April 17th, 2008 writerspice
Just like I could never understand how equations fit together back in Grade 10, all the facts and figures of wine labeling elude me. What does it all mean? There’s the type of grape, the location and, among all that, the name of the winery (I think) and does any of it really matter?
For me, a trip to the wine store involves narrowing in on the bottles that are giving out extra AirMiles. I never ask the sales staff. I just grab a bottle and slink over to the cash register, eager to escape.
But wine has been appearing a bit more for me lately. First, an assignment to do a profile about a company building wine cellars and now, the arrival of a new release of Red, White, and Drunk All Over: A Wine Soaked Journey From Grape to Glass
, a highly readable and compassionate book about the broad world of wine by award-winning Canadian wine writer Natalie MacLean.
Divided into an assortment of adventures from vineyard-hopping in France to a friendly and indulgent wine-soaked dinner with writer Jay McInerney (of Bright Lights, Big City fame and, more recently, Bacchus & Me), the book brought me out onto dusty earth, inside the crowded aisles of a neighbourhood wine store in San Francisco, to the tables of fancy restaurants (from a sommelier’s perspective) and right inside the contentious debate of scoring wines.
Me, a veritable ‘ignoramous’ (as my mother used to say), as far as talk of wine goes.
But this is the great thing about MacLean. She wants to blast the intimidation factor around choosing wine, pairing it and even tasting it right out of the water.
Near the end of the book, during the description of a warm dinner party with friends, she gives elaborate advice on pairing wines with food (without always going for the old school white-with-white-meat and red-with-red-meat) before gently putting it back in the court of the person who will actually be drinking the stuff. “First and foremost,” she writes,”drink what you like. Think of wine like clothing: most of us choose it based on comfort, not fashion. So pick wines you like to drink, not because they get high scores.”
By the time I read this invitation to trust my own tastes, I’m already armed with lots of new knowledge and the finish of a few hearty laughs.
Throughout the book, MacLean puts herself on display to cast a more human light on her profession. She even spins a hilarious story involving choking (and, um, coughing and spraying) during a professional wine tasting. This willingness to share some of her more embarrassing moments – and to work for a day in a wine store and serve snobby diners as an undercover sommelier – nicely flavours a book that dishes out enough information to turn a trip to the wine story into fun exploration rather than agony.
And there’s even lots of advice on deciphering those elusive labels. During her day-long job in New York City’s Discovery Wines, she gives a boat load.
Some words can simply be ignored, she writes. “A novice buyer might be … seduced by fancy label terms such as reserve, proprietor’s reserve, vintner’s blend, and cellar selection. While these may sound good, they don’t necessarily mean anything at all in most New World regions. They’re not regulated…”
And others can actually help: “…the more specific the place name, the better. When a region in narrowly defined, quality guidelines and laws are more stringent, so it’s less likely that grapes from good and bad vineyards will be blended.”
These are just a few samples of a lush crop of practical wisdom and compelling narrative. For the rest, you’ll just have to buy the book. I’m way too busy putting my new knowledge into action. Bottoms up!
For more information – and a nifty wine-pairing tool – check out Natalie MacLean’s website.
Photo by Lauren Carter
Posted in Food, People, Recommended | No Comments »
September 12th, 2007 writerspice
In the town that Honda built, it isn’t surprising to see a modern subdivision just off the main street.
But drive a bit further north on this rural road in Alliston, Ontario and the whole place takes a turn into another century. The road becomes gravel, the yellow fields open up, and a scruffy Victorian farmhouse sits back from the road like an old man watching the world go by.
The home’s mailbox has seen better days. Rusty and bashed by countless baseball bats, it sits atop a post that stands like a drunken sailor tipped towards the sea. But look a little bit closer at that mailbox and you’ll see a name that can’t be erased by any amount of age and neglect. Edward Banting, it says.
Now dead, Edward willed this farmhouse to the Ontario Historical Society. It is, after all, an important place. This is where Frederick Banting was born. He spent his childhood wandering these wide open fields before venturing out in the world with the smarts to save millions and millions of people.
He earned some fame for his team’s discovery of insulin, but no money. Unlike many pharmaceutical companies, Banting sold the patent for the life-saving medicine for a single buck. He also won the Nobel Prize. The King of England turned the farmboy from Alliston into a knight. A crater on the moon carries his name.
And yet, his childhood home stands bare and empty, still rocking from the controversy surrounding its sale. Back in 2006, the Ontario Historical Society sold it to a developer for twice as much as the million dollars already offered by the town, which intended to turn it over to the Sir Frederick Banting Legacy Foundation.
Both sides have stated their cases and my casual look at each prevents me from taking sides, but what I do know is that this house is still crumbling, nearly a year after the OHS sold it with, they stated, the intention to “concentrate its efforts on the conservation and protection of the Banting Homestead”.
I wonder what the hold-up is.
“If this was in the U.S., there would be a tour guide out front, full period costumes and organized bus tours from downtown Toronto. In the U.S., if George Washington even walked by a house, or if Walt Whitman even stepped in a restaurant, there’s a plaque,” the home’s neighbour, Joe Matheson, told the Barrie Examiner last year.
As I plan a press trip to Northern Michigan, where every tavern, bookstore and old inn proclaims its attachment to Ernest Hemingway, I can’t help but think that he’s right. With this lack of care for one of our hometown heros, what will happen to this little bit of important Ontario?
Posted in People, Simcoe County | 1 Comment »
June 18th, 2007 writerspice
My uncle died on Saturday. At the end of a ceremony with my aunt, he lifted his arm to embrace her, relaxed and slipped into peace.
It was expected, it was a good death, but that doesn’t make it less difficult for those left behind.
I was not prepared for the memories that came flooding back, the realization that emerges over and over again that he is gone. That his body, bounding through that door with his grin and wit and energy, is empty now. That he’ll never return to the Island, armed with some hot sauce he wants us to try. The stroke he had two years ago took much of that away, but now he’s really disappeared.
On Saturday night, we gathered – minus my stepdad, up north, and my brother, who jumped on a plane to try to get out to Oregon in time to say goodbye, but missed him. My cousin, when she picked him up at the airport, told him how sorry she was. People don’t die on our time, he said.
On the back porch, overlooking the choppy water of the lake, we lifted bottles of Sleemans and Mill Street Stock Ale in his memory. My mom read aloud the last chapter of William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth, an account of a walk they took together through the wide open lands of Kansas. When I’m an old prune of a man on my deathbed, he told Heat-Moon, I’ll remember the longest walk I ever took, because it was the time I connected the most. We cried. We cried so hard.
I like to think that my uncle, dubbed the Venerable Tashmoo by Heat-Moon, is rambling now, traipsing effortlessly through some amazing landscape with a history he knows inside and out. Postulating, pontificating, he has an audience of admirers and the company of those he loved and lost long ago: his father, his mother, his son.
I like to think this but I don’t really believe it’s true.
What I do know is that I feel him with me. Yesterday, as I brutally scrubbed the bathtub to escape from grief, I almost heard – in light of the fact that I’m not much of a housekeeper – the joke he would have made. Geez, people should die more often, he’d say. I laughed outloud. And I felt how much I love him, again, as I always will.
***
For those who knew my uncle, a funeral service will be held in Utah on June 30th and a memorial, probably next year, will be held on Manitoulin Island.
Donations in Clive’s name can be sent to:
Michaels Bay Historical Society
c/o Ed Sagle
P.O. Box 7
Southbay Mouth, ON
P0P 1Z0.
A charitable donation receipt will be issued.
Email me at laurenc AT laurencarter.ca for more information.
Posted in Contemplations, People | 5 Comments »
April 16th, 2007 writerspice
I wish I’d known June Callwood better.
In the late ’90s, early ’00s, I crossed paths with the acclaimed writer and social activist when I worked at TERLA (The Electronic Rights Licencing Agency, sadly defunct). She was chair of the board. Every now and then she’d pop in on business or just because she was nearby.Â
She wasn’t like anyone else. There was something intense about her, focused. At the same time, though, her iron was softened by a real concern and care for human beings and a great sense of wit. There I was, a self-absorbed, angst-ridden young woman who sat outside the Executive Director’s office, unhappy in a 9 to 5 life.Â
“You must be in love,” she said to me one day, after seeing some new brightness in my face. I was sort-of in love, more like obsessed, more like gripped by an inappropriate guy. Startled, but happy to be drawn out of myself, I grinned and nodded.
Weeks later, at a board meeting, she quietly pushed the agenda toward me, pointing at Pierre Berton’s last name. I’d spelled it with a U, instead of an E. I could have been shamed but I wasn’t. She was simply educating me, clearly and compassionately, with no note of annoyance at all.
In the last years of her life, June showed everyone who exactly she was. Gracefully, with courage, she brought death back into common currency. Rather than racing to live, struggling to find the cure, climbing aboard the chemotherapy circuit, she accepted her impending death for what it was: a natural end for a woman who has lived a long and very valuable life.
“I believe in kindness,” she told George Stroumboulopoulos on The Hour, when he asked her what she believes in if she doesn’t believe in God. “Great consideration for one another. That’s what’s going to change the world.”          Â
Even though I didn’t know take the opportunity to get to know her, her spirit and kindness touched my life. I am certainly not alone. She left a huge legacy of compassion and necessary attention to the rights of the weakest.
As June herself would say, this is something to celebrate, not to mourn. Â
Posted in People | 3 Comments »
