Table of contents for September 2022 in Food & Wine

2020 KETTMEIR PINOT BIANCO ($22) This bright, crisp, lightly floral white from Alto Adige was a hit at my house this summer, and I intend to keep drinking it into the fall. It’s perfect for an herb-roasted chicken, a big green salad with lettuces from the farmers market, or just sitting outside on a balmy evening. 2020 LA GRANGE TIPHAINE NOUVEAU NEZ ($25) On a trip to Montlouis, one of the Loire Valley’s smallest wine regions, this past July, I drank more than one glass—hey, it was really hot!—of this lively pét-nat from La Grange Tiphaine’s Damien and Coralie Delecheneau. It will be just as refreshing as the weather slowly grows cooler, too. 2020 DOMAINE HUET LE HAUT-LIEU VOUVRAY SEC ($40) Huet is one of the great domaines of…

A MEMBER OF THAT ALL-STAR TEAM OF NBA PLAYERS who love wine, CJ McCollum wasn’t satisfied with just collecting bottles. In 2020, he launched his own McCollum Heritage 91 label, coming out with a 2018 Chehalem Mountains Pinot Noir from Oregon’s Willamette Valley that sold out faster than a Finals game. The name pays homage to his family name and to his own vintage year—McCollum was born in 1991. McCollum was introduced to wine in his early twenties by his then girlfriend, now wife, Elise, but then the Portland Trail Blazers drafted him, putting his second career in motion. “My fortuitous move to one of the top wine regions in the U.S. took my existing passion for—and knowledge of—wine to new heights,” McCollum says. The basketball star (who now…

YOU KNOW THE EXPRESSION you eat with your eyes first? It never felt truer to me than when I first set eyes on the Figs ’n’ Cream dessert special at Beit Rima in San Francisco. It’s a simple dish, but striking: a geometric bloom of fresh figs laid atop a layer of labneh and topped with carob molasses, olive oil, toasted sesame seeds and hazelnuts, and a shower of black pepper. Imagine my delight when I learned it tastes as good as it looks. “This is a dish we do every year when figs are in season, using figs from a local farm with amazing 30-year-old organic fig trees,” says Samir Mogannam, chef and owner of Beit Rima. “Our customers go crazy for this dish every summer. It never gets…

WE’VE COME A LONG WAY from the saketini. When Kenta Goto was bartending in New York City in the aughts, he decided that the formerly trendy sake-and-cucumber concoction needed an upgrade. What if, instead, drinks actually highlighted the beauty of Japanese ingredients? “I thought, ‘Somebody needs to do something,’” he says. “I started feeling I should be the one.” Today, he’s not the only one. The types of cocktails he serves at Manhattan’s Bar Goto and Brooklyn’s Bar Goto Niban have become popular, while American mixologists have started cribbing ideas from Tokyo sipping trips. And Japanese-born bartenders are introducing “ingredients special in our culture,” says Julia Momosé, owner of Chicago’s Kumiko and author of last year’s The Way of the Cocktail: Japanese Traditions, Techniques & Recipes. With ever more Japanese…

Now That’s Rich ATTENTION, SHOPPERS: Let’s talk about those ingredients in your grocery cart. Unless you’re a gazillionaire, you’ve been feeling the effects of inflation. That “whole paycheck” quip about Whole Foods prices hits a little different now, with the cost of staples like chicken, eggs, and milk up as much as 33% over last year, as of this writing. For the first time, I’ve been talking to my daughters about the true cost of food, and we’re becoming even more discerning about which restaurants we support. And while Food & Wine has never been a budget cooking magazine, we always try to give you good weight, to borrow a term from the writer John McPhee. We work to ensure every page—every recipe, cooking tip, wine recommendation, and travel itinerary—counts.…

GATEWAY CASSOULET THE EPITOME OF SLOW FOOD, cassoulet is a marriage of rustic yet refined flavors craftily layered and melded together into the ultimate comforting pot of garlicky white beans, snappy pork sausage, and meltingly tender duck confit. Most cooks endure the tantalizing aromas of braised meats and fragrant herbs for an agonizing two or three days as the dish is prepared, but this recipe takes you from soaking beans to scooping into the pork-laden mahogany crust all in a single day, without compromising flavor or technique. Let this be your gateway into Southern French cooking. Sylvie Bigar, author of Cassoulet Confessions: Food, France, Family and the Stew That Saved My Soul, traveled to the South of France to report on the significance of this ancestral meat-and-bean stew. “I couldn’t…

AT MY FIRST WINE EDUCATION CLASS, the instructor issued a mandate: Dessert wine must always be sweeter than the dessert itself. I don’t like cloyingly sweet wines, nor do I like sugary desserts, so for many years, I took a pass on these wines and their pairings. As wine lists have become more wide-ranging and exploratory, I began to suspect I was missing out by ignoring an entire category of wine. But what finally turned me around was Wine Style, the latest cookbook from wine expert Kate Leahy, where Leahy shares recipes designed to pair with dessert wine. She notes that while some dessert wines are sweet, others are more tart, reminiscent of “citrus zests, toasted nuts, spices and wildflowers, all bathed in honey and acidity.” Here, she shares two…

SAN FRANCISCO BY CAREY JONES IT’S A RARE WARM AFTERNOON in the usually fog-cloaked Outer Sunset, and at Palm City (palmcitysf.com), blocks from the Pacific, the party has spilled onto the street. It seems like half the neighborhood has come out to sip aromatic Blaufränkisch rosé on the sidewalk. Wine bars aren’t new to San Francisco, but in 2022, they’ve shaken off any reputation of stuffy sameness. Today, they’re some of the most vibrant, downright fun bars in a city with no shortage of competition. Palm City is a prime example. It launched in April 2020 as a takeout window serving bottles and hoagies. The indulgent sandwiches and well-chosen wines struck a chord in early pandemic–era San Francisco, attracting a loyal following. Today, it’s firing on all cylinders with a robust…

“I PAID A LOT OF BRIBES TO LEARN, TO BE HONEST WITH YOU,” Chintan Pandya, chef-partner of several excellent Indian restaurants in New York City, tells me with a look of bemusement. We’re in the kitchen at Dhamaka, his restaurant of provincial cuisine dubbed “unapologetic Indian,” which looks out on bustling Delancey Street in the Lower East Side. The chef drops a handful of curry leaves in a small aluminum pot containing hot coconut oil and just-popped mustard seeds. The curry leaves sizzle-dance and turn a shade of green that’s nearly black. He sets the pot aside so we can talk about curries—perhaps the world’s most simultaneously controversial and widely beloved foods. “First and foremost, I think it’s a British term. We use the word kari in different ways and…

“Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.”—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD In the 2013 film The Great Gatsby, there’s a scene where Jay Gatsby, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, raises a coupe glass of Champagne, looking right at the camera, while fireworks explode around him. The rounded, short coupe has long been the Champagne glass of choice for society’s elite, whether Gatsby or Marilyn Monroe. There’s a legend that the coupe was modeled after the breast of Marie Antoinette or Helen of Troy, but that myth has been debunked, as has another: that Dom Pérignon designed the glass in 17th-century England. The more likely story? After a 1621 decree by King James I banning wood-burning ovens, Brits began using hotter-burning fuels, yielding stronger, sturdier glass. By…

SINCE THE TIME humans first started drinking wine (nearly 8,000 years ago), they’ve had to figure out how to store it. When I started my very small collection of wine (er, two years ago), I searched for space-efficient storage methods that would keep my wine cool and happy—and hopefully safer than sitting on top of my fridge in my tiny, temperature-volatile New York apartment. I was frustrated; even the smallest wine fridges were too big. So I did as the Romans did and turned to stone to store my wine. In ancient times, wine was most often stored in large ceramic vessels. The Greeks called the vessel an amphora, the Romans a dolium, and they were made of fired clay. Producers would nestle these wine-filled vessels into the ground,…

Celebrity-affiliated wines and spirits can be a hit-or-miss proposition. At their worst, they’re little more than vanity projects and questionable brand extensions. But when done right—with care, expertise, and passion—the results can be fantastic. Just look at Inglenook, which was purchased by Francis Ford Coppola in 1975 in a decrepit state. Today, nearly half a century later, it’s considered to be among the top tier of Napa Valley producers. These days, it seems as if every other week heralds the arrival of a new bottle from a well-known actor, musician, or reality star that you just have to taste. But one question always remains: Which ones are worth your money? Well, we’ve done the hard work for you. After tasting more celeb-affiliated wines and spirits than we can count, we…

“This Nero d’Avola from Martha Stoumen is delightful, especially with a good chill, which brings out the bright fruit and smoked tomato on the nose, making it an ideal pairing with zingy and rich amatriciana.”—ARJAV EZEKIEL, BIRDIE’S, AUSTIN Rigatoni Amatriciana TOTAL 55 MIN; SERVES 4 Amatriciana sauce typically calls for cured pork, traditionally guanciale. Here, we’ve substituted fatty pancetta for easier sourcing. It comes together with tomatoes, pecorino Romano cheese, sweet onion, and crushed red pepper to make a rich, jammy, pleasantly spicy sauce. This is a deeply flavorful dinner that can be made in under an hour, making it a perfect weeknight recipe. 2 Tbsp. olive oil1 medium-size (9-oz.) yellow onion, finely chopped (about 1½ cups)1 (4-oz.) pkg. chopped pancetta¼ tsp. crushed red pepper1 (28-oz.) can whole plum tomatoes¼…

THERE’S NO QUESTION that grape growers and winemakers—and wine lovers, for that matter—lean toward concern for the environment. Sustainable viticulture, despite the fuzzy nature of that term, is almost de rigueur; the number of wineries growing grapes organically increases every year; and more rigorous approaches like biodynamic and regenerative agriculture are more popular than ever, too. The problem for wine buyers is that wine labels are utterly baffling in this regard. The U.S., E.U., Australia, and practically everywhere else all have different regulations about what “organic” means; there are dozens of different certifications and programs for sustainability and environmental friendliness of one kind or another; and, of course, there are categories like “clean” wine, which are more marketing plays than specific winemaking philosophies. Here is a little distilled clarification on…