actually pour the pour-over, I douse the central core of the grounds, waiting a minute or two to allow a puffy bubble to form, as streaks of brown stain the sides of the filter. This is called the “bloom.” I then add another small amount of water into the cone and wait for the liquid to strain through. Then I add some more, then some more, listening to the coffee slowly stream into the bowl of the Chemex, filling it up to the tiny belly-button-like knob. Before I finally pour myself the finished coffee, I always rinse my mug with hot water to warm it.

Yes, in so many ways, the pour-over is a ridiculous process for making coffee. Most people I know have ditched their Harios and Chemexes for the convenience of Nespresso or Keurig machines, which take a fraction of the time. Yet maybe even Nespresso and Keurig aren’t fast enough. Food & Wine recently sung the praises of a new wave of instant coffee: “We’re loving being able to enjoy a high-quality ethically sourced cup on a busy travel day, camping trip, or one of those weekday mornings when the ritual of grinding beans to filter through a Chemex is just too much to tackle.” They even did a taste test and “found nine options that are sure to challenge your pre-existing notions about instant coffee.”

Perhaps this is just how the coffee revolution — the one that freed us from Folger’s and Sanka 30 years ago — was always destined to end, coming full circle back to instant. I wonder what the legacy of the pour-over coffee fad will ultimately be. In the late 2010s, it was the hottest thing going, fundamental to coffee’s so-called Third Wave. These days, I find very few mentions of pour-over coffee in fashionable circles.

But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Trendspotters had already been declaring pour-over over since at least 2018. “Can We Talk Seriously About the Obsolescence of Pourovers?” the trade site Daily Coffee News asked. More bluntly, Eater asked: “Do People Even Want Pour-Over Coffee Anymore?” The answer: “RIP pour-over coffee.” Those two pieces were in reaction to a Wall Street Journal takedown of pour-over coffee. In that article, the CEO of Intelligentsia Coffee was quoted, saying, “We realized that a lot of customers loved getting a cup brewed for them. But in today’s day and age they’re not willing to wait five to seven minutes to get it.” A coffee shop owner in Los Angeles told the WSJ that robots and machines were “better than distracted humans” at coffee making.

Only the founder of Blue Bottle Coffee, James Freeman, seemed to swim against the tide, telling the WSJ he’d only switch to large-batch brewing machines “when hell freezes over and there is a skating party,” which makes sense because it was Blue Bottle that first popularized in the U.S. what until then had been a Japanese method. “They’re going for a mastery of technique,” Freeman told The New York Times Magazine in 2011, one of the first mainstream articles on pour-over coffee. “It adds up to an incredibly elusive experience. It’s hard to manufacture splendidness.”

Yet even the writer of that piece, Oliver Strand — who was the Times’ coffee columnist and the author of a book on coffee — was skeptical. “To be frank, it’s not for everybody,” Strand wrote. “Some will enjoy the ritual. But others will always consider coffee a convenience…I have no doubt that countless pouring kettles and slow drippers will be used three or four times, then boxed up and put on a high shelf, the fondue sets of our day.”

My Chemex and Hario have yet to be boxed up. I’d been an early adopter of the pour-over. In the mid-2010s, I lived almost solely on pour-over coffee while I was writing a book that took years to finish. When I was racing to beat the final deadline, I’d stay up writing into the wee hours, often sleeping in my office in Philadelphia. A few hours later, I’d wander bleary-eyed over to a place called Rival Bros. to drink pour-over coffee and edit the garbage I had written the night before.

Rival Bros. was one of the first places in my neighborhood to focus on single-origin coffees that were lightly roasted. The guys who worked there told me that the darker roasts my generation enjoyed — which they called “Charbucks” — ruined the “origin distinctiveness” of the coffee beans. It was sort of like a wine with too much oak aging, also out of fashion. A new generation of coffee cognoscenti told us that light roast, barely a shade of tan, is what best showcases the “distinct origin” of a coffee. They told us that we want bright, fruity, floral flavors from our coffee. We want lightly roasted beans from a single origin.

When I rediscovered the joys of pour-over during the holidays, I realized how long it had actually been since I’d bought a light-roast, single-origin coffee. My astrology app told me “Get rid of something today” and so I ground the last of some old Peet’s Coffee. This was Peet’s Major Dickason’s Blend, about as basic a coffee as you can find — there are pods of Major Dickason at the supermarket for your Keurig. Major Dickason is an unhip and decidedly old-school blend, created in 1969 by a retired army officer, a loyal customer of the original Peet’s store in Berkeley. Like Starbucks’ Pike Place, it’s one of those blends that’s been around for as long as I’ve been drinking coffee. Major Dickason is not bright and fruity and floral. It’s full-bodied, earthy, and bitter.

As I went through the pour-over ritual with Major Dickason, I couldn’t help but feel nostalgic, not just for pour-over, but also for an earlier era of coffee connoisseurship: In particular, the mid- to late 1990s, the zenith of America’s first red-hot love affair with fancy coffee and its accouterments.

That time also happened to be the zenith for a certain genre of niche, connoisseur magazine. During those years, I wrote for, and later became the editor of, a magazine called Coffee Journal that covered what it termed the “Coffee & Tea Lifestyle.” The magazine dutifully tasted and compared coffee roasts, reviewed the newest espresso machines and grinders, provided biscotti recipes, and profiled cafes all over the world. Travel was a major part of this so-called “Coffee & Tea Lifestyle,” and I wrote stories about visiting coffee farms in Nicaragua and Haiti, as well as an article titled “The Best Coffeehouses Coast to Coast.” By the time I took the reins, the magazine’s demise was imminent. America’s first love affair with gourmet coffee — much like its recent fascination with pour-over — had cooled considerably.

Following an argument with the publisher over whether our next issue’s cover would be a photo of a coffee mug with doughnuts, or simply a photo of a solitary coffee mug, I decided to assign myself a travel story on the coffeehouse culture of Helsinki. The clever Coffee Journal angle, I am embarrassed to admit, went as follows: Nine cups of coffee was what the average Finn drank each day, the highest per capita consumption in the world. With that statistic as my cue, I planned to sit in Helsinki’s finest cafes and drink nine cups of coffee each day, just like the Finns, and write about it. It was the type of story one writes for a connoisseur magazine that has long ago exhausted its niche. I made my reservations, and two days later, Coffee Journal ceased publication. I was now unemployed and not being reimbursed for this plane ticket, but I decided to fly to Helsinki anyway.

When my Chemex full of Major Dickason was finally finished, and I’d rinsed my mug with hot water, then poured the first cup, I remembered that I still had copies of Coffee Journal from the late 1990s boxed away somewhere. With my pour-over coffee in tow, I rummaged around in a storage closet and found them in a dusty corner.

Paging through those old print issues made me think of my late 20s, of the ends of things, of the vicious cycle of trends, of how worried I was that I’d made bad decisions, of loneliness and of melancholy, of the precariousness of work and love and life. All the things I’ve been feeling even at the end of 2024. Looking at my old articles about coffee, I fear that I’ve not evolved very much in two decades.

Maybe this sort of reflection and checking in with myself is the blessing and the curse of taking the time to make pour-over coffee. If I’d just popped a pod into the Nespresso and pressed a button, I’d have quickly moved on with the rest of my day without much thought. Making pour-over coffee is a daily reminder that everything is always a work in progress.