I've always thought Mai Tais were kind of campy, something fun to have with roast pork shoulder and pineapple. Now I know better. Recently my friend Joe Raffa, a Hawaiian native, mixed the world's greatest Mai Tai from his extensive rum collection. He calls it the $100 Mai Tai because it would cost $100 to buy bottles of all the necessary ingredients. But the drink itself costs much less. And with last week's news about the growing GDP, it seemed ok to post. Especially because it's just so good: caramelly yet tart, smooth yet bright, perfectly balanced — and supersmart (case in point: instead of Cointreau, Joe uses Rhum Clement Creole Shrubb, an orange liqueur made from rhum agricole instead of neutral spirits. "It keeps the rum with the rum," Joe says. And in place of ordinary simple syrup, he uses Depaz cane syrup, a Caribbean sweetener gives the Mai Tai a richer maple note.) The best part, Joe is José Andrés' chef de cuisine at Oyamel in DC, and has been dropping hints that his boss should open a Hawaiian restaurant in DC serving roast pork and really good Mai Tais. All I can say is, José, please, listen up. Recipe after the jump.

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A group of geologists in Oregon have a few skeptical things to say about the notion of "minerality" in wine, the Southern Oregon Mail Tribute reports. They've got a good point or two—that the amount of actual minerals in wine is below the threshold of human taste and smell, for instance—though they're a bit wobbly on what the French term terroir actually means, which is not just the soil, but the totality of the influence of a specific place on a wine's character.

Terroir takes into account human influence, too, according to Rhône winemaker Michel Chapoutier, who stopped by our office for a quick tasting a few days ago. Chapoutier also made a nice distinction between what he sees as the two broad types of wine in the world: taste-driven wines (where the producer assesses what consumers want, finds appropriate grape sources, and markets a wine that satisfies that demand) and wines of terroir (where the nature of a specific vineyard determines the character of the wine, the winemaker intervenes as little as possible in order to preserve that character, and then the owner hopes that people will buy it). 

When angry colonists threw tea into Boston Harbor in 1773, they had no idea that their rebellion would eventually lead to the American Revolutionary War in 1775, or that it would inspire the creation of another kind of beverage in 2009: Absolut Vodka Boston, a limited-edition vodka infused with black tea and elderflower.

Recently, mixologist Jamie Gordon hosted an Absolut Vodka Boston Tea Party at Food & Wine's New York City office. He gave the editorial staff a taste of some fantastic cocktails he created with the spirit, such as the juicy and aromatic Absolut Boston Blackberry.

ABSOLUT BOSTON BLACKBERRY
Makes 1 Drink

4 large blackberries
1 ounce agave nectar
4 ounces Absolut Boston
1 1/2 ounces fresh lemon juice
4 dashes rhubarb bitters
Ice

In a cocktail shaker, muddle 2 of the blackberries with the agave nectar. Add the Absolut Boston, lemon juice, bitters and ice. Shake well and double strain into a chilled large martini glass. Garnish with the remaining 2 blackberries.

So it seems that researchers in Japan have determined the cause of that horrible metallic super-fishy taste that occurs when some red wines are paired with fish. It's iron. Specifically, the amount of ferrous ion present in the wine. You can read all about this discovery here in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Admittedly, you'll have to be willing to plow through sentences like "Metal ions were analyzed by a postcolumn reaction with 4-(2-pyridylazo)resorcinol reagent combined with spectrophotometric detection," and "Total phenolics of wines were estimated according to the Folin-Ciocalteu method expressed as gallic acid equivalents," but what the heck, it's Wednesday afternoon and you're probably bored at work anyway, right?

If you do manage to wade through the article, you'll hit the payoff which is that tannins—long the scapegoat of bad fish-and-red-wine pairings—are entirely innocent. Yes, tannins are the Dreyfus in this whole fishy affair; blame not the tannins, friends. Instead, stick the onus on iron. Of course, there is one small hitch. As Mssrs. Tamura, Taniguchi, Suzuki, Okubo, Takata and Konno put it with appealing delicacy, "In daily life, it is difficult to predict the iron content in a bottled wine without opening it."

And, one might add, without subjecting it to a postcolumn reaction combined with spectrophotometric detection—but then, who doesn't do that sort of thing, these days?

There's a fascinating article in the NY Times today about how the tongue perceives the particular taste of carbonated beverages—a category that includes sparkling wines. Evidently, it isn't the prickliness of the popping bubbles that gives things that 'fizzy' taste, as one might think, but the receptors in the tongue that perceive sour flavors, which, as it turns out, are also tuned to sense carbon dioxide. The article (and the research paper in Science, which it reports on; only available with a subscription) is mainly concerned with soda and whatnot, but Champagne lovers might get a kick out of it as well.

Yes, oddly enough, social networking phenomenon Twitter is coming out with a wine (full story from the SF Weekly blog here). No idea how good the juice is, as it won't be bottled until August of 2010, but the proceeds are going to a good cause—Room to Read, a global charity that seeks to improve literacy rates among rural and impoverished children. More info can be had at the wine project's website.

On a side note, I met Twitter founder Biz Stone at a dinner party about five years ago. He was carrying on about the unbelievable future of blogs, social media, and so on. I thought to myself, this guy's kind of nuts about this stuff, uh, right—good luck with that. So, wow. Excellent job of predicting the future, Mr. Wine Writer. It's not like anyone has offered me half a billion dollars for anything I've founded recently...

Yes, it's come to this—as the LA Times reports here, wrestling mogul Vince McMahon and his World Wrestling Entertainment company are taking legal action against the Philadelphia-based American Wine Foundation to prevent it from referring to one of its wine classes as the "Sommelier Smackdown." I'd suggest settling it in the ring, but somehow I doubt things would go well for the wine-tasters in that fight...

Over the weekend I had the good fortune to introduce (and then sit on a panel with) Marc Perrin of Château Beaucastel, as eighty or so equally fortunate people got to taste through a vertical of Château Beaucastel going back to 1988. The wines showed gorgeously and reaffirmed—not that there's much doubt about it—Beaucastel's place in the top ranks of the Châteauneuf-du-Pape heirarchy.

Perrin was adamant about the benefits of organic viticulture, though in an effortlessly charming way: "When my grandfather decided to use organic viticulture in 1950, people thought he was crazy. But we think it is absolutely the only way to go to make wines that express a sense of place," he stated, adding later, "Industrial yeasts are good for industrial wine. But when you are talking about the identity of a terroir, natural yeast is the only option." 

Of the vintages we tasted through ('07, '06, '98, '94, '90, '89, & '88), these were my highlights:

2007 Chateau de Beaucastel, a powerful wine with creamy black raspberry and licorice notes, hints of toast and berry skin, and lots of fine-grained but substantial tannins—though still extremely young, it promises to be fantastic over time. This hasn't been released yet, but will be soon; it would be an outstanding cellar purchase.

2000 Château de Beaucastel, which had shifted toward more secondary characteristics of earth and loam under its dark cherry fruit, with a touch of tobacco on the end and a velvety texture. Perrin said it reminded him of "when you go into a forest after it rains," which struck me as just right.

1990 Château de Beaucastel, an extraordinary CdP with lots of life left in it; the aroma was all exotic spice, a hint of bandaid box (i.e. brett, which Beaucastel was known for in the past, & which did not come up during discussion) and dried herbs; the fruit suggested kirsch and raspberry liqueur. Stunning wine. Wish I had a case of it, rather than just a memory.

There was plenty of debate—as there has been over time—about the '89 vs. the '90. Both were terrific—or somewhere beyond terrific, actually. Perrin preferred the '89 this time, which was rounder and more generous, with more dark chocolate than spice notes. I went for the '90.

He also said this about Grenache in general: "For me a great Grenache wine, a big part of the experience, is the texture. It's like eating a cherry—that juicy, fleshy character of a ripe cherry."

Thirsty now?

I’m always game to try a funky new beer, but when Maggie Fuller of Beer Ethos called to say she’d scored a bottle of chicha from Delaware's Dogfish Head Brewery, I nearly wimped out. Chicha is a traditional South American brew made from corn. I like to refer to it as “spit beer” because before the brewing process begins, the corn must be chewed and moistened in the brewer’s mouth. The enzymes in the saliva activate the starches, which then break down into fermentable sugars. The beer is ultimately boiled, which leaves it sterile and germ-free. Dogfish Head’s renegade founder, Sam Calagione, created a super-limited amount based on a Peruvian recipe that called for purple maize, yellow maize and pink peppercorns. He also mixed in strawberries, a traditional chicha ingredient that Calgione felt was best to source locally in the U.S.

Maggie had tried real deal chicha on a trip to Peru and didn’t find our tasting at all daunting. I, on the other hand, sipped with caution. The strawberries gave the brew a lovely purplish-pink hue making it look deceptively pretty and innocent for a beer with someone’s spit in it. The nose was pure strawberries and the taste was surprisingly refreshing, dry and a bit spicy. And the flavors became more complex as the beer came to room temperature. The verict: a tasty beer, if you can get past the mental hurdle of how it's made.