Now what? | The Spectator

Two modest but delightful wines

According to Tennyson, ‘in the spring, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love’. Be that as it trochee, in the autumn a man of any legal age abandons rosé and moves on to Cabernet. If he is broadminded, he also makes a spot in his heart for Chablis, which I’ll come to in a moment. First, some anthropological, or perhaps I mean ethological, news. A friend recently passed along a slender but improving book called Wine: the Source of Civilization. Written by John J. Mahoney, a ‘certified wine educator’, it is full of edifying revelations. Right at the beginning, we have this bulletin: ‘Man did not settle from nomadic travels to build cities and civilization, and then develop wine.

Calla Jones Corner

Mums the word

In early October I bought three chrysanthemum plants to brighten my front doorstep during the gloomy days here in Montecito, California. The outdoor plant stand at Trader Joe’s, overflowing with a panoply of colored mums, reminded me how I love seeing French flair flourish when decorating with these seasonal blossoms. How, for a decade, I’ve been sharing and creating recipes with my daughter, a wine executive, with chrysanthemum flowers from her local organic épicerie and leaves discovered in a Burgundian marché. In Burgundy, as in the rest of France, mums are displayed for Toussaint (All Saints’ Day) on November 1, and for Armistice Day, to mark the end of World War One.

Timothy Jacobson

In defense of the English original sandwich

Hannah Moore’s June Spectator piece on sandwiches made me hungry. Then it made me think. Ms Moore makes a sound distinction between modern Britain’s plastic-boxed, triangular ‘sandwich’ and the custom-made, piled-high, endlessly imitated, seldom-matched product of a good New York or Chicago delicatessen. Why, one wonders, do the Brits put up with it? Landing in countless foreign ports over the years, for business or pleasure, I’ve always wondered, pretty much before wondering about anything else, ‘What’s the food like?’ Almost always, I’ve liked what it was like. In the age of real borders and undiluted ethnicities, food was a powerful expression of locality.

Joe Rogers

Drinking with James Bond

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.

Food & Drink