Greetings from Honk Hong where they take their Christmas shopping more seriously than any Macy’s ever did. So when you’ve been salivating over Prada and Versace, all day, stop in at Isobar overlooking Victoria
Harbor for a
Candy Cane Martini
One shot Sky Vanilla Vodka
One shot peppermint Schnapps
Shake with ice, serve with a cherry and a sprig of mint .

It’s a tough life for a Groovy Grape tour leader. Every day he gets tourists really really drunk on Barossa wines, eats some Kangaroo, and then drives everyone home snoring in a big white van.
Actually, no joke- it probably is tough. A recent study showed that 50 % of Australians consider drinking till they pass out to be an indelible part of their national character, right up there with playing footy and beating up minorities. And the Barossa valley police, operating as they do in Australia’s most prolific wine growing region, rake in a steady stream of moolah from day-trippin’ drivers who’ve indulged in their patriotism.
This can’t be easy for a van-driving winery tour guide, but it’s great for us. A sizable chunk of the Australian wines that end up in the US start in this hilly area just outside of Adelaide on the Southern coast. Except for the wallaby roadkill it looks a lot like Provence: tiny stone villages, blue mountains in the distance, and carefully manicured vineyards. Quite a few of them are pruned by under-the-table backpacker labor, paid minimum wage and all the grapes they can steal.
On this particular day our long-suffering guide drove us from cellar door to cellar door until we loved everyone in the world. You’ll be surprised how many of these wines end up in Calvert-Woodley Liquors (and everywhere else too).
Richmond Grove actually owns vineyards in other Australia regions too, but its Barossa Shiraz is some tasty tasty stuff. The stone chateau would look great if everything else in the valley wasn’t made out of corrugated tin.
Jacobs Creek is Australia’s largest wine brand- if you’ve drunk a shiraz, you’ve probably drunk Jacobs creek. And hated it. Their touristy celler door is really a high tech “visitors center” reminiscent of that humorous scene in Sideways. Their wines are uniformly bitter and watery.
Vinecrest is famous for Its huge black dog that lazes around in front. The Semillons are sweet and fruity, the Shirazes are nifty (that’s a technical term).
Bethany wins for the prettiest view, and has really really tasty everything: Great fortified that don’t kick your rear with sugar,and big spicy shirazes and shiraz mixes. I think there was a good Semillon here too, but I was way to gone to tell exactly.

Perhaps this sounds familiar to you. It’s a late night at the back room of the Black Cat, and some art student is going on and on about how Starbucks has taken over the world. In fact (he mumbles into the counter) there are so many bloody Starbucks in DC, he shoo…he should…should try to visit every single one. Then he probably passes out in a pool of his own self-righteousness.
Well, when he wakes up, there’s more than a sad head waiting for him. Jacinda and Jerry over at Siren Song have taken it upon themselves to visit, yes, every single Starbucks in DC, and they do it better than he ever could. They have detailed pictures, reviews of the location, and critiques of the clientele. Which just goes to prove that bitching about Starbucks does not make you alternative. But really liking them does make you intriguingly eccentric.
http://www.sirensongdc.com/

The poor girl behind the counter at Gloria Jean’s today is a Midwesterner named Annalies. She’s been trying to explain why it’s impossible to boil a latte to a middle aged raisin who’s already sent the cup back twice. ‘Look, I know you can do it hotter because I have them hotter in San Francisco. I live in San Francisco. Why can’t you do it like in San Francisco?’
I can see the cup of frothy liquid steaming from here- I’d love to give this ridiculous hag a stern lecture on the specific heat for evaporation of various liquids, but Annelies is way ahead of me.
Apparently, what it comes down to is the heat at which coffee starts to burn. The shot of expresso has to be between 70 and 90 degrees Celsius to keep it from developing that rancid bottom-of-the-office-coffee pot taste. The milk has to be 130 to 150 degrees Celsius to bring out the sweetness, but anything above it might scorch the coffee (which is, when you get down to it, just some woody pulp distilled into water). It seems, from Annelies’s frantic gesticulations that anything above 160 degrees will just make a mess as the milk separates out.
‘Look, the standard is just how its made. If you want it hotter you must be used to having it burned.’ Grudgingly she brings the milk to a rolling boil and pours it into the cup with an audible hiss.
‘Well the standard is changing.’ The woman huffs as she snatches her spoiled latte and stomps away, sipping. I swear I can hear her lips singe as she goes by.

Speaking of Sangiovese…
I wasn’t able to go to my “company picnic” this summer, because I work in a restaurant and someone had to be there to feed the hungry people. The next morning, my manager handed me a bottle of wine. Apparently, I had been entered in a raffle and won the wine in absentia. Never being one to turn down free…anything…I took the wine more than happily.
I opened it the other day, and experienced something completely different from the last Sangiovese I had (the Il Turchino Chianti). Luna Vineyards‘s 1999 Sangiovese was a much better sipping wine than the Il Turchino would have been. It was incredibly smooth, with low acidity and tannins, and hints of black pepper, almonds, and tobacco. For a meal, I’d pair this wine with a roast chicken, but it was so good to drink on its own, I think I’d like it with a simple cheese plate with apples, walnuts, and hard cheeses.
We didn’t finish the bottle that first night, and I thought I’d drink it with dinner the next night to keep it fresh. Unfortunately, we had pizza for dinner. The wine was still good, the pizza was good, but the combination of the two was…less than good. I do not reccommend drinking this wine with pizza! It was not pretty.
This wine retails for around $19.99. The Luna 1999 Sangiovese Reserve retails for $40.

Yes, yes, I went to Ceiba for lunch on Friday for Restaurant Week. And it was excellent. But I am here to write about wine, and I didn’t drink any wine at Ceiba, due to the fact that it was the middle of the early afternoon, and I was broke from dining out twice already last week. I graciously defer to MJF’s awesome review. I did go to two other restaurants, though, and since it was normal dinner time, and since I was not-so-broke, I tried some excellent wines.
Tuesday night at Galileo, not only were the Restaurant Week food prices discounted, their wine list was equally—if not more—economical. The restaurant’s actual list is, according to their website, “too long to post on [their] website”. I assume it is rather extensive, probably changing quite often as management and the sommelier see fit, and probably very pricey. For Restaurant Week, Galileo featured two wines, a red and a white, priced at $5/glass, or $18/bottle. My friends and I opted for a bottle of the red. I usually get to choose the wine; I was having beef for dinner, and $18 for a bottle of wine at a nice restaurant really can’t be beat. The waiter brought a bottle of Il Turchino Chianti to the table. This Chianti, like many, was made from the Sangiovese grape. The wine was dry but light; it paired really nicely with my chilled tomato soup (with almonds! But this isn’t a food review), and was quite tasty with my beef dish, although a more robust Chianti Classico would have made a better match. This wine might have gone better with pasta or roast chicken, but I enjoyed it a lot. Il Turchino retails for $5.99/bottle, and will be much better with food than as a sipping wine. If you can find this wine, buy and drink it, especially at this low price.
Thursday night took me and my girls to Butterfield 9. The atmosphere was decidedly less stuffy than at Galileo, but they featured a full wine list (at full prices). Since I was having fish, (Tasmanian steelhead trout), I wanted a white wine, and I chose the Barnard Griffin Fumé Blanc, priced at $8/glass. I liked this wine a lot, and Fumé Blanc goes very well with fish. Technically, “fumé blanc” is just an American synonym for “sauvignon blanc,” and the grapes share a lot of the same characteristics. The Barnard Griffin was very uncomplicated: crisp and fruity, pairing equally well with my appetizer of seared Day Boat scallops. This wine retails for $10/bottle.
Restaurant Week is worth the effort not only for the low-priced meals (and my meals were GOOD!), but also for the wines you can now afford to pair with your food. I find myself more willing to go out on a limb with my wine, and maybe splurge a bit, if I’m not paying an arm and a leg for my food. Both restaurants were absolutely wonderful—the food was inspiring, and the company was fantastic. Can’t wait for six months from now, and our next Restaurant Week!

So many brands of iced tea only get half of the definition correct. They might be cold as hell, but each sip is a harsh reminder that claims of “Natural flavors’ in the US can be backed up by coal tar, chicken skin, and my personal favorite, that grapefruit aroma infused from grasshopper bits.
For those of us who prefer our tea to have something to do with plant matter, stalking the local 7-11 can be a daunting and thankless process. I would like to offer the following spotters guide in the interest of tagging these rare animals for future capture and study.
Malted battery acid
This syrupy brown liquid is perpetrated in the form of Lipton, Snapple , and Nestea, brands known for the gooy chemical residue they leaves on the roof of your mouth and that toxic burn at the back of your throat. If they appear premixed at a restaurant they’re either noxiously sweet or dishwater bland when the poor server gets the syrup to water proportions confused. There is no hope for rehabilitation, shoot all species on site.
The mimic
The utter putridity of the malted battery acid variety has left the habitat open to any tea that won’t outright poison you: Arizona, Sobe, and Nantucket nectars. These drinks do a decent tea mimic and sometimes even include tea leaves as part of their manufacture.
Liquid hippie
There are many ways to get a hippie in liquid form, not the least of which is a blender. But in the last couple of years a couple of teas have taken a more domesticated approach: Honest Tea, The Republic of Tea, and Tazo. They’re real tea alright, often sugarless and always organic, as every label proclaims loudly. Drinking them will also single-handedly close the hole in the ozone layer, plant a new rainforest, and impregnate the endangered species of your choosing.
Milk tea, hold the tea
It’s the same concept that created, guacamole-flavored Doritos, pre-made Ritz cheese sandwich things, and peanut butter and jelly spread. If you’re going to be putting two ingredients together anyway, you might as well sell them as a single, low quality product. Milk and tea. In a bottle. Some places even warm it up. Then you have…warm milk and tea in a bottle. Well worth the tranquilizer dart. Try Gogono Koucha, or Kirin. Yes, Kirin.
That green honey rosewater stuff
A shy and retiring beast, the natural habitation for the green-honey-rosewater brands seems to be Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia. But not, for some reason, Vietnam or Australia…or anywhere else in the entire world. Which is really too bad because I would happily sell both kidneys and an ear if it meant just one more sip of this sweet sweet concoction. Ito En makes good ones.

Do you like a little dancing with your wine?
Four friends of mine and I made the trek Saturday to Boordy Vineyards, located in Hydes, Maryland, about 15 minutes from the Baltimore beltway. A place that offers tours and reasonably-priced wine year round, Boordy also stages many events throughout the year. Craving stew in the winter? Go there one evening for the nights they serve hot pots of the stuff made with Boordy wines. They have a similarly-themed fondue night as well.
But in the sweltering heat of the weekend, wintery foods weren’t on our minds. Music, dancing and drinking, though, seemed a great way to spend the night, and throughout the summer, Boordy brings out a different band for each event, with a corresponding dance class. They’ve got a zydeco group, motown singers, salsa instruction, and even an 80s night to finish off the series.
We learned the Fox Trot and danced and drank the night away to the sounds of Shades of Blue, fronted by a guy essentially doing a decent Sinatra impression. A warning – nearly every swing dancing event I’ve attended before has been very friendly to singles – there’ll either be plenty of unattached people there, eager to dance, or many opportunities to swap partners. At Boordy, this wasn’t the case – the dance floor was crowded almost exclusively with couples, and a lack of guys present meant I ended up being paired with an almost-elderly Asian woman for the entirety of the class. So if you’re into dancing, bring a date – or at least a buddy.

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Guest writer JEB has joined our staff to write about wine.
How many things have to happen before you’ll admit that you’re wrong? I had to admit three times that I was wrong about wine, and the admission didn’t come too easily.
I grew up in a Jewish house. My only exposure to wine for the first 19 or so years of my life was Manischewitz. With non-drinking parents, I was never taught about the “real” stuff. I came of age thinking I hated wine altogether.
I grew up a little and drank a little and tasted a little more wine and realized there was more to life than kosher blackberry wine. I came to the conclusion that there were lots and lots of good wines out there, and I liked all sorts of varietals. I just couldn’t stand chardonnay or merlot.

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