Pot pairings & good cheap wine

This Sunday’s New York Times (March 19, 2017) had two unusual but very interesting articles concerning wine.

Pot & Wine Pairings: The first article featured the wine country of Sonoma California which is famous not only for the quality of its vines but also for the quality of its cannabis – which it is now legal to grow and to consume recreationally.

Taking advantage of these two home-grown pleasures and supporting the local economy, some Sonoma restaurants are now offering wine & pot pairing dinners.

"Sam Edwards, co-founder of the Sonoma Cannabis Company, charges diners $100 to $150 for a meal that experiments with everything from marijuana-leaf pesto sauce to sniffs of cannabis flowers paired with sips of a crisp Russian River chardonnay.

“It accentuates the intensity of your palate,” Mr. Edwards, 30, said of the dinners, one of which was held recently at a winery with sweeping views of the Sonoma vineyards. “We are seeing what works and what flavors are coming out.”

Read more of Thomas Fuller's article at the NYT:  http://tinyurl.com/kjvkgv6 

Pleasures of cheap, delicious wine:  The second article confronts wine snobs head-on by offering a detailed and well-argued defense of ‘processed’ wines. The writer, Bianca Bosker, argues that there is nothing inherently superior in natural, unadulterated, fermented grape-juice, as opposed to juice which has been processed by the wine maker. Adding everything to the wine from resin, to crushed marble or egg whites to ox-blood has been a common practice since even before the Romans. With all the technologies of the twenty-first century, wine makers are now able to reproduce all the subtle pleasures of the very best and rarest wines in cheap and accessible versions for the rest of us.

Read the full article by Bianca Bosker at NYT: http://tinyurl.com/mv8v4b4