Food Wednesday...

[lsanderson]

A Liquor of Legend Makes a Comeback
By PETE WELLS

EARLIER this year, when Lance Winters heard that absinthe was being sold in the United States again for the first time since 1912, he shrugged it off. Then he reconsidered. He’d spent 11 years perfecting an absinthe at St. George Spirits, the distillery where he works in Alameda, Calif., and considered it one of the best things he’d ever made. Why not sell it?

Over the past few months, he must have wished he’d stuck to his first instinct.

The division of the Treasury Department that approves alcohol packaging sent back his label seven times, he said. They thought it looked too much like the British pound note. They wondered why it was called Absinthe Verte when their lab analysis said the liquid inside was amber. Mostly, it seemed to him, they didn’t like the monkey.

“I had the image of a spider monkey beating on a skull with femur bones,” Mr. Winters said. But he said that the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau thought the label “implied that there are hallucinogenic, mind-altering or psychotropic qualities” to the product.

“I said, ‘You get all that just from looking at a monkey?’”

His frustration came to a sudden end last Wednesday, when he learned the agency had finally granted approval to his St. George Absinthe Verte, the first American-made absinthe on the market in almost a century. More

A Blue Blood New in Name Only
By HAROLD MCGEE

London

IT’S December in England, and Stilton rules the cheese board.

Long celebrated as the king of English cheeses, festively veined with blue-green mold, Stilton is the holiday cheese of choice here. Something like half of the year’s production is sold in November and December.

On Monday, I attended an intriguing tasting of this year’s Stiltons — intriguing because it included a new aspirant to the throne. This upstart young cousin can’t use the royal name, even though it aims to be the most traditional Stiltonian cheese of all. It’s called Stichelton.

Stichelton is the creation of Randolph Hodgson, the proprietor of Neal’s Yard Dairy and a major force in the renaissance of British specialty cheeses, and the cheesemaker Joe Schneider, a native of Syracuse, N.Y., who started cheesemaking a decade ago as “an American making Greek feta for a Turk in Holland.” Mr. Hodgson convened the tasting at his home in west London.

This wasn’t my first taste of the new English blue. I had sampled an earlier version in September at the Stichelton Dairy in Nottinghamshire, a three-hour drive north of London and 75 miles northwest of the village of Stilton. Stilton was a convenient stop on the old Great Northern Road between London and Scotland, and lent its name around 1700 to farmhouse cheeses made throughout the region that were brought there to be sold to travelers.

On our journey up to the Stichelton Dairy last September, Mr. Hodgson explained how cheese quality progressed for centuries, then declined in the age of mass production and supermarkets. More

Ham From Spain’s Prized Pigs Ready for Debut
By FLORENCE FABRICANT

THE first Ibérico hams from Spain are ready to be sold in the United States, having passed government inspections. They will make their American debut tomorrow afternoon at Jaleo, in Washington, where the chef José Andrés plans to slice and serve jamón Ibérico to the Spanish ambassador, among others.

In the next few weeks, some restaurants and shops will serve and sell their allotments of the initial shipment of 300 hams from Embutidos Fermín, in La Alberca, Spain, the only producer that is authorized by the United States Department of Agriculture to export the hams here. More

Drink and Be Merry: Wine Prices to Rise
By ERIC ASIMOV

THE signs, at best, have been wretched. The price of oil has shot up, and the dollar has plunged to new lows. For lovers of European wines in particular, it’s a recipe for skyrocketing prices.

So far, though, what has seemed inevitable has yet to occur. Price increases have been modest at best.

But the bad news may simply have been delayed. In three to five months, many in the wine trade say, the pressure will become irresistible, and prices for European Union wines will rise.

“It’s like a huge bubble that’s about to burst,” said Joshua Wesson, a founder of Best Cellars, a wine retail chain based in New York, which was recently acquired by the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company.

Importers and distributors of European wines say they have essentially held the line on prices for months, even though they have had to pay more as the dollar has sunk and their own profits have eroded. Their reason? The fickle nature of wine consumers.

The beer and spirits industries are built on consumer loyalty to brand names, but aside from a few successful brands like Yellow Tail and Santa Margherita, wine consumers buy for different reasons, like price.

“When the price of your favorite Pouilly-Fuissé goes up you go to a different Mâcon,” said Gary Vaynerchuk, director of operations at Wine Library, a big retail store in Springfield, N.J. “The culture actually induces you to go out and try other things.” With the holiday season accounting for an enormous percentage of annual wine sales, importers and distributors have been especially loath to raise prices significantly at this point in the year. But that’s likely to change in 2008. More