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Dec. 23rd, 2007
Whatever happened to $5 bubbly?
Dec. 23rd, 2007 09:03 amChampagne Beyond the Big Names
By AMY CORTESE
By AMY CORTESE
WHEN it comes to Champagne, are you a slave to fashion?
Americans are preparing to indulge in the traditional holiday bubblefest: more than 360 million glasses of sparkling wine are expected to be consumed over the holiday season, according to a new tally by M. Shanken Communications. Sparkling wines are made all over the world, but those hailing from the Champagne region of France — the only ones that can be called Champagne — have a special cachet.
Among the offerings, a handful dominate: Moët & Chandon and Veuve Clicquot together account for 55 percent of Champagne sold in the United States. These two blockbuster brands, along with Krug, Ruinart and Mercier, are owned by the luxury giant LVMH. In fact, the top Champagne brands are almost all owned by conglomerates, which churn out millions of bottles annually while spending heavily to market an image of luxury.
Against this backdrop, a relatively new genre of Champagne, made by independent grower-producers, has been quietly gaining a foothold. Many of these small, family-owned vineyards have long supplied the big houses with grapes: land in Champagne is limited, so big makers rely on the 20,000 or so small farmers across the region for their grapes, which they blend together. About 2,000 of these farmers make their own bubbly, the best of which is increasingly available in the United States. More
Film: NY Times' Top Ten Lists
Dec. 23rd, 2007 10:15 amStopping at 10 Just Seems Wrong
By A. O. SCOTT
A List, to Start the Conversation
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Films That Look Death in the Eye
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
By A. O. SCOTT
BY the end of next week, the number of movies reviewed in The New York Times in 2007 will top out somewhere around 640. The traditions of movie criticism decree that I select 10 as the year’s most worthy candidates for immortality (or at least future Netflix rental). Everyone knows that this is an arbitrary and subjective exercise — that’s part of the fun of it — but this year I’ve found it especially difficult to commit to so narrow and exclusive a list. More
A List, to Start the Conversation
By MANOHLA DARGIS
THE whole point of a Top 10 list, a friend recently scolded me, is to number them. (I was declining to do so.) My friend was wrong, but only because Top 10 lists are artificial exercises, assertions of critical ego, capricious and necessarily imperfect. (I have a suspicion that the sacred 10 is meant to suggest biblical certainty, as if critics are merely worldly vessels for some divine wisdom.) More than anything they are a public ritual, which is their most valuable function. I tell you what I liked, and you either agree with my list (which flatters us both) or denounce it (which flatters you). It’s a perfect circle. More
Films That Look Death in the Eye
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
THE betrayal of the body, decrepitude and death: in 2007 an unprecedented number of serious films, along with the usual slasher movies, contemplated the end of life. Might they be a collective baby-boom response to looming senescence and a fraying social safety net? Or do they reflect an uneasy sense that humanity is facing end times, when global warming, terrorism, nuclear proliferation and the war in Iraq, or any combination thereof, could bring on doomsday?
At once the scariest and most exhilarating of such films, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” contemplates the world from the perspective of a stroke victim who can communicate only by blinking one eye. If its metaphor of human life as imprisonment in one’s own body is terrifying, the horror is partly countered by its portrayal of the imagination as a means of ecstatic liberation. It’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman” elevated to a metaphysical plane. More
A Beast in the Jungle
By DAVID LEAVITT
By DAVID LEAVITT
In the title essay of a collection published this year, the novelist and critic David Lodge declared 2004 to have been “The Year of Henry James.” This was because 2004 saw the publication of two major “biographical” novels about James — “The Master,” by Colm Toibin, and Lodge’s own “Author, Author” — as well as a novel by Alan Hollinghurst, “The Line of Beauty,” in which the hero is writing a thesis on James. Both Toibin’s and Lodge’s novels took as their starting points the facts of Henry James’s life, and while they shared certain material, each had a distinct focus: Lodge wrote primarily about James’s involvement in the theater and his friendship with the caricaturist and writer George du Maurier, whose novel “Trilby” was enjoying phenomenal success just as James’s own literary star was in eclipse, while Toibin focused on James’s close relationships with his cousin Minny Temple, the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson and the sculptor Hendrik Andersen. Toibin also dramatized a scene in which the young James sleeps naked in the same bed with Oliver Wendell Holmes — a scene, Lodge points out in his essay, probably derived from Sheldon M. Novick’s 1996 revisionist biography, “Henry James: The Young Master,” in which Novick suggested that James experienced his “initiation” into sex in 1865 and that his partner was very likely Holmes. Too much about Henry James?
I plowed my way into the garage today after a wonderful brunch at 
Drewan and Rvrjoe775's this morning. I plowed out of the garage to run down town for the theater, and then back again after I did some shopping and got gas for the blower. Four-wheel drive is too much fun.
Drewan and Rvrjoe775's this morning. I plowed out of the garage to run down town for the theater, and then back again after I did some shopping and got gas for the blower. Four-wheel drive is too much fun.