Wine Spectator reveals Top 100 Wines of 2009, but... are all wine rating systems flawed?

Now that Wine Spectator has finished dragging out the reveal of its Top 100 Wines of 2009 -- a 2005 Columbia Crest Cabernet Sauvignon was ranked No. 1 -- over a yawn-inducing three days, we have to ask: Are wine ratings an accurate and useful guide for consumers? Or are they merely a series of wildly subjective impressions based more on context and expectation than the actual qualities of the wines? That's the question Leonard Mlodinow explores in a recent Wall Street Journal story, "A Hint of Hype, A Taste of Illusion."

Given the high price of wine and the enormous number of choices, a system in which industry experts comb through the forest of wines, judge them, and offer consumers the meaningful shortcut of medals and ratings makes sense.

But what if the successive judgments of the same wine, by the same wine expert, vary so widely that the ratings and medals on which wines base their reputations are merely a powerful illusion? That is the conclusion reached in two recent papers in the Journal of Wine Economics.

He's referring to findings published by Robert Hodgson, a retired statistics professor and the proprietor of Fieldbrook Winery. A few years ago, Hodgson joined the California State Fair wine competition advisory board, which allowed him to run a controlled scientific study of its tastings.

The results, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed that the judges' ratings varied by ±4 points on a standard 100-point rating scale. And "only about one in 10 [judges] regularly rated the same wine within a range of ±2 points."

Sampler Platter: Veterans Day deals, Toshi Sushi celebrates anniversary, Ruby Tuesday gets posher, bacon envelopes and chocolate mousse Peeps

Even among fast casual eateries there's a caste system. And Ruby Tuesday wants to move out of the neighborhood it shares with Applebee's and Chili's and into the classier 'hood alongside Olive Garden and Outback Steakhouse. All this and more essential food news:

--Speaking of Applebee's, they're giving a free meal to Veterans today. Krispy Kreme giving away free doughnuts. Consumerist
--Ruby Tuesday upgrades with fancier decor, more expensive food. New York Times
--Toshi Sushi, "greatest omakase bargain in Little Tokyo," celebrates anniversary. Sinosoul
--Mendocino Farms to open 2nd downtown venue at 5th and Flower streets. Blog Downtown
--Portland brewer makes beer from Bac-O Bits, Nutella and more. Houston Chronicle
-- Food pioneer: Chef Fergus Henderson. The Times
--The folks who made Bacon Salt bring you Bacon Envelopes. J&D Foods
--Crispy tripas at Rambo's Taco Truck in Eagle Rock. Gourmet Pigs
--Miniature finger-food plates: Absurd or absurdly practical? The Kitchn
--Everyone loves the cheese dust. Dorito's DIY commercial contest returns.
--Burlingame officials try to run Curry Up Now truck out of town. California Taco Trucks
--Chocolate mousse-flavored Marshmallow Reindeer Peeps, new for the holidays.
--A roundup of pumpkin-based restaurant specials. Caroline On Crack

--Elina Shatkin

Photo: Toshihiko Seki, owner and chef of Toshi Sushi in downtown Los Angeles, prepares a plate of sashimi and rolls. Credit: Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times

Sampler Platter: 7-Eleven makes its own wine, MasterChef cooks endangered eel, 70 cases of brat pizza stolen

How will two-buck Chuck compete against 7-Eleven's new wines? How does someone steal 70 cases of pizza? How do you open a bottle of wine with nothing but willpower and your shoe? All this and more in today's food news roundup.

-- How to open a bottle of wine in France: For those times when you've been up all night, you're drunk and all you want to do is drink another bottle of wine, but you're in the street, you have no corkscrew and the stores aren't open yet. Happens all the time. YouTube
-- Speaking of which ... 7-Eleven's making its own wine. Oh, thank heavens. Dallas Observer
-- Hotel and nightclub impresario Sam Nazarian slams into ugly financial reality. Could this be part of the reason behind SBE's recent split with Brent Bolthouse? Wall Street Journal
-- Auntie Em's tops list for best cupcake shop; Sprinkles left out. LAist
-- A $47,000 lunch tab from Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich. Buzzfeed
-- In the ongoing Tavern on the Green saga, the venue hosted the Halloween party from hell, say booted patrons. New York Daily News
-- BBC's "MasterChef" cooks critically endangered eel. Oops. The Telegraph
-- It's cloudy with a chance of record-setting meatballs in New Hampshire. Yahoo! News
-- Tasting ecstasy and agony at Le Cordon Bleu in Ottawa. New York Times
-- 70 cases of brat pizzas stolen from Wisconsin company. Sheboygan Press
-- A preview of the apocalypse: Boston Markets will all run dry. Consumerist

-- Elina Shatkin

Photo: Meatball appetizers, distant cousins of the New Hampshire record setters, at the Crow Bar and Grill in Corona Del Mar. Credit: Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times

Sampler Platter: Mignon coming to downtown L.A., Santa Monica resists food trucks, loads of contests

How is it possible that Farrell's is opening a location in Orange County before opening another location in Los Angeles? I have no idea, but it's true. This and more in today's food news.

-- Mignon, from the owners of Bacaro LA Wine Bar, is set to open this winter next to Cole's/Varnish. Eater LA
-- Santa Monica resists nouveau food trucks. California Taco Trucks
--Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour makes its Orange County return on Wednesday, opening a new location in Mission Viejo. Fast Food Maven
-- The New Yorker profiles Jonathan Gold (and mentions local food blogger Teenage Glutster!).
-- With the demise of Gourmet magazine, Jane and Michael Stern will now be e-mailing their Roadfood newsletter once a week. Eating LA
-- Mattatouille has some lovely pictures from his recent foodventures in Japan, Indonesia and Korea.
-- New York firm recalls ground beef due to possible E. coli contamination. Safe Tables
-- Challenge Butter recently launched its "Taste of the West" contest. Prizes include a seven-day / six-night trip to Montana and an $850 kitchen package from Spice Islands and OXO.
-- Check out this infomercial, supposedly the first one ever, made in 1949. It's from Vita-Mix and features founder William G. “Papa” Barnard and a blender. Make your own absurd video and you could win Vita-Mix's Pitch Me! contest.
-- Marly Billings of Newport Beach, Shelly Mayo of Brentwood and David Walter of Los Angeles won Wahoo's Fish Tacos' recent naming contest with the three following dishes: Power Chopper Salad, Wafu Bowl and Baja-ladas Platter.

-- Elina Shatkin

Photo: 28-year-old Justin Dervaes (right) secures a smoothie being blended as his sister Jordanne pedals in the backyard of the family's urban homestead in Pasadena. Credit: Al Seib / Los Angeles Times.

A call for applicants: Maybe this year the U.S. could win the Bocuse d'Or (or at least place in the top three)

Can Norway not win the Bocuse d'Or again, please? 

The Bocuse d'Or USA Foundation is seeking applicants from talented chefs for the opportunity to represent America at the Bocuse d'Or international culinary competition in Lyon, France, in 2011. Founded by legendary chef Paul Bocuse, it's the Olympics of the food world, and the U.S. has never placed higher than sixth -- in 2005 by Hartmut Handke of Ohio and last year by Timothy Hollingsworth of the French Laundry.

Last year's winner was Norway's Geir Skeie, pictured above, right. For more than a decade, chefs from Norway have been top contenders against longtime front-runners from France; chefs from both countries train for years. The winner gets the golden Bocuse trophy and 20,000 euros.

The Bocuse d'Or USA Foundation, led by Daniel Boulud, Thomas Keller and Jerome Bocuse, will choose 16 applicants to compete in the U.S. semifinals and finals competition, which will be held Feb. 4-6 at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park.

The deadline for applications is Nov. 30, and the application is available at www.bocusedorusa.org.

-- Betty Hallock

Photo credit: Associated Press

KCRW's pie contest is Nov. 14; you still have time to perfect your recipe

 

Pumpkins, apples, even tomatoes and zucchini are all practically begging to get baked into pies at this time of year. To be honest, all year round there are fruits and vegetables -- and nuts and meats and other things, too -- that make wonderful pies.

If you are a pie baker, you may be used to showing off your crusts. Here's a chance to go pie-dish to pie-dish with other proud bakers: KCRW's "Good Food" is holding a pie contest on Nov. 14 at 2 p.m. at the Westfield Topanga Shopping Center. Nov. 8 is the deadline to register.

The four categories are: fruit and nut; cream, custard, chiffon and mousse; savory; and interpretive pie, one that "defies categorization." Judges include Campanile's Mark Peel and Russ Parsons, the Food editor at the Times.

The pie contest was a result of "Good Food" host Evan Kleiman's summer project. She set out to bake a pie a day, and says she's learned a great deal in the process about crusts and thickeners and fillings. She's made little Nutella "hand pies," chicken pot pies and all manner of fruit pies in recent weeks.

-- Mary MacVean

(Photos: Plum pie, top, and honey guava chiffon pie by Evan Kleiman.)

It's an oyster-shucking throwdown at the annual Galway International Oyster Festival

The Guinness World Oyster Opening Competition in Galway, Ireland, recently brought together the creme de la creme of competitors in the oyster-shucking universe. The contest is the annual highlight of the three-day Galway International Oyster Festival.  

The Europeans call it oyster opening. Americans call it shucking. Either way, for one of the participants that assemble from 14 countries, winning in Galway is like snagging gold at the Olympics. 

Click here to read more about America's William "Chopper" Young and the 13 other competitors that come from all over the globe to determine who is the world's best shucker.

Photo credit: Necee Regis

First American competes in Golden Spurtle World Porridge (a.k.a. oatmeal) Making Championship

To my mind, oatmeal is the most boring food on Earth. On its own, without nuts or raisins sprinkled in, it’s the equivalent of a blank canvas aching for paint. If you're into the conceptual, po-mo weirdness of bare walls and dudes sitting at pianos not playing a note, then oatmeal is probably the perfect food for you -- you and Oliver Twist. After all, gruel is only a tiny cultural leap away from its big-city cousin, oatmeal. When Dickens' titular orphan hero asks, "Please, sir, might I have more?" (I'm paraphrasing here), that's how we, as readers, are meant to understand how utterly wretched his life is. For God's sake, the boy is begging for oatmeal.

But if the culinary trends of the last decade have taught us anything, it's that one era's poverty food is another's gourmet treat. (In a world where millions starve to death, the privilege of being able to complain about oatmeal is not lost on me.) So this Sunday (which also happens to be World Porridge Day, a terrific event that helps feed children in some of the poorest countries around the globe), an international array of chefs who take oatmeal way too seriously will gather at the 16th Annual Golden Spurtle World Porridge Making Championship in Carrbridge, Scotland, where they’ll do their best to gussy up the tabula rasa of the breakfast world. And for the first and only time in the history of this storied oatmeal-cooking competition, an American entrant has stepped onto the field of battle.

The hopes, dreams and culinary pride of our nation rest on the shoulders of Matt Cox (of team Bob’s Red Mill), who will pit his Oregon Orchard Oat Brûlée against the best oats from around the world. Cox's signature oatmeal is a brûlée-topped wonder of steel-cut oats studded with a fruitful bounty of Oregon pears, cherries, hazelnuts and distilled spirits.

We don't know what odds the bookies have laid down, but Cox has the potential to blow the lid off the oatmeal world. You can cheer him on via Twitter or try the recipe that he spent months perfecting for yourself. Go, Team Oatmerica!

[Recipe after the jump]

Sampler Platter: GrubHub launches in L.A., Susan Orlean considers the chicken, Superior Grocers opens in South LA, Vegemite renamed as iSnack2.0

A new Japanese restaurant, a new grocery store for South L.A., a new name for Vegemite and more in today's food news roundup.

--Superior Grocers is the first full-scale supermarket to open in the South Central Avenue corridor in at least five years. Los Angeles Times
--Susan Orlean considers the chicken. The New Yorker
--Agura Japanese Dining coming to La Cienega. Blackburn + Sweetzer
--Naming Contest Fail: New Vegemite spread to become the ever so catchy iSnack2.0. News.com.au
--Angry child's "bacon is good for me" rant gets remixed. YouTube
--GrubHub, which lists all the restaurants in your area that deliver food, launches in L.A. Click this link from Thrillist and get a $10 discount if you're a first-time user.
--Californians may soon be paying increased deposits on drink containers because lawmakers have been raiding the state's recycling fund. Los Angeles Times
--Folgers holds a contest (Sep. 30-Nov. 7) where five winners will receive a seven-day, six-night trip for themselves and up to three guests to travel to their hometown. (Restrictions apply.)

--Elina Shatkin

Photos: Top left: Annie Wells / Los Angeles Times. Top right: Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times. Bottom right: Lori Shepler / Los Angeles Times. Bottom left: Christina House / For The Times.

Sampler Platter: Find L.A. food trucks, pet-friendly restaurants and win 52 free dinners

Finally, an easy way to keep up with all of Los Angeles' fancy new food trucks. Plus, a cooking lesson from Christopher Walken.

-- Finding it difficult to keep up with L.A.'s burgeoning nouveau food truck scene? Ever wish someone would collect their locations into a handy website? Now some mad genius has! Find LA Food Trucks
-- Christopher Walken cooks a chicken. YouTube
-- The 50 best things to eat in the world, and where to eat them. L.A.'s one mention: Fosselman's Ice Cream in Alhambra. Guardian
-- Pittsburgh welcomes world leaders with open-faced sandwiches. And pirogi and spaetzle. Los Angeles Times
-- BLD's chef de cuisine Diana Stavaridis is now Tweeting about her nightly plat du jour at @BLDchefD.
-- The Virginia Avenue Project, an after-school program that provides one-on-one mentoring to help kids, is sponsoring a sweepstakes in which the winner receives 52 free meals at a variety of L.A. restaurants: Fig, La Grande Orange, Mastro's Steakhouse and more.
-- OpenTable releases a list of the top top 10 most pet-friendly restaurants in the U.S. including the Farm of Beverly Hills.

-- Elina Shatkin

Photo: DeAnna Pappas of "The Bachelorette" and then-fiance Jesse Csincsak enjoy a meal with their pet. Credit: Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times