This upsets me.
Phil Vettel posted this little blurb on “The Stew,” the Trib’s food and wine blog. Vettel writes that making Mint Juleps is “polluting perfectly good bourbon,” and he commends The Fifty/50 (2047 W. Division St.) for making 10 Cane Mint Juleps, which use 10 Cane Rum instead of bourbon.
The food-fanatical among you should know and love the revelatory cooking blog Taste Memory, one woman’s loving tribute to all things comestible, replete with gorgeous color photos of the mouthwatering dishes she creates. A blog sidebar cites a tidbit from James Beard’s Delights and Prejudices, a work I recently devoured with great pleasure, wherein Beard discusses the blessings of a talent called taste memory, or “the ability to recall a taste sensation”–and there you have the blog title.
Thanks to the excellent Dr. Vino for creating this google map of Chicago BYOB restaurants. For those of you who didn’t get a chance to attend our BYOB-themed free tasting on Sunday, this will be a good cheat sheet. My personal favorites are Terragusto at 1851 W. Addison and Mado at 1647 N. Milwaukee. If you’re planning on heading to a BYOB, make sure to let us know so we can help you pair up your wines with some of their best dishes.
Special thanks to Michael at hungrymag.com for bringing this link to my attention.
Posted by Lance
The Raincoat is a cocktail made with walnut liqueur, bourbon, almond syrup, and cinnamon. The recipe comes from Haus Alpenz, who imports the Nux Alpina Walnut Liqueur that we carry. They, in turn, credit Absinthe, a restaurant in San Francisco, for the creation of the drink.
Sometimes I do embarassing things. I frequently forget people’s names and have to spend significant portions of conversations trying to get them to refer to themselves in the third person. Two days ago I called a nice young lady “Sir.” I have an approximately 100% rate of getting caught in any lie I tell. This weekend, though, I did something that went beyond embarassing and extended into the realm of mortifying.
I, a manager of one of the best fine wine and spirits stores in the country, bought a boxed wine. From the grocery store.
This post is a bit reflective, and a bit more involved with my formal academic training as an anthropologist…but is also intrinsically interwoven with my work in wine. I have been thinking, and thinking, and thinking, so now I’ll type a bit and hope to share some new knowledge, as well as encourage a discourse with you and the Lush staff. I am enthralled and intrigued and just can’t get enough of the thinking.
I want this post to be too many things. I’ve had the focal point for a while: a particular bottle of wine that I recently had the great (unfathomable! serendipitous!) fortune to try. The experience has inspired numerous tangential ponderings, each jutting out from the bottle’s hold as the center of a brainstorming web inside my head. And each of these has in turn inspired new meditations, resulting in schematic chaos that could not possibly be resolved into a cogent piece of writing.
But here it goes.
I am down at the Halsted store today, where I am a
lways delighted by a new selection of wine and spirits at my fingertips. If it wasn’t such a pain to get the stuff back up to my Roscoe Village apartment, I would probably leave with a half-case of bottles every time I worked here.
I am riding a huge high…and yes, it may indeed be drug induced, but the doctor says it will make me better. The sniffles are abating, slowly…but bronchitis won’t keep me down. I will be euphoric, oh yes I will! Traveling makes me so very happy, and traveling to Italy is perhaps my most favorite thing to do because it involves so much eating, drinking, and talking with friends. Ahhh, bliss.
LUSH, take a bow.
TimeOut Chicago has so graciously awarded Lush as their ‘Critics Pick Favorite Winos in Chicago’. And, they gave the gals of Lush a shout out, too.
We love you all, we really do. Almost as much as our bottle….
Lance
Jane
erin
Rachel