Niea Milwaukee 2009 Again

Marques de Murrieta

The Ygay estate covers 750 acres in Rioja Alta.

Anyone interested in what is happening in the world of wine should be looking toward Spain. From a viticultural perspective, it is one of the most fascinating wine-producing countries in Europe, if not the world.

Ask me which wines I have had the most fun tasting this year and, unquestionably, the answer is those offbeat grape varieties, grown by small, often young, artisanal wine producers in the northwest of the country. Varieties such as Albillo, Graciano and Mencia may not mean as much as Chardonnay or Cabernet Sauvignon, but they are helping producers in spearheading a movement that puts a greater emphasis of indigenous regional styles, reintroduces traditional grape varieties and uses oak sensitively.

For the consumer, the country isn’t as easy to comprehend as, say, Australia or Chile, as there isn’t the consistency in winemaking styles. In many ways, it is probably easiest to navigate your way through contemporary Spanish wine by imagining three different strands. Firstly, there is the traditional style, where it still exists, which favors long maturation in American oak that can produce brick-red wines with a creamy, vanilla character. Secondly, there is a new international form of winemaking that embraces technology but favors heavily extracted, deep-colored, glamorous and opulent wines, which are often high in alcohol and dominated by plenty of fruit characteristics. And lastly, there is a new wave of young winemakers who are rediscovering the quality of ancient vineyard sites, using new technology judiciously and focusing on indigenous grapes. It is the latter that I find the most appealing.

“Add all these components together and the result is a wine-producing country with so much variety and style,” says Pierre Mansour, Spanish wine buyer for the Wine Society cooperative. “We try to taste all the wines we are selling together and to get a sense of the world as a whole. In those tastings, Spain, along with Chile and southern France, emerges as one of the most exciting areas to buy wine.”

Of course, to refer to Spain in winemaking terms is to hopelessly generalize. This is a country that has been making wine for more than 3,000 years. Today, it has more land under vine than any other country and is a myriad of elevations, climates, regions and styles. Spain is searingly hot in the summer and very cold in the winter. Some of its vines back onto the Atlantic, others touch the Mediterranean, while other more-distinguished pockets are land-locked.

Temperatures have increased to such an extent that in certain regions, for example Catalonia, winemakers such as Miguel Torres have been forced to plant vines on higher ground in light of future temperature increases. This is where plantings of heat-tolerant grape varieties, such as Graciano, come in. High in acidity, with a tart, green character, the grape variety produces red wines with plenty of character and freshness.

Another varietal, Mencia, is being planted widely in the northwest of Spain. Wines from this grape sit in the glass with a pronounced maroon color and offer an inviting herbal character on the nose, before giving way to a tart, cherry fruit flavor on the palate. Often heralded as one of Spain’s most interesting new grape varieties, Mencia stylistically is not unlike France’s Cabernet Franc, a grape variety that goes into some of Bordeaux’s finest blends.

It isn’t just the red wines that are worth hunting out; some of the white wines coming out of Spain are fascinating. Albarino has established itself as a wonderfully aromatic white wine that has an attractive, broad, sometimes buttery feel, in the mouth, with a racing acidity on the finish. Then there’s Godello, another hugely aromatic variety, with inviting notes of peach and pineapple; it adds texture to the blend and isn’t as acidic as Albarino. And the Albillo, an early ripening variety, has a pleasant aromatic nose, with a delicious, weighty mouthfeel. At their best, these wines are thrilling.

Write to Will Lyons at william.lyons@wsj.com

By LETTIE TEAGUE

If you’re walking down Mott Street during the evening and happen to spot someone sporting a large bag of bottles, the odds are good it’s a famous winemaker, sommelier or wine collector on his or her way to Peking Duck House (No. 28). This Chinatown mainstay has long been a favorite among oenophiles—both for its generous corkage policy (free for all) as well as for its duck.

There are so few New York restaurants where you can bring your own wine without paying the consequences (a hefty corkage fee or really bad food) that the Peking Duck House is a particularly welcome exception to the general rule. And if you factor in the reasonable prices and the waiters’ facility with a corkscrew, you might wonder, as my friends and I did, why we haven’t been eating there at least once a week.

While the food is fairly good overall, the duck is truly splendid—perfectly cooked with just the right ratio of fat, crispy skin and tender meat—and it is accompanied by terrific pancakes. We brought six bottles of wine, of which one was corked. (BYO rule of thumb: Always bring backups when the corkage is free.) The best duck wines were the two Rieslings—one from Alsace, one German—though the wine of the evening was an Australian Shiraz. Bernie Sun, wine director of the Jean Georges restaurant group and a regular at Peking Duck House, also likes to pair Syrah with his Peking duck, saying it “cuts through the richness.” He admitted that Billecart Salmon Rosé Champagne was a favorite as well.

There is one drawback to the restaurant’s generous corkage policy—the large groups of wine drinkers drinking lots of wine can turn the place into a bit of a frat house, especially on weekends. That’s especially true when you’re eating in the basement, as our group of seven did on the night of my last visit. I’d made the reservation a few weeks in advance, but when we arrived they couldn’t find my name in the book. (“I saw Eddie party of seven—I think that was you,” said a friend afterwards.)

Our table was all the way in the back, directly adjacent to the kitchen doors. But even that rather unpromising location was not without rewards, such as the dramatic view of all the ducks departing the kitchen (and there were quite a few) and ready access to waiters with corkscrews. That’s one more rule about Peking Duck House: If you’re going on a busy night or you’ve got lots of bottles, you might want to bring your own corkscrew as well.

Corrections & Amplifications

An earlier version of this article said the Peking Duck House was at 82 Mott St. It is at 28 Mott St.

A version of this article appeared February 24, 2012, on page A16 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Great Duck, Bring Your Own Wine.

Adam Golfer for The Wall Street Journal

LIQUID LIGHTNING | Dave Arnold in his kitchen

ORDER A GIN AND JUICE at Booker and Dax, the new bar at the back of David Chang’s Momofuku Ssäm Bar, and you’ll receive what looks like a wine glass filled with water. Inside it is a mixture of Tanqueray and clarified fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice that is carbonated directly (to achieve fizz without any seltzer). Dave Arnold, 40, who is Mr. Chang’s business partner at the bar, is also the drink’s “inventor.” His Son of a Peach cocktail is made with clarified canned peaches, tweaked for optimum sugar content by adding cane syrup with an electronic refractometer. Lady of the Night, a bloody mary riff, calls for horseradish distilled in a rotary evaporator. Mr. Arnold is currently the French Culinary Institute’s director of culinary technology, teaching students how to cook with sous vide machines and transglutaminase, aka “meat glue.” He grew up in Englewood, N.J., tinkering in the garage with his father, an electrical engineer, and earned his MFA in sculpture at Columbia before turning his talents to the culinary realm. Sunday afternoons find him at his New York home making dinner for his sons, the original Booker and Dax (10 and 7, respectively), and his wife, architect Jennifer Carpenter.

Mixologist and owner of David Chang’s Booker + Dax, Dave Arnold, demonstrates how he uses Bombay Sapphire East and liquid nitrogen to make his signature drink that will be featured at the upcoming Lucky Rice Festival.

I completely redid this kitchen myself. I did all the electricity, all the plumbing, all the cabinetry. My vents may or may not be illegal. And the BTUs coming out of here? Also probably illegal. I modified my Blodgett stove so the output is 40,000 BTUs, the fryer is 90,000 and the crêpe maker is 30,000. My total combined output when everything is screaming? It’s absurd.

The main problem with cooking in urban environments is a lack of adequate ventilation. In the future, I’m pretty sure more and more studies are going to say that cooking fumes are bad for you.

I built a six-foot sink with sliding cutting boards and foot pedals to control the sink. My stepfather’s hobby is surf-casting [fishing from shore], and he used to bring me really large stripers. I wanted a sink big enough that I could clean them. As for the foot pedals: Why would you ever want to touch the faucet of a sink?

We use leftovers throughout the week. I typically over-make on Sundays. It would be horrific to run out of food—basically that’s the equivalent of punching your guest in the face. Last week I cooked five chickens at Sunday dinner, then took the bones and backs and made a quick stock in my pressure cooker. With that, I made a favorite leftover dish of mine, a pasta with puréed broccoli cooked in stock. The angel hair pasta soaks up all the sauce and it becomes really creamy.

Travis Huggett

hHs Lady of the Night cocktail

My fried chicken recipe is our go-to for family dinners. Even before I started using the circulator [a temperature-controlled water bath], which I brought into the apartment five years ago, it was always a little more difficult than standard recipes. There’s something about gnawing on a bone that Jen doesn’t enjoy, so a long time ago I started completely deboning the chickens. The main problem with standard recipes is that you have to fry the chicken at a lower temperature than you fry all the other things you’re serving that day—like onion rings or french fries. Now I cook the chicken in an immersion circulator in Ziploc bags before deep-frying it at a high temperature.

In the future, the circulator is going to be a lot more prevalent in home kitchens. The issue is that we’re not used to having big troughs of water sitting about, but eventually maybe it’ll be built into sinks or cabinetry so it can be easily stored and drained.

F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal

Bubbies sauerkraut

In my fridge, I always have lots of eggs. I go through boatloads of them. I have Bubbies sauerkraut, which is a great brand, if you’re keeping track. Also a can of Surströmming, this crazy Swedish fermented fish. We snack on wine while we are cooking.

Even though I’m inherently a disorganized person, my kitchen used to be organized and my knives sharp. Now—because of the kids, the babysitter, my schedule—I don’t know where anything is.

I detest nested things that aren’t identical. I only want like-size things stacked on top of like-size things. There are different-size glass bowls in the cabinet that I never use because they are nested.

My seltzer maker was one of the first things I built in this space. I used to use a mix of carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide to carbonate—nitrous makes creamier tasting bubbles—but my main nitrous tank ran out so now I just use carbon dioxide. I used to have a keg too, but since Dax was born, I haven’t had time to home brew. That was seven years ago.

During my MFA program at Columbia, I recreated St. George and the dragon—I built a kerosene-spitting machine—and the idea was that I’d fight it. Well, I miscalculated. During a test, the thing totally torched my back. I can’t take my shirt off in the sun now. It starts to itch.

I use my Krampouz French crêpe maker for pancakes, which we make two times a week. I got it at a restaurant supply store outside of Paris. That trip, Jen was sick, I was sick, we lost our wallets, it was a total nightmare—but I did bring my crêpe maker back. The surface gets up to 650 degrees quickly, so you have to put it on the lowest setting for pancakes to cook them through without burning. I like a thicker pancake.

Neil Setchfield/Alamy

Surströmming

My KitchenAid broke a long time ago because it’s poorly designed—a piece of plastic sheared off. When I was fixing it, I accidentally epoxied the cheese grater attachment onto it. I can’t get it off. So now I use it as a cheese grater.

If I could have anything else in this kitchen, I’d like a vacuum machine. I just don’t have the space.

The biggest problem with my kitchen is power management. I can’t run the air conditioner and the coffee machine at the same time.

I installed a six-gallon deep-fryer under the counter. I’ve been deep-frying a long time, since I was 10. The first thing I ever deep-fried on my own was a beignet.

As a kid, I used to make toaster-oven preparations like garlic bread with white bread and garlic powder. One time I dumped a container of garlic powder on the bread and ate it. My dad made me sit in the very back of our Gran Torino station wagon because I smelled so bad.

—Edited from an interview by Sophie Brickman

Dave’s Angel Hair Pasta With Broccoli Purée

Total Time: 20 minutes

Serves: 4-6

Adam Golfer for The Wall Street Journal

Angel hair pasta with broccoli purée

Ingredients

3 cups chicken stock

1 head broccoli, including stalk, roughly chopped (about 3 loosely packed cups)

½ cup grated Parmesan, plus more for garnish

1 clove garlic

2 egg yolks

Salt and black pepper, to taste

1 pound angel hair pasta

What To Do

1. In a small saucepan over high heat, bring stock to a boil. Add broccoli and cook until stalks are fork-tender, 8-10 minutes.

2. Transfer stock and broccoli to a blender and add cheese and garlic. Pulse until combined. Adding one egg yolk at a time, pulse until mixture is slightly thickened. Season with salt and pepper. Transfer back to a medium-size saucepan and bring to a simmer.

3. Meanwhile, cook pasta in a large pot of salted water until just pliant—about 30 seconds—then transfer immediately to the simmering sauce.

4. Finish cooking pasta in sauce over medium heat until the pasta is al dente and sauce has thickened, about 3 minutes. The resulting dish should be more creamy than brothy. Serve with extra Parmesan.

A version of this article appeared May 5, 2012, on page D4 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Dave Arnold, Cocktail Wiz.

Top Bordeaux wine estate, Chateau Margaux, uses the best corks money can buy but a percentage are still faulty. Since 2003 it has been conducting an experiment with synthetic corks and screw caps. WSJ’s Will Lyons puts his palate to the test. Photo: Getty

There is one wine fault that even the world’s most prestigious estates cannot escape. Despite using the best corks money can buy, there is still no analysis available to detect the unpleasant contamination of cork taint.

A corked bottle of wine is always an irritation, particularly if it is the last from a favored case, a vintage port reserved for a special occasion or if a bottle requires protracted discussions with the sommelier. But where a corked bottle of wine can turn into a catastrophe is when you have paid more than £4,000 for the privilege of tasting it. This is why Château Margaux, one of Bordeaux’s top wine estates, is experimenting with a number of closures that could see its Grand Vin bottled under screw caps.

“We all know about the problems of cork and are frustrated with it,” says Paul Pontallier, the managing director of Château Margaux. “We have done our best to make it less of a problem, but we cannot pretend we have solved it. It remains unacceptable that we can work so hard to produce great wines and then it can be ruined by the cork.”

The problem is the small minority of corks contaminated with TCA, the chemical compound 2,4,6-Trichloroanisole, found naturally in cork, that imparts in the wine an unmistakable pungent, moldy odor. Identifying a corked wine shouldn’t be confused with other wine faults, such as bits of cork floating around the glass, which has no effect on the flavor at all, or oxidation, where a small amount of air has seeped through the cork, leaving the wine smelling “sherried.”

But corked wine is the most serious as its foul smell leaves the wine undrinkable. So in a bid to find a solution to the problem, Mr. Pontallier says Château Margaux’s R&D department began an experiment a little more than 10 years ago, bottling a number of its wines under a variety of closures. The move, even if it was for a trial, proved controversial and when news leaked out of the estate’s plans, there was a strong reaction. “We received plenty of mail,” says Mr. Pontallier. “Half of them were terrible and asked ‘Are you crazy?’ The other half congratulated us and said this was the modern way. But we are not afraid of changing, as long as we are sure it is for the better.”

Today, the château is still measuring quality. Recently, at a small blind tasting in London, I was fortunate to sample six of the wines under trial. A generic red and white wine from the same vintage were each bottled three different ways—under natural cork and two kinds of screw cap, an air-tight example and a permeable one. Wines bottled under the fourth closure, synthetic corks, were discarded, as, in Mr. Pontallier’s words, they were “absolutely catastrophic.”

Of the reds, from the 2003 vintage, I immediately favored the third example, which was bottled with an airtight capsule and, to me, tasted more polished and silkier than the previous two. The first wine, bottled with a permeable capsule, had very forward aromatics but also included a strange note that was quite wild, possibly medicinal. The second wine, with a natural cork, was altogether more classic, with a restraint on the nose and more grip on the palate. The majority of participants in the room favored the third example; Margaux disclosed that finding tallied with their research.

The whites I found harder to differentiate. I thought the first wine was fresher with more appeal, No. 2 was a little over the edge, while No. 3 was perhaps less evolved, with more primary fruit aromas. In the room, natural cork was preferred, although I remained undecided.

It was clear from the tasting that for wines one plans to drink in the short term, screw caps offer a reliable alternative to cork, changing the wines’ character in mainly positive ways. But for the long term, Mr. Pontallier is still undecided. “The problem is to know about the future evolution,” he says. “Our point is to make sure that in 100 years these bottles are fine. There is probably one distance of years where it might work, but on the long term, I really have questions.”

I wouldn’t be discarding those corkscrews just yet.

Write to Will Lyons at william.lyons@wsj.com

By TOM L. FREUDENHEIM

Spies in the House of Art

Metropolitan Museum of Art, through August 26

Playing House

Brooklyn Museum, through August 26

***

New York

‘Artists are the secret constituency of museums.” That’s the opening textual salvo in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s incoherent photography exhibition “Spies in the House of Art.” It also has little to do with the show’s other claim—that the exhibition demonstrates how “artists explore the secret life of museums and their collections.” Museums are filled with secrets, among them attribution disputes, art deaccessions and exchanges, unsavory provenance issues, and power struggles within and between trustees and staffs.

At best, the argument that this show “surveys various ways museums inspire the making of works of art” is evident in a few of the photographs on view—most notably the large Cindy Sherman portrait that conjures up an Old Master painting (and wonderfully confuses you as to precisely which one it might be). But, by their very celebrity, Ms. Sherman and other oft-seen artists in this show have long disposed of the notion that they constitute a secret museum constituency.

That art galleries provide grist for artists’ comment mills is no special revelation. Giovanni Paolo Pannini, in the 18th century, may have been among the most prolific of those who showed us paintings on collectors’ walls, while Samuel F.B. Morse’s iconic painting “Gallery of the Louvre” (1833) was an important attempt to bring the glories of European culture to our shores. The noted caricaturists Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin depicted both the art and the raucous crowd of viewers at a Royal Academy exhibition in their satirical work “The Exhibition Room at Somerset House” (1800). So it’s difficult to be overwhelmed by the contrasting gallery views by Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth in this exhibition.

The high-definition pictures of both of these accomplished photographers regularly provide us with insights into scale and space: Ms. Höfer is interested in the mysterious nature of space itself, while Mr. Struth suggests the tension between people and the places they inhabit. But their work appears incidental and trivialized in the context of this show. Francesca Woodman’s majestic photo-collage “Blueprint for a Temple” (1980) may or may not reference museums, which are only one of many “temple” types; the intriguing scale combined with the elusive medium and subject matter of Woodman’s image remind us of the artist’s precocious power, and her tragic early death in 1981 at age 22.

In my experience, artists are often a museum’s most enthusiastic and sophisticated audience, rather than “spies.” And as consistent visitors, they may infuse their own work with visions expanded by regular encounters with art. So it does artists an injustice to suggest, as this exhibition does, that they are simply cynical critics looking down their noses at the masses crowding today’s museums. Andrea Fraser does this in a sarcastic and pretentious performance video of the artist as museum guide, “Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk” (1989), while Lorna Simpson, in a text/photo combination, “Parts” (1998), makes no secret of her negative view of museum visitors and how they really don’t understand what they are viewing; the photo of a vitrine containing “Bronze period” bones, presumably in a natural-history museum, is accompanied by a snooty text that includes the comment, “their [i.e., the visitors'] gaze and pace was guided by the [audio] tapes.”

***

Brooklyn, N.Y.

In what is probably coincidental scheduling, the Brooklyn Museum recently invited several artists to create “activations” (the museum’s language) in some of their wonderful American period rooms. This may be a far more interesting place to get a sense of how artists can creatively interact with museums, although the results of these interventions are not always successful. The star of this exhibition is Betty Woodman (the mother of Francesca), also the lead artist here, who invited the others to participate. Ms. Woodman has collaborated with Anne Chu to add an array of decorative objects to the late-18th-century Cane Acres Plantation room—one of the earliest examples of a separate dining room in such a house, with a long dining table and sideboard. Among the works included are ceramic takeoffs on traditional objects that might have graced such an interior. Most of them are characteristic of Ms. Woodman’s visual puns on traditional art—strategically positioned on the center table, sideboard and mantle. The total effect, along with Ms. Chu’s elaborately cut-out floor coverings (referencing early American floorcloths, while suggesting bits of Frank Stella and Elizabeth Murray) combine to make an opulent abstract composition enriching both the old and the new.

Ann Agee is far more in-your-face when her work takes over the mid-19th-century Milligan Parlor and Den, filling the already dense American Victorian neo-gothic aesthetic with a cacophony of handmade and found objects and kitschy wallpaper. It doesn’t quite work. Far more subtle and refined interaction with the art of the past is evident in the six videos that Mary Lucier has strategically placed in the rooms of the two Schenck Houses, which span almost a century of construction beginning in the early 18th century, presenting among the most austere interiors of those at the museum. Using carefully edited and spare re-enactments (such as cooking and dining), the artist reimagines what might have taken place in these rooms at an earlier time. There’s a reminder here of Shimon Attie, whose projections on European buildings conjure up their pasts. But these are Brooklyn ghosts summoned up by an artist personally connected to her intervention as a descendent of early Dutch settlers in New York.

Watching artists interact with art and its institutions and contexts can be illuminating. Artists are occasionally invited to roam a museum’s storeroom and select an exhibition, which can provide an insightful understanding of both the art and the artist. The timely juxtaposition of the Met and Brooklyn exhibitions may tell us more about the curatorial decisions within these two institutions. While the Met show includes some accomplished artists whose interesting ideas about museums never actually develop, the Brooklyn room interventions are much more respectful of both the museum’s holdings and the ability of artists to add value to our understanding of what we see.

Mr. Freudenheim, a former art-museum director, served as the assistant secretary for museums at the Smithsonian Institution.

A version of this article appeared March 13, 2012, on page D6 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: When Artists Take On Museums.

By DON STEINBERG

There are dark comedies and then there are Bobcat Goldthwait comedies, which are sack-over-your-head-in-a-closet dark, like the new “God Bless America,” a trigger-happy rampage that Mr. Goldthwait calls “a violent movie about kindness.” The small films Mr. Goldthwait writes and directs are warped and incendiary, which might not astonish anyone who recalls the unstable wacko he inhabited as a comedian in the 1980s and ’90s. He lit his chair on fire on “The Tonight Show.” He seemed to be playing himself as a screaming nutjob in three “Police Academy” sequels and “Scrooged.” The surprising thing may be that, at age 49, Mr. Goldthwait is alive and well and calmed down, making films you might even call thought-provoking.

“God Bless America,” the fourth film Mr. Goldthwait has written and directed, opens in theaters on May 11. He has also returned to stand-up with a Showtime special to be released May 8 on DVD, aptly titled “You Don’t Look the Same Either.” He speaks in his real voice, not as the volatile weirdo he’s known for, a persona that, he confesses during the comedy set, seemed to have borrowed the voice of Grover from “Sesame Street.”

“I dropped doing the persona onstage when I realized that doing it for people was why I no longer enjoyed stand-up. It cost me work, but I’m not interested in being a nostalgia act,” he says. “I think you get a better idea of who I am and how I see the world in my movies than in my stand-up.”

Mr. Goldthwait’s unbalanced onstage character was funny enough to earn him a debut on Letterman at age 20. He didn’t try to dispel the impression he was out of control “because I was kind of hiding behind it.” He was a little scary. “People’s perception was that I was always high or on drugs, which is kind of funny. I’ve been sober since I was 19.”

He views his “Police Academy” days, which he calls his “porn past,” with ambivalence. “I often joke that I’d like to make a short comedy where the 50-year-old me time-travels back and talks the 22-year-old version of me out of being in ‘Police Academy.’ I don’t regret it, it’s just that the little voice inside of me that knew what I really wanted to do got pushed aside by the chance to be in movies, and this really immature thing that most Americans think is normal—that you should try to become famous.”

His directorial debut, 1991′s “Shakes the Clown,” could be classified as for fans only. After that, he directed TV and happily faded into “We Love the ’80s” memory. In 2006, he made “Sleeping Dogs Lie” with $20,000 and a crew hired via Craigslist. It’s about a newly engaged girl-next-door whose life gets complicated when she admits that as a lark in college she performed a sex act on her dog. From the X-rated premise, Mr. Goldthwait creates an understated fable about unconditional love. In “World’s Greatest Dad” (2009), Robin Williams plays a single father coping with an unexpected dose of celebrity.

In “God Bless America,” Joel Murray is an honest man near suicide, disgusted by how cruel and crude society has become, finding a purpose in exterminating rude people. He picks up a teenage-girl accomplice, in the great tradition of outlaw couple films like “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Badlands.” It’s a blood-soaked movie about comeuppance and rage that, in these mad-as-hell days, has struck a chord with film-festival audiences.

Mr. Goldthwait denies the character is based on him, but says he partly identifies: “I guess maybe I snapped in a way, that I turned my back on the whole Hollywood system. That’s part of the reason why I’m not on social media. This idea of continually trying to make yourself famous and not having a moment of privacy—what a horrible way to live.”

“The squirm factor is hopefully what makes the movie funny,” Mr. Goldthwait says. “The fact that you empathize with this guy even though he’s doing horrible things, hopefully that’s where the comedy comes for people. If it works for people. I’m fully aware that my movies don’t work for everybody. But I’m honestly not trying to appeal to everybody.”

A version of this article appeared May 4, 2012, on page D4 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Squirm Factor: Bobcat Goldthwait’s Sense of Satire.

By ELIZABETH GUNNISON

Laura Gardner for The Wall Street Journal

Aquavits have been made in Scandinavia since at least the 15th century by distilling fermented potato or grain mash and flavoring it with savory, herbaceous ingredients.

“SKÅL!,” WE CRIED, and no sooner had I set down my thimble-sized glass than a colossal Swede slapped me on the back and seamlessly refilled it. Then we began again, lilting through a new melody, my bleary eyes struggling with the foreign text spelled out phonetically before me.

This is how I whiled away one long summer night at a wedding reception on the Baltic coast of Sweden: hearing toasts, crooning local drinking songs and draining a profusion of little nips bottles of something called snaps (which is pronounced “schnahps,” but is very different from dessert-like schnapps). My first glass was a mouthful of pure licorice; the second, redolent of rye bread; others gave off the earthy taste of cardamom or a bitter marmalade kick.

Such was my introduction to aquavits (or aquavites or akvavits), high-proof liquors that have been made in Scandinavia since at least the 15th Century by distilling fermented potato or grain mash and flavoring it with savory, herbaceous ingredients. Caraway seeds—which account for rye bread’s flavor—are always included in a traditional aquavit. Cumin, lemon or orange peel, cardamom, dill, clove, aniseed and fennel are also typical. Some aquavits—particularly Norwegian ones—are mellowed with barrel aging, while others are consumed young, raw and crystal clear.

These savory spirits form perfect counterpoints to the bold flavors commonly found in Scandinavian cuisine: pickled and smoked fishes, ripe cheeses, rye bread and dill-inflected potato salads.

Regardless of the flavor or production method, there’s only one way to drink aquavit in Scandinavia: straight up, from a small, stemmed glass. The tradition is referred to as “drinking snaps,” and it is not for the faint of heart. In Sweden, drinking snaps is mostly reserved for celebratory occasions like weddings, Christmas and Easter; in Denmark, they’ll do it over a long lunch; Norwegians prefer to sip their aquavit, which is a sensible place for the snaps novice to start.

Countless varieties of aquavit are available throughout Scandinavia, but its rarer in the United States. Here are a few of my favorite bottles available stateside and instructions on how to make your own at home.

A Lesson in Homemade Aquavit

Despite the ample supply of commercially available aquavits, it’s still common for Swedes to make their own. “A family will have its own aquavit recipe, just as Indian families have their own unique garam masala recipe,” said Keri Levens, the beverage director at Aquavit Restaurant in New York, who oversees the eatery’s in-house infusion program. While true aquavit production involves distillation, you can cop the same effect by infusing a store-bought spirit with any number of savory ingredients. Here are Ms. Levens’s ground rules, plus a few of her recipes.

1. Start with a neutral spirit. Ms. Levens recommends potato vodka—such as Boyd & Blair, Chopin or Teton Glacier— which picks up flavors better than grain vodka due to its higher viscosity.

2. Clean your ingredients thoroughly. Cut all the pith from citrus to avoid bitterness, and toast hard spices to intensify their flavors. Chop or slice fruits and vegetables into manageable pieces; the more surface area, the more flavor gets extracted.

3. Use a clean glass jar as an infusion vessel. A vodka bottle works fine, provided your ingredients fit through the small opening.

4. Different ingredients require different infusion times, ranging from a few days to a few weeks. Taste is the best judge here. Once the infusion is complete, strain finished aquavit through a coffee filter. It will keep indefinitely in the freezer.

Classic Aquavit

Toast ¼ cup coriander seeds and combine with 750 ml potato vodka, leaving to infuse for one week. Add ½ bunch dill fronds (from crown dill if available) and let infuse for three to four more days. Strain and store.

Fig and Cardamom

Toast ¼ cup cardamom pods and combine with 750 ml potato vodka, leaving to infuse for one week. Wash and halve ½ cup dried black mission figs and add to the infusion for four to five days more. Strain and store.

Horseradish

Peel, wash and coarsely chop a horseradish root. Combine ¼ cup chopped horseradish with 750 ml potato vodka. Leave to infuse for one to two weeks. Strain and store.

Three Brands to Sample

Lysholm’s Linie Aquavit.

Norway’s signature spirit is barrel-aged in sherry casks, and spends almost four months on the deck of a ship that crosses the equator twice. The motion and temperature fluctuations along the way are said to lead to a mellow, balanced final product. It might sound like pure marketing gimmick, but Lysholm has been at it for two centuries, producing a dry, smooth-drinking amber aquavit that’s softly spiced with caraway and hints of aniseed, fennel and coriander. Drink at room temperature. 42% ABV, $30

House Spirits Distillery Krogstad Aquavit.

There’s no rule that says great aquavit has to come from Northern Europe. This one is made according to a classic recipe by the same Portland, Ore.-based micro-distiller that produces Aviation Gin. The brilliantly clear spirit is flavored primarily with star anise and caraway, imparting a licorice zing that recalls pastis or ouzo. Ideal served right out of the freezer, alongside flavorful, rich foods like smoked salmon, strong cheeses and cured meats. 40% ABV, $30.

North Shore Distillery Private Reserve Aquavit.

This spicy, small-batch spirit out of Lake Bluff, Ill., is another example of high-quality aquavit made stateside. North Shore’s aquavit picks up its straw color and caramel notes over six months spent in American white oak barrels. Cardamom and cumin dominate, complemented by hints of lemon grass and pink peppercorn. Serve chilled or at room temperature. 45% ABV, $30.

A version of this article appeared April 21, 2012, on page D8 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Sipping the Spirit of the North.