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Wine, Food, and Other Vital Things

Tag: José Andrés

Marty Mathis and his mother, Kathryn Kennedy, in 1979. (Kathryn Kennedy Winery)

What I’m Reading: An Acre of Sylvaner, William Kennedy at 97, and a Wine Bar in Cleveland

November 21, 2025 / / 2 Comments

The news never stops coming, and keeping up with everything is an impossible task. Regrettably, there are too few hours in a day that one can devote to reading, and though I attempt to stay on top of as much as I can, my stacks of newspapers, magazines, and books are always beckoning (and expanding). There’s wine and food, of course, but there’s so much more, from literature and cinema to essays and profiles. Here’s a look at a few things that caught my eye this week.

I like Sylvaner. I first drank it years ago when I lived in Germany, and though it is not overly popular in the United States, I always try keep a few bottles on hand at home and am delighted when I find it at wine bars or restaurants. Marty Mathis, owner of Kathryn Kennedy Winery, is planting an acre of the variety on a hilltop in Santa Cruz County. He calls it “the last planting project of my life.” Esther Mobley has written a fine profile of the 67-year-old Mathis here. I look forward to tasting his Sylvaner.

Marty Mathis and his mother, Kathryn Kennedy, in 1979. (Kathryn Kennedy Winery)

We’ve all heard far too much about the woeful state of the wine industry. Health warning, the habits of younger generations, restaurant pricing … on and on it goes. According to Jeff Bitter, president of Allied Grape Growers, 2024 was not an easy one for growers. Read more here.

Haiti has long had more than its fair share of troubles, and a dinner that took place last month in Manhattan at The Bazaar did its part to help some people in that beleaguered country. Grapes for Humanity teamed with José Andrés and a number of wine-world luminaries to raise money for Hôpital Albert Schweitzer Haiti, which is the only remaining hospital in a region of 850,000 citizens. Wine to the rescue.

Kash Patel, the director of the FBI, is on a crusade to avenge a slight he received from a judge in Houston. He’s also the man carrying out Donald Trump’s scorched-earth campaign to fire everyone who ever attempted to hold the president accountable. Reading this made me ill.

Eric Texier, a vigneron based in Northern Rhône, is on a mission he calls “a post-modern, global warming compatible dream,” and we might be able to taste the fruit of his efforts in four or five years. He’s attempting to propagate four forgotten grape varieties — Exbrayat, Pougnet, Ribier Gris, and Bourrisquou — from specimens in the Conservatoire de Vassal, a repository based in France. The past, he hopes, is never truly dead.

La Cave du Vin is part of the Cleveland wine scene. (La Cave du Vin)

Headed to Cleveland? If so, here’s a good read about the city’s food and wine scene. La Cave du Vin is on my list of places to visit.

Long ago on a winter morning I was on a train bound for New Haven, “The Stories of John Cheever” in my hands. It was snowing outside and I was lost in Cheever’s imagination. When I looked up I saw a woman sitting in the seat across the aisle. It was Susan Cheever, the author’s daughter. We chatted for a bit, and then went back to our books. Fathers and daughters share a special bond.

William Kennedy as a young reporter in the 1950s, top, and with New York State Senator Pat Fahy this month at ADCo Bar & Bottle Shop in Albany. (Paul Grondahl / NYS Writers Institute)

William Kennedy, The Bard of Albany, will turn 98 on Jan. 16. But as seen, really seen, in this profile by Dan Barry, he is still the talk of the town. This piece is beautiful.

Considering moving to Portugal? You are not alone. Here’s the tale of one woman who did so. She has no regrets.

‘It’s Really Hard’: The Human Spirit Is a Thing of Confounding Beauty

September 4, 2017 / / 0 Comments

The woman stands on the street in front of her home, in the Braeswood section of  Houston, pieces of her life stacked haphazardly on the lawn, edging out over the curb. Battered sections of walls, mattresses, a cat’s scratching post, bedspreads and pillows and other items I did not immediately recognize. We had just emerged from a home across the way, a house that, though it stood on a piece of land comfortably above street level, had flooded on Sunday during Harvey’s onslaught. Its owners had been forced to retreat to their attic, saw in hand; they were, they told us, planning to cut a hole in the roof and signal for rescue.

“We went to bed the night before thinking we would be OK; we had never flooded here, this house had never flooded” the husband says. “It was around midnight, and the water was flowing in the street, but we were dry, no water in our house. We set the alarm for 4 a.m., just to make sure, and still, OK.” Then, his wife says, 6 a.m arrived; she got out of bed and saw the water flowing across the kitchen floor. “Harvey was waiting us out; he waited everyone out.”

This woman had nearly died during Hurricane Ike. “I was driving and went through some water that was too high; I jumped out of the car and tried to walk, but the current was strong,” she recounts. “The water was up to my waist, and I grabbed a street sign. A man was wading toward me, no shirt, struggling. He reached for me, and we walked together, me first, grabbing onto something, pulling him, then he would do the same.”

We were on the couple’s back patio. The home’s swimming pool was half empty, the water in it turned green with algae. “I could not find any of my shoes,” the woman tells us. “I guess they all floated away. They gave me these,” she says, nodding toward the brown canvas loafers on her feet. “They” are the people whose nearby home she and her husband were taken to in the boat that had ferried them away from their flooded home. “I need to find them and thank them. They fed us.”

Back on the street, the couple’s neighbor surveys the pile, shaking her head. “It’s hard,” she says, lowering her gaze.

The photographs below were taken by my friend Michael Pitzen in the Braeswood neighborhood. House after house ruined, the remnants of life piled high.

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Earlier that day, I had spent several hours working at Reef, a restaurant in Houston. It had been transformed into a staging area for relief efforts, and its owners, Bryan and Jennifer Caswell, had opened it to World Central Kitchen, a charitable organization founded by José Andrés. The large space, currently under renovation, was full of activity; a line of volunteers assembled sandwiches, others unloaded boxes of produce from a truck parked outside. The bar area was overflowing with items destined for the displaced and those who saved them; energy bars were stacked next to bags of avocados, sport drinks shared a table with tortillas.

José Andrés and I at Reef.

I took some packages of beef brisket to the kitchen and put them in a sink to thaw, then carried two large trash bags of lettuce to the dining room. There, three of us assembled salads for 500 people in Beaumont. Every 15 minutes or so, someone would walk in off the street to volunteer. One of the newcomers joined our brigade, and we continued.

The brisket had thawed, so I cut it from the bags and arranged it in four baking pans. An oven had been set up on Reef’s front patio, and I slid the pans into it. The meat, along with the salad, would feed the group in Beaumont.

Walking back into the dining room, I saw Felix Flores on the sandwich line. Flores owns Black Hill Ranch, on which he raises a variety of pigs. The ranch had flooded, and a large number of the animals there had drowned, piglets and sows. Flores and his teen-age son, a day or two after surveying the damage at the ranch, were at Reef to help, father and son spreading mayonnaise on pieces of white bread, stacking slices of meat on top of sandwich after sandwich, each a little offering of hope.

Inside Reef, the work continues.

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