Oct 23 2009
“Eat Local, drink European”
sip & quip: “eat local, drink european”
Eric Asimov, NY Times wine columnist, takes on the contemporary dilemma of what to drink with the locally-sourced cuisine. Beyond issues of style — Italian wines with Italian food — is it hypocritical to prefer european wines with locally farmed foods? Is wine the same as a peach? What about the environmental/energy concerns?
“At many restaurants in the Bay Area, the dedication to using local ingredients does not extend to the wine list. …A surprising number of Bay Area restaurants offer wine lists dominated by European bottles. …it’s a little hypocritical, but we also recognize there’s a certain style and authenticity that you can’t get anywhere else.”
“Not everybody sees wine in the same light as ingredients like produce or meat. Wine is different from a carrot or a peach. .. once the grapes are crushed, fermented, aged and bottled, the wine will not lose its freshness or succulence if carefully shipped.”
“Even though local and regional has become such an important buzzword for buying and eating, I don’t know that it necessarily extends to wines,” said Dan Barber, the chef and an owner of the Blue Hill restaurants in New York, an ardent proponent of sustainable agriculture.”
“Of course, shipping wine has other costs, namely energy. Tyler Colman, a writer and blogger (drvino.com), has studied the cost of greenhouse gas emissions in the wine trade. He has found, surprisingly, that for wine consumers in New York, it’s more environmentally sound to drink Bordeaux than Napa Valley cabernet because it’s far more efficient to transport Bordeaux by container ship than it is to truck in the California wine.”
VINTAGES celebrates the food-wine connection, and in our experience, artisanal wines of Europe make more congenial dinner partners than wines from hotter new world climes. Small family wineries that produce modestly priced wines are still abundant in europe, while large companies with the efficiencies of mass-production dominate the new world scene. What choices do you make?
