Food and Drink

It was nine on a Monday morning, and whereas my fellow commuters were heading to the office, or their classrooms or a lecture hall, I was on my way to Parcafé in the Dorchester Hotel, right next to London’s bougie shopping district, Mayfair. It’s a place to buy Ferraris and Bugattis and shop at the Row and Goyard and be passed by an endless convoy of black Rolls-Royce SUVs. Waiting for me at the hotel would be a man with a little golden cup, containing a freshly brewed portion of mankind’s favorite black nectar. And his is the best, uncut stuff on the market. The man is Amir Gehl, founder and CEO of Difference Coffee, which sources some of the best, rarest coffee beans in the world.

In the summer of 2020, as impatience with quarantine and the urge to get out of town gradually displaced fears of Covid, a joke circulated on Hungarian social media about Lake Balaton, a favorite destination for domestic holidaygoers. The post-quarantine stampede had driven up prices at the lake to such an extent, the joke went, that penny-pinching travelers should consider less expensive destinations, such as Monaco or the French Riviera. Until recently, Balaton had always been the inexpensive Hungarian alternative to pricier (and, during the Cold War, politically restricted) foreign getaways.

One of the great stories in the world of wine over the last half century is the rebirth of Greek wine. I say “rebirth” because wine has been an inextricable part of the story of Greece from time immemorial. What would Plato’s Symposium — literally “drinking party” — be without wine? And the story of Greek wine goes back much further than that. According to experts, wine grapes have been cultivated in Greece from about 6000 BC. Anyone who has read Homer recalls his frequent deployment of the epithet “οἶνοψ πόντος.” That is usually translated as “wine-dark sea,” though it literally means “wine-faced” or “wine-eyed” (οἶνος + ὄψις) sea. What color do you suppose “wine-dark” is?

Some undetermined time in the long past, possibly in 1890s Montana, a miner had finished a long and tiring day and needed a refreshing beer. But after aparticularly taxing shift, a beer wasn’t going to cut it alone. He asked the barman for a shot of whisky as well — and washed it down with his pint. It’s hard to call the boilermaker a cocktail, and inventing one certainly wasn’t on the mind of our tired protagonist. To this day, mixing beer and spirits is not generally the province of mixologists; it’s a combination more often favored by partygoers looking to get slammed as entertainingly and quickly as possible.

What do you suppose the grandest wine was in the early 1800s? The wine that populated the sideboards and dining tables of the courts and palaces of Europe? That consoled Napoleon as he moldered on St. Helena? That John Adams judged among “the most delicious in the world?” That Baudelaire apostrophized along with his lover’s lips in Les Fleurs du Mal? That Queen Victoria quaffed nightly after dinner as a digestif? That Hugh Johnson says many kings and consorts preferred to Yquem, Tokay or Madeira? If you said “Constantia, the sweet wine from the eponymous town southeast of Cape Town,” go to the head of the class and collect a golden star reminiscent of the honey-colored, late-harvest Muscat Blanc à Petits Grains that today makes up the wine.