Every one and their mom is having a rosé wine tasting this week. Its almost like the release of every year’s Beaujolais nouveau on exactly the third Thursday of November. Luckily for me though, I enjoy rosés far far more than I’ve ever taken to a Beaujolais nouveau (granted, I’ve only tried the cheapest kind).

So in honor of wine consumerism, a group of us headed down to our ecletic neighborhood wine store, Crush, to sample some wares in their annual War of the Rosés. There was a lively and energetic crowd, consisting mainly of young female Midtown drones come to drown out their petty sorrows with free wine (ok, I may have made the backdrop up, but forgive me a mite of jealousy for our salary differential). But our group did stand out a bit; instead of the collared shirt, black skirt and office pumps, I was sporting a bright red tshirt depicting squirrel violence, one of our group had a blue tubetop, the last one was wearing sneakers and brought a JanSport backpack. But hey, we’re used to it, dressing like students in the Upper East Side means you get used to shopkeepers looking either 1) suspiciously or 2) disdainfully at you.

One fact still remained though; none of us knew much about wine. We understood the concept behind roses. We knew they tend to be cheap, low quality wines, meant for being quaffed in copious quantities with a picnic basket full of food. Finally, we knew… or at least, thought, they were supposed to be light and fruity and all the other wonderful easy characteristics of a white zinfandel that didn’t just suck.

Well. We certainly didn’t get that.

Our first few glasses were disappointing; perhaps we were just expecting the wrong thing. Most of us enjoy dry wines, but… not in our roses. We moved on quickly to the next table, where upon my first sniff, I exclaimed.

“Buttered popcorn!”
“What? Are you crazy?”
“No! It’s hot buttered popcorn, theatre-style!”
“Huh… well I guess I can kind of see that.”

I quickly lost this good will though, after exclaiming “Buttered popcorn!!” for each of the next 3 wines.

“Dandan. Are you sure you’re not just hungry??”

We moved on, tried a few inoffensive, but unremarkable wines, none of which had that light fruitiness that we had come to associate with roses after years of acclimation. Spotting a couple bottles of sparkling rose in the corner, and remembering the wonders of the FRV 100 we had tried a couple weeks ago, we planted ourselves in front of the sparkly and readied ourselves for magnificence.

I took the first sniff, of the Strohmeier 2000 Schilcher Sekt Reserve we were served.

Hesitation. “Wasabi. Definitely. Wasabi.”

The other two girls stared at me like I had grown two heads, one of which was made out of green horseradish.

“No, seriously! Wasabi!”

They sniffed. Tasted. Mouths dropped open.

J: “This is… this is like an entire sushi meal in one.”
Me: “Isn’t it?! Isn’t it?! There’s that salty miso soup at the start, an intense buttery tuna belly in the middle, and then the long wasabi/soy sauce finish.”
A: “Crazy! You’re right! This is crazy!”

How could one sip of wine, hell, one sip of rose, taste of an entire sushi entree? I have no idea. There’s black magic in this. None of us could decide whether or not we actually loved it, but the novelty factor was so strong, it didn’t even matter. Hell, I could just skip dinner and drink a glass of this. It’s Violet Beauregarde from Charlie & the Chocolate Factory all over again!
Unfortunately, it was also the most expensive wine, knocking in at $26.99 with the discount for the day of wine tasting (normally $29.99). Even if a whole bottle would’ve ended up being too much weird wine, it would’ve been worth the cost just to videotape your friends faces as they try the wine. This is not your grandmother’s rose.

All in all, not a bad expenditure of a Thirsty Thursday hour. Even though we ended up not buying anything, the experience truly broadened our expansions in terms on roses (one friend couldn’t believe the geographical diversity represented by the wines that night — and here we thought roses only came from California).

Wines we tried at Crush
Jean-Paul “Big Boy” Brun’s 2007 Rosé d’Folie (Made from Gamay in Beaujolais)
“Cool Guy” Copain’s 2007 Le Printemps Rosé (Pinot Noir from California)
Gérard Boulay’s 2007 Sancerre “Sacrificer” Rosé (Pinot Noir from Sancerre)
“The Commander” Commanderie de Peyrassol 2007 Rosé (Syrah from Provence)
“The Ferocious” Fenouillet 2007 Rosé (Syrah from Rhone)
Lauverjat “Loverboy” 2007 Sancerre Rosé (Pinot Noir from Sancerre)
“Lean and mean” Lafond 2007 Tavel Rosé (Grenache from Provence)
Triennes “Go ahead and Try Me” 2007 Rosé (Cinsault from Provence)
Jules “Rules” 2007 Rosé (Grenache from Provence)
Palmina “You’re Mine-A” 2007 Botasea Rosé (Dolcetto and Nebbiolo from California)
Stringtown “Meantown” 2007 Rosé (Grenache from California)
“Strong arm” Strohmeier NV Schilcher Sekt (Sparkling Blauer Wildbacher from Austria)
“Vintage Strong arm” Strohmeier 2000 Schilcher Sekt (Sparkling Blauer Wildbacher
from Austria) (our favorite, and unfortunately, apparently only available from Crush while in the US).

Rejoice, ye humble supplicants kneeling at the foot of the Beer Gods; our prayers have been answered!

Take MenuPages, add beer, you get BeerMenus.com, or a rather comprehensive listing of bars & restaurants and their respective beer menus, currently only available in New York (but of course). A quick browse through the site yielded many fruits; I finally know where I can find that delicious amazing nectar known as Dogfish 120 (and for only $7/bottle? I feel like that’s got to be some kind of typo… maybe a little bit of investigative journalism is at hand? Oh the depths I’d go to for the Truth and a bottle of Dogfish), and there’s apparently a free beer & … oysters? tasting on May 6th at Blind Tiger Ale House. Well sir, you’ve sold me twice - beer & oysters rank right up there with oxygen in my book.
On a more disappointing note, the uptown offerings seems to be fairly meager. A walk through my neighborhood shows 8 restaurants/bars. That’s at least 30x that existing up here. Conspicuously missing is the UES beer mecca of David Copperfield’s (if 30 taps & 100+ bottles doesn’t count, then nothing does).

Still, a solid/clean site that just launched 2 days ago — looking forward to seeing this site become a real go-to spot for beer in the city. In retrospect, it’s quite amazing that this particular Web 2.0 niche took so long before being filled…!

Having recently acquired a $5 gift card, I stepped into a Starbucks yesterday - for the first time in a while (yay for living in a city where the number of small independent coffee shops actually outnumber the chains). I was downtown, at Astor Place, and wanted to sit down to read for a bit. After nearly backing out after seeing the swarm of NYU students buzzing around the place, I decided the line was moving fast enough for me to pick up a caramel apple cider — pretty much the only drink I get there anymore, since I no longer have that sweet tooth for frappuccinos that my 15 year old self had and I don’t have a high opinion of their coffee, tea, or cappuccino. As I was idly looking at the menu overhead, I noticed the board looked… strange.

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As the New York Times reported today… apparently eggs are back! Pink ladies, flips, fizzes. What perfect timing — right after I started lamenting that the cream sherry flips and gin fizzes I’ve been enjoying at home would be impossible to find at bars!

 ”Suddenly, eggs are everywhere. Just a year ago, a bartender in the meatpacking district lamented that while she longed to add a flip to her cocktail list, she feared it would be impossible to sell a drink that listed eggs as an ingredient. (“I can’t leave it off, though,” she said. “What if someone’s allergic to eggs?”)

But what a difference a year makes. At Olana, a restaurant that opened on Madison Avenue in February, two of the restaurant’s seven signature cocktails feature eggs: the Pear Sidecar, in which egg whites meet pear brandy, and the Apricot Cobbler, a similar drink featuring apricot brandy. A recent addition to the cocktail list at A Voce, a flatiron district restaurant, is the Agrumi Fizz, in which a mix of gin, limoncello, orange liqueur, and egg whites gets topped with a float of Chianti.”

-   Let Rocky Balboa Drink the Yolk April 6, 2008, New York Times

Now, to the farmer’s market to find fresh eggs! Or maybe I should just skip that and go straight to Olana…

One of the jokes between Neil & I is that we’re the exact same person. It can be generally taken that if I enjoyed a particular food or drink, Neil would probably enjoy it also, and vice versa. In fact, watching us eat can be rather disturbing, as our plates tend to become communal property. Anyhow, this near-universal principle hit a roadblock at our recent wine tasting at Wagner Vineyards by Seneca Lake in upstate New York wine country. Admittedly, our tastes in wine haven’t been as similar as our tastes in beer (and I would argue that my taste is cocktails is quite a bit less cavity-licious than his), but we’ve never been at such a complete disagreement before.

After a couple ho-hum tastings of their reds offerings, we got into the better stuff — Rieslings, Gerwutztraimer, etc. Our first taste of their white wine was of a rather obscure grape, the Niagara grapes, crossed between Concord and white Cassady grapes and created in the same region its grown. A sniff yielded intense intense fruity scents, mainly of grape juice. It tasted exactly like it was scented. Amazing!!

Me:” WOW! This is… this is truly delicious! O_O”
Neil & other friend: “… This… this is really weird.” *spits it out*

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Think Coffee
248 Mercer St @ 3rd St. (map)
New York, NY 10012
(212) 228-6226

Gtalk last night
Y: do we have our date tomorrow?
Y: i read reviews for think coffee
Y: apparently, you have to go early so you can go and “pretend to work”
Y: i challenge you to a 7:30 date
Me: …
Me: you’re trying to kill me

And this is how I dragged my ass out of bed at 6:30AM and drank the best cappuccino I’ve ever had. Read the rest of this entry »

I may just have found my new favourite site.

Doesn’t it just annoy you sometimes when you discovered a wonderful new beer on tap in a bar somewhere, manage to remember the name and trace it to a brewery and maybe an online retailer or so… but then you realize you live in a state where BevMo doesn’t exist and now you’re going to have to call/visit all the local beer caves. Now imagine you live in NYC and there’s a million random grocery stores/delis/etc that randomly stock on craft beers.

Luckily, the Great Brewers’ Alliance, hooks us up with a searchable online database of the 10 nearest retailers, relative to your zip code, that bought a local alliance distributor in the past 90 days. For example, my local distribution turns out to be Union Beer Distributors in Brooklyn (which I have heard much tell of, but still haven’t made the trek out to Brooklyn to visit yet… heck, I haven’t even made it down to LES to see New Beer Distributors).

Check it out here: http://www.greatbrewers.com/union/index.php?option=com_retail&brewery=2

I now know that a grocery store just a couple blocks away from me carries Allagash White. Admittedly, it’ll probably be 200% markup or something, but at least I know I can get Allagash White whenever I feel compelled!

gramstand http://www.gramstand.com/

214 Avenue A (btwn 13th & 14th st.)
New York, NY 10009
East Village

hours (their words not mine ;))
M-F: 7:30am until rather late
Weekends: 9:00am until rather late

Review after the cut! Read the rest of this entry »

Doctorate qualifying exams. Imagine that grad school is like a fraternity; qualifiers is our version of a hazing. It comes from a somewhat bygone era when intellectual inquiry was the main reason people went to get graduate degrees. And maybe there was indeed such a time that existed when people didn’t mind taking 6 months off their regularly scheduled lives to complete a 12 page research proposal that they fully intend to never carry out. Or maybe professors just want us to go through the exact same hysteria-inducing pain that they went through half a century ago (ok, maybe just 3 decades).

Either way, I have 12 pages of science stuff to write over the next 3 weeks. I could try working from my apartment and inevitably get nothing done, I could go to the school library (which I adore and love to death), but all of those will probably get old after a few couped up days. So I figure that while I’ll go to the library in the evenings/nights, this might be a good opportunity to scout out all those lovely coffee & tea houses in the city that I would never go to otherwise once I’m full time in the lab.

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