Thinking & Drinking: A New Biweekly Feature
Aged wine as a trend, a 35-year-old travel memoir, four great French bottle recs, and your new favorite dip. The first of this new twice-a-month roundup.
If you’re in the northeastern U.S., like me, you’re likely still recovering from our crazy weekend snowstorm, and trying to stay warm in this frigid Arctic weather. While housebound, I decided to move forward with a feature I’ve been brainstorming for a while, and today is its launch. Twice a month, (every other week) I’ll be posting what I’m calling (for now) “Thinking & Drinking.”
Thinking & Drinking will span wine and spirits, with specific recommendations on where and what I’ve been drinking, recipes I’ve been making (both kitchen and cocktail), as well as what ideas and bits of culture (books, songs, art, film, TV, design, etc.) I’m pairing with those drinks and food.
Where I’ve Been Drinking: Old and Young
I recently went to Long Count, a new wine bar in Manhattan’s East Village with a great vegan menu and an interesting focus on aged wine. Even Long Count’s by-the-glass list features wine with 10 to 20 years of aging. For instance, we had glasses of Mas Candí macabeo sparkling wine from 2016 (the first Corpinnat vintage), Heinrich single-vineyard blaufränkisch from 2014, and a 2011 traminer from Valais, Switerzland.
What I really liked about Long Count’s list is that they expand the idea of what “aged wine” can mean. Too often, we equate aged wines with prestige or collector wines—wine as “investment” or status-seeking, fueled by predictions from critics on pricey bottles from name-brand regions, producers, and vintages, bought and cellared to presumably increase in value as the years roll on.
Much of Long Count’s list is populated by wines that Americans don’t normally “invest” in, or age as a mark of status: 25-year-old xinomavro from Greece, 20-year-old hárslevelű from Hungary, 15-year-old mondeuse from Savoie. It illustrates that you can age all sorts of wines. If we don’t know how a certain wine ages, it may only be because no one ever tried to age a particular grape, region, or producer. I’ve been talking about this for a while now:
What gets lost in our current generational wine divide—of new and natty versus old and staid—is we’ve lost sight of what aging wine is really about. It’s not about a slowly accruing financial investment, like a mutual fund. What’s much more interesting—what collecting wine should be about—is that cellar aging brings an unpredictable, wild-card, human element into wine. Just as with a person, we never know exactly how a wine will mature over the years. Putting a wine away for three or five or ten or twenty years is an investment only in being able to open a unique wine in the future—a taste of the past, something you can never buy in the present. Long aging in a cellar is an essential concept in understanding wine. And I fear the concept is becoming lost.
The fact is that there are many more ageworthy wines in the world than we’re led to believe by the Liv-ex index or by legacy wine critics. And these wines are affordable and pay back your patience if you’re willing to cellar them.
After a few rounds at Long Count, we walked further downtown, to Babysips in the Lower East Side. Opening just last year, Babysips has quickly become one of my favorite wine bars in New York.
Part of that is the wine, but a big part is also the low-key vibe curated by owners Zoe Clifton and David Wilson (no relation lol). The wines lean toward France and Spain (where they’ve spent quality time) with particular offerings from Catalonia (they actually make a wine with La Rural), Loire, Beaujolais and elsewhere. As my former colleague Sara Keene (and trusted wine bar scout) calls Babysips, “cool but unpretentious, sophisticated but modern, seasonal but with a perennial warmth…an edge that defies its youth.”
The 2022 La Grange aux Belles ‘La Roche de Mûrs’ that David and Zoe poured for us was stunning, and one of the bottles I’m recommending below.
What I’ve Been Drinking: Four French Finds
2022 Damien Moyer 'A La Source' Montlouis ($30)
This subtle, fresh, unoaked, bone-dry chenin blanc from Montlouis-sur-Loire is such a great value. Damien Moyer, whose grandfather was a founder of the Monlouis appellation in 1938. Classic chenin notes of apple, pear, and honeysuckle, hints of wooly sweater, and a long peppery finish.
2024 Château La Colombière Fronton ($30)
Négrette is a lesser-known grape from Southwest France, particularly from the AOC Fronton, near Toulouse. This blend of 90% négrette and 10% syrah is a good introduction to the grape, which makes juicy, drinkable wines, balanced by savory notes. This is a perfect chilled red.
2024 Josmeyer ‘Chante Pinot’ Pét Nat ($35)
I don’t usually love pét nat, but something about this blend of pinot blanc, gewürztraminer, muscat—from a biodynamic producer in Alsace—appeals to me as fun and complex. Fresh, floral, a bit tropical, elegant, aromatic. A friend I was tasting this with said, “I’d like to smell like this all day long.”
2022 La Grange aux Belles ‘La Roche de Mûrs’ ($49)
A bit of a splurge, but I loved this dry, mineral Loire chenin blanc that the guys at Babysips poured for us. From Anjou, bottled as Vins de France, with notes of yellow apple, honeysuckle, lemon curd, crisp with great a slaty finish.
What I’ve Been (Re)Reading While Drinking: French Dirt
During my recent move, I came across a travel memoir I hadn’t thought about in a very long time, a book that’s become part of my own personal travel writing history. This 1991 book, French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France, has been a part of my life since I was a college boy figuring out his own literary path.
Coming two years after Peter Mayle’s A Year In Provence and five years before France Mayes’ Under The Tuscan Sun, French Dirt occupies a curious place in the genre of Anglo-American expats living in sunny southern Europe. I’ve always thought French Dirt should have gotten more attention than it has. Yet it has managed to stay in print for 35 years.
Goodman, in spare prose, tells the simple story of leaving New York to spend a year in a farmhouse (paying $450 a month in rent!) in a small village in Provence, with his Dutch girlfriend. It’s telling, and admirable, that Goodman refuses to name the village. It’s also charmingly old-fashioned—particularly in our oversharing era—that Goodman refuses to tell much of the details of his love affair with the Dutch girlfriend (who it’s clear by the end of the book he’s broken up with).
What he does go into great detail about is the garden he tended to, on land borrowed from a neighbor.
I had a garden in the south of France. It wasn’t a big garden. Or a sumptuous one. Or a successful one, even, in the end. But that didn’t matter. It was my garden, and I worked it hard and lovingly for the few months I had it—or it had me. This little piece of tan, clayey, French earth, nine meters by thirteen meters (thirty feet by forty-three feet), was in fact the first garden I ever had. It taught me a great deal about myself. “Your garden will reveal yourself,” writes the wise gardener Henry Mitchell. It did. It taught me that I am generous, impatient, hard-working, sentimental, boyish, stubborn and lazy.
Having a garden also connected me to France in a way more profound and more lasting than any other way I can possibly think of. Part of me is still there. And always will be. Even though my friend Jules Favier has recently written to me from the village that “only one of the four boundaries of your garden remains standing,” I’m not upset. What does that matter? The garden is in my heart. Having a garden gave me a place to go in my village every day, a task to perform and a responsibility. You cannot ask more of a land in which you are a stranger.
One of the book’s blurbs comes from none other than M.F.K. Fisher, who wrote a letter to Goodman after reading the galley: “I possess a deep prejudice against anything written by Anglo-Saxons about their lives in or near French villages. So, Richard, I thank you for breaking the spell. I like very much what you wrote.”
I have never been a gardener, but I’ve always admired the writing, Goodman’s restraint, which one rarely finds in travel memoirs.
The day this book came into my life, I had been sitting in the University of Vermont dining hall talking with a girl that I had a crush on. It was that first warm, sunny day after a frigid Vermont winter, and she insisted that we should skip our classes on go on a country drive. That afternoon, we ended up in a bookstore, and French Dirt was on display. Something about its cover spoke to me, and so I bought it.
I never ended up dating that girl, but I ended up being enthralled with French Dirt. It was likely one of the first pieces of travel writing I’d ever read and I certainly had no idea who M.F.K. Fisher was. At that age, it was likely just the idea of living in a French farmhouse with a Dutch girlfriend and cheap rent, that was the appeal.
Several years later, when I was in my mid 20s, and I had abandoned fiction writing and gone full bore into travel writing, starting a journal, Grand Tour, dedicated to the genre. For the first issue, I was sending letters to published writers, begging them to write for Grand Tour for almost nothing (sigh, little has changed in three decades). Richard Goodman was one of those writers, and he graciously wrote an essay for me. At that time, it meant the world to me that an older writer I admired would work with me. I am still in touch with him.
In my recent re-reading of French Dirt, I realized more clearly that Goodman was living in a Rhône wine village. He talks about pruning vines with his neighbors, as well as the local cooperative. He sort of dismisses the village wine as drinkable but forgettable. Which is the opposite of his book.
What I’ve Been Eating While Drinking: Muhammara
While I love hummus and baba ghanoush, lately I’ve been semi-obsessed with another Middle Eastern dip, muhammara. This roasted red pepper and walnut dip, originally from Syria, is bright, tangy, smokey, spicy and little bit sweet—and it also pops with color. With warm, fresh pita bread and a glass of, say, cabernet franc (or any of the above wines) it’s an amazing appetizer to kick off an evening. There are many different versions of muhammara floating around. For instance, one of my favorite renditions is served at Honey Road, a great Middle Eastern spot in Burlington, Vermont.
I’ve adapted this recipe from a really nice food blog called Love & Lemons. The biggest difference is Love & Lemons calls for ground cumin, and I prefer za’atar instead. But overall, this is a very flexible recipe. I inevitably use a little more lemon juice, Aleppo pepper, olive oil, and sometimes one more garlic clove, too.
3 roasted red bell peppers, or 12-ounce jar of roasted red peppers.
½ cup bread crumbs
½ cup walnuts
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 ½ tablespoons pomegranate molasses
1 garlic clove
2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
2 teaspoons Aleppo pepper or ½ teaspoon red pepper flakes
½ teaspoon ground za’atar
Black pepper
Salt
Fresh herbs (such as mint, parsley) for garnish
Instructions
Put the red peppers, breadcrumbs, walnuts, olive oil, pomegranate molasses, garlic, lemon juice, Aleppo pepper, za’atar, and black pepper into a food processor. Pulse until creamy and salt to taste.
Garnish with fresh herbs. Serve with pita bread, pita chips, and/or crudite.
Note: If you don’t have pomegranate molasses, replace with 2 teaspoons of maple syrup and an additional 2 teaspoons lemon juice.
