Food & Drink

Every good vintner deserves a good origin story. David Bruce, the founder of the eponymous winery in the Santa Cruz hills, has one of the best. When he was at medical school at Stanford in the 1950s, he chanced upon Alexis Lichine’s classic book The Wines of France. Lichine said some fancy and evocative things about the great wines of Richebourg in Burgundy. Bruce padded down to a wine shop in San Francisco and collared a bottle of 1954 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Richebourg. “The minute I opened this bottle of wine,” he recalled, “the whole room was pervaded by this floral, spicy aroma.” Here’s the kicker: “I remember thinking, I guess you get what you pay for.” Oh yeah? He paid $7.50 for the bottle.

Join Cockburn in a thought experiment. Close your eyes — and think of the phrase “toxic masculinity.” Who is the first person that you picture in your head? Recently charged Andrew Tate, perhaps — or maybe Floyd Mayweather. French Member of Parliament Sandrine Rousseau sees someone a little less likely: Monsieur Le President Emmanuel Macron. Macron was filmed downing a bottle of Corona this weekend in the dressing rooms of the Stade de France, after Toulouse had beaten La Rochelle in the French rugby final. Urged on by victorious Toulouse players, the president necks the bottle of beer in a modest seventeen seconds. https://twitter.com/chufl3t3r0/status/1670501095502757888?

Ask anybody who’s really been in a band what being a musician is like, and they won’t tell you about the moments that make it into the Hollywood biopics. To them, the experience is not the hero-shot onstage, or the girls they picked up after a killer set, or anything you saw in Ray or Bohemian Rhapsody. The reality of being in a band is of driving from place to place. Think of Bob Seger’s baleful “Turn the Page” with its opening lyric setting the place: “On a long and lonesome highway, east of Omaha,” where he’s “ridin’ sixteen hours and there’s nothin’ there to do.” This raises an issue of where to drink in Miami.

As the Bud Light War enters what feels like its fifth year, Cockburn has further evidence that America’s "wokest" brew has an unlikely ally, giving it beachheads at some of the world's swankiest properties. The Trump Organization, which boasts properties in several continents, offers Bud Light and/or Bud Heavy at its properties in locations ranging from Chicago to Los Angeles to Scotland. A Cockburn review on Trump Organization menus show that the beer goes from £6.50 in Scotland, to $7 at his iconic Trump Tower in New York City, to $9 in Chicago, to $10 in Vegas. Trump’s Bud Light offerings go beyond just his hotels. Want some suds while you’re golfing? Trump National Golf Club in Los Angeles, for example, has you covered at only $7 a beer, or a six-pack for $35.

Foie gras doughnuts, check. Rooftop location, check. Framed collection of fountain-pen nibs on the wall, check. Where should a scribbler with aspirations to the higher life turn his feet in Toronto, if not to the Park Hyatt Writer’s Room? At seventeenth-story level, the higher life seems within easy reach. The Writer’s Room is the renovated and rechristened edition of the historic Rooftop Lounge, a famous hotel bar that first opened its doors to the public in the Thirties. Before the renovations, it boasted Toronto’s longest-serving bartender, Joe Gomes, who worked there for fifty-seven years. His fondest memory, he said on retirement, was meeting John Wayne. Everybody who’s anybody seems to have popped by for a drink at some point: Leonard Cohen, Brangelina, Hunter S.

Quizzed on how best to assimilate a new culture, travel writer and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain once uttered the famous line: “Drink heavily with locals whenever possible.” I never met the man, but still I miss him and his deft writing. The Opening a Bottle series is about getting pickled with people far cooler than I am, in whatever city I’ve washed up in. I land in Stockholm as the leaves start to fade brown, and the mercury is already dropping. My gloveless hands turn alabaster as I doggedly cycle around the island of Djurgården, or "museum island." I gape at the once-sunken Viking boat. I dodge the ABBA tribute. I take aim at hilltop open air museum Skansen, then ditch my wheels (out of bounds). I swear a lot. I get really fucking cold.

The Lincoln Project, a disgraced PAC launched in 2019 “to defeat Donald Trump at the ballot box” and “to ensure Trumpism failed alongside him,” has a new mission: take down Dr. Pepper for advertising on Fox News. Having seemingly taken inspiration from the Bud Light/Dylan Mulvaney boycott that’s seen conservatives abandon the beloved beer brand in droves, the Lincoln Project called out “Texas’s favorite soft drink” on Twitter, scolding: “Your motto is ‘Drink Well. Do Good.’ Your goal is to ‘make a positive impact with every drink.’ Yet you continue to advertise on Fox News, a network committed to telling lies and degrading our public discourse. Time to live up to your promise and drop Fox.

Quizzed on how best to assimilate a new culture, travel writer and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain once uttered the famous line: “Drink heavily with locals whenever possible.” I never met the man, but still I miss him and his deft writing. The Opening a Bottle series is about getting pickled with people far cooler than I am, in whatever city I’ve washed up in. Lisbon to Berlin, December 2022. I was amazed to fly away unscathed as Storm Efraín reared its ugly head, with more than three inches of rain falling in twenty-four hours. Germany’s capital welcomed me with a cool 32 degrees Fahrenheit, dropping to a bone crunching thirteen degrees by the end of my stint. I kept my puffer coat on in techno clubs and danced in front of lit fireplaces.

When I search my memory for a favorite bar, I’m struck by thoughts about bars of legend that I can only fantasize about. My drinking life is a tale of three cities — Chicago, New York and Paris — but since I’ve spent most of my adulthood in New York, it’s hangouts in Manhattan, some long gone, that first come to mind. And establishments where writers and reporters liked to drink hold for me a privileged position. I wish that I could have bought a cocktail in the 1930s for the tragically brilliant novelist Dawn Powell at the now defunct Lafayette Hotel in Greenwich Village, or at the nearby Brevoort Hotel on Fifth Avenue and 8th Street.

One day, Cockburn is sitting on a stool in his favorite watering hole, knocking back effervescent, metal-flavored oat sodas from those iconic blue cans; the next, he’s swept along with rural beer distributors, Nick Adams and fellow "alpha males" in a “complete and total boycott of Anheuser-Busch to restore hot women and masculine horses to their rightful place on our domestic beer cans.” Easy enough, Cockburn tells himself. He’ll pass on the Bud Light in favor of a — gasp! Turns out the tentacles of the AB Corporation are long and sticky. Long before Bud Light deemed Dylan Mulvaney, a trans woman, as representative of its consumers, the parent company was beating the diversity, equity and inclusion drum back in 2021.

The late Christopher Hitchens once lamented that he left London for America because the “piss and vinegar” of the city had been swept away by an antiseptic tide of money. Manhattan, though, still has plenty of both, not only in the subway but also in the form of a series of old-school pubs that have somehow resisted the modern mania for restoring the life out of anything old and authentic. The granddaddy of them all is McSorley’s Old Ale House on East 7th, opened in 1854 and America’s oldest continuously operated bar. The front room of McSorley’s has no chairs or tables. There is sawdust on the floor. The place accepts only cash and has no till. It serves only two kinds of ale (light or dark) and house soda. A sleeve of crackers and a chunk of cheddar are the staple bar food.

There are a few words you need to know when visiting Georgia — gamarjoba for “hello,” madloba for “thank you” — but one word is absolutely crucial, and that is gaumarjos, for “cheers.” The Georgians are serious drinkers, as I recently discovered while visiting a friend in Tbilisi. And when they drink, they toast. And when they toast, they don’t stop toasting. In Georgia, raising a glass is an essential ritual of the supra, their ancient tradition of the feast. The recent discovery of a bronze tamada (“toastmaster”) figurine from 600 bc means it’s older than the development of their written language. As with any ancient ritual, toasting has its own set of rules.

If you dare to host a dinner party, said Brillat-Savarin, you must be prepared to be responsible for your guests’ entire happiness while they are under your roof. It’s not just the victuals you are serving. It’s an entire world. I got that sage bit of advice from the French doctor and food writer Édouard de Pomiane (1875-1964), one of the most engaging writers about the preparation and enjoyment of pain quotidien I know. At least two books by Pomiane have been translated into English, Cooking with Pomiane and French Cooking in Ten Minutes (yes, really). Neither replaces Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking or similar nitty-gritty manuals, but both are atmospheric charmers, books that can be read as well as consulted.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) just released draft guidelines concerning the definition of “milk,” saying that producers of alternative milk beverages derived from plants and nuts (non-mammals) can keep calling their products “milk” because, basically, they’ve been doing it for a while and the public likes it that way. The draft guidance explains “that the public already refers to plant-based milk as milk while also acknowledging the plant source it comes from, such as ‘almond milk’ and ‘soy milk,’” according to Fox Business. “Consumers reportedly favor the term ‘milk’ over plant-based ‘drink,’ ‘beverage’ or ‘juice,’ according to internal and third-party focus groups the FDA cited.” Not everyone agrees with the FDA.

There are many different reasons to like a bar. Because it does the best cocktails. Because it is the cheapest around. Or the most expensive. Because it’s a great place to meet people for sex. Because all your mates go there. Because it is ubertrendy. The colorful, ornate, majolica-tiled, lushly colonnaded bar restaurant of La Roca, in Nogales, Mexico, isn’t really any of these things. And it certainly isn’t ultra-convenient: you must cross a border to get there from Nogales, Arizona. Why do this?