September 17, 2008

Wine & Food Around the World: France, Alaska, Kansas, Prosser

French%20wine%20bottle.jpg A new feature, occasionally blending dispatches from vineyards and kitchens around the globe.

Hard to read (the small print), even harder to fathom (the small-mindedness): Parler de cette bouteille peut vous faire condamner. Talking about this bottle could send you to jail. Seems you can't advertise wine on the web in France thanks to a weird loophole in the country's 1991, pre-internet temperance statutes. Even writing about wine could get you into trouble. All very puzzling.

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Want to know how to cook a moose, just like Sarah Palin? Kim Severson of the New York Times is your gal. It's on her blog "A Moose Bouche." That's a (bad) pun, I think. I hope. We are not a moosed.

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From a Q & A with Anthony Bourdain this week in the Kansas City Star.

Are there any food kicks that you get on?

I’m on a yakitori jag. There’s sort of an underground scene of casual Japanese restaurants for entirely Japanese clientele. It’s very specific to Japan; you almost never see Westerners. It’s very casual, usually with beer, maybe sake, and a lot of it is little bits of chicken parts cooked on skewers over charcoal. Absolutely delicious. And casual, which is really important to me. I think there’s a fine dining backlash. I think a lot of the nonsense is being bled out of the restaurant scene, and it’s really a joy to get really, really good ingredients and authentic food without the nonsense and the pretense.

He could be talking about Kushibar in Belltown. Japanese street food along with an assortment of ramen and yakitori.

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HHH-RibbonCutting.JPGIt's been known as the Horse Heaven Hills since the mid-19th century, this area roughly 50 miles long and 20 miles wide, but not until the legenday Dr. Walter Clore came along in the 1970s did anyone think to plant wine grapes alongside the wheat.. Now, with half a dozen wineries bonded (among them: Columbia Crest, Alexandria Nicole, McKinley Springs), 7,000 acres of grapes planted and an official designation as an American Viticultural Area, the Horse Heaven Hills Wine Growers decided to put up signs at the various points of entry. The hills--loam on fractured basalt--were formed when the Missoula floods receded; they look like crumpled blankets forming the ridge between the fertile Yakima Valley, traversed by Interstate 84 and the banks of the Columbia, skirted by Highway 14. First of four signs went up this week outside Prosser.

Posted by Ronald Holden at September 17, 2008 11:00 AM | TrackBack

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