posted January 17, 2005 06:19 PM            

Southcorp says Foster's Group offer is inadequate

The Associated Press

SYDNEY, Australia - Australian winemaker Southcorp Ltd. urged shareholders Monday to reject a 3.1 billion Australian dollar ($2.36 billion) takeover bid by global brewing company Foster’s Group Ltd. — a step that would create the world’s fourth-largest wine company.

Southcorp called the offer inadequate and opportunistic. Chairman Brian Finn said it did not “adequately reflect the value of the company.”

“The board believes that Foster’s offer of A$4.17 (US$3.17; euro2.42) per share may just be its opening bid,” Finn said in a statement, adding that Southcorp — whose wines include Australia’s Penfolds, Lindemans and Rosemount, and Talomas in California — has the best portfolio of wine brands in the Australian market.

Combining the two would create the world’s fourth-largest wine company by volume, with a market capitalization of more than $10.6 billion.

“The board believes Southcorp shareholders should be adequately compensated for the substantial value that would be created from any combination,” Finn said.

Last week, Foster’s paid A$4.17 (US$3.17; euro2.42) per share to snap up an 18.8 percent stake in Southcorp from the Sydney-based Oatley family, Southcorp’s largest shareholder and the founders of the Rosemount wine brand.

Foster’s Chief Executive Trevor O’Hoy said the breadth and quality of Southcorp’s wine portfolio would put the company at the forefront of the global premium wine industry.

“Our decision to proceed with this transaction has been made in the context of increasingly favorable industry trends and greater confidence in the outlook for the North American wine market and New World wine markets generally,” O’Hoy said.

But Southcorp Chief Executive John Ballard described the Foster’s bid as “opportunistic” because it comes as the company’s earnings are depressed due to the Australian dollar’s relatively high value, and an excess of wine on the global market.

posted January 20, 2005 04:20 PM            

Not long ago, Chris Burroughs heard visitors to his tasting room repeating the same comments. They pondered "thin-skinned pinot noir." "I'm not drinking any bleeping merlot," they muttered.

They were, of course, quoting "Sideways," the wine movie that scored two Golden Globes earlier this week and is now eyeing Oscar.

Burroughs knows these lines ever so well. You know that scene, early in the film, in which Miles (Paul Giamatti) instructs his buddy Jack (Thomas Hayden Church) how to taste wine? Remember the guy in the cowboy hat and vest standing by?

That was Burroughs. He really is the tasting room manager at Sanford Winery, in Buellton, Calif., and that really is his tasting room on screen.

The wine they were trying -- Sanford's vin gris, a rosé made from pinot noir -- is now sold out. And when the recent floods haven't shut down Highway 101, a growing stream of visitors are showing up at Sanford and other wineries that made cameos in the film.

Unlike the wine malls of Napa, most operations in Santa Barbara wine country, some two hours north of Los Angeles, aren't set up to handle hordes of tourists. "If we have more than a dozen or so people in there at one time," Burroughs says, "it gets a little chaotic."

They may have to get used to it. Many movies inspire fans to visit locations they see on screen, but only a small handful -- I'm thinking here of how "Field of Dreams" transformed Dyersville, Iowa, and how "Amélie" magnified the appeal of Paris' Montmartre -- have made the scenery such a compelling, trip-worthy player in the film.

"Sideways" is on that list too. Director Alexander Payne hatched a compelling combination: a road-trip movie that exults in its destinations, and a reliance on real-world locations that already had a following in the wine world. Author Rex Pickett, whose novel was turned into the "Sideways" script, also gets credit. His frequent trips to the Santa Ynez Valley and the rest of Santa Barbara wine country, where over 60 wineries run tasting rooms, resulted in many of the area's most luminous locations woven into his book.

Mapping the movie
The area got another boost when Fox Searchlight Pictures, working with the Santa Barbera Conference & Visitors Bureau, devised a quirky map outlining a sort of "Sideways" wine tour, listing many sites and their appearance in the film -- from the Days Inn Buellton (that windmill hotel) to a farmers' market in nearby Lompoc where Miles and would-be love interest Maya (Virginia Madsen) take a stroll.

About 10,000 copies of the map were printed last October prior to the movie's L.A. premiere. By its national release Thanksgiving weekend, all were gone.

Cars and tour buses been showing up with increasing frequency ever since. LearnAboutWine, a Santa Monica, Calif., firm that organizes wine tours, has organized a $129 bus tour this weekend -- including a tasting with Burroughs and lunch at the Hitching Post II, the real restaurant where the fictional Maya worked a waitress.

Throughout the valley, the film has boosted bottom lines. Sanford sold 50 percent more pinot noir in December than a year earlier. Business at the Hitching Post is up 20 percent. Even at Fess Parker Winery (which showed up in the film, not charitably, as Frass Canyon), visitors are requesting "Sideways" maps.

"It's a gift from the p.r. gods," says Shannon Turner Brooks, the bureau's communication manager.

'You're still going to get the slobs'
The movie's impact on the wine business is being felt well beyond California coast. Retailers nationwide are starting to hear the film referenced in their aisles. Both the New York Times and Boston Globe recently reported on surges in sales of pinot noir, all traced back to "Sideways."

Winebid.com, which auctions rare and hard-to-find bottlings, has begun offering a collection of wines featured in the movie -- from Sea Smoke Cellars 2002 Botella pinot noir to Miles' treasured 1961 Cheval Blanc. (Bids for the Cheval Blanc start at $750.)

If there's a net benefit from all this, says Firestone Winery president Adam Firestone, it will be that the film's dynamic -- finding the balance between a haughty, socially inept wine snob and his type-A, chug-a-lug pal -- resonates with drinkers who want to expand their palates without becoming a pain in the butt.

"We're still going to have our wine geeks who come in here," says Firestone, whose Los Olivos winery appeared in the film. "And you're still going to get the slobs who are dumb to the whole process. But it will build the whole part in the middle that says, 'Hey, this is interesting.'"

That said, a trickle of fame can easily become a torrent. Most area wineries have just a handful of employees. Many realize that a quick rush of publicity from the film may not help come next year's vintage.

"I just tell everybody, 'Let's just keep our feet on the ground. There's just a lot of hype around here right now,'" says Frank Ostini, the Hitching Post's owner and winemaker.

Nutty Edam cheese?
Ostini produced just 350 cases of his $48 Highliner pinot noir in 2001 and 2002, but prior to "Sideways," many customers opted for his less expensive single-vineyard wines. Now the top-notch cuvée offering, which Miles orders by name in the film, is flying out of the rack. Ostini won't what his bottling run will be this year, "but it's going to be more, way more."

Yet Ostini also worried about the film's underside: how Miles' wine fancy serves as a smokescreen for his own alienation and alcoholism. In one scene, Miles essentially closes down the Hitching Post after sucking down a good share of their pinot, then stumbles back toward his motel. (In reality, it's a mile-long walk.) Payne had to convince Ostini the tone didn't reflect poorly on his restaurant -- and it doesn't, if you see the film -- before shooting began.

While he expects a quick rush of grape-minded stargazers, Ostini is more interested in building repeat business for his 52-year-old restaurant. He's not planning expansion, at least not yet: "We take reservations for dinner, and we book to full, and that's it."

One last thing, from Chris Burroughs. Miles' unforgettable tasting of Sanford vin gris -- strawberry and citrus and maybe even a hint of passion fruit. Sure. But a soupçon of asparagus and a flutter of nutty Edam cheese?

posted January 24, 2005 04:57 PM            

Warm snacks thaw diners in Harbin, China
By Ted Anthony

Associated Press

HARBIN, China (AP) -- In the dead of winter, on a narrow side street in the middle of one of China's iciest cities, a standoff is unfolding. I am part of it.

On one corner: Oriental Dumpling King, awash in fluorescent light, trimmed in fake gold and overstaffed with young women in green dresses. On another corner: Central Dumpling King, its windows steamed up, its tables filled with people trying to escape the cold and carb up against the fiercest weather China has to offer.

January is the buildup to guonian, the Chinese New Year season. And as the Year of the Rooster approaches, ushering out the Year of the Monkey, the dumpling -- or "jiaozi," for those linguists keeping score at home -- reigns.

Shrimp dumplings. Pork dumplings. Dumplings stuffed with pungent leek, with crispy celery, with pleasantly bitter winter cabbage. Steamed dumplings. Boiled dumplings. Dumplings fried in the pan until they're golden brown. Dumplings by the dozen, the hundred, the thousand.

I am on a mission to eat these dumplings. During a week in Harbin, I make a daily tally and realize I am consuming far too many. Then I look at the next tables over and see that I am an amateur: Chinese half my size are consuming twice my complement of dumplings, washing them down with Hapi beers as frigid as the air that blows in each time the front door opens.

In a country where geography so often dictates cuisine -- lamb and pork reign inland, seafood on the coast; noodles orient toward the harsh north and rice to the more temperate south -- the dumpling is a gastronomic ambassador across China's regions, ethnic groups and even religions.

In the far northwest, Muslim Uighurs wolf down mutton dumplings as enthusiastically as Cantonese gulp open-topped shumai in the southeast and Shanghainese savor soup dumplings -- elegantly twisted morsels full of pork, flaked crab meat and scalding liquid known as "little dragon buns."

Dumpling assembly line
"When you think about it, it's the perfect food," says Oriental Dumpling King waitress No. 005, known to her friends and family as Huang Yibo. Chinese restaurant staffers tend to be identified by numbers, which can reach a dizzying six digits -- a combination of the remnants of communist bureaucracy and the Chinese obsession with numerology.

Huang watches as her colleagues -- behind sanitary glass, of course, in keeping with the new China -- toil in the dumpling version of Henry Ford's assembly line, racing to keep up with New Year's demand for, count 'em, 33 kinds of dumplings. "They get calluses on their fingers from making so many dumplings," Huang says.

I ask in my most polite Mandarin but am denied entrance to the inner sanctum. Too busy, they say. But would you want a hulking, bushy-bearded foreigner running roughshod through your dumpling operation?

Sated -- at least for a few hours -- I bundle up in a coat that makes me resemble a large version of the morsels I've just consumed. Dumplings, it turns out, are (along with clear Chinese sorghum liquor known by its deceptively innocuous name, "baijiu," or "white wine") another great inoculation against a Harbin winter day.

At one place, called Dongbei Ya, or Northeastern Duck, I order three dozen: pork and cilantro, fresh shrimp and boiled cabbage.

"Are you sure you want 36? That's quite a lot. Can you eat that many?" the waitress says to me, smiling but defiant.

"Could a Chinese person eat them all?" I ask.

"Probably."

"Then don't worry about it."

(Dumplings are really cheap, too. My total -- 36 dumplings, two Cokes and a pot of tea -- comes to about 25 yuan (US$3.20;euro2.45).

Cutting the cold
I have come to this far reach of China alone; my wife, a hot-blooded creature, opts instead for a week on a southern island. She thinks me crazy for pursuing the coldest environ in the land, but I feel, somehow, that the secret of northern Chinese hardiness -- the strength of a country where hardship is referred to with the phrase "eat bitter" -- can be found in the swirling winds of the Manchurian province of Heilongjiang, or Black Dragon River.

On this particular afternoon, Harbin's Ice Festival is in full swing. Ice sculptures are everywhere downtown, and in no danger of melting. At the edge of the city, entire parks are devoted to ornate ice edifices two, three, even four stories high, lit from within using colored lights. Young Harbinians (Harbinites? Harbinese?) stride through them with tiny digital cameras, the flashes twinkling like mirrors through the ice.

Like everyone else who lives here, they seem impervious to the bitter weather aside from the occasional pink cheek. Even in mid-afternoon on the sunniest day of my visit, it struggled to reach 10 degrees. On that day, a woman at the bus station, bundled up, said to a companion, "Pretty warm day!" This is what you're dealing with here.

This all may be due to what lies beneath: Entire stores in Harbin are devoted to long underwear -- sort of a Victoria's Secret for the tundra dweller who has everything.

The city's Russian influence -- it's not far from the border -- is clear in its architecture and the abundance of Orthodox churches that dot the landscape in an officially nonreligious country. The grandest, St. Sofia, towers over a square in the center of town, a reminder that whatever politics may be, culture often has a way of trumping official geography. Still, even the church spires seem to shiver when the wind kicks up.

The diminutive dumpling, I'm told repeatedly, helps cut the cold. For one, the cooking methods retain heat. Unlike quick-fried wok cuisine, whose heat dissipates in a minute or two, something steamed or boiled is the perfect conduit of warmth from hearth to stomach. All the Chinese characters for the cooking methods used to make dumplings -- steamed, boiled, pan-fried -- have four small apostrophe-like critters at the bottom, signifying flames licking up from a stove.

Then, of course, there are the ingredients. Globs of meat and vegetables pinched into robust dough -- not exactly standard Atkins fare -- offer the stick-to-your-ribs potential that can give a guy the get-up-and-go to walk, say, a few blocks across Harbin's frozen cobblestones without turning into an ice sculpture himself ("Dumpling-Sated, Bundled-Up Westerner in Repose"). Pungent mixes of soy sauce, black vinegar and thick, seeded red-pepper paste add to the glow.

I'll admit it: When I lived in China as a child at the end of the 1970s, I overdid things a bit. The dining hall at our foreigners' compound made Dumplingfest a Sunday staple, and I'd go for lunch and eat 40 of them. Then, for dinner, they'd pan-fry 'em to make sure they all got used. I ate 40 more, appreciative of the increased oil quotient against the biting Beijing cold.

In those days, Beijing dumplings were a special occasion. Families whose entire home was a single room gathered in communal cinderblock kitchens and formed their own dumpling brigades, with children mixing filling and pinching dough while mothers and fathers manned huge pots of water heated by wood and coal stoves. The result, a weekend feast, was a vast difference from the melancholy vegetables and slivers of tough meat that each day usually brought.

By my final day in Harbin, I waddle out the front door of Oriental Dumpling King, feeling lucky that I fit through. Across the way, Central Dumpling King is just as crowded, and the eternal faceoff continues. I realize the winner is, of course, me.

My final count, in six days: exactly 367 dumplings. I am ready to go home.

posted February 16, 2005 05:53 PM            

By GREG RISLING, Associated Press Writer

BUELLTON, Calif. - Frank Ostini can't seem to keep his cocktail napkins in stock. The owner of the Hitching Post II restaurant, featured in the Oscar-nominated film "Sideways," is on pace to blow through a three-year supply of 50,000 in the next few months. Customers, it appears, are plucking napkins as souvenirs.

Since the October premiere of "Sideways," which features nearly two dozen locales including Ostini's Western-style restaurant, business has been brisk during what is usually a slow season for Southern California wine country.

Filmed primarily in the bucolic Santa Ynez Valley, 45 minutes north of Santa Barbara and 2 1/2 hours from Los Angeles, the movie about two friends on a wine-fueled odyssey before one gets married, has sparked interest in an area normally overshadowed by Northern California's wine country.

The Santa Barbara Conference & Visitors Bureau published 10,000 "Sideways" map for tourists wanting to retrace the adventures of the movie's two buddies, Miles and Jack. Within a month of the film's release the maps were gone and 30,000 more were printed. The map also has been downloaded nearly 5,000 times from the bureau's Web site since December.

"We couldn't have imagined it would be this big," said bureau spokeswoman Shannon Turner Brooks. "We had faith it was going to be well-received, but thought it would be an indie or art-house movie that would have limited coverage."

Not so — "Sideways" recently won the Golden Globe for best musical or comedy and is nominated for five Oscars (news - web sites), including best picture. The film has made about $50 million at the box office and the Oscar buzz prompted Fox Searchlight to release "Sideways" to 1,000 more theaters last month.

Now, some businesses are offering "Sideways"-themed packages.

Guests at the Wine Valley Inn & Cottages in Solvang, for example, also receive a gift certificate for a meal at a Danish restaurant and a bottle of wine from the Firestone Vineyard, among other items. The restaurant and vineyard are two places Miles and Jack visit.

Marie Knelange has decided to integrate the film into her own wedding in May. Knelange, who recently moved from Montana to Santa Barbara County with her fiance, Nathan Naidas, plans to shuttle about 60-70 wedding guests to three wineries.

"We're movie buffs and we wanted to do a wine tour as part of the wedding," said Knelange, 36, "so when we saw the movie it was a perfect fit."

If "Sideways" is released on DVD before her wedding, Knelange would like to give copies to her bridesmaids.

"Everybody will think we're crazy, but we wanted to do something different," she said.

Bob Gifford, a Chicago resident who visits California on business several times a year, decided after watching "Sideways" to include a first-time stop in wine country in January.

"We saw the movie a month ago and wanted to see what it's all about," said Gifford, 57. "The movie definitely enhanced it."

At the Sanford Winery, customers recognize tasting room manager Chris Burroughs from a scene in which he pours, as Miles, the connoisseur, teaches Jack, the novice, about the subtleties of wine. Burroughs has been asked to pose for pictures and sign bottles.

"Even though I feel a little absurd, people recognize me and it's part of the experience," he said.

Burroughs adds that visitors shouldn't be misguided by some of the messages in the film, which he calls "a twisted love song to wine."

"We're not trying to put wine up on a pedestal," he said. "It's just fermented grape juice."

Still, he and other locals don't mind watching the film spread word about the Santa Ynez Valley, which despite its award-winning vintages has long been overshadowed by vineyards north of San Francisco.

"We hope that the movie creates a greater awareness that California wine is not confined to just the Napa Valley," Burroughs said.

Back at the Hitching Post, where Ostini was getting ready for customers to arrive one recent evening, advance bookings have tripled, filling the dining rooms and prompting him to consider expanding hours. Business, he says, is up 30 percent.

"The attention we've received has been incredible," said Ostini, 52. "It's taken us to a different status."

The walls of the restaurant's bar, where Miles bellies up, are adorned with pictures from the film and a giant wine bottle signed by the cast.

Indeed, the film's star might not be anyone in the cast but one of Miles' favorite wines — the Hitching Post-produced Highliner. Of 350 cases of the 2002 vintage released in December, only 100 remain. Ostini expects to release at least 600 cases of the next batch.

Ostini acknowledges he had concerns when filmmakers first approached him. He worried that portraying a couple of guys draining glass after glass might portray the wine industry in a bad light. Instead, the film seems to have inspired novice drinkers to sample different varieties.

posted February 22, 2005 10:06 AM            

The best pizza in the entire United States is not in New York City. Or Chicago. It's in Phoenix, Arizona. That's the word from New York food critic Ed Levine who just wrote the book, "Pizza: A Slice of Heaven."

Who makes the best pizza in your opinion? Sound off in the Cooks Online Forum.

This mouth-watering, just-have-to-get-it pizza is from Pizzeria Bianco in downtown Phoenix. "In many ways, it's the definition of a perfect pizza," Levine told The Arizona Republic in an interview. When he first ate it while researching his book, he said, "I was blown away."

Phoenix may have the best pizza, but it's been deemed the worst city for singles to find a date. Find out the funny reasons why!

While this is great news for the little pizzeria in Phoenix, those in the Big Apple are none too pleased. "I know it's not true," L. Goldberg, one of the partners in Totonno's Pizzeria Napolitano, boasted to the Republic. Her pizzeria is a descendant of a place called Lombardi's, which was the first licensed pizzeria in America, founded 1905. "It's the water. New York's got the best water. And yeast," she insisted. "Does he cook over coal? We use coal." No, he does not. The stove is wood-fired at Bianco's.

Love, pizza, and a $5.5 million helicopter. What a story this is!

posted March 01, 2005 01:41 PM            

by Bruce Schoenfeld
Travel+Leisure
Updated: 8:30 p.m. ET Feb. 28, 2005

In the sleepy southeastern corner of Washington State, a quiet revolution is under way. Bruce Schoenfeld meets some of the passionate (even obsessed) vintners, chefs, and farmers who are making Walla Walla this country's next great wine destination.

I won't soon forget the first meal I ate in Walla Walla. It was six years ago, just as the local wine industry was beginning to boom. One of the area's leading viticulturists, a man of some sophistication, took me to what he pointedly called "the best restaurant in town." His quote marks hung in the air like smoke; before long, I understood why. The restaurant was a family steak house, on the model of a Sizzlerbut lacking the predictability of a chain. The room smelled like a school cafeteria, and the meat that arrived at our table tasted like something an office-supply store might sell.

Now I sit at a dining room table in Dayton, Washington, half an hour outside Walla Walla, reveling in the unmistakable, earthy scent of fresh truffles. Out here in the country where Lewis and Clark waited out a winter by eating horses, dogs, and fennel, chef Mike Davis of 26 Brix has prepared a lunch of home-cured prosciutto with grilled melon; corn soup with chunks of smoked trout; and a salad of arugula, toy box tomatoes, and those glorious black truffles. Still to come is free-range chicken roasted over the staves of French wine barrels. "I hate to use the cliché that this is the next Napa," says Davis, whose restaurant has been turning out the best food in the region since it opened last summer. "But I admit that I have thought to myself, 'I want to do for Walla Walla what [the French Laundry's] Thomas Keller did for Yountville.'"

Seated beside me are the Sisks, whose farm, Ideal Organics, grew the produce we're eating. Across the table are the Monteillets, our hosts, who opened the area's first fromagerie in 2001 and now sell exquisite chèvre to shops and restaurants as distant as Idaho. When I smell the truffles, I sigh with contentment—but also relief. I know I'll never have to eat that office-supply steak again.

There's an often told story, which I heard three times in less than a week, that back in the late 1800's Walla Walla chose to be the site of the new penitentiary instead of the state capital. Local historians dismiss it as apocryphal, but it might as well be true. Until quite recently, this city of 30,000 appears to have taken pains to deflect the attention brought by its humorously euphonious name, doing little to lure visitors and exhibiting a profound suspicion toward the unfamiliar. The wheat farmers who made up the bulk of the population were satisfied to live out lives as dry and monochromatic as the crop that paid their bills, set against a faceless panorama of grain elevators, chain motels, and squat, bungalow-style houses. Even today, Walla Walla seems to have been dropped onto this corner of the southeastern Washington prairie by sheer happenstance. (The Columbia River flows nearby but plays no role in the city's geography.) Most of downtown is still filled with dun-colored buildings that look more small-town Texas than Pacific Northwest. Venture off Main Street and you're on the set of The Last Picture Show.

Yet lately, life in Walla Walla has been transformed by the wine industry. Some of America's best vintages are currently being made in Walla Walla, which couldn't boast of a single commercially viable grapevine a quarter-century ago. Even as late as 1990, when tumbleweeds blew through an all-but-abandoned Main Street, only five wineries were operating here. By 2004, there were 59, producing the requisite Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, and Merlot, but also redefining the area with Syrah and Sémillon.

The new tasting rooms that sprout from the wheat fields every month, making architectural statements with their obtuse angles and walls of glass, are attracting carloads of wine adventurers who stumble across a coveted bottle and then set out for the viticultural frontier for a weekend of tasting. The infusion of money, combined with a spirit of entrepreneurial enthusiasm, has helped remake the town. Restaurants aren't the only manifestation of the new Walla Walla: the art scene is growing (sculptor Jim Dine casts his works, including one on display at the Guggenheim Bilbao, at the Walla Walla Foundry), and boutique businesses—from the organic farm and the fromagerie in nearby Dayton to the Orchidaceae nursery, which ships plants nationwide—are suddenly thriving. There's even that ultimate validation of a burgeoning demographic, a Starbucks.

At the same time, gifted winemakers and resourceful businessmen are streaming in, seeking America's next great viticultural region or simply a fresh start, filling those once empty parking spots. Raised in Seattle, Nina Buty studied art history at Walla Walla's Whitman College, then left to travel the world. By chance, she married a local oenologist—Caleb Foster, who'd worked at the pioneering winery Woodward Canyon—and returned in 2001 to help him create Buty Winery, in a concrete hut beside the Walla Walla airport. Plans for a showcase facility with a sculpture garden are off in the future; for now, all resources go into the wines. Foster's oenology texts share shelf space with Buty's art books, and their crisp Chardonnays and densely packed Cabernet- and Merlot-based blends serve as both commercial products and Buty's artistic statements. "In a sense, making a wine is just like building a sculpture," she says.

As she steers into the parking lot of the Foundry, where works by Funk Art's Robert Arneson are displayed beside David Bates's three-dimensional pastiches and the works of local sculptors, Buty tells me she never thought she'd live in Walla Walla once she left Whitman. "Creativity has always been here, but before now the ideas were only sustainable for a month or two," she says. "Restaurants would open with all kinds of ambition, but they couldn't stay in business for long. Now, with the influx of money, and people who have come to Walla Walla to enjoy the wine, we've reached a critical mass."

Walla Walla may not turn into another Napa, because the closest big city, Seattle, is a five-hour drive away over a mountain pass (Napa is only an hour's drive from the Golden Gate Bridge). But it does seem poised to become America's second destination for wine tourism. Dayton's Weinhard Café, 26 Brix, and downtown's Backstage Bistro, and the Whitehouse-Crawford—which reinvented Washington dining east of the Cascades when it opened in 2000—have recast restaurant meals here from rudimentary pit stops to something you can plan a night around. What you ate, and the wine you drank with it, have become prime topics of conversation during coffee breaks at businesses around town. Of course, it doesn't hurt that many of those businesses are wineries.

One afternoon, I wander into Grapefields, a bright and uncluttered wineshop and café. The wine list is the entire store: buy a bottle, and the clerk who is also your waiter will pull the cork. The owners have stocked the shelves with hard-to-find European treasures but also some rarities from top Washington producers. I come from Colorado, which takes a church-and-state attitude toward retail wine sales and on-premises consumption, so the idea of choosing a bottle off the rack and being allowed to drink it over a meal seems wonderfully subversive. It goes without saying that not so long ago my hand-fired pizza with plump forest mushrooms would have been the best dish in Walla Walla; the Corbières rosé I drank would have been simply unobtainable.

Tasting the rosé, I remember the first Walla Walla wine I tried, back in the early nineties: Rick Small's 1988 Woodward Canyon Cabernet Sauvignon. At the time, it struck me as the best American bottling I'd come across that wasn't from California. Then I uncovered one of Gary Figgins's Leonetti Merlots, a wine that had been just a rumor to me for years, and several impressive releases from L'Ecole No. 41, which is set in an old schoolhouse in nearby Lowden. I was a believer.

Small and Figgins, Army Reserve buddies, started Walla Walla's wine industry as a glorified home-economics project in the late seventies. They began on a modest scale, trucking in fruit from other parts of the state, not having any notion that Merlot and Cabernet would actually flourish amid the wheat and sweet onions. They made wine in Walla Walla only because they lived in Walla Walla. But L'Ecole's Marty Clubb, the son of a Texas oilman, has a business degree from MIT. He'd spent time in Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. What, I couldn't help but wonder, had brought him here?

It turns out that his wife, Megan, has century-old Walla Walla roots that run deeper than the oldest vines. Megan's father, Baker Ferguson, was running Walla Walla's biggest bank when he started L'Ecole in 1983. He soon learned that you can't manage a winery as a hobby—not a successful one, anyway. So he dangled the possibility of an eventual position at the bank to lure his daughter home from San Francisco, where she had a high-powered finance job, and told her to bring along that husband of hers to handle L'Ecole.

Clubb took to the wine business, and soon L'Ecole was thriving. But the transition from San Francisco was a struggle for the Clubbs. Walla Walla seemed smaller than its 30,000 inhabitants, in part because nobody new ever moved in. "It was the kind of place," Clubb recalls, "where, if you dialed a wrong number, you knew the person who answered the phone."

The change happened so fast, locals like the Clubbs didn't see it coming. First, two wineries set up tasting rooms on Main Street. Then, the once glamorous Marcus Whitman hotel, built by a civic consortium in 1927 as a local showpiece but converted to subsistence housing in the late seventies, was restored by a Walla Walla organization headed by cell-phone millionaire Kyle Mussman. His group gutted the interior, creating a hotel and conference center. The guest rooms had handcrafted desks, DVD players, two-line phones, terry-cloth bathrobes, and a higher level of luxury than the area had known. Until the first 75 deluxe rooms opened in February 2001, Walla Walla had had few visitors, only aspirations.

In retrospect, the Marcus Whitman was the tipping point. Today, the property isn't always full, or even close to it, and the service doesn't quite reach the level of the appointments. (By appearances, half the staff is still enrolled in high school, and breakfast—even on weekday mornings—means a visit to a nearby Denny's.) But its mere existence signifies that local money has faith in the city's future. Watching the stream of well-heeled hotel guests during one of the several formal tasting weekends held each year at area wineries, it's impossible for Walla Walla residents not to think of themselves as shareholders in a stock destined to rise.

All week, I've been holed up at the Inn at Abeja, a five-cottage bed-and-breakfast housed in a restored farmstead a few miles east of downtown. There's a Wi-Fi computer link in my split-level suite, a CD player I haven't had time to use, and several hundred channels of DirecTV. The bookcases are stuffed with authors I actually want to read, from David Sedaris to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the cabinets are stocked with Riedel stemware to show off the local wine. At breakfast on my first morning, I found fresh mango chunks awaiting me, and juice that had been inside the orange moments before. Lucinda Williams was singing on the sound system, and two newspapers were tucked beside my plate. Poached eggs and warm bread were headed my way, just as I'd requested when I was contacted before my visit. I could have stayed there all morning.

In the hotel's Locust Suite, with its Craftsman-style cabinets and slate floors, I notice pencil marks scratched on the wooden walls. Dating back to the mid 1940's, they record the maintenance status of the farm vehicles. I see that a Pierce Arrow needed an oil change; I find myself hoping someone attended to it before the transmission balked. For a moment, I visualize what it must have been like here on a September day when that long-departed Pierce still had a fresh coat of paint. The wheat farmers would have been busy stocking provisions against the coming cold; unlike winery owners, they had no $50-a-bottle cases of Merlot to ship to customers during bleak months.

From almost the day the Whitehouse-Crawford opened in 2000, the L-shaped bar tucked into a corner of its dining room has served as an unofficial clubhouse for the town's wine-and-food community. It isn't just because a winery, Seven Hills, shares the same circa-1904 mill building, separated only by a wall of glass—and it certainly isn't the draconian corkage fee that the restaurant imposes on anyone who wants to drink his own wine with dinner, even if he made the wine himself. Jamie Guerin's menu is as urbane as any in eastern Washington (house-made agnolotti; griddle-seared sole with hot pecan sauce; squab breast and Bartlett pear with 12-year-old vinegar), and the high-ceilinged space makes you feel sophisticated each time you step through its doors. The waitstaff moves briskly; the bartender has that big-city twinkle in his eye. The hardwood floors, exposed brick, and open kitchen place the restaurant's sensibility somewhere between San Francisco and Seattle, with just a bit of New York bustle thrown in.

On a Thursday night, I'm sipping wine there with K Vintners owner Charles Smith, who used to manage rock bands in Copenhagen. At 43, Smith has the hair of a heavy-metal guitarist and an irreverent manner that just about mandates self-employment. "I didn't want my future to be decided by the talents of other people and the whims of the record business," he tells me. Instead, he returned to wine, his first love: he'd been a sommelier at the Ritz-Carlton Rancho Mirage in his early twenties. If anything, his iconoclastic style has become more pronounced. He keeps a '49 Cadillac parked in the driveway of his winery, and has painted a huge block-letter K on the building's front door. And yet, his Syrahs may be the most graceful this side of Hermitage.

"Three people showed up at the tasting room the other day, and I wasn't in the mood for it," he reports. He tells me that he handed out glasses, then gave a droning, half-hour monologue about wine making while his visitors waited for something to drink. Finally, Smith led them to the barrel room and flicked a switch that filled the room with the booming chords of Led Zeppelin, and the tasting was on. An hour later, the visitors staggered into the light, dazed but gratified. I was sipping Smith's Pepperbridge Vineyard Syrah, so I knew why. His Syrahs—the left-of-center grape variety that provides the bulk of his tiny output—have the heft of heavy metal, but on the palate they're all Billie Holiday.

As Smith's story ends, I notice Christophe Baron, the Champagne-born pro- prietor of Cayuse Vineyards, striding toward our table with a wine bottle in each hand. To our left is another winemaker we all know, and at a table beyond is a chef I met earlier in the week. My food—braised halibut with sweet peppers, then steak with gnocchi and a smoky, leather-scented chimichurri sauce—is infused with the ambition of a chef who wants to make a difference, and the energy in the room could power the city for an entire week. I leave at midnight, intoxicated by a sense of limitless possibilities—and an awful lot of the local wine.

By contrast, 26 Brix trades on a restrained sensibility that feels almost European. If the Whitehouse-Crawford is a Walla Walla Cabernet, full of brightness and flexing its muscles, 26 Brix is an ethereal Pinot Noir aspiring to Burgundian elegance. Jazz piano plays on the sound system; conversation is modulated. Mike Davis's cooking, sensible and balanced even in its flights of fancy, fits perfectly. One day, I eat both brunch and dinner at the restaurant, from biscuits in a venison gravy in the early afternoon through a seared breast of Muscovy duck with warm apple-and-fennel salad and the sublime creations of pastry chef Matthew Zack, an emerging superstar, at night. At dinner, I meet a Spanish couple, in town from southern California for Cayuse's annual tasting weekend. "This is my third trip here in a year," the husband says, ticking off on his fingers the wineries' Spring Release weekend, their holiday barrel tasting, and the Cayuse celebration, as he polishes off a tomato tartare topped with cucumber sorbet. "I come for the wine, but now I'm going to start coming for the food."

The next morning, I walk off the meals with a stroll down Main Street, from one end of downtown to another. I pass a street-corner sculpture I haven't seen before, and just beyond it a new Internet café selling gourmet jams and jellies. The New York Times is on sale at the Starbucks, and two cars with California plates are parked outside the Waterbrook Winery tasting room—but not, I can't help noticing, a single tumbleweed.

posted March 21, 2005 01:55 PM            

LONDON (Reuters) - It's no ordinary toasted cheese sandwich.

American food guru Ruth Reichl called it the tastiest morsel she had eaten in the place she said was now the world's food capital.

And the praise she heaped on Bill Oglethorpe's designer sandwich in Gourmet magazine triggered a flood of visitors to his Saturday stall in London's trendy Borough Market.

"I would guess that my sandwich turnover has doubled since the article," Oglethorpe, 42, told Reuters while standing over a hotplate full of sizzling delicacies with a long queue of people waiting.

They are not cheap, but nevertheless they were selling at a rate of close to one a minute.

There is an art to the Oglethorpe sandwich experience. He takes two slices of Poilane sourdough bread, crumbled Montgomery cheddar cheese, matured for 18 months at 12 degrees centigrade, and tops it off with five varieties of onion and garlic.

posted March 22, 2005 11:03 AM            

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Napa Valley wineries claimed a legal victory on Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court (news - web sites) declined to review a state court ruling which upheld a law limiting the use of the exclusive term "Napa" on wine labels.

The Supreme Court action was a setback for Bronco Wine Co., California's largest vineyard operator, which went to court to preserve its ability to sell lower-cost, Napa-branded wines that do not contain grapes from the region.

Bronco's Charles Shaw wine, which sells through the Trader Joe's grocery chain for $1.99 a bottle, created a stir when it launched in 2002 and earned the nickname "Two-Buck Chuck."

At issue is a law passed by California legislators in 2000 to limit the use of the "Napa" label to wines made from at least 75 percent Napa-grown grapes.

"Wine is of place, and that's what makes it interesting and romantic and even more enjoyable," said Linda Reiff, executive director of the Napa Valley Vintners, which had argued in favor of the state law.

Privately held Bronco, which brought a new cachet to bargain-basement wines with its Charles Shaw label, won a stay in 2001 that kept the California law from taking effect as the issue made its way through the courts.

Federal regulations also place limitations on wine labels that refer to specific regions but allow exceptions for brands that were launched before 1986.

Bronco had argued that federal law preempted the California law with regard to its labels, which include the Napa Ridge and Napa Creek wine brands.

A lawyer for Bronco could not be immediately reached for comment. The Ceres, California-based firm had no comment on the action by the U.S. Supreme Court, which was made without comment by the justices.

Bronco, which is headed by Fred Franzia, nephew of wine legend Ernest Gallo, owns about 35,000 acres of California vineyards, including large operations in the state's Central Valley.

Tom Dresslar, a spokesman for the California Attorney General's office, said the Supreme Court recognized the state's "traditional interest in protecting consumers and markets."

A California appeals court had sided with Bronco, but the California Supreme Court had ruled unanimously that the state law was not preempted by federal law.

"We're please that the Supreme Court has let that ruling stand," Dresslar said.

The California Court of Appeal in Sacramento is scheduled to hear arguments on April 20 on remaining issues in Bronco's challenge, including whether the state labeling law usurps its free speech rights or represents an illegal bar to interstate commerce.

"For the Supreme Court to deny review is a great victory for us, but it's bittersweet because we know the fight is not over," said Reiff, whose group represents 265 Napa Valley wineries.

Wine analyst Jon Fredrikson said Bronco, which has its own sales force, would have to shift to buying Napa-grown bulk grapes to keep its labels if it lost the coming rounds in the courts.

But he noted that the issue had become a cause for Bronco's Franzia, who has a track record for bucking the conventional wisdom in the wine industry.

posted March 22, 2005 06:50 PM            

BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- The Boston of a century ago was a beer-brewing hub to rival Midwestern suds capitals such as Milwaukee, St. Louis and Chicago. Research by local historians has turned up evidence of 31 operating breweries inside the city limits in the late 19th century.

A city better known for its baked beans and clam chowder had the greatest number of breweries per capita at the time, said Michael Reiskind, a Boston historian who has researched Boston's brewing history.

But few visible reminders of the industry remain -- except a two-decades-old beer named after one of the city's fieriest Revolutionary War patriots. The Samuel Adams Brewery Tour and its Boston Beer Museum as the chief repository of the city's brewing history -- a place to learn about the past and toast the legacy by downing some sample Sam Adams varieties.

"There are empty remnants, and some old warehouses left behind, but nothing else really interesting like the Sam Adams Brewery to walk around and really get a feel for what it was like," Reiskind said.

Modern Boston brewers like Sam Adams, founded in 1984, and more recent arrivals including the Harpoon Brewery and Tremont Ale in nearby Waltham "brought back a whole local industry of brewing" that began to die out during Prohibition and the subsequent consolidation in the U.S. brewing industry, Reiskind said.

The Sam Adams tour, which is free with a $2 donation to charity encouraged, promotes the city's best-known contemporary beer brand. It also recaptures some of the city's brewing past through historical displays, memorabilia, and even a 30-foot-long glass-lined brewing tank that has been cut open and placed on its side to walk through.

Included is a section on Sam Adams, who brewed beer for a time before fueling some of the political ferment that preceded the Revolutionary War. Jim Koch, a sixth-generation brewer whose family has brewing roots in St. Louis and Cincinnati, borrowed the Sam Adams name when he worked off an old family recipe to create his modern brew.

One of the first major Boston breweries was the Boston Beer Co., a defunct brand chartered in 1828 that now is the namesake of the corporate entity behind Sam Adams Beer. The company develops new brews at the Sam Adams Brewery but brews most of its product elsewhere.

The brewery is in Boston's Jamaica Plain section, which, along with neighboring Roxbury, was home to about three-quarters of Boston's breweries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The brewers were drawn to the then-inexpensive land in the Stony Brook Valley and also to the Stony Brook Aquifer, which no longer boasts the pure water of a century ago.

Most of the old brewery structures still standing have been turned into warehouses and storage, and they're hard to find tucked away amid a maze of narrow streets once populated mostly by immigrants from countries like Germany and Ireland. The German legacy is easy to see in Jamaica Plain's streets, which bear names such as Beethoven and Bismarck.

Irish and English immigrants produced hearty ales in Boston, while Germans favored lagers, Reiskind said. Some of the brews shared partnerships with Boston's professional baseball teams, such as the Burkhard Brewery's Red Sox Beer and Pennant Ale. The Pfaff brewing family cut a deal with the former Boston Braves, Reiskind said.

Prohibition forced many of the breweries to either shut down or convert to other products like soft drinks. By the time the ban on alcohol consumption was lifted in 1933, many small breweries were unable to survive as industry consolidation took hold, Reiskind said.

At 30 Germania St. stands the Samuel Adams Brewery, which occupies several structures in a complex of two dozen buildings dating to the 1870s that once housed the Haffenreffer Brewery.

The Haffenreffer was the last of the old Boston breweries to shut down when it ceased operations in the 1960s, two decades before Koch set up shop there and reinvigorated the local industry.

Sam Adams beer fans come from far and wide to take the brewery tour, which Koch figures has drawn as many as 300,000 visitors since 1988. They come even though the brewery is hard to find and the tours are offered just six times a week most of the year.

posted March 23, 2005 01:51 PM            

By Terry Riley
Travel columnist
Tripso.com

Sonoma County’s wineries have come a long way since the days when visitors stood in converted storerooms tasting from a couple bottles of wine served by a guy in rubber boots. Today, most of the nearly 200 wineries in this Northern California oenophile Mecca are going out of their way to make wine tasting a pleasant and educational experience. So much so, in fact, that it can be overwhelming.

Many wineries rely on tourism as a significant source of revenue and spare no expense in creating elaborate visitors’ centers. There are so many visitors’ centers and kiosks offering “information” that you could end up confused. If you’re thinking of visiting Sonoma, it’s best to do some planning. Most wineries have Web sites with lots of information about their products and operations. A good place to begin is at the Sonoma Valley Visitors Bureau and Sonoma County Tourism Program Web sites. The rest, I can help with.

Go in off season
Spring brings green vineyards, crisp air and fewer tour buses than during the crowded summer months. “Bud break” (when the first shoots emerge on a grapevine after winter dormancy) begins around the spring equinox and continues through Memorial Day. Wines for spring release are usually available for tasting, some even before they’re available to the public.

September and October tend to be busier than spring—though not nearly as crowded as summer—and there is more going on at the wineries during these harvest and crush months.

Regardless of the season, the best day to visit a winery is one in the middle of the week and the best time is during the morning or midday hours. Tasting rooms are usually less hectic and the pouring staffs will have more time to spend with you.

Stay nearby
Reasonably priced accommodations in the Sonoma Valley are readily available—if you make reservations well in advance. Try the modestly-priced The Sonoma Valley Inn in Sonoma or the Flamingo Resort Hotel in Santa Rosa. If your budget is less constrained, the Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn & Spa in Sonoma is a good choice. There is also a nice selection of B&B’s located throughout the Sonoma Valley.

Optimize your experience
Plan to visit no more than four wineries a day. With most tasting rooms charging for tasting these days ($5 to $10 on average), wine tasting can get pricey—and you’ll find yourself pooped and in need of a mid-afternoon, wine-induced nap to boot.

Oh by the way, if you see tour buses standing in a parking lot at a winery, make a U-turn and head off to the next stop on your list.

Take a tour
Most wineries offer a tour of one sort or another. Generally they are pleasant enough; it’s just that, after entertaining thousands of visitors, some tours can seem a little too mechanical. A few wineries even show a videotaped presentation as their “tour.” One exception is at Benziger Winery where you can get what Wine Spectator calls “maybe the most comprehensive vineyard visit offered by any winery in California.” My wife concurs. Not bad testimonials.

Come off like an oenophile
Intimidated about wine because of a lack of familiarity with its terminology? You are far from alone. Very few of us—me included—are prepared to discuss such technicalities as the malolactic fermentation process. Nevertheless if you arm yourself with just a few enological terms (you already know “bud break”) you will get much more out of your visit.

Here’s a crib sheet to get you going:

Appellation — A protected name under which a wine may be sold, indicating that the grapes used are of a specific kind from a specific district.

Aroma — Simply, the scent.

Nose — The characteristic smell of a wine; its bouquet.

Palate — The sense of taste.

Reserve — A wine that a winery considers “special.” Usually a higher quality—and higher priced—product.

Varietal — A wine made principally from one variety of grape and carrying the name of that grape.

Get your purchases home
If you choose to ship wine home, you may find a legal impediment—a vestige of Prohibition which is still being played out in federal courts. Most wineries will know where they can and can’t ship their products, but you can also check the shipping page on the Wine Intro Web site to see where your state fits in.

Take a break
Take an occasional break from doing the winery “thing.” For instance, pick up a deli sandwich at a local market and have a picnic along your route. Or take a stroll through historic downtown Sonoma—in 1846 Sonoma was capital of the Republic of California. There you will find the Mission San Francisco Solano, the last of the California missions.

Or take a hike in the hidden treasure of Jack London State Historic Park in Glen Ellen. Located about 20 minutes north of Sonoma, this 800-acre site was the home of the writer for whom the park is named. He lived here from 1905 until he died in 1916. Following his death, London’s wife, Charmian, lived here until her death in 1955. The east-facing view from the park toward the Mayacamas mountain range (which separates Napa from Sonoma) is both splendid and peaceful.

Skip
While I’m at it: if your cup of tea is getting up before the crack of dawn, being ever alert to changing weather conditions, negotiation high-voltage power lines and forking out a bundle of dough, perhaps it is for you, but hot air ballooning, one of the most “touristy” activities in wine country, is not for me.