December 2011 Archives

This wheel-shaped dessert? GQ magazine named it "Dessert of the Year" in 2010. It's called a Paris-Brest, named for a bike race in France, the Paris-Brest-Paris. The PBP is the second-oldest cycling event in the world, and still the longest one-day event, since it covers 1,200 km (750 miles). That's a lot of riding. Closest thing hereabouts is the STP, organized by the Cascade Bicycle Club. The annual ride, held in the second half of July, sends 10,000 riders from Seattle to Portland. It's about a quarter of the distance covered by the PBP, and comes complete with food carts, tech support and an overnight stop for exhausted riders.

(Wait, wait! Friend says the PBP never was a one-day race. More like three-plus.)

Making the Paris-Brest: choux pastry (like a cream puff), filled with a flavored cream. The dessert in the picture was made by Jennifer Formez, pastry chef at Seattle's Hotel 1000, for a private, Christmas Eve dinner party for 14 guests in the hotel's Grand Suite. It's not on the menu, so I can't even give you a price.

But here's a year-end proposal to all the pastry chefs in Seattle: create a dessert called the STP, send a photo of your creation to this address along with the recipe, and we promise that someone, somewhere, will publish it.

Second of two parts.

The United States is the third-largest consumer of olive oil in the world, a market approaching two billion dollars a year, yet has some of the loosest laws on earth concerning olive oil purity or honest labelling. The Food & Drug Administration and the US Department of Agriculture have no budget for testing, let alone enforcing laws against fraud.

The problem, as journalist Tom Mueller describes in his new book, Extra Virginity, is the huge reward, with vrtually no risk, in mislabelling the oil. "Extra Virgin" has all but lost its meaning.

I spoke with Mueller by phone recently and he reminded me that olive oil is a truly amazing substance. "We shouldn't be scaring people away," he said. Indeed there's been a huge increase in olive oil sales in the US, thanks to publicity about the health-enhancing properties of the Mediterranean Diet.

Olive oil is, as Mueller puts it, "an age-old food with space-age qualities that medical science is just beginning to understand." There's even an intriguing chemical relationship between EVOO and the anti-inflammatory Ibuprofen. The tragedy is the temptation to dumb it down, by stripping from real Extra Virgin oil the specific characteristics (fruity, peppery, bitter) that make it the "real thing."

Does it have to be Italian? Hardly. In fact, Whole Foods now sells Extra Virgin Olive Oil from Turkey as well as California. (Many Whole Foods oils are DOP-labelled as well, to certify their origins.) Does it have to come from gnarled trees growing on a hillside in Tuscany? Hardly. Excellent oils are produced on vast, quasi-industrial groves in Spain, as well as Sicily and Puglia, even if the bottling plants put them in jars with Tuscan scenery.

There's a lot of unnecessary mystery in the production of olive oil. Those great stone mills are ancient history. Today's harvested olives are ground up with large metal burrs, the paste stirred in huge tanks and the liquid extracted by centrifuge. Trader Joe's website, in a convoluted, 1,900-word article on olive oil, calls this step "centrifugetion." The TJ's description continues: "Because oils are mixed together to achieve balance and style, judging oil by the country of origin has passed into legend. Nowadays, oils from all growing regions and countries can be blended together to produce tastes and styles that have specific uses." So TJ's lowest-cost oil is labeled "Packed in Italy," which doesn't reveal much about its origins.

Ironically, the US is not part of the International Olive Council, a 50-year-old rule-making body set up by the United Nations, relying instead on standards set by the US Department of Agriculture. Still, some surprising results from the University of California, Davis, which is in the heart of America's olive-oil producing region. In a report a year ago, UC Davis researchers found that 69 percent of imported "extra virgin" olive oil (and 10 percent of domestic oil) wasn't what it pretended to be. Even the best-known brands showed signs of adulteration (blended with inferior grades of olive oil or cheaper oils from soybeans, hazelnuts and sunflower seeds).

The lone import to receive top ratings on all points was Costco's Organic Extra Virgin Oil, which sells for one fifth the price of competing brands.

As it happens, you can taste some new, 2011-vintage premium olive oils at ChefShop, the specialty food supplier at 1425 Elliott Ave West in Seattle.

And if you want to watch Mueller talk about olive oil, there's a YouTube video here.

Extra Virginity, by Tom Mueller, WWNorton, 238 pages, $25.95

Some of Puglia's olive groves, extending to the Adriatic, are seen from the village of Ostuni.

PUGLIA, Italy--We're along the heel of the Italian boot, a region that produces almost half of Italy's olives and olive oil. There are somewhere between 50 and 60 million olive trees here in Puglia, twelve or thirteen times as many trees as people (4 million). From Ostuni, an ancient village on the edge of the Murgia plateau, you look toward the Adriatic, five miles to the east, and see nothing but olive trees, many of them centuries old, half a million acres all told. That's about the same area as all of Pierce County.

The region lacks rivers and doesn't get much rain, so its agricultural potential, down on the flatland, is pretty much limited to olives and grapes. (Puglia is also Italy's most prolific grape producer, with powerful reds like Primitivo--Zinfandel's identical twin--that ripen perfectly in the cool Mediterranean breezes of the Salento peninsula.) But it is the olives, specifically, that concern us here.

In 2007, the New Yorker published a 5,500-word article titled "Slippery Business" about colossal levels of fraud in the sale of what's known as Extra Virgin Olive Oil. Two thirds of what's sold in American supermarkets as EVOO, estimates Tom Mueller, the article's author, isn't the real thing at all. Oil from olives, perhaps, but hardly the rigorously controlled and strictly defined "first press." It's even worse in the food service industry, with adulterated soybean and sunflower oils regularly passed off as higher quality olive oil. What's more, any manner of imported vegetable pressings from Greece or Turkey or Tunisia are regularly offloaded in ports along Puglia's coast, processed to remove unwanted characteristics, and resold as "Italian." (That step is actually legal as long as the intent isn't to mislead consumers). But then, often with the assistance of a corrupt bureaucrat or two, the stuff is relabelled as olive oil and often "transformed" into extra virgin.

The fraud is relatively easy to detect analytically but almost impossible to prosecute. Not even a notorious case, in Spain 20 years ago, in which 300 people died from adulterated olive oil, slowed the tide of fraud. In Italy, on the regional and national level, the crooked operators are very well connected politically. Supposedly independent industry associations are toothless. The European Union doles out massive subsidies to the "olive oil" producers but has yet to recoup any of its fraudulently obtained grants. When Italy's respected Guarda di Finanza (the military police arm of the Finance Ministry, responsible for drug smuggling, border patrol, and the like) does manage to act, the bad guys stall until the statute of limitations runs out. Experts who challenge the Big Oil producers are regularly sued for slander. Stateside, the various agencies responsible for food safety and domestic security have, thus far, claimed that mislabeled olive oil isn't a big priority.

Who's to blame? In Italy, at any rate, the buck stops at the very top. "[Former Prime Minister Silvio] Berlusconi's role is indirect but meaningful in olive oil crime - creating and enhancing a sense that law and order is irrelevant," Mueller wrote to me in an email.

Mueller, who lives in Italy and has family roots in eastern Washington, has now expanded his New Yorker article into a book titled "Extra Virginity." He updates the various court cases he described (no one went to jail) and widens the horizon of the Italian frauds to the rest of the world.

We'll have that part of the story tomorrow.

We've been posting all week about the important of public leadership for the tourism industry. Today's final installment looks at what the private parties can do, and what happens if promotion stops.

A good example of private-sector initiative comes from the 30-year-old Greater Seattle Business Association, the country's largest LGBT chamber of commerce. GSBA runs its own promotion, Travel Gay Seattle, with the slogan "Where Out Is In," which is responsible for moving Seattle from 19th to 9th place as a destination for the closely watched gay travel sector. "Ahead of Philadelphia!" the GSBA's Rene Neidhart told the Seattle City Council.

But is it enough? Enough to make a difference? City council member Jean Godden, who chairs the budget committee, calls even the modest TIA assessment "a good thing, a step in the right direction."

An instructive example from Europe. Italy was once the most visited country in the world, until, in 1993, in the midst of an austerity crisis, its citizens voted to eliminate the country's cabinet-level Ministry of Tourism. The thinking was, Italy has everything, from La Dolce Vita to the Sistine Chapel, and it's on everybody wish list, so there's no need to spend a bundle on telling our story. Wrong! Within a decade, Italy had fallen from first to fifth in both international arrivals and tourism revenues. They're trying desperately to catch up, with a new tourist board and a new tourism minister, but it's a tough battle to claw back once you've been deposed.

France, on the other hand, invested heavily in tourism promotion and did a decent job of overcoming its reputation as hostile to foreign visitors. Sunny Spain, which has an even more positive image, sees fewer visitors than France but earns more from tourism than any European country. France wants to wring a few more euros from its 77 million tourists; they've started by moving tourism into the Finance Ministry.

Poor Italy: all those priceless art treasures, all that delicious pasta, all that magnificent scenery, and they're stuck in fifth place.

Buon Natale! Merry Christmas!

This week Cornichon looks at Washington's fourth-largest industry: tourism.

Business travel accounts for only ten percent of tourism traffic to Seattle. Leisure travel is the name of the game. Half the visitors to Seattle arrive by air, a full 20 percent come from outside the country. Sure, half of all travelers come to visit friends and family and don't stay in hotels, but they go out to eat, too; they visit museums and attend local theatrical productions. The Picasso show at SAM last year generated $66 million for Seattle; half the museum-goers were from out of town. The last King Tut show, at the Pacific Science Center, was 30 years ago; it's coming back for a nine-month run next May and already has local hotels and restaurants salivating at the anticipated million visitors the Boy King will attract.

There's also a Gauguin exhibit coming to the Seattle Art Museum, and a big push this year, a new team effort by the Convention & Visitors Bureau and the Washington Wine Commission, to promote Taste of Washington at the end of March.

"If we're going to compete with other west coast cities, we've got to spend more," says Burgess. Los Angeles and Vancouver, BC, spend the most, $12 million a year to promote themselves as a vacation destinations. Seattle, Portland, and Anaheim (Disneyland) spend about $8 million each. But on a statewide basis, nothing.

True to the new economics, now that government has abdicated its responsibility, walked away from the table, the private sector has stepped in. The Washington Tourism Alliance was created earlier this year, bringing together the players with a direct stake in the tourism industry.

And now, to bolster shoulder-season and off-season travel, a coalition of 41 Seattle hotels has started adding a $2 per room-night tax. Not your neighborhood bed & breakfasts, but hotels with more than 60 rooms. Much as a neighborhood might create a Local Improvement District, the hotels have created a Tourism Improvement Area. The tax, which the city collects, is expected to generate $30 million a year. Having passed all the statutory hurdles, the new tax has been in effect November 1st.

As Darryl Brian of Clipper Vacations pointed out, the competition isn't the Coho or Washington State Ferries, it's other destinations.

Surveying the damage here in Washington, a Seattle travel writer named Charyn Pfeuffer tried to start an interactive website called GoWAState.com to promote Washington tourism, but the $50,000 project raised only $350. More successful was the Washington Tourism Alliance, which has a statewide board of directors from a variety of fields (lodging, transportation, wineries, government). Longtime travel pro Suzanne Fletcher was named executive director last month. For now, the privately funded WTA has taken over the official functions of Washignton's tourism agency. Fletcher has a two-year window to work out not just a funding mechanism that doesn't put the whole financial burden on hotels, but also a marketing plan that makes efficient use of a limited budget.

On the national level, there's a similar effort. In the past ten years, the US, as a destination for international travelers, has lost 17 percent of its popularity, and in attempt to make up lost ground, the former Corporation for Travel Promotion has been renamed "Brand USA," complete with an attractive website.

By themselves, ads that feature mountain goats or powder snow or Mickey Mouse don't get people making plans to visit specific destinations. Another important piece of the marketing plan is known as "fam tours," trips to the region for both tourism professionals (who have to know the destination in order to sell its attractions) and for journalists. Some travel agents and writers treat fam tours as junkets or free vacations, but serious journalists and professional travel agents recognize the important advantages of feet-on-the-ground research.

The Seattle TIA will have $6 million a year, give or take, to spend on tourism promotion. Their first effort, now underway, is a campaign to bring visitors from major cities around the Northwest to Seattle for the holiday shopping season, an effort undertaken in conjunction with the Downtown Seattle Association and Seattle Center. It's called a moving billboard, like a snow globe on a truck, and it's making the rounds in Vancouver, BC., Spokane and Portland, while "ambassadors" hand out brochures promoting Seattle as a shopping destination for the holiday season. So far, says Tom Norwalk, results are encouraging.

On the east side of the mountains, legislators are skeptical about assessments to promote the tourism industry. "I don't think you can expect the state to put an assessment tax on anybody," said state Rep. Norm Johnson, R-Yakima, told the Associated Press in relation to a proposed statewide tourism levy. There's a sentiment that tourism benefits only the Seattle economy, and ignores the fact that big cities are the gateway to rural attractions, that rural areas are actually more dependent on tourism than the more vibrant, economically diversified big cities. (Assessments to promote agriculture don't seem to have the same problem; the state's wine industry just voted a self-assessment to help launch a wine science center on the WSU campus in Richland.) Perhaps the Washington legislature feels tourism is "expendable." Perhaps they would trade Ichiro and Felix because the Mariners and losing.

Tomorrow's final installment will look at what happens when a country like Italy stops spending on tourism promotion.

This week on Cornichon: a look at the state's fourth-largest industry, tourism

Compare the enlightened legislature in Texas (previous post) to the wimps in Olympia. Washington's tourism promotion budget ranked close to the bottom of the 50 states with a paltry $1.8 million, now trimmed to zero. Oregon spends $10 million, Idaho $7 million, Montana (Those Metro bus boards! Those mountain goats!) over $9 million. California spends $56 million to promote tourism. British Columbia's budget is a whopping $60 million, paying to promote tourism to Vancouver, to Vancouver Island, to the Okanagan wine country, and other destinations.

Ed Murray, chairman of the state Senate's Ways & Means Committee, which cut tourism promotion out of the state budget, told Crosscut writers and editors recently that he does believe the state should invest in tourism, "but not when the alternative is cutting teacher salaries." Yet that's a false choice. You don't pay for tourism promotion with money that could have gone for teacher salaries, it's the other way around: you pay teachers' salaries with tax dollars you raise from tourism.

Tourism is big business. King County Executive Dow Constantine points out that 50,000 jobs in the county depend on tourism. Nine million travelers visited King County last year, spending $5.5 billion and generating $440 million in local taxes. In fact, it's Washington's fourth largest industry, generating 150,000 jobs and a billion dollars in tax revenues statewide.

David Blandford of the Seattle-King County Visitor Bureau (the marketing arm of the state Convention Center) points out those tax revenues, the billion dollars associated with tourism, are paid by visitors, not local taxpayers. Taxes generated by tourism lower the tax bills of in-state households by nearly a thousand dollars a year, Blandford says.

And yet, this seeming no-brainer is a hard sell.

City Councilman Tim Burgess, an ex officio member of the Visitor Bureau's board of directors, laments that it's an uphill battle to persuade budget-writers that promoting tourism makes economic sense. In an interview earlier this year, he told me, "We're talking about 50,000 jobs locally, and many of them are what you can call first jobs." Entry-level positions in the hospitality industry, not particularly glamorous, but jobs nonetheless. One out of every nine non-farm jobs, nationwide, 7.5 million spots nationwide.

Tomorrow: Seattle scrambles to keep up.

This week on Cornichon: an extended look at the business of tourism.

In Austin, Texas, this summer, as the legislature was debating budget cuts, the knives were out for the state's Economic Development & Tourism Division. A million here, a million there, and funding for tourism promotion in the Lone Star State was trimmed to $5 million. It looked as if the tourism promotion campaign, "Texas: It's Like a Whole Other Country," was in danger of disappearing altogether in Gov. Rick Perry's austerity budget. Yet, by coincidence, the governor's wife, Anita Perry, had been invited to address the Texas Travel Industry Association's annual convention.

She told the 800 assembled delegates that she'd become convinced of the spiritual and emotional benefits of travel. "That's the story I'm taking home," she said. (More on the Perry family's romance here.)

She was preaching to the choir. "State tourism promotion is a program that lawmakers and budget writers should cherish, nourish and protect, because it's a self-funding program that generates far more revenue that it consumes," the tourism association's president, David Teel, told local reporters. He said that for every dollar Texas spends on tourism marketing, $7 comes back in state tax revenue.

Anita Perry's line of thinking eventually met with approval at the spiritually aware Perry household. And so funding was restored: over $31 million in 2012, $33 million in 2013.

Bob Lander, president of the Austin Convention and Visitors Bureau, was happy. "We're extremely excited," he said. "Here in Texas, the Legislature understands the return on investment that tourism provides."

Next episode: Why did the wimps in Olympia kill off Washington's underfunded tourism department?

A truck ("a snow globe on wheels") and its ground crew are selling Seattle as a shopping destination for the holidays in Vancouver, BC, Spokane and Portland. Photo courtesy Seattle Convention & Visitors Bureau.

This week on Cornichon: a multi-part series on Washington's misunderstood tourism industry, and the ill-considered opposition to state funding of tourism promotion.

In the coming year, the Seattle Convention & Visitor Bureau expects to spend 40 percent of its admittedly modest budget for tourism promotion online. Along with the Port of Seattle, the Visitor Bureau will actually double its spending to bring tour operators and journalists here "to see for themselves." For its part, the Port maintains marketing offices in Beijing, Tokyo, London, Frankfurt and Paris to tell the Seattle story. One out of every five visitors to Washington these days flies into SeaTac from outside the United States, and the foreign visitors are responsible for a third of all tourism revenues. (Emirates will begin nonstop flights to and from Dubai in March, 2012.) All told, tourism is a $15 billion dollar industry in Washington, the fourth largest sector of the state's economy, according to Tom Norwalk, president of the SCVB.

So how did it come to pass that Washington's legislature voted, in the last session, to eliminate all state funding for tourism promotion? With a paltry, $2 million budget, Washington's funding was already 48th out of the 50 states. "It's somewhat embarrassing," Norwalk says.

But it's far from the first time that cost-cutters have taken the ax to tourism's Golden Goose. They did it in Colorado some years ago; Colorado's tourism revenues plummeted 30 percent. You'd think state legislatures would learn. Wrong.

Tomorrow: what happened in Texas.

Ah, Starbucks, Seattle's temperamental teenager! She's long outgrown her training bra.

Founded here, headquartered here, fawned-over and cossetted, she's as closely watched as a pubescent-adolescent celebrity, and as exasperating a child as ever captured our fancy.

Starbucks remains the world's most popular brand, with something like 50 million customer visits a month. She's trying so hard, our mercurial, petulant sexpot! The world loves her, but the family that raised her, and still has her under its roof, knows her all too well. Is she really sneaking out of the house and having sex for money with strangers? It's too late for summer camp but we don't know if we should send her to reform school or to Hollywood.

The very latest news, the one that inspires this post, was in the Seattle Times yesterday: Starbucks in a shipping container. You don't unpack it; it's not a pop-up. That's it, the 448-square-foot shipping container is the whole thing. First one goes to Tukwila, near the Boeing plant on East Marginal Way.

Don't think of it as cheap, think of it as recycling the box that all the candy came in. What's that? You still think of Starbucks as a coffee shop? Dreamer.

Sunday dinner, the ritual, is what restaurants like to do. Saturday nights are from hell (most places), Monday's dark (many places), so Sunday's when the chefs strut their stuff. At Tavolata, for example, they do $65 "feasts" that feature suckling pig or whole goat around their communal table. Emmer & Rye does Sunday dinners in their lofty upstairs space. Le Pichet does Sunday afternoon events, Harvest Vine does special Sunday menus.

And then there's RN74, Michael Mina's downtown Seattle wine bar, with its upscale menu and down-home atmosphere. No hoity-toity wine stewards in tuxedos looking at your brand of wristwatch to decide whether you're a $30 or $300 spender. They all wear jeans, gingham shirts, no ties. On Sunday nights, there's a $48 chicken dinner special that features a whole Mad Hatcher bird roasted in duck fat; it tastes almost nutty, like almond butter. Two sides: truffled mac & cheese and a braised kale with pork cheek. You might want to start with exceptional lobster "corn dogs" on a stick with a crème fraîche dipping sauce ($12), but even the garlic and goat cheese toast ($6) makes a great starter.

You might be tempted to go for one of the "last bottle" wines on the Solari board. (If the clacking sign reminds you of running for a train at station in Europe, that's the idea.) But you don't have to buy an expensive bottle. The sommeliers have the gift of describing wines so that you want to drink them, whether it's a familiar wine like Beaujolais or something you've never heard of them (a stunning glass of cabernet franc from Pyramid Valley in New Zealand's Hawkes Bay).

There are both sweet and savory desserts, if you're up to them. Good luck!

UPDATE Jan, 24th: Winter hours: the restaurant will close on Sundays, so the chicken dinner moves to Mondays. Price goes up to $65 (for two), adding freshly shaved truffles under the skin and in the sauce.

RN74, 1433 4th Avenue, Seattle, 206-456-7474   

The iconic pyramid atop Seattle's 26-story W Hotel might just remind you of the pyramid in front of the Louvre, in Paris. You can go see for yourself, after you win today's contest.

Here's what: The "W Hotel ReWonder Trivia Hunt."

Here's why: The hotel is closing its "living room" on Fourth Avenue for a remodel. Yes, its award-winning restaurant, Earth & Ocean, is closed as well. When all the dust settles, sometime in March of next year, the space will reopen with an elegant new eatery called TRACE.

Here's how: Go to the W's Facebook page for clues: https://www.facebook.com/wseattle, click "Like" and answer the clues.

The winning prize is an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris, including a five-night stay at the new W Hotel next door to the Paris Opera (opening on Valentine's Day, 2012), as well as a cooking class from TheInternationalKitchen.

But don't wait around. The contest started early this morning and ends at midnight tonight, Friday, Deceber 9th. You're always talking about that trip to Paris, right? Well, now's the time to do something about it!

UPDATE: The Seattle Times reports today (Dec. 9th) that a second lawsuit has been filed to prevent I-1183 from taking effect.

Wine World Warehouse, a 23,000-square foot facility just off I-5 on NE 45th, is the largest wine store in the Northwest. Six months from now, when the Washington Liquor Control Board is supposed to close its 700 or so retail outlets, Wine World will also become Washington's largest independent liquor store. Yet its owner, Seattle sommelier David LeClaire, is not thrilled.

LeClaire launched his superstore a year ago, taking over an expansive space that once been the University Plaza Hotel, and, briefly, an OfficeMax outlet. He had spent the previous decade as a savvy producer of Seattle wine events, with a politician's touch and a marketer's dream list of writers and tastemakers; before that, he'd spent a decade as the wine steward at the Painted Table in the Alexis Hotel. With backing from a group of private investors and the energetic support of a get-it-done chef named Lenny Rede, LeClaire assembled shelves that display 8,000 bottles, including wines from 500 Washington wineries. He's a hero to wine producers, having leveraged his hard work as a consultant into a position of retail prominence.

Let's flash forward for a moment, to June 1st, 2012, the day after the state goes out of the retail spirits business. Two out-of-state liquor giants, Bevmo (from California) and Total Beverage (Maryland), will have their grand openings. No one knows yet just where they'll be located, but they've already sent scouting parties. "They even came to see me," LeClaire admits. "How could I say no?" Bevmo has 77 stores in the western US, Total has over 100.

LeClaire, now 50, grew up in Escanaba, on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a town of some 13,000 souls. When Wal-Mart opened a 24-hour superstore on the west side of Lincoln Road, he recalls, the townspeople responded with unusual solidarity to support their local merchants, among them Elmer's County Market, on the other side of the highway. Elmer Dagenais, who died last year at the age of 94, was the sort of old-fashioned shopkeeper who doesn't exist anymore. He'd trust his customers to settle their bills when they'd get a paycheck. Even more importantly, Elmer would hire local teenagers, give them their first jobs and teach them the value of community. And plenty of times, he'd be standing right beside his kids, LeClaire among them, helping bag groceries.

"Treat your customers with respect, appreciate their business and thank them for shopping at your store." Those were Elmer Dagenais' words, but they're also David LeClaire's.

LeClaire voted "no" on Initiative 1183 to privatize Washington's liquor business, not because he wanted to keep the state stores open or because he sympathized with the union workers who'll be laid off, but because he didn't like Costco's "clear the deck" approach, which he fears will "decimate the little guys."

As owner of the only freestanding wine shop in Washington to meet the 10,000-square foot minumum size for liquor sales, LeClaire certainly isn't going to turn away from the opportunity to sell spirits. He intends to sell far more than the "Top 100" brands, especially in categories like Scotch, Tequila and Sherry. He'll showcase the Northwest's increasingly ambitious micro-distilleries. He'll continue to have partnerships with outside event planners, and hold tastings and host private events at Wine World. But he's deeply worried about the effects of privatization on smaller wine shops in small towns around the state. "What's going to happen to the independent wine shops in Hoquiam or Montesano once the Wal-Mart in Aberdeen starts selling liquor?" he asks. It's an ethic you don't see very often.

Before the November election, LeClaire was warning of "changes buried in this initiative [that] will crush or at the very least severely impact small wine wineries, small wine stores, and small grocery stores." The voters, though, were so anxious to get government out of the liquor business that they approved I-1183. "We are going to benefit handsomely," LeClaire admits, "but a no vote would have been in the long-term best interest of the entire community."

PARIS--You may recall that our trip to southwestern France last year featured a number of ideas to promote the wines of Bordeaux to a wider public. Not the five famous Grands Crus Classés (Marguax, Latour, Mouton, Lafite, Haut Brion), but ten thousand or so "lesser" châteaux within the strictly defined boundaries of the Bordeaux appellation.

We're going to take the liberty of quoting our dispatch dated October 12th, 2010:

"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."

The only hitch: the headline, which reads "Bordeaux: Des Vins, Un Style." Translates as badly as it reads in French. "Some Wines, One Style" But the art direction and taglines seem on target: "Aromas of fruit, flowers and spices: the aromatic palette of Bordeaux wines is infinite." Figs, berries, kiwis, licorice, dried leaves, not bad. Still, kinda liked my line better.

Not to rub it in or anything, but Matt Kramer, in the current issue of Wine Spectator, calls Bordeaux "the easiest [wine] region to understand."

FLORENCE, Italy--It would be pure speculation that Michelangelo ("Mickey") Buonarotti would recognize this scene, even though he had a hand it its creation. (Just as he and his pal Leo were single-handedly--ambidextrously?--repsonsible for the Renaissance.) Point being that even here, at the epicenter of Italiian high culture, McDonald's is part of daily life.

What you have to understand is that Italy is a country with a strong street-food tradition. Not fast-food, but food you buy on the street and eat from your hand. Arancini (deep-fried, stuffed rice balls) and cannoli (yes, cannoli) to name but two. Pizza, only rarely. Coffee, never. American-style fast food in the land of slow simmered ragù has been a long, hard sell. Not to mention that it's expensive! A Big Mac goes for $8, a McBacon for $8.25, and that's without fries or soda.

So the challenge facing McDonald's in Italy isn't price resistance but concern that the product doesn't measure up to Mamma's homemade pasta.

Enter Gualtiero Marchesi, at the venerable age of 81 Italy's reigning voice of culinary authority. (We crossed paths with his kitchen crew last year in Franciacorta, when we stayed at the Albereta Hotel, where his three-star-Michelin restaurant is located.) Concerned that young Italians no longer know what good food tastes like, Marchesi struck a deal with Mickey to upgrade the entire menu. "Haute Cuisine comes to McDonald's" is the tag line. I tried the entry-level Bavarese ($2.50); it tasted like a Whopper Junior, without pickles.

"Begin to Believe," the in-store display says. In small print, you can also read another tag: "The surprises never stop at McDonald's."

The real surprise (to your wallet) would come at Marchesi's flagship restaurant in the scenic Alpine lake country, where international celebrities like George Clooney dine and the seven-course tasting menu runs just under $300 without wine. "But why should the rich be the only ones to eat well?" Marchesi asked in a magazine interview. He sees his work with McDonald's as a public service. "Children especially are at risk of obesity because of industrial food." Take that, you Slow Food whiners, who complained that Italy's most famous chef was promoting Fast Food.

Funny thing, LATimes.com reports this week that Mickée is also the subject of a makeover in France. More architectural than gastronomic, however.

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You know you've looking at a good team when they finish each other's sentences. Even better, she talks for two minutes, and when she stops, he picks up. Without sounding the least bit scripted, they stay on topic. She talks about flavor, he talks about food. They make you want to read the book.

Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg last breezed through Seattle three years ago (!!), when they were promoting book Number 8--"What to Drink With What You Eat." Now it's Number 9: "The Food Lover's Guide to Wine." They've added a few new tricks to their repertoire. There's a list of 250 wines (varieties, origins) complete with flavor profile, recommended pairings and best producers, so you'll never be intimidated by a wine list or wine shop again. Condensed example: Sancerre. Citrus & grass flavors, goat cheese, Henri Bourgeois. There are useful sidebars, too. Chris Miller of Spago talks about wines from Washington's Red Mountain AVA ("rustic tannic structure"). There's a list of 150 wines under $15.

When it comes to actual wine and food combinations, Page and Dornenburg aren't dogmatic. Foie gras doesn't automatically mean 100-year-old Sauternes (though that does remain Page's iconic wine pairing). Sparkling rosé works very well, as does a California red.

We've come a long way. The USA is now the world's largest consumer of wine, albeit we drink but a piddling amount, per capita. Still, wine has been made in every state of the union for the past decade. Barack Obama has a thousand bottles in his cellar back in Chicago. The nation's official dietary guidelines recommend a glass of wine a day for good health. And yet, only a quarter of Americans drink wine at all, let alone with dinner.

Page and Dornenburg have their own heroes, the sommeliers who recommend specific bottles to restaurant-goers. Not the ones who look down their noses because you can't pronouce Montepulciano, not the ones who look at the brand of wristwatch you're wearing to guage now much you're going to spend, but the ones who truly care, who see themselves not just as salespeople but as guides on an exciting tour of the world's vineyards. No less than the chefs, it's the sommeliers who will guide us to a better future.

New York City's a tough place to live. It's crowded, it's hectic, it's expensive. When you're on deadline, you order in. Fortunately, there's a wide array of cuisines, everything from Mexican to Indian, from Italian to Thai. And of course the busy writers have a glass or two with dinner. And what's in the bottle? "Well, we're always running out of Riesling," Page confides.

Food Lover's Guide to Wine, Little Brown & Co., 352 pages, $35.

In the beginning, there was the Deity, Julia herself, who cooked upon the earth and saw that it was good. Now come the Apostles: St. Michael (Pollan), Mark (Bittman), St. Bill (Buford), and another Michael (Ruhlman), even Uncle Harold (McGee), all journalists who spread the Gospel of Good Food.

Ruhlman, the boysih author of ruhlman.com, is one of the country's leading food philosophers, with a single, simple message: the world would be a better place if you were to cook your own food. Bittman, at NYTimes.com, may have a bigger platform, Pollan has a catchier business card ("Eat Real Food"), McGee's been around longer, but Ruhlman's got the science of food (as well as its basic message) down to a science.

Ruhlman became a cook by attending the Culinary Institute of America in order to write "The Making of a Chef." Since then, starting with "The French Laundry Cookbook," he's written a string of culinary standards that mix theory and practice ("The Soul of a Chef," "The Elements of Cooking," "Ratio"). And he keeps writing turning out books about esoteric, non-culinary subjects like wooden boats and pediatric surgery. The defining moment in his career? He tried to cancel attending a béchamel class at the CIA because of bad weather in upstate New York; his mentor pointed out that a real chef wouldn't be fazed by the blizzard. Furious, Ruhlman drove through the snowstorm and showed up for class. "I became a chef out of anger," he admits.

The latest volume is called "Ruhlman's Twenty." It breaks cooking down into a series of techniques, starting with the most fundamental of fundamentals: Think.

Why? Well, says Ruhlman, if you don't think for yourself, you'll be a slave forever to incomprehensible recipes on index cards. "Recipes are not instruction manuals," Ruhlman writes, "they're like sheet music, written descriptions of acts that are infinitely nuanced."

The second item is Salt, which has become a bugaboo in much of today's nit-picking, self-absorbed, too-delicate-to-eat-real-food society. Then the rest of the culinary basics: water, onions, eggs, butter, doughs and batters, vinaigrettes, sauces, soups, and so on.

As for techniques, Boiling was covered in the Water chapter, so it's on to Sauté, Roast, Braise, Fry, Poach, Grill and Chill. Ruhlman apologizes for including the fundamental technique of making stock in his chapter on water, redeeming himself with separate chapters for soup-making and poaching. Along the way, you get 100 step-by-step recipes, beautifully illustrated with photographs by Ruhlman's wife, Donna Turner. "They're real-life photos, too, not idealized," he says.

Ruhman isn't a stickler for fancy equipment. A couple of good knives, a couple of frying pans, a couple of pots, a blender, a few measuring cups and bowls, an instant-read thermometer. He also sells a set of handy "offset" tasting spoons.on his website, but you don't really need them.

The book is not a perfect bible. Batter and dough are both flour-based and don't need separate chapters. Vinaigrette is nothing more than a sauce. Ruhlman mentions olive oil only as a medium for poaching halibut, yet it's a more popular fat, world-wide, than butter, and no less versatile. That, and Ruhlman's timidity with salting the water for pasta: in my view, it should be the salinity of the sea, three percent, not his timid one percent. There's a passing reference to sous-vide cooking, and nothing at all about "passive cooking," the notion that food cooks perfectly well in the residual heat of the oven or the pasta pot.

Ruhlman was in Seattle this week on a tour to promote his new book, and I had lunch with him at Sazerac. "I left out one important tool," he said over tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. "Micro-organisms. Yeasts. The bacteria that cause fermentation in charcuterie and cheese." He'll catch up on the leftovers with a series of shorter volumes for Chronicle Books, perhaps publishing direct-to-Kindle.

The most important thing: making the world a better place by eating less industrial food and more food cooked at home. "Cooking brings people together, it's less expensive, it's better for our bodies, our families, our animals and our land."

This post updates a preview earlier this week promoting Ruhlman's appearance at a Seattle book signing event. The previous post has been removed.