Let’s face it - we can all go a week without watching our favorite show, everyone can deal with the loss of a treasured piece of clothing, stolen cars can always be replaced and we can all deal with small amounts of distance from our friends and loved ones. Nothing however, besides obvious things like oxygen can be more important than food. So one must wonder, if eating is something we do regularly - then surely it’s something we should learn about. If you’re doing okay financially it makes little sense that you should know everything there is to know about sport, have a good fashion sense, be geographically and politically aware - and know next to nothing about food.

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My wife and I recently went to Dans Le Noir - London’s first restaurant in the dark, started after the success of it’s parent restaurant in Paris. Seeing as the restaurant only seats 60 people, you need to book pretty well in advance to get a place (there are three sitting for dinner a night), but once you do - it’s an experience you’re not likely to forget. Upon arriving you are in a lit cocktail lounge where you can enjoy a drink and look at the menu and order your meal. My wife and I both chose the ’surprise menu’ where you are not told what you will be eating. Deciding to at least have some choice in the matter, we ordered the 2003 Chablis ‘St. Martin’ white Burgundy, and our blind waiter led us to our table.

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On the Friday of Wine 2.0 we decided to treat ourselves and head to The Slanted Door. We had intended, naively, to go for supper - only to find that it was booked out for two weeks straight. As we walked in with the last of the luncheoners, we were able to wangle a seat - which immediately called for a miniature celebration in the form of two classic Austrian wines.

For Greg it was the Gruner Vetline Shmelz, and for myself I chose the Csersgezi Fuszeres, Hill Top. Both were smooth, floral, off-dry and crisp - perfect for an afternoon lunch, especially seeing as we had a conference to go to. A wine conference it may have been - but a conference none-the-less.

Crispy Imperial Rolls with *shrimp, pork and glass noodles* Amazing, we got this starter to share, and we were served five of the little suckers on a plate. The only thing better than a novel food - is a novel way of consuming food. Hence my personal preference to eating with chopsticks at restaurants; hand making tortillas; enjoying Mongolian stir-fries; eating Indian or Persian food with my bare hands; the occasional shot of tequila and of course - shucking oysters straight from the rock and eating them with lemon, Tabasco and salt. It’s all about the process and trying to make it all more tactile - and for being a day-to-day knife and fork person, any food or process that breaks the norm is a welcome addition to my repertoire.

We photographed the process of eating the crispy imperial roll which involves:

1. laying out a piece of lettuce
2. placing a piece of mint on the lettuce
3. adding a lump of noodles on top
4. inserting the Crispy Imperial Roll
5. rolling it all into a consumable ball
6. dipping it into the teriyaki and plumb sauce
7. stuffing it all into your mouth and rolling your eyes back into your head because its just so good.

The Slanted Door is an incredibly popular restaurant in San Francisco and they only use organic produce and ecologically farmed meat. It’s nice to see people’s taste buds moving in the right direction.

We did a site update today… tried to make it a bit tighter. We also got our Tastevine banner up, which just links to our splash page. Go ahead and sign up for the email newsletter if interested.

We’re going live with the site this coming Monday the 28th. It should be pretty cool. We’ve got 100,000+ wines with about a million tags, as well as thousands of recipes, so you can start playing around with as many search ideas as you can think of to find a wine or recipe that you’re looking for.

We’re also going to have TasteID user profiles where you sign up, rate the top wines for each of 12 varietals, and thereby personalize your Tastevine experience allowing you to get more customized recommendations based on your specific taste profile. This will be a really useful feature for you winos out there looking to discover a new wine that’s just right for you as well as those novices just getting into wine and looking to enhance their taste experience.

The food and recipes won’t have as advanced a rating system to start, but when you find a wine, there will be generally recommended recipes and foods for that wine. The key is to start using, contributing, and rating, which makes the system more valuable to everyone.

Once people have started to rate the same things, Tastevine will provide you with recommendations by matching you with your ‘taste budds’, who will be other members that have similar taste profiles. This gets around the problem of getting recommendations from one critic or reviewer who’s trying to appeal to all. Instead you get matched up to others like yourself. Hopefully, this will build a strong element of trust in the community fueled technology.

We’re really excited about this and look forward to everyone’s feedback.

Having just checked back in at Khymos’ site - I realize that I missed the boat for TGRWT #1 by somehow having thought that the deadline was tomorrow when it was actually May 1st. Anyhow - I’m going to have to go for it as a late entry!

The idea of tuna steaks was a little crazy, and it tasted crazier. I thought of creating a mocha sauce for a tuna steak based on a meal I’d had at a very eccentric restaurant some time ago in Cape Town. However - although it was palatable, it had far more of a novelty effect than anything else.

However, last night, with some advice from my mother, I think I managed to crack the formula. My mother reminded me that garlic, like onion, became sweet when it was roasted. My mistake with the Garlic, Chocolate and Coffee sauce was that I didn’t roast the garlic first.

So based on a recipe for chocolate covered strawberries on my resource for any recipe, www.AllRecipes.com, I set to work on the TGWRT #1 challenge.

The amazing thing about this recipe is how quick it is. Roasting the garlic takes around 15 minutes, and while its roasting the sauce can be made just as easily.

I grated 80% cocoa Green and Blacks into a double boiler along with 2 spoons of shortening. Once the chocolate had melted I added a teaspoon of roast Kenyan coffee beans into the mixture; and then proceeded to take each clove of garlic, skewered on a cocktail stick, and dip them into the mixture and setting it down on plate. All in all I had ten dipped cloves, which I put in the fridge.

In an effort to do a double duty we had the mocha-cloves as an after dinner sweet, together with the General Billy’s Syrah Grenache. The entire General Billy’s concept is great, but as this blog tries to stay faithful to small, country specific producers, it can’t win by ultimate pick for WBW.

However, the Gaullist undergrowth aromas and red berry flavours were a perfect accomplice to the mocha-dipped cloves. Altogether, although late, the TGRWT #1 challenge has been great fun, and really challenged my limited culinary faculties. The opportunity to combine it with Wine Blogger Wednesday has also been great. I wonder if Khymos could help us finding chemically related food pairings.

Who would’ve thought that a Languedoc Syrah/Grenache and a skewered clove of roasted garlic dipped in coffee and chocolate sauce would be such fine companions - bring on the White Chocolate and Caviar challenge, I think it’d go really well with Sancerre Rose.