Word: ironic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...This is the golden age for California wines," says Forrest Tancer, 43, a co-owner of Sonoma County's Iron Horse Vineyards. Renowned for his crisp, elegant sparkling wines, which have been served at White House state dinners, Tancer belongs to the cadre of talented young vintners who are largely responsible for this era of excellence. Their success has inspired ambitious new winemakers all across the nation, even in areas where grape growing is an experimental novelty...
Other vintners are taking their cues from Italy. Iron Horse's Tancer and Dominic Martin of San Luis Obispo's Martin Bros. are among winemakers who have planted such Italian varietals as Nebbiolo and Sangiovese; Tancer intends to blend his Sangiovese with Cabernet or Merlot in new proprietary wines similar to ones being produced in Tuscany. There is a certain irony here. Investment banker William Hambrecht, who sells the Zinfandel grapes from his Sonoma ranch to Ridge Vineyards, notes that many of these newly fashionable varietals were first planted in California at the century's turn by Italian immigrants...
...smugness of Czechoslovaks may stem from the fact that, along with Hungarians, they are relatively free to travel. Not so for others: although the Iron Curtain has crumbled along the entire length of the old East-West divide, many East Europeans find their freedom of movement as curtailed as ever. It is no longer a question of obtaining a passport and an exit permit from a suspicious communist regime. Now the problem for Poles, Bulgarians and Romanians is to obtain visas to the West or even permits to visit one of the other countries in Eastern Europe. Says Andrzej Misiok...
...cages off the coast of Norway. The catfish du jour is probably a product of the $704 million industry centered in the Mississippi Delta and is a cosseted cousin of the wild redfish that was fished to near extinction in the '80s craze for Paul Prudhomme's cast-iron Cajun cuisine. The succulent oyster on its bed of ice could have been pampered like an orchid in Quilcene Bay on the Hood Canal in Washington, or in Tomales Bay near Marshall, Calif. The two fish that Jesus served to the multitude in the New Testament parable may well have been...
...East and West officially proclaimed the end of the cold war at the Paris summit last week, the once unthinkable happened: a Soviet armored vehicle roared across what used to be the Iron Curtain smack into downtown Berlin. Following an argument with his girlfriend, a 20-year-old Soviet soldier from a base in Elstal, west of Berlin, had decided to cool off by taking his ACRV M-1974 artillery-command and reconnaissance vehicle for a spin. About 16 miles down the road, he rumbled into what was formerly West Berlin and headed down the fashionable Kurfurstendamm, hitting several cars...