"You see Mr. Kittredge, it really wasn't Tracy at all. It was another girl, a Miss Pommery, '26 ...."

The line comes towards the end of The Philadelphia Story, in a scene in which heroine Tracy Lord's friend tries to explain to Tracy's stuffed-shirt fiancé why the bride behaved rather extravagantly at the party the night before. "You'd had too much to drink," the stuffed shirt grudgingly allows. I like the line so much I made it the tagline to my blog (even though I can't fit it all in the header anymore, since changing to "Dynamic Views." But that's another story).

Here is Miss Pommery herself. She's a champagne.



Actually there are many of her -- you might call her a family of sisters, Brut Rosé, Brut Grand Cru Millésime, etc. -- this being Brut Royal. The modern equivalent of Tracy Lord's vintage Pommery '26, though a bit above our everyday price range, would be the house's prestige bottling, Cuvée Louise. That's a family of sisters, too.

How can I describe the way Pommery tastes? I sipped it at an Easter party a few weeks ago. The word that came to mind was "full." The appropriate French words on Pommery's website are more graceful, but they say almost the same thing. Finesse, rond (round), vif (life, lively). While sipping this flute of golden depth and richness, I found I didn't want to bother discerning much else, or making the usual mental notes about apricot or biscuit or whatever. I simply kept on sipping. It is delicious, its complexities beyond what I understand.

Beyond what I understand -- and there are many more like it, or better. The world of wine begins to remind me of the world of great music. You remember I went out on a limb recently and bought myself a clock radio. I have been enjoying it ever since, especially at night when I can set the timer and go to bed listening to the strains of whatever WFMT is playing. (Recently some friends and I agreed that bedtime has become a delicious ritual, what with a glass of wine beforehand and lots of pillows and a cat or two, and a clock radio with a timer. We agreed also that all this must amount to the most comical signs of galloping middle age.) I can savor my radio and bed routine every night except Saturday, when the station still broadcasts that hoary and insufferable old Midnight Special. If you have never had the pleasure, let me warn you off. It's lots of self-adoring folk singers twanging guitars and congratulating themselves on how they, marvelous creatures, "don't hate anybody." Shock, then brave loud cheers and applause from the audience, and then more twanging and strumming about injustice, and Our Voices "singing louder than the guns." Yes, do try that in Syria very soon, won't you?

Anyway, for most of the rest of each week WFMT regains its senses and does fine work teaching me about fine music. When I hear something I like, I go to YouTube to hear it again, and perhaps see old video clips of opera performances or piano recitals. Robert Schumann's "Andante and variations for two pianos, two cellos, and horn" made me feel I was in a nineteenth-century drawing room, complete with horsehair sofas, vases of pampas grass, and carriages rattling past outside the window. And look at that woman pianist's big, fat, hammy hands. That is strength. Richard Strauss' oboe concerto was hypnotizing and lovely -- I thought he only did loud crashing "Also Sprach Zarathustra" stuff (think 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Elvis' big Vegas introduction theme). And if there is music more beautiful than Barbara Bonney singing Mozart's Laudate Dominum, I don't know it yet. The text is a Latin translation of Psalm 117, whose short five lines begin "Praise the Lord, all the nations." I wonder if some musician could sometime "transcribe" it, is that the word? -- to be sung in Hebrew.



What with my clock radio and my Pommery and so on, it struck me. The difficulty in learning about great music is that, as with wine, one starts from nothing. I couldn't find middle C on a piano to save my life, I don't understand what great singers or players are doing with their trills and "arpeggios," and I certainly don't know what any long-dead composer wanted them to do with a key or scale or anything else. Earlier eras must have been wise to lay it down that music be a part of everyone's education, not only music appreciation but playing and singing too. Surely knowing how to pick out a simplified version of Laudate Dominum even on a hurdy-gurdy would help in understanding "what Mozart was trying to do." Certainly I can't tell who, in all the YouTube videos, is sublime and who is very very good.

As with wine: we start from nothing. Rieslings might be red or Pinot Noir a brand name. You can't tell what, in any bottle, is sublime and what is very very good. This matters because it's all very well for a more knowledgeable person in either field to say "how marvelous, isn't the homework fun, what a world of delight opens up before you," etc. etc., but that is not the same thing as knowing what on earth you are about now. Ever since starting my wine career in a little suburban shop, I have noticed how anxious novices are to be perceived as instinctively liking the best. They also want to be perceived as instinctively recoiling from flaws and humbug or even good yeoman product. As with wine, so, I suspect, with music. The middle-aged novice especially has so much ground to make up.

There is nothing for it, of course, but to carry on listening and learning, just as there is nothing for it but to carry on drinking. (You know what I mean.) Upon being introduced to both pleasures, one finds they speedily become necessities. So now if you have three minutes to spare, do go to YouTube and savor, for example, the English horn solo from Act III of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. This is what Lucia is talking about in E. F. Benson's The Worshipful Lucia when she says, "it's like the last act of Tristan, when the shepherd boy goes on playing the cor anglais forever and ever." Type in "Tristan cor anglais" on YouTube's search bar and you will find half a dozen performances to choose from.

That done, set aside a little cash for your Pommery brut royal. It will retail for about $35.

Perhaps it has something to do with asparagusic acid, which "the body metabolizes into a close chemical relative of the essence of skunk spray called methanethiol" (Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking -- it is this acid and its breakdown that cause the strange odor people notice in their urine after eating asparagus). Or perhaps it has something mysteriously to do with "sulfur volatiles" present in spring's favorite grassy green treat (McGee, again). After all sulfur is a friend of wine. Judicious doses of it, from the vineyard to the bottling line, help keep wine from spoiling.

We muse in this very unscientific fashion because our point today is that a helping of asparagus, skunky and strong, is surprisingly suited to a strong, smoky, lush red wine. If you have seen the vegetable placed at the top of "difficult-to-match" food and wine lists, and have obediently tried restricting it to the recommended company of grassy sauvignon blancs or bubbly-sweet moscatos, throw duty aside. Think anew. Pour a cabernet or a merlot with it. The thicker and more tannic the red, in my experience, the better.

Only alas, wouldn't you know it? -- I am not the first to realize pairing asparagus and red wine can be a good thing. Boo hoo for absolute originality. Brooklyn Wine Guy drank a red with his side-dish "sparrow grass" -- an old-fashioned term, not the Guy's -- a few years ago and found it interesting, Stevie Parle at the Telegraph devised a red wine and garlic sauce to drizzle over it, AllRecipes braised it in a sort of red wine, garlic, and raisin reduction. We will shortly learn that one must not braise asparagus, but AllRecipes had a glimmer. At least red wine in all its novelty was there. Perhaps future historians, when they have a free moment, will kindly note that we all came to these discoveries "working independently." Like Darwin and Wallace.



But here is part 2. Your pairing of red wine and A. officinalis (the asparagus "from the dispensary") will be of no moment unless you have prepared and cooked the vegetable properly to begin with. (There happen to be over three hundred types of the plant asparagus, the common houseplant "misleadingly called asparagus fern" being A. sprengeri or A. densiflorus. Don't eat that, please, but if you have ever grown it, you have noticed how remarkably its tiny new spring shoots look like, well, asparagus.) And how does one prepare and cook it properly? How does one become an asparagus snob? Not by any methods the proofs of which we can see in photographs on our fellow red-wine-and-A. discoverers' websites. One glance at those spears shows us that those cooks have not gotten their proper tutelage from the great Madeleine Kamman. Her instructions must be utterly obeyed. I obey them, and I have never tasted any asparagus in any kitchen, whether restaurant, friend's, or family's, better than my own. She speaks, in The New Making of a Cook, p. 374:

To prepare asparagus, bend the stalks head to stem; the stem will break at exactly the place where the fibers stop being edible. Peel -- this is a must or you will lose half the delicacy of the vegetable -- with a potato peeler or a parer from the blossom end down, starting just under the close crop of leaves. Assemble the stalks in bundles of small, medium, or large asparagus.

So the disappointing photographs betray the cooks' ignorance or disregard of Madeleine's rules by repeatedly showing us (1) long, long, unsnapped spears, all (2) fully green with not a peeled, fresh and delicate white surface in sight. Perhaps it's understandable considering A. officinalis' expense. Perhaps even people who might know her instructions balk at the seeming wastefulness they imply. But what of the wastefulness of tough, strong, often crisply undercooked, therefore uneaten or certainly not much enjoyed asparagus?

For you know you mustn't undercook them. You mustn't overcook them either, à la the horrid luncheon in Little Women when Jo "boiled the asparagus for an hour, and was grieved to find the heads cooked off and the stalks harder than ever." By the way, what on earth are we to think when, later in that chapter, we hear author Louisa May Alcott speak blithely of her heroine's also "forgetting to put the cream in the refrigerator"? The refrigerator -- in 1868? Even briefly consulting a history of the appliance leads us to think that the fictional Marches, for all their yowling about poverty, must have been technologically quite au courant as Amy would say.

Anyway what you must do re: correct asparagus cooking -- after correct prepping -- so that you too have results to be photographed with confidence and eaten with relish, is this: boil the snapped, peeled, and delicate spears, in a pot full of salted water kept at a rolling boil and left uncovered, for 4 to 6 minutes depending on their size. This 6-minute-maximum, rolling-boil rule holds for any young fresh vegetables whose "volatile acids," Madeleine says, must evaporate from the uncovered pot in order to preserve any vegetable's color, taste, and texture. Therefore no braising, in red wine and raisins or otherwise. Vitamin freaks will probably get huffy here, and scold about the evaporating of nutritive value as well. Madeleine knows this and offers a scant paragraph of her own vitamin-preserving cooking methods, but again -- what is the nutritive value of vegetables left uneaten because they are dark, dank, and still half raw?

But who knows? Perhaps there's lots. I am reminded of the ancillary character Isabel Poppit in E. F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia novels, who lives on the sand dunes outside Tilling, "eats raw vegetables out of a wooden bowl, like a dog," and enjoys the rudest of good health. I had forgotten to mention anyway that when shopping for asparagus, you must look for tightly closed, purplish-headed spears; if they are beginning to open out and show weird little knobbly bracts at the top, they are old. Unless maniacally devoted to pure, dog-like cold water, Isabel ("such a Yahoo") would probably pour a claret ....

The sweetness and the sparkling-ness are delightsome; the odd piney or rosemary-like flavors of the torrontés grape will not be to everyone's taste. Pair it with powerful cheeses or spicy party tidbits, no?


Retail, about $15.

Perhaps we all don't appreciate cabernet sauvignons enough. "ABC," I remember reading once, the acronym representing what wine professionals say to one another when they sit down to enjoy a glass of something other than what they have been tasting and talking about and writing about all week. "Anything But Cab."


Do they really say that? I hope not very often. A good cabernet sauvignon is so very good -- so solid, so masculine, so comforting, with its black color and firm chalky bite supporting solid ripe (but not overripe) fruit. Today's example (if you can find it), William Cole Vineyards' Columbine Special Reserve, retails for about $15.

At first I only taste green pepper, and I suspect I have opened it tragically before its time.


Five days later, I taste green pepper and vanilla, and I muse -- well, it's no worse than Perfectly Fine. Ten days later, Hands of Time is a chewy mouthful of dark baked fruits preserved in a cedar chest. We recall vintage port, and the sensation of eating one's wine.

Still. It won't hurt to let this sit a few years.

Retail, about $28.

There are women who are butterflies for a living.






Sure, they look alert now.




Above, independent-minded camels. Not good, though the crowd loved it.



The elephant. Always to be relied upon.

Below, you see how huge the floor was -- that's what they call a three-ring circus. Gentleman friend says I need a better camera. I say, my camera is just fine. Every closeup you see is all its own work.



Below -- ah to be young, and riding BMX bikes in the circus.



"Hair-hanging artistry." It exists. And below, the mistress of ceremonies heads toward the cannon. There are women who do that for a living, too.

I have decided to create a new wine category, which I intend shall become immensely useful and popular, rivaling any potty little 100-point scale devised by anybody else. My category will be reserved for wines that are inexpensive, or obscure, or of no glorious provenance, or all of the above -- certainly they will be of no spectacular marketing or spectacular pretensions to any of the above. Often you'll know them by cost and by their plain, even dorky labels. And yet these are wines that will be, I can almost promise, Perfectly Fine. Explosive flavors of cassis and lychee, no, tannic grip and laser-sharp acidity, no. You needn't worry about vintage either. They will just be drinkable and sound, for the moment. If you take a half-open bottle home from a tasting, don't expect it not to turn muddy after a week.

Usually these are wholesaler's closeouts to be enjoyed once and probably never seen again, and not much regretted. Sometimes they are winery closeouts. (I do think it's a pity Renwood stopped making that charming barbera ... or have they?) "Four bucks, your cost. We'll blow through it -- in and out," the salesmen like to say.


If, after enjoying this Sottano malbec for example, you happen never to see it again, don't worry. In these days of good, sound winemaking my category of Perfectly Fine will be very large. It will repay a lifetime's recklessness with a ten dollar bill.

Retail, about $8.

From Civello Winery, in Graton, California. In my little corner of retail, nobody will try it. What puts people off? I suspect it's the marketing. The label's tagline, "Sexier than a pinot grigio, Naughtier than a chardonnay," means exactly nothing, even less than nothing. Memo to the powers that be: please do not not tell the public, sort of, what the wine might or might not, possibly perhaps, be made of, and then try to be cute about it. What with that, and the $12 to $14 price tag, and the fact that no one knows what Civello means, you have a formula for customer frustration and increased sales -- for Robert Mondavi and Beringer.

Mind you, I wouldn't know what Civello means either, except that at leisure I can look up the website and learn that it's a brand of the Row Eleven wine company, along with Stratton-Lummis. (The first time someone knowledgeable asked me about Row Eleven, I thought she was saying "Rowy-Levin," and went home to google that. Dead end.) As a matter of fact Civello, online, is refreshingly informative. Would that they might fit half of that information on their label. For that matter once you trace Row Eleven, you find this parent company is informative, too. I like it when wine producers are honest about the business of wine. After all, you know -- after a while, Passion, Integrity, and Respect for the Land becomes self-parody; a love of pH levels and soil composition is really for the very few. Tell me instead, "we are a company and we own three brands" -- brands! and they admit it! -- and my respect for you soars.



The wine is what I would call Very Nice. Moderately sweet, moderately tart, moderately syrupy, moderately flowery and and refreshing, it is just all around what you ought to try if you are a chardonnay drinker and are in the mood for something moderately different.

Retail, call it $13. Do splurge.

And don't forget our theme for the year, which is the Baroque (and lemons, though the two themes don't always have to go together. Perhaps Civello's lemon-yellow label inspires me). I cannot tell you how much I am enjoying my new clock radio. Why in twenty-four-and-a-half years of marriage did I never think to buy myself a clock radio? Somehow I assumed that his beep-y alarm was enough for the two of us. Now I climb under the covers at a bedtime that is so grandma-ish I would be embarrassed to admit to it, and I set the radio's timer, and the (often-Baroque) strains of WFMT lull me to sleep. That is, unless the announcer announces something REALLY LOUD.

Surely there is no better Baroque to listen to, today, than Vivaldi's Spring. The temperature outside is 20 F and blustery, but we can dream.

It's a small revelation, but here it is: when you are lucky enough to bring home a six pack of beer samples courtesy of a very well-respected American craft brewery, and you try each one over the course of several weeks; and each one makes you grimace; and then directly after passing off the last one to a beer lover you pour yourself a glass of wine to go with that chicken sandwich, you realize -- wine is after all a fruit juice. Beer is a sort of grass soup. And why hasn't anyone ever tried to make a beer out of the malted seed grains of ordinary lawn grass? Poa pratensis is the botanical name of Kentucky bluegrass, for instance. Think of the possibilities.



All this is not to cast aspersions on the good people who make and like beer. It is only to say I had a revelation. And it was this Rioja that happened to do it.

Retail, about $11. P.S. We tasted its crianza younger brother here.

A pity it was corked, that is. There is no mistaking the aroma of damp, mildewed cardboard, or a flooded basement after a summer storm.

The wine would have been lovely I am sure, if very acidic, which is to say very Italian -- meant to wash down food, not stand alone as a cocktail. Rosso di Montalcino, or "red of [the town of] Montalcino," is a DOC (Denominazione di Origine Controllata) of Tuscany. The grape used is brunello, a clone of sangiovese. A step above our plain Rosso is Brunello di Montalcino DOCG (Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita) -- same grape, same land, stricter standards. Capital-B Brunellos are made from the best of the brunello harvest and are aged four years before bottling instead of one. The result is a famously "brawny," tannic, complex wine, and expensive, too, easily retailing for $60. Even then you are advised to stash it in your cellar for years so that it may soften and ripen. Our Rosso starts out fresher tasting and readier to drink, and costs in the $20 range.

As to the cork problem. It happens, in about 5 percent of wines, experts tell us. When we smell damp basement we are smelling a chemical compound called 2,4,6-Trichloroanisole or TCA, which the human nose "can detect at levels as low as 30 parts per trillion" (Ron and Sharon Tyler Herbst, The New Wine Lover's Companion). Karen MacNeil in The Wine Bible says that TCA comes from an interaction of certain bacteria with chemicals in the cork-cleaning process. The problem doesn't go away -- or does it? A few years ago the great Harold McGee, in his New York Times column the Curious Cook, passed on a tip from a scientist friend. Slosh your corked wine into a bowl with a piece of ordinary plastic wrap, the friend said, and damp basement will go away. TCA is "chemically similar to polyethylene and sticks to the plastic." Full disclosure: I tried this once with another wine, but in my opinion it didn't work.

For more on Franceschi's brunellos and rossos, see the February 20, 2013 article at NJ.com -- "Restrained winemaking elevates il Poggione's brunellos."

Dear me. I was contemplating a bit of spring cleaning, a bit of re-purposing, as they say, of At First Glass. I thought I might change its name, free it up, give it a bigger focus than food and wine. I thought I would call it "Black Pony," after the cheap-o scotch that the detective finds in Laura's apartment after her murder. This is the (fictional) scotch that clues him in that something, in this mystery, is wrong with the clues themselves. He challenges Laura's maid, Bessie, about it. "But she never bought cheap stuff, did she? -- not a lady like Miss Hunt?"

"No," Bessie replies warily. And they go on to discuss where the bottle came from and who bought it, and who drank it with the cheap-o purchaser while Miss Hunt was ... away?



Aspiring to some blog-o originality and clarity of purpose, however, and not wanting to confuse people, I did a little investigating of the name and soon re-thought my ideas. There are already blogs out there called "Black Pony" or close variants of the same. This doesn't surprise me, nor am I surprised that all the Black Pony-ish domain names are used up, but I am somewhat troubled that the very first of them I came across must needs dabble in soft-core porn. Who knows how many others do also? And then there is the separate issue of the whole My Little Pony thing. No kidding. Google any phrase which happens to include the word "pony," and this universe pops up. "Ask Pony" (I ask you) blogs apparently exist by the thousands, and are run by people who love the toys, the cartoon series "Friendship is Magic," who love trying their hand at drawing the ponies, love inventing new plots for them and even updating them or melding their personalities with other cartoon or superhero characters. Sometimes the ponies get new, dark flaws ("Applejack becomes an alcoholic"). And all this is not even to scratch the surface of what is going on, My Little Pony-wise, at Fan Wiki. There are things that are canonical. There are people who know what that means.

Most startling. I think, after all, At First Glass had better turn away blinking from the open door with the pony hurricane howling outside, quietly shut that door, and stick to what it knows. I think it had better keep the simple ten-dollar domain name that has served well enough for five years and more, even if it does prompt Adsense to automatically load in sidebar ads for replacement auto windows and shower stall glass blocks. Only -- only, alas. People who re-invent their blogs after five years seem so coolly decisive.

Now you've heard everything you may sip a cocktail. Fittingly, it will contain scotch. Remember the Rusty Nail? Does it not conjure memories of the grown-ups ordering trendy drinks at mid-'70s wedding receptions? If I add something else to it, olive brine perhaps, could it become the Rusty Nail holding the Horseshoe on My Little Pony's hoof? Anyway here it is, as simple as you like:

Rusty Nail

1 oz. (a little less than a jigger) Scotch
ditto, Drambuie (a liqueur, based on malt whisky, flavored with honey, spices, and herbs -- not the same thing as a cheap-o "malt liquor"!)

Stir both spirits in a glass filled with ice cubes, and serve.

It may be that only the great Chef René Verdon himself could have pulled this one off. Or, perhaps some vital detail was left out of the recipe when the book went to press in 1963. For my part I, intrigued as I was by the combination of lemon and beef, was in the end forced to label the thing an interesting failure. It's because I took out of the oven and served forth a pot full of very, very lemony muscle fibers, tasting not remotely of beef. Any explanatory post-mortems, perhaps from people who know something of M. Verdon in his post-White House career -- his San Francisco restaurant Le Trianon, his five books -- would be welcome.

Meanwhile, feel free to try your luck.





Top sirloin lemon pot roast, from René Verdon's White House Chef Cookbook (1963)

1/2 cup lemon juice
3 slices lemon, quartered
2 Tbsp. minced onion
1 clove garlic, sliced
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. celery salt
1/2 tsp pepper
1/4 tsp thyme, dried
3 Tbsp flour, optional

1 five pound top sirloin roast
3 Tbsp melted butter

Mix all ingredients except the beef and butter in a small bowl. Cover and let sit in the refrigerator 24 hours. Oddly, it is this lemon marinade which just sits -- you will not use it to soak and tenderize the beef, although perhaps you should.

The next day, about four hours before you plan to serve dinner, melt the butter in a heavy stock pot. Dust the beef with 3 Tbsp. flour before searing, if desired. Brown the beef in the butter on all sides.

Add the lemon mixture, cover, and simmer on the stove or in a very slow oven (at about 225 F) for three hours or until the meat is tender.

Serve forth, and hope.

I am privileged to live with interesting young people. One of them discovered Brian Jacques' Redwall series of novels in childhood (think good medieval mice, and other woodland creatures, battling bad medieval rats). Now this young person not only still enjoys the books, but has also set herself the project of cooking all the foods mentioned in them.

It's a lot of food -- and she is not the only aficionado (-nada?) who does this. It seems the late Mr. Jacques was known for his love of food, and depicted his mice and woodland creatures feasting for a purpose. (He once explained that the wartime rationing of his childhood affected him.) His readers have taken up his enthusiasms. They buy and cook from officially published, if slim, Redwall cookbooks. They also do free-form cooking based on Redwall, because not every scene of revelry in the twenty-three novels includes recipes. Needless to say they also write blogs and manage websites about cooking from Redwall.


Some fans, like the interesting young person in my house, simply go on-line and search independently for recipes to plug into place when it's time to create a dish mentioned in Loam Hedge or Pearls of Lutra. Scarcely can the good people at Williams-Sonoma, for example, have realized that their recipe for holiday mushroom turnovers will do excellently when we want to cook from Martin the Warrior.

Here then for the first time is something like a guest post at At First Glass: I did not make these. I can assure you however that the good people at Williams-Sonoma know what they are doing. The turnovers are excellent. I enjoyed five more than my share at one sitting on a drab winter Sunday afternoon, washing them down with my "house cocktail," a delicious and tangy rum sour. The afternoon instantly turned far less drab.




Martin the Warrior's (by way of Williams-Sonoma) mushroom turnovers*

• 2 Tbs. unsalted butter
  
• 2 Tbs. olive oil
  
• 3 Tbs. finely chopped shallot
  
• 12 oz. cremini mushrooms, finely chopped
  
• 1 1/2 tsp. chopped fresh thyme
  
• 1 1/2 tsp. chopped fresh rosemary
  
• Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste
  
• 1/2 cup heavy cream
  
• 1 oz. Gruyère cheese, grated
  
• 1 batch double-crust pie dough, divided into 2 disks and chilled (see related recipe, or use mine)
• 1 egg, lightly beaten with 1 Tbs. water

Directions:

In a sauté pan over medium-high heat, melt the butter with the olive oil. Add the shallot and cook, stirring, until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add the mushrooms, thyme and rosemary, and season with salt and pepper. Cook, stirring, until the mushrooms are tender, 6 to 7 minutes. Add the cream and simmer for about 15 seconds, then remove from the heat. Fold in the cheese. Let the filling cool to room temperature.

Preheat an oven to 400°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment.

Remove the dough from the refrigerator and let stand for 5 minutes. On a lightly floured work surface, roll out dough into a large rectangle about 1/8 inch thick.

Cut the dough into squares measuring about 3 inches by 3 inches.* Lightly brush their edges with some of the egg wash. Fill with a scant 1 Tbs. of the mushroom filling (do not overfill), fold over and press together, and place on the prepared baking sheet. Gently pinch together any edges that are not fully crimped. Repeat with the remaining pastry rectangles and filling.

Lightly brush the tops and edges of the pastries with egg wash. Bake until golden brown, about 15 minutes. Let cool slightly before serving. Makes 24 turnovers.

*The original recipe is written to make use of a special pastry press which helps shape and cut the turnovers into uniform packages. Interesting Young Person rolled out the pastry and assembled everything by hand.

Late harvest rieslings and riesling eisweins can be divine little desserts in a glass: the lemon cake-and-clove tastes of the riesling grape translate well into, let us be blunt, a glass of syrup. Late harvest wines like Nils, below, made from other grapes ["late harvest" means the grapes have been plucked late in the fall, after they have hung long enough on the vine to lose some water content naturally, and to concentrate the juices inside] -- other late harvest wines, I say, strike me as a bit odd in comparison. They are interesting and good, but can also remind one strangely of things that don't entirely go together, re dessert. Maybe mustard and caramel, for example, or olive brine and maple syrup.



But it is also possible to fail to do them justice, especially if one is in a hurry one night, or does not chill them enough one lazy winter afternoon. Luckily the sugars naturally present in late harvest wines help preserve them even after opening, so that one may try again to sort out the mustard and caramel a few weeks later, and no harm done.

Our Nils, you must know, comes from Napa Valley's Saddleback Cellars, is named for its winemaker Nils Venge (famed among other things for making the 1985 Groth cabernet sauvignon reserve which was the first California wine awarded 100 points by Robert Parker), and sells for $45 per 500 ml bottle from the winery website. These are all reasons enough to want to do it justice, and to be glad about the preserving qualities of sugar.

Tiny hint to those of us anticipating a quite middle-aged birthday. A dollop of something like Nils is just the treat to round off the evenings if you have noticed, in these latter days, that perhaps your waistline can no longer cope with the gargantuan midnight snacks of yesteryear. A careful pour in a champagne flute will do very well. Then off to bed with you, and listen to WFMT's opera broadcast (tonight it's Ernani), or dip into wonderful E.F. Benson's Secret Lives (first published, 1932).