Tribune Food: Wine, Wine, WTF


Today’s headlining story is the heartwarming tale of a little backwater country with a dream of making beautiful wine. Kidding! It’s about Russia, who up until recently produced bottles of wine the same way East Germany produced women’s olympic weightlifting champions: brute force, lots of government oversight, and little to no regard for the principles of biology. In the past few years, though, an influx of French and Australian winemakers (hired at the behest of the country’s very wealthy overlords) have started applying global winemaking standards to Russia’s myriad vineyards. A certain M. Duseigneur, in particular, is raising the bar, and his vineyard is intriguingly profiled.

• Speaking of fermented grapes, Bucktown’s getting a new wine shop, called Red & White. Trendy neighborhood? Check. Inexpensive bottles? Check. Proprietor with an interest in carpentry? Check. “Biodynamic” this and that? Check and check.

• Chinese five-spice powder! It’s a neat seasoning! No really, we are actually quite big fans of this combo of clove, cinnamon, anise, fennel, ginger, and whathaveyou. We put it in shortbread.

• Bill Daley gives us a mouthwatering recipe for chipotle brats topped with the double-rouge combination of red peppers and red onions, all grilled. It is not remotely in the lunchtime ballpark right now and yet we are officially obsessing over this.

• Our man Christopher Borrelli profiles artisan gelato-maker Jessie Oloroso, WHICH HE HAS TOTALLY DONE BEFORE. Like, the exact same article. We were so struck by this that we ran out and looked at a paper copy of the Tribune (seriously) and there it is — section 7, page 4, lower corner. Expliquenme, los Tribunos: what is up with this?

[Photo: Vineyards in Gelendzhik, via Lyubov’s Flickr]

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Tribune Food: Wine, Wine, WTF