When Is a Davis Bynum Not a Davis Bynum?

When it's a Rodney Strong.

On a recent trip to the Russian River Valley, I sought out the Davis Bynum winery. The night before, I had enjoyed one of his well-known Pinot Noirs and was suitably impressed. I thought I'd get me some myself to bring home.

But when we passed the place on the map, there was no David Bynum Winery. Just a place called River Bend Ranch. A local told us that, yes, this indeed was the Bynum place. We ventured into the tasting room and got our explanation. Last summer, Bynum, who is in his 80s, sold his "brand" and inventory to winermaker Rodney Strong, who will now bottle wine under the Bynum name. Bynum did not sell the winery itself, and will have nothing to do with the wines that will now be made under his name. Rodney Strong owner Tom Klein plans to make the Bynum wine from a number of
vineyards in Russian River Valley that he owns, along with "additional
negotiated grape contracts within the AVA." Rodney Strong Vineyards "luxury winemaker" Gary Patzwald will actually make the wine for the brand. To all of which my reaction is: WTF?

I don't know about you, but selling Bynum wines not made by Bynum and not even made on the Bynum land sounds kinda fishy to me, like someone's pulling a fast one. I asked if the new Pinot Noir made under the River Bend Ranch name was made by Bynum with Bynum grapes and was told "yes." So that's the wine I bought. And, what's more, is was a steal at $26, about half of what Bynum's wine cost last year.

A Claar Winner

It's not often I go on about an American Cabernet. Most are too extracted and huge for my tastes. So Claar Cellars' 2001 Cabernet-Merlot blend came as a surprise to me.

Claar's located in Washington's Columbia Valley. Washington's not a state you associate with Cab, making this wine's success even more of a surprise. It's beautifully understated, the way Napa Cabs would be if everyone down there weren't so insane for fruit and power. The palate shows currants, purple grapes, spice and broad tannins, with a touch of candy in the background. The 13.7% alcohol level keeps everything at an agreeable level and makes the wine a welcome addition to dinner, as opposed to bullying all the food off the table. And it's only about $15.

A Trip to Forbidden Island

In my recent interview with tiki drink expert Jeff Berry, he mentioned three places in the U.S. where you can sample the original concoctions conjured up by Donn Beach of Don the Beachcomber's. As one was in L.A., one in Ft. Lauderdale and one in Alameda, CA, I figured my chances of getting to any of them soon will next to nothing. (I'm not a warm climate guy, preferring the gloomy, intemperate East Coast.)

But life's full of surprises. Last weekend, I went out to visit my brother in San Francisco after he proffered an unexpected invitation. I mentioned Berry and the tiki drink world and Forbidden Island, the authentic place located in Alameda, and he grew intrigued. "Do you want to go there?" he asked. Turns out Alameda was less than a half hour drive away from where we were staying. And so on Saturday night we journeyed on the long, low-lying Richmond-San Rafael Bridge across San Pablo Bay, skirted Berkeley and Oakland and went through the Webster Street tunnel to Alameda, a large island community east of San Francisco and known primarily for it Naval Base.

Alameda is an interesting place. It looks like a slice of middle-class California, circa 1940, held in time. Americana. Forbidden Island is located on Lincoln Avenue, the island's main drag. It's not a big place, but it looks like you expect it to—basically, a faux hut, colored dark brown.

The interior is dimly lit. The long room has a bar stretching along the left side and a series of thatched-roof booths on the right. Further back are some tables and chairs. A jukebox is stuffed with tropical-themed music; nothing from after 1960 that I heard. There are tikis here and there, and various posters and album covers on the wall of artists in Hawaiian or the like. The walls are made to look like dark wooden beams and thatch is everywhere. The lamps about the booths are made up like tiki versions of jack o'lanterns. No question, they've got the mood right.



The menu was a pleasure to peruse. It was divided in a series of categories: house specialties, grogs, bowls and Don the Beachcomber specialties. Mr. Berry was listed among the "thanks yous" at the bottom. I was hard to decide. There are so many classic tiki drinks that I have never tried. The drinks have anywhere from one X to fives Xs next to them to indicate their potency. I concluded I should start with a classic, and ordered a Navy Grog, supposedly Frank Sinatra's favorite drink. Strangely, the grogs were the only drinks on the menu where the ingredients weren't listed. I talked my brother into ordering a lost Donn Beach classic called Missionary's Downfall, made of fresh mint, lime, pineapple, and a dash of peach.

A young, cheerful waitress took our order. Interestingly, the bar staff was populated only by women that night, including the bartenders mixing the drinks (which they did expertly and more speedily than I had expected). I asked if the owner, Martin Cate, was in. Sadly, he was not there that night. I would have liked to have spoken to him.

The Navy Grog was excellent, a more mature drink than I expected, balanced with just a touch of fruit. The Missionary's Downfall was a surprise. The mint and lime dominated, making for a slightly bitter beverage, though not in a bad way. It put the lie to the idea that tiki drinks are all about strong rum and sweet fruit. Everything was served in clear glasses, not tiki mugs or coconuts, so you could enjoy the color of the drinks. The waitress said people can bring in their own tiki mugs, which the bar will keep and bring out whenever that patron comes in. But, she said, they may discontinue the practice as they've already got a shelf of mugs and are running out of room to keep them.

For the second round, I ordered a Painkiller, which the waitress said was the bar's most popular drink. According to the menu, it was invented at the Soggy Dollar Bar on the tiny island of Jost Van Dyke in the British Virgin Islands. It's made of a "creamy blend of pineapple, orange and coconut with a hint of spice. Made the authentic way with Pusser’s Navy Rum!" Creamy it was, and frothy and delightful. Like a tiki milk shake. And it came with an paper umbrella! I thought those things were verboten in today's tiki world.

My brother ordered the Classic Mai Tai, and I know it must sound boring to say that the most famous tropical drink in the world is the best one we had, but, well, it was. It was fantastically delicious! I beautifully integrated mix of fruit flavors and fine rum. A masterpiece.

That was all we could handle, leaving so many tempting drinks on the menu left untried. Forbidden Island was a completely satisfying experience from every point of view: taste, aesthetics, service, professionalism, atmosphere. I recommend it. We went early in the evening. I guess it gets crowded later on and there are lines. I recommend arriving at 6 or 7 PM.

Now, how do I manage a trip to Ft. Lauderdale?

Out West, They Grow Them Big

A week or so back, when I was trolling wine stores looking for some Sonoma Coast Pinot Noirs, I had a most pleasant chat with a distributor who was pouring some fetching wines at Morrell Wine. I liked her opinions, so I pulled a Sonoma Coast Flowers Pinot off the shelf and asked her if she enjoyed the winery's products. "Not really," she said. "I've never really liked them." Why? Too big? "Yeah. Too big."

I then asked her what Pinots on the shelf she did like. She pulled down the Arcadian Pinot Noir 2004 from the Santa Rita Hills. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was one of her own wines. But she said, with seeming sincerity, that it was being underrated, was as good as any of the more touted west coast Pinots, and at $30 was a steal.

I was curious, so I took one home. Arcadian's winemaker is Joe Davis and the winery's credo appears to be low production and wines in the Burgundian model. OK so far. The wine's alcohol level of a whopping 15.8%, which didn't thrill me, but I liked the honesty of the back label description, which mentioned the many hot days the vintage endured and admitted "we find this wine to be much different in texture and balance from anything we have produced previously."

The wine was tight and meaty upon opening and needed a good hour to breath. Tons of concentrated blackberry-like jammy fruit was right there at the front but right under it was a carpet-thick layer of tannin. My tongue had to stand up to this boy with every sip. At times I liked the roughness of the wine, other times I felt like yelling "uncle." After a few hours, it really broadened out. I had to admit it had character to burn. But I also felt I would enjoy it more if I laid it down a few years and let it mellow and integrate itself.

I'll look for Arcadian again. But maybe not in such a hot year. Any of those coming up, I wonder?

A Spin on Pimm's

Pete Wells' New York Times article about the appeal of Ratafias continues to occupy my mind, some two months after it appeared in the New York Times. After my initial attempt to make a nectarine version of this homemade beverage—made from wine, vodka, vanilla bean and fresh fruit or vegetables—I went on to experiment with mangoes and cucumbers.

The mango brew was fine. The mangoes could have been riper (you really need ripe fruit for ratafias), and my experiment to use less vanilla bean didn't really succeed in making the potion take less strongly of vanilla. But the cucumber ratafia was a marked improvement. I opted for cucumbers because of something I read in Wells article. He mentioned a restauranteur from the Southwest who used a cucumber ratafia as part of a special recipe for a Pimm's Cup. Now, they didn't mention the details of the recipe, but I love me a Pimm's Cup, so I decided I'd act first and figure out the drink later.

The cucumber ratafia was more subtle in flavor than the fruit ratafias; somehow, the vegetable was less affected by the vanilla than the fruit was.

I didn't know how to integrate the ratafia into a regular Pimm's Cup, so I had do some guesswork. The recipe I typically use calls for 1.5 oz. of Pimm's and 4 oz. of ginger ale, with a cucumber slice for a garnish. Nice and simple. I figured the Pimm's ratio should remain the same—it is a Pimm's Cup after all and the liquor shouldn't be shunted aside. I decided to lessen the ginger ale dossage by 1 oz. and fill in the cavity with 1 oz. of ratafia.

Damned if my first guess didn't do the trick. The drink was beautiful. The ratafia added a new layer of complexity to the drink, without complicating things too much. I'll probably experiment with ratios a bit more, but my feeling is that this is the right mix.

For anyone who's interested, I made the ratafia this way:

1 bottle dry white wine
1/4 cup vodka
1 cup chopped cucumber (peeled)
1/4 vanilla bean

Put in a jar, cover and store in fridge for 3-4 weeks.

A Talk With the Tiki Master

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Jeff Berry, the Tiki Drink expert nonpareil, for Salon.com. I found Jeff to be among the most personable, easy-going and funny cocktailians I have met. That is fitting, I suppose, since his field of expertise are tropical drinks associated with a life of laid-back ease. You can check out the piece here. Or, if you like, here's the complete text:

"Sippin' Safari"

By Robert Simonson

Oct. 23, 2007 | For many years, so-called tiki drinks were the punch line of the cocktail world. The quasi-Polynesian tropical concoctions served in the kitschy mugs and adorned with paper parasols couldn't get any respect in a world of elegant martinis and stately manhattans. Not anymore.

In recent years, as the cocktail revolution has gathered steam, mixologists and drink historians have taken the time to reexamine the zombie, the mai tai and their brethren. What they discovered was a lost universe of finely honed drinks boasting complex flavors and requiring as much skill to execute as any libation in the bartender's lexicon. Leading the charge has been Jeff Berry, aka Beachbum Berry, a former screenwriter-turned-cocktail expert who has gone to great lengths to uncover the lost recipes and bar histories of one of the defining drinking trends of the mid-20th century.

In his most recent book, "Sippin' Safari," Berry relates the origins of a bygone rum-soaked world, including the lives and adventures of its pivotal figures and cocktail creators, such as Donn Beach (aka Ernest Raymond Beaumont-Gantt), founder of the once phenomenally popular Don the Beachcomber chain, and Trader Vic (aka Victor Jules Bergeron). Berry talked to Salon about his life as a South Seas alcohol archaeologist.

Q: You explain the phenomenon of umbrellas in drinks in "Surfin' Safari." Hawaiian bartender Harry K. Yee used them instead of sugar cane sticks, because they were easier to clean up. Do you approve of them as garnishes, or do you find them silly?

A: Here's my thing. I'm trying to be an evangelist for these lost drinks that were actually worthy, that could actually hold their own against all the other alcoholic inventions in this country. Then, someone has a visual image in their mind and says, "Are you talking about those drinks that come in those mugs with the umbrella?" It kind of works against me.

As much as I love tiki mugs -- and I have a whole collection -- I don't serve drinks in them. I want to see the drink in a glass. It's a legitimate drink in the same way a manhattan is. I want to see a zombie in a nice, tall, frosted glass where I can see the color of the drink.

Q: How did you develop an interest in tiki drinks?

A: I grew up in the San Fernando Valley in the late '60s and there were a ton of these places. My parents liked Chinese food so they would go to this place, Ah Fong. It had opened in the early '60s as the Bora Bora Room, but whoever opened it spent so much money on decor that they went broke soon after they opened. There was this guy named Benson Fong, who was a Chinese restaurant magnate back then; he would move his Cantonese crew into Polynesian places if they couldn't recoup their costs, and rename them Ah Fong.


Anyway, as a 10-year-old I'd walk in the door and it was just completely all-encompassing and enveloping, this Hollywood-art-directed Polynesian theme. It was amazing to my young eyes. You just wanted to live there. And these people around me were drinking these exotic drinks. When I got old enough to drink, I sought these places out. And of course they had all disappeared at that point.

Q: Yes, most of the tiki palaces are gone now, aren't they?

A: In L.A., there were so many of them for so long that a few have survived. I couldn't afford to go to any of them when I got out of school. Trader Vic's Beverly Hills location lasted right up until this year. Don the Beachcomber, the original, was there; it lasted until 1984. I lived around the corner from it at one point, but I couldn't afford to go until their last year, when they were advertising an all-you-can-eat lunch for $4.95. I finally got to go in and see that celebrity chopstick case.

Q: Why do you think there isn't a major tiki bar in New York, which is supposed to be the cocktail capital of the U.S.?

A: Doing all my research, I found out that that cliché about New York thinking the tiki trend was tacky, and being above it all -- that's not true. New York had a ton of these places. It had the Hawaii Tai on Broadway, the Luau 400, which was very expensive, and they had a Trader Vic's in the Plaza Hotel, which Donald Trump famously got rid of when he bought the hotel. I think New York just burns through trends faster than other places.

Q: The most famous tiki drink is probably the zombie. But my chances of going into a bar and getting an authentic zombie are pretty slim, aren't they?

A: Slim to none. The problem with the zombie is nobody knew how to make it. Donn Beach was a victim of his own success in keeping it a secret. Everybody says, "Oh, the zombie, that's an awful drink. It's just eight different kinds of rum. It's just a gimmicky, crappy drink." And the reason for that is because people were guessing. They were all just trying to guess what was in this thing, because Donn wouldn't publish the recipe. The reason we know that Trader Vic's mai tai is a good drink is because, despite the fact that there were a million awful mai tais out there, he printed the recipe himself.

Q: Most tiki drinks have a rum base. What do you think of the theory that rum's place in the drink world today has been supplanted by vodka? So many popular fruity drinks are now built on top of vodka.

A: Yes. Not only that, but the rum market has been trying to become vodka for so long, that vodka has not only supplanted rum, but it's changed rum into becoming blander. It's "Bacardi: The mixable one." Rum really did have its day, though, from the 1930s, when the Don the Beachcomber thing got going, all the way into the late '70s, because even after the tiki bars died, there was still the piña colada and the frozen daiquiri. Cruise ship drinks, I guess you could call them.

Q: You sought some of the tiki master bartenders who worked at the classic bars to get their stories. I bet they were surprised that anyone cared about their experiences.

A: Yeah, they were. For most of them, it was just a job and when the Polynesian thing dried up they just moved on to something else. Very few of them had a sense that this was anything else than just a way to make a living.

When I was writing the first books, it was incredibly difficult to get any information out of them. Their whole life was based on not giving these recipes out to anyone. They wouldn't give recipes out to anyone. I'd ask, "What's in this?" and they'd say, "Fruit juice." None of these guys had made one of these drinks in 40 years, but they would not part with the recipes.

Q: Over the course of the years, you pried the secrets out of them.

A: It gets easier with every book.

Q: You've said that there are only three places in the United States where you can still drink Don's original concoctions.

A: The Tiki-Ti in Los Angeles -- you can still get Don the Beachcomber drinks there. You have to know what drinks were served at Don's in order to pick one off the menu. A rum barrel or a panang or a montego bay.

The Mai Kai is in Fort Lauderdale. And the reason you can get Don's drinks there is the owners of the Mai Kai, when they built it in 1956, they poached a bartender from the Don the Beachcomber in Chicago specifically so they could get Don's recipes. They just tweaked the names of the drinks a little bit. The Navy grog became the yeoman's grog, like that.

The third place is a new place. I have not actually been there yet, but I've met Martin Cate, the guy who runs it. It's called Forbidden Island [Tiki Lounge] and it's in Alameda, which is in the San Francisco Bay Area. They're real Don drinks -- which he got from my books mostly.

Cocktail Incompetency: Patsy's

One would think that a restaurant and bar that has been around 60 years—stretching way back to the days when cocktails were king—would know how to mix a drink.

But if I've learned anything in recent years, it is to assume nothing when you belly up to a bar. I entered Patsy's, the old Frank Sinatra hangout in midtown Manhattan, thinking I could get a decent old school cocktail. After scanning the not-too-impressive collection of bottles behind the bar, I decided not to challenge the rather dim-looking bartender too much and requested a Manhattan. But I like my Manhattans with rye, so first I asked if they stocked any rye.

He pointed to Canadian Club and said, "This is rye." Uh, no it isn't. It has rye in it and I know a lot of people use it as they would use rye. But that ain't rye. Then he pointed at an anonymous bottle I didn't recognize that didn't feature the word "rye" anywhere on the label. "This is rye," he said. I was suspicious that he didn't know his ass from his elbow at this point. Then he pointed at a bottle of Cutty Sark and said "This is rye." Yikes! Mayday! Bail out!

I resorted with a bourbon Manhattan, made with Wild Turkey. It was OK.