Hello wine lovers, today, Tuesday June 9^th, at Ralphs Downtown we are  tasting  great Pinot Grigio from 5pm to 8pm in our wine café. 

Pinot Grigio can be grown in California as well as in Italy. Continue reading Hello Wine Lovers! →

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Hello wine lovers, tonight June 8, 2009 from 5pm to 8pm at Ralphs Downtown, we will taste two of the same wines from different parts of the world, Syrah from California and France and Shiraz from Australia. 

The ancient city of Shiraz is said to be the birthplace of the Shiraz grape, not too far from what now is modern day Baghdad.  It seems strange to think of a Muslim country as the birthplace of any alcohol, Continue reading Hello Wine Lovers →

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Hello Wine and Sake lovers.  Tonight June 5, 2009 at 5pm to 8pm I will be serving Sushi and Sake for a fun Friday night. Friday is a great night to start your evening festivities at Ralphs with a little Sushi and Sake then head out to your favorite places in town o get your party on.  Sake is an alcohol product distilled from the rice grain. Originating in Japan and slowly making its way around the world Sake is consumed so often that one in three drinks consumed is  a sake-based product. Many bars and sushi houses are serving Sake-tini drinks a mild concoction of a dry to sweet sake and a mix or several mixes shaken and served in a Martini glass. My friend Debbie in Manhattan Beach spent many years as a bartender during her training  with me she  showed me the way around the sake- tini business.  Using fresh ginger and puree of fruit nectars and a little simple sugar she created a few tasty drinks I  am sure if you go to a fine sushi house the bartender will have some recipe with a sake based option. 

To drink warm sake or cold sake is up to the individual.  Preference for me is always cold sake, so tonight it will be cold—the Sake that is.   Cheers !

Mike Berger The Wine Guy

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May was a good month to taste wine at Ralphs downtown and here are some of the highlights:

Cellar Night.  When you see these two words on the wine tasting calendar at Ralphs you probably expect some high-end Gallo wines and maybe a well-chilled Reunite.  I mean it’s Ralphs Market, right?  If you think that, you haven’t met Mike Berger, the impresario of downtown wine tasting.  For him Cellar Night means a trip to the locked, built-in wine cellar which keeps in optimal condition the most valuable bottles in the vast inventory under his purview.  There he will select a breadth of flavors to astound even the palates of regulars who have come to expect surpassing experiences at his tastings.  He will also take into account the preferences of his expected clientele and design delights specifically for each cherished guest. And, as he showed on May 23^rd, he’s willing to make adjustments on the fly. Continue reading Berger Continues to Amaze →

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I am having a lot of firsts lately. For someone who’s done many things in one lifetime, this is amusing to say the least. For instance, I went to my first Dodgers game over Memorial Day Weekend. I also adopted my first pet from the pound, a Chihuahua, two days ago. How I managed to miss something as basic as the all American baseball game experience and dog ownership my whole life, I’ll never know.

Anyways, when my friend told me she had two tickets to see the Cuban Ballet at Vibianas tonight, I thought…it figures. This was my first ballet.

You’ll have to excuse my lack of expertise in covering a ballet, but I’ll try to make up for it with charm and sarcasm. As usual.

I’d also never been inside of St. Vibianas Cathedral. Like Charlie Bucket dreaming about that golden ticket, I figured some day I’d be cool enough to get invited to something going on there. Continue reading Blankenship Cuban Ballet Extravaganza →

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Foreword by Stan Lerner: I’ve heard people are dying to get into this place. Thanks for checking it out Sumner!

It took a while to convince her that relics of the underworld would not haunt her for the next week, but my girlfriend finally agreed to accompany me to a Sunday night movie showing at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.  The idea had come up more than a few times once summer arrived and the days got longer, but at no point did she show any signs of relenting, instead insisting, especially since the defection of her roommate to San Francisco three weeks ago, that three hours of lying between the headstones of Los Angeles’ most prominent luminaries would send her into a deep, dark, schizophrenic abyss.

Luckily I don’t succumb easily to girlie hyperbole, so I lobbied for last weekend’s showing of “Dazed and Confused” as much as possible and even managed to excite her a bit about the adventure.  We asked a few friends that had already seen screenings there what to expect, and they provided rave reviews as well as a fairly detailed recommended packing list: blankets, sweaters/sweatshirts, lawn chairs, $10 per person for entrance, food, coolers and however much booze we desired.  For such a morbid setting, it certainly seemed as though the event coordinators knew how to lighten up the mood.

We got to the corner of Santa Monica and Gower at 6:30 – an unheard-of thirty minutes before the gates opened – and found a line of pedestrians curled around the block with an auto queue just as long. Continue reading Sunday Night at the Cemetery →

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Hello Wine lovers. Tonight Monday from 5pm to 8pm we roll the clock back to the classic wines of Europe namely Bordeaux.  The region of Bordeaux is to the south west of Paris France sitting along the Gironde river the region is split by the body of water.  One side of the river is known for producing wine based on a mostly Merlot.  The other side of the river is known for   producing wines heavy in Cabernet Sauvignon.  The five grapes grown in Bordeaux are, Continue reading Hello Wine Lovers! →

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Hello wine lovers today, Friday, May 15 we are tasting great Pinot Grigio’s from 5pm until 8pm in our wine café. 

Pinot Grigio can be grown in California as well as in Italy.  California has a Mediterranean climate like that of Italy.  Pinot Grigio is not a blended white wine like many people think, it is its own varietal.  The popularity of this wine grew around the late 90’s as a light alternative to Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc.  Pinot Grigio wines characteristics are light lemon notes and floral with a silky mouth-feel. The acids are balanced in the wine due to warm climate in the growing region. Continue reading Hello Wine Lovers! →

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Psst! WANT TO BECOME FAMOUS?

What regular daily activity did Ronald Reagan, Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and General George Patton all share?  The answer is that along with many other distinguished men and women, these leaders all kept diaries.

If you consider it a coincidence that many famous people happen to have kept diaries, you’d be wrong.  It is not that eminent personalities keep diaries.  It is that ordinary people who keep diaries often become notable.  All the diarists listed above started keeping diaries long before they became famous.

Let me explain with a nugget of ancient Jewish wisdom. 

Upon leaving Egypt, the Israelites were directed to count formally each passing day for seven entire weeks until the fiftieth day which would be the holyday of Shavuot or Pentecost.  This is the day on which God gave Moses the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai.  (Leviticus 23:15-16)  Thus, fifty days after acquiring physical freedom, they would acquire spiritual freedom by accepting God’s message to mankind, the Torah.

People often mistakenly assume that their counting reflected their eagerness to reach Mount Sinai and receive the Torah.  However, had this been so, the counting would be in descending order, just the way school children count down to summer vacation.  On the day after the Exodus, they would have said “Today there are 49 days left,” and thus day by day they would have counted down to zero.  In reality, the Israelites counted in ascending order, starting with one and ending with forty-nine on the eve of Shavuot, just as we do today.

There can be only one explanation and ancient Jewish wisdom confirms it.  We are not counting how many days remain; we are counting how many have passed.  The seven weeks separating Passover and Shavuot are meant to be 49 days of spiritual growth and the first step in authentic self-development is to recognize the passage of time and the value of each and every day.  There is no better way to do this than engage in a formalized daily ritual that marks each passing day.

In Judaism, the days of the week are numbered not named. Sunday is day one, Monday is day two, and so on.  In the Torah, the months are also numbered rather than named.  These are further examples of the stress placed on keeping ourselves aware of time’s passage.

Through old French and Latin, both the words “journal” and “diary” are derived from the word day.  Even the word “journalist” used to apply to someone who wrote for a daily newspaper.  It follows that the entire purpose of a diary or a personal journal is to record things on a daily basis.  

Most of us would take no more than ten seconds to think of three actions we could take that would utterly ruin our lives.  What is more, each of those three ways to destruction could be accomplished in just a few hours, at most.  However, if I asked you to think of three things you could undertake that would significantly improve your life, it would be much harder, wouldn’t it?  What is more, once you did think of three life-enhancing actions, you’d notice that all of them would take considerable time and require long term commitment. Continue reading THOUGHT TOOLS →

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Foreword by Stan Lerner: written as only the great Alec Silverman can the story of Mad Vanilla to follow is a sweet treat to end the day. I am also familiar with this precious substance and find it a great source of pride that it can only be found here in downtown Los Angeles. 

Great chefs are always seeking the finest ingredients, winemakers the best fruit and perfumers the purest expression of each aroma in fragrances.  What they have in common is reliance on highly developed olfactory sense.  Practitioners of the three above named professions would be thrilled to discover what Dan Norton shared with me last Monday; but it is pastry chefs – also called pâtissiers – who might have to change their underwear after tasting this product.   He has created what may be the greatest vanilla extract ever produced in the U.S.

This unsweetened precious flavoring agent has the most sublime and potent vanilla flavor and aroma imaginable.  It was made with one of the world’s most sought after vanilla beans, the Madagascar Black Bourbon species.  Because it has been aged for six years, (compared to the twenty-day average of commercially available vanilla extracts), it has developed what wine experts refer to as bouquet: a complex combination of fragrances.  Although it has never touched wood, it has notes of cedar as well as plum, dried fig, white pepper and woodsmoke.  Just like wine grapes, vanilla beans develop character specific to their variety and the place they are cultivated.  These elongated seed pods are the fruit of the vanilla orchid.  They require three years to develop into fruit bearers.  After harvest they must be sun-dried for up to six months during which time they also ferment and develop their distinctive flavor and aroma.  There are about 110 different species and they have global proliferation in the tropical and subtropical regions of four continents and many islands.  

Using a 35% higher than normal concentration of vanilla beans he infused super-premium vodka , steeping this brew for six years.  In the early 2000’s the entire crop of this prized orchid was destroyed by cyclones, the most devastating of which was named Huddah.  These catastrophic storms plunged the island-nation’s economy into desperation as their two most important export crops, vanilla and coffee, were lost.  This drove the price of Mr. Norton’s beans to over $240 a pound when they were last seen on the market, five years ago.  Although he would like to make more extract he can’t get these vanilla beans anymore.  The nurseries have rebounded but seed pods of the size and quality of the 2003 crop have not yet been produced.  Thankfully, unlike many other flora and fauna of Madagascar, they haven’t become recently extinct. (Over twenty percent of the world’s plant and animal species are exclusive to the African island, which is slightly larger than the country of France, from which it became independent in 1960.  Indeed, for this biodiversity some scientists refer to it as the “eighth continent”.)  
  
Necessity being the mother of invention, and Mr. Norton being the type of man who is driven to pursue the highest degree of excellence, there simply wasn’t a good enough vanilla extract to put into his family’s secret recipe Irish Pound Cake.  This clandestine information is no joke; it’s been in the family for over 250 years.  It’s not for sale and it would require torture to get it out of him.  If the expense he has gone to seems extravagant bear in mind that pound cake was named after the British Pound and one pound 250 years ago is the equivalent of hundreds of dollars today. Continue reading The Perfection of an Essence →

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