Food & Wine August 2022

2021 TIBERIO CERASUOLO D’ABRUZZO ($25) Toss out your pale pink Provençal rosés, please. This transparently scarlet wine from Cristiana Tiberio, a star in Italy’s Abruzzo region, makes most rosés seem anemic and bland. A traditional style in the region, it’s filled with citrus and wild strawberry flavors. I plan to drink it all month long. THACKREY & CO. PLEIADES XXVIII EDITION ($27) Sean Thackrey, the iconoclastic Bolinas-based winemaker who created this wine, passed away in May, too young at 79. Thackrey was a brilliant thinker, and his remarkable wines—like this luscious, alluring nonvintage Rhône-style blend—remain as a memory to his talents. 2019 RAMEY WINE CELLARS RITCHIE VINEYARD CHARDONNAY ($75) I poured several older vintages of this single-vineyard California white at the new Healdsburg Wine & Food Experience in May. The 2005 was a testimony to…

Keep It Simple WHEN I GROW UP, I’m going to build the outdoor kitchen of my dreams, the one that I’ve sketched in notebooks dozens of times. For now, the backyard patio will suffice. Many nights this summer, you’ll find me out there cooking over a basic propane burner. Much though I love my grills and outdoor pizza oven, the propane burner has turned out to be the most versatile outdoor gear I own and the one I recommend the most. I got my first one 20 years ago to deep-fry Thanksgiving turkeys and learned about its utility over time. The ring burner on my current four-legged stainless steel model cranks up to 59,000 BTUs. That kind of output quickly brings a tall pot of water to a boil for my Proper…

FOR THOSE OF US whose hosting game might be feeling a little rusty after a couple of years of social distancing, a new breed of party planning service has got your back. Whether you need help to pull together a sit-down dinner party for six or extend an open invitation for drinks and graze-as-you-may snacks for 20, these companies make menu planning, decorating, and shopping for ingredients and wines not only feel like a breeze, but also extremely fun. Read on for a few of our favorites. AT YOUR SERVICE PLAN Brenna Gilbert launched Feste (lovefeste.com) last year when she saw a huge gap in the party planning industry, with hosts having to choose between an inexpensive “peck and find” approach via online retailers or shelling out for a full-service planner. “We want…

AS A CHILD, I was always afraid of the bowl of ambiguous yellow sauce camped at the end of our dinner table. It was sour and spicy, a little fruity and a lot funky; my elementary-aged palate struggled to decipher its complexity. The sauce is amba, a condiment made of pickled mango and pungent spices. And nowadays, I can’t get enough of it. Amba is a diaspora food that tells the story of the Jews of Iraq. Iraq was once home to the oldest and largest population of Jews in the world; there have been recorded populations since 586 B.C., during Babylonian times. Now, there are fewer than five Jews. My obsessively recorded family history in Iraq dates back over 2,500 years, since the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem.…

IF YOU’VE SPENT TIME with another human over the course of the past few summers, you’ve probably come into contact with a hard seltzer. The appeal has layers: They tend to be relatively low in alcohol; live in park-, picnic-, and boat-friendly canned packaging; and, perhaps most importantly, come in flavors and carbonation levels that easily cater to cider, beer, and soda lovers alike. While there’s constant innovation in the hard seltzer space, there are also cans that haven’t earned the right to live in your cooler. We tasted as many as we could get our hands on so you don’t have to. Here are eight brands we recommend. AMASS SUN SIGN Sun Sign, from master distiller and Amass founder Morgan McLachlan, is like a Creamsicle in a can, without being overly…

I’VE KEPT A GUEST BOOK ever since I started throwing dinner parties at home in New York City 13 years ago. The dining table in that first apartment may have been small—it was my coffee table, actually, and my chairs were backless and ground-level (i.e., they were the floor)—but there was always a guest book. Something about the term “guest book” makes it sound stuffy, but I assure you that, unlike grape shears or a cake breaker, guest books deserve a place in this century. My guest book isn’t fancy—it’s paperback, not leather-bound, and there’s certainly no stand for it—and I don’t require that my guests write anything particularly meaningful in it. In fact, they don’t have to write anything at all: signatures, drawings, stickers, favorite quotes, lewd poems … All of…