Food & Wine December 2019

2018 DOMÄNE WACHAU TERRASSEN GRÜNER VELTLINER FEDERSPIEL ($18) Even in the warmest year that Austria’s Wachau has seen since 1873, this lightly peppery white has plenty of fresh zest coupled with ripe melon fruit. Buy a case, because it’s a perfect holiday party pour. 2015 TRIENNES SAINT AUGUSTE ($19) Slow-roast a pork shoulder and open a bottle of this juicy Cabernet-Syrah blend. The work of two Burgundy superstars (Domaine Dujac’s Jacques Seysses and Domaine de la Romanée-Conti’s Aubert de Villaine) who jointly invested in a Provence property, it’s a bargain. 2016 ADELAIDA SIGNATURE VIKING ESTATE VINEYARD CABERNET SAUVIGNON ($100) Surely someone you know deserves an expensive (and terrific) bottle of red? Winemaker Jeremy Weintraub’s impressive estate Cabernet is full of intense black currant fruit—lusciously rich, elegant, and balanced.…

How We Holiday WHAT IS LOVE IN THE MONTH OF DECEMBER? How about a bowl of perfectly supremed Ruby Red grapefruit chilling in the refrigerator for breakfast? Or fat and flaky biscuits, warm and shiny with melted butter? Sometimes love is the unapologetically retro platters of sausage balls, or cheese balls, or almond snowballs dusted with powdered sugar on the kitchen counter. Or it’s the bleeding, rare slices of smoked beef tenderloin with horseradish crème fraîche. It most certainly is guinea hen braising in a bath of Dijon mustard, white wine, and country ham–flavored stock with a pot of wild rice on the back burner ready to report for sopping duty. Love is a nightly helping of oysters, morale-boosting cook’s snacks slurped over the sink, plus one proper shrimp cocktail with…

IN THE RESTAURANT BUSINESS, many spend their waking hours hard at work in a kitchen or dining room. But during a time of year that’s about spending quality time with family and loved ones, that mandate can prove to be a real challenge. That’s why this month, we turned to some of our favorite chefs and restaurateurs to ask how they take a beat to celebrate, reflect, and care for their teams during the busiest (and sometimes most stressful) time of the year. “We celebrate with 12 days of cookies for staff meal, leading up to Christmas. Our pastry chef also decorates the restaurant with gingerbread. This year she made a lighthouse, complete with oyster boats!”—JULIA SULLIVAN (HENRIETTA RED, NASHVILLE)“Last year, we booked a private studio and got tattoos, had a…

SHINE BRIGHT RAISE A GLASS 1. GABRIEL-GLAS WINE GLASS Femi Oyediran, co-owner of Graft Wine Shop in Charleston, reminds us of the importance of great stemware. He recommends these lightweight glasses, the same ones they use at Graft, for their durability and versatile shape. ($31, gabriel-glasinternational.com) 2. MAZAMA WARES DECANTER AND CARAFE Mazama’s glassware first caught our eye at Portland, Oregon, cocktail hot spot The Solo Club, and since then, we’ve reached for their handblown soda-lime glass carafes and decanters for all our drink-serving needs, from water to wine. ($165, tannergoods.com) 3. PIENZA 7.5 OZ. TUMBLERS The brother-sister team at Pienza, in Tuscany, whose family has run a traditional glassblowing studio for generations, make Il Buco’s colorful signature drinkware collection. ($32, ilbuco.com) SET THE TABLE 1. COLLEPINO TWISTED CANDLES Called duplero, from the Latin duplex, meaning double, these twisted beeswax…

A COOKBOOK CAN BE A KEEPSAKE—a heritage conveyed through recipes, a benchmark treatise on the cuisine of a region or culture—and if you think of those we’ve continued to love well beyond their publication dates, they tend to have been written by women: Madhur Jaffrey, Diana Kennedy, Joyce Chen, Julia Child, Anissa Helou, Julie Sahni, Elizabeth David, Dorie Greenspan, Marcella Hazan, Jessica B. Harris, Claudia Roden. The next generation of matriarchs is now carrying on that tradition in their own right, and their cookbooks, the heirlooms of the future, are ripe for the giving. There’s journalist Toni Tipton-Martin, who has just published the comprehensive Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking, or Calcutta-born chef Asma Khan of Darjeeling Express in London, whose Asma’s Indian Kitchen is a celebration…

I FIRST CAME TO KNOW the Italian specialty food importer Beatrice Ughi while fishing for anchovies under a dome of stars somewhere off Italy’s Amalfi Coast. I’d come on Beatrice’s invitation to meet the manufacturers of a Mediterranean sauce called colatura. She’d wanted to investigate how her producer rendered the stuff, drip by drip, over the course of two years from the flesh of fish that range annually from Sicily up to Salerno. We’d spent the morning interrogating the owner of the Nettuno company in the village of Cetara and tasted his colatura’s use in a range of different dishes prepared by Pasquale Torrente in his restaurant Al Convento. But this wasn’t enough for Beatrice. Come evening, she convinced a burly, unibrowed fisherman, who did the actual fishing for Nettuno,…