Food & Drink

Chablis has the paradoxical distinction of being at once one of the most famous and least well known of French wines. Hugh Johnson opined that it is “one of the world’s most under-estimated treasures.” I agree. We say that Chablis is Burgundy, but, situated on the Serein River some 100 miles southeast of Paris, Chablis is nearly 100 miles north of Beaune. Perhaps we can say that it is the Hadrian’s Wall of Burgundy. Hadrian’s bit of Britain was part of the Roman Empire, but no one would confuse it with Rome. The climate in Chablis is markedly different from and less forgiving than that of the Côte-d’Or: chillier and windier. Think of Auden’s poem, “Roman Wall Blues”: “The rain comes pattering out of the sky, / I’m a Wall soldier, I don’t know why.

The best bars are empty. And empty bars close, which is a shame. I used to like drinking Polish vodka in the Russia House, up from Dupont Circle, in Washington, DC. The site is currently shuttered because some over zealous internationally correct ideologues smashed it up after Russia invaded Ukraine and it hasn’t come back. The Russia House never seemed to be that popular. It had a sort of fake glamour and contrived shadiness that I liked. I could never afford the caviar, so the prostitutes left me alone. DC snobs would call it “basic” — but then DC snobs are basic, so who cares what they think? I hope it has reopened by the next time I’m in Washington. Spare a thought, too, dear Americans, for British pubs.

If Paris is cafés and London is pubs, New York is bars. Most of the legendary Big Bagel bars have been Irish: P.J. Clarke’s, still going strong, and the now-shut Elaine’s, where Woody Allen, Jackie Onassis, and Norman Mailer partied and gossiped protected by the formidable Elaine. But for me, although a regular at the above watering holes, there’s one that stands out because it was there where I cut my teeth as a young man about town, where I met Joan Collins, Janet Leigh, and Linda Christian — and debutantes and models galore. That was Orsini’s, at 43 West 56th Street, just off Fifth Avenue.

Cockburn joins the rest of the world in mourning the good Queen Elizabeth II, a stalwart figure of grace and warmth who endured much during her long life and seventy-five-year reign — often, incredibly, with an impish twinkle in her eye. The Queen worked as a truck mechanic during World War II, served alongside fifteen prime ministers, including Winston Churchill, lived through fourteen US presidencies, and weathered the marriage scandals of Princess Diana and Prince Charles, the heartache of Diana’s tragic death, Meghan Markle’s endless attention-seeking antics, and an exhausting schedule of public appearances. It's no wonder the woman liked to enjoy a drink — or four?

Pennsylvania’s liquor laws are... vintage. But not in a single-malt Scotch kind of way that means they improve with age. The state legislature did move the needle to the right side of draconian in 2016, but the Philadelphia Inquirer’s 1983 assessment of “Pennsylvania’s backwardness” being “a hangover from the administration of Republican governor Gifford Pinchot, who was elected on a ‘dry’ platform in 1930,” remains accurate. The Inquirer reported that after Prohibition was abolished in 1933, Pinchot led a special session to establish the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board and “state stores” to make the purchase of alcoholic beverages “as inconvenient and expensive as possible.

Writing about and — the necessary preliminary — drinking wine is a voyage of discovery. I won’t say that any new vineyard has made me feel quite like “stout Cortez” who, according to Keats, “star’d at the Pacific — and all his men/ Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—/ Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” But wine is in a deep sense about more than the fermented juice of the grape. It is about place — terroir, of course, but also place in a larger sense: place as habitation, place as community, which means place as the stage whereon manners, romance, technique and custom perform for the gods of pleasure. It is also about history and personality and their distillate: money, which ushers in snobbery and its accoutrements.

Cockburn is always looking for a good roast to accompany his morning swig of Bailey’s. Luckily, if you’re a card-toting member of the Grand Old Party, own at least one gun, and supported the Iraq War when it was in vogue, you have a plethora of options. On his search to find a coffee that can’t be cucked, Cockburn initially found Black Rifle Coffee Company, which might bring with it a connotation of Ben Shapiro or National Review to any attuned Republican ear. Veteran-owned with blends named “AK-47” and “Coffee, or Die,” the company has poised itself to become any patriot’s official blend, even recently becoming the official coffee of the Dallas Cowboys. Of course, this is not without controversy, on both left and right.

Some of my readers may be unfamiliar with Athenaeus of Naucratis, a shadowy Egyptian-born Greek who floruit somewhere in the Roman Empire during the reigns of Marcus Aurelius, Commodus and Septimius Severus, i.e., around 200 AD. Athenaeus was a rhetorician, grammarian and epicure. But he is known to posterity primarily as the author of The Learned Banqueters (Δειπνοσοφισταὶ), a sprawling, miscellaneous work that touches on, well, just about everything: food, philosophy, fermentation, fabulation and many other subjects, not all of which begin with the phoneme “f.” Henry James called the three-volume Victorian novel a “loose baggy monster.” None was so loose or so baggy as Athenaeus’ compendium. There is a bit of Petronius’s Satyricon (c.

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.