Food & Drink

Some people think that wine is a serious business. I am often tempted to think that myself, but then I remember an amusing cartoon by James Thurber called “The Wine Snobs.” It shows four people sitting around the dinner table, each holding up a glass of wine. There is an air of resigned dubiousness emanating from the table as whole. But the W.S. himself sports a big smile and says enthusiastically “It’s a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.” Been there, done that. We’ve tasted some pretty fancy wines together in this column, and I hope there will be plenty more to come. At the end of the day, though, wine for most of us is chiefly about pleasure and camaraderie, not connoisseurship.

What’s in a name? Sometimes, quite a lot, especially when seen through the benign lens of sentiment. By the time you read this, April, which is not the “cruellest month,” will be upon us and the morning mercury will be edging upward, coaxing forth the crocuses and daffodils. But in the last several days, dawn has come to where I live in Connecticut accompanied by temperatures in the teens and twenties. March has entered clad in its traditional lion’s mane. I feel especially grateful, therefore, that duty called me and a handful of colleagues to Palm Beach, just as February gave way to March, on behalf of the New Criterion, the magazine I edit, and Encounter Books, the other phalanx in my campaign for world conquest.

Passive news absorbers across the nation haven’t been able to avoid this thing they heard about some guy named Poutine, who’s, like, Russia’s Orange Man, invading Ukraine, which is, like, a peaceful society of hunter-gatherers and supermodels who live harmoniously with nature, talk to animals, and invented Democracy. This is a super important, really bad thing. The Crane people have been forced to take up arms and defend their way of life. Now, Americans across social media are also stepping up to let you Cranes know they’re paying attention, they care, and they’re ready to strike back at the invaders. Yellow and blue are this season’s black square.

It's been many years since Cockburn popped in to the DC watering hole Sign of the Whale. Tucked into an underrated bar district on M Street about a five-minute walk from Dupont Circle, the Whale was once a popular hangout for interns and thirsty twentysomethings, the Joseph A. Bank-clad worker bees who make the city go. Now it's recovering from a devastating fire. Just before 5 p.m. on Wednesday, smoke began to billow out of the Whale's upper-level window. Firefighters rushed in and doused the flames, which thankfully didn't spread to adjacent establishments like Camelot and the 1831 Bar and Lounge. No injuries were reported. The owner of Sign of the Whale released this statement Wednesday night: Sadly we had a big fire today.

To you and me, “Châteauneuf-du-Pape” means the bold, dark, spicy red wine from the Rhône region of southeastern France, a bit north of the town of Avignon, with bottles usually featuring a glass-embossed representation of the keys of St. Peter. If you were Jacques Duèze, known to history as Pope John XXII, second and longest reigning (1316-34) of the Avignon popes, Châteauneuf-du-Pape meant first of all that “new castle of the pope” he built on the hill overlooking the town. After the popes left, it fell into desuetude and was raided for stone by local builders. During the Revolution, all the buildings except the great tower or donjon were sold off. During World War Two, the Germans attempted to dynamite the structure but succeeded in destroying only the northern half.

Donald Trump has nicknamed Mitch McConnell “Old Crow,” and the Senate minority leader is proudly embracing the epithet. As he should. “It’s my favorite bourbon,” Mitch told the Washington Examiner. Old Crow whiskey is produced by the parent company of Jim Beam in Kentucky, McConnell’s home state. It has a long and storied past, including among its accolades, as McConnell pointed out, having been a favorite of fellow Kentuckian Henry “The Great Compromiser” Clay. Trump is a notorious non-drinker who apparently never had the varnish of his teeth singed off by bottom-shelf bourbon during a rowdy frat party.

Some people think that it is the job of a wine critic to discover great bargains in the world of bottles and impart the news in hushed but excited tones to the madding crowds. Maybe that’s part of the remit. I incline, however, to this piece of wisdom from George Saintsbury, prosodist to the stars and incomparable, if quirky, cicerone to the fructum vitis et operis manuum hominum, which is to say: wine. “There is no money,” Saintsbury wrote, of the expenditure of which I am less ashamed, or which has given me better value in return, than the price of the liquids chronicled in Notes on a Cellar-Book. When they were good they pleased my senses, cheered my spirits, improved my moral and intellectual powers, besides enabling me to confer the same benefits on other people.

A common avenue for conservative commentators seeking an escape from politics is wine criticism. One thinks of Roger Scruton, Kingsley Amis, Roger Kimball and other such sophisticated, cultured men for whom even refreshment is a serious business. Millions of words have been spilled on wine criticism, though, and in the service of a drink a normal man only enjoys when he has finished work and has no need to drive. Who speaks for, say, the chilled caffeinated drink? “Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world,” said Hemingway. The same could not be said of energy drinks, perhaps, but then the same could not have been said of Hemingway. Our moveable feast is a varied one, and each element deserves attention.

Almost every right-of-center writer claims to be leaving New York. So Cockburn headed up to see what's left of the Big Apple — and take in a couple of festive ragers while he had the chance. The book party for Miranda Devine’s Laptop From Hell unfolded at the Beach Café, recently dubbed "the Upper East Side’s Republican Cheers" by New York magazine. After checking his coat and having his vaccine card closely inspected, Cockburn rubbed shoulders with Devine, several of her past and present New York Post comrades and dozens of NYC GOP staples. Cockburn shared a cocktail with Republican fixer Roger Stone, who teased his strategy ahead of his summit with the January 6 Committee next week and reminisced about the stolen election of 1960.

Cockburn entered the Christmas party fray with two ironclad rules in mind: don’t mix drinks and make sure you eat something. He managed to break both on Tuesday night as he stumbled across the nation’s capital. His first port of call was the Breitbart Christmas drinks at Blackfinn. Guests including various GOP Hill staffers took advantage of a free bar towards the back of the venue and were treated to a brief appearance from petite former Trump press secretary Sean Spicer. The talk of the event was the forthcoming DC newsletter Breitbart are set to launch in the coming weeks.

It is, as Andy Williams memorably put it, the most wonderful time of the year. Christmas party season has hit the Swamp — and naturally Cockburn is in his element. He has dusted off his dowdiest Clark Griswold cardigan and Santa hat. He has stocked up on milk thistle and Brita filters to abate the inevitable daily hangovers. His social calendar is quickly filling up with invites from think tanks, embassies and slightly grubbier magazines than this one — but it could be fuller still. Email your party invitations to cockburn@thespectator.

A dinner party without good conversation is like flat Champagne: pretty pointless. It’s like that not-so-funny joke about the inscription on an atheist’s tombstone: “All dressed up and nowhere to go.” Of course at a miserable dinner party you and your glad-rags have reached a destination of sorts, but (as for the late atheists) it’s not the one you were expecting. How to avoid such an infernal disappointment? Jean-Paul Sartre famously felt that hell was other people; all I can say is, that’s no attitude to bring to the table.

James Bond’s most impressive talent is not his prowess as a spy or his skills of seduction. It’s his ability to always get exactly what he wants at the bar. In the 1954 novel Live and Let Die he orders a round of Old Fashioneds while on a train to meet Felix Leiter, his CIA opposite number. Not only does the buffet car make them for Bond, they even have his preferred brand of bourbon, Old Grand-Dad. You try pulling that sort of thing on the Acela from Penn Station to DC. ‘Sorry Solitaire, they wouldn’t do us a cocktail, but I’ve got a cup of Lipton’s and a bag of pretzels.’ We’d all like to drink like Bond but, lacking his miraculous powers, we need to be in the right sort of bar to do it.

Cockburn was waiting to get his beard trimmed at the barber recently and found himself flicking through the latest issue of the Washingtonian, an outlet where fangirling over the Biden administration passes as journalism and a love of America’s dreary capital substitutes for a personality. The issue in question featured Washingtonian’s annual best of list. This is supposed to be a list of bars, restaurants, people and other stuff that makes DC such a great place to live. But this year’s offering had Cockburn browsing Zillow for homes in Ketchum, Idaho, faster than you can say 'Fauci Pouchy'. It’s been years since Cockburn relied on the Washingtonian for advice on having a good time in the imperial city, but the 2021 offering is especially unappetizing.

Cockburn has rarely met a pub he didn't like, though plenty of pubs haven't taken a liking to Cockburn. Fortunately, occasional dissolute behavior was never a problem at Post Pub, the old neighborhood watering hole on L Street in Washington. So you can imagine Cockburn's dismay when he learned last spring that Post Pub would be closing after 43 years. The cause wasn't so much the pandemic as it was a tragic outbreak of public health. The Washington Post reports that 'back in the era of hard-drinking lunches, bartenders at the Post Pub used to stir up three-gallon batches of gin and vodka martinis and a two-gallon batch of Manhattans to prepare for the daily crush. And that was just for Mondays.’ What happened?

Years ago, an entrepreneurial friend had the idea of marketing ketchup with a catch, a jaunty political declaration. I say ‘many years ago’, and to give you a sense of just how ancient this ancient history is, contemplate that the ketchup was called ‘W’ and the ‘W’ stood for the personage that the followers of William Jefferson Clinton mean to disparage when they removed that letter from the computer keyboards in White House and other government offices just before the W in question — George W. Bush — took office.

Some people, out at a nice restaurant, are shy about sending a bottle of wine back when there is something wrong with it. They shouldn’t be. Wine, as the vintners like to tell you when everything is going as it should, is a living thing. Like all living things, it is subject to a variety of unfortunate vicissitudes. We’ve probably all encountered ‘corked’ wine at one point or another — that taint caused by a smidgen of 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA) or 2,4,6-tribromoanisole (TBA), which can be transferred from or through a cork. But wine is susceptible to other liabilities as well. One is the same liability that, sooner or later, affects us all: age.