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The blessing of a good wine shop

There are good wine shops and bad wine shops. Among their various attributes, the good ones have a broad selection of interesting wines from interesting places and — important add-on — a knowledgeable staff whose members can talk intelligently about their wares and can steer you in the right direction. The bad ones — well, you know. Their shelves are full of the stuff the distributors tell them to buy and their staff is not really sure whether Morgon is the name of the boss’s pet or a place in Beaujolais that produces good wine. My office in New York is close to an excellent wine shop called Flatiron Wine & Spirits. It is a big shop on Broadway at 18th Street and it boasts a large, expert and helpful staff.

Hannah Moore

How good is cod liver oil for mental health?

In the apocryphal Book of Tobit, Tobias is sent by his father to retrieve some silver that is owed to him. On the way Tobias is attacked by a large fish on the banks of the river Tigris. He cries out to his companion, a man named Azarias (he’s the angel Raphael in disguise), who tells him to grab it and bring it ashore. “Take out the entrails of the fish,” Raphael tells him, “and lay up his head, and his gall, and his liver for thee; for these are necessary for useful medicines.” Tobias seems skeptical. How, exactly, can the liver and gall of a fish be helpful? According to Raphael, “If a demon or evil spirit gives trouble to anyone, you make a smoke from these before the man or woman, and that person will never be troubled again.” And so it proves to be.

Ross Anderson

The espresso martini is the best cocktail template

Try making up your own cocktail. It's hard. Really hard. Cocktails are balanced chemical concoctions, delicious flavors and fun textures that result from a trick of various dancing ingredients, and usually, when you come up with a cocktail idea and try to make it — even if you’ve read great theory books — it is either too sweet or too nothing, too flat. The best way to come up with one, then, is to play on existing templates. It’s not difficult to make your own sour or spritz, but the best of the best, perhaps the most fun cocktail ever, is the espresso martini. And no cocktail is easier to play with. Many of today’s classic cocktails trace their heritage to the Prohibition Era, but the espresso martini comes from the swinging nightlife of 1980s London.

Calla Jones Corner

How now, Hausfrau?

It’s summer and very warm on the famed Café Tomaselli terrace in the heart of Salzburg. Nevertheless, I’m sipping a hot coffee and nibbling strudel (mit Schlagobers — whipped cream, of course!) with Melissa (Missy) Baldino. We are talking food, fashion and Rike & Co., the charming entrepreneur’s new business. Missy launched Rike & Co. this past October from her charming Victorian home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It may seem a bit incongruous in this age of hyperfeminism to be selling aprons and housedresses. But “Rike & Co.,” Missy says, “is all about family and being fashionable while cooking and doing housework and everything else that many of the fairer sex still enjoy doing.

Ben Domenech

The magic of Charleston’s Gin Joint

There are few greater joys in life than to wander the streets of Charleston in the evening, the light and shadow of the holy city and the sea salt in the air guiding you near the haunted past, toward cobblestones and the maze of the French Quarter. The quiet of the port pierced by the occasional gull and the stopped-up cannons at every turn bring you back to the age of Henry Timrod, when ships brought the Carolinas “Saxon steel and iron to her hands, And summer to her courts.” As a believer that liquor has seasons, in the summer I shift to good gin, and for the most inventive cocktails on the East Coast there is no comparison to Gin Joint.

Kathleen Willcox

The grapes of wealth

Are the rich different from you and me as F. Scott Fitzgerald posited in 1926? Or do they just have more money, as Ernest Hemingway allegedly retorted? Whatever the answer, they’ve certainly become wealthier. While many of us normies have been sweating fallout from inflation and skyrocketing interest rates — buying a dozen eggs, never mind a new home, requires major budget adjustments — we can take comfort that at least the 0.001 percent are doing fine. According to the latest Oxfam International Inequality Report, the five richest men in the world have doubled their fortunes since 2020 — from a measly $405 billion to $869 billion. What do they sip as they stroke their fat white purebred cats atop piles of gold? It’s wine you won’t find at a store.

Estella Shardlow

Bar-hopping, Venetian style

It’s a mist-steeped weekday morning in the Dorsoduro district. The kind when the rising lagoon licks at the old stones as if trying to devour the city, footsteps echo mournfully between peeling palazzi and even the marble statues seem to hang their heads. But not too early nor too dismal, it turns out, for wine. In Osteria Al Squero — named after Venice’s oldest boatyard, which it faces across the narrow canal — the lights are on. A huddle of Venetian men stands beneath the wooden beams with their grocery bags and small dogs, enjoying un’ombra. It means “shade” in Italian but also, here in the Veneto, a small glass of vino.

Food & Drink