Power Pal

The weekend edition of the WSJ had a fun article titled A Stinky, Pricey Delicacy highlighting the recently increasing price of the durian fruit in Asia. One durian can set you back upwards of $200. Until today, I had not had the pleasure of tasting durian. But the article prompted me to see what all the fuss was about. Here's a quick excerpt from the article describing its unique qualities: Adored by Southeast Asians and Chinese, the durian sends most foreigners fleeing, thanks to its unmistakable odor. "Gasoline" and "blue cheese" are two tame metaphors people often use to describe it; "garbage," "stinky socks" and "manure" also are frequently invoked. Even here in Thailand, durians are banned in hotel elevators, subways and airplanes. Well. We bought one tonight from the Asian market, cracked it open, and dug in. I have to say all the above descriptions were wrong. It was more like a custard version of french onion soup. ...

I read an interesting article in USA Today a couple weeks ago while traveling. USA Today actually is pretty fun reading. Anyhow, the article was about the Argentine wine industry and how it has grown over the last 30 years or so. Sue and I have been trying out Malbec's from Argentina lately (including the Norton winery they mention in the article), so I thought it was interesting to read the background on the whole industry. Apparently the wine industry was already pretty big in Argentina, but they generally only sold their wines locally. But a part-time UC Berkeley economics professor put the lesson from Napa Valley into action. Napa was able to elevate their wines to be competitive with those from Europe. He figured, why not do that in Argentina? So he did. And he made an interesting decision in pricing the wine that demanded people respect Argentina's product. Here's an excerpt: By 1990, Catena had returned to Argentina and begun producing wines for sale abroad. As he ...

I read this article in USA Today a week ago, but thought it was appropriate to write about it today given that I just gorged myself during Thanksgiving dinner. The article is about how many children go hungry or are at risk of going hungry in the U.S. One of every four children in New Mexico and Texas and one of every five in a dozen other states live in households that struggle to provide enough food at some point during the year. California is in that latter category of one out of five. That's absolutely amazing to me. I suppose I know very little about the problem of poverty in America. Interesting, cause my last post was all about income mobility in America. But indeed, there are millions of Americans, 35 million in fact (about 12% of the population), that fall into that "food insecure" category. The report found that 13 million children are at risk. It was nice to find that 15 million low-income children get free school lunches and 7 million get free breakf...

Continuing on my " cork " theme of postings, I read an article about a liquor store in Washington D.C. that is near and dear to my heart - Cork 'N Bottle . Apparently the new owners are trying to change the face of liquor stores on Georgia Avenue in D.C. by not allowing people to buy single bottles of beer. They're even doing wine tastings. Not sure how successful they'll be, but it sounds like a great idea to me. That area could use an overhaul. Long live Cork 'N Bottle.

I read a book review in the WSJ a few weeks ago. The book was about the cork industry. I'm not exactly a wine connoisseur, so I don't know much about the general industry. I do know that out of the many bottles of wine I've had, I've never come across a rotten cork. I was quite surprised to read the statistic about the percentage of wine bottles where the cork ruins the wine. Here's the excerpt: For a couple of hundred years, winemakers and wine drinkers understood that the wine in a small percentage of bottles -- as much as 3% to 5% -- would suffer from the contamination of bad corks (and, sometimes, bad barrels). The culprit was a chemical called tricholoanisole, or TCA. It caused wine to become "corked" -- that is, to smell like a moldy pile of damp cardboard. The TCA problem -- apparently originating at the early stages of cork harvesting -- seemed to get worse over the past few decades. But the cork industry, dominated by a handful of big companies in...