All about Men and the women who love them!
From a sweet potato souffle with pistachio crust to a luscious maple-infused sweet potato gratin, you’ll find plenty of inspiration for your Thanksgiving table.It began as a festive display to delight all assembled: Huge LED formations of fanciful wine bottles and Champagne flutes lighting up the sky in a drone show over Victoria Harbor at last week’s Hong Kong Wine and Dine Festival. But the show, and 46 drones, came to an abrupt end when said drones unexpectedly made a plummet-out-of-the-sky formation into the water. Authorities are now investigating what went wrong.
The 100-machine show, which commemorated the 10th anniversary of the four-day wine and food event, went off without a hitch the first two nights. It’s still not certain exactly what caused the drones to fritz during their third act, though local publications are blaming GPS interference, with some speculating that the signal was intentionally jammed. According to the South China Morning Post, the Hong Kong Tourism Board, which organized the festival, estimated the calamity caused at least HK$1 million (about $127,500) in damage. (So far no one had suggested that the wine robots, silently chafing under their human masters and forced into menial vineyard labor, wine bar servitude and, now, humiliating aerial dances, were finally revolting, until we just did.)
However, at least some of the festival’s estimated 140,000 attendees were too preoccupied with the main draws of the attraction—wine-pairing meals created by top chefs, tasting classes led by industry experts, and 450 booths showcasing wines, beers, snacks and more by vendors from all over the world—to even notice that something had gone awry in the sky.
“Actually, we didn’t know the show was going on,” Hongkonger Eva Ng, a regular festival attendee, said to the Post. “But we really like to join the wine-tasting classes.”
Benjamin Hessel, winemaker at Château des Annereaux in the small Bordeaux appellation Lalande-de-Pomerol, lost almost all his crop to frost in January. Every year, it seemed to him—hail, frost, erratic weather! So he did as any frustrated citizen might: Write his representative, French President Emmanuel Macron. Hessel emailed that climate change conditions were hurting his vineyard’s production—hurting his business—though “[the letter] was more like how you write a book, as a therapy,” Hessel told Unfiltered. He didn’t expect a response.
When Hessel heard back from Virginie Routis, Macron’s head sommelier at Élysée Palace, exactly one week later, the response was even more than he had hoped for. “She wrote, that after my letter to the President Macron, she would be glad to receive me at Élysée and taste the Château des Annereaux,” Hessel said. “I was really surprised—first to get an answer, then a personal answer from the sommelier, then to be invited at Élysée to taste my wine.”
In addition to Routis calling the wines “excellent,” as Hessel recalled, the 30-minute meeting ended with her ordering cases of Annereaux’s 2012s and 2015s. “All the work and the effort we make to produce the best wine was judged by the most important sommelier of France,” Hessel said. “[It felt like] a sort of knighting of our wine by the president.” While Macron has made great strides in blind tasting and decreed wine o’clock for lunch and dinner, it remains to be seen how much he can influence the fickle depredations of the angry weather gods.
Being Unfiltered means learning surprising tidbits about the pop cultures of the world’s major wine producing countries, so here’s something about the French: They love, love, love comic books, almost as much as bicycles, selfies and vandalism. Naturellement, the intersection of BD (“graphic novels”) and vin was inevitable (there is now, in fact, an annual BD & Vin festival at Bordeaux’s Château Lacouture).
The latest addition to the canon is particularly ambitious: L’Incroyable Histoire du Vin, published last week, is a 232-pager from author Benoist Simmat and illustrator Daniel Casanave that travels 10,000 years of wine from Noé (Noah) to Chine (China). “What we wanted to show is that the story of wine is a story of world conquest,” explained Simmat to Unfiltered via email. “What seems surprising to [our French readers] is that this story is not a ‘French’ story, but a global conquest, that concerns all continents and civilizations.”
Indeed, our intrepid guide through the book is a friendly orange-bearded, flannel-clad time-traveling bon vivant who walks the vines from Stone Age Mesopotamia through ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, through medieval France and Spain, and into California, Australia, South Africa and China. All our favorite wine superheroes are there, Avengers-style: Dom Ruinart, the duke who banned Gamay from Burgundy, the popes of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Thomas Jefferson, mononymous novelist and wine aficionada Colette, André Tchelistcheff, Prof. Patrick McGovern, a gender-non-specific phylloxera and many more.
Simmat, who’s also a journalist with La Revue du Vin de France, said the book has already been picked up for translation into Spanish, and he hopes to see an English version soon. “I had written this story for the global public.”
Once upon a time, if you were riding the rails to destination unknown with nothing but knapsack on your shoulder and a song in your heart, your trusty companion in said knapsack was bottle of Thunderbird, the flavored, fortified, wine-adjacent drink from the original E. and the original J. Gallo. “What’s the word? Thunderbird. How’s it sold? Good and cold,” went the jingle in ads for a product that, really, sold itself.
And now, like some sort of mythical bird that dies and is reborn from the ashes, Thunderbird is back! Gallo’s new ‘bird is neither flavored nor fortified nor 60 cents (as the jingle had it), but its packaging preserves the retro font and the mighty winged logo: “We have always felt there was something powerful about the Thunderbird logo,” Leon Susen, senior director of marketing for E. & J. Gallo Winery, told Unfiltered via email. “It is bold, disruptive and hardworking.” The new T-Bird comes in Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay and red blend, with a Zin on the way, and Gallo began the rollout in the Midwest’s great M cities (Milwaukee, Madison, Minneapolis), sponsoring performances of local musicians like Greatest Lakes, Luxi, Lost Lakes, Guerilla Ghost and General B & The Wiz. Next up, Gallo is casting around for more musical partners and markets for expansion. And a final tip for anyone in the market for either a piece of collectible Americana or one last citrus hangover: “We are discontinuing the old Thunderbird,” Susen confirmed.
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Michelin starred chefs around the globe are creating commemorative dishes to help celebrate the Michelin Guide’s milestone Instagram following. See the dishes.There’s a scientific explanation for why drinking a glass of wine makes you happy (and no, it’s not just because it’s delicious): Alcohol consumption triggers the release of the chemical dopamine in the brain, which creates those pleasant feelings that are associated with drinking. Now, scientists are looking into the mechanism behind that dopamine spike in order to understand why certain behaviors, such as binge-drinking, occur.
In a new study published in the journal Neuropharmacology, researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Center for Alcohol Research in Epigenetics focused on the role of a protein in the brain’s ventral tegmental area (VTA), where alcohol-related dopamine is released. “Our work over the past two decades brought us to the possibility that a specific protein, KCNK13, was a target for alcohol,” Mark Brodie, professor of physiology and biophysics at the university and the study’s lead author told Wine Spectator. According to Brodie, KCNK13 is the protein that activates the VTA—and thus spurs a release of dopamine—when interacting with alcohol.
In a series of tests on mice, Brodie’s team found that genetically reducing KCNK13 levels by about 15 percent was associated with a 20 percent increase in alcohol consumption. Brodie believes the mice were consuming more alcohol to try “to get the same level of ‘good feeling’ as mice with normal amounts of KCNK13,” he said.
“This same relationship between KCNK13 and drinking may occur in humans, but we don’t know for sure,” he added. “We speculate that if someone’s genetic makeup causes them to have lower amounts of KCNK13 in their brain, they might binge drink more alcohol than someone else who has higher amounts of KCNK13.”
Not much is known about what determines an individual’s KCNK13 levels; it could be an inherited trait, or it could have to do with life experiences, such as prolonged stress. Understanding the regulation of KCNK13 in the brain could help scientists down the road to develop treatments for those prone to excessive drinking, Brodie said. In the meantime, this study helps draw attention to the science behind alcohol’s feel-good effects, even in those who enjoy in moderation.
The polyphenolic compound resveratrol, found in red wines, has been linked in numerous studies to potential health benefits, including the ability to fight cancer. But how the body can best metabolize and use the compound has long been debated. A new study by researchers in Switzerland suggests that resveratrol could prevent lung cancer—but only if taken in a specific way.
Lung cancer is the deadliest form of cancer, according to worldwide health statistics. For their research, published in the journal Scientific Reports, a team at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) in Switzerland monitored four groups of mice. One group was given resveratrol before being injected with carcinogens, while the second group was given only the carcinogens. The team observed that the resveratrol-treated mice developed 45 percent fewer malignant cells compared to the group that received no resveratrol.
The two other groups of mice were both a strain that were already very sensitive to developing tumors (much like a smoker who’s more at risk for developing lung cancer). Neither group was injected with carcinogens. The scientists gave one group doses of resveratrol and nothing to the other group. They found that 63 percent of the mice given resveratrol did not develop cancer, compared to 12.5 percent in the control group.
But before you light up a cigarette and knock back a bottle of red wine, it’s important to know that oral consumption of resveratrol does not seem to help. “It has been found that when you take resveratrol by mouth it does have some effect on prevention of cancer, maybe [relating to] the gastrointestinal tract, but not in the lungs,” Muriel Cuendet, an associate professor in UNIGE’s school of pharmaceutical sciences, told Wine Spectator. “What we did is we gave the resveratrol to the mice in the nose, so when they were breathing, the compound was getting to the lungs.” In order for resveratrol to have the same effect on humans, it would have to be ingested as a nose spray.
Some of life’s best memories can be made over a bottle of wine with friends. But a new study published in the scientific journal Neuron shows that the bottle may influence how you remember those moments, and thus may also cause cravings for another bottle in the future.
In the study, a team of Brown University researchers looked into the molecular basis of memories that form from sensory cues associated with drinking, “like the feel of a glass in your hand, the sound of a beer can being opened or the bouquet of your favorite wine,” said Karla Kaun, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Brown and the paper’s senior author. “These memories can trigger cravings for alcohol. Our rationale was if we could understand the molecular basis of these cravings, we would be one step closer to understanding how cravings form.”
The researchers used genetically manipulated fruit flies—which “show remarkable similarity [to humans] in their response to alcohol,” according to Kaun—to determine how alcohol contributes to memory-making. They found that alcohol increased activity of the brain’s notch signaling pathway, which is involved in embryo development, brain development and adult brain function in both flies and humans.
The activation of the notch pathway sets off a chain of events, one of which affects the dopamine-2–like receptor, which is involved in determining whether a memory is a good one or a bad one. In the study, the researchers found that alcohol consumption led to a slight alteration in the genetic makeup of the dopamine-2–like receptor.
“This is a new layer of plasticity in memory circuits that could affect how our experiences drive our future actions,” Kaun said.
They also found that while smaller doses of alcohol only temporarily activated the notch pathway in flies, heavier doses had longer-lasting effects. If these functions are similar in humans, this would mean that a certain number of drinks would more strongly influence the types of memories you make over a longer period of time.
“Since notch is very similar in function between flies and humans, we think that alcohol might also be able to activate [it] in our brains,” Kaun said. “We hope that our study inspires someone who studies memory formation in mammalian brains.”
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Our guide to cookie decorating includes tips on making and using royal icing and buttercream icing. You’ll find great ideas for icing cookies for the holidays.