Ed Behr launched The Art of Eating in 1986 as an small food newsletter, a novelty at the time. It grew into a print quarterly, and more recently went all digital. There is no advertising. I’ve long admired the magazine’s fixity of purpose, its focus on food and flavor, on cooking, on simplicity. I also admire its eminent sanity in this age of multiple-exclamation-point food writing. I’ve wanted to write for it forever.
So I was delighted (maybe floored is the better word) when Ed Behr asked me to contribute a wine review for Issue No. 98. The column, called Why This Bottle, Really?, features a wine the author admires and recommends wholeheartedly. This not a wine review of the current fashion; The Art of Eating does not do numbers. The idea is to contextualize the wine, describe its provenance and flavor, how to use it at the table, why it matters. It should be a wine the writer knows well and loves ardently. It should be a wine carefully farmed and made by hand. It should be a food wine, and a wine that is also food. Hermann J. Wiemer’s Magdalena Vineyard Riesling was an easy choice.
My review has just gone live, and although it’s available only to subscribers—an incentive to subscribe if you don’t already—you can read my earlier review, of the 2012 vintage, here on Maker’s Table.
