Value, not prestige, is the new watchword in the wine world. Here, 10 bottles under $10 that smash the stigma of cheap wine.
(Photo by Daniel Shipp)
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Mark McEwan protégé to open new Italian restaurant
Rob Gentile will open Buca in late May (Photo by Mary Luz Mejia)
Mark McEwan protégé Rob Gentile has left the fold of his mentor’s Yorkville restaurant, One, to open a place of his own later this spring. The former executive sous chef proudly declares that Buca will be “unico” in a city that’s fixated on pizza and pasta. “Our focus will be on artisanal techniques from bread-making to the salumeria curing method. It’s more or less sticking to the simplicity of what Italian food should be,” he says.
Inspired by Italian enotecas, Gentile created a menu that reflects his Italian roots with such dishes as striped clams stewed with tomato and cured pork; pasta alla carbonara prepared tableside with farm-fresh eggs and house-cured guanciale; and house-made salumi. A glass-enclosed room will showcase the curing meats, many of which the chef prepares from family recipes.
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The Local Company: is the Danforth still seeking its sexy hero?
Globe Bistro
Late last year, there was buzz that the Danforth was primping for some big nights out. The opening of The Local Company, near Logan, was supposed to bring an upscale, King West sexiness to the Greektown strip. We checked on the area’s progress and discovered that the nightlife effect was there on weekends, but the mid-week vibe is not so hot.
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A taste of the food to come
My last stint in Italy was in Siena. I got into town at 3 p.m. and found a dingy little hotel room, then stopped at an enoteca (wine bar). I had brought my A game, so I was talking to everybody in there like it was my birthday or something. I was just so damn happy to get out of that lonely hotel in Alba where I was working and living up in the storage room with a leaky roof and a hose for a shower. By dinnertime, I had drunk enough brunello to kill a small deer, so I asked for the bill, but the bartender charged me nothing because she said I had done her job for her. Then she quickly declined when I asked her to come for dinner with me. My mother had told me about a slow food restaurant called Osteria le Logge, so I drifted there by my weaving, weary self. The place looked like a library inside, with big old shelves full of books. The kitchen was beautiful and glassed-in and had all the stoves and ovens set in an island that the chefs worked around. I wasn’t looking forward to eating on my own, but luckily an Italian couple that I had just met earlier at the enoteca spotted me and invited me to their table. The guy, Francisco, has his own vineyard, and the woman was a tree farmer. They were both nice and had their hands in the earth. We talked about tree farming and wine, and we ate like kings—ravioli and rabbit and a steak that barely fit on the plate—and then we sat with Mirco, one of the owners, till three in the morning, sipping grappa and talking about the restaurant business (by then I was telling the world what I was going to do). He stressed that the big part of the game—half the battle, really—is serving stuff in your place that nobody else has and to keep it simple, “like a good engine.”
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My Brother Is an Only Child (***)
Daniele Luchetti’s My Brother Is an Only Child (Mio Fratello è Figlio Unico) will suffer from inevitable comparisons to Bertolucci, whose high-period films remain the gold standard for art films about Italian revolutionaries. Indeed, Luchetti’s film is so close in theme to Bertolucci that it would seem redundant were it not for a slight tweak in context: instead of the ’40s, My Brother gives us the Republican ’60s, when Mussolini’s legacy was present in the fascist-nationalist MSI party and vehemently rejected by the popular Communist Party.
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The LCBO’s blockbuster $10 deals
After tasting virtually the entire LCBO general list in preparation for the annual Toronto Life Eating & Drinking guide, I know it’s rare to find a great value wine for less than $10. This year’s tasting process is just getting underway, and while you may be sipping wines on the deck or dock this June and July, I’m tasting dozens of wines daily and want nothing more than a cleansing ale by shift’s end. (I ask no pity because I know none is forthcoming.) The upside to all this is having an up-to-date repertoire of the best bargains at the LCBO.
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Parties
There are parties you simply don’t want to miss, but then you do miss them and end up regretting it the rest of your life. Or at least until Tuesday. I was actually invited to Ivy Knight’s sausage party—a riotous assembly of competitive sausage-making, sausage-eating, imbibing and burlesque. Ivy describes it with typically vivid verve (and pictures) on the Gremolata blog. Wish I could have been there.
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Blooming Whites
If you have never dedicated your wine budget to exploring the world’s aromatic whites, I suggest that now might be an opportune moment—when May is blossoming with fragrance, and some terrific bottles are selling for a song. The June issue of Toronto Life features reviews of 10 great aromatic whites from some of the world’s more obscure wine regions. Several others were tasted in researching the article, so I’ve reviewed them here. Plus, I’ve added a few classic selections from Germany and Niagara also released at Vintages on May 10.
Nova Scotia’s New Eden
Nova Scotia might soon be a remarkable source of high-quality, expensive sparkling wine—the Champagne of North America.
Vintages’ April 12 Release: The Top 10
Vintages stores will be releasing dozens of new wines this Saturday. I have been able to taste most of them in advance along with other wine writers, a twice-monthly ritual that sees a couple dozen people sandwiched into a small white “lab” to work their way through almost 100 bottles. Some taste them all; some hit on a few big names. I am increasingly looking for quality above all else. The older one gets the more appropriate maxim “life is too short to drink (or taste and write about) bad wine.”
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California Greening
My column in the May issue of Toronto Life (on newsstands April 10) examines the burgeoning “green” wine movement, with observations and reviews based on tastings at the international Return to Terroir event in February, and Vintages’ organics release on March 29. Since then, I have compiled even more notes on the wine world’s most pressing trend. Much of the information and inspiration has come out of California, where “green” is becoming an industry-wide mantra. Grape growers are taking the lead in environmental practices and turning the heads of those in other sectors of California’s massive agricultural industry. Two insiders have told me that a stunning 55 per cent of Californian wine producers have now registered for a new program that allows for self-assessment of sustainable agriculture practices.
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The Best Fest in the West
I spent last weekend at the annual wine inundation known as Vancouver Playhouse Wine Festival—an event that locals and winery visitors argue is the best of its kind in Canada. It’s actually not even arguable, in my opinion (even if some easterners feel bruised by this admission). One would think that Toronto should be able to mount a show of this calibre, yet it never has. Hogtown’s big shows are for-profit, commercial ventures that tend to cheapen the content and keep the LCBO at a distance. The government cannot be promoting any commercial interest other than its own, and the reason that other wine shows work across Canada, including Playhouse, is that they have the full support of provincial liquor boards. One might ask why the government is in the wine retail business at all, but that’s a topic for another day.
Surprising Australians in Vintages’ new release
The upcoming March issue of Toronto Life (on newsstands February 7th) contains reviews of 10 wines from Vintages’ February 2nd release, all of which have been rated 90 points or higher by other writers. In the spirit of helping you critique the critics, my reviews in the magazine compare my impressions and ratings to theirs, but there are certainly more than 10 interesting wines on this release.
Busy like bee
Quelle week, as they say in France—though of course one would always rather be busy and active at this age than morosely, motionlessly wealthy or monotonously toiling away for Matthew and Son. On Thursday, I played guinea pig for a series of new dishes chef Patrick Lin is introducing at the redesigned Senses—fascinating, innovative cuisine and exactly what we have patiently hoped to see from Lin since he came back from Hong Kong. The new menu kicks in once Winterlicious is over, so I’ll wait until then to share the experience in more detail.
