Terry Theise

Hi Guys - nice to be cited so often and so kindly, and thanks to Rocks for the tip-off. Joel makes me wish I drank coffee, because he's my kinda guy. But I think the curious sensibility conduces to any number of things where variations on a theme are present, and especially where those variations are based on things both unprovable and inexplicable. Whether the matrix is tea, cheese, wine, coffee, chocolate (among others) we first are intrigued and delighted by the complexities in play, and then we become intensely curious about how they arise. We can cloak ourselves in a high-minded moniker like "The artisan sensibility" but really we're just a wondering sort of humanoid thinking "HTF???" The nice part is that it colors our view of the world with vitality and multiplicity. We even learn that white asparagus grown in a small set of soils in certain parts of Europe is especially sweet and "elegant," or that the Door County cherry of Wisconsin is markedly more complex than other cherries, and so our world becomes a most wonderful place, and we are wonderfully alert to it. So to me a man like Joel is more than just a coffee Lama; he's an agent of appreciation. Thanks again to all who remembered me. TT

Well, that's sort of my entire point, which isn't to get ludicrously granular but to demonstrate the various ways flavor combos can work great, work OK, not work or REALLY not work. It's very rare there's a "perfect" wine, but it can be very helpful to get a few basic rules under our belts. Put it this way, the goal isn't to hit the bulls-eye; it's to hit the TARGET. If you "prefer the #3 rather than the #7" you should only be prepared to share why, so that others can understand what it is you're experiencing. It's all enlightening. It's possible to understand German wine if you're a moderately intelligent 9-year-old whose parents let her drink wine. Stemless glasses and t-shirts at fine-dining establishments are a grim sign of the goofball social/civil entropy threatening to lay waste to all culture and values. Or not. Over and out for me. I hope to see some of you Friday evening, and please tell me you're a member of Don's fattening universe.

Sorry, I ignored your question. Yes I do know (and very much admire) that book.

Space is indeed limited but I'm not sure what the demand has been. I'm optimistic that every food-wine whack-job out there who wants to get in will get in.

The fact they had both a test-kitchen and a chef willing to tweak the food into small variations on basic themes.

I'd suggest German wines with RS, and the best place to get them is MacArthur; talk to Phil. If the cheeses are soft or semi-soft, Champagne would work. Goat cheeses can manage Veltliner if they're young, but aged examples really need a take-no-prisoners Sancerre.

Yes; do call them, or call the shop and speak to Elli. And thanks to everyone for their kind words.

As always, depends what's on the menu!

The first time I visited Zola Kitchen and Wine Bar, I knew it offered chance to do a different sort of "wine dinner." The old formula is tired, and I want to revive it. So what we're doing is delving as deeply as possible into FLAVORS, and how they combine and synergize. We're doing three basic preps each of which will have small but telling variations, in such building-block flavors as acidity, herbs/spices, and sweetness. We'll have nine wines alongside, themselves arranged from driest to least dry, from the three segments of my portfolio: Austria, Champagne and Germany. This way the diner can see, for example, how the addition of more acidity in the dish makes wine #3 unsuitable but suddenly demands wine #7 - we can see flavors up-close and in detail, and therefore see wine as just another in a chain of flavors which undulate in various interesting ways. This is a first for me, and there's a chance I'm overreaching. But I'm willing to risk it because we so seldom get to think about these things in such detail. The idea came from Charlie Trotter's new wine-service book, in which he wrote that his kitchen will routinely adapt a dish to the wine being drunk. Lest this appear to be oh-so earnest, if any of you know me, you know it won't. I hope to see you on Friday evening; we start at 6:30. Terry

An Open Letter to Washington City Paper: Dear Editor, While I take no issue with peoples' varying impressions of the food or service at Restaurant Nora, it is galling to see a quarter-century of capital-I Integrity dissed as " (an) incredibly pretentious organic credo" by some feckless doofus. This person cannot possibly be in a position to identify precisely where the "pretense" might lie. But we can; we have known Nora Pouillon, Steven Damato and Thomas Damato for more than twenty years, and there is not one scintilla of pretense in their "Organic credo". They embody their principles, they WALK THE WALK as the saying goes. Disagree with this or any credo if you wish, but spare us the anonymously delivered invective toward people whose commitment you'd be better advised to emulate than to take cheap shots at. Sincerely, Terry Theise Odessa Piper

1) Flutes of varying roundness. I keep three different types, using the narrower bowl for Chardonnay-based Champagnes and going wider as the red-grape proprtion increases, or as the wine gets older (in which case I don't want to quash all those yummy secondary aromas). I also have two of the Richard Juhlin glasses I sometimes use for primo stuff. One thing is I always use two different glasses (one for me one for my sweetie) so that we can compare. That said, I appreciate TASTING Champagne from "wine" glasses, either INAOs or else the many tulip-shaped glasses you see in growers' places in the region. I prefer to drink Champagne from flutes because I appreciate the beauty of the mousse. 2) Ah yes, the Austria story. The offending Champagne was Deutz, which does rhyme with "hurts" and not with (ex)ploits.

You could do it by varietal or by region, or both if they intersect. So for instance, drink nothing but Sauvignon Blanc and Syrah. Or nothing but Chianti and Riesling (even more specifically starting with, say, Mosel Riesling and morphing into other German regions and then beyond Germany). Then just buy whatever you can afford, and, guided by your books, start yankin' corks and slurpin'.

I assure you I am not she.

Hi Brendan, great to hear from you. The answer to your various metaphysical questions is...YES. Nor am I being facile. The "essence of authenticity" involves these few phenomena: first, there is a kind of trinity-of-meaning wherein soil, family and culture intersect. As indeed they do in artisan wine wherever it comes from. This is to my mind concretely meaningful to the drinker, and here's why: Taking, say, Willi Schaefer as an example, Willy knows intimately that his wines from Himmelreich taste one way and those from Domprobst taste another. His forefathers knew it, and so does he. It is a matter of simple fact to him (I come along later and philosophize emotionally over it, which makes him chuckle) but it has the effect of establishing an order of priority, first the vineyards (i.e. the soil), which change hardly at all and then v-e-r-y slowly, and then the human, which changes each generation. Thus Willi is connected to his land, and the wine he makes expresses the connection. Why? Because he knows the land's innate flavors existed both before and after his particular period of stewardship, and so he gets out of the way and lets his land speak. (This is what we mean by non-manipulative winemaking: no flavors ADDED in the cellar but instead the preservation of what comes out of the vineyard.) Then you come along and drink the wine. Let's assume you like it. You know it comes from a family, not a factory, a "him" and not an "it". A guy just like you or me. You're connected to Willi becdause his reality is plain to see. Willi is connected to his land. You're connected to Willi, and so you are ALSO connected to his land. I don't see this as being metaphysical in any way; rather it strikes me as explicit and simple. Authenticity is, therefore, the preservation of a loving humility towards one's land which then expresses in the wine. If you put all these many artisans and their families together, it comprises a culture of detailed tending in a matrix of collegiality between man and soil. Yet for me to come along and explicate it is somewhat dangerous, because these are experiences of soul, and soul-experiences are inferential. They are about knowing but not knowing how you know what you know. When it comes to the wine in your glass, to refer to your question about the notes you "don't hear", in my experiences every authentic wine has two levels; the levels of its "flavors" and the level of its "flavor". Flavors-plural are all those bits and nuances we love to delineate. But FLAVOR is the holistic impression of the thing in its entirety. It is the thing that plays in silence as well as sound. It is why a poet famously once said the last line of a poem is the silence following the reading of the final line of text. It's the unit of time between the tick and the tock. Are we having fun yet?!?!

There's only one wine book anyone strictly needs to own; Hugh Johnson's (and Jancis Robinson's) World Atlas Of Wine. There are two other great wine books recently issued: The Accidental Connoisseur (Lawrence Osborne) and The New France (Andrew Jefford) though neither is an all-purpose for-beginners book. Karen MacNeil's Wine Bible is also useful and charming. I never took classes and don't know how they might work. It depends on the quality of instruction I guess. What I'd personally recommend is to read the Wine Atlas and see what sort of wines most arouse your curiosity. Then drink ONE type of white and ONE type of red for at least 4 months and even better 6; really go deep into those wines until you start to know them (old hippies will appreciate it if I say to "grok" them). Then take another two types and instantly your mind will compare and contrast to what you already know. Build that way and what you build stays built. I think it's useless to dabble in 60 different wines and expect to understand anything about them, about wine, or about yourself.

My addmittedly subjective answer to that question is, I look for a wine list to REFER TO THE FOOD. Too many times the list is either incoherent or else the spawn of the sommelier's ego (spending his boss's money....), and it's distressing when the list and the menu look to have been composed by two people who never spoke to each other. So IMO a "good" list is sensitive to what works with the menu. Further, it's not too large ("Too many choices America: not healthy!" Geo. Carlin) nor physically unwieldy (a real pet peeve, 10lb lists you can't open without knocking over your date's water glass), and it offers interesting drinking in all price ranges. These things matter far more to me than having 15-vintage verticals of La Mouline et al. Naturally I prefer an ecumenical list with lots of "interesting" choices to one that's all the old Cab-Chard-Bordeaux-Burgundy orthodoxy, and all things being equal I always prefer to see growers instead of Negoçiants. Being in the trade, I can also glean the suppliers the buyers prefer to work with, and that tells me something. Personally the first thing I look for is Champagne; do they have good ones or just the same tired old Factory-fizz? Very few places ever pour interesting Champagne by the glass, so I look at the bottle list to see if there'll be some fizz to drink. I then look for Alsace, Loire, Germany or Austria as these are the sources of the most food-lovin' whites. For reds I favor Burgundy, old-style Rioja, Veneto and Piedmontese, red Loires; those are the things I scan for when I take my first quick pass through a list. I then make a mental short-list from which final selections will be made depending on the food. Once in a while there's such a gotta-drink-it wine that I'll order food around it, but usually the food dictates the wine choice - and this is the point I can't stress enough: wine is just another comestible, a "grocery" if you will, and its function is to harmonize with what you're eating. You wouldn't deliberately order food with discordant combinations, so please take the same care when ordering wine.

I don't remember, but it sounds like something I might have said! Germany is my first and deepest love. It's the place that rouses me most profoundly. People who visit Germany with me often say it's a religious experience - though it's a religion that encourages plenty of partying. Austria is a wonderfully good time, youthful, oxygen-rich, nothing but fun. What I feel there is maybe more extroverted but maybe not quite as "center-ing" (meditators will know what I mean, probably better than I do...). Places like Undhof and Nikolaihof have more gravitas, which is why they remind me of what I feel while in Germany. But I exaggerate these distinctions. I mean, if I hear myself getting ready to say "yeah Austria's more fun but less deep" I think of Willi Bründlmayer or Ludwig Hiedler or Heidi Schröck and think "WHAT the @*!k am I talking about?" Champagne is the one wine for which I truly THIRST. Dry Muscat is 2nd. If I go too long without drinking Champagne I start getting a massive jones for it.

TT: I'm gonna answer two questions here; first, yes Don I do think Ruta's food is (honorary) girl-food and I mean that as a VERY high compliment. To the matter at hand: you might be surprised to hear I don't actually dine out much locally. That's not any sort of editorial on local restaurants, but more a question of how much I travel - I'm away one out of every three nights - so that when I'm home I tend to cocoon. And eating out some 125 nights a year makes me cherish meals cooked and eaten at home. Naturally I have favorites locally, but in truth I'm not enough of an habitué to speak with expertise about the scene. On a completely unrelated note, long-time DC diners might be interested to know I ran into Mary Richter (remember Zuki Moon?) in Minneapolis last month. She looked great and happy. She's managing the (substantial) food department at Surdyk's, which is one of the big league wine shops there. I told her we all missed her; at least I do.

Among the many things I love about Palena is how egoless Frank's food is: it's about the beauty of ingredients more than him trying to dazzle you with his reinventions-of-cuisine. I use a word like "perfect" because he always seems to grasp what he reaches for, maybe because he doesn't OVER-reach. The result is food that seems to love you back.

TT: You might get lucky, but the odds are against it. Halves are notoriously finicky about transport and storage. Have a back-up bottle in case this one's brown and decadent. The pedigree is excellent. The `73 vintage was what I'd call "clement", i.e. a lovely soft-ish vintage mostly in the Kabinett-Spätlese ranges without a lot of stamina or drive but with pleasant fruit while they lasted. The best are still pretty, but these are bottles mostly of Mosel wines that never left the wineries and thus have been stored impeccably. A small amount of Eiswein was made at the end of the harvest, and yours hails from a "Grand Cru" and ought to be, or ought to HAVE been, lovely. Bonne chance.

Reverse osmosis machines and spinning cones are the most egregious, followed by centrifuges and separators. I draw a distinction between those which really falsify a wine and those which merely are the easiest/cheapest way around a "situation", for example: you can green-harvest to remove rotten berries and/or you can hand-pick and sort either on tables or slow-conveyors or both....or, you can pick any old crap and clean it up with fining in the winery. Hard-good way or easy-bad way. An example of a "good" advancement is temperature-control inside tanks or casks, because here's a case in which technology improved upon the old method without altering the wine. I can go into more detail but it starts geeting geeky. I think you see what I mean. The idea of CONTRIVING a wine is essentially repugnant to me.

TT: Well now we're getting into philosophy and aesthetics, which is fine, but there's no question that a v-e-r-y thin line exists between the "perfect" and the bland when it comes to wine. It's not that the flaw needs to be forgiven; it's the opposite. We LIKE the flaw (or so-called flaw) because it makes the thing interesting, animate, human. I mean, my Christmas tree is a little droopy on one side and it's definitely not as picturesque as a fake tree would be, but it smells so good and it's alive.

I think I'm a little confused by the question. I don't argue for "flawed" wine (though I might assert the virtue of something others might perceive as a flaw, e.g. asymmetry), but instead argue for AUTHENTIC virtues as opposed to contrived (and therefore inauthentic) "virtues". Even more (if you will) holistic, I'd say that the 'meaning" (again if you will) of fine wine is such as to make irrelevant an enumeration of flaws-plus-or-minus-virtues. No doubt there are wines that seem flawless; you and I have drunk a few of them together. But we've also drunk unforgettable wines, wines incandescent with meaning and beauty, in which we might easily have found flaws if we were feeling nit-picky - the 90 Hermannshöhle Auslese of Dönnhoff's comes to mind. Yet a wine like that one takes you to a place where IT DOESN'T MATTER IF THE WINE ISN'T "PERFECT". Don's referring to Jack Gilbert's newest book of poems, by the way. If anyone's interested in poetry don't get that one until you've read the previous (and better) one, The Great Fires.

Not to mention the failure of reviewers to establish their own frames of reference. Notwithstanding all the shots taken at Parker, I must say I think he's all one could reasonably ask from a critic; he's visible, he's incorruptible, he lets you know where he's coming from, and you can USE the results, though not in the way many of his readers do. That said, part of the reason for your complaint is a simple matter of space: most publishers don't feel they have the luxury to print text establishing a writer's benchmarks; they gotta print the stuff that sells. Scores, TOP-10s! BEST-Ofs!

That should be apparent on its own face. Just look at what's advertised each Monday in the Post. Look, the crowd runs toward the things it always runs toward, the lowest common denominator. Add wine's intimidation factor (which confers authority on wine writers who claim to tell you which wines you should buy and PRECISELY how much you should like them) and there's all the makings for a herd-effect. The prevailing style, if you will, is a cunning contrivance of all that is OVERT and which is designed not to engage you, but merely to entertain you. Commercial wines are like commercial television; they encourage your passivity, they do all the work for you - "You just lie back and watch, and I'll strut my (surgically enhanced) stuff." - as opposed to 'cooler' styles of wine which encourage you to engage, which create a kinetic 2-way experience because the wine isn't gushing away at you, isn't filling your entire field of vision with STUFF. Commercial wine is like riding in the car with grunge-rock blasting away, and yes there's a time & place for that experience, but it gets old FAST and it prevents you from noticing anything ELSE. Fine wine, on the other hand, doesn't show you all its cards right away. It speaks with a moderate "voice", and it seduces not with a spurious voluptuousness but rather with its finesse, texture, and many-sidedness. It makes you curious; it encourages you to ponder and wonder; it takes you on a journey not only to its own home - where it grew, and who grew it - but into all the fascination of the world, starting with the strange fact of beauty and all the way to home and the notion of belonging. Now clearly this isn't an experience for which one can draw a map or write a recipe. That's part of its nature and essence. But imagine two movies: the first a typical popcorn-blockbuster, maybe even a well-made one, full of special effects and bim-bam-boom. You're entertained, certainly, and that's fine of course, but the calories are empty. Now imagine another, more quiet movie, the kind you're still thinking about days later, with characters you can't get out of your head and scenes of indelible impact. Watch the two theaters empty out when the movies are over, and tell me which one you think will have attracted the larger crowd.