hello Bottlers.
Still on vacay in remotest Vermont and fresh from an interview with Ann Marie Gardner — whose first issue of Modern Farmer magazine (a quarterly) appeared in April. The new publication is quite unlike anything I’ve seen before, with the visual appeal of Saveur, the kind of gritty detail you would find in a bulletin from the county agricultural extension service, and even a couple of Roz Chast-type cartoons.
The design and photography are cutting edge, and the stories come from around the world. In the first issue were stories about growing mangoes in Malawi, which bird to choose when your starting a backyard flock of laying hens, and a thoughtful piece on a visit to a slaughterhouse complete with some unpleasant photos of the dreadful business that’s conducted in such places. Their online offering will give you an idea of the quality and the aesthetic in play. They post three new stories every day. Have a peek here.
Gardner is a Massachusetts native with degrees from Boston College and the Harvard School of Public Health. She lives in Germantown N..Y., a Hudson Valley community about an hour north of Poughkeepsie. The magazine offices are in the town of Hudson (otherwise known as Brooklyn-on-the-Hudson). My profile of Gardner and her magazine will appear in the Food section of Globe sometime in September.
Gardner was eager for us to spend some time in the town of Hudson and in particular to drop in on her friends Michael Albin and Marianne Courville, a husband-wife team who own Hudson Wine Merchants, a retail shop, on the main street of the town. It’s a tiny spot, less than half the size of the Bottle, I would say, but stocked with wines that would be familiar to all of us. They do more with higher-end Burgundy and Bordeaux but small-producers from the naturalist school are well represented. They seem to have more interest in California than we. I met and chatted with Michael for about a half hour. They bought their fine old multi-story building a few years ago. The first floor retail area was gutted, but they were left with some beautiful bones to work with (not unlike Belly in this respect). When I asked what the building had been before he said: “A crack house.” It’s that kind of town – or was.
Michael is an affable sort and (perhaps because Gardner had alerted him that we might be dropping by) was prepared to give me a tour of what appears to be his special project: a walk-in, temperature and humidity-controlled room where he keeps a small stock of rare, expensive bottles. Some of these, it seems, came from his father’s cellar assembled over the last fifty years or so. There was a lot of the sort of stuff Chinese collectors are eager to pay scandalous sums for — and that’s exactly what he’s up to: selling off the collection to the highest bidders at high-end auctions. Of course he would soon have come to the end of his father’s cellar if this kept up for long so I don’t know how he plans to keep it going or even if he can. We didn’t really have that long to chat. But the idea of a little wine shop in Hudson N.Y. selling bottles of this calibre to buyers a world a away does rather take the breath away.
Earlier this week and before getting out of Dodge I posted a third installment of the series I’m calling A New England Vintage on my personal blog. The subject is a return to Turtle Creek Winery in nearby Lincoln to check in on the state of the vintage in mid-season. They’ve had good growing conditions there, according to vineyard manager Matt Bombarasso – not too much trouble with pests or fungal infection. They haven’t been struggling as much as Deirdre Heekin at la garagista in Vermont (see part 2 in the series), largely because Turtle Creek is not limited to those defensive measures which are approved for organic viticulture. You can read owner Kip Kumler’s reasons for not adopting a strictly organic approach in the post,Mid-August on Conservation Hill, here.
While in the vineyard Matt and I had some fun taking photos of grape leaves which I later posted to Twitter in the form as a kind of multi-tweet quiz. The idea was to match the variety (chardonnay, cab franc, riesling, and pinot noir) to the leaf by observing its shape. You can replay the quiz by going to my Twitter page @stephen_meuse and scrolling down to August 14th where you’ll see the four tweets each with a photo and a final one with the link to the answers. I’ve got a Drop Stop for any of you who get it right — on the honor system.
That’s it for now.
-Stephen