The apathy vote | The Spectator

Why dry Sauternes are the next big thing

It is my sense that the popularity of sweet wines like Sauternes, Port, Tokaji and all the German Auslese wines is on the upswing. I am here to tell you about the Next Big Thing: dry Sauternes. Yes, that’s right: dry Sauternes. The supersnazzy, superexpensive Château d’Yquem is the only Sauternes to boast the designation “Premier Cru Supérieur” from the 1855 classification of Bordeaux wines. That exclusive label — along with the probably apocryphal but oft-repeated story that Michel de Montaigne, born Michel Eyquem, had something to do with the property — helps account for its astronomical price. But Yquem has been making a blanc sec since 1959.

Mary Kate Skehan

The best cooking podcasts

There comes a time in every home cook’s life when she is separated from her craft. This may be due to illness, incapacity, repairs, renovations or, worstof all, moving house. This month, I moved from Texas to Pennsylvania. Between packing up my utensils and appliances, waiting for the moving truck to make its halting way across the nation, and finally unpacking and reorganizing my tools, I lost my kitchen for four weeks. But benched cooks like mehave a surprisingly satisfying alternative: cooking podcasts. The first podcast I tried is most similar to traditional cooking shows: Food 52’s Play Me a Recipe. Chefs and cookbook authors host episodes in which they introduce a favorite recipe and talk through its ingredients and method, encouraging listeners to pause and rewind as needed.

Kathleen Willcox

Champagne and America is a love story without end

From the beginning, Champagne has never been just a drink, or a region: it’s a celebration, an occasion, a trophy, a reward; a symbol of joyful decadence and glamorous debauchery; the overflowing drink of the American Dream. In short, it’s a boozy cheat sheet for the zeitgeist and the anxieties and dreams of the people who sip it. And, for the past seventy-five years or so, that zeitgeist has been driven by the United States. “American culture pervades everything,” says Christian Holthausen, a dual French-American citizen and founder of the Paris-based Champagne consulting firm Westbrook Marketing Partners. “Driving through Paris just now, I saw a Coca-Cola machine on one street, and a billboard for Apple on the next.

Timothy Jacobson

The joy of baking your own bread

Flour furnishes most everyone’s kitchen. If you’re a baker or breadmaker, you will probably have several five-pound bags of it in the pantry alongside the yeast. If you don’t bake or don’t bake much, you will probably have at least a cup or two of it in the canister on the kitchen counter for thickening the gravy, frying the chicken or making the roux. Most likely, most of it will have come from wheat. Wheat has been with mankind for 10,000 years or so and was first domesticated somewhere in the Fertile Crescent, or, as our old geographies used to say, Mesopotamia, which also, it was hinted, was the neighborhood of the Garden of Eden. Wheat’s genetic diversity made it adaptable to a variety of climes and continents.

Margaret Mitchell

The Office Lounge is everything a Texas bar should be

The downtown streets of Georgetown, Texas, are a grid of pastel storefronts and Victorian architecture, centering around the domed and columned Williamson County Courthouse (named after the judge known as “Three-Legged Willie”). America’s fastest-growing city looks like a time capsule from the old Southwest. But thirty miles south, Austin — or “Silicon Hills” — is undergoing a tech boom. Microsoft, Musk’s gigafactory and a host of tech startups have unleashed a flood of yuppie commuters into Austin’s surroundings, rapidly transforming not just Georgetown, but what we think of as quintessentially Texan. Rodeos, the Alamo, cowboys and outlaws — will we one day think instead of smartwatches and Bill Gates? I doubt it.

Food & Drink