Well, what do you suppose popped up at the liquor store next to the Recession Red?

Recession White!

Ladies and gentlemen, it's $3.99, it has a plastic cork, and it's totally decent. It's a mild, dry California chardonnay; gentle oak without too much vanilla (why do all the chardonnays I'm tasting lately have so much vanilla?). I would recommend pairing Recession White with bold, stinky cheeses or, you know, ramen noodles if you're in this for the price tag.

Between Recession Red and Recession White, I'd say the red is the better value. I'd pay more for that wine -- but I don't have to. This chardonnay is definitely acceptable, though, and mild enough to please a crowd. So bring it to a dinner party. I did on Monday and was met with smiles all around.

I've had a number of inquiries about where in New York I've found this delightful duo of Recession wines for $3.99 so I'm gonna go ahead and say it: Adel Wines & Liquors on Columbus Avenue between 105th and 106th Street.

I'll see you there.

While grape growers in the northern hemisphere are just winding down harvest, the southern hemisphere is six months ahead of us. It seems we should still be drinking our 2005's, 06's, and 07,s, but I've just opened a bottle of the 2008 Veramonte Sauvignon Blanc Reserva, a gorgeously fresh and lively wine from Chile's Casablanca Valley.

Ordinarily I think of Sauvignon Blanc as a summer wine because its bone-dry acidity and grapefruit flavors zing through your palate and refresh a thirsty mouth like no other wine can. But dry, unoaked varietal Sauv Blancs are mostly meant to be drunk young in order to stay fresh--so the younger, the better, and when the southern hemisphere 2008s roll out in the fall, it's best to catch them while you can.

Many producers in New Zealand and Chile use a new harvesting method of picking grapes over a longer period of time at different levels of ripeness, which gives the wine a heady combination of raciness and curves. Pick too soon, and Sauvignon Blanc, already a vegetal varietal, is too green, too grassy. Pick to late, and the wine is flabby and flat instead of full and round. The combination picking results in a multi-dimensional wine that has the best of both worlds: flinty minerality and ripe body.

When a woman in Marino, a small Italian town south of Rome, turned on her kitchen tap, she got a spurt of wine instead of water. "Miracolo!" she shouted, and ran outside to tell others. Word quickly spread, and soon residents all over town were filling bottles and containers with Frascati, the local white wine made from trebbiano and malvasia grapes.

It turns out the wine wasn't blessed from above after all. Plumbers were supposed to have connected the 3,000 liters of Frascati to the town fountain for the annual harvest festival, but they accidentally hooked it to the water supply instead.

"People were calling it a miracle which it wasn't--it was a mistake," said mayor Adriano Palozzi. Mistake or miracle, I'd be pretty pleased if wine came out of my kitchen tap.

Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter picks up his second restaurant, Monkey Bar. His first, the Waverly Inn, has been luring a high wattage crowd for two years, despite not being officially open.

L.A.'s fast food moratorium raises questions about choice and personal responsibility.

The Minimalist makes chapati, Indian flat bread.

A recipe for slow-cooked green beans.

Eric Asimov sips the crisp white wines of Spain.

Specialty coffee roasters hit New York.

If there's one thing that's better than a good chicken recipe it's a good chicken recipe that rhymes.

This is from the Cooking For 2 blog and is called Quick Chick. It combines two of my favorite things: one I eat all the time (chicken) and one I don't enough that often, for obvious reasons (bacon). This is a deceptive recipe: very, very easy to do but it has some clever ingredients to make it seem to slaved over it all day (white wine, chicken broth, a splash of lemon juice just before you serve), cooked in a skillet for about 20 minutes.

Have you ever found yourself with leftover wine? Here's how to store it.

This week, the Los Angeles Times dedicates its entire Food section to white wines, very appropriate for summer!

• White wine isn't all about oak. For summer, the new bouquets are jasmine, peach blossoms, verbena, and thyme
• White wine works well with cheese
• As far as wine regions, the Central Coast of California uses unusual grapes and SIV praises a hot wine, Le Picpoul from the Languedoc region in France.
• You must have A/C in your house if you can stand to be in the kitchen! White wine gelees are a refreshing addition to the summer table and the Times hunts down the recipe for Grilled Cheese from restaurant Lucques.

If I were a famous musician who went on tour a lot, I'm not quite sure what special demands I'd have. I think I'd want a TV in my dressing room and maybe a few snacks and drinks for me and my friends, but I can't really think of anything outrageous. Remember when Van Halen demanded no brown M&Ms?

Now take a look at what Diana Krall wants. This is a wine list that would make the Gallos jealous. This isn't what she has in her wine cellar; this is what she wants in her dressing room when she's on tour in North America. Obviously, she doesn't want all of them, it's just a list of wines she'll accept. There's Clos Pegase Cabernet Sauvignon, Falesco from Italy, D'Arenberg Shirz "The Laughing Magpipe," Landmark Chardonnay (2001, 2002, and 2003) and a ton more.

OK, OK, this is a little twist to our usual "Happy Hour" feature. It's not a drink but a recipe with the words "Happy Hour" in it. But it is a good appetizer to eat while drinking and it does have wine in it, so I think it fits.

It's Happy Hour Mushrooms, and utilizes monterey jack cheese, garlic, butter, wine, soy sauce, and Ritz Crackers. Full recipe after the jump.

And that headline is your first answer in this quiz over at AOL Food (via The Smoking Gun). Match the contract demand with the singer that makes the demand on their contract.

All the same names seem to pop up: Britney, Christina, Mariah, Celine, Madonna, and Paula Abdul. I didn't realize that Abdul even toured anymore, but she actually seems to have some reasonable demands when it comes to dressing room food. One diva demands NO TOMATO, APPLE, OR GRAPE JUICES. And another wants only Diet Coke - IN CANS!

For the record, I only got 3 out of 10. I guess I don't know my divas.

Here's a clever idea: online wine videos! It's The Winery Channel, and they have everything from instructional videos that teach you what foods go with what wine to visits to various vineyards and vacation spots.

The site has a sense of humor too. Make sure you watch Rex Havoc (and his horse "Brokeback"), who shows you the best wine bottles to use for shooting practice, and Dave in Los Angeles, who rants about his neighbor Walter, a wine snob. The stuff he says...well, you know people like Walter (and not just when it comes to wine). You'll be quoting a couple of Dave's lines to your friends later this week.

There are many "shows" to watch, including "Hot Legs," "The Wine Bar Show," and "Got Wine?" (the videos can be kinda glitchy - took me a few clicks to get each video working, but it's worth it).

The world of wine can be intimidating, so you have to go into it with a few rules, and David LeClaire, the sommelier at The Tasting Room in Seattle, has some advice, including:

1. There's no such thing as peanut greg-io. Learn how to pronounce the big names, or you're going to sound like a big geek. You don't need to know everything - and it's OK to stumble on the obscure French boutiques - but do yourself a favor and take "Gewurztraminer" out for a spin before your big date.

7. Move over, Scrooge McDuck. More expensive wine is not always better, especially in the store (bottom-shelf shoppers, rejoice!). But, since a bottle of wine in a restaurant is marked up, by up to three times its retail price (four times for wines by the glass), the cheapest bottle you'll want to buy in a restaurant is $30, says LeClaire. If you're watching pennies, go for wines from Spain, Chile, Argentina or Australia - they're good and half the price.

We always make general resolutions like "eat better" or "exercise more," but what about specific food resolutions? Here are five of mine I hope to keep in 2007.

1. Drink more wine. I drink a lot of wine anyway, but I want to learn more about it and drink it on a more regular basis. Oh, and get into white wines more. I never drink any because I've tried some white wines in the past and didn't like them. But I gotta find something I like.

2. Cut down on cookies, cakes, and crackers. Yeah, they all say "0 Trans Fats!" on the boxes now, but they can't be that great for you, especially the amount I seem to eat.

3. Stop eating after midnight. When you're a writer, you work a lot late at night. Which means you might eat later too. And when you add in television and the fact that there are several pizza places near my apartment...ugh. And then the next day you were up so late you want to sleep in and not run in the morning. I gotta stop eating so late, staying up so late, so I can get up early and exercise.

4. Eat out more. I get into these long ruts where I don't go out to restaurants, especially new places that have opened. But there's a lot of great stuff out there and I really should explore a lot more than I do.

5. Actually make some of the food I see in magazines. I think I accumulated around 40 issues of various food magazines in 2006, but I don't think I made anything in them. I keep seeing great recipes and I keep saying to myself "that would be great to make, I gotta try that!" And then the magazine sits on my coffee table for three months and then gets put on the bookshelf with the rest of them. Do you do this too?

The holidays can get pretty expensive, with gifts, food and entertaining expenses piling on until after the New Year (especially if you want to hit one or two after-Christmas sales), so it is always great to find a way to save some money without loosing out on quality. Food is one area where it is difficult to cut back, since price and quality are often closely linked. Paying more will usually get you better meats, cheeses and chocolates, for example. When it comes to wine, however, price are quality are not necessarily as closely inked - not unless you're talking about $100+ bottles of wine, anyway. Since AOL Food has a much larger staff than we do, they went through many bottles of wine to find five great ones that are $5.99 a bottle or less, perfect for serving with holiday dinners or bringing along as a hostess gift to a party because they are guaranteed to taste good without breaking the bank.

1. Trader Joe's Coastal Cabernet ($4.99)
2. Amaicha Torrontes ($4.99)
3. Banrock Station Shiraz ($5.99)
4. Barefoot California Merlot ($5.99)
5. Barefoot California Chardonnay ($5.99)

I love it when someone puts "palooza" at the end of a word, to make the person, thing, or event seem big and grand. Has anyone used the term "Blogapalooza" yet? I think that pretty much describes what we do here every single day.

The Boston Globe's Stephen Meuse recently held his annual Plonkapalooza wine tasting. Plonk is a red or white that you can get for under $10. Meuse and several other wine lovers get together every year to find out what the best ones are in Massachusetts (but available beyond, of course). It's so popular that they're suggesting five bottles every month now, but still get together every year for the annual big event.

This year there was a new panel that included wine store owners and professors. Here's a list of the 50 wines nominated this year, and the above link will tell you which reds and which whites won. 24 of the 50 were in the top 5 of each taster, and many of the wines came from South Africa.