Food & Wine February 2024

2021 CHÂTEAU PÉGAU CÔTES DU RHÔNE MACLURA ($24) Pégau is one of a number of French producers I wrote about in my recent book, The World in a Wineglass. This spicy, winter-warming Grenache blend is an affordable introduction to the winemaker’s style and a perfect pour for dinner parties. 2021 ROBERT BIALE VINEYARDS PARTY LINE ZINFANDEL ($35) A party line was a single shared telephone line. Decades ago, if you called the Biale house—which had a party line—and wanted to buy wine, you’d use the code word gallo nero. This full-bodied, luscious Zin is a nod to those days. 2018 CAIN FIVE ($150) In 2020, the Napa Valley Glass Fire incinerated most of Cain’s winery. Thankfully, winemaker Chris Howell’s actual wines were stored off-site, meaning that this savory, complex…

PICTURE THIS: It’s pasta night. You don’t have time to make your own sauce, so you run to the grocery store to pick up a couple of jars. You walk down the aisle and turn to look at your options, only to see dozens—hundreds, even—of tomato sauces. You see affordable sauces, premium sauces, mom-and-pop sauces, and sauces with the same name as that one famous restaurant in New York City. Where to begin? Well, we at Food & Wine dove deep into the sauce to help with that conundrum. We tasted a whopping 100 tomato sauces (exclusively marinaras and tomato-basils) to determine the ultimate best sauce for every category and occasion. (See foodandwine.com/best-store-bought-tomato-sauce for the full list of winners.) BEST OVERALL MONTE’S ORIGINAL FAMILY RECIPE TOMATO SAUCE Monte’s tomato sauce…

LONG BEFORE I EVER DREAMED of becoming a sommelier (and later a wine writer and educator), I was tasked, around the age of 7, with decanting and pouring the wine at my grandparents’ weekly Sunday lunches. And that wine was invariably red because red wine was, and remains, the flavor-enhancing vehicle that drives many of my Italian family’s meals. The reason? Because so many of those meals employ tomato sauce, one way or another. Silky, crimson, basil-scented tomato sauce gets used all year long by my famiglia, not only as the headliner in penne marinara or the foundation of porky-beefy Sunday sauce ragù, but also for stracotto braises, pizzas, and as the delicate underpinning of sauces like amatriciana, Bolognese bianco, and white clam. (For context, we canned thousands of jars…

FINE-DINING CHEFS understand that a beautiful ceramic plate can elevate the food on it to the next level. Many are taking that insight into their own hands by making pottery for their restaurants that is as satisfying to behold as the food served on it is to eat. There’s chef Dan Cox in St. Mellion, England, who built an entire pottery studio to produce the plateware for his restaurant and farm, Crocadon (crocadon.farm), which has a Michelin Green Star (a designation recognizing restaurants that excel in sustainability). There’s also chef Marshall Blair in Los Angeles, who owns several locations of The Pottery Studio (thepotterystudio.com) across California and Chicago—he produced the dishes for his restaurant, Blair’s, at the original Atwater Village location and now sells pottery as well as clay…

IN 2016, while on a sushi dinner date, Felix Böck and his partner, Thalia Otamendi, took a look at their single-use bamboo chopsticks and saw in them the base for an entirely new product. So Böck used his background in woodworking and his PhD in structural bamboo engineering to come up with a new composite material that’s highly durable and sustainable, looks just as sleek as finished hardwood, and is made entirely of recycled chopsticks. Today, Böck’s Vancouver-based company, ChopValue, collects thousands of used chopsticks from restaurants, shopping malls, airports, hotels, and casinos around the city. “We’re using waste that people would ordinarily throw away and turning it into a resource that people can bring into their homes, kitchens, restaurants, and businesses,” says Sabrina Kon, ChopValue’s head of community and…

THE WORKHORSE OF THE KITCHEN, a refrigerator rarely makes for an exciting topic—until you need to buy or sell one. Faced with the need to do the latter when my husband and I relocated from Australia to the U.S. a decade ago, we advertised our fridge online as the “Gateway to Narnia.” Our ad promised an interdimensional portal to conquer parallel universes, noting that if you climbed inside, you could truly feel the icy grip of the White Witch. While our fridge did have some features that were cool back then (C.S. Lewis references aside), the refrigerator and freezer category has come a long way in the 10 years since, incorporating smart Wi-Fi–enabled features, flex- and dual-zone technology, and more creative colors and finishes. The most exciting refrigerators of…