Sneakeater

The Knife: Shaking the Habitual

Ballet Royal du Cambodge: Chants & Musique Pinpeat

Sam Rivers Rivbea Orchestra: Aurora (When he was alive, I took him for granted. Now, I miss him very much.)

With a really very good one-plate dinner of duck sausage, stinging nettles, garlic, shallots, and chives over pasta.

I had wanted to drink a nice Loire Cabernet Franc with this. But my home "organizational" "system" broke down: I couldn't find one.

So why not another tart red?

2008 Leone Conti Sangiovese di Romagna

This is the entry-level wine of a fairly well-respected producer. With many makers, the entry-level Sangioveses are better -- fresher, nimbler, racier -- than their reservas and superiores. I don't know if that's the case with Leone Conti, but this drank very well.

Romagnan Sangiovese has always been a poor cousin of neighboring Tuscan (the first I ever had was from a carton in a train). But of course, there's better and worse. And especially as prices in Tuscany rise, more of the better has been reaching our shores and receiving promotion here in recent years.

This is one.

The question I'm thinking about now is: why is Sangiovese so much less cool than Cab Franc? They share some characteristics. Is it Sangiovese's fiascol past? That will soon be an advantage, if the NYC Carbone Model takes hold. Is it the practices that led up to the recent adulteration scandal, where wines were falsified in a way that actually made them less attractive to the current geeky palate? Some would say that it's just because Cab Franc is better. I tend to think so, too, but food-and-wine is driven by fashion, not genuine taste. So THAT can't be it.

Anyway, this was a very attractive bottle. It tasted like . . . Sangiovese. The acid, the bitter cherries. There's lots of bad cheap(ish) Sangiovese -- and there's some good. This was good. Not "good" as in, it will haunt me. "Good" as in, it went well with dinner and I'm glad I drank it.

Florida is where everything on Long Island goes when it gets old.

Oh. That's different.