It took me a full day and a half at COPIA – The American Center for Wine, Food & Art to figure out what Taste 3 meant. I stared at the screen behind the speakers in COPIA’s Theatre and realized that the 3 was actually small and raised slightly and meant “cubed,” as in the three bases for the institution, wine, food and art.
Organized in every detail by efficient staff at Icon Estates, the mega wine corporation that now owns both Robert Mondavi Winery and Ravenswood Winery, the first ever fabulously varied event celebrated forty years of Robert Mondavi Winery and honored thirty nationally known chefs who have given cooking classes as part of Mondavi’s Great Chefs series.
The Thursday through Sunday event included receptions, lectures, tastings, elegant food and beverage breaks, lunches, dinners, and parties, as well as comedy and tragedy, and poetry and dance performances.
The tie-in between COPIA and Robert Mondavi Winery is that Robert Mondavi spearheaded the development of the center and contributed millions to it. He and Julia Child co-chaired the fundraising committee, hence the on-site restaurant’s name of Julia’s Kitchen, with which she never had a thing to do and which is run by an outside entity.
Mondavi’s second wife, Margrit Biever Mondavi, serves as “Vice President of Cultural Affairs” of Robert Mondavi Winery and hosted and attended every session, sitting in the front row and asking questions. Mondavi himself attended a few events in his wheelchair, still handsome but finding difficulty in speaking, which did not detract from the strength of his accomplishments.
Margrit Biever told several audiences that her husband had started the winery forty years ago with “only a $50,000 loan and twelve acres.” Everyone acknowledged that he has been an unabashed promoter of wine, his winery and Napa Valley.
A wide array of chefs, cookbook authors, sommeliers, researchers, scientists and artists accepted the invitation to perform and show their stuff.
Here are some highlights.
Famed sommelier Andrea Immer Robinson, a casual size 2 at max in khakis and sandals, serves as a COPIA trustee and moderated the first group of presenters.
Dan Barber, green and slow food advocate and chef/owner of Blue Hill at Stone Barns, an old Rockefeller estate, grows five acres of organic vegetables for his restaurant, keeps bees, and gives 23 acres of home to animals, including an old boar, Boris, who can no longer perform his masculine function and caused a deeply researched dilemma for Barber and colleagues of what to do with him. Poor Boris became a symbol of old versus new throughout the conference.
Ari Weinzweig owns Zingerman’s delis and food businesses in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which he began in 1982 with a $20,000 loan, two employees, and “a bad location.” Having grown up on Kraft macaroni and cheese, fish sticks and green Jell-O with fruit cocktail, Weinzweig now leads the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses, at which all decisions are made by consensus by the leaders of each business. His list of enterprises now includes a Bakehouse, Zingerman’s mail order and hilarious online catalogue, creamery, catering and events companies, a roadhouse, ZingTrain, and Zingerman’s Coffee Company.
Weinzweig’s main message was that “visioning,” meaning developing a vision of what you want to do or create so you can see it, will make you succeed. He sees this as the opposite of “strategic planning” and said, “This is painting a mental picture of where you are going. A strategic plan is how to get where you’re going.”
Faith D’Aluisio and Meter Menzel, co-creators of the book “Hungry Planet: What the World Eats,” shared the point that comparatively wealthy Americans and British use more of their money to buy sugar-coated junk food and are less healthy than the equivalent family in a less “developed” country that subsists on beans, rice and local fruits or fish.
Leo McCloskey of Sonoma’s Enologix, Inc. explained that his analytical chemistry systems can turn a not-so-great-rated wine into a winner in both Robert Parker and Wine Spectator rating systems.
Wine authority Tim Hanni explained that part of the reason things taste different to many of us is that some people have more taste buds than others. According to Hanni, people who like white zinfandel have more taste buds than people who like Scotch and cognac. Stimulus, sensation, variables, perception, response, and interpretation all contribute to the taste experience.
Hugo Liu, an MIT researcher, devised the “Synesthetic Cookbook” by entering 160,000 recipes, 24,000 ingredients, and 3,000 preparation techiniques into his computer, and came out with millions of combinations of recipes and things to do with food. You can type in “Thai paella feet,” and with a few chugs his program will give you a wild and crazy recipe – thought by many to be a new direction for recipe development.
Napa Valley’s Carl Doumani, developer of Quixote Winery and father of Lisa Doumani of Terra restaurant in St. Helena, shared his thoughts on the importance of integrating art and architecture with wine making and marketing. To prove his point, he hired Austrian artist and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser to design his new winery to make people smile even before they enter.
Paul Draper, winemaker and CEO of Ridge Vineyards in the Santa Cruz Mountains, whose wines still beat the French in the recent thirty year re-tasting challenge, stressed the importance of “slow wine” as opposed to “fast wine” with additives such as “mega-purple,” the addition of pressed grape skins discovered by wine writer Dan Berger. No wine snob he, Draper confessed to having grown up on Red Mountain jugs and thinks “Two Buck Chuck” is just fine because “it draws people in who will buy better wines later.”
Drew Nieporent, who owns some of the best known restaurants in the country, such as Tribeca Grill (with Robert de Niro), Rubicon, Nobu, Montrachet, Centrico, and other food enterprises and received the James Beard Foundation Humanitarian of the Year Award, began his career flipping hamburgers at McDonald’s. The most important quality of life to Nieporent is that his work is not a job, it’s his life. He says “McDonald’s sells sizzle, not the steak.”
Nierporent always demands that his chef/partners can cook better than his mother, and said that restaurant owners always feel that “when you work you are neglecting your family and when you are with your family the restaurant feels neglected.” He also believes one should treat your staff even better than you treat the customers, and that you should be charitable to both your community and staff, and they will in turn treat others well.
Possibly the most innovative restaurateur in the country, Homaro Cantu studied at the traditional Le Cordon Bleu, created his packed Moto Restaurant in Chicago, and now holds several patents for gadgets and machines that do all sorts of far out weird things to food. He creates printed edible menus, makes buttered popcorn purée and peas and carrots syrup, whips up macaroni and cheese cotton candy, and designs cutlery that more resembles art.
About to bring us Native American cuisine via a PBS series, Loretta Barrett Oden, who owns two Corn Dance Cafés featuring indigenous foods in Santa Fe, explained that fry bread, a food many of us think is indigenous, actually came from U.S. Government programs that introduced wheat flour and fat to the Native diet. Watch for her program, “Seasoned with Spirit – A Native Cook’s Journey,” airing in November.
Temple University professor Bryant Simon made everyone laugh, if self-consciously, with his analysis of why people pass up local cafés to go to Starbucks. He says Starbucks’ coffee can be addictive, we feel better about ourselves in a form of self-gifting by treating ourselves to too expensive coffee, and we feel like we belong to a Starbucks community with a connection, all lures cast about by Starbucks’ careful marketing. Simon says even the artwork on Starbucks walls is designed to make customers feel a little artsy, but carefully not too. He also points out that non-customers express themselves by neither succumbing to nor shopping at Starbucks.
Cuban-American chef and cookbook author Maricel Presilla owns Zafra and Cucharamama restaurants in New Jersey and grew up in Cuba close to Fidel Castro – so close that every time she smells sour milk she remembers “that’s how Fidel smelled.” With a PhD in anthropology, she sees recipes as a “skeleton squeezed out of life that one must experience to know.” Her 2007 cookbook of the Americas will explain the influences of culture and what can be grown in each country and how availability influences regional cuisines.
Napa’s Quintessa winery owner, the independent Chilean Augustin Huneeus, and Icon Estates CEO Richard Sands spoke together, with Huneeus stating that corporate winemakers probably have more freedom than those at small wineries because the boss isn’t always hovering. Sands commented, to the astonishment of much of the audience, that “when we think of agriculture, we think of commodities,” and not people.
Southern Oregon University Professor Gregory Jones explained how much climate change influences local crops. He said the Napa Valley currently has five degree warmer nights and a 90-day longer growing season between frosts than in the 1940s and 1950s, and such a trend will alter drastically what grapes will grow there successfully.
Walter Scheib, White House chef under the Clintons who recently beat Iron Chef Cat Cora in a Food Network challenge, started an organic garden on the roof and said he is glad to get out after “eleven years locked in the White House basement.” He also told he story of Hillary Clinton beckoning him to the family residence and was surprised to find her in running shorts, sweatshirt and hair curlers. First Daughter Chelsea Clinton hung out with him in the kitchen for days at a time learning to cook vegetarian meals for herself. Scheib said Laura Bush demanded 100 percent organic food in the White House and when the staff served the president organic milk he questioned, “Organic? At the White House?”
Enjoy
Read Kathleen's Epicurious column in this week's Sun>
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