Vintage Story

WINE LISTS AND FOOD

Full Moon: March 21, 2008.

            Readers have seen that we are re-working the wine list at Story and are trying to convince lawmakers to allow us – and you – to buy wine directly from wineries for delivery to your home or business. (Currently, the law requires restaurants to buy only from wholesalers and individuals only from retailers, meaning our wine purchases are restricted to what others determine we may have.)

            Even so, in spite of those restrictions, at Story we are hard at work to find good wines at proper value to match the style of food in the General Store Restaurant and tasty, quaffable wine for use in the Story Still Bar.

            We bring this up partly because there is a trend among upscale restaurateurs to create multi-flavor dishes served sequentially on several small plates, thus putting emphasis on show-off food rather than on wine. A meal of nine or ten tiny courses will have widely varying taste sensations, rendering a single wine awkward; yet to pour a glass for each taste would be overwhelming. A $300 dinner at Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago, for example, may offer a dozen or more small courses, most of them based on fish, seafood, Asian, or vegetable flavors making it difficult to enjoy a fine red wine until or unless the later courses include a piece of meat or poultry. True, diners are offered a taste of wine with each course, usually at considerable additional expense, but someone wanting to experience an entire bottle of fine wine – white or especially red – is like ly to run into any number of taste conflicts.

            Trotter is not alone. Even in Paris and New York, top-ranked chefs are presenting tapa-sized courses instead of the traditional sequence of starter, fish, meat, and dessert. Change is inevitable in diets and menus, as in fashion and politics, but unfortunately for wine lovers, getting an in-depth wine experience as part of a restaurant meal faces decline. Granted, many diners appreciate trying several different wines during a meal – something we do at our monthly wine dinners but always in a sequence that allows each glass to prepare for the next, and our chef always designs a menu around the wines, not the other way round.

            At Story, we want your wine experience to be satisfying from beginning to end, so we offer a variety of wines by the glass and the half-bottle so you can on your own decide to vary the wines during the meal. Our servers also experience the wines and are prepared to help you with your selections. The kitchen staff is knowledgeable about wines on the list and design the menu to accommodate the wine list, so every dish on offer can be paired with a wine or wines to your liking. And our bottle selection represents wines from nearly every major producing area and in most grape varieties.

            We try to present wines not generally available in grocery stores as well as wines with which you may be familiar. This month, Story Innkeeper Rick has been in Napa Valley searching for boutique-style wines suitable for Story. Some of those we would like are not available to him because Indiana wholesalers do not or will not carry them, either because they feel they would not sell well on a large scale or they aren’t produced in sufficient quantity to offer them on a large scale. We would like to obtain wines directly from producers in all parts of the country and directly from importers to assure that all our wines meet your and our expectations. For that, we need your help. Write or call your elected Representative or Senator and urge him or her to change state law to allow us – and you – to buy wines for shipment directly from the producers.

            For more information on what to tell your officials, please visit the VinSense web site at www.VinSense.org. As a reader of Sheer Lunacy, you are automatically a member of VinSense.

 

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            Subscribers to Sheer Lunacy are automatically members of VinSense, but we urge all of you to enlist more members (read: voters). Membership is free. The easiest way to join is via the VinSense web site – www.vinsense.org -- where you can also read about opportunities to donate to VinSense to help cover costs of lobbying, maintaining the web site, and furthering the cause. We would like 10,000 voter-members by the end of 2007.      

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   Vintage Story is an e-newsletter authored by Ole Olson and published by the Story Inn, and is available free of charge to all who appreciate good wine. Vintage Story is published at each full moon. The author and the Story Inn specifically authorize the republication, reprinting and circulation of any issue Vintage Story so long as due credit is given to the author and to the Story Inn (which holds the copyright). If any newspaper or website desires to make use of any issue of Vintage Story, we do request that you notify us. Thanks, and here's to your health!

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