Ice wine-and-food fest in Canandaigua

CANANDAIGUA, NY -- Winter need not be a bleak time, not if you pay attention to whose imagination is working at full tilt.

Take the New York Wine & Culinary Center. The facility is working on the finishing touches for its 3rd annual nICE Festival, a celebration of ice wines and food, all New York sourced.
The event, scheduled for noon to 5 p.m. Saturday, February 26, will be more than a sit-and-watch affair. It will include cooking classes, pairings, ice sculpture demonstration and live music to go with the wine tastings.
The schedule:

Noon to 5 p.m. -- Ice wine tasting in the tasting room and exhibit room with representatives from area wineries, accompanied by regional food favorites. Free.
2 p.m. -- Kitchen Quick Takes in the Hands-On Kitchen: Preparing cheese soufflé, paired with ice wine, $40 per person.
2 p.m. -- Ice sculpture demonstration with Executive Chef Carlo Peretti. Free.
2 to 5 p.m. -- Live Music in the Taste of New York Restaurant. FREE.
3 p.m. -- Wine and chocolate pairing in the Educational Theater, Sampling three New York wines, including one ice wine, paired with a sampling of three chocolate desserts prepared by NYWCC pastry chef Andrew. $20 per person.
4 p.m. -- Ice sculpture demonstration with chef instructor Jeff Christiano. FREE.
5 p.m. -- Winter wine and food pairing -- In the Educational Theater; serving New York cheddar quiche, roast beef au jus, and spiced pumpkin pie paired with Chardonnay, Meritage and ice wines. $25 per person.
All day -- Sweet & Savory Duo/Ice Wine Pairing -- In the Taste of New York Restaurant. $15 per person.

Advance registration is required, and can be done online.
The Center is located at 800 South Main Street. Phone: (585) 394-7070.

Curious about nano-brewing? Head for Long Island

What is smaller than a brewery? A micro-brewery, of course. Ah, but what is smaller than a micro-brewery? Welcome to the emerging world of nano-breweries.

As Lenn Thompson of the New York Cork Report, who tips us to this event, explains it:

"It seems like every few months I hear about a new smaller-than-micro brewery popping up on Long Island, places like Barrier Brewing Company, Blind Bat Brewery, Barrage Brewing Company and Rocky Point Artisan Brewers. ... One challenge, even for an intrepid beer seeker such as myself, is getting your hands on these brews. Beyond here-and-gone growler fills and the occasional tap at a craft beer bar, it's not easy. Very few of these beers are bottled."

One's thirst for a nano-brew can be satisfied this Saturday if you care to brave the driving conditions and head south. The Long Island Nano Cask Ale Festival will be held from noon to 4 p.m. at DEKS American Restaurant, located at 605 Route 25A in Rocky Point, a North Shore hamlet located about halfway between Port Jefferson and Wading River. DEKS is located in the historic Hallock House, the town's oldest commercial building, parts of which date to the early 1700s.

Admission is $40 per person, which will cover unlimited samples of locally-made ales and a commemorative half-pint glass. Designated drivers will be admitted free. Tickets are available online, in person at DEKS, or by calling (631) 821-0066.

Little Lenz on a big marketing trip

PECONIC, Long Island — Lenz Winery describes itself as "a relatively small winery, making wines to exacting standards." That, however, does not describe its ambitions.

In a state replete with wineries that are anything but proactive when it comes to marketing their wares, Lenz (seen at right buttoned up for the winter) has come up with a new dining program called "Lenz On Tour" that offers diners a prix fixe menu at restaurants across Long island, pairing its wines with specific foods. Members of the Lenz Wine Club, the winery’s subscriber program, get a 10% percent discount on the prix fixe menu price.

The promotion is being co-marketed by the restaurants and the winery, and has just been instituted at several spots in Nassau and Suffolk counties. Lenz hopes to expand the promotion to several New York City restaurants through the end of April.

Dorothy-Dean Thomas, Lenz marketing director and creator of the program, said the promotion began earlier this month at The Fifth Season in Port Jefferson, where it is scheduled to run through the end of the month. Diners there are being offered Lenz wines at $6 a glass or $20 a bottle. The $45 per-person wine-pairing menu is offered Sunday through Friday evenings and Saturday for those seated between 5 and 6 p.m.

Other participating restaurants:

• Jamesport Manor Inn
• Scrimshaw Restaurant, Greenport
• The Allegria, Long Beach
• Mano Osteria & Wine Bar, Mattituck
• North Fork Table & Inn, Southold
• The Dark Horse, Riverhead

Check the individual restaurants for dates and prices.

Local wine-and-food cooking series to begin

Photo by William M. Dowd

CANANDAIGUA, NY -- The New York Wine & Culinary Center will kick off its "Local Pairs -- Seasonal Cooking with New York Wineries" series this Thursday. Successive classes will be held February 17 and March 24.

Participants in the class will use regional New York ingredients paired with local wines. Class will begin in the center's Educational Theater with a tasting of wines to be served with the meal. A winery owner or winemaker will lead the tasting and answer questions.

Students then will move into the Hands-On Kitchen -- a place where I've cooked and can highly recommend -- to work in groups to prepare a four-course menu under the guidance of a chef Instructor. At the end of the class, participants will dine together.

This week's participating winery will be Billsboro Winery of Geneva, followed by Hunt Country Vineyards of Branchport, and Imagine Moore Winery of Naples.

The New York Wine & Culinary Center is located at 800 South Main Street. Class reservations may be made by calling (585) 394-7070.

Wine-centric art exhibition in Rochester

Théodor Rombouts' "A Drinker With a Flask"

ROCHESTER, NY -- The art of wine will be celebrated in a slightly unusual way at the Memorial Art Gallery beginning Saturday.

A traveling exhibition titled "Wine and Spirit: Rituals, Remedies and Revelry" will run through April 10. It will open with a party from 8 to 11 p.m. Saturday, with advance registration required. Tickets and additional information on the opening event are available online.

The content of the exhibition includes more than 100 objects that illustrate the transformative effects of wine. The earliest is a Neolithic wine jar dated 5400-5000 BCE, and the latest is a 2009 painting by New York artist Leonard Porter.

In between are works by 17th Century Dutch masters, featured alongside prints, drawings and photos by such artists as Honoré Daumier and Pablo Picasso. The show also includes Greek vases, Roman glassware, Renaissance vessels, rare books and manuscripts.

The exhibition was organized by the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum of South Hadley, MA, with support from the Warbeke Art Museum Fund and the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum Friends of Art. In Rochester, the show will be supplemented with 16 objects from the Memorial Art Gallery collection.

In addition to the exhibition itself, MAG has scheduled a serties of lectures and wine tastings. The full schedule is available here.

MAG is located on the University of Rochester campus at 500 University Avenue. Phone: (585) 276-8900.

Wine trail reinvents, renames itself

WESTFIELD, NY -- A well-established wine trail is changing its name to more simply reflect its territory. Thank goodness.

The awkwardly-titled Chautauqua-Lake Erie Wine Trail now is Lake Erie Wine Country. The trail has 23 member wineries spread between North East, PA, and Silver Creek, NY, in Chautauqua County. That swath is home to about 3,000 acres of more than 30 varieties of wine grapes.

“We believe the new name better reflects our region and eliminates confusion,” Bob Mazza, current LEWC president and owner of three regional wineries, said in a news release Thursday.

Julie Pfadt, a native of North East, has been named new executive director of the trail.

As part of the re-branding campaign, the website has been re-worked; the trail is offering Visit Visa -- a coupon packet for restaurants, lodging, attractions and transportation -- for $20; and, the trail has added Fridays to its first ticketed event of the year, the annual Wine & Chocolate Weekend, which this year will be held February 4-6.

The wine trail members:

Blueberry Sky Farm Wine
Burch Farms Country Market and Wine Shop
Courtyard Wineries
Heritage Wine Cellars
Johnson Estate Winery
Lakeview Wine Cellars
Liberty Vineyards & Winery
Mazza Chautauqua Cellars
Mazza Vineyards
Merritt Estate Winery
Noble Winery
Penn Shore Vineyards
Presque Isle Wine Cellars
Quincy Cellars Winery & Banquet Hall
Schloss Doepken Winery
Sensory Winery & Art Gallery
Seven Vines Winery
South Shore Wine Company
Sparkling Ponds Winery
Twenty-One Brix Winery
Vetter Vineyards Winery
Willow Creek Winery
Woodbury Vineyards

You can get linked to all the wine, beer and food trails in New York State by clicking here.

Irish mead tasting at Montezuma/Hidden Marsh

Column still at Hidden Marsh.

SKANEATELES, NY -- There is something about winter that makes many people revert to primal tastes. Put that element together with a certain calendar date -- such as St. Patrick's Day -- and the result is a "Luck of the Irish Mead Celebration."

The event is scheduled for March 19-20, the weekend of St. Patrick's week, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day at the Montezuma Winery and Hidden Marsh Distillery.

Mead, historically the drink of Irish kings, may well be the oldest alcoholic drink known to man. The honey flavor is dominant, but floral notes are common and there are several styles of the finished product.

Montezuma/Hidden Marsh will be pairing samples of various meads with a variety of Irish foods, as well as providing a demonstration of how mead is created from water, yeast and honey. Admission is $3 per person (free for Montezuma case club members), with no reservations required.

The winery/distillery produces BEE brand vodka from honey as well as apple brandy, honey brandy, maple liqueur and raspberry liqueur. The facility is located at 2981 Auburn Road. Phone: (315) 568-8190.

Revived Fraunces Tavern finally reopens

NEW YORK -- There were many Irishmen in the Continental Army that helped the United States break away from England, so it is perhaps fitting that an Irish company has revived Fraunces Tavern, where General George Washington bade farewell to his troops when he briefly returned to private life.

Although the upstairs museum has remained in operation, the tavern has been closed since last February as it was turned over to the Porterhouse Group, an Irish company, (see earlier story here) and underwent some conversions. It opened Wednesday night to a mixed crowd of history buffs, people involved in its conversion and to the general public.

Keeping the provenance of Fraunces Tavern -- which traces its origins to the Queen's Head tavern, established in 1762 -- straight can be sometimes a tricky task. The Sons of the Revolution in the State of New York owned the Pearl Street building, which has been home to a museum, the restored second-floor Long Room where Washington made his remarks, and a ground-floor restaurant that will re-open in about two weeks. The Irish-style pub is located at 58 Pearl, a connected building that also was acquired by the Sons of the Revolution. So, the complex houses now houses the museum, restaurant, pub, storage area, administrative offices, and the Anglers’ Club.

Fraunces Tavern is located at the intersection of Pearl and Broad Street in the Financial District. The phone number is  (212) 968-1776, although it accepts online reservations.

Iconic Elaine's left to longtime manager

Longtime customer Woody Allen with Elaine Kaufman.

NEW YORK -- The will of the late Elaine Kaufman, whose homey Upper East Side restaurant and bar was for 47 years a gathering place for the literary elite and those who liked to watch them, leaves the establishment and other properties to the restaurant's longtime manager.

Kaufman, who died December 3 at the age of 81, also left two five-story buildings to her Diane Becker. She has managed the restaurant for 26 years.

Elaine's was home-away-from-home to many of the entertainment industry's major stars, including regular Woody Allen, shown in the photo with Kaufman during the restaurant's 45th anniversary party in 2008.

Becker told The New York Times she plans to keep the restaurant open and running the same as it always has. "The staff is still here," she said. " ... The only missing link is Elaine."

The will was be filed in Surrogate's Court in Manhattan today.

Elaine's is located at 1703 2nd Avenue between East 88th and East 89th streets. Phone: (212) 534-8103.

Earlier bar closings sought around state

"The clubs are all closed,
And the ladies are leaving.
There's nobody nobody knows on the street.
A few stranded souls
Standing cold at the station,
And nowhere to go
But to bed, and to sleep."

-- "Breakdown" (A Long Way From Home), by Kris Kristofferson

It's a quiet time of night, that period between 2 and 4 a.m., when not much good comes of hanging around a bar. At least that's the view of a number of municipalities in New York State where moves are afoot to get proprietors to pile up the chairs, sweep the floors and lock up for the night by 2 a.m. voluntarily or otherwise rather than use the two hours state law allows them after that time.

Albany Mayor Jerry Jennings, for example, is taking the conciliatory route. He has met with a number of tavern owners recently and asked them to voluntarily curtail their hours. The city councils in Saratoga Springs and Buffalo are discussing making it the law that bars in their municipalities must close up shop by 2 a.m. as already is the case in such places as Rochester and Syracuse, both big college towns. In little Ithaca, home to both Cornell University and Ithaca College, local statute requires a 1 a.m. closing.

The common theme is that the 2 to 4 a.m. period is the one in which there are more alcohol-fueled fights, noise disturbances and serious crimes than any other.

Curiously, the idea of earlier closings in countries with a strong pub culture seems to be gaining traction, just as the anti-smoking movement did some years back and which now has spread to virtually the entire western world. In the United Kingdom, for example,"Up to half the pubs and bars could abandon late-night opening under plans to impose new charges to help police alcohol-fueled disorder, the Home Office has predicted."

That's the lead on a report in today's editions of The Telegraph of London. It goes on to say:

Tens of thousands of venues could stop opening past midnight to avoid paying a so-called late night levy of up to £4,500 (about US$7,000) which councils will have the power to impose. It is part of a series of changes that will transform the licensing regime and spell the end to Labour's 24-hour drinking laws, five years after they were implemented.

Other measures contained in the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill, published today, will see (city) councils allowed to stop problem pubs and clubs in entire areas from opening all hours.

The public will be also be handed a much stronger say in opening times including the power for any local resident to object rather than just those living close to a premises. Health bodies will be consulted, there are greater powers to close permanently those shops or bars that serve children repeatedly, and fines for selling alcohol to those who are under age will also be doubled to £20,000 (about US$32,000).

The levy is aimed at allowing councils to make problem pubs and clubs contribute towards the cost of policing the resulting disorder. But the proposals provide for a general power meaning there is nothing to stop a local authority charging it for every venue that wants to stay open past midnight.