Read Best Food Writing 2015 for Free Online Page A

emphasized that this was supposed to be a caricature,” he had told me. (He once stopped to pay it a visit and snap a few photos while driving his daughters to summer camp in Bellingham.)
    Just around the corner from Dukes’s smiling likeness, Burlington’s old main street still bears the false fronts, sturdy awnings, and backdrop of sloping fir trees that recall its start as a logging town. Though the PSL festival in the commercials was fictional, the town does celebrate Berry Dairy days every June. It’s a true-to-life version of the agrarian American ideals the humble pumpkin represents.
    What was created in a lab has taken on a life of its own and become a frothy microcosm of how contradictory those ideals can be these days. The pumpkin spice latte is loved and hated. Artificial but genuine. Manufactured by canny marketing, yet legitimately, ardently adored. We have once again become a population accustomed to consuming seasonally, be it the first rhubarb of spring, summertime berries, or a sauce engineered to summon fall from inside a corrugated cardboard sleeve while the summer sun still shines overhead.

Maverick Wine Guru Tim Hanni Rethinks the Pour Maverick Wine Guru Tim Hanni Rethinks the Pour
    B Y C HRIS M ACIAS
    From the Sacramento Bee

    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Can one man change the entrenched assumptions of high-end wine culture? Sacramento Bee critic-at-large Chris Macias—himself an iconoclast who surfs between food, wine, culture, and music writing—spent some time with a wine expert who’s willing to break all the rules.
    Throw away your Wine Wheel. Disregard the precious pairings from restaurant sommeliers. This Master of Wine insists that much of what you’ve been taught about fermented grapes is just plain wrong.
    Allow Tim Hanni to demonstrate.
    In his two-story home on the edge of Napa’s tony Silverado Resort and Spa, Hanni lines up a selection of wines on the kitchen island. Notion No. 1 to be debunked: Red wines are “heavier” than whites.
    Hanni mixes a pour of white zinfandel with cabernet sauvignon in a glass. The wines quickly separate into two distinct layers, like a bottle of unshaken Italian salad dressing. The cab floats on top, outweighed by the white zin and its residual sugar.
    â€œPeople say the big, heavy red wine you serve in the bigger glass, because a BIG wine needs a BIG glass, even though it’s not bigger than any other wine,” he said. “We have legions of wine educators telling people untruths. We need to be more responsible about the information, the expectations and the false judgments we put on people.”
    Many things in the wine world aren’t supposed to mix. Cabernet sauvignon and oysters. Moscato and rib-eye steaks. White zinfandel and good taste. Hanni says that’s a bunch of twaddle. People should be empowered to decide what tastes good to them.
    In a multibillion-dollar industry that often insists on absolutes—the kind of wines meant to go with certain foods, even the kinds of people qualified to be experts—Hanni, 63, remains one of the highest-regarded and most iconoclastic figures. He’s a certified Master of Wine whose anti-establishment notions might raise eyebrows or elicit smirks from colleagues, but they have others in the business reconsidering ideas once viewed as sacrosanct.
    He extols the virtues of supermarket-brand moscato, a wine that’s a punch line to the Riedel-swirling, first-growth-Bordeaux-collecting crowd. The best wine match for a “supertaster,” someone with nature’s most evolved taste buds? According to Hanni, it’s white zinfandel, perhaps the lowest-hanging fruit in the hierarchy of wine connoisseurship.
    â€œThe whole industry needs to be reset,” Hanni said on a recent March day. “We say, ‘This is wine education and we’re going to educate people,’ and the information is purely and simply