The restaurant, which opened in 2014, at 948 Cooper, will move to the site of the old Jim’s Place Restaurant & Bar at Poplar and Perkins, said chef/owner Josh Steiner.
Steiner is excited about the move. “We’re moving to a bigger and better spot.”
He plans to give “a nice facelift” to the old Jim’s restaurant. “Clean up the bar. Bring in a management team to help with the front of the house to compete with Houston’s and Fleming’s (Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar).”
As for the facelift, he said, “We’re keeping the mahogany wood because it’s beautiful in there. Everything in that restaurant is beautiful. It came from the previous owners. So, we’re going to emphasize the beauty and elegance.”
The name will change slightly. “It’s going to be ‘Strano by Chef Josh,’ not ‘Strano! Sicilian Kitchen,’ so I can express my creativity more.”
The food won’t just be Italian, he said. “I’m internationally culturally trained in every type of cooking. And I want to show Memphis everything I can do. Not just my Italian style.”
Steiner is going for a quick turnaround. “This is kind of ambitious. We’re going to do Valentine’s (Day) in Midtown and try to open the new place in a month. But it might be longer. It’s going to be a nice move.”
Steiner, 26, opened Strano in Cooper-Young when he was 22 years old. He wanted a traditional Sicilian restaurant that would pay homage to his family, but also express his education and his passion. He wanted to cook with modern techniques, including sous-vide machines, to add to the taste of his food.
“Strano” – his mother’s maiden name – means “strange” in Italian.
Steiner recently was chosen to be a featured chef on the celebrity James Beard Celebrity Chef Tour dinner, which will be held in May at the Memphis Zoo.
His TV work includes appearances on “Guy’s Grocery Games” on The Food Network.
Steiner recently was selected as a member of the 20 under 30 Class of 2018 by the Memphis Flyer. Each year, the Flyer honors the best and brightest Memphians under 30. Twenty candidates were selected from more than 50 young people nominated by Flyer’s readers.
Tonight sees the debut of a new music series in a new downtown space: the Old Dominick Distillery. Many have noticed the impressive Dominique chicken signage on Front Street in the past year, a revival of the original Old Dominick liquor brand and logo from the 19th Century. Such spirits helped the Canale family rise to prominence in the early days, and they’ve now renovated a beautiful space downtown as the headquarters of a newly galvanized brand.
This is also a win for music lovers, beginning tonight with the debut of the Pure Memphis music series in the distillery’s listening room. The series is curated by Kate Hackett and Bill Myers, who have already altered the local music landscape with their Memphis Music Mansion on East Parkway. Their beautiful home and Air B’n’B also hosts occasional house concerts where listening comes first. Last October’s series of shows by Charlie Hunter. which doubled as recording sessions for his upcoming album, give one a sense of how important listening is to the environments they create.
As Hackett explained to me, the series at at the distillery “was inspired by what we were doing at the house. I was working for Mempho Music Festival and Old Dominick was a sponsor. They were really interested in somehow using their space to have a place where performers could come and people could enjoy it, and it was less of a bar scene and more of a listening space.”
The room will adhere to a locally-oriented aesthetic, spotlighting “working musicians that are either from Memphis or call Memphis home—transplants—or musicians that are coming to record at one of our studios. Those collaborations we think will happen a little bit further down the road, as the studios are more aware of what we’re doing, and they can almost use the performance option as an incentive: while you’re in town, you would be a great fit for this listening room. And it’s just another bonus for the artist to get a feel for Memphis and get a little money in their pockets when they’re in town to record. And obviously we want artists that sip the Old Dominick brand…”
Hackett waxes enthusiastic about the location and her partnership with the distillery. “They have such an awesome spot there on the river, and there is a rooftop that we’ll be utilizing when the weather’s better, and doing some music out there. It’s a work in progress as well. The great thing about working with Old Dominick is, it’s a big beautiful distillery that looks amazing. And they’re putting out great product. But when it’s all said and done, they’re still a startup, and so they are a really agile group and we’re also working together to come up with a sustainable model that is artist-friendly and gets foot traffic in the door, exposing people to what they’ve got going on down there from a distiller’s standpoint, and then aligns that with Memphis music that’s happening now. Everything from Jim Lauderdale, who’s coming into town to make a new record at Boo Mitchell’s place, to Talibah Safiya, who’s this great emerging neo-soul artist. So we’re excited that they’re open to exploring that.”
As with the local house show and DIY scenes, the Pure Memphis series has been designed as an alternative to local bars. Hackett explains, “We really want it to be a place that Memphians go to hear music when they don’t necessarily migrate toward the club scene that starts at 10:00. So we’re done by 9:15, it’s an early show. No smoking. It’s definitely geared towards folks that either want to go to another show after that or get home to their baby sitter.”
John Németh & The Blue Dreamers open the Pure Memphis series
So far, the series has been greeted enthusiastically by the artists themselves. “We’re really indicating with the way the room’s set up that this is a room for listening. And enjoying the music; giving the artist your attention and engaging with them rather than socializing sort of room setup. A lot of it has to do with how the seats are set up and arranged. So we’re gonna have some comfortable couches and seating options. We also have rows of chairs and rows of seating options that are facing directly toward the music. You’re not at a table, you can’t put your back to the music.”
“The distillery is a spirit business, but not necessarily a bar,” Hackett sums up. “I think this model and this type of series fits really well with what they’ve already built. It’s just a beautiful space so we’re just excited to play around with it.”
Old Dominick Distillery’s Pure Memphis Music Series
Doors at 6:30 p.m., music at 7:30 p.m. // $25 includes one Old Dominick cocktail
January 25: John Németh & The Blue Dreamers
February 8: The Pistol & The Queen
February 22: Jim Lauderdale
March 8: Talibah Safiya
March 22: Luther Dickinson
Tickets:https://olddominick.com/events/
Spring is in sight, and with that comes tons and tons of food-related events.
• The three-day wine event Vintage 901 returns March 2-4. There will be grand tasting at Crosstown Concourse. A four-course dinner led by Kelly English at Memphis College of Art, and the finale a Sparkling Brunch is at Shelby Farms Park.
The three-day ticket is $315 through January 26th.
• Capital Grille is holding a Valentine’s Day dinner, February 13 and 14, with complimentary Veuve Clicquot Brute Rose and chocolate-covered strawberries. Getyer steaks rare for this romantic evening. Reservations, starting at 7 p.m., can be made through the Capital Grille App.
• On Sunday, January 28th, Bounty on Broad is holding a “After the Hunt” dinner featuring local game with wine pairings. Dinner is $60 per person, with wine an extra $30. Cocktails start at 6:30 p.m., dinner is at 7 p.m. Reservations: 410-8131.
• Doc’s is holding its annual Bacon & Bourbon (not to be confused with the Flyer’s own Bacon & Bourbon event, set for April 21st) on Tuesday, January 30th. This event will feature rare whiskeys and cuts of meat from Porcellino’s Craft Butcher. Call Doc’s 249-7928 for all the details.
Finding Neverland star John Davidson has an affinity for the double role he plays in the spectacle-laden musical adaptation of Finding Neverland. “As Captain Hook, I give [Peter Pan author J. M.] Barrie the same advice I’d give anybody getting into the business,” he says. “Find the child within yourself, because to find out who you are is the greatest challenge of life. I’m telling Barrie, ‘Don’t write what you been writing. And don’t write what everyone expects you to write. Write your story.’ Then, as Charles Frohman who’s Barrie’s producer, I’m trying to talk him out of writing a play for children. ‘It will be a disaster,’ I tell him. ‘Children don’t have money; they can’t buy tickets!'”
When it comes to the business of show there are worse people to take career advice from than Davidson. The clean cut actor started on Broadway in the 1960s before packing up his Pepsodent smile and taking his act to Hollywood, where he became a ubiquitous game show presence, recorded albums, and landed notable guest spots on popular shows. Davidson hosted That’s Incredible, The New Hollywood Squares, and was a frequent substitute forTonight Showicon Johnny Carson. But between appearances on The American Style and in made for TV films like Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders II, Davidson continued to work as a song and dance man.
“Until this time, my favorite roles have been Don Quixote in Man of la Mancha and playing Harold Hill in The Music Man. But now this is by far my favorite role,” Davidson says. “I’m at my best when I can chew on the scenery, and each of these roles gives me a chance to do that. It is exhausting and I just love it and I’m so grateful.
“In my mind, I’m the luckiest guy in the world to have this role,” says Davidson who, at 76, describes Finding Neverland‘s Hook/Frohman as, “the role of a lifetime.” Intermission Impossible: Critics really seem to like you in this role. Even those who don’t love the script seem to love you in this double role as Hook and Frohman
John Davidson: It’s true that it’s not a typical Musical. It is not Sondheim. It’s not Rodgers and Hammerstein. But it’s a magical show with a hit song in every scene. It’s British pop music and very singable. I just love the music. The story will make you laugh. There’s a lot of funny funny pieces. But it’s guaranteed to make you cry. It’s a very moving script. Of course it’s paste on the film where Dustin Hoffman play Charles Frohman and Johnny Depp played J.M. Barrie. But I think the Broadway show. It has incredible special effects. It is a powerful two and a half hours in the theater.
As I read the reviews I wondered if there was some surprise among people who may mostly know you as the host of Hollywood Squares or from That’s Incredible. It’s got to be at least a little gratifying to turn heads: “Wow, he’s really a good actor!”
That is true. My career has been very confusing. I would call it variety. But it is confusing. Is John Davidson just a game show host? Is he just a singer or not an actor? Whatever. I’ve been so many different things, and that’s been the fun of my career, but it’s true that it does surprise people. A lot of people who saw me on That’s Incredible didn’t even know that I sing or act. But I have a Bachelor of Arts in theater and I started out on Broadway as a leading man. That is at the heart of what I do. That kind of storytelling is what I started out doing, and it’s nice to get back to that. But I understand. It is surprising people. And that’s okay, it’s kind of fun to surprise people.
The great thing about being a generalist writer is getting to wake up in a new world every day depending on your subject. So I really appreciate that perspective.
I’m sort of old school. You know, the performers that came on the scene in the 50s and 60s and before always thought of being multifaceted performers. I had an early manager who said, “Don’t be a spear, be a pitchfork.” By that he meant a spear has one prong. But a pitchfork can handle a lot of points of attack. The variety is what’s kept me going all these years. That’s the old-fashioned way of doing it, and that’s my advice to a lot of the kids in our cast. I’m 76, and most of the kids in the cast from their late 20s. When they Google me.
‘Finding Neverland’ Star John Davidson Has Some Advice for Actors (3)
You get Googled!
Oh yes. And they come back the next morning and they’re surprised by all the things I’ve done. And I say to them, “You could do that too. Don’t just think about playing roles in musicals. The greatest role you play is yourself. You got to figure out who you are, Because that will help you play other parts.”
You talk about being old school. But you really have worked with generations of artists. Your first Broadway show was with the Cowardly Lion, Bert Lahr. As a host and panelist on Hollywood Squares you worked with so many people including the great Rose Marie who just passed — best known for The Dick Van Dyke Show, but whose career goes all the way back to Vaudeville and variety when she was Baby Rose Marie. Were there performers like this who inspired you particularly?
I think Bob Hope. I worked on a lot of his specials. He was an early supporter of mine and he was a total performer. I guess he didn’t do any serious roles, but he did Broadway film television. And Betty White. Any person who has a talk show always wants Betty White on because she’s mischievous and funny and she’s a total performer. I was always attracted to people who knew yeah, but to tell a story with a song. To take stage. To master the space. I think that excites me more than just a singer. Robin Williams was an inspiration to me.
I knew you’d been a guest host for Johnny Carson before he retired from The Tonight Show. I honestly can’t think of anything more intimidating than sitting in for an icon like Carson who so completely owns his format.
When you substituted for Carson you always knew it was his desk. It was his desk, it was his chair. His name was on the pencils. His name is on the coffee cup. I couldn’t book my own guests. They were very tight about getting people on. I remember trying to get Kenny Rogers on. I told them, “You understand Kenny Rogers is a major performer, right? He’s a Storyteller he’s a singer, he’s a great talker.” They saw him as just a hit record guy. I finally got him on. I want to have a Jacques Cousteau on because I’m a scuba diver and a big fan. And I couldn’t get him on. Then they finally put him on but in the last 7-minutes of the show so I didn’t have enough time with the great Jacques Cousteau. You realize you’re just a guest there, you’re not the host. You can’t really indulge yourself. But I began to have this realization — I replaced Carson. I replaced Mike Douglas on his daytime talk show. When I got the music man I replaced Robert Preston in his Harold Hill. I came to realize you can’t feel someone else’s shoes. Like in Finding Neverland I’m replacing Kelsey Grammer from Broadway. I began to realize you can’t feel someone else’s shoes. You’ve got to bring your own shoes and try and fill them. That became my motto. Bring your own shoes.
But what kind of shoes do you bring if you want to be a game show host? That’s its own skill set it seems. Where does one train for that? How do you prepare?
It’s a very tough thing. And it’s a very good question. That’s why I talk about with the young actress in Finding Neverland. We talk about it all the time. How do you make that jump from Broadway to television. Because you can play Broadway all your life, and it’s great it’s very fulfilling. But if you want to have some power, and the freedom to pick and choose, and if you want to have producers call you instead of you trying to call them you’ve got to get some television so that you mean something. And fame gives you power. That’s the reason for being famous. But when I first started on Broadway, a television producer named Bob Banner Who had just found Carol Burnett signed me to a five-year contract. And he brought me to television. And he helps me do my Las Vegas act. And he help me find out who John Davidson was. He developed me as a television variety show performer. I was very lucky in that way.
‘Finding Neverland’ Star John Davidson Has Some Advice for Actors (4)
So we’ve talked about how you were a goto replacement guy. But you were also at the leading edge of some things. That’s Incredible is a pretty clear antecedent to reality programming.
That’s Incredible and another show at the same time called Real People.
With Sarah Purcell who you sometimes had as a guest on Hollywood Squares.
Yes. And they were some of the first shows to bring real people to television in that way. It was fun working on That’s incredible with Fran Tarkington and Cathy Lee Crosby. I think that advanced my notoriety, but it didn’t advance my talents as a singer or actor. It gave me the power to say okay now I want to do Man of La Mancha. So I can go to a theater and people would come because they see me on That’s Incredible. That’s Incredible was at its best when we celebrated human triumphs over physical and mental obstacles. We were at our worst when we dealt with ghost stories and psychic phenomena, and some of them really superstitious stuff. Just these pitfalls the imagination can get us into. I think we were at our best when we should real stories, and not people who just wanted to be on TV.
‘Finding Neverland’ Star John Davidson Has Some Advice for Actors
Concerts and yoga classes are just two of the activities proposed to activate two Downtown parks that are the former homes to Confederate monuments.
Memphis Greenspace, the nonprofit that bought Health Sciences Park and Memphis Park in December, announced Thursday its plans to make improvements and bring more life to the parks in the spring.
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“For a majority of our population, these parks were not inviting, and we want them to be for our entire community,” president of Greenspace, Van Turner, said. “We’ve taken a significant and critical first step by removing Confederate statues, and now we are moving forward with our intention to reinvent the park as a valuable asset for communities and the city as a whole.”
Greenspace plans to start by cleaning up the park’s walkways, adding seating and trash cans, as well as increasing wayfinding and security measures.
Beginning in March, the Downtown Memphis Commission (DMC) will host a music series, as well as weekly meditative arts programs at both parks.
“We’re thrilled to play a role in the community activation and affinity-building for these critical parks in our Downtown bookends,” Penelope Huston, DMC vice president of marketing and communications, said. “There is a demand for recreational and community-mobilizing programming in these areas, both for residents and tourists.”
Meanwhile, the Memphis Medical District Collaborative (MMDC) is working with the city and local artists to improve the streetscape and install an “artistic” crosswalk on Manassas, the street bordering Health Sciences Park on the west. MMDC staff says these improvements will be designed to steer people toward the park.
“We think it is important to provide connections for people living, working, studying in, and visiting the Medical District to open space assets such as Health Sciences Park,” MMDC president, Tommy Pacello, said. “We are excited to work with stakeholders, visitors, and other partners to make even more improvements to Health Sciences Park so more people can enjoy it.”
Greenspace asks that the public submit suggestions and feedback on the park’s activation plans here. The group is also accepting donations toward funding the operations and maintenance of the parks.
The former Kroger store on Exeter is planned to be a new Trader Joe’s store, the first in Memphis.
A promising plot twist emegred Thursday in the will-they-or-won’t they saga of a Trader Joe’s store in Memphis.
Store officials announced way back in the fall of 2015 that they’d bring a store to the Memphis area. Delays and pushbacks began almost immediately.
Without many official statements from the company since then, reporters have been reading the tea leaves in government meetings and documents for any hint of the store’s future or remaining prospects here.
A building permit was pulled Wednesday for the store at 2130 Exeter in Germantown. The former Kroger location will get a $750,000 build out, according to the permit.
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The former Kroger location on Exeter seems to be ready for a new life as a Trader Joe’s.
The company had no new statement about the Germantown project on its website Thursday morning. However, the company has been busy.
According to its website, 24 new Trader Joe’s stores either opened or were started last year from Kalamazoo, Mich. to Jacksonville, Fla. and from Los Angeles to New York City.
The Griz lost to the Spurs on Wednesday night,
but Memphis had five players who were out.
Though youth and hunger they brought to the fight,
their offense—nothing to write home about.
This season moral vict’ries are the norm,
but last night fell short even in that way.
Some nights they never cohere, never form
into a thing resembling winning play.
One cannot yet say if they’ll truly tank,
or whether winning’s clarion call’s too strong,
but even if by accident, they stank
for forty-some-odd minutes. That’s too long.
When Tyreke leaves town at the deadline’s bell,
the Grizzlies’ record truly goes to hell.
Former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once famously said, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” If Brandeis is correct, we no longer have a democracy in the U.S., or, at best, we are damn close to losing it.
An economic report released this week by the Oxfam organization concluded that income inequality has reached unprecedented levels. To illustrate, Oxfam noted that three Americans — Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett — hold a total of $263 billion in wealth, which is equal to the holdings of the lower 50 percent of the American population at large, or 160 million people.
So, to reiterate: Three guys have as much money as the total amount of wealth held by 50 percent of American citizens. Worldwide, the figures are just as staggering. Oxfam reported that 42 people now own as much wealth as the bottom 3.7 billion people living on the planet.
The U.S. governing bodies — the House and Senate — are mostly run by millionaires who became millionaires by doing the bidding of billionaires via special interest lobbies and corporate donations. The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision — which decreed, essentially, that corporations are people with the right to “free speech,” meaning they have the right to contribute unlimited funds to political advertising — has polluted and corrupted the electoral process to an astonishing degree in just eight years.
The Trump presidency has stepped it up another notch by appointing billionaires to most key cabinet positions. And almost without exception, they are serving the very corporations they are supposed to be regulating. Millions of acres of our National Parks are being sold off to mining, oil, and lumber interests. Off-shore drilling rights are being granted near the beaches, coral reefs, and fishing grounds of our coastal states. Banking and financial investment regulations are being loosened. Environmental laws are being repealed or rolled back or ignored. Public school funding is being curtailed, as money gets funneled into for-profit “educational” institutions. Health care is becoming a luxury the poor and working-class can’t afford.
All in the name of greed. All in the pursuit of accumulating more money by those who already have more than most of us would see if we lived 10 lifetimes.
We’ve been here before in our history, most recently in 2007-2008, when the subprime mortgage crisis nearly destroyed the economy. The Wall Street cowboys thought the Ponzi-scheme housing bubble they’d created would never burst. But it did, and fabled financial institutions, including Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, Citibank, and AIG went down in flames. The U.S. automobile industry went on life support. The government threw $700 billion at the banks to bail them out, and poured another $800 billion stimulus into the economy. It worked, eventually, but a lot of folks got burned; a lot of folks lost everything.
Now, here we are, 10 years later, and it’s party time again. Regulations? We don’t need no steenking regulations! The economy is booming! Unemployment is low. The stock market is hitting another all-time high every week. What could go wrong?
Maybe nothing. Maybe we just soar and soar into the great wide open, as the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting screwed by the trickle-down myth. But karma is a bitch, and the universe has a way of correcting imbalances. So do democracies, if they can survive long enough to vote the money-changers out of the temple.
Early in the 2015 documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, Cobain’s aunt Mary says offhandedly, “I’m glad I wasn’t born with the genius brain.”
Artists, scientists, inventors, and creatives of all sorts have a long history of struggling to fit in. Maybe because their creative drive, rooted in a need for novelty, renders them allergic to the ordinary world. To do your best work, sometimes you have to put the world at arm’s length and follow your muse where it leads you. But for those stuck in the ordinary world, this can be very irritating.
Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) definitely has the genius brain. His House of Woodcock is the best and most prestigious haute couture establishment in postwar London. His clients include the rich, famous, and royal. His fangirls tell him they want to be buried in one of his dresses. Reynolds was taught his trade by his mother, whom he and his spinster sister Cyrill (Lesley Manville) idolize long after her death. Cyrill acts as a kind of gatekeeper and manager to Reynolds. The attention to detail that has brought him fame and fortune comes with a side order of obsessive compulsive disorder. Reynolds is the human incarnation of the word “persnickety.”
Woodcock has had a string of girlfriends who he keeps around until he tires of them and Cyrill runs them off. One day, he’s having breakfast at a quaint restaurant near his country home when he sees a beautiful waitress named Alma (Vicky Krieps). He asks her out in a most unusual way, and soon she is living with him and Cyrill. Their relationship eventually evolves into a three-way battle of wills, with Alma striving to get closer to Woodcock, while Cyrill tries to maintain her grip on her brother.
Daniel Day-Lewis (left) and Vicky Krieps tangle their lives in Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film about fashion and passion, Phantom Thread.
Phantom Thread is writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson’s eighth film, and if there’s one thing you can say about Anderson’s career, it is that he never does the same thing twice. Another thing you can say about Anderson is that his work can be divisive. Boogie Nights, Punch Drunk Love, and There Will Be Blood enjoyed near universal acclaim, but as for Magnolia, The Master, and his last film, Inherent Vice, well, you either love them or you hate them. Personally, I loved Inherent Vice, which puts me in the minority, and I can’t stand Punch Drunk Love, which alienates me further. So, for me, Anderson is hit or miss.
Day-Lewis, who earned a Best Actor Academy Award in There Will Be Blood, is pretty brilliant as Reynolds, the kind of guy who wears a blazer and vest over his pajamas. He cannot be satisfied, even by success. The day before a beautifully sewn royal wedding dress is to be shipped off he declares it “ugly.” His relationship with Alma plumbs new depths of passive aggression. But Alma gives as good as she gets, and maybe since she is the first person to ever stand up to him, he can’t let her go, even when their affair becomes life threatening.
As usual with Anderson’s work, the cinematography is meticulous and excellent. Alma and Reynolds’ love story is exceedingly chaste, which is remarkable given that the director is most famous for his ode to the pornography industry. The porn urge is redirected toward the clothes, with loving closeups of lace and sewing fingers. The most erotic it gets is a measuring session that borders on the sadomasochistic. The film’s deep obsession with accoutrement reminded me strongly of the work of Memphis director Brian Pera, while the claustrophobic atmosphere of social obligation and niceties lends a strong Barry Lyndon vibe.
Perhaps Phantom Thread is best understood as the director coming to grips with his own genius brain. It’s probably too simplistic to say Reynolds is a stand in for Anderson’s perfectionism, but the director clearly sympathizes with him. What makes this film stand out is that he also sympathizes strongly with Alma. In this “Me Too” moment, it seems that the myth of the Byronic, bad boy artist is crumbling, and that’s probably for the best. Lewis, who says he’s retiring from acting after this film, will grab all of the attention, but it’s Alma’s fight to bring Reynolds back into the real world that will resonate.
Hemingway once said that the only way to find out if you can trust someone is to trust them. True, if a little nerve-wracking. If Papa is to believed, he knew something about finding a new favorite wine — namely by trying a new wine. That can be expensive, which I also find nerve-wracking.
Fortunately, Memphis abounds with wine tastings, and after a week of being snowed in, the charming Mrs. M suggested the Dixon Gallery and Garden’s quarterly Wine Down — Cheese edition. “Well, A, it’s wine and cheese,” she said sensibly, wiping the cabin fever from her brow. And with an A like that, you don’t really need a B.
There are other wine tastings across the city that occur on a regular basis if you can’t stand beautiful art and lovely surroundings. No matter where you go, the controlled tasting is really the best way to learn about wine and — more importantly — what wines you like. There is really only so much learning on-trend buzzwords from wine snobs and making yourself omnipresent at happy hour will teach you.
A Catered Affair handled the food, and Buster’s Liquors & Wine supplied five Chilean wines, most from the 120 Reserva Especial line by the Santa Rita winery. Since Chilean wineries first pushed their way into the American market in the late 1980s, they have tended to fall in and out of fashion without much fanfare — not unlike my Wallabees. The upshot here is that the prices on Chilean wines have never really shot to the moon despite routinely turning out a solid product. The wines we tasted last weekend all had a very reasonable price point — around $10. Remember, that there is no trial without error, so while you may not like everything you try, you aren’t going to run afoul of actual plonk.
The Cabernet Sauvignon was a big fruity number with spice and chocolate that was paired with a variety of aged and smoked goudas supplied by Murray’s Cheese. This alone was proof positive that there really is something preternatural about the pairing of wine and cheese.
A little fruitier and not as big, was the 120 Pinot Noir — earthier than a typical Pinot, it had a hint of vanilla to keep it interesting. It was paired with a mushroom quesadilla with Monterey jack. While they went to together nicely, the fellow from Buster’s casually mentioned that it paired well with Dr. Pepper. A little unorthodox, but it’s always nice to know you’ve got options.
As for the whites, there was a lovely Sauvignon Blanc that was fresh and grassy. Sipping a glass while picking at some feta and olives, it was hard to not start pining for warmer weather to get here (something I’m certainly going to regret before next fall). Since I’m not a fan, I casually ignored the Chardonnay, but the tasting notes looked delightful and Wine Enthusiast magazine rated it a Best Value.
The tasting was a great way to sample and learn a little something without getting into an entire bottle or trying to take on a whole country or varietal at once, which is heroic, sure, but likely to end in drunken frustration. It’s best to take a smallish herd of friends so there are people around who refuse to take you seriously. You just might stumble on your new favorite go-to and get a little insight into your palate in the process. Which is really the point.
Or you might learn something ridiculous. The featured Santa Rita 120 Reserva Especial was launched in 1982 to commemorate the 120 years since the winery’s founding — in 1880. Hmmm. And for good measure, the 50th anniversary commemoration was bottled in 2014. The math doesn’t work at all; I’ve double checked it. The bottom line is that the folks at Santa Rita down in Chile’s Central Valley know how to make some solid wines, but bookkeeping like that might explain the great pricing.
Jeremy Daniel 
Downtown Memphis Commission 
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Larry Kuzniewski 
