CLINK!
''The Troubles'' may be a thing of the past in Northern Ireland, but a liquid legacy of those tragic times is still a hit on college campuses and at Irish bars.
When hard-charging former Texas Instruments exec Kathy Charlton offered Bordeaux winemaker Benoit Murat a job in her new winery on the Pacific Ocean side of Seattle in 1999, he wondered if she was serious.
Hip Sips: A guide to South Florida wine tastings ruce Shaw and Sandra Aaronson sit on stools in the back of Wolfe's Wine Shoppe, sipping a light-bodied but intensely flavored old-vines zinfandel.
Listen carefully. That slurping sound you hear is from all the wine tastings -- a score or more -- happening at shops, restaurants and hotels around South Florida each week.
In the rolling hills of Tuscany, where the sun casts a yellow-green glow over the landscape, causing the grape vines and olive trees to vibrate with color, every good-sized hilltop sports an ancient rock castle. In the Middle Ages they were fortresses, grim redoubts from which warriors under siege poured cauldrons of boiling oil down onto enemy soldiers trying to top the walls with scaling ladders.
"You can eat spicy, sir?" Every time I order in a restaurant in this noisy, steamy, teeming, traffic-clogged, friendly and fascinating city, they ask me that. With the sweetest of smiles. But I'm worried. What are they preparing me for? Warning me against? Is there some hidden national conspiracy to fry the foreigner's palate, then protest that they tried to warn me?
High in the Serra de Montsant mountains 100 miles southwest of Barcelona, an intrepid group of winemakers has banded together to take an ancient, fallen wine area and restore it to past glories. It's called Priorato.
New Orleans, "The City That Care Forgot," clings proudly to the cuisine that time forgot, its huge portions, rich sauces and decadent desserts, be they in the Creole tradition of the seafood gumbo at Arnaud's, the Cajun "paneed" (breaded) rabbit at Brigtsen's or the traditional French Poulet Rochambeau at Galatoire's.
A waiter at Picasso, the elegant restaurant in the Bellagio Hotel whose walls boast eight real (if minor) paintings by that fabled artist, reports that one diner recently ordered six $19 servings of foie gras with pear butter and pomegranate -- all for himself. As long as this gambling city attracts high-living high rollers like him, its boom in fine restaurants seems likely to continue.
It's a cool, sunny morning, and the wineries of the Finger Lakes Wine Trail, in the rolling, vine-covered hills that slope down to deep blue Keuka, Seneca and Cayuga lakes in central New York, are pouring samples of their wares for visiting tourists. The wines are surprisingly varied -- both familiar and little-known, tracing the whole history of the American vine: chardonnay and riesling and merlot; baco noir and seyval blanc; catawba, elvira and Delaware.
Standing atop the stone staircase on Cerro Santa Lucia, the hill on which this city was founded in 1541, looking east past the verdant vineyards that dot the suburbs, you can see the dramatic, snow-capped Andes.
How could I absorb a country in a week? Especially one as complex and contradictory as this? I couldn't. Dashing frantically from sensation to exotic sensation, at the peak of endurance every 18-hour day, I experienced the trip as a blur.
An American dining in South Africa might not realize at first that he or she is away from home. Most of the food is that familiar. But just a little digging turns up some exotic differences.
The national sport of the Soviet Union, as you know, is drinking. The country's national obsession is not politics; it is drinking. Its current national crisis is neither the economy nor the break-away republics; it is drinking. Its national idol is neither Raisa nor Yeltsin, but the Hero Workers of the Soviet vodka works. The reason: Making vodka is what Soviets do best.
Geologists say the Sleeping Bear dune that towers 300 feet above Lake Michigan's blue-green waters here is simply a few billion tons of sand ground fine by glaciers, tugged down by gravity and piled back up by wind and waves.
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