October 2010 Archives

For Sicily, geography has always been destiny. The rocky isle, a land mass the size of Vermont, rises from the Mediterranean like a giant pebble kicked by the toe of Italy. Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans and Arabs viewed it as a strategic military and cultural outpost; it was ruled by outsiders for centuries. But its society, from wealthy landowners to impoverished peasants, was actually managed, on a daily basis, by a shadowy network of quasi-military local power brokers known in recent decades as the Mafia. They made life bearable for the conquered Sicilians, but at a huge cost: Sicily, breadbasket of the Mediterranean, should be Italy's wealthiest region. Instead, it gets little respect, let alone investment capital; it's literally Italy's step-child.

And yet: ringed by rich waters and covered with dense forests, amazingly fertile hillsides and ancient vineyards, Sicily is southern Italy's gastronomic paradise. "When it comes to bounty from land and sea, modern Sicilians are the most spoiled people on the planet," writes Robert Camuto in his new book about Sicily, "Palmento."

Camuto visited Seattle about two years ago to promote his first book, Corkscrewed, a love-letter to the small, independent wine growers of France. The feistiness of the French is intellectual; the passion of the Italians is different, rooted in a fierce loyalty to family and respect for the land.

Siciliy is dominated by an active volcano on its eastern shore, Mount Etna, and the island is both a crucible of original recipes and a melting pot of culinary traditions. Etna, growling and regularly oozing glowing lava from its flanks, shares its slopes with vineyards, olive groves and citrus orchards: red nerello mascalese, white cataratto, carricante and malvasia di Lipari. (The world being what it is, one also finds the ubiquitous cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay.) Wines were once made right in the vineyards, using ancient stone presses called palmenti; it's in tribute to this tradition that Camuto titled his "Palmento." He calls it a Sicilian wine odyssey, but it's more. Camuto has written a cultural history of the island by telling the stories of a dozen wine growing families; he's not, he points out, a wine writer but a writer with a particular interest in the stories of wine makers. His profiles of the Occhipinti and Planeta families, come to life on the page, but the most fascinating part of the book, for me, was the chapter he devoted to the island's ancient capital city of Palermo.

Here is both historic grandeur and inexplicable rubble. "I thought about dinner and I thought about wine. What do the Palermitani drink with their diet of beauty and decay, divinity and chaos? I wondered."

In the city's historic center he finds the locally famous Antica Focacceria San Francisco, where a police car has been parked out front ever since the restaurant's owner, Vincenzo Conticello, refused to pay the Mafia's pizzo (protection money). That was five years ago. Others had refused similar demands and were gunned down on streetcorners. Two prosecutors investigating the Mafia were killed, their cars blown up by bombs. Conticello has had armed guards since 2005, and doesn't sleep in the same bed two nights in a row.

But there is hope. Libera Terra is a coop that now makes wine on land seized from the Mafia, outside the town of Corleone, no less. (On its own, Sicily produces more wine than New Zealand and Austria combined.) Fifty years ago, Il Gattopardo ("The Leopard") chronicled the slow demise of the island's aristocracy, like a Sicilian "Gone With the WInd." Camuto suggests that it is wine, in the end that may provide the unifying metaphor for the island's new identity.

Palmento, University of Nebraska Press, 250 pages, $24.95

Robert Camuto's book tour to promote "Palmento" comes to Seattle Monday, Nov. 1st.

• 5 PM: Reading and book signing at Elliott Bay Books (1521 10th Ave. 206-624-6600) .


• 6:30 PM All Saints Day Sicilian "soul food and wine evening" at La Medusa (4857 Rainier Ave. S., 206-723-2192). $25 includes wine and food.

A new survey by Chicago Cutlery finds that Canadians are sharper than Americans when it comes to cooking habits and the use of knives in the kitchen.

The study coincides with the launch of the company's knives in Canada. Our neighbors to the north outranked Americans on the "Sharp Cities Index," with Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto scoring higher than New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. (Seattle wasn't included in the survey, alas.) Montreal (indexed at 62.2 out of 100) topped the entire list. Houston outranked New York, Los Angeles (57.4) and Chicago.(44.9, dead last).Canadians cook more than Americans, using knives to prepare an average of 21 meals per week, compared to seven meals per week in the US. Slightly more than a third of Canadians, slightly less than a third of Americans said they "sharpen their knives for better performance."

This is relevant because two of the most ambitious meals served to Cornichon in the past couple of months have been prepared by Canadian chefs. Over the summer, as we reported here, Chef James Walt of Araxia prepared a stunning dinner for 150 guests in a field north of Whistler not to mention an amazing sweet corn soup back at his home base.

And earlier this week, at Joey on Lake Union in Seattle, another Canadian chef, Chris Mills, dazzled a roomful of skeptical foodies with a six-course, six-wine extravaganza that previewed his upcoming dinner at James Beard House in New York on November 20th ($170 per guest).

Joey isn't the first place you'd think of, if asked to name a local haute cuisine spot like, say, Mistral Kitchen or Bisato. Gathering many of the dinner's ingredients himself, not just sourcing everything from purveyors, Mills created a Pacific Rim menu that ranged from Japanese hummus to Vietnamese banana cake, from Alaska black cod and Haida Gwaii salmon that he caught himself to Lapin cherries from Kelowna that he personally canned .The sliced beef rib-eye was garnished with potatoes from Helmers Farm in Pemberton and root vegetables from Bellmann Farm in Armstrong, the sort of hyper-local commitment that chefs like to talk about but can't often muster.

A James Beard dinner is the sort of exercise any good chef can only dream of, given the astronomical cost of undertaking a venture of this scale. The "guest chef" is expected to donate everything (product, labor, travel) to James Beard House; he's in it for the glory. Which explains why most of Seattle's "celebrity chefs" give JBH a pass; it's just too expensive. But Joey is a chain of 20 stores, the three in Seattle are the only US outposts. While they're comfortable in their upscale casual niche, they also recognize the need to motivate the staff beyond lettuce wraps and curry bowls. Mills is one of the company's stars; the first Canadian to compete in the original Iron Chef competition in Tokyo, he placed 5th in the world-wide Bocuse d'Or competition a few years ago and has since created a 16-stage training program for Joey's young chefs.

So is Mills wasting his time with sliders and tacos? Well, knowing how to executie complicated dishes is a great way to motivate your staff, you can hear him say, and besides, customers deserve a good meal, even if most of them show up just to guzzle Joey's $5 happy hour "Supersonic Gin & Tonic." They treat you right, those Canadians.

Joey Lake Union, 901 Fairview Ave. N., Seattle, 206-749-5639  

Comes news that Walmart is going to start "working with" local farmers on behalf of sustainable agriculture. The program, says the New Yawk Times story, is intended to put more locally grown food in Wal-Mart stores, invest in training and infrastructure for small and medium-size farmers, and to measure how efficiently large suppliers grow and get their produce into stores.

This is big news, and not just because it might give small farmers a chance at some Wal-Mart business. "Grocery is more than half of Wal-Mart's business," their ceo said, yet only four of the company's 39 "public sustainability goals" address the issue of food. (Whole Foods has long encouraged store managers to purchase from local farmers.) Wal-Mart will invest $1 billion to improve its supply chain for perishable food, which will help local farmers and ranchers. Along with other improvements in purchasing and tracking, the Wal-Mart initiative could well be the shot in the arm that small local farmers need to enter the mainstream of the American food supply chain.

But in the meantime (and you didn't think you were going to get off scott free, did you?), there's a new product from Chiquita, the banana people. It's a "produce wash" called FreshRinse that Chiquita says reduces (dramatically) those icky microorganisms on leafy greens and helps maintain their freshness."We view FreshRinse as the biggest invention since the start of pre-packaged salads," says the ceo. "FreshRinse sets a new standard in food safety for the produce industry."

A brief aside to readers: remember these posts?

• Don't Lettuce Poison You (September, 2006)
• We iz poopn in ur spinach (May, 2007)
• And We iz back, still poopn in ur spinach (August, 2007)

A charming title, "Creating a Meal You'll Love: Notable chefs & food writers on their unforgettable dining experiences." The editor, Mark Chimsky-Lustig, approaches some two dozen food writers and chefs, asking them to contribute stories that will raise money for the restaurant industry's charity devoted to ending childhood hunger, Share Our Strength. Earnest, funny, wistful, practical, the essays include contributions by IACP and James Beard winner (Mimi Sheraton), TV star (Jaden Hair of "Steamy Kitchen") and a devotee of New York's vanishing Jewish delis (David Sax).

Seattle's gluten-free superstar Shauna James Ahern signs on and sends in the book's anchor piece, a rewrite from her memoir of meeting (and marrying) the chef who seduced her with (gluten-free) food. And, what do you know, here's Cornichon, with an essay about Mamma Enza's ethereal lasagna at Enza Cucina Siciliana atop Queen Anne, whose praises were sung in these very columns. (That's Enza in the photo.)

"It's a good cause," Cornichon says. "Buy the book."

Creating a Meal You'll Love, Sellers Publishing, $16.95

Initiative 1100 takes the state out of the retail liquor business. All but 11 states have survived the trauma.

Washington remains tethered to Prohibition (and its cousin, Repeal) for antiquated reasons that have taken root in 21st century commerce. Look not to the 2,000 or so state employees who work within the system; they are straw men. Look not to the 300 or so landlords who hold commercial leases on property used to sell spirits. They are pawns.

Instead, look to the self-evident trail of modern politics: follow the money. And the money, on the most cursory examination, is flavored with hops. .

Ignore or put aside for a moment the hysterical rhetoric about underage drinkers of liquor. Ignore the staged movies of earnest grape growers plodding through their vineyards, the wailing trauma-room nurses, even the occasional celebrity restaurateur with "No on 1100" signs in their well'stocked bars. They are all in the thrall--unwittingly, perhaps--of the beer industry.

Make no mistake, it's Beer, Beer and more Beer that wants to keep the state in the liquor business. Why? So that supermakets and convenience stores won't present an attractive alternative to canned and pasteurized six-packs.

The beer guys take every opportunity to paint I-1100 as the "Costco" initiative, ignoring the fact that Safeway, Kroger (QFC & Fred Meyer), Albertson's and Walmart, along with hundreds of mom & pop stores, have just as much to gain. The I-1105 folks, in case you haven't noticed, would replace the Liquor Board's monopoly with their own duopoly, Young's Columbia (out of California) and Odon-Southern (Florida) would essentially take over the wholesale distribution of all alcoholic beverages.

But wait, wouldn't they also profit under I-1100? Sure, but remember that their biggest interest is in maintaining the status quo; their ideal outcome is the defeat of both measures. The wholesalers and distributors created 1105 as a diversion to confuse the public.

Distributors, the middlemen between manufacturers and retailers, were established in the days of Repeal, and have grown steadily in influence. Today, there are a few giants in the field nationally, who ensure their position the way the powerful have always done: campaign contributions, product for parties and gifts to lawmakers around the country. Distributors have become the dominant force in the alcohol selling business and fiercely defend that dominance. I-1105 would help them do that in WA state. They've hired powerhouse consultants from all parts of the political spectrum (Tim Ceis and Chritsian Sindelman from the democratic side, Chris Vance from the republican camp) to craft ads that scream "too risky." The money, millions of dollars according to public records, comes from the beer industry.

Opponents of both initiatives weigh in on their putative effect on two institutions with "hero" status: the state's homegrown wine industry and its craft breweries. But their arguments--that wineries and craft brewers are universally opposed to elimination of state controls--are refuted by more thoughtful voices.

Paul Beveridge is an attorney who has turned his Madrona home into a boutique winery, Wilridge. More carefully than most, he has parsed the rhetoric of the initiatives and has come out in favor of 1100, opposed to 1105. "1100 will benefit wineries, breweries, restaurants, retailers, small distributors, and, most importantly, wine consumers," he says, while "1105 replaces the existing state monopoly on spirits with a middleman distributor monopoly." Worse, he points out that 1105 "eliminates the alcohol tax at great cost to the state, and does nothing for wineries or wine consumers."

Metropolitan Markets, the largest locally owned supermarket group, but with a smaller footprint than most Safeways, would have to "make room" for spirits. But, says spokesman Brad Halvorsen, "Whether either initiative is passed or not, we remain supportive of small Washington wineries and doing all we can to give them prominence in our stores and high visibility with our customers." Met Markets understand that their customers look for more than low prices, "They have a real affinity with local businesses who take the time and effort to provide good flavors and ingredients....We will be focused on supporting the small wineries and breweries and will not lose sight of them."

John Bell, a former Boeing engineer who now operates the well-regarded Willis Hall winery, points out that there's always been tension between big wineries, distributed by the big wholesalers (Ste. Michelle, Columbia, Hogue) and small wineries (almost everybody else) who fight to get distribution. The problem, as much as anything is the outmoded set of tied-house restrict the ability to offer volume discounts and extend credit, They date back to Prohibition and were crafted to curtail financial bullying of small pubs by large breweries (which would coerce the pubs to carry only one brewer's product. But, says Bell, "There's no need for these onerous and restrictive laws today because, over the years, a whole body of anti-trust and commerce laws have been put into place that make such anti-competitive behavior illegal."

There's no guarantee that every one of the 3,700 retail licensees in Washington (any place that currently sells beer or wine) would automatically add take-out booze to their menu. For one thing, that would require a separate license costing $1,000. But that's just the start. Staff would have to undergo manadatory training, as bartenders do currently. Sales space would have to be reconfigured, a big issue for smaller stores. What do you bump? Wine or canned tomatoes? Wine maker Brian Carter says he's fought hard for the shelf space he gets--three or four facings when he's lucky--and he's afraid of losing a slot or two to higher-margin spirits. Fair enough, but unlikely, given most retailers' interest in providing customers with choices.

Manufacturers of alcoholic beverages (brewers, wineries, distilleries) should be allowed to conduct business in the marketplace just like all other forms of commerce, Bell says, with special attention paid to their sale and use (which is where the Liquor Board's power to regulate and enforce should be exercised).The craft brewers are worried that they'd be forced to extend credit in order to get "tap space" at retails outlets, and would have trouble collecting from notoriously short-of-cash bars and restaurants. Again, a straw man.

Cost Plus World Markets, which does a big business in wine, tried adding premium spirits in California, but changed its plans when it ran into an unforeseen problem: theft. "The problem wasn't kids coming in with fake ID to buy booze," says spokesman Henry Alvidres. "It was adult customers swiping bottles of product."

One of the big points on both sides of the debate involve the Liquor Board's role in "enforcement."The figure that the Board is most proud of: is its so-called "compliance" rate.

The Board sends 18 to 20-year-old "investigative aides" into each of its stores twice a year. They do not carry fake ID and they do not lie about their age (they're "allowed to be evasive," however). In 19 out of 20 cases, they get turned down, but one out of 20 minors succeeds in purchasing alcohol from a trained state clerk. (Hence the state brags of a 94 percent compliance rate.) There used to be comparable, random checks at the 14,000 premises of private licensees (bars and restaurants); the result was that one successful attempt in four by underage "investigative aides" to purchase liquor would end in a sale. (A 76 percent compliance rate.) But that program, says WSLCB spokesman Brian Smith, was suspended two years ago for budgetary reasons.

It's safe to say you've never been into the largest-grossing liquor store in the state, a windowless, one-story warehouse at 7th and Bell in the no-man's land between Westlake and South Lake Union. But this is where Class H licensees (restaurants and bars) pick up over $20 million a year worth of booze, more than any other outlet in Washington. For individuals, sales top out at $7.5 million at University Village (all those hard-drinking professors and frat boys). Statewide, 27 percent of liquor sales are to holders of Class H licenses, and they'd love to be able to buy on credit, or get volume discounts. The largest single buyer of booze in the state, by the way, according to records furnished by the WSLCB, is an umbrella account for the Port of Seattle's concessionaire, Host International; there's a lot of vodka in those Sky-High Double Bloody Marys. The Indian casinos aren't far behind. Peso's on Lower Queen Anne (and its sister restaurant, Toulouse Petit) buys more than any Seattle bar.

In the end, though, neither initiative is really about spirits; that's less than a billion dollars worth of business a year in Washington State. The state's own projections estimate the annual market for all alcoholic beverages is $20 billion, 80 percent of which is beer.

The state owns or manages about 300 stores around the state with but one purpose: to sell spirits. (By comparison: Starbucks has three times that number of stores, each selling dozens of products.) The state sells virtually no beer, and clings to an 8 percent share of wine sales.

And here's the part the state doesn't tell you: as a result of the Liquor Board's "control" function, liquor consumption in Washington has plummeted. It's now half the level of 30 years ago. (The figures are buried inside this report, known as the Board's "Strategic Business Plan.")

Assuming you can think back to 1980, per capita consumption of spirits was 3.4 gallons, which sounds scary, but in fact works out to just over an ounce per adult per day. Were the streets full of reeling drunks in 1980? The ERs filled with mangled bodies? The landscape littered with abandoned vineyards? Of course not.

If Washington drinkers were to return tomorrow to the drinking levels of 1980, the state would collect about half a billion dollars in additional revenue at current rates of taxation. (The rates wouldn't change under I-1100). Alas, the Liquor Board can't do that within the narrow confines of its own, antiquated system; it doesn't even have the computer capability for contract stores to place and track an order. It would take private-sector marketing, logistics and retail know-how.

If the state is serious about solving its budget woes, it could balance the budget tomorrow on the thirst of its citizens. You might hear squeals from the big brewers, but the beer trucks have room inside for cases of Jack and Stoli, nestled up against the kegs of Bud. Squeals of delight, in the end.

And by the way, if 1100 passes and 1105 fails, the distributors will still be your friends. Have a beer, have a drink.

Cornichon gratefullly acknowledges the research assistance of Seattle blogger (and attorney) Shalini Gujavarty, known as Seadevi at CHTriangle.blogspot.com.

Costco poster, photo courtesy of Paul Hughes.

Siena Province, Tuscany--Chianina, the giant, long-legged white cattle indigenous to Tuscany since Etruscan days, are an untamed race. And decidedly matriarchal. So much so that Rudy, the seven-year-old bull purchased (for $10,000) to service the herd owned by Bartolo Conte, couldn't perform for six months.

Things are better now. Rudy's 30 wives give birth to 30 calves a year. Ten are sold young, ten are raised for 18 months, until they reach a weight of 800 kilos or so and then butchered (sales price, $3,500 per head), the remaining ten are butchered and packaged for sale here on the farm (by Bartolo and his German-born wife, Wiebke Buchholz). One animal produces 300 kilos of "good" meat, wrapped and sold for roughly $7 a pound. Sounds very expensive, true. But these are Chianina, the finest of the finest, a beast that's all muscle, whose bistecca Fiorentina is the costliest item on restaurant menus in Italy. And they're costly to raise: one hectare (2.5 acres) to graze one animal, plus another two acres per head to raise enough winter feed and silage.Then the government, concerned about mad cow disease, steps in to demand proof that the meal in the troughs doesn't consist of ground up sheep (or whatever), and it's not easy.

Wiebke, whom everyone calls Vicki, runs the hospitality side of the family business, an agriturismo (farmhouse B&B) near Siena called Casanova. "My husband is an idealist," she says, " but farmers like him will make the difference." Her upper-middle class parents were surprised when she opted to marry a farmer, of all things, "but it's a beautiful life."

Rudy would agree.

Note: Our brief excursion in Tuscany was sponsored by the Siena chapter of Terranostra, a national association of agriturismo operators.

RIMINI, Italy--It's the longest white-sand beach in Europe, and during the summer season a dozen scheduled and charter flights arrive every day bearing pale Scandinavians and pallid Dutch for two weeks of toasting. The tan, when they return home, is well worth the (bargain) package price, $1,200 or so, hotel, half-board and round trip airfare included.

Don't hit the beach at night, though, unless you're prepared for moonlight couplings and the pickpochets who prey on the gawkers. If it's nudity you're after, you have three choices. The "sexy disco" clubs, the municipal museum, or late-night tee-vee.

Serious stuff first. At the medieval Castello Sismondo, it's an exhibit titled "Paris, the wonderful years: Impressionism versus Salon." Nudes by Bouguereau and Ingres. Very tasteful. On the tube, it's a mock call-in show with a cast of bored, half-dressed sexpots talking about their private lives. Ho-ho-hum.

RIMINI, ITALY--If you get on a plane at SeaTac and fly west, you'll arrive soon enough in Old Europe. Air France would drop you off in strike-bound Paris, but Delta lands in Amsterdam (no smoking at the airport, dude), from which the KLM CityHopper (tone-deaf translation of puddle-jumper) takes you to Bologna and a bus from there along the ancient via Romana to Rimini, a lively resort on the Adriatic Coast. Lively in summer, anyway, judging from the number of "Sexy Disco" joints along the beachfront.

I'm here for the annual Travel Trade Italia show, the largest event of the year in Italy for tourism professonals. Everything's run Italian-style, that is to say with a combination of passionate precision (think Lamborghini) and fashionable indifference (think silk scarves). It's as if the Italian language had no future tense; Italian events often resemble last-minute creative improvisations. I'm not complaining, but dinner, at the fairgrounds, was scheduled for 8, moved up to 6:30 at the urging of jet-lagged delegates, and actually began (after 300 guests had been seated for an hour without food or adult beverages) at 7:45. The tourism councillor of Naples, who sponsored the dinner and wanted to thank us for attending, arrived too late; we were back on the buses, comatose, before he even started to talk.

That full moon, those blue towers? Outside the fairgrounds tonight. A cross between Avatar and 2001: A Space Odyssey, no?

Update: On second thought, maybe the tourism guy just didn't want to talk about the stinking mess in Naples.

So. In the emails back at the hotel, news of two fascinating new iPhone apps. The first is from Deborah Ashin, former Gayot staffer, former LA restaurant critic. She published what she calls the first ("and so far only") iPhone app specific to Seattle restaurants. "I thought there was a need for an app that was locally produced but not affiliated with a magazine or newspaper," writes Ashin, who is donating half her royalties to Farestart (the non-profit restaurant that trains homeless people to work in the food service industry). Our good friends at UrbanSpoon.com might take issue with the "first and only," but when it comes to restaurant sites, anything that helps drown out Yelp has to be commended. The app is available here.

The other, not limited to Seattle, comes from Snooth, the wine-finder website. They've launched an iPhone app, Snooth Wine Pro .You can literally take a picture of a wine label, and the app finds the wine, shows you a map of nearby stores that have the wine in inventory. There's more here.

Canlis, the iconic Seattle restaurant known for its outstanding service, wine and Northwest cuisine, will celebrate its 60th birthday in December with the ultimate foodie's treasure hunt.

A lot as changed since the restaurant's opening six decades ago, not the least of which is the price of a good meal. To celebrate with the city, Canlis is inviting Seattle to experience the restaurant's hospitality at 1950's prices.

But there's a catch.

To order off the 1950 menu, guests will need to have one. That's where the hunt begins.

Brothers Mark and Brian Canlis have signed 50 menus from 1950 and will hide them beginning today, Oct.19th, leading up to the restaurant's birthday. Guests who locate a menu must bring it in to the restaurant and enjoy their dinner before the restaurant's actual 60th birthday (Saturday, Dec. 11th).

Clues to the menus' hiding places will be sent out daily on Twitter and Facebook. First clue: Squash a Beetle in your hand.

"Birthdays are a time for play," said Mark Canlis. "We invite the city to join the festivities as we celebrate our history, and we thank our guests for their generations of support."

The original Canlis menu features a whole broiled lobster for $4, filet mignon for $4.25 and, of course, the famous Canlis salad, $2 for two. With the lowest prices in Canlis' history, guests who find the hidden menus can enjoy a four-course meal for under $10. Each menu is good for a party of two guests. The downside, and it feels churlish to mention it, is that the gratuity will be calculated on the value of the meal at the restaurant's current prices.

The first of several heart-stopping moments in Seattle Opera's dazzling new production of Gaetano Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor comes in the first act. Lucia, sung with crystalline brilliance by the Polish soprano Aleksandra Kurzak, entwines her limbs with Edgardo's (tenor William Burden) as they pledge eternal love. In the audience, you can't help but fall in love with the singers, even though you know there's trouble ahead, big trouble.

Meanwhile, the music keeps on coming. When Lucia premiered in 1835, Donizetti was the king of Italian opera composers, with Rossini retired, Bellini dead, and Verdi still on the horizon. For continental audiences of the 19th century, the Scotland of Sir Walter Scott's romantic novels was a wild and woolly emotional frontier of stormy landscapes dotted with rugged cliffside castles and populated by endlessly warring clans. (For all that, the setting of this Lucia is more Italian hill-town than craggy Lammermuir.) In the second act, there's a brilliant sextet in which the principle characters express their individual perspectives on the action (joy, despair, trepidation, excitement, etc.) in what's become an operatic clické, but here it's staged with such musical conviction that you realize "Aha! This is where those silly parodies (Bugs Bunny, Three Stooges), originate! Now they make sense!"

Then, in the third act, comes the hair-curling mad scene, which could be nothing but coloratura flash. With the right performers (Maria Callas, Dame Joan Sutherland), it becomes a gut-wrenching tour de force. (The opening night performance was dedicated to Sutherland's memory.) Kurzak is technically perfect and emotionally convincing.

The Seattle Opera chorus periodically fills Robert Dahlstrom's multi-tiered set with lavish costumes (by Deborah Trout) and rousing voices (prepared by Beth Kirchhoff). In the pit, the Neapolitan conductor Bruno Cinquegrani, a Donizetti specialist, leads the orchestra with assurance and verve.

It's the fourth time now that McCaw audiences have heard Burden: shipwrecked in Iphigenia auf Tauris, shirtless in Pearl Fishers, in dress whites as Amelia's father, and now as a love-struck Scotsman. He becomes more assured and muically confident with each appearance. If he kept his mind on his mission (avenging his family, murdered by Lucia's older brother) there'd be no opera. If Lucia refused hers (to marry her brother's benefactor), there'd be no opera. Instead, Lucia kills her husband,goes mad and kills herself. Burden has the unenviable task of following one of the most famous scenes in opera with an anguished aria of his own; he pulls it off with aplomb.

Kurzak, an immensely talented and accomplished lyric soprano whose roles to date have stopped just short of madness, sings her first Lucia. She's entirely credible as a teenage Lucia (clowning around a fountain) who quickly gets in over her head as a pawn in story's medieval Scottish politics. She lands the thrilling high notes but she's almost too cute for her hysteria to be absorbed as tragedy. Genuine madness, you think, requires greater maturity, greater sense of loss than teenage poutiness:

Act One: @LuciaLamm Edgardo the coolest, love forever, but bro disapproves
Act Two: @LuciaLamm Marry to save famiily, WTF? Arturo better not eff w me
Act Three: @LuciaLamm OMG stabbed Arturo blood everywhere. Losing it

And yet, and yet. What makes Lucia such a pleasure is the seamless collaboration of international talents (Polish, Croatian, Italian, Israeli, Spanish, to name just the froeign-born artists) in the service of music written close to 200 years ago, music that gives a depth of meaning to a timeless story, performed by singers who give it emotional depth.

Sopranos (and the occasional mezzo) go mad with frightening regularity in opera; on this same stage we've heard Elvira in I Puritani, the title character in Amelia, Lady Macbeth in Macbeth (more histrionics), and Azucena in Il Trovatore

So when Kurzak's Lucia descends the staircase of the Piranesi-inspired set clutching the bloody veil of her wedding gown, she's no longer a little girl overwhelmed by family politics, she's no longer a "canary" but a woman with spectacular vocal gifts. Her madness, transcending demented confusion, becomes an expression of victory, of moral clarity.

Un armonia celeste, di, non ascolti?
That celestial harmony, don't you hear it?

What we learn from Lucia is an all-too-familiar lesson: sanity is no substitute for honesty, madness no impediment to truth.

Seattle Opera presents Lucia di Lammermoor at McCaw Hall through Oct. 30th. Tickets $25 to $191. Reservations online or by calling 206-389-7676.

Seattle Opera photos © Rosarii Lynch

They've been known by several names (25 for $25, 30 for $30, New Urban Eats), these promotional events now called Dine Around and Restaurant Week. The current edition of Restaurant Week runs from Oct. 17th to Oct. 28th, excluding Friday and Saturday nights. Restaurants promote themselves with three-course, $15 lunch menus, $25 for dinner, in hopes of luring new customers to their stores.

But restaurants aren't grocery stores, an industry with a long history of loss-leader weekly specials; they're more like small manufacturing businesses, and it's a mistake to think they recover the costs of money-losing promotions.

It's bad math for a restaurant owner to think he can make up the cost of the promotion by doing more businesses (the argument that "we lose $10 on every widdget we make, but we make it up on volume") or acquire new customers (assuming they return when prices return to normal). And it's wrong for customers to wait until prices drop (often by half) to visit a new restaurant.

Let's start with the cost of the promotion itself, regardless of who sponsors it. (The Seattle Times promotes October's upcoming Restaurant Week.) Every participating restaurant contributes close to $1,000 to cover the cost of advertising, giving the Times a windfall of $100,000. I spoke with Carolyn Kelly, the Times president, about restaurants that were unhappy with the promotion; she claimed not to have heard any complaints.

For the current promotion, each participating restaurant contributes $750 to a non-profit association, Seattle Restaurant Cooperative, which purchases advertising. A full 97 percent of the 106 restaurants that participated this spring reported an increase in revenue,according to spokeswoman Heather Jensvold, and the number of participants this time around has risen to 126. (An earlier version of this story erroneously reported that the cost was "nearly $1,000" and that the money was paid directly to the Seattle Times.)

Many regular customers flee their favorite haunts during these promotions. Some no doubt take off for the competition's cheap meals; the rest don't want to be anywhere the relative chaos of Restaurant Week and its ilk. Menus get more complicated (because the restaurants want to put their best feet forward), service is less polished (because the servers have less training on the temporary menus, or have been hired just for the week). Not many restaurants are equipped to handle a nightly influx of double the number of regular guests. The newby guests, furthermore, tend to be lousy tippers (perhaps in response to lousy service, perhaps because they have no intention of ever returning).

Assuming, though, that all goes well: that a small, neighborhood mom & pop gets through the ten-day "week" with 500 covers, twice as many as usual. (That's $2 per guest for the Seattle Times.) Whatever the restaurant's normal average check (let's say $50), it's going to be less during the promotion. Some higher-ticket restaurants face a drop of $20 per customer during Restaurant Week.

No restaurant owners would speak for attribution, but many face the approach of promotional weeks with the excitement of Opening Night and the dread of a trip to the dentist. "Most restaurant owners like Restaurant Week, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea for every restaurant," an industry observer told me, but he didn't want to be named because he's involved in a competing sector of the marketing business. Yes, promotional events put "butts in seats" (as the saying goes), yes they help fill "excess capacity." But restaurant seats are not like empty spots on the "Ride the Duck" tour bus; it costs money to cook and serve meals to each additional customer.

Many restaurant cooks approach Restaurant Week promotions with their customary macho swagger and competitiveness. They've got to produce a three-course menu for the standard 35 percent ingredient cost or they're in deep trouble. And the menus themselves are public knowledge, published on the Seattle Times website. "My $8-food-cost menu is going to blow you away," they say to their rivals down the street. You look at the dishes, and you know somebody's not being entirely truthful; there's no way you can put that much food on a plate for $8.

Assaggio, maybe. At dinner ($8 ingredient cost): a salad, some braised pork shoulder, gelato; at lunch ($5 ingredient cost) soup, pasta, panna cotta. But Rover's? At dinner, smoked salmon, Pacific cod with lobster mushrooms, espresso crème brûlée for $8? Impossible. Fine, you say, owner Thierry Rautureau spends more on ingredients. And I say, either he's got to make it up somewhere else or he's willing to lose $5 a plate (or maybe much more) in the name of bringing in new customers.

And assuming that's true, I have two more questions for restaurant owners: why in the world would you turn your back on your regulars, who support you and your elegant, high-priced dinners year-round, for the purpose of bringing in dozens of bargain-hunting cheapskates who would never pay your everyday prices? (If General Motors sold Cadillacs for $5,000 for one week a year, why would you buy a Cadillac when it's not on sale?) Why, in other words, are you training your customers to pay half price? Promotions like Restaurant Week are self-inflicted poison, slow suicide. A minority viewpoint, no doubt (who doesn't want to save money?), but If I go to a participating restaurant during the promotion, I'm abetting the suicide.

It's called côte de boeuf, a two-inch, bone-in rib-eye steak, a 3- to 4-pound hunk of marbled beef and the most generous piece of meat you can be served in France. It's what you bring home from the butcher when you've got company; it's what you (and two or three friends) order at the brasserie when you're really, really hungry.

At Seattle's Metropolitan Grill, they call it their "Long Bone" rib-eye; it sells for $99. At the Brasserie Bordelaise in Bordeaux, it's served with a side of pommes frites; the price is 65 euros per kilo, so a 3-lb portion runs something like $150. Not unreasonable for three or four eaters, but still: this is an expensive, special-occasion piece of meat.

(You might think that Tuscany's famous Bistecca Fiorentina is the same thing; it's not. The Italian cut is a porterhouse; what makes it special is its provenance: Tuscany's gangly Chianina cattle.)

In the course of a five-night visit to Bordeaux earlier this month, we enjoyed côte de boeuf three times, twice in private châteaux, once in a restaurant. This isn't an entrecôte, by the way; that's a boneless rib steak. Ideally, you grill the côtes de boeuf m over vine clippings that have been reduced to embers, If you don't have any vines nearby, a cast-iron skillet is ideal for searing the steaks; you'd finish them in a 350-degree oven, until the internal temp is 135 degrees; let it rest for ten minutes before proceeding. The host (or maitre d'hôtel) carves the meat before serving the guests; you don't get the whole damn thing for yourself. The French eat their beef very rare, bleu rather than saignant, seasoned only with salt and pepper. The rib bone and the marbling impart tremendous flavor to the meat, which pairs beautifully with whatever old Bordeaux you might find in the cellar.

As we've been saying the past several days, there's no place like Bordeaux. Hundreds of charming villages, especially in the woodsy countryside between the Garonne and the Dordogne rivers (known as the Entre-Deux-Mers), literally thousands of elegant estates. The wine producers here--independent growers and giant cooperatives alike whose wines carry the AOC of Bordeaux or Bordeaux Supérieur--banded together in the mid-seventies to form a vintners association to promote their wines and to ensure a uniform quality; their visitor center, on the busy road between Bordeaux and St. Émilion, has the ambitious name Planète Bordeaux.

These are the "average" guys, the solid base of the pyramid. If you ask most American wine drinkers about Bordeaux, they'll describe one of the famous names, like Château Margaux, the Audrey Hepburn of wines: classy, sophisticated, and, at $2,000 a bottle, out of reach. But the majority of Bordeaux wines are far more accessible, $20 and under on the shelf in most states, and still quite elegant. (Anne Hathaway, perhaps? Same initials, right?) And it's the elegance, after all, that makes the difference.

Bordeaux doesn't taste like wine from California or Italy; it's far more subtle, even cerebral; you approach a glass of Bordeaux with your mind on high alert, with all your senses tingling, like Cinderella at the Ball. (A bottle of Burgundy, on the other hand, is more like "Pretty Woman," a sure thing.) There's a Prince Charming in the crowd, and, at the banquet, into the glass you take along to watch the sunset together at the river's edge, the wine they're pouring is Bordeaux.

Top, Château Pierrail (photo upper right by Jacques Demonchaux, courtesy Renie Steves); Château Parenchère; above: rosé at Château de Bel

The American dream would have it that you can do or be anything you want...if you just want it enough and work hard enough. (That's a big lie, of course; it undermines the way Americans behave at home and the way we see the rest of the world.) Books and movies love to tell the Horatio Alger story of newsboys and bootblacks who lifted themselves from poverty to middle-class respectability by dint of hard work. So far, so good, but you don't become a world-class athlete just by practicing long hours; you have to start with talent. You don't make a mint on Wall Street (or Main Street) just because you're greedy and ambitious; you have to be smart enough to know how the system works...and then get lucky. But for every natural athlete who washes out of spring training, for every math whiz who ends up driving a cab, there's still that nagging doubt: I could have been a contender.

Which brings us to France and its wines. Aubert de Villaine's family owned some vines behind the village church in Vosne-Romanée. Mae-Eliane de Lencquesaing's family owned vines in Pauillac; Thierry Manoncourt's family owned vines on the slope leading up to Saint Émilion. Their families all paid hefty sums, in generations past, because those were already highly regarded parcels, and when the time came to "classify" the vineyards of France, they were, quite naturally, placed at or near the very top. But famous vineyards like these (Domaine de la Romané-Conti, Château Pichon-Lalande, Château Figeac, respectively; that's Pichon in the photo, above) represent the tiniest fraction of all the wine made in France. They get a disproporionate amount of atttention, and they bring in substantially more revenue per bottle than average.

But they don't try to be something they're not. You'll never see de Villaine adding syrah to his wines to beef them up, for example, not just because it would be illegal and deceptive, but because land owners, grape growers and wine makers in France (generally, generally) play by the rules. If your property is within the demarcation of St. Émilion, for example, the wine you make is "St. Émilion," and sells for something like $20 a bottle, twice that (and up) if you're in the Grand Cru classification, but if you're next door, it's generic Bordeaux, period, and it doesn't matter how hard you try or how much you want to be in the high-priced club, you'll never get in. For you, $6. Same grape varieties, similar viticultural practices, slightly higher yields, perhaps, but essentially the same wine-making techniques, and still $6.

Hey, that's not fair, you may say, as an egalitarian American visitor who might discern little difference between wines made.from grapes grown only a few hundred meters down the road. At which point the French look at you quizzically, like a dog trying to understand what you're saying. A resigned, gallic shrug of the shoulders, "Eh ben, c'est comme ça." That's just the way it is.

The wine geeks will tell you that Romanée-Conti's grapes are hand-coddled and require additional labor, its expensive barrels newer. No doubt true. But those are costs de Villaine and his fellow aristocrats can incur because he gets a higher price in the first place. To stick with Bordeaux, where nearly half the production of 10,000 estates is sold as "generic" Bordeaux or the slightly better Bordeaux Supérieur, the growers are hemmed in by the distribution system: Bordeaux wines are sold through 400 or so businesses called négociants, who purchase bottles at the lowest possible price.

You want a road map? It's called the Féret, a 2,300-page doorstop listing 7,400 estates (detailed entries for the top 1,800 of them), 14,500 wine labels, hundreds of négociants and related suppliers, and a 200-page index with 30,000 entries. It sells for $295 on Amazon.

All is not grim, however. Slowly, slowly, a few enlightened châteaux are emerging from the tight web of the big Bordeaux négociants. They don't escape entirely, but manage to catch the attention of individual importers. Here in Seattle, Chateau St. Martin is a company that direct-imports estates from St. Emilion. In New York, Daniel Johnnes of Daniel Boulud's restaurant is bringing in a few estates, but they are not many. (Elin McCoy wrote just yesterday about the frustrations faced by the non-celebrities for Bloomberg News.) And there are tons of everyday, non-celebrity wines here; the Bordeaux region produces as much wine as California.

The best position: own a châateau and a négoce business, like Dominique Meneret (who distributes his Château Brondeau through Domaines Meneret-Audy, or Allan Sichel (photo, left) of Château Angludet, Château Palmer and Maison Sichel). Then you can afford to go on the road with your own wines. Second-best position, have a deep, deep pocket, like Per Landin, the Swedish-born owner of Château Parenchère, whose day job is overseeing the Daxin petroleum empire (with an office in Seattle, to supply bunker fuel to Alaska-bound freighers). Landin bought Parenchère only a couple of years ago; it's a marvelous property at the eastern end of the Gironde, with a stunning views from the terrace across its manicured vineyards. And even here, with a resident vineyard manager and a full-time marketing director, it's not an easy job to sell the wine; it's not "famous" enough.

There's a marketing plan in the works for Bordeaux, a ten-year plan not for the two or three dozen famous names but for the other ten thousand. The campaign will target casual drinkers who don't care a drop about terroir; it will capitalize on the elegance suggested by the term "château." There will be music, there will be wine, there will be romance. The tagline: "And the bottle on the table is Bordeaux."

You read it here first. Meantime, if your property's in the right place, you've got a seat at the game; after that, it's all in how you play your cards. Jacques or better to open, but remember that the VIPs (the Pichons and Palmers and Figeacs of the world) are playing at the high rollers' table, out of your league.

The answers to yesterday's quiz: top row, left to right: Brondeau, Parenchere; bottom row, Couronneau. Lamothe. The people: top row, left to right: Christian Piat (Couronneau), Anne Néel (Lamothe); bottom row, Dominique Meneret (Brondeau), Per Landin (Parenchère).

Once again, we acknowledge the folks who made this trip possible. Our delegation of wine writers was invited and hosted by the Syndicat Viticole of Bordeaux & Bordeaux Supérieur, also known as Planète-Bordeaux, the umbrella organization for some 4,000 growers and their annual production of 500 million bottles of wine. (Hope we didn't drink it all!) Many thanks for your thoughtful planning, patient explanations and generous hospitality.

Above, four châteaux on wine-producing estates in Bordeaux; as it happens, they all produce Bordeaux Supérieur wines, none is a "classified growth." Below, four owners. Can you match the owner to the estate? Answer in the comments, or on Twitter; solution in tomorrow's post.

BORDEAUX, France--The best wine country visits invariably involve sitting down around a table and sharing a meal. Here's one, at the impressive Château Lamothe, an estate in the commune of Haux, atop a steep hillside in the Entre-Deux-Mers 20 miles or so upriver from Bordeaux.

Four generations of women are in evidence. the 88-year-old grandmother, who watches the youngsters, but also prepares the salmon mousse (recipe follows). Her daughter Anne Néel welcomes us with a pitcher of the newly pressed white wine, known locally as bourru. Her daughter, Maria Chombart, is the winemaker, responsible for the contents of the barrels in the cave below the chateau; her husband Damien runs the sales side. And their 9-year-old daughter Valentine created the "V" for the label of a jaw-dropping white wine (85 percent sauvignon gris) that the family served our band of thirsty journalists late last month.

Above: Fort Worth-based foor & wine writer Renie Steves helps herself to the salmon.

Mme. Néel provided these details; feel free to try it at home, she writes, but be sure to use Château Lamothe.

Salmon Loaf
serves 6

The day before: poach 1-1/2 lbs salmon in a court-bouillon (don't overcook!).Skin, debone and drain; then mix with:

1 glass dry white from Château Lamothe
1/2 finely chopped onion
Juice of 1/2 lemon
Now here's a problematic step. Mme. Néel's recipe calls for "1/4 l de gelée Maggi à double concentration," a product that doesn't exist in the US. The closest thing we've got is Knox unflavored gelatin, while Maggi has desirable aromatic qualities. So if I were making this dish tomorrow, I'd dissolve the gelatin in 8 ounces of the reserved fish stock.
About 6 ounces mayonnaise
About 6 ounces crème fraîche

Nap the inside of a fish-shaped mold with some additional jelly (aspic) and let it set in the refrigerator. Once the aspic has set, pour the salmon mix into the molds and chill for 24 hours. Unmold and decorate before serving.

To be enjoyed with a dry white from Château Lamothe, of course! Got that? Many more pictures, if you'd like to drool, on my Facebook page.

As always, we thank the winegrowers of Bordeaux and Bordeaux Supérieur, who sponsored this trip.

ARCACHON, France--We're here on a wine tour, and one of the highest and best uses of the sauvignon blanc-based crisp white wine called Bordeaux Blanc is to accompany local oysters. So to the source of the oysters we go, accompanied by Xavier Milhade, owner of Chateau Recougne and a few bottles of his wines.

The Bassin d'Arcachon, a bay on the Atlantic coast southwest of the city of Bordeaux, is the principal oyster-growing zone for all of Europe. It's a triangle roughly four miles on each side, open to the ocean by a narrow passage. (Think Elliott Bay, but closed off between Magnolia and West Seattle.) Arcachon is tiny by comparison with Seattle's coastal waters: half a percent of Puget Sound's surface area. Furthermore, because it's shallow, there's a significant tidal coefficient in the best spots, a man can maneuver bags of spat (young oysters) in water.no more than knee-deep. (Don't ask Cornichon to describe the math; French sailors have an innate understanding of tidal coefficients.)

Our captain on the bay today is Jonathan Meyre; he's in his mid-twenties and bought the business from his father, a legendary oysterman named Camilot. Some 3,000 families make their living in the French oyster-growing business, 400 of them here at Arcachon, leasing concessions for specific oyster beds around the bay from the government. The Frenchword for this type of flat-bottomed steel scow, incidentally, is chaland, the same term used in the Louisiana bayous. A few of the boats, equipped with rails and safety gear, take tourists out into the bay, but two years ago, tragically, an overloaded commercial oyster barge capsized as it was leaving shallow waters and a crewman, thrown overboard, was killed by the boat's propellor. (The boat's owner is standing on trial this week for negligent homicide.)

While the United States, with thousands of miles of coastline, is the world's number one producer of most oysters, France is actually the number one consumer of the succulent bivalves, and Arcachon's oystermen supply 60 percent of the seed stock (newborns, or naissins). The reason, again, is the significant variation in the depth of the oyster beds between high and low tide. Fertilized oysters attach themselves to chalk-covered tiles set out in the oyster beds and are hand-coddled through every stage of their three-year development: regularly dragged out of their salt-water environment for sizing and graduating to heavy-duty bags with larger perforations, just like schoolkids. (You'd never find a corn farmer willing to put up with this much labor.) Some of the youngsters are shipped off to growers further up the coast, in Charentes-Maritimes, in Brittany, in Normandy; some are held back to be "finished" in local waters and sold at the growers own shacks, much the way lobstermen in New England do. Retail price on the spot, for a dozen medium-sized, three-year-old oysters, about $7. This sort of decentralized system would curl the hair of large-scale American oyster growers such as Taylor Shellfish.

We visit oyster beds marked with reeds planted in shallow waters, it's a calm day and Xavier (in photo at right) sets up a folding table on the deck of the flat-top. Out comes an aperitif, a bottle of Bordeaux Blanc from Montcabrier. Milhade also makes a rose and a red from his merlot vineyards near St. Emilion, but that's for later in the afternoon, with the cheese. (And yes, of course there's cheese.) Feet firmly planted on the flat steel deck of the barge, we toast to the good life, and the good folks who brought us here, the producers of Bordeaux & Bordeaux Supérieur.

Eventually, Jonathan glides the boat back to the dock, where lunch awaits: a splendid platter of shellfish from local waters (crayfish, shrimp, oysters). Locavores, you want a piece of this? More photos on my Facebook page.

Above: a platter of shellfish; below: the Meyre family's "oyster shack" on the beach on the Bassin d' Arcachon. Bottom: Jonathan with bottle of Chateau Montcabrier.

Ah, the French. Always showing off their worldliness, their familiarity with wine, their appreciation of art, their love of culture. It was only natural that the city-owned Museum of Modern Art in Paris would be the first to mount a Larry Clark retrospective, paying homage to the American photographer who gave us an unflinching look at adolescents obsessed with sex and drugs.

Clark, who's 67 years old, grew up with a camera in his hands. After a series of well-received books depicting his young friends (Tulsa, 1971; Teenage Lust, 1982; The Perfect Childhood, 1992), he directed his first movie, 15 years ago, Kids, a scripted story (by 18-year-old Harmony Korine) filmed in a dispassionate, documentary style. Clark's refusal to judge the "underage" sex earned the film an NC-17 rating (it was eventually released "unrated"), although it's pretty tame compared to what anyone can find these days on the internet.

And the retrospective at the Paris museum, nothing really shocking either, given that Clark's photographs have been widely exhibited. So what's the hangup?

The mayor of Paris, Bernard Delanoë, personally ordered the museum to turn away patrons under 18 because, he claims, the images show pedophilia: the kids in the pictures are minors. His office claimed the city of Paris was afraid of complaints and lawsuits by conservative groups. This is Puritanical hypocrisy, not French enlightenment. (The front page of the liberal daily Libération printed one of the more controversial images on its front page, without a peep from anyone; it was even shown on national television's roundup of newspaper front pages). The subjects depicted in the show are neither exploited children nor paid models, and the purpose of the photographs is their gritty reality, not their occasionally prurient appeal. Mayor Delanoë's edict threatens every small museum in Paris that might be considering an innovative exhibition.

Then again, it might be a trick to stir up interest in the show. With the French, you never know.

COLMAR, France--Whenever one of the wine mags wants a cover shot of vineyards at the foot of a medieval castle, or grapevines clustered around an old stone church, they go for Alsace: it's the most picturesque wine region in France. Alsace, Burgundy and Champagne long ago teamed up for a joint promotional campaign, the ABCs of France; Alsace wines go it alone on this site, and Alsace Tourism is here, and yet another that focuses on the affinity of Alsatian wine and food.

The Frenh government's tourism development agency, which keeps track of these things, tells us that Alsace is the third most-popular wine region in France, with nearly 1.5 million cellar visits a year (behind Bordeaux, with 3.6 million and Burgundy with 2.5 million). Not necessarily a fair comparison: Bordeaux has 10,000 properties and covers.250,000 acres; Alsace has fewer than 1,000 wineries open to the public and 40,000 acres. The difference is the "cute" factor: Alsace is like a stunning girl who knows she's irresistable, but she has such a warm personality that everyone adores her, no one's jealous. Alsace is as manicured as Disneyland but without a hint of artificiality.

Half a million Americans a year (of the five million who visit France) come to Alsace, for the scenery, for the Christmas markets in Strasbourg and Kaysersberg, to visit the European parliament, and to drive along the 100-mile-long wine road that connects 100 or so picturesque villages dotted along the flank of the Vosges mountains. (Germany's Black Forest, across the plain of the upper Rhine valley 30 miles east, also grows wine, with fewer but no less charming villages; it's almost a twin sister to Alsace.)

Geraniums and roses are everywhere at this time of year, brightening the pastel-colored, half-timbered houses in pale green and burnished gold. Most of the towns have German-sounding names (from Marlenheim and Obernai to Guebwiller and Thann); Alsace after all is a bi-cultural border province with its own, Germanic dialect (and a local version of Yiddish as well). But we're getting away from the vineyards, away from the wine. Seven varieties are authorized here, vinified separately and labeled by grape: riesling, gewurztraminer, sylvaner, pinot blanc, pinot gris and muscat for the whites, and one modest red, pinot noir. Styles that range from dry to sweet to sparklng, each with a distinct fragrance and an affinity for the banquet of Alsatian food: onion tart, choucroûte, foie gras, river fish, baked goods and a wide range of cheese.

This gent, Robert Blanck, owns 17 hectares of vineyards around Obernai and produces 80,000 bottles a year. He sells every single bottle directly to private clients, most of them come to his cellar door. His average price is about 7.50 euros a bottle, maybe 8 (under $12). And he's far from the only one. The independent winegrowers along the Route des Vins account for 20 percent of all wine sales in the region.

If the Bordelais had anything as attractive and interesting as the shop M. Blanck has built, they wouldn't be complaining that the négociants are only paying 4 euros for a bottle of Bordeaux Supérieur. But of course this is retail merchandising here in Alsace, which would require an adjustment of self-image for the aristocratic denizens of Bordeaux. I was on a panel this morning at which wine growers and tourist offices from several regions acknowledged their increasing interests in the benefits of wine tourism; and international tour operators like myself responded with encouragement at the progress that's being made. The French government now has a 96-page book called How to Welcome Guests to Your Winery and is about to launch a national wine-tourism "label" that encourages wine cellars to open tasting rooms with regular hours. One enterprising tour operator already has an iPhone app that will tell you whose cellar is open and which restaurants are nearby.

France is still the world's number one destination for wine tourism, even if its wine-producing regions are diverse and far apart. (Bordeaux to Alsace, for instance, is a 7-hour journey.) But progress is being made. There are new high-speed trains, better local signage, and above all a growing awareness that personal contact is what makes markets: the more opportunity for wine consumers to meet wine growers, the better.

SAUVETERRE DE GUYENNE -- Holding the beaker is enologist Philippe Cazaux, general manager of the giant wine-making cooperative here, a medieval market town in the heart of Bordeaux country. Not one of the prestigious châteaux of the Médoc (a region that has its own very fine coop, thank you), but in the Entre-Deux-Mers, a vast swath of woods and vineyards studded with relatively modest 10-acre properties.

They say it takes great humility to make wine, to accept as gracefully as possible the fruits of the growing season for the grapes of your vineyard. At least they say it in Burgundy, where they plant either pinot noir or chardonnay, and have no recourse to other grapes if it's too hot, too cold, too damp or too dry. They also say that it to make wine in Bordeaux takes genius, because you have half a dozen grape varieties to worry about, each with its attributes, diseases, flavors and flaws. Winemakers in Bordeaux are free to blend from a palate of grapes and flavors, but it's an uneasy freedom; the permutations multiply with astonishing rapidity when you factor in the result you want to achieve.

The concept of a "Bordeaux blend" is as old as these picturesque, densely planted hills. Wines, to use the French word, are "assembled" from the region's authorized varieties: merlot, cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, malbec, petit verdot for the reds; sauvignon blanc, sauvignon gris, semillion and muscadelle for the whites. (In American wineries, partial to bottlings of single-variety wines, they've come up with a word for wiines blended from these Bordeaux varieties, the made-up name "Meritage;" it may look kinda French but it's pronounced like Heritage.)

Four out of every ten growers in Bordeaux (and there are some 10,000 of them, farmers with fewer than 20 acres apiece) sell their grapes to one of the region's 40 or so coops, whose bottlings, in turn, account for about a quarter of all Bordeaux produced. As one might expect, some of them simply churn out oceans of undifferentiated wine under a house label, generic Saint Emilion, for example (still pretty good stuff, as long as it qualifies for the AOC designation, and basic Bordeaux for whatever doesn't qualify). But here in Sauveterre, the Union de Guyenne has the technical capacity to take things to a higher level: making wine to order.

Let's say a chain of supermarkets in the UK, or a regional group of casual dining restaurants in southern Germany, or even the Swedish liquor monopoly wants to offer its clients relatively inexpensive, easy-drinking "private label" French wine from Bordeaux. The call would go out to potential suppliers via the wine merchants who handle three-quarters all the region's sales (and there some 400 of these négociant houses in Bordeaux). The client might have any number of additional conditions: a specific price point, bottle size, flavor profile, etc. Now, where to find a winery big enough to satisfy such diverse requests? Increasingly, such custom-crushed, custom bottled wines are coming from cooperatives like Philippe Cazaux's high-tech Union de Guyenne.

Cazaux has a team of expert enologists on his staff, who spend their time in the vineyards as well as the lab; they know each coop member's strengths and weaknesses, soils, viticultural practices and so on. This guy's merlot might fit the bill, but needs some reinforcement from that guy's cabernet, for example. In practice, it's far more complicated, since the cooperative's growersrepresent smaller vineyard holdings to begin with, and the custom orders re for more than one or two growers can supply. So not only is the challenge to blend from one property but from several.

American drinkers, always eager to latch onto easy-to-grasp numbers, have come to understand that many of their favorite reds aren't really 100 percent cabernet sauvignon, that the winemaker has blended in a touch of merlot, say, or a touch of malbec, the way a chef might add wine or cream to a sauce. But it's one thing to whisk in a slosh of brandy before serving that veal chop, and quite another to produce a palatable blend of tens of thousands of hectoliters (that may change as it ages in bottles), to complement a regional preference for a soft-but-spicy wine to accompany a restaurant's winter promotion of wild boar (let's say--I'm making this up).

To test this notion, Cazaux invited our delegation to try our hand at blending. The assignment: to concoct, from half a dozen not-yet-botled wines, a palatable blend that would offer pleasurable drinking over the next couple of years. Merlot, the workhorse red grape in the Entre-Deux-Mers, is juicy but lacks acidity. Cabernet sauvignon is often quite tannic, while cabernet franc can give lovely aromas. Adding to the uncertainty: some of the young wines showed rather intense effects of aging in oak casks. We take notes on the samples, we guess at what might work: 50 percent of wine number one (bright red fruit), 20 percent of number two (100 percent merlot, to bring down the acidity), 30 percent of number three (mostly cabernet, for some "grip"). Cazaux follows our instructions, measures out the millilters, then judges our efforts at creating something drinkable. His comments vary from "concentrated" to "oaky" to "not ready" to "rich, round and accessible" (which turned out to be Cornichon's blend, described above, his favorite).

It's a daunting task, and I don't expecct to open my consulting business any time soon. (The last time I tried it, at the Blend tasting in Seattle last month, I found my own blend virtually undrinkable.)

How does Cazaux do it? Simple, he answers with smile. "First, bit of organization. You have to know the market. And, of course, you have to have savoir-faire, that is, technical ability, and then even more organnization."

Cazaux is too modest. There's more to this than just being "organized," as the French put it You've clearly got to be a genius.

By way of explanation to readers (and busybody federal regulators) who might wonder how Cornichon got here: our delegation of wine writers was invited and hosted by the Syndicat Viticole of Bordeaux & Bordeaux Supérieur, the umbrella organization for some 4,000 growers and their annual production of 500 million bottles of wine. Hope we didn't drink it all! Many thanks for your thoughtful planning, patient explanations and generous hospitality I raise my glass in a toast: to your health, santé!