How is Your Pepper Palette?

One of my favorite food blog reads is Harold McGee's Curious Cooks site that has a collection of his articles from the New York Times. He weaves some technical background into his articles on a variety of food and cooking topics. His recent article about pepper notes in wine was interesting -- especially the fact that a significant portion of the population lacks the ability to detect some flavors. That creates an interesting challenge for cooks trying to season a dish for the average person.

Obsession, Passion, and Addiction

That was the theme this week in the Macro Mondays group on Flickr. Dianne came to mind immediately. I worked that into a triptych shown below. I have to work on the eye photo technique, as there is quite the lighting reflection in the eye. I really like the hand hold macro.



For the other shot I went with wine corks to fit the theme. I used a combination of synthetic and cork, red wine stained and not. I played around with a few different arrangements before I came up with a composition I liked. The lighting also took some time to figure out. The main light was a flash with a grid (to diffuse the light a bit) from high left. To break up the shadow from that light, I used a softbox on the left. That still left some harsh shadows and the undersides were dark. I placed the corks on a white, opaque sheet of craft plastic supported on a piece of glass raised above the table. Underneath I placed a mirror on the table and bounced a flash off the mirror to illuminate the corks from the bottom. It makes the support whiter, lightens the shadows even more, and illuminates the undersides of the corks. I love that trick.

"New" Wine Store

This afternoon, Dianne and I noticed a couple "new" stores in the strip mall on the east side of Kenwood Road just south of Montgomery -- across from the Graeter's ice cream store. Tucked away on the south end of the strip is a store called microWINES. We noticed their sign the last few weeks and thought the place was new. We stopped in to look and found out they have been there over a year, but put up new signs relatively recently.

It's a very nice store that offers a wide variety of wines from smaller wineries across the world. The store has an elegant look and the two staff folks we met were very knowledgeable about the wines. They have a tasting table that is always open, so Dianne and I tried a pinot grigio and a tempranillo red wine from Spain. Both were very nice, but I liked the Kios wine a lot.

They have lots of tasting and education events, they will track your purchases to help you remember what you bought, and they have information about wines in their inventory on their website or available via kiosks in the store. If you're into wine and in the neighborhood, stop in and check out the store.