Author: Richard Murff

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

The Magic Pairing of Red Wine and Red Meat

CREDIT: Thomas Perkins | Dreamstime.com

Humans are survivors. Science repeatedly tells us that this has more to do with instinct than smarts. When pre-science humans really put their brains to something, we were often wide the mark: Disemboweling virgins so the sun won’t eat the Earth leaps immediately to mind.

Instinct is another matter. If not perfect, it tends to serve us at least pretty well. Alcohol has long been considered medicinal, even if we didn’t know why. And practically, in a world before plastic wrap and disinfectants, it was.

What instinct told us, science has subsequently proven: that a little booze is good for us. Studies show that moderate consumption of alcohol raises the level of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) in the body. HDL is known as “the good cholesterol” by those who know these things. To the rest of us, HDL promotes solid cardiovascular health and aids in the fight against dementia. Not only does it help you avoid a heart attack, you are lucid enough to contemplate your good fortune.

A few years ago, Dr. Joseph Kanner, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, went a step further to ask why we instinctively pair red wine with red meat in a wonderfully titled paper: “The Stomach as ‘Bioreactor’: When Red Meat Meets Red Wine.”

In his report, published in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, Dr. Kanner says that not only is red wine good for you, it can prevent other things from being bad for you. Red wine, in addition to its HDL-boosting properties, is rich in polyphenols: powerful antioxidants thought to protect the body from cancer and heart disease. Here’s the thing, most of the benefits of red wine come not from drinking it alone, but pairing it with food.

Thomas Perkins | Dreamstime.com

Say that you’re having a nice steak, that seductive boogieman, and you pair it with a dry red wine. When you start to digest the meat, it releases an oxidizing toxin ominously called malondialdehyde (MDL), which is tied to arteriosclerosis, cancer, diabetes, and giving the Beef Council nightmares.

Don’t worry, enjoy your meal, you’ll be fine. Red wine, and all those polyphenols, arriving in the stomach at the same time the MDL is released seems to neutralize the toxins before they can get into the bloodstream or guilty conscience. According to the study, the MDL level in the stomach was 50 percent highter than the control baseline after red meat and red wine. In full disclosure, the tests were performed on rats — not known to be picky drinkers — so your mileage may vary.

Commenting on the report, although not involved, Dr. James O’Keefe, Chief of Preventive Cardiology at St. Luke’s Mid-American Heart Institute said, “This is what I’ve been telling people for years based on observational data.” He then went on to say, “If you have a glass of red wine with your evening meal tonight, your peak blood sugar, if you measured it an hour later, would be about 30 percent lower than if you hadn’t had the wine.”

It’s this post-meal blood sugar spike that causes the inflammation that contributes to diabetes, dementia, heart disease, arthritis, and a near-fatal jump in health statistics. Keep in mind, all the health returns on booze start to diminish rapidly. Overdoing it is likely going to have you staring at the ceiling at 2 a.m. in a sugar rush. But you knew that.

Again, science has proven our instincts sound: that red wine and red meat pair well. Like most things that instinctively go together, there is a good reason for it: It’s the body making its needs known to those sensible enough to listen to it.

The coexistence between science and religion has been, at times, problematic. Even in the ancient world, virgins were something of a perishable commodity. Science and instinct, generally, get along famously.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

How to Find the Perfect Beer for your Ribs

It’s hard not to love a Southern belle — especially after witnessing one execute a precise head flip that sends a loose strand of hair back where it’s supposed to be without having to take the barbecued rib out of her hand. It’s hard not to love barbecue, for that matter. And while we’re on the subject, it’s hard not to see that the marriage of barbecue and beer is a timeless love story unto itself.

Back when two enormous breweries held nearly the entire market and all their beers tasted exactly alike, that beautiful relationship didn’t require much thought. Now that we’ve got the entire pantheon of beerdom available — as well as an evolving library of innovative experiments from brewers who can’t leave well enough alone — the relationship, well, it’s gotten complicated.

First, you’ve got to decide on the barbecue. I tend to haul out-of-town guests down to the Rendezvous, and everyone always loves it. On a pleasant Tuesday evening in the spring, however, it’s hard to find a better low-key barbecue joint than the original Central BBQ. There is generally a line, but you can get a beer at the to-go window and the people are friendly. Then comes the significant other …

The Charming Mrs. M. is a devotee of cheap domestic beer and opted for a Budweiser (no Bud Light). If you can get over your sneer at the macros, Bud isn’t a bad choice: It’s light, refreshing, and the taste will politely go away before the next bite. It’s what you want to drink when you want to focus on your ribs.

Those light lagers work so well because even the mildest barbecue is a bold proposition for the palate and the digestive system. I’ve seen a brave and short-sighted man drink a milk stout with pulled pork, but I couldn’t tell you what logic he was using. You’ve got two heavy flavors wrestling on the palate. Further down the line, the pair will get along like a 2 a.m. bar fight. But to each their own.

Even if you shoot for something with a bigger flavor, keep it light when dining on ‘cue. One of the more popular drafts at Central is the Ghost River Cream Ale, called Grindhouse. It doesn’t sound like anything you’d drink with barbecue, but the name is misleading. Unlike a milk stout, cream ales are neither heavy nor milky. They are a New World invention, similar to the American-style lager but brewed like an ale (top-fermented) then lagered (cold-conditioned). Cream ales are light, with a “creaminess” that comes from being heavily carbonated. Stick it with a plate of ribs, and you have something that is light without being watered down. Because of the carbonation, it is also filling, which might not be what you want.

Wiseacre’s Tiny Bomb is another local favorite. It’s their Pilsner “with a twist.” The twist is a touch of honey. And it works.

Those who think that there is a right answer to these pairings, however, miss the best part of the puzzle: that messy grab bag of personal inclinations that is you.

I was in London as a young man —eyeballing some colorful punk rockers — when I had my first bitter. It was my first beer that wasn’t churned out by Miller or Budweiser. Half a lifetime later, I was eyeballing the tap of the High Cotton’s ESB thinking, “Well, here is an ale light enough to let the smoked meat have the right of way but has enough flavor on its own to not be overwhelmed by it.” Deep. But was it wishful thinking? Could I marry childhood comfort food with that first discovery of the wide world beyond? And is that asking too much from the good people at Central BBQ? Or should I just be satisfied with Mrs. M.’s physics-defying hair flip?

Turns out the ESB was a good choice, not just wishful thinking. And Central doesn’t charge for “circle of life” epiphanies. Which isn’t bad for a Tuesday.

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Food & Drink Food Reviews

Big Beer Is Back

As anyone who is likely to be reading this knows, the craft beer industry has been on one of the greatest underdog winning streaks in the history of corporate capitalism. Way back in 2010, craft brewers were hoping against hope to take — on some far off sunny day — a 20 percent cut of the domestic beer market. Most industry experts thought the craft brewers might have done a little too much product sampling before setting that goal.

Yet, craft beer continued to boom, growing year over year: 18 percent in 2014, 15 percent in 2015. Last year, the numbers got a little more sobering with 6 percent growth. But the stats can be misleading. According to the Brewers Association, craft brewers churned out 24.6 million barrels of beer in 2016, that’s up 1.4 million from the year before. This figure is around 22 percent of the beer market. So, naysayers vanquished; mission accomplished.

What this figure doesn’t include is that 1.2 million barrels that were considered craft beer in 2015 were not considered as such in 2016. That number represents the small brewers who sold out to Big Beer. The Brewers Association defines a craft brewery as producing less than 6 million barrels a year and no more than a 25 percent ownership by a non-craft brewer. So, those flattening craft beer numbers have more to do with ownership than production or sales.

Bart Watson, the Brewers Association’s chief economist, said, “As the overall beer market remains static and large global brewers lose volume, their strategy has been to focus on acquiring craft brewers.”

As a business tactic, buying up successful rivals certainly makes more sense than Budweiser’s awkward attempt to remarket itself as a Macro beer. If Anheuser-Busch InBev was trying to make me nostalgic for college, it worked. Not in the blissful cheap-domestic-beer-at-a-lake-party memories, so much as flashbacks to an economics class that was the academic equivalent of waterboarding.

So which of your craft brews are no longer craft? You might be surprised. Through a company called Craft Brew Alliance, InBev owns a 32 percent stake in Widmer, Kona, and Redhook. Heineken owns 50 percent of Lagunitas, and one of my personal favorites, Founders, is 30 percent owned by Spanish brewer Mahou San Miguel.

Purists argue that the quality can’t be maintained if the owners aren’t the brewers. There may be something to that, but it’s a slippery charge. The more concrete issues aren’t in the barrel, but the ongoing, behind-the-scenes battles that small brewers, no matter how great their product, are ill-equipped to fight. Before the buying spree, the big four brewers caught a lot of blowback for trying to strong-arm beer distributors into dropping small brewers from their product lists. They are still trying to muscle the little guy off the shelf, but because they’re doing it with a lineup of craft beers, it’s not so obvious. Using massive economies of scale everywhere from ingredient sourcing to distribution, huge brewers can offer their “craft” selections at lower prices to edge out the small brewers in shelf space and on the tap line.

In short, by simply brewing a better product, the craft brewers have been a victim of their own success.

Or have they? One of the founders of Birmingham’s Good People Brewing told me that he couldn’t afford to drink his own beer. In the tech sector, a huge buyout from corporate America is, more or less, the accepted endgame for most start-ups. Users don’t care who owns Snapchat, but the good people of Richmond, Virginia, were miffed when local Devil’s Backbone sold out to InBev. The owners, I understand, were delighted. If their goal was to make great beer on a national scale and ultimately make a lot of money, then they aren’t a victim of anything.

It’s just really hard to win and remain the underdog.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Vino Italiano

CREDIT: Food-micro | Dreamstime.com

The subject of Italian wines always puts me back at Pete & Sam’s over on Park, inevitably two tables over from a quartet of priests gathered around their veal parmigiano and one of those grass-wrapped bottles of Chianti. Even at 10 years old, I knew — through a friend whose parents had emigrated from Spain — that the stuff was just awful. Although, at the time, I was under the impression that priests could do some wild stuff with wine, so I couldn’t be too sure.

This wasn’t always the case. Back in 1726, the Grand Duke of Tuscany issued a proclamation restricting the use of the name Chianti and setting a geographical boundary to keep the style’s integrity. Two hundred years later, the stuff was widely known for being just awful. The region’s growers thought this was being uncharitable as the sangiovese grape just needed to lie for a time. I don’t mean three or four years, but something a little more generational.

Food-micro | Dreamstime.com

In 1967, the Italian government stepped in to regulate the process, but that only codified Chianti’s wimpy, acidic badness. So awful was the wine’s reputation that it triggered something of a laid-back revolution among Italy’s more ambitious wine makers — called the Super Tuscan movement. Basically, they completely ignored government regulations regarding styles and regions. One man heavily credited with inspiring the revival of Italian wines was actually born in Minnesota. The son of Italian immigrants, Robert Mondavi established the first major American post-prohibition winery in 1966, after leaving the family winery due to a fight with his brother. The irony of Mondavi’s place in the rebirth of Italian wines is that he himself had his epiphany while touring France — and he wondered if he could achieve Old World quality with modern technology. Conventional wisdom said no.

This, of course, had the predictable effect on an American-born child of immigrants. Not only did he bring respect to New World wines, he inadvertently turned Old World winemaking on its head. Italian winemakers traveled from the old country to his winery to study and work with him. These days Tuscany is as dotted with Mondavi alumni as Napa Valley.

Officially, these “Super Tuscans” were classified as vini da tavola — a sort of nondescript peasant wine. Eventually, reality set in that all the better wines were the ones that ran afoul of regulations, so the government relaxed the rules. With the freedom to do it right, many of these winemakers began making a new and improved Chianti. Which is the long way of saying that Chianti, and Italian wines in general, have in a lot of ways outgrown the reputations held by earlier vintages.

I picked up a Chianti Classico as well as one of those unmistakable grass-wrapped bottles. Being a supporter of recycling, I figured I could always find a U of M student to jam a candle in the kitchy decanter … or turn it into a bong. The style, then and now, is still primarily the sangiovese grape. Or perhaps overwhelmingly is the better word. Gone is the wimpy-yet-astringent quality of old for a full-frontal assault by a wall of grape jam, with hints of more of the same. Not for me, really — but the Italians design their wine to go with a meal, and that does make a difference.

There is a certain harmony embodied in “what grows together goes together.” If you are at Pete & Sam’s sitting over a plate of pasta with red sauce or veal parmigiano, that overpowering jamminess gets cut drastically. You don’t even need a priest, really. Neither food nor wine seems quite as overpowering as before. Nor is it particularly quiet. The experience is big, loud, boisterous, and fun. Which is as good a description as any of the meals I’ve had at Pete & Sam’s.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Beer Napa

The waiter at the Top of the Hill Tavern (“TOPO”) in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was pleading his case for an IPA called Assist. I wasn’t complaining. In fact, I’d just told him that TOPO’s Ram’s Head IPA was one of the best I’d ever had. It wasn’t just me — last year, the brewpub’s Ram’s Head brought home the platinum in the World Beer Championships. Our waiter said that for his money, he liked the hop-heavy, “fruit-forward profile” of Assist. The thing is that I’d already bought a second round; he wasn’t trying to make a sale. He was trying to convert me.

One of the truly great side effects of the craft beer boom has been a raising of a sort of hipster version of civic pride. So when traveling, I always order a local brew and have regretted it exactly once. It’s something new, and the waitstaff won’t just rattle off options. They get excited about it. Just like the fierce competition has driven Memphis barbecue to the next level in both quality and loyalty, North Carolina breweries are at the top of their game and have created a craft brew tourism in the bargain. It has become the Napa Valley of beer.

According to the North Carolina Craft Brewers Guild, there are currently 185 breweries in the state, with 56 in the areas called the Triad and The Triangle. The regions are right next to each other, but the locals are picky — they aren’t the same thing.

“This is our second collaboration with Gizmo,” said our waiter, adding, “If this is what they are doing with us, I’m going to make the drive to Raleigh just to see what else they’ve got.”

According to its website, Gizmo Brew Works was launched in 2013 “from the ashes of a fallen brewery brother. … Gizmo represents the thinkers, tinkerers, and inventors who make up [Research Triangle Park] and the Umstead Industrial Park which we call home.” My only real complaint with the Assist IPA was the same I had with Gizmo’s prose — there was just a little bit too much going on.

That’s when it struck me — the state’s success with craft beer isn’t just sensible laws and fierce competition, it’s also friendly collaboration. These are the factors that Matt Ridley points out in his book, The Rational Optimist, that cause “ideas to have sex.”

Apt point, as Mrs. M and I were in town for a wedding. While she and her college friends went to pester the bride, the husbands went down to a famous burger shack called Al’s. It was a little too famous, actually, and crowded. One of us called his boss lady to say we’d gone down the street to …

“… the Carolina Brewery?” she guessed. Well, she had us there. This puts two fully functioning brewpubs, churning out excellent beer (try Carolina’s Pamlico Pale Ale, named after the local Pamlico Sound) within about six blocks, in a city the size of Chapel Hill.

The talent in this area is so thick that when a friend from college, Britt Lytle, opened a brewery down the road in High Point, it was easy to find a local brewmaster to help him out. Brown Truck Brewery (named after Britt’s first truck) won three medals in the Great American Beer Festival in its first year. If you love craft beer, beautiful scenery, and friendly arguments about brew, you might want to get yourself out to North Carolina for a long weekend.

And I have to admit to doing my part for the N.C. beer boom. Britt and I were discussing his opening up a brewery in such a competitive environment — the challenges and the fears — when the conversation turned to “Murffbrau,” my college homebrew. “Was I an inspiration for Brown Truck?” I asked.

“Actually, you were.” He said. “I took one sip of that crap and said to myself, ‘There has got to be a better way.'”

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

The Prisoner Breaks Free: Four California Blends

Man, sometimes things just break right for a guy. It was one of those beautiful winter days masquerading as spring when I dropped in on Brian Herrera over at Kirby Wines and Liquors. I’d meant to pester him about something else entirely when I stumbled into a small tasting of the flagship label and three new wines from The Prisoner Wine Co. of Northern California. Then I promptly forgot what it was I’d meant to ask him.

Back in 2003, David Phinney put his vast knowledge of the Italian-American winemaking tradition and his contacts in the community to use to produce the first vintage of his now famous blended red — The Prisoner. It’s primarily a zinfandel, but they don’t like to call it that. It’s a red table wine that sticks to its powerful profile — the make-up changes every vintage in light of harvest conditions. The endgame here wasn’t to produce a devoted varietal wine, but to recreate the flavors of what the original Italian settlers of Napa Valley called “mixed blacks.” Or what we would call a “blended red.”

This is not, however, the point where I describe Phinney taking a Zen-like walk around his old-growth vineyards. First of all, Kirby Wines is over on Quince, and second, while I’ve never met the man, Phinney’s not a grower. The Prisoner Wine Co. works with vineyards across Northern California to source their grapes. This gives the company the freedom to make a vintage as its winemakers see fit. Whatever it is they envision, it seems to work.

The Prisoner breaks free.

Regular readers know that I’m not afraid of some vin ordinaire, but that’s not what these wines are. The Prisoner retails at $46.99, so it isn’t a Tuesday night vino, but you don’t have to wait for an anniversary either. John Caradonna of West Tennessee Crown (who was doing the pouring) told me that it was a big flavor, but “structured.” Given my dislike of wine-speak, it pains me to say that he’s pretty much hit the nail on the head.

The other booming expression is The Prisoner’s cabernet sauvignon — Cuttings ($49.99). It was the biggest of the lot — I mean it really comes at you. That having been said, it stops well short of the point where so many of these big numbers begin to taste like an alcoholic Smucker’s grape jelly.

A little down the price scale at $29.99 is the Saldo. For those of you who haven’t been through 12 years of Catholic schooling, that’s a Latin term meaning “from here and there,” which is a fair description of how the grapes are sourced: mostly zinfandel blended with syrah and petite shirah.

If this all sounds random, it’s anything but. The PWC deliberately gravitated to using the oldest vines, mostly in Sonoma and Mendocino counties, because of the distinct soil. This California dirt isn’t like the deep Delta loam we’ve got around here; it’s rocky, dry ground. These are grapes that really have to work for growth, creating a concentration of flavors and colors. Honestly, the Italian immigrants were close to the mark calling these wines “mixed blacks.” In the end, though, the Saldo certainly doesn’t taste cheaper; it’s a big fruity wine with some pepper in it.

While the Saldo was probably my favorite, the big surprise for me was a wine called Thorn — a merlot. I’ve never been an unqualified fan of that varietal, for the simple reason that I haven’t found many that were particularly interesting. This one is, with an intense flavor I don’t normally associate with merlot. The trick is achieved, partly, through using those older vines.

“It’s the cabernet lover’s merlot,” said Caradonna.

Which probably explains why I liked it so much.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

An App for Tap: Pour-It-Yourself Brews

In my experience, the craft beer scene seems to run on two different but parallel tracks: tap rooms that look like charming, happy barns or garages and the distinctly modern. PizzaRev, which opened the other week next to International Paper, is the latter. It isn’t being overly stylish. It’s just really clever.

PizzaRev is a chain out of California where you can create your own pie — from the crust to sauce, cheese, and toppings, or you can choose a pizza from the menu. And it’s good pizza, but what caught my eye was the self-pour beer system, which co-owner Robby Stewart told me isn’t a PizzaRev thing at all. “I don’t mean to make myself seem smarter than I am, but I was looking for a unique way to deliver beer.”

So you pony up to the counter and order. They swipe your card and give you a little fob on a wristband which looks like a watch you’d get out of a Cracker Jack box. Mosey on over to a wall of 16 gleaming taps, each with a screen telling you about the brew. After you make a decision and a pour, the fob and the tap “chat” and keep track of what you’ve had. Usually, a 16-ounce pint glass measures 13 or 14 ounces of beer, plus gas and foam. Here you only pay for the beer.

An “all-day, every-day flight”

“We sell pizza. It’s a pizza place,” says Stewart. But he’s quick to admit that he also wanted to create a conversational draw. “In our first week, I saw people who didn’t know each other striking up conversations about what they like and have tried. And that’s what I wanted to do.” The beauty of the self-pour system is that you aren’t committing to a full pint. You can pour eight ounces. Or less. Or more. “It’s an all-day, every-day flight,” says Stewart.

The key to the experiment was developing relationships with local breweries. To do that, Stewart recruited Ryan Guess — mortgage banker by day, host of 600 WREG’s The Beer Show, and president of Memphiscraftbeer.com. Guess poured me a pint (13.5 oz, actually) and explained that his mission with the wall was two-fold: providing local favorites, as well as introducing new flavors to the Memphis palate. Of the 16 beers on tap, eight are local brews — some standards, some short runs — and eight are carefully chosen craft beers from elsewhere. “There will never be a beer on that wall I haven’t tasted,” he says.

Macro-brews are available too, but the taps are for craft beers. Like Stewart, Guess is excited about the sampling for the simple reason that it promotes trying new things. And he’s also excited about the beers Memphis doesn’t know about yet. Guess changes the beers out with an eye to the seasons and because … why not? Current selections can be tracked with the iPour app, which lets you rate favorites and take notes. It also will track how much you’ve had, which sounds like a bizzaro-world Fitbit to me, but to each their own.

The taps put on the brakes after you’ve had 32 ounces. If you’ve been there for more than an hour or so and have eaten a pizza, you can get cleared to have another. But, frankly, if you’ve quaffed 32 ounces of high-gravity double IPA, you’ve probably had enough. “We are a pizza place,” said Stewart. “We’ve got families coming in here.”

Why stop at one futuristic gizmo? The PizzaRev app lets you order from your phone while in the restaurant. Stewart told me about a customer who was sitting with friends, got hungry, and ordered a pie from his phone. They delivered it to his table.

“Wow,” I said, “We’ve reached a tipping point in laziness.”

“No,” Stewart said, “We’ve reached a tipping point in convenience.”

And so we have.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Hop Scots

CREDIT: Bianca Phillips

It was raining like stink and I was fighting with my tweed coat when I stepped into the taproom at High Cotton Brewing (HCB), so I felt Scottish, though being something of a skinflint, I always feel that way. I ordered one of HCB’s standards, its Scottish Ale. Because nothing in the booze industry can be straightforward, this is not to be confused with Scotch Ale. Like “English Muffins” in Britain, neither term is used much in the old country.

Calling a person Scotch is something that even the British concede is insulting as hell. The people are Scots — and they will correct you. Still, this is about as good a way as any to keep the two straight. Scottish Ale is the lighter of the two, with a lower alcohol content, but it still delivers a big flavor — a beer you can drink all night, as it were. Scotch Ale — also called a Wee Heavy — is made from the same ingredients, in the same style, only more so. It is a big, booming brew, higher in alcohol — the bagpipe of ales, these days, described as the IPA of the malt. After a couple, you’ll be gripped with the twin urges to shave your tongue and then tell them what you really think. Do us all a favor and resist these impulses.

For all the associations the world has with Scots and their uisgebeathas (water of life) these rich ales have a much longer history than the country’s whiskey. There is evidence that the Picts were producing heather beer long before the Romans showed up to plant their vineyards. There is even a legend of a Pictish chieftain taking his beer recipe to the grave with him. The art of distillation, on the other hand, arrived in Scotland with St. Columba in 563. Two years later, in 565, the same monk claimed to have seen a “water beast” in Loch Ness. You do the math.

Bianca Phillips

Whisky-fueled fish tales aside, up until the 19th century, most beer brewing in Scotland was done by women, old-school “housewives,” if you will. They worked with what ingredients were handy. The unforgiving climate produced a lot of barley and oats (that were dried with peat fires), but precious little hops. As a result, the ales were smoky and very malty. Having a great many other things to do, these put-upon home brewers also boiled the wort (the beer before we call it beer) for much longer than their southern counterparts, which carmelized the ingredients into that rich color and flavor that shows up in your glass. The last twist was the use of ale yeast, followed by cellaring the beer in a climate more akin to Bavarian lagers.

I asked Cayleigh, the taproom manager at HCB about their version of this classic. “We love the style,” she says, “but our take on it is a little different.” Cayleigh will modestly tell you she’s not an expert, but she knows all the technical answers, anyway. HCB does a little roasting on the front end; this lightens the ABV (there is a state law to abide) but keeps that big flavor, one that will go with hearty foods. “Ours is made to pair well with, well, barbecue,” she says. And it does. These are rich flavors that rest on a complex sweetness. The nice thing about HCB’s Scottish Ale is that you up fill up on pork, not beer.

For the more traditionally minded, there is always the maxim, “What grows together goes together.” Try one with that infamous highland widow-maker the Scotch Egg: It’s a hard-boiled egg wrapped in a sausage and deep-fat-fried. On trying one for the first time, an uncle of mine exclaimed, “Where have you been all my life!” Evidently, in Scotland.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Wine-speak

The thing to remember is that wine-speak isn’t about expertise; it’s about what the philosopher professor Harry Frankfurt called “bullshit.” Because even a Princeton University philosophy professor couldn’t come up with a better word for it.

One of my favorite movie lines comes from that scene in Goldfinger, where Bond, eating with M and Colonel Smithers, says of his brandy: “I’d say it was a 30-year-old, fine, indifferently blended … with an overdose of Bon Bois.” The fact that those are industry terms for brandy didn’t stop me from using the line at a wine-tasting once. The only person in the room who caught the B.S. I was swirling around wasn’t a wine expert at all, but a die-hard James Bond fan.

Like a good movie line, wine-speak is all in the delivery. Think about those stories on 60 Minutes where the famed art expert can’t tell the difference between a 6-year-old’s finger painting and a Jackson Pollock, or that hot-shot Wall Street trader whose 10-year running average is only slightly better than what could be attained by a chimp with a dartboard.

If you think an industry can’t be based entirely on B.S., consider that the “quants” who didn’t see the global financial collapse coming still have their careers. So do the Kardashians. They may not be good at their jobs, but they are good at keeping them, which has a lot more to do with cunning than expertise. Not to knock these bold con artists: A successful sham takes almost as much smarts as running a successful business.

The trick to wine-speak, then, as Stephen Potter wrote back in 1950, is to be “boldly meaningless.” French words are best, because almost no one you know actually speaks it; they just know some French terms. Translations are provided for the examples here, but they don’t really matter. Without the context, your complete ignorance can be hidden. Try the following:

“This Bordeaux has got interesting traces of mer chat.”(sea cat)

“I like the way the ventre singe plays on the palate.” (stomach monkey)

“The pipé dés is overdone …” (loaded dice)

A light just went on, didn’t it?

Since wine never really tastes like asparagus or pine tar, even though those descriptors are sometimes tossed around, discussing its ventre singe can’t be terribly off-base. If no French terms come to mind, it’s often helpful to liken the experience of drinking the vintage at hand to some quasi-spiritual aspect of the natural world: I’m partial to, “It’s like a winter sunrise.”

Obviously, if you are a beer nerd, French won’t do. You’ll want to use German words. Try, “this lager has a great kummerspeck” (grief bacon) — which is an actual euphemism in the fatherland for the weight you gain from emotional over-eating. Or if you want to be a real first-rate ass, just learn some Flemish.

Now that you know the B.S. fundamentals, let’s get on to besting the wine-snob on the field of battle. Avoid quoting too directly from Wine Spectator; chances are they read the same issue. You won’t get called out, because the only ones who would know are as guilty as you. But they’ll know. On the other hand, Wine Spectator, to my knowledge, has never mentioned the mer chat of any vintage.

No matter what drivel you might mutter when scanning a wine menu, try a slightly pensive face, which will make it look like you are thinking. Do NOT engage, which could lead to an actual discussion of wine. Better to say, “Let’s be adventurous …” so if whatever you pick turns out to be not so great, it’s because you’re an interesting free spirit, not because you’re just a baratineur.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Guinness & Stew: Nothing Finer on a Winter’s Day

In Ireland the word ‘stout’ is synonymous with Guinness — and we celebrate a lot of things with stout,” says DJ Naylor, the proud owner of Celtic Crossing in Cooper-Young. The “we” he’s referring to are the Irish. DJ hails from County Cork, where the next stop West is America. When asked how he got to Midtown, he says “soccer” with a laugh, as if he knows that’s the least Memphis thing in the world to say. Still, we know a lot of the same people — proving that even if you start from way over in Ireland, Memphis is really just a big, deranged Mayberry.

“The perfect pint isn’t just your favorite stout, but one that’s poured correctly,” says DJ, “with the right temperature and that has the right lip.” A good stout has a reputation of being a meal unto itself, but writing it off as some 18th-century Irish protein shake is a little wide of the mark. True, those rich, toasted flavors won’t sit well with a basket of hot wings, and to suck the stuff down with barbecue might put you into a coma but, paired well, the right stout can make a real meal sing.

What I didn’t expect was for DJ to tell me how well stouts go with oysters. And I like oysters, a lot. I took a dozen for a spin, and what can I say? It works — salty brine against the toasty malt.

Perfect pairing — stout and beef stew

The day DJ and I met was one of those perfect winter days — 32 degrees and cloudless. We were hunkered down over some Irish stew. “But for the beef, this is exactly how my Mom makes it,” he says. And it tastes like it. “Back in the old country, it’s made with lamb, but lamb is a hard sell in the South.”

Last year when the place went smoke-free inside, Celtic Crossing got refurbished with wonderful leather seating and mahogany tables. DJ told me he’s one of 12 children. It was all very Irish.

We were talking about food pairing, and it was obvious that what was before us was the perfect match. A pint of the black stuff stands up to the beef and potatoes (in a Guinness gravy), because what grows together, goes together. Not as heavy as it sounds, it’s satisfying. This, honestly, is comfort food at its best — and for $10, they’ll bring you all the comfort you want.

Another natural pairing — and a little lighter — is corned beef as a sandwich or, for an extra pop, stuffed in peppers.

Of course, there are other stouts: Samuel Smith out of Scotland is a respectable one. As is Murray’s Irish Stout if you like a little sweeter finish. Locally, Memphis Made has a silky Oatmeal Stout, and Wiseacre had waded in with its “Gotta Get Up to Get Down” Coffee Milk Stout. It is made with coffee, so there is caffeine in it. It’s pretty good for a hangover. It’s not for everyone, but I like it. Admittedly, though, I can’t see myself drinking three of those in a row, and if I did, I can’t see anyone wanting to hang around with me.

But for a stout and stew, nothing strikes the same chord as “Uncle” Arthur Guinness did when, in 1759, he took a 9,000-year lease on the property at St. James Gate, Dublin, and started doing what has been done so well ever since. His birthday, “Arthur’s Day,” became something of an Irish national holiday until the government thought it was becoming a little too festive and tamped it down for “health” reasons. It sounds like bureaucratic fun-sucking to me. Exactly how bad for you can the black stuff be? Arthur and his wife, Olivia, had 21 children. That took stamina.