Children’s Atlas of Wine

(full disclosure: I have poured wine for money at Kabawa)

Tiny quibble re this otherwise very good piece:

Kabawa‘s set menu, where you pay a fixed price and select your choice of first course + main + dessert while the table is festooned with extras, doesn't fit well into the tasting menu as described

(This only strengthens the argument below tbh)

Oniani points out that one should not overlook the growth of the Georgian wine industry, which is happening at the same time. “Our cuisine and our wine are inherently linked, so it’s not a surprise that as Georgian wine has become more popular in the U.S., so has the cuisine.” From 2011 to 2021, sales of Georgian wine in the United States have quadrupled.

One of the restauranteurs quoted makes this point, too! But it...just kind of sits there.

(And just as notable as the quadrupling of Georgian wine sales over a decade is the shift in the *kind* of wine being sold, from cheap, Soviet-throwback industrial sweet reds to handmade things aged in clay)

"At the same time, more Americans are visiting: in 2013, about 25,000 visited, and by 2024, that number doubled to 50,000."

This is anecdata of course but as one of those 50,000 I know why I was there

Anyway a decade later, after years of natural wine fairs, a couple of Alice Feiring books, and widespread consumer awareness of Georgia as "birthplace of wine", it's crazy to me not to see how that might have something to do with travel to the country + awareness of its culture + the food scene here

(there's a *moment* in 2013 where the Georgians invade the Parisian natural wine scene and Thierry Puzelat gets, like, Marcel Lapierre drunk on presumably mtsvane and everything changes)

Like, you can draw a straight line the 2008 Russian invasion + embargo choking out 90% of the country‘s (industrial, sweet) wine exports to the rebirth of qvevri wine + Georgia's pursuit of new export markets / embrace by the global natural wine movement

Why Georgian Restaurants Are Suddenly Everywhere in New York What was once a hard-to-find cuisine is now booming across the city, thanks to a new generation of chefs

This trend piece about Georgian restaurants in NYC is ok (I'll take as much feature writing as I can in the midst of eater gutting itself) but it's baffling that the piece barely mentions wine

ny.eater.com/dining-out-i...

Just heard during a let's play that wine "makes you unstable on your feet but reduces the mana cost of spells," which

9. complicated! 🌀 what does it mean to "like" a grape variety that can produce everything from industrial pinot grigio to $1000 bottles of red Burgundy?

Is "I'll have the pinot" a meaningful sentence?

8. you'll see, especially on say the U.S. west coast, a lot of industry discourse around these clonal selections: Dijon 777 or Pommard 5 or Wadenswïl 02A?

should you, a drinker, worry about this?

(no — the future is field blends and agro-forestry)

7. cloned! 🤖 these days, though, wild vineyard diversity is a rare exception. much more likely to see fragile monocultures copy-pasted up and down the hillsides on grafted rootstocks, based on clonal selections made starting in the 1960s and sent abroad

6. (being three-colored, often with those colors mixed in really old vineyards, is true of a lot of old, well-traveled varieties, like grenache or carignan or picpoul)

5. rainbow! 🌈 but one of the most common mutations is berry color: pink or ruby or mauve or green or gold.

sometimes the same plant produces differently colored bunches — sometimes berries themselves are striped.

there are rogue pinot gris plants amongst the noir in many of Burgundy‘s oldest vines

4. some of these versions get given names of their own, and even get treated like distinct varieties — like meunier, the "miller‘s pinot“, for the white fuzz on its leaves that looks like a dusting of flour

others are just the small local differences that historically shaped "village character"

3. mutated! 🧟‍♀️ vegetatively propagated for centuries (cuttings nanes, carried, placed in the ground to grow again). every time you do this, there's a chance for something small to toggle. pinot has been spread so widely for so long we've got tons of little variations to choose from

2. progenitor! 👵 w/ gouais blanc, parent to an entire universe of varieties in northern France, from aligoté to chardonnay to gamay.

great-grandparent of syrah, grandparent to chenin.

outward branches of its family tree encompass everything from refosco to rotgipfler

1. ancient! 🧙‍♀️ morphologically close to wild vines, one step out of the forest, no idea what its parentage is

A hand drawn diagram describing "pinot": a variety with one step in the forest that, crossed with gouais blanc, birthed an entire universe of northern French grapes and that was brought all over the world. more details in the thread.

Who or what is 'pinot' anyway?

Here is a diagram I drew for class next week to help explain, and a little thread unpacking 🧵

Doing a cheeky little 1:30am rewatch and is JOHN WICK 2's gun sommelier (2017) maybe the deepest evidence yet of the type + extent of profession's cultural penetration (a Q-from-Bond coded gentleman in a little waistcoat talking about "German varietal" handguns)

This and "Devil's Advocate" (1997) double feature

Oh I forgot the other most glaringly NYC-inaccurate thing is a production of "Carousel" staged like an opera, with the entirety of the city's political scene in attendance, in a (Broadway?) theater with the largest lobby I've ever seen and cut crystal decanters on the bar sideboard and espresso cups

The denouement so far is a series of quiet two-hander scenes of all of our That Guys dealing with the fallout, which was probably not dramatically satisfying on release but feels 30 years later like a delicious meal of many small plates designed to share

More That Guys: John Slattery working security for the mayor — "the sharks are circling"!

Danny Aiello aka "Do The Right Thing"'s Sal as the Brooklyn party boss who knows the words to every Rogers + Hammerstein musical!

The ubiquitous David Paymer, who translates "too kosher" as "pregnant Virgin"

The one glaring thing is that inexplicably Los Sures/South Williamsburg where the child lives and is killed is represented in the movie as a Black neighborhood instead of historically Dominican/Puerto Rican (and Hasidic) (and in general there just...aren't Latino people in the movie?)

A young Toby from West Wing pops up early as a morally compromised parole officer
A runner is that Southern Cusack doesn't understand NYC
Early on "too kosher" is translated to him: "like a pregnant Virgin"
Just now he mispronounced "schlep" and is told to "get the gumbo out of your Yiddish"

A (crooked?) cop and a minor Mafia nephew die in a murky shootout on Marcy and Broadway
A 6 year old walking to school from South 5th dies in the crossfire
Directed by an NYC born New Hollywood veteran with tons of location photography

Browsing Tubi continues to be the only streaming worthwhile because what do you mean there's a forgotten 1996 NYC politics/crime movie called "City Hall" in which Pacino is the mayor and John Cusack is his inexplicably southern chief of staff and the whole cast is full of That Guys

clone talk is mainly a West Coast pinot noir trope, if you were selling other wines from other places it might not have touched you tbf

14. to sum up:

- borderlands!

- nexus of Austrian natural wine scene

- rainbow of wine styles, (mostly) not grüner

- soils, high to low: schist in the hills, then limestone, then squelchy

- curled around giant puddle

- cool birdwatching

- the past isn't over, it's not even

- drink from here