You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an alternative browser.
You should upgrade or use an alternative browser.
The Village Voice's take on Terroir (NYC)
- Thread starter slaton
- Start date
Sharon Bowman
Sharon Bowman
I think you're confusing the words "awesome" and "painful."
Nah.originally posted by Rahsaan:
I almost feel bad for the author.
His belligerent followup comments are defensive in the extreme and fail to show any trace of humility.
No sympathy for this one.
Cristian Dezso
Cristian Dezso
I guess it all depends on perspective: who is the readership of VV? But thanks for the link to the fun read - both the articles and the comments.
Steve Edmunds
Steve Edmunds
[No message]
Wow.
What a lame business that is on many fronts.
I have an odd crusade that someone who is a professional reviewer for a real publication (OK, I mostly meant Frank Bruni until last month) could comment not just on whether there was wine for $20 a bottle in the place, but on the general level of the markup. It is not past the investigative capabilities of the NYT to say, 'dang, Le Bernardin is charging you 8x their wholesale cost!' Or, 'the markups on expensive wines are low, so if you're a high roller this is for you.' Or, 'this is a place that devotes so much effort to their list that their moderately high markup seems fair for the cool, allocated stuff that you can drink there.'
But instead, they write stuff like brother Sietsima--"the glass was $15!" Well, wtf was in the glass? Is $15 the right number or not? OK, if you are looking to drink inexpensively it would be nice if they had a little Muscadet number for a better price, but for me it's a question of what value are they adding and what are they charging for it?
I tell you, if I could get another glass of the perfect 1983 Chave that a kind guest brought to dinner tonight right this second, I wouldn't much care what it cost. There are good values that are expensive, and shitty values that are cheap, and a decent reporter could help distinguish them and educate the reader in the meantime.
I'm a little puzzled why they don't, really, ever. It makes me think there are incentives at work that I haven't perceived.
What a lame business that is on many fronts.
I have an odd crusade that someone who is a professional reviewer for a real publication (OK, I mostly meant Frank Bruni until last month) could comment not just on whether there was wine for $20 a bottle in the place, but on the general level of the markup. It is not past the investigative capabilities of the NYT to say, 'dang, Le Bernardin is charging you 8x their wholesale cost!' Or, 'the markups on expensive wines are low, so if you're a high roller this is for you.' Or, 'this is a place that devotes so much effort to their list that their moderately high markup seems fair for the cool, allocated stuff that you can drink there.'
But instead, they write stuff like brother Sietsima--"the glass was $15!" Well, wtf was in the glass? Is $15 the right number or not? OK, if you are looking to drink inexpensively it would be nice if they had a little Muscadet number for a better price, but for me it's a question of what value are they adding and what are they charging for it?
I tell you, if I could get another glass of the perfect 1983 Chave that a kind guest brought to dinner tonight right this second, I wouldn't much care what it cost. There are good values that are expensive, and shitty values that are cheap, and a decent reporter could help distinguish them and educate the reader in the meantime.
I'm a little puzzled why they don't, really, ever. It makes me think there are incentives at work that I haven't perceived.
Joel Stewart
Joel Stewart
obviously, from the first "critical" remark about all those riesling pages, the biggest chip on the writer's shoulder is what he perceives as snobbery in the wine world. that is his crusade, and it looms so big he can't see his own ignorance propping it up.
Arjun Mendiratta
Arjun Mendiratta
originally posted by SFJoe:
I think I learned "auslese" pretty early in high school.
And I thought I went to an elite high school...
It was especially egregious. Is he that bad at food, too?
This is going to get me in trouble, but what the hell...I'm going on vacation, and won't have to deal with the fallout until next year.
When I started writing in Boston, we had four critics. The one no one could stand (and I mean no one, but he was the best writer of the group, and certainly the most famous) only reviewed once per month, so he wasn't that useful except for the high-end restaurants he mostly reviewed. He did OK with wine when he deigned to mention it. We had another critic who was fairly good with wine and a pretty incisive food writer, but he was not only not anonymous (something I think is overrated, but that's another issue), he was pals with rafts of people in the industry. He probably shouldn't have invited multi-restaurant GMs to the premiere of his play, for instance.
The guy who wrote where I did fancied himself a wine expert. He was not (it was amazing how many times he ended up with either merlot or Chianti in his glass, even at Sardinian, Catalan, and Cantonese restaurants), and he suffered the same problem that Sietsema is exhibiting in the linked thread: a genetic inability to admit a lack of expertise. He was a good critic aside from a reflexive disdain for high-end dining, which made him very useful in one narrow group of restaurants, and only marginally reliable outside that box.
And then there was the other one, who was a horrid restaurant critic and even worse when it came to wine. ("Was" because the reign of terror is now over, though I don't know if the successor is an improvement.) I had more than a score (at least) of restaurateurs, wine directors, etc. insist to me that said critic did not drink alcohol. Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn't (Levi might know, though he probably shouldn't say if he does); I had lunch with the critic once during an interview, and there was no alcohol. But I can write said critic's wine coverage in my sleep: "Chez Joe has a good selection of wines at varied prices, with some bottles priced well into the higher ranges, and a short list of well-chosen options by the glass." (That's the long form; often, wine was entirely ignored.) The beauty of this, I guess, is that it doesn't mean a damn thing. I mean, hell, for someone who knows as much about wine as the critic in question (or Sietsema) does, Smith & Wollensky has such a list. It's an all-purpose trope, and mostly reflective of the bulk of non-wine-specialist wine writing.
The "incentives," however...on those, I can give a bit of insight. Journalists, as a rule, don't have the disposable income to explore many wines of note. Certainly none of the "important" wines, and decreasingly few of their replacements. (There's a whole rant here that I just erased because I'm not going to be around for the next few weeks to have the argument.) This affects how they view wine lists in an obvious and dramatic way. They also, as a rule, receive enormous pressure from their editors, who are also paid like journalists and have similar views of expensive wines, but are less personally invested in the wine and thus have even stronger feelings about what's "too expensive." So even if a critic took a more sensible approach to a wine list, an editor would likely protest. (Certainly they express the same protest to the actual wine writer, when such a beast exists, all the time. For me, in the late nineties, it was "try to keep the bottle prices between $10 and $15 dollars, and see if you can find some below $10; none of our readers are going to spend more than that." Yes, an exact quote. The advertising and marketing departments had a different opinion on their demo, but that didn't seem to hold any weight with my editor, his editor, or the editor-in-chief.) And furthermore, the number of non-wine publications that are eager for expense reports that include $20/glass wines number, at least in the States, between zero and zero. With the occasional exception of no one, and the notable standout performance of fuck-all.
So, you're now wondering: yes, but why can't they at least learn about this sort of thing and write about it properly even if they can't expense the wines? Well, they don't care, so that point's moot. But assuming they did, how do you propose they do that, given the above-mentioned income issue? (And now we're back to the rant.) (And we're also missing another rant about reflexively idiotic New York wine retailers who promote asinine asceticism in their wine critics. Man, this channel sucks...all the best stuff's on cable.)
Yes, the research ability for what you ask exists at the Times. (Maybe. I'm no longer quite sure.) But the will or the interest? Likely not.
You'll get the very occasional critic who "gets it," usually as the result of prior training. Craig LaBan, for example, seems to understand wine, but then again he's in a city where it's a lot more complicated to write about it. The disclaimer here is that I know the guy (not well), and I happen to know that he is indeed the beneficiary of prior training before restaurant criticism was his career. But on-the-job training? No way the Inquirer's paying for that, especially now.
This is going to get me in trouble, but what the hell...I'm going on vacation, and won't have to deal with the fallout until next year.
When I started writing in Boston, we had four critics. The one no one could stand (and I mean no one, but he was the best writer of the group, and certainly the most famous) only reviewed once per month, so he wasn't that useful except for the high-end restaurants he mostly reviewed. He did OK with wine when he deigned to mention it. We had another critic who was fairly good with wine and a pretty incisive food writer, but he was not only not anonymous (something I think is overrated, but that's another issue), he was pals with rafts of people in the industry. He probably shouldn't have invited multi-restaurant GMs to the premiere of his play, for instance.
The guy who wrote where I did fancied himself a wine expert. He was not (it was amazing how many times he ended up with either merlot or Chianti in his glass, even at Sardinian, Catalan, and Cantonese restaurants), and he suffered the same problem that Sietsema is exhibiting in the linked thread: a genetic inability to admit a lack of expertise. He was a good critic aside from a reflexive disdain for high-end dining, which made him very useful in one narrow group of restaurants, and only marginally reliable outside that box.
And then there was the other one, who was a horrid restaurant critic and even worse when it came to wine. ("Was" because the reign of terror is now over, though I don't know if the successor is an improvement.) I had more than a score (at least) of restaurateurs, wine directors, etc. insist to me that said critic did not drink alcohol. Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn't (Levi might know, though he probably shouldn't say if he does); I had lunch with the critic once during an interview, and there was no alcohol. But I can write said critic's wine coverage in my sleep: "Chez Joe has a good selection of wines at varied prices, with some bottles priced well into the higher ranges, and a short list of well-chosen options by the glass." (That's the long form; often, wine was entirely ignored.) The beauty of this, I guess, is that it doesn't mean a damn thing. I mean, hell, for someone who knows as much about wine as the critic in question (or Sietsema) does, Smith & Wollensky has such a list. It's an all-purpose trope, and mostly reflective of the bulk of non-wine-specialist wine writing.
The "incentives," however...on those, I can give a bit of insight. Journalists, as a rule, don't have the disposable income to explore many wines of note. Certainly none of the "important" wines, and decreasingly few of their replacements. (There's a whole rant here that I just erased because I'm not going to be around for the next few weeks to have the argument.) This affects how they view wine lists in an obvious and dramatic way. They also, as a rule, receive enormous pressure from their editors, who are also paid like journalists and have similar views of expensive wines, but are less personally invested in the wine and thus have even stronger feelings about what's "too expensive." So even if a critic took a more sensible approach to a wine list, an editor would likely protest. (Certainly they express the same protest to the actual wine writer, when such a beast exists, all the time. For me, in the late nineties, it was "try to keep the bottle prices between $10 and $15 dollars, and see if you can find some below $10; none of our readers are going to spend more than that." Yes, an exact quote. The advertising and marketing departments had a different opinion on their demo, but that didn't seem to hold any weight with my editor, his editor, or the editor-in-chief.) And furthermore, the number of non-wine publications that are eager for expense reports that include $20/glass wines number, at least in the States, between zero and zero. With the occasional exception of no one, and the notable standout performance of fuck-all.
So, you're now wondering: yes, but why can't they at least learn about this sort of thing and write about it properly even if they can't expense the wines? Well, they don't care, so that point's moot. But assuming they did, how do you propose they do that, given the above-mentioned income issue? (And now we're back to the rant.) (And we're also missing another rant about reflexively idiotic New York wine retailers who promote asinine asceticism in their wine critics. Man, this channel sucks...all the best stuff's on cable.)
Yes, the research ability for what you ask exists at the Times. (Maybe. I'm no longer quite sure.) But the will or the interest? Likely not.
You'll get the very occasional critic who "gets it," usually as the result of prior training. Craig LaBan, for example, seems to understand wine, but then again he's in a city where it's a lot more complicated to write about it. The disclaimer here is that I know the guy (not well), and I happen to know that he is indeed the beneficiary of prior training before restaurant criticism was his career. But on-the-job training? No way the Inquirer's paying for that, especially now.
Mark Anisman
Mark Anisman
seemed like both sides were silly.
"of course Cornas is going to be spoofed up! I avoid that appellation like the plague". Gene does not help the cause!!! pot calling the kettle black. he needs to learn a bit as well.
GeneT was a lone voice of reason in his response. he offered to help the writer out of the hole he dug. what a concept : let's help build a person up instead of tearing him down. and all ausleses are not the same. terroir can help their customers by somehow indicating sweetness levels. is it not incumbent on the waiter to note that the particular auslese chosen is quite sweet and may not match your food selection?
don't get me wrong, it was an article deficient in an embarrassing multitude of ways. but the attack dog responses may have kindly offered a little education on their part instead of simple vitriol and their own misconceptions. or merely asking questions of the writer on the specifics etc and making a little good come out of a badly written article.
the other day i paid my first visit to Terroir in San Francisco. i asked a bunch of questions about regions i know little of. it was a very nice back and forth. what went wrong in NYC? it is apparent that the writer does not have a great depth of wine knowledge, but could the wine bar have helped him out a touch?
"of course Cornas is going to be spoofed up! I avoid that appellation like the plague". Gene does not help the cause!!! pot calling the kettle black. he needs to learn a bit as well.
GeneT was a lone voice of reason in his response. he offered to help the writer out of the hole he dug. what a concept : let's help build a person up instead of tearing him down. and all ausleses are not the same. terroir can help their customers by somehow indicating sweetness levels. is it not incumbent on the waiter to note that the particular auslese chosen is quite sweet and may not match your food selection?
don't get me wrong, it was an article deficient in an embarrassing multitude of ways. but the attack dog responses may have kindly offered a little education on their part instead of simple vitriol and their own misconceptions. or merely asking questions of the writer on the specifics etc and making a little good come out of a badly written article.
the other day i paid my first visit to Terroir in San Francisco. i asked a bunch of questions about regions i know little of. it was a very nice back and forth. what went wrong in NYC? it is apparent that the writer does not have a great depth of wine knowledge, but could the wine bar have helped him out a touch?
As someone pointed out in the comments (which, I'll agree, were aggressive and occasionally ignorant...but so was Sietsema's original post), Terroir's best course of action is not to launch into an explanation of the pradikat system to everyone who orders a German riesling. That would turn off more than it would help. This is why those who don't know every single thing about wine (i.e. everyone) ask. For example, when I was there the first time, there was most definitely a conversation. What's this North Fork cabernet franc like? I don't usually like chardonnay of any sort, so tell me why I would like this aged Auxey-Duresses? What's this Spanish appellation I've never heard of? And so forth.
I don't care that Sietsema doesn't know much about wine. In that, he's like almost everyone else in his profession. I care that he's reviewing the wine at wine bars, and doesn't seem to acknowledge his lack of qualification. And I care that he's doubling down on that ignorance.
"So I went to Manhattan Mexicana, and the waiter recommended this very elaborate appetizer to me. But when it arrived, there was this gross sticky stuff all over the rest of the ingredients. I asked what it was, and he gave me some pretentious word for it that I've never heard of. (Why can't waiters just call things what they are?) I looked it up later, and it was mold!!! Can you believe it? A restaurant that costs this much actually asking me to pay for mold? Clearly, there was rotted chicken in the fridge. They must think we're rubes, or maybe it's just a health violation. That Sietsema guy who reviewed this restaurant must be an idiot. Can't he recognize mold when he sees it?"
Do you think Sietsema would approve of the above rant if posted to some forum over which he had influence? No. Because he knows what huitlacoche is. He might be helpful, but if the original poster doubled-down on the anti-fungal ignorance, he might get snippy. And then we have the thread in question, but reversed.
I don't care that Sietsema doesn't know much about wine. In that, he's like almost everyone else in his profession. I care that he's reviewing the wine at wine bars, and doesn't seem to acknowledge his lack of qualification. And I care that he's doubling down on that ignorance.
"So I went to Manhattan Mexicana, and the waiter recommended this very elaborate appetizer to me. But when it arrived, there was this gross sticky stuff all over the rest of the ingredients. I asked what it was, and he gave me some pretentious word for it that I've never heard of. (Why can't waiters just call things what they are?) I looked it up later, and it was mold!!! Can you believe it? A restaurant that costs this much actually asking me to pay for mold? Clearly, there was rotted chicken in the fridge. They must think we're rubes, or maybe it's just a health violation. That Sietsema guy who reviewed this restaurant must be an idiot. Can't he recognize mold when he sees it?"
Do you think Sietsema would approve of the above rant if posted to some forum over which he had influence? No. Because he knows what huitlacoche is. He might be helpful, but if the original poster doubled-down on the anti-fungal ignorance, he might get snippy. And then we have the thread in question, but reversed.
Cory Cartwright
Cory Cartwright
two quick notes:
1. The review did indeed suck. If critics can list every fucking ingredient in a salad they hated, they can list the basic information on a wine.
2. Never, ever, forget to mention a wine is sweet. Ever. I don't Know if the guy is bullshitting about the auslese thing, but if you serve a wine and don't tell them it's sweet, prepare for some shit.
1. The review did indeed suck. If critics can list every fucking ingredient in a salad they hated, they can list the basic information on a wine.
2. Never, ever, forget to mention a wine is sweet. Ever. I don't Know if the guy is bullshitting about the auslese thing, but if you serve a wine and don't tell them it's sweet, prepare for some shit.
Joe Dressner
Joe Dressner
That's one long vacation! Where are you going?
You write:
And we're also missing another rant about reflexively idiotic New York wine retailers who promote asinine asceticism in their wine critics.
What does this mean?
You write:
And we're also missing another rant about reflexively idiotic New York wine retailers who promote asinine asceticism in their wine critics.
What does this mean?