Florida nation | The Spectator

Tolosa Winery: my latest discovery

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.

Calla Jones Corner

Introducing f’mores

Don’t mess with s’mores, s.v.p... unless it’s for f’mores. They are my Gallic version of the gooey, sinfully rich and highly caloric, all-American dessert that the Girl Scouts invented in the 1920s. Graham crackers are sandwiched together with marshmallows roasted over campfire embers, and chocolate. S’mores are in our genes. I have three half-French grandchildren. Two summers ago, when California closed its schools, Covid sent the family fleeing Los Angeles to Antibes for two years. French schools reopened after six months of Zoom learning while California gave way to the powerful teachers’ unions and remained closed until this past spring. Before leaving, the family came to us.

Timothy Jacobson

The decline and fall of eating out

"Upgrade” is a term I associate with flying and getting a seat in the front cabin that you don’t pay for — except perhaps with “miles” and “points,” our version of Green Stamps. Upgrade’s predecessor from the era of rail travel was “step-up,” the term used by the Pullman Company when a passenger wished a better accommodation and space was available. You paid the conductor the step-up charge (in cash), and the porter dutifully toted your bags to your new compartment. Nowadays, it is no longer necessary to travel to upgrade. Just step out for lunch and add some “protein” to your salad. Upgrade! Marketing gibberish in the restaurant world is nothing new, but today it signifies the accelerating downgrade (sorry, no refund) of the whole business.

Jane Stannus

The scoop on homemade ice cream

"Gelati, sorbetti e granite,” it said on the cover. We were in a little bookshop off the Piazza Duomo in Verona. Days of consuming Italian gelato in the hot afternoons had worked so wonderfully upon our imaginations that here we were purchasing a recipe book in a language we didn’t even understand, trying to capture a little of the magical glitter of the Italian summer before it slipped through our fingers. I still have the book — and I still don’t understand enough Italian to follow a recipe. But the pictures convey some of the original magic. Gelato al limone peers creamily out of a yellow bowl, garnished with bristling strips of lemon peel. Gelato allo Champagne is pink and melting, snuggled up to a strawberry. Sorbetto d’arancia is spooned into a hollowed-out orange.

Food & Drink