Sipping Away: 30 Years of Unique Wine Experiences

By David Klein

Wish you knew more about choosing wines than which one has a cool label? Follow a wine enthusiast through his personal journey into the world of red, white, and beyond.

Avid taster David Klein didn't start out as a wine expert. His appreciation for spirits began with his Italian-Jewish childhood and continued through adulthood as he discovered a passion for this enduring beverage. Now 30 years later, he's here to share his tasting adventures so you can hold your own with the best wine connoisseurs.

With an intoxicating mix of humor, helpful tips, and personal anecdotes, Sipping Away: 30 Years of Unique Wine Experiences unveils an insider's viewpoint as he escorts you through 5-star restaurants, boutique hotels, and California's lush vineyards. From inexpensive to pricey vintage selections, Klein shares expert secrets to help you purchase, store, and order the best varietals.

In Sipping Away, you'll discover:

• Why taste and not price reigns supreme
• Helpful tips to boost your wine selection confidence
• How to gracefully send back wine in a restaurant
• What matters most when selecting wine for special occasions
• How to host a tasting party and much, much more

Sipping Away is a humorous, memoir-style exploration of three decades of swirling, pouring, and loving fine and not-so-fine wine. If you like candid accounts, enjoyable insights, and expert tips, then you'll adore David Klein's informative guide.

Buy Sipping Away to start your tasting journey today!

• Language: English
• Publisher: The City Cork Press
• Release date: Jul 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781733712712

David Klein

David Klein has over 30 years of experience tasting a diverse variety of wines, from the inexpensive to the very expensive. His love affair with wine began when he was working in his father's liquor store and he would sample the shop’s offerings. He is the founder of the wine-tasting club The Wine Group and author of the blog The City Cork, in which he reviews restaurant wine lists and provides suggestions for finding “hidden gems.” David’s belief is “the taste of the food changes the taste of the wine and the taste of the wine changes the taste of the food.” David resides in New York City with his wife Robin.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Growing Up Foodie

Food and wine were always an important part of my life growing up. My mother was Italian and my father was Jewish, so I suppose in food terms, you could think of me as something of a pizza-bagel. While my parents were not religiously observant people, they enthusiastically celebrated all holidays involving food.

While I was growing up, my maternal grandmother lived down the hall from us in another apartment in our building in Forest Hills, in Queens. I can remember her spending a signi­ficant amount of time cooking in the kitchen with my mother. My grandmother was a young widow who raised her two children in Greenwich Village during the depression in the 1930s.

Their family credo was derived from a blend of the Italian immigrant experience and their time in America. They had kept all the Italian cultural traditions intact, such as the celebrations of holidays like Easter and Christmas, and going to Roman Catholic mass.

They cooked and ate almost entirely from recipes handed down from my maternal grandmother’s family. These dishes are not the typical Italian fare the American public expects to see on an Italian restaurant menu. These were old stove comfort foods like escarole and bean soup, simple pastas and risottos—no lobster or exotic ingredients. These dishes were flavorful, authentic, and economical.

The most important thing was the gravy. What you pour over cooked pasta is not traditionally known as sauce (like a marinara or pesto) but is instead called gravy by actual Italian Americans.

The preparation of gravy borders on alchemy. All Italian-American families have their secret spice-and-tomato recipe. I can remember my grandmother entreating my mother in a desperate voice to turn (stir) the gravy, or it would burn.

When we had guests over for dinner, there would always be a dish of oil-cured olives, a large ball of smoked mozzarella cheese, raw slices of finocchio (fennel), sliced Sopressata (hot or sweet salami), and Grissini (bread sticks) offered upon their arrival. If she were serving the hot (spiced with hot pepper flakes) Sopressata, my mother would issue a caveat to the guests to be careful.

But her warning was not necessary if our Italian relatives were coming over for dinner. A true Italian with years of Sopressata-eating experience can detect the difference between a sweet Sopressata and a hot Sopressata from about two to three feet. The hot Sopressata has a red cast from the red pepper flake ingredient. Italian Americans are born with Sopressata radar in their DNA. Nonetheless, at times someone will make an error and assume a hot Sopressata is sweet, and the anguished cries of Rosemarie [my mother], this sausage is so hot! never stops them eating the piece they have already put in their mouth.

They are just making an announcement, as if to say Ole, what a Sopressata!

Glasses of wine were filled from a gallon-sized bottle of Carlo Rossi red Italian wine, along with small glasses of sweet vermouth and cocktails as an option for those who desired.

If you wanted white wine, a Frascati or a Soave was poured from another large bottle.

People milled about, and the scent of my mom’s cooking wafted through the whole apartment. You could smell the cooked fennel seeds and cooked meats (sausage, beef, and pork) that she used to make her gravy. This could be intoxicating at times. But I was a child and did not appreciate any of this when I was growing up. I look back only now and see the beauty.

The next act in this food Kabuki was sitting down at the table to begin the actual meal. First came the salad course, composed of fresh endive dressed with a lemon vinaigrette. The tartness of the endive paired beautifully with the dressing. Murmurs of Rosemarie, this is a lovely salad could always be heard. But the salad is really like the under card at a boxing match: You enjoy it, but it is not what you bought your ticket to see. You came to my mother’s house for the main event—the pasta course.

This is the Italian side of the family eating over, and they are the ones who are best able to judge your gravy. As the salad plates are cleared, the vigil begins as they wait for the pasta course. Relatives would ask those painful questions like So, how is school? and with glazed-over eyes and robotic voice I would reply with the safe and time-worn It’s OK.

Finally, my mother bursts out of the kitchen with the platter of pasta topped with the gravy. There are gasps and cries of Rosemarie as if she had brought a first-born male child, produced by a diagnosed-infertile couple, into the hospital waiting area. This ritual is customary and expected but never taken for granted.

No one has even tasted the pasta, but it has received an A+ rating from all the guests, based on sight alone.

And appearances do not deceive: My mother’s pasta and gravy are delicious. It is served family style and accompanied with shouts of Oh, that’s too much for me! Portions are passed around the table. No one touches a thing until my mom sits down.

And this is where the real problems begin. My mother has laid the blessed pasta and gravy plates before each worshiper, but they cannot start to eat until my mother joins us from the kitchen, where she is finishing a few things up.

Rosemarie, please sit down, the pasta is getting cold! my father begins shouting, since serving cold pasta is tantamount to offering a glass of water to a drowning person. Eventually my mother sits down, and we begin. Everyone lauds my mother in exacting detail. The first commandment of pasta preparation is that the pasta be al dente. This translates as to the tooth in Italian, and means that the pasta is cooked only until there is almost a slight crunch in the center of the strand. You do not want mushy or soft pasta, which is essentially criminal.

Next in line for praise is the gravy. Rosemary, your gravy is fantastic! followed by probes of Is this meatless or what? For a significant period of time, possibly lasting the length of the entire pasta course, questions are posed just about the gravy, with my mother always deferring to my grandmother Mary when a difficult question is raised referring to a specific ingredient or brand of ingredient that is in the gravy.

Mary says that she uses only this brand of olive oil or that brand of tomato paste. To drive the point home, she will repeat the mantra You have keep turning the gravy or it will burn. This essential maneuver is well understood by the guests, because they have made their own gravy on an infinite number of occasions and did not want it to burn.

After the pasta course a large platter of the meats that were cooked in the gravy is brought out. The smell and taste of the meatball, sausage, and tomatoes that had been cooking for hours is intense.

Next, and finally, comes dessert. Trays of fresh cannoli and sfogliatelle purchased in the predominantly Italian American neighborhood of Astoria, in Queens, are placed at the center of the table. Sfogliatelle is an Italian pastry made with a dough that turns to flaky layers when baked. It is filled with ricotta cheese and shaped like a squat lobster tail. Sometimes there were pignoli cookies, which were my favorite. These are soft almond paste cookies with a few pignoli nuts sprinkled on top. There was also a plate of plain biscotti and simple Italian cookies that were usually purchased at the supermarket under the Stella D’Oro brand.

Along with the dessert, demitasse coffee was served. We did not call it by the now commonly used name of espresso. It was referenced as demitasse because that is the French word for small cup. There were no espresso machines available at that time, and you could not make demitasse coffee in a regular coffee brewing pot.

You had to use a Maganata instead. This type of coffee maker, imported from Italy, is used to make good demitasse coffee. Using a Maganata involves packing the coffee into one end of the pot. (We always used Medaglia D’Oro brand.) You then turned the Maganata upside down and filled the other end with water. This was then placed in a pot of water, which acted as a double boiler. You could not put the Maganata directly on the flame of a stove because it would melt the thin metal. At some point, when the water was boiling, you would then turn the Maganata upside down and let the hot water seep through the packed coffee. The demitasse was then ready to be served.

A bottle of Anisette was placed on the table as the coffee was poured. Anisette is a licorice-tasting liqueur that sweetens the coffee and gives it a very unique taste. The thing my sister and I looked forward to most at dessert was when my mother would offer each of us a small glass of sweet vermouth. We would then dip the biscotti in the sweet vermouth until it was sodden and enjoy this taboo dessert with glee.

Food was always an important part of our lives. It was a metaphor for love, which is an attitude shared by many cultures around the world.

As a family, we would often go to Kissena Park in Queens because they had barbecue grills. We lived in an apartment building and therefore had no access to outdoor grilling. After stopping at the pork store in Astoria, where my mother would purchase fresh, sweet, hot, and thin cheese and parsley-stuffed sausage, we would proceed to the park.

My dad would start the grill and begin to cook the sausages. A long Italian bread was cut into sandwich-sized sections. When the sausage was done cooking, a link or two was placed into the bottom of one of the sections along with red and green peppers that had been roasted in the oven carefully at home. Rings of yellow onion were roasted on the grill along with the sausage and were then added to the ever-enlarging sandwich.

The smell alone was incredible. On one occasion, a group people passed by and were attracted to the aroma of the sausages and onions cooking and wanted to know if they could buy a sandwich or two based on the intoxicating smell alone.

We attended the Saint Gennaro festival in Little Italy in New York every year. Back in the