The persuasive stereotype of the rude French waiter

Is Your Waiter Rude, or Merely French? A Debate Is Revived - The New York Times

Few cultural stereotypes are more pervasive than the surly French waiter.
In the 1985 movie “European Vacation,” Chevy Chase and his family meet a Parisian garçon who, after insulting the brood, offers them dishwater to drink.

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Well, in Canada recently, Guillaume Rey, a waiter at Milestones Bar + Grill in Vancouver, British Columbia, filed a complaint against the restaurant’s parent company, Cara Operations, after he was fired for being combative, aggressive and something of a bully. His defense? He’s not rude, he contends. Instead, he’s French and his former bosses are discriminating against his culture and heritage.
The argument is a novel one, but with enough traction that one member of the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal who reviewed the complaint agreed that Mr. Rey deserves a hearing.

A Tasmanian makes one of the world's best whiskies

The world's best whisky awards announced in London this week include the Tasmanian produced Sullivan's Cove American Oak Single Cask as the World's Best Single Cask Single Malt.
The other award winners:

World's Best Rye - 291 Colorado Rye Aspen Stave Finish

World's Best Grain - Bain's Cape Mountain Whisky

World's Best Bourbon - 1792 Full Proof Kentucky Straight Bourbon

World's Best Blended Malt - Taketsuru 17 Year-Old

World's Best Blended Limited Release - Ichiro's Malt & Grain Limited Edition

World's Best Blended - Johnnie Walker Gold Reserve

World's Best Single Malt - Hakushu 25 Year-Old

The fine Japanese art of mixing drinks

This is a "should read" for cocktail lovers.And how about that recipe for the Line Cocktail!

Good libations: Examining the evolution of Japan's rich cocktail culture | The Japan Times:

The Japanese way of bartending is like “a time-capsule of 1930s international bartending,” [ cocktail historian David] Wondrich says. But given its foreign origins, how on earth did Japanese bartenders gain such outsized influence in worldwide mixology? And are they really keepers of the flame for some long-forgotten school of cocktail arts?
To answer those questions, let’s first turn back the clock to 1860. This marks the appearance of Japan’s very first Western-style bar, inside the Yokohama Hotel, also known as the Hotel Hufnagel after its Dutch owner. It was a hastily constructed affair surrounded by a tall fence designed to keep locals out. Perhaps this was for the best: The Hufnagel’s guests were a crusty lot of seamen, merchants and adventurers whose drinking games included firing their revolvers at a clock on the bar’s wall.
“There wasn’t much to do, other than drink,” says Kazuo Ishikura, a writer specializing in the history of Japan’s cocktail culture. “Foreign residents were told by the authorities to stay inside at night. If they ventured out, there was a high chance they’d be surrounded by samurai with a grudge against foreigners.”
A recipe for needing a stiff drink, to be sure. But the Hufnagel offered only beers, wines and liquor — straight up.

“The first bar to serve actual cocktails opened in Yokohama’s International Hotel in 1874,” Ishikura says. “The bartender, Mr. Purvis, was so popular that he was caricatured in the English-language humor magazine Japan Punch.”

Line Cocktail (1924)
All but forgotten today, this represents one of the very earliest cocktails known to have been created locally, by a Japanese bartender named Yonekichi Maeda.

⅓ oz dry gin
⅓ oz Benedictine
⅓ oz Italian vermouth
Two dashes of bitters

Shake over ice, strain and serve. And here’s the trick: Garnish with a small portion of pickled rakkyo onion, slightly crushed. It’s a — how to put this kindly — uniquely local touch.

 

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The racket of third party endorsements - gold medals to influence the gullible

There's a nice little racket going on in the wine industry these days. It's called giving quality endorsements for money.
Let me explain. Those wonderfully pretty gold medal stamps you see on wine labels and in advertisements from retailers: most of them are near enough to worthless as a guide to quality.

The game is played this way. Establish a wine show and charge producers an entry fee. Make sure that everybody wins a prize. Hey presto and yours will be a show that wine companies want to enter. Lots of wonderful revenue for organisers and attractive stamps to mislead consumers into thinking the products displaying them must be worthy.
This a con trick being performed on a massive scale with drinkers being the ones conned.
Now of course there are some legitimate shows but even medals from them are worth being sceptical about. Just look at the different judgements delivered by the various shows around Australia. A gold in one place can be a mere bronze or unrewarded somewhere else.

Memories of great grandfather in a new heritage blend red from the Barossa

Memories of great grandfather in a new heritage blend red from the Barossa:

Bagot Station Captains Table Barossa Valley Red Blend 2012. How could I resist it? Our Farmer family history has it that great grandfather John was brought out from England by Edward Meade (Ned) Bagot in the 1860s to look after his horse Cowra which won the Adelaide Cup in 1866 and 1867. This wine just had to be a winner.

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Hoppy tasting beer without hops

Every pint of that craft beer you drink requires 50 pints of water just to grow the hops that give it flavour. Hence the search for an ecologically sustainable, and cheaper, alternative. And scientists from the University of California Berkeley believe theynhave found one. They have used used DNA-editing software to manipulate the genome of brewer’s yeast, splicing in genes from mint and basil plants as well as two from normal yeast in a way that boosted the production of flavors normally provided by adding hops during the brewing process. Details of their research were published this week in the journal Nature Communications under the title Industrial brewing yeast engineered for the production of primary flavor determinants in hopped beer.
Here's the Abstract of the article:

Flowers of the hop plant provide both bitterness and “hoppy” flavor to beer. Hops are, however, both a water and energy intensive crop and vary considerably in essential oil content, making it challenging to achieve a consistent hoppy taste in beer. Here, we report that brewer’s yeast can be engineered to biosynthesize aromatic monoterpene molecules that impart hoppy flavor to beer by incorporating recombinant DNA derived from yeast, mint, and basil. Whereas metabolic engineering of biosynthetic pathways is commonly enlisted to maximize product titers, tuning expression of pathway enzymes to affect target production levels of multiple commercially important metabolites without major collateral metabolic changes represents a unique challenge. By applying state-of-the-art engineering techniques and a framework to guide iterative improvement, strains are generated with target performance characteristics. Beers produced using these strains are perceived as hoppier than traditionally hopped beers by a sensory panel in a double-blind tasting.

The Glug Quartet - a mixed dozen reds from the Barossa and there's not a shiraz in the box

The Glug wine maker Ben Parker has been experimenting and used his skills to make this intriguing limited edition collection of:
Glug 'The Italian Job' Barossa Valley Montepulciano 2017 x 2 bottles; 
Glug 'The Wayward Child' Barossa Valley Pinot Noir 2017 x 3 bottles; 
Glug 'The Heartbreaker' Barossa Valley Grenache 2016 x 3 bottles; and 
Glug 'The Outsider' Barossa Valley Cinsault 2017 x 4 bottles.

Order at http://www.glug.com.au/index.php…
Personally I'm a Grenache man but the Cinsault really took my fancy