The vermouth revival, Ethiopia's 40 day pre-Christmas vegan fast and other food and drink news for the day

• Tastiest food trends for 2015 - Vermouth "Hugo Thurston, general manager of the newly opened Jago in East London, has put it at the top of the restaurant’s drinks list. “We’re fully championing it,” he says. “I’ve been expecting this to happen for a while.” Why? “The fact that drinks like Campari have suddenly become fashionable again, coupled with the amount of artisanal vermouth products being made. Plus, it’s delicious.” The Ethicurean in Bristol has gone a step further and created its own, The Collector, made from ingredients found in the restaurant’s walled garden. Meanwhile, Marks & Spencer has just upped its range, adding the bartender’s favourite red vermouth, Antica Formula, to its shelves. So, how should we be drinking it? “Straight up with no mixer, on the rocks,” says Thurston. “Or with the tiniest splash of soda to mitigate the sweetness.”
• A 40-Day Vegan Fast, Then At Last, A January Christmas Feast - The Ethiopian Orthodox Church, one of the world's oldest, observes Christmas on Jan. 7, following a calendar similar to the Coptic church. The 40 days prior to Christmas (including Dec. 25) are observed with a vegan fast. ... The traditional dish for Ethiopians on Christmas Day is doro wat, which features pieces of meat swimming in a rich red sauce. Unlike the doro wat eaten the rest of the year, the Christmas dish is prepared with a slaughtered rooster rather than a hen, and carved into exactly 12 pieces, representing the 12 disciples
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• Are some diets “mass murder”? – Richard Smith ploughed his way through five books on diet and some of the key studies to write this article for the Beitish Medical Journal – “By far the best of the books I’ve read to write this article is Nina Teicholz’s The Big Fat Surprise, whose subtitle is “Why butter, meat, and cheese belong in a healthy diet.”3 The title, the subtitle, and the cover of the book are all demeaning, but the forensic demolition of the hypothesis that saturated fat is the cause of cardiovascular disease is impressive. Indeed, the book is deeply disturbing in showing how overenthusiastic scientists, poor science, massive conflicts of interest, and politically driven policy makers can make deeply damaging mistakes. Over 40 years I’ve come to recognise what I might have known from the beginning that science is a human activity with the error, self deception, grandiosity, bias, self interest, cruelty, fraud, and theft that is inherent in all human activities (together with some saintliness), but this book shook me.”
• Will 2015 Be a Rosy Year for Wine? Wall Street Journal wine columnist Will Lyons takes a look at the year ahead in wine and what it means for some of Europe’s best and brightest regions - "Alexander McCall Smith tells a wonderfully funny story about a fictitious trip to Italy’s Montalcino. While there, he meets a wine producer whose land is rather unfortunately situated just outside the famous Brunello di Montalcino DOCG boundary, in the less valuable Rosso di Montalcino, amid the picturesque hills near Siena. Without going into too much detail, by the end of “My Italian Holiday” all is rectified (with the help of a bulldozer) and the happy producer now finds his vineyards safely within the zone of one of Italy’s great wines. As we enter 2015 and look ahead at what it will mean for the world of wine, I’m reminded of this story. If it weren’t fiction, 2009 would have been just the year to set it in—in time to catch the 2010 growing season, the results of which, by all accounts, are very good. This month, the fine wine year will kick off with the release of these 2010 Brunello di Montalcino wines."