For a time between 2017 - 2019, listening to “Stand by Me” by Ben E. King would make me a bit weepy. I hadn’t heard any iteration of the song in a while and decided to listen to Weezer’s cover - because it’s Weezer! Surely, Rivers Cuomo will sprinkle a little magic into this track and make it more chipper.
Wine. When did you first find wine? Or when did you get into wine? How did you get interested in such? When we were given the recipe for beef bourguignon, I noticed you listed a whole bunch of wine varieties. Is wine a passion? An art even? Or amI over thinking this?
JF: I like wine, but I try not to be a snob about it (if that’s possible).
I guess like a lot of people, it was from travel that I kind of discovered the edges of those wine worlds. Going to Australia, Dan Miller and I visited the D'Arenburg vineyard which was just a beautiful place, and once you have that experience you relate to the wine made there pretty directly.
Around that time, Robin and I got a house in rural NY and there was a room in the cellar set up to be a simple wine cellar (not refrigerated-just underground) and that gave me the ability to tuck a few bottles away from my trip just to see what happened. That kind of started things.
Later on I spent a couple of weeks in the Loire Valley in France to see an extraordinary production by the Royal De Luxe (later on RG and I volunteered and did security for a bunch of shows in Ireland). While we were there we kind of noticed the area had it’s own very specific wine culture-old men drinking muscadet at noon, and everyone drinking these amazing white wines, including savennieres-a very fancy wine-at night. It seemed just a couple of years later became the epicenter of organic wine making and a lot of hipster wine interest-but I do love a lot of the wine that comes out of there-even the cheap stuff.
(Just thinking outloud about wine trends-I think trends in wine and food are confounding. Once they happen people think its been that way forever-but I am so damn old I remember when stuff hit the scene-even basic stuff like sushi which barely existed when I was 20 and was ubiquitous by the time I was 30, or balsamic vinegar, or extra virgin olive oil or sun-dried tomatoes, or Thai restaurants-all of which enjoyed the same kind of explosive popularization. So when a brand comes in do you fold you arms and say it’s all just trendy stuff or do you embrace it and explore? I guess I embrace it and not feel too self-conscious about it being “the new thing”.)
My tastes in wine ended up seeming kind of conservative. I like old world wines (France, Italy, Spain) which some people find subtle, and especially with French wine-kind of watery. A lot of US wine people like new world much more-especially California and Australia-but to my palate those wines are too big and jammy… I could go on…
Asparagus ferns were my favorite plants when I was a little kid. My grandparents had them in their yard. I loved them. I doubt they’d do well in my zone, but ugh… I do enjoy them.
