Anyone who knows me well knows that I love food and wine. I have for a long time. My grandmothers each were fantastic cooks and so is my Mom. I got into wine when my wife visited her brother shortly after we were married. He lives in Kenwood, CA in the heart of the Sonoma County wine region.
There are very few cuisines that I don’t care for. Indian, Italian, French, German, Chinese, Thai, Southern, Turkish, Israeli, I like them all. Except maybe the English and Irish. Although they have some good dishes. I can skip the Norwegian Lutefish too.
We have collected, drank, gone to wine auctions, and shared wines with friends ever since. It brings us great joy. When we rehabbed the house we are in putting in a wine cellar was not optional. The most fun thing with wine is to figure out how to pair it with whatever you are cooking. There are subtle differences in the best regions of American Pinot Noir and they can pair better or worse with certain dishes. Same with other wine regions around the world.
You can spend $3000 on a bottle and have it not be great and spend $15 on some Muscadet and drink it with oysters and have an ethereal experience.
I recently had knee surgery on 11/29, so I am not drinking. Crutches and drinking do not mix. I am also not cooking. My wife hates to grocery shop and cook. One of the conditions of marriage was that I would be doing that. I enjoy it and my waistline shows it. The Warden has put me on a diet since knee surgery.
I am happy that I read wine prices might be starting to come down. I am so old that I remember buying great wines at $20-25 per bottle. At that time, my friend Ralph used to complain that he used to get the same bottle for $10. Those days are gone because worldwide demand and costs to produce have gone up, but at least we might be hitting an apex.
My old friend from the trading pits, James Dean (DIXI), who was fabulously wealthy used to tell me he was rich enough to afford Bordeaux but not Burgundy! Plenty of business dinners were closed over knowing your way around a wine list, not the finer points of business.
Next year, I am hoping to go to France in November. I have a buddy who owns a boutique champagne house I’d like to visit. We also want to go to the Hospices de Beaune, the oldest wine auction in the world. Even the Nazis couldn’t shut it down in WW2. Then, I am hopping over to Bordeaux to see a cognac-producing friend and do a special tasting at a Chateau that I am on the list for. I will try to stop in Lyon as well, and am thinking that since I am over there a stop in London for a day or two would be great.
That’s why this article caught my attention.
Food and food innovation is very interesting. So interesting that in the US at Ole Miss, the Southern Foodways Alliance was established. Food can tell you cultural history. It’s fascinating.
New Orleans is an endlessly amazing town because of the melting pot of food that has evolved there since the first French trader walked into town. I think it is the best restaurant town in America.
As the bulls in the old meat and grain trading floor pits used to say, “People gotta eat” and people have been innovating around food and food production ever since the Garden of Eden.
Italy is especially interesting because of its singular history. The ancient Romans conquered the world and for sure brought ingredients and methods back to the home base to be implemented. The north and south of Italy are very different geographically and in climate, so people eat different things. Stanley Tucci’s documentary about Italy was awesome.
In the great migration, primarily from the south of Italy to America, people brought food traditions with them and then innovated. When the GIs went back to liberate Italy, they brought those innovations with them and Italians incorporated them. They have forgotten that they are “American” innovations and not ancient Italian recipes! Chicken Vesuvio is a Chicago dish, and should never contain peas. Am I wrong?
This paragraph from the linked FT article is interesting, isn’t it?
“Parmesan, he says, is remarkably ancient, around a millennium old. But before the 1960s, wheels of parmesan cheese weighed only about 10kg (as opposed to the hefty 40kg wheels we know today) and were encased in a thick black crust. Its texture was fatter and softer than it is nowadays. “Some even say that this cheese, as a sign of quality, had to squeeze out a drop of milk when pressed,” Grandi says. “Its exact modern-day match is Wisconsin parmesan.” He believes that early 20th-century Italian immigrants, probably from the Po’ region north of Parma, started producing it in Wisconsin and, unlike the cheesemakers back in Parma, their recipe never evolved. So while Parmigiano in Italy became over the years a fair-crusted, hard cheese produced in giant wheels, Wisconsin parmesan stayed true to the original.”
For what it’s worth, I prefer the “new” parmesan reggiano to the Wisconsin variety but I never see any boutique Wisconsin parmesan anywhere.
I think that the strict food administrators of Europe while trying to preserve an ancient craft and quality often get in the way of innovation. France has them and so does Italy. Spain has heavy-handed ones too. The Germans have them, but since WW2, they seem like they are less obtrusive than the ones in France and Italy. Countries that were behind the Iron Curtain now liberated seem to be more at ease with food innovation and not doing things by the book as they did in “ancient times”.
Communism destroyed food and wine production behind the Iron Curtain. It’s now just starting to come back. Watch the German wine industry. Hitler ruined it and the commies made it worse. If you haven’t had a beautifully aged dry riesling from a top producer give one a try sometime. It can make a dish like sauerbraten sing.
The heavy-handedness of European regulators leaves an opening for countries like America if our FDA allows it. I have had the Iowa prosciutto and it is a good effort. However, unless you age it at altitude like they do in Italy and Spain, it’s just not exactly the same even if it is good.
Here is an example.
I’d argue that France has the best cheese in the world. Every country has one or two great cheeses, but France has the most spectacular. Cheese is heavily regulated in France. America could beat France because, in America, you can innovate and experiment. You can try new stuff and if it fails, so what? However, the FDA won’t allow Americans to do anything with raw unpasteurized milk cheeses. Those are arguably some of the finest cheeses in France.
A few years ago, the FDA wanted to mandate that cheese makers couldn’t age cheese on wood and had to do it on stainless steel…..how stupid is that? That is unless, of course, you want a bland industrialized product. Yecch.
Are we not men? We should not have to survive on bland industrialized food. That was for the 1950s.
In many cases, in every industry, our government regulates so much it stifles innovation that would raise standards of living, or at least make our lives more pleasurable. Who wouldn’t want to have a nice stinky raw milk cheese from Wisconsin along with a hard cider, craft beer, or wonderful Santa Rita Hills wine?
There is room for traditional by-the-book products. We see that in bourbon with “bottled in bond” bourbons which are made a specific way because back in the day, the US government got involved to ensure the quality of bourbon was what it said it was on the label. But, we see distilleries cropping up all over the US that make bourbon and deviate from the norms. My friend Bill O’Donnell (WCOD) makes excellent bourbon in Wisconsin and my friend Jimmy (SIM from Seattle) turned us on to a bourbon made out there that is excellent as well. They rival Kentucky bourbon. Sacrilege I know but it’s true.
Innovation creates diversity, creative destruction, and competition! Everyone benefits. This isn’t just true with food. It’s true with everything!
Over the past few weeks, we have seen Congress begin to organize to regulate artificial intelligence. Is anyone there intelligent? How are they going to begin to regulate artificial intelligence? They surely will screw it up, SNAFU…….
In Argentina, I love the new President. Can he come and run the US? President Milei deregulated the food industry in Argentina as one of his first acts. The price of food declined by 15% in Argentina overnight. People can feed themselves again.
Imagine what would happen in America if we got the government out of the food production and distribution process. Say goodbye to subsidies, production limits, price supports, price ceilings, artificial label carve-outs, the food pyramid, artificial tax advantages, duties, and tariffs, and say hello to innovation and cheaper food. It’s better when the market speaks and not legislators/regulators.
Remember, “people gotta eat” so there will always be demand.
Argentina is a beautiful place with very fertile soil and people that emigrated from Europe. It is similar to the US that way. I bet you will see innovation blossom under the new president.
I hope over the next two days you get to share some food and drink (and cookies) with someone who means something to you. When you do, think about how much better it could be if the government didn’t demand a seat at your table.
Merry Christmas. Thank you for reading, sharing, and participating in this blog. I appreciate it and am grateful. Now I have to crutch over to my wine cellar to find a little something for tomorrow.
We cure our own hams, make our own sausage and bacon, and each year do more canning. I would love to get into cheeses but NC regulates raw milk (can only be sold for "pets") so it's eye-wateringly expensive and I haven't talked myself into 'investing' yet just to experiment. The family farm raises beef cattle and, yes, we know quite a bit about the costs of government fingers in every pie. From feds to state to local, some bureaucrat is making life more difficult for production or use of each ingredient way before it becomes a pie.
The biggest pressure is putting small and medium sized operations clean out of business over the burden of either complying or just keeping the lawyers and accountants on retainer to do all of the paperwork just-so, to be sure you really are exempt or otherwise staying within the lines. When that range or layer of machinists, processors, trades, and small industrial services is no longer available at least somewhat locally, people you can trust, everything else becomes 100x harder. We know how to do stuff and have learned how to do so much more for ourselves (next project is building a forge!). It's very satisfying. But other days it can be infuriating and demoralizing.
I really enjoy reading your posts. They go in a lot of directions and sometimes I think a post isn't for me... but by the end you've said something that might also send my mind in a new direction I didn't expect. Thanks for taking the time and effort you invest in this substack. Much appreciated!
"Are we not men"?
well, some of us are women...
Merry Christmas Jeff and a happy new wines!