nyt: Food Is the Thrill at Some Bachelor Parties

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June 22, 2010

By OLIVER STRAND

BY tradition, a bachelor or bachelorette party is a night of Dionysian excess. How that unfolds is a matter of taste.
For some, it entails a liberating number of drinks and a close encounter with the taut, spray-tanned skin of an exotic dancer. But for one recently married man and his friends, it meant bottles from a good winemaker to accompany the crispy, golden skin of a roast suckling pig.
“For the groom, carnal pleasure involved eating,” said Archie McAlister, 43, explaining why he reserved the chef’s table at the Breslin in Manhattan for a bachelor party he held earlier this month for Theo Peck, 38, a cook. “They brought the pig, then this slender girl came over and butchered it down for us and chopped it into little pieces. I don’t mean this in a leering way, but that was the female entertainment for the evening.”
Rounding out the feast were roasted fennel, potatoes cooked in duck fat, broccoli rabe, salsa verde and generous pours of a dry albariño from northern Spain and a fruity young Beaujolais-Villages. According to Mr. McAlister, a cabinet maker, the evening satisfied all the senses without getting anybody into trouble.
“A lot of these stags run into each other,” he said. “It’s just another night of drinking. Whereas I don’t know how many people will sit down and have a suckling pig for dinner.”
It was one of a number of recent events where future brides and bridegrooms have decided to trade in the bump and grind for the tasting menu. Some have made pilgrimages to the temples of haute gastronomy, while others rolled up their sleeves and made an elaborate dinner with their friends. A culinary bachelor party, participants say, can be a night to remember. Which stands in contrast to some pre-wedding excursions, where the activities are best forgotten, or at least denied.
“It’s not just going out and getting wasted,” said Elissa Crum, a 30-year-old nursing student, who booked the private room in May at Colicchio and Sons for a bachelorette party for her best friend from high school. “Later on, we could talk about dinner and say things like, ‘Do you remember the agnolotti with the octopus and the pork belly?’ ”
Restaurants like Per Se and WD-50 in New York and Coi in San Francisco have catered to bachelors and bachelorettes with tasting menus and wine pairings that might last three hours or longer. Hen parties have taken over some of the cabins at Blackberry Farm, an inn on 10,000 acres in Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains, where meals are often a luxurious multicourse events: foraged morels stuffed with homemade sausage, saddle of rabbit wrapped in Benton’s country ham.
Even in Las Vegas, where selective memory is a civic virtue, memorable meals have been the focus of stag and hen parties. Recently, a group of men took over the Krug Room, a private room at Restaurant Guy Savoy in Caesars Palace, and paired a seven-course dinner with seven vintages of Krug. The wine brought the bill to more than $1,000 a person.
“The groom specifically requested the black truffle and artichoke soup,” said Franck Savoy, the restaurant’s general manager. “They were extremely sophisticated and knew what they wanted. It was the opposite of ‘The Hangover.’ ”
Andrew Loewenstern, 37, a software developer and a dedicated gourmand, flies around the world with his friends, descending on destination restaurants. Last year they went to Spain for a meal at El Bulli. Mr. Loewenstern celebrated his bachelor party two weeks ago at Alinea in Chicago. His friends converged on the city, flying from San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. (Bonus: Phish was playing in town, too.)
The five men had the 25-course “tour,” a tasting menu that lasted late into the night and included a king crab presentation that Mr. Loewenstern is still talking about.
“You eat the crab morsel” in a small depression in the center of a plate, he said. “Then they remove the cover and there is another, more elaborate and even more beautiful crab preparation inside. Then you think they’re taking the dish away, but they remove the center piece and there is actually a third crab preparation,” what he called “the best crab au gratin you could imagine.”
The dish may be the contemporary bachelor’s equivalent of a woman jumping out of a cake.
“This type of experience is as much fun as you can have with your clothes on,” Mr. Loewenstern said of the meal, before launching into Jermaine Stewart’s 1986 hit, “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off.”
Grant Achatz, the chef and an owner of Alinea, said that the restaurant has hosted around 10 bachelor and bachelorette parties in the last year. “When you think about a bachelor party, what are you really trying to focus on?” he asked. “For some people, it’s ‘I want the best meal of my life.’ Yes, it’s about the food and wine. But it’s still a bachelor party. There’s an energy that is palpable. They’re out to have fun. But they’re doing it their way, which is cool.”
Darcy Miller, the editorial director of Martha Stewart Weddings, noted a decline in “cookie cutter” bachelor and bachelorette parties. “People want to do something unique,” she said. “A sit-down dinner where you’re having a real conversation and having toasts is a more intimate experience than running around and bar-hopping.”
The intimate conversations aren’t just taking place at restaurants. “Cooking schools do a lot of these parties,” Ms. Miller said.
Indeed, the Brooklyn Kitchen, a cookware shop in Williamsburg with classes on subjects like home brewing and canning, has hosted six bachelorette parties in the last year. Most are multicourse dinners made from scratch, with plenty of wine and snacking while the meal is prepared. A pickling party is scheduled for next month.
Caroline Fey of the Mariposa Kitchen in San Francisco recently guided a bride-to-be and her bridesmaids through a five-course meal with the honeymoon in Tuscany in mind: roast pork with rosemary, sage and garlic; fried baby artichokes with aioli; lemon ricotta tart.
“It’s a communal experience,” Ms. Fey said. “It’s a good environment for bridesmaids coming in from all over the country. You work together in a cooking class, so even if you don’t know each other, you get to know each other.”
When Casey Oetgen, a lawyer, helped organize a bachelorette party at Pizza a Casa on the Lower East Side, almost every one of the 17 women brought a bottle of prosecco or another wine. They made more than two dozen pies, from the classic margherita to one with truffled honey and Grayson, a funky taleggio-like cheese from Virginia. During downtime they played games like “Guess the Ex.”
In fact, anecdotal evidence suggests that women go in more for do-it-yourself group activities, while men are more likely to sit back and be served. Restaurateurs also suggest that the bachelorettes are more rowdy.
“The women will get goofy,” said Wylie Dufresne of WD-50, who has stood in his open kitchen posing for photographs with more bachelor and bachelorette parties than he can count. “They have an active sense of fun. In general, women are louder, men are bigger consumers.”
Still, the steak-and-a-stripper formula may never go out of style. Some epicures see a Michelin-starred meal as just the start of the night’s amusements. Others have tried to mix the two, which can lead to complications.
At St. John, the London restaurant where nose-to-tail eating was first elevated to an art form, bachelor parties are such a regular event that men who ask about holding one are sent a letter outlining a code of conduct.
“We’re appealing to a sense of good manners,” said Thomas Blythe, the general manager. “I don’t mean it’s an Edwardian list of etiquette. It’s more to let them know that they’re not the only group in the dining room.”
The letter is clear on that point. “Stag groups can be noisy and we therefore do not recommend coming to St. John if the expectation is for a rowdy, bawdy and boisterous evening,” it reads. “We do not tolerate abusive, disrespectful or destructive behaviour. Cleaning and or damage costs will be added to the bill at the manager’s discretion on the evening. We do not serve rounds of shots or chasers.”
Not everybody is dissuaded. “A long, long time ago, a policewoman walked into the bar,” Mr. Blythe said. “We were concerned at first, but then an observant bartender recognized that she was wearing stilettos.”
The management approached her before she could start removing her uniform, Mr. Blythe said. “We explained that we weren’t that kind of establishment.”

NYT: Happiness May Come With Age, Study Says

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May 31, 2010

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

It is inevitable. The muscles weaken. Hearing and vision fade. We get wrinkled and stooped. We can’t run, or even walk, as fast as we used to. We have aches and pains in parts of our bodies we never even noticed before. We get old.
It sounds miserable, but apparently it is not. A large Gallup poll has found that by almost any measure, people get happier as they get older, and researchers are not sure why.
“It could be that there are environmental changes,” said Arthur A. Stone, the lead author of a new study based on the survey, “or it could be psychological changes about the way we view the world, or it could even be biological — for example brain chemistry or endocrine changes.”
The telephone survey, carried out in 2008, covered more than 340,000 people nationwide, ages 18 to 85, asking various questions about age and sex, current events, personal finances, health and other matters.
The survey also asked about “global well-being” by having each person rank overall life satisfaction on a 10-point scale, an assessment many people may make from time to time, if not in a strictly formalized way.
Finally, there were six yes-or-no questions: Did you experience the following feelings during a large part of the day yesterday: enjoyment, happiness, stress, worry, anger, sadness. The answers, the researchers say, reveal “hedonic well-being,” a person’s immediate experience of those psychological states, unencumbered by revised memories or subjective judgments that the query about general life satisfaction might have evoked.
The results, published online May 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were good news for old people, and for those who are getting old. On the global measure, people start out at age 18 feeling pretty good about themselves, and then, apparently, life begins to throw curve balls. They feel worse and worse until they hit 50. At that point, there is a sharp reversal, and people keep getting happier as they age. By the time they are 85, they are even more satisfied with themselves than they were at 18.
In measuring immediate well-being — yesterday’s emotional state — the researchers found that stress declines from age 22 onward, reaching its lowest point at 85. Worry stays fairly steady until 50, then sharply drops off. Anger decreases steadily from 18 on, and sadness rises to a peak at 50, declines to 73, then rises slightly again to 85. Enjoyment and happiness have similar curves: they both decrease gradually until we hit 50, rise steadily for the next 25 years, and then decline very slightly at the end, but they never again reach the low point of our early 50s.
Other experts were impressed with the work. Andrew J. Oswald, a professor of psychology at Warwick Business School in England, who has published several studies on human happiness, called the findings important and, in some ways, heartening. “It’s a very encouraging fact that we can expect to be happier in our early 80s than we were in our 20s,” he said. “And it’s not being driven predominantly by things that happen in life. It’s something very deep and quite human that seems to be driving this.”
Dr. Stone, who is a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, said that the findings raised questions that needed more study. “These results say there are distinctive patterns here,” he said, “and it’s worth some research effort to try to figure out what’s going on. Why at age 50 does something seem to start to change?”
The study was not designed to figure out which factors make people happy, and the poll’s health questions were not specific enough to draw any conclusions about the effect of disease or disability on happiness in old age. But the researchers did look at four possibilities: the sex of the interviewee, whether the person had a partner, whether there were children at home and employment status. “These are four reasonable candidates,” Dr. Stone said, “but they don’t make much difference.”
For people under 50 who may sometimes feel gloomy, there may be consolation here. The view seems a bit bleak right now, but look at the bright side: you are getting old.

NYT: Growing Vegetables Upside Down

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May 19, 2010

By KATE MURPHY

IF pests and blight are wrecking your plants, it might be time to turn your garden on its head.
Growing crops that dangle upside down from homemade or commercially available planters is growing more popular, and its adherents swear they’ll never come back down to earth.
“I’m totally converted,” said Mark McAlpine, a body piercer in Guelph, Ontario, who began growing tomatoes upside down two years ago because cutworms were ravaging the ones he planted in the ground. He made six planters out of five-gallon plastic buckets, some bought at the Home Depot and some salvaged from the trash of a local winemaker. He cut a two-inch hole in the bottom of each bucket and threaded a tomato seedling down through the opening, packing strips of newspaper around the root ball to keep it in place and to prevent dirt from falling out.
He then filled the buckets with soil mixed with compost and hung them on sturdy steel hooks bolted to the railing of his backyard deck. “Last summer was really hot so it wasn’t the best crop, but I still was able to jar enough whole tomatoes, half tomatoes, salsa and tomato sauce to last me through the winter,” said Mr. McAlpine, who plans an additional six upside-down planters this year.
Upside-down gardening, primarily of leggy crops like tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers, is more common partly because of the ubiquity of Topsy Turvy planters, which are breathlessly advertised on television and have prominent placement at retailers like Wal-Mart, Walgreens and Bed Bath & Beyond. According to the company that licenses the product, Allstar Products Group in Hawthorne, N.Y., sales this year are twice last year’s, with 20 million sold since the planter’s invention in 2005. Not to be outdone, Gardener’s Supply and Plow & Hearth recently began selling rival upside-down planters. “Upside-down gardening is definitely a phenomenon,” said Steve Wagner, senior product manager for Plow & Hearth.
The advantages of upside-down gardening are many: it saves space; there is no need for stakes or cages; it foils pests and fungus; there are fewer, if any, weeds; there is efficient delivery of water and nutrients thanks to gravity; and it allows for greater air circulation and sunlight exposure.
While there are skeptics, proponents say the proof is in the produce.
Tomato and jalapeño seedlings sprout from upside-down planters fashioned out of milk jugs and soda bottles that hang from the fence surrounding the Redmond, Wash., yard of Shawn Verrall, a Microsoft software tester who blogs about gardening at Cheapvegetablegardener.com. Mr. Verrall turned to upside-down gardening last summer as an experiment.
“I put one tomato plant in the ground and one upside down, and the one in the ground died,” he said. The other tomato did so well, he planted a jalapeño upside down, too, and it was more prolific than the one he had in the ground. “The plants seem to stay healthier upside down if you water them enough, and it’s a great way to go if you have limited space,” he said.
While horticulturists, agronomists and plant scientists agree that pests and blight are less likely to damage crops suspended in the air, they said they are unsure whether growing them upside down rather than right-side up will yield better results.
“Growing things upside down seems like a fad to me, but I’m glad people are fooling around with it and hope they will let us traditionalist gardening snobs know what we’ve been missing,” said Hans Christian Wien, a horticulture professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.
Judging from gardening blogs and Web sites, those fooling around with upside-down gardening are generally enthusiastic, particularly if they have planted smaller varieties of tomatoes.
“Bigger tomatoes are too heavy and put too much stress on the vine, causing it to twist and break,” said Michael Nolan, an avid gardener in Atlanta and a writer for Urbangardencasual.com, who has four upside-down planters also made out of five-gallon buckets in which he grows bushels of cherry and patio varieties of tomatoes as well as small pickling cucumbers.
Tomato varieties are labeled as either indeterminate or determinate, and horticulture experts recommend choosing indeterminate ones for upside-down gardens. Determinate tomato plants are stubbier, with somewhat rigid stalks that issue all their fruit at once, which could weigh down and break the stems if hanging upside down. Indeterminate types, by contrast, have more flexible, sprawling stems that produce fruit throughout the season and are less likely to be harmed by gravity.
When Mr. Nolan first tried upside-down gardening, he used the Topsy Turvy planters, which are made of polyethylene bags and look like Chinese lanterns gone wrong. But he was disappointed in the yield. “I far prefer using buckets,” he said, which hang from tall metal shepherd hooks bolted to the posts supporting his backyard deck. He paints his buckets bright colors, and plants herbs and marigolds in the top to help retain moisture.
Another, less decorative solution for preventing evaporation is to top the planters with mulch or simply cover them with a lid. Regardless, Mr. Nolan said, “The upside-down planters tend to dry out really fast, so I have to water a lot — probably once a day in the heat of the summer.”
Many gardeners reported that the thinner, breathable plastic Topsy Turvy planters ($9.99) dried out so quickly that watering even once a day was not enough to prevent desiccated plants. There were similar comments about the Plow & Hearth version ($12.95) and while the Gardener’s Supply upside-down planter ($19.95) has a built-in watering system, online reviewers said it is difficult to assemble.
In addition to plastic soda bottles, milk jugs and five-gallon buckets, upside-down planters can be made out of thick heavy-duty plastic trash bags, plastic reusable shopping totes, kitty litter containers, laundry hampers and even used tires. Web sites like Instructables.com and UpsideDownTomatoPlant.com show how it can be done, and YouTube has several how-to videos. Variations include building a water reservoir either at the top or bottom of planters for irrigation, cutting several openings in the bottom and sides for planting several seedlings and lining the interior with landscape fabric or coconut fiber to help retain moisture.
Donald Rutledge, a construction project designer and manager in New Braunfels, Tex., devised a triple-pulley system so he could easily hoist his nine upside-down planters 16 feet above the ground, away from ravenous deer. He made his planters out of five-gallon buckets four years ago, following instructions on the Internet. “The tomatoes and basil worked real well upside down, but the lettuce, peas and carrots weren’t so successful,” he said. “It’s been trial and error.”
This year, he put his plantings right-side up in the buckets to see if it makes any difference. He said his suspended garden started as an entertaining summer project for him and his three children but has become more of a scientific pursuit: “Is upside down better than right-side up? I’m guess I’m going to find out.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 21, 2010
A previous version of this article misstated the price of the Topsy Turvey planter as $19.98.

NYT: On This Oregon Trail, Pioneers Embrace Organic Wine

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April 30, 2010

By BONNIE TSUI

CARLTON, Ore.

TWO decades ago, Doug Tunnell was a veteran newsman who wanted to be a winemaker. Having been a globetrotting CBS correspondent for 18 years, he bought a farm and returned to his family’s roots in the Willamette Valley, a landscape of rolling hills and farmland about 45 minutes southwest of Portland, Oregon.

But he didn’t just want to make wine — he wanted to make organic wine.

“Back in the day, no one else was doing organic, other than the Cattrall Brothers Vineyard down the valley in Amity,” Mr. Tunnell said. He bushwhacked his way through his 40-acre parcel, a former hazelnut farm scarred by years of pesticide use, and employed natural remedies to rehabilitate the soil and keep his young pinot noir vines alive in those early years. “There was really no advice to get — we had to learn as we went along,” he said.

Mr. Tunnell’s winery, Brick House Vineyards, celebrates its 20th anniversary in May; all the fruit is estate-grown and certified organic, and each season about 4,000 cases are produced and bottled by hand. The winery itself is a certified-organic and biodynamic operation down a quiet country lane near this small town, which has become something of an attraction for the green oenophile.

When it comes to winemaking these days, Willamette Valley wineries are on the leading edge of sustainable, eco-conscious practices. According to the Oregon Wine Board, more than 25 percent of Oregon’s vineyards are certified sustainable, organic, or biodynamic, classifications that require varying degrees of organic methods.

Oregon was also the pilot site for what is now a national wine-cork recycling program adopted by Whole Foods; it started as a partnership between Willamette Valley Vineyards and the Rainforest Alliance. Visitor interest has prompted eco-wine tours of the area’s top wineries, and the wine board has also offered wine-oriented “green getaway” packages.

Innovators include a winery and tasting room called the Carlton Winemakers Studio. It is the country’s first green-built cooperative winery, using natural light, recycled materials and as little electricity as possible, among other improvements. Ten independent small-batch wineries can share space at one time, and the studio has acted as an incubator for young, talented winemakers without a home. About 20 winemakers have come through since the studio opened in 2002.

And like many wineries along this laid-back and friendly wine trail, it’s also the kind of intimate place where you can run into your favorite winemaker while sampling flights. On a recent visit, my friend Sarah and I watched as the tasting room manager introduced two Portland fans of the winemaker Andrew Rich to the man himself, who happened to be the guest winemaker on duty.

“Everyone’s wines are featured on a rotating basis here in the tasting room,” said Mr. Rich, who poured a pinot noir flight that included creations by several different winemakers. We tasted Mr. Rich’s own flagship blend, the Andrew Rich Vintner 2006 Willamette Valley Pinot Noir, an earthy, berry-rich wine.

“Pinot noir is the dominant grape of the Willamette Valley — it’s challenging and difficult, but rewarding to make wine from it,” he said. “What you get is subtle, but with a very big range.”

Carlton Winemakers Studio has also begun a program of wine education classes taught by in-house vintners; topics range from subappellations of the Willamette Valley to sustainability in the vineyard.

Around the valley, typical tasting fees run about $5 to $10 per person, and are usually waived with the purchase of a bottle.

Of course, no one drinks green wines just because they’re green — they have to taste good, too. It’s notable that many of the area’s new breed of winemakers are respected longtime players in the industry. Robert Brittan of Brittan Vineyards was the winemaker and estate manager at Stags’ Leap Winery in Napa for 16 years; Eric Hamacher, a founder of Carlton Winemakers Studio, has produced wines for Robert Mondavi and others.

The practices associated with organic, sustainable winemaking are really the traditional ones, says Mr. Tunnell of Brick House Vineyards. “Our model from the start was Burgundy: small family farms,” he said. Mr. Tunnell and his wife, Melissa Mills, live in the brick house on their farm, the namesake of their label, and keep an organic garden.

“In the beginning, the vines looked pretty weird for a while, and they had to compete with everything from hardy native grasses to fungal diseases,” Mr. Tunnell said. “We did a lot of hand hoeing and planting of cover crops. And we learned that things like vegetable oils are really effective against mildew.”

In a typical season, Brick House puts out three to five bottlings of pinot noir, one of chardonnay, and one of gamay noir. We conducted our tasting in the barrel room; on an unusually cold spring day, it was the warmest room on the farm, with a yeasty scent of fermentation in the air. Mr. Tunnell pulled tastes from selected French-oak barrels with a “wine thief,” a glass extractor that reminded me of high school chemistry lab.

What will eventually become the 2009 gamay noir had a fruity, acidic character. We also tried a few current bottlings, including the 2007 Les Dijonnais, a light, plummy selection that received 91 points from Wine Spectator.

“There’s this generational shift happening here right now in food and wine — for them, local, sustainable and organic is just the starting point,” Ms. Mills said. “It’s the baseline.”

What impressed us about the places we visited was the lack of pretense: These were well-executed establishments filled with passionate people who wanted to share their knowledge. Mr. Tunnell and Ms. Mills say this collaborative feeling among growers and producers in the valley has led to a more intimate community than what is found in Napa or Sonoma.

Other wineries on the eco-trail include the nearby Stoller Vineyards, the first winery in the United States to receive a gold LEED certification, a green-building rating program, for its design and construction. The tasting room is all light and glass, and solar panels are visible on the roof of production buildings.

A bit farther south is Amity Vineyards, whose sulfite-free “eco wines” and other creations have received accolades from Robert Parker, Wine Spectator and the Oregon State Fair. The longtime organic producer Cattrall Brothers Vineyard is one of Amity’s grape sources.

For those on the eco-trail, there are also inventive places to stay, like Abbey Road Farm, a five-room bed-and-breakfast on a working farm with modern rooms inside converted grain silos. Circular rooms have floors warmed by radiant heat, Jacuzzi baths and expansive views of the lush countryside. Breakfasts are made from ingredients straight from the garden: farm-fresh egg frittatas, homemade granola with huckleberries and warm zucchini bread, all made by the proprietor, Judi Stuart. Trails crisscross the grounds, making it a lovely place to explore.

On our last night in the valley, we went to Thistle, a tiny restaurant in McMinnville opened last July by the chef Eric Bechard and his partner, Emily Howard. Everything, with the exception of the bread — which comes from down the block — is made by Mr. Bechard, with ingredients coming almost exclusively from 15 small farms within a 35-mile radius of the restaurant.

Rows of pickle jars lining the shelves above the chef’s counter are filled with peppers, green beans, plums and apricots. The wine list is strong in local Willamette Valley selections, including Brick House.

“Our vision was really to marry the local community population with wine tourists and Portland folks,” Mr. Bechard told us as he served first-of-the-season Chinook salmon with pillowy gnocchi. “We don’t want them to have a California experience when they come here — this food is truly local, as much as we can make it.”

If You Go

VINEYARDS

Carlton Winemakers Studio, 801 North Scott Street, Carlton; (503) 852-6100; winemakersstudio.com; open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. Tasting flights from $9 per person.

Brick House Vineyards, 18200 Lewis Rogers Lane, Newberg; (503) 538-5136; brickhousewines.com; tastings and tours by appointment Thursday to Saturday, $10 per person.

Stoller Vineyards, 16161 Northeast McDougall Road, Dayton; (503) 864-3404; stollervineyards.com; open 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday to Friday, until 5 p.m. on weekends; tastings $10 per person, tours of winery by appointment.

Amity Vineyards, 18150 Southeast Amity Vineyards Road, Amity; (503) 835-2362; amityvineyards.com; open noon to 5 p.m. October to May, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. June to September.

WHERE TO EAT

Thistle, 228 Northeast Evans Street, McMinnville; (503) 472-9623; thistlerestaurant.com; dinner for two $80.

WHERE TO STAY

Abbey Road Farm, 10501 Northeast Abbey Road, Carlton; (503) 852-6278; abbeyroadfarm.com; silo suites from $210.

Allison Inn & Spa, 2525 Allison Lane, Newberg; (503) 554-2525; theallison.com; doubles from $315. Opened last September, this is the region’s first luxury resort, with 85 rooms, a spa and an in-house restaurant with its own vegetable garden and hazelnut orchards.

NYT Travel: 36 Hours in Telluride, Colo.

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February 28, 2010

By LIONEL BEEHNER

TELLURIDE almost begs comparisons with Aspen. A Colorado mining town affixed to a world-class ski resort; rugged locals brushing elbows with the occasional celebrity; white tablecloth restaurants serving up foie gras next to taco dives. “It’s like Aspen was back in the ’70s, but less pretentious,” said Bo Bedford, a self-described Aspen refugee who is a manager at the New Sheridan Hotel. “It hasn’t gone Hollywood yet.” There is, of course, a certain star-studded film festival. And Telluride does count Jerry Seinfeld and Tom Cruise among its regulars. Yet, the town stays true to its hardscrabble roots. Dogs roam off-leash, folks rummage for freebies at a so-called Free Box, and residents zip up in flannel instead of fur coats.

Friday

4 p.m.
1) DAS BOOT

Ski shops are often staffed by workers straight out of “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” Not Boot Doctors (650 Mountain Village Boulevard; 970-728-8954; bootdoctors.com), where Bob Gleason and his team of “surgeons” run a kind of operating room for your ill-fitting equipment. But don’t expect a sterile ward — it looks more like a torture chamber, with pinchers and clawlike tools to stretch, squeeze and custom-shape any size boots (prices range from $20 for a boot stretch to $175 for a custom-molded sole).

6 p.m.
2) BROADWAY MEETS OPRY

Film and theater buffs will take comfort in Telluride’s abundance of preserved art-house theaters. Take the intricately stenciled balcony and the maple floors of the Sheridan Opera House (110 North Oak Street; 970-728-6363; sheridanoperahouse.com), which dates from 1913. Part ’30s vaudeville, part Grand Ole Opry, the stage has been graced with everything from Broadway musicals to bluegrass bands, and is the hub of the Telluride Film Festival, in its 37th year (held Sept. 3 to 6 this year).

8:30 p.m.
3) HIGH STEAKS

If the New Sheridan feels like the kind of joint with a secret poker game going on in a smoky backroom, well, that’s because it is (H. Norman Schwarzkopf is said to be among the regulars). But the real draw of this Victorian hotel is its newly refurbished Chop House Restaurant (233 West Colorado Avenue; 970-728-9100; newsheridan.com), which serves large platters of prime steaks (starting at $26). Like the hotel, which was reopened in 2008 after extensive renovations, the musty dining room has been spiffed up with plush booths and crystal chandeliers. After dinner, sneak away next door (there’s a secret passage in the back) to the New Sheridan bar, which looks much as it did in 1895 — with its crackling fire and carved mahogany bar — but has added a billiard room in back and, yup, a poker table.

Saturday

7:30 a.m.
4) BISCUITS AND GRAVY

With its red-checkered tablecloths and folksy service, Maggie’s Bakery (300 West Colorado Avenue; 970-728-3334) holds its own against any ski town greasy spoon. A healthy-size biscuit and gravy goes for $7.45. Another popular spot, Baked in Telluride, burned down in early February, though its big, red barn is expected to be rebuilt.

9 a.m.
5) GOLD RUSH

Telluride feels as though it belongs in the Alps — with its 2,000-plus acres of backcountrylike terrain and above-the-tree-line chutes, European-style chalets and snowy peaks framed by boxy canyons and craggy rock formations. Throw in thin crowds and short lift lines, and what’s not to like? To warm up, take the Prospect Bowl Express over to Madison or Magnolia — gentle runs that weave through trees below the gaze of Bald Mountain. Or hop on the Gold Hill Express lift to find the mountain’s newest expert terrain: Revelation Bowl. Hang a left off the top of the Revelation Lift to the Gold Hill Chutes (Nos. 2 to 5), recently opened to skiers and said to be some of the steepest terrain in North America.

Noon
6) WINE AND CHEESE

Telluride does not believe in summit cafeterias, at least not the traditional kind with long tables and with deep fryers in the kitchen. Its hilltop restaurants come the size of tree forts. Case in point is Alpino Vino (970-708-1120), a new spot just off the Gold Hill Express Lift that resembles a chalet airlifted from the Italian Alps. Diners in ski helmets huddle around cherry-wood tables and a roaring fireplace, sipping Tuscan reds ($15), while neatly groomed waiters bring plates of cured meats and fine cheeses ($15). Arrive by noon, as this place fills up fast. For more casual grub, swing by Giuseppe’s (970-728-7503) at the top of Lift 9, which stacks two shelves of Tabasco sauce and a refrigerator full of Fat Tire beer ($5) to go with home-style dishes like chicken and chorizo gumbo ($8.99). After lunch, glide down See Forever, a long, winding trail that snakes all the way back to the village. Detour to Lift 9 if you want to burn off a few more calories.

5:30 p.m.
7) FULL PINT OR HALFPIPE?

A free gondola links the historic town of Telluride with the faux-European base area known as Mountain Village. Just before sunset, hop off at the gondola’s midstation, situated atop a ridge. For a civilized drink without cover bands, you’ll find Allred’s (970-728-7474; allredsrestaurant.com), a rustic-chic lodge with craft beers on tap ($7). Grab a window seat for sunset views of the San Juan Mountains, or relax by the stone fireplace to the soothing sounds of Bob Israel on his piano. Shaun White wannabes, however, will want to continue down to a new terrain park with an 18-foot-high halfpipe. Illuminated by klieg lights until 8 p.m., it is one of Colorado’s few halfpipes where you can flip a McTwist under the stars ($25 entrance fee).

8 p.m.
8) NO VEGANS

Carnivores should feel at home in Telluride. At some spots, steak knives look like machetes and the beef is said to come from Ralph Lauren’s nearby ranch. For tasty Colorado lamb chops ($28), try the new Palmyra Restaurant (136 Country Club Drive; 970-728-6800; thepeaksresort.com). Opened last December at the Peaks Resort & Spa in Mountain Village, the glass-walled restaurant has dazzling fire features and romantic valley views. Or, for hearty grub you might find at a firehouse, head into town and loosen your belt at Fat Alley BBQ (122 South Oak Street; 970-728-3985), a no-frills joint with old, wooden tables and a counter where you can order Texas-style barbecued spareribs and breaded-to-order fried chicken. Most items run $10 to $15, except the Schlitz beer, which is $1.

10 p.m.
9) GETTING HIGH

If the high altitude and lack of oxygen leave you winded — and they probably will — pull up a bar stool at the Bubble Lounge (200 West Colorado Avenue; 970-728-9653; telluridebubblelounge.com), a grungy bar that serves craft beers, Champagne and, yes, oxygen. Choose from a two dozen scents (cherry and lemon grass, among others) served in bubbling beakers that light up like DayGlo bulbs and look like a mad scientist’s lab ($10 for 12 minutes).

Sunday

10 a.m.
10) STOMPING GROUNDS

The snow-carpeted trails that roll past wide meadows and frozen waterfalls in this pocket of southwest Colorado are ideal for snowshoeing. Stock up on snacks and water before riding to the top of Lift 10, where you’ll find a warming teepee run by Eco Adventures (565 Mountain Village Boulevard; 970-728-7300). Eco offers guided snowshoe tours, with ecological lessons thrown in, for $45, including equipment.

2 p.m.
11) OUTLAW TOUR

Did you know that Butch Cassidy robbed his first bank on Main Street in 1889? Or that the town’s red-light district once had 29 bordellos? These and other historical tidbits give Telluride an added sense of place that’s missing from newer, corporate-run resorts. For an entertaining tour, call up Ashley Boling (970-728-6639), a D.J., actor and self-appointed guide who offers 90-minute tours that are encyclopedic and long on stories ($20 a person). He’s hard to miss: he’s the one walking around with cascading blond hair under a cowboy hat, stopping every few minutes to say hello to friends — unless it’s a powder day, in which case Telluride turns into a ghost town.

IF YOU GO

The closest commercial airport is Telluride Regional Airport, about seven miles from town. There are daily (turboprop) connections from Phoenix and Denver, but the airport closes often because of bad weather. It can be easier and more reliable to fly into Montrose Regional Airport, a larger airport about 90 minutes away by car. Continental flies nonstop from Newark to Montrose (from $347 in March, according to a recent search), but only on Saturdays. A car is not needed to get around. A free gondola connects the town of Telluride to the Mountain Village till midnight.

In Telluride, the New Sheridan Hotel (231 West Colorado Avenue; 970-728-4351; newsheridan.com) reopened in 2008 with 26 renovated rooms that kept the Victorian touches, like the old-style light switches. Doubles start at $199.

In Mountain Village, lumière (970-369-0400; www.lumierehotels.com), a modern boutique hotel, opened in 2008. Each of the 29 chocolate-carpeted units offers a steam shower, and a few come with balconies with breathtaking mountain views. Doubles start at $349.

NYT: Division and Its Discontents

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February 21, 2010, 5:46 pm

By STEVEN STROGATZ

Steven Strogatz on math, from basic to baffling.
Tags:

'my left foot', division, dollars and cents, fractions, integers

There’s a narrative line that runs through arithmetic, but many of us missed it in the haze of long division and common denominators. It’s the story of the quest for ever-more versatile numbers.

The “natural numbers” 1, 2, 3 and so on are good enough if all we want to do is count, add and multiply. But once we ask how much remains when everything is taken away, we are forced to create a new kind of number — zero — and since debts can be owed, we need negative numbers too. This enlarged universe of numbers called “integers” is every bit as self-contained as the natural numbers, but much more powerful because it embraces subtraction as well.
More in This Series

* From Fish to Infinity (Jan. 31, 2010)
* Rock Groups (Feb. 7, 2010)
* The Enemy of My Enemy (Feb. 14, 2010)

A new crisis comes when we try to work out the mathematics of sharing. Dividing a whole number evenly is not always possible … unless we expand the universe once more, now by inventing fractions. These are ratios of integers — hence their technical name, “rational numbers.” Sadly, this is the place where many students hit the mathematical wall.

There are many confusing things about division and its consequences, but perhaps the most maddening is that there are so many different ways to describe a part of a whole.

If you cut a chocolate layer cake right down the middle into two equal pieces, you could certainly say that each piece is “half” the cake. Or you might express the same idea with the fraction 1/2, meaning 1 of 2 equal pieces. (When you write it this way, the slash between the 1 and the 2 is a visual reminder that something is being sliced.) A third way is to say each piece is 50 percent of the whole, meaning literally 50 parts out of 100. As if that weren’t enough, you could also invoke decimal notation and describe each piece as 0.5 of the entire cake.

This profusion of choices may be partly to blame for the bewilderment many of us feel when confronted with fractions, percentages and decimals. A vivid example appears in the movie “My Left Foot,” the true story of the Irish writer, painter and poet Christy Brown. Born into a large working-class family, he suffered from cerebral palsy that made it almost impossible for him to speak or control any of his limbs, except his left foot. As a boy he was often dismissed as mentally disabled, especially by his father, who resented him and treated him cruelly.

A pivotal scene in the movie takes place around the kitchen table. One of Christy’s older sisters is quietly doing her math homework, seated next to her father, while Christy, as usual, is shunted off in the corner of the room, twisted in his chair. His sister breaks the silence: “What’s 25 percent of a quarter?” she asks. Father mulls it over. “Twenty-five percent of a quarter? Uhhh … That’s a stupid question, eh? I mean, 25 percent is a quarter. You can’t have a quarter of a quarter.” Sister responds, “You can. Can’t you, Christy?” Father: “Ha! What would he know?”

Writhing, Christy struggles to pick up a piece of chalk with his left foot. Positioning it over a slate on the floor, he manages to scrawl a 1, then a slash, then something unrecognizable. It’s the number 16, but the 6 comes out backwards. Frustrated, he erases the 6 with his heel and tries again, but this time the chalk moves too far, crossing through the 6, rendering it indecipherable. “That’s only a nervous squiggle,” snorts his father, turning away. Christy closes his eyes and slumps back, exhausted.

Aside from the dramatic power of the scene, what’s striking is the father’s conceptual rigidity. What makes him insist you can’t have a quarter of a quarter? Maybe he thinks you can only take a quarter of a whole or of something made of four equal parts. But what he fails to realize is that everything is made of four equal parts. In the case of something that’s already a quarter, its four equal parts look like this:

Since 16 of these thin slices make the original whole, each slice is 1/16 of the whole — the answer Christy was trying to scratch out.

A version of the same kind of mental rigidity, updated for the digital age, made the rounds on the Internet a few years ago when a frustrated customer named George Vaccaro recorded and posted his phone conversation with two service representatives at Verizon Wireless. Vaccaro’s complaint was that he’d been quoted a data usage rate of .002 cents per kilobyte, but his bill showed he’d been charged .002 dollars per kilobyte, a hundredfold higher rate. The ensuing conversation climbed to the top 50 in YouTube’s comedy section.

About halfway through the recording, a highlight occurs in the exchange between Vaccaro and Andrea, the Verizon floor manager:

V: “Do you recognize that there’s a difference between one dollar and one cent?”
A: “Definitely.”
V: “Do you recognize there’s a difference between half a dollar and half a cent?”
A: “Definitely.”
V: “Then, do you therefore recognize there’s a difference between .002 dollars and .002 cents?”
A: “No.”
V: “No?”
A: “I mean there’s … there’s no .002 dollars.”

A few moments later Andrea says, “Obviously a dollar is 1.00, right? So what would .002 dollars look like? I’ve never heard of .002 dollars… It’s just not a full cent.”

The challenge of converting between dollars and cents is only part of the problem for Andrea. The real barrier is her inability to envision a portion of either.

From first-hand experience I can tell you what it’s like to be mystified by decimals. In 8th grade Ms. Stanton began teaching us how to convert a fraction into a decimal. Using long division we found that some fractions give decimals that terminate in all zeroes. For example, 1/4 = .2500…, which can be rewritten as .25, since all those zeroes amount to nothing. Other fractions give decimals that eventually repeat, like

5/6 = .8333…

My favorite was 1/7, whose decimal counterpart repeats every six digits:

1/7 = .142857142857….

The bafflement began when Ms. Stanton pointed out that if you triple both sides of the simple equation

1/3 = .3333…,

you’re forced to conclude that 1 must equal .9999…

At the time I protested that they couldn’t be equal. No matter how many 9’s she wrote, I could write just as many 0’s in 1.0000… and then if we subtracted her number from mine, there would be a teeny bit left over, something like .0000…01.

Like Christy’s father and the Verizon service reps, my gut couldn’t accept something that had just been proven to me. I saw it but refused to believe it. (This might remind you of some people you know.)

But it gets worse — or better, if you like to feel your neurons sizzle. Back in Ms. Stanton’s class, what stopped us from looking at decimals that neither terminate nor repeat periodically? It’s easy to cook up such stomach-churners. Here’s an example:

0.12122122212222…

By design, the blocks of 2 get progressively longer as we move to the right. There’s no way to express this decimal as a fraction. Fractions always yield decimals that terminate or eventually repeat periodically — that can be proven — and since this decimal does neither, it can’t be equal to the ratio of any whole numbers. It’s “irrational.”

Given how contrived this decimal is, you might suppose irrationality is rare. On the contrary, it is typical. In a certain sense that can be made precise, almost all decimals are irrational. And their digits look statistically random.

Once you accept these astonishing facts, everything turns topsy-turvy. Whole numbers and fractions, so beloved and familiar, now appear scarce and exotic. And that innocuous number line pinned to the molding of your grade school classroom? No one ever told you, but it’s chaos up there.

NOTES:

George Vaccaro’s blog provides the exasperating details of his encounters with Verizon.

The transcript of his conversation with customer service is available here.

For readers who may still find it hard to accept that 1 = .9999…, the argument that eventually convinced me was this. They must be equal, because there’s no room for any other decimal to fit between them. (Whereas if two decimals are unequal, their average is between them, as are infinitely many other decimals.)

The amazing properties of irrational numbers are discussed at a higher mathematical level here.

The sense in which their digits are random is clarified here.

Thanks to Carole Schiffman for her comments and suggestions, and to Margaret Nelson for preparing the illustrations.

NYT: A Dutch Home With Some Serious Whimsy

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February 18, 2010
On Location

By GISELA WILLIAMS

AMSTELSCHEG, the Netherlands

THE kitchen in Don and Sylvie Murphy’s home, on the suburban edges of Amsterdam, is orange, about the same shade as their goldfish, their food processor and Ms. Murphy’s car, a vintage Fiat 500 parked outside. It could be seen as a sign of fanatical nationalism — orange being the color of the Netherlands — but it is not: Mr. Murphy is from Ireland, and Ms. Murphy is British.

“Orange is our color,” Ms. Murphy said.

Her husband explained: “Sylvie was wearing an orange dress when I first met her.”

Having a signature color is not the only way the Murphys stand out. Their house, a futuristic bunker-like structure that Mr. Murphy designed and built for about $1.4 million (or around a million euros), is surrounded by traditional thatch-roof bungalows.

“People have shouted abusive things at us,” said Mr. Murphy, a founding partner of VMX Architects in Amsterdam, referring to neighbors who have voiced their disapproval of the modern design. “They’ve written notes that say, ‘How is it possible to build this house here?’ and left them in our mailbox.”

But like the house he built, Mr. Murphy, 44, has a tough facade. He and his wife, a stay-at-home mother to Oscar, 14; Ava, 13; and Edan, 3, said that their vision for the home was more important than what the neighbors thought.

“If we just produced another thatched cottage, we might as well still be living in caves,” he said.

As it happens, Ms. Murphy, 40, once lived in a thatched home — she grew up in a 15th-century house in England — and she was particularly intent on maintaining their modern, urban aesthetic.

“Having a modern house in the country is the best of both worlds,” she said.

Their two-story house, on a tiny island overlooking a canal, was completed in August and has about 5,300 square feet of living space. The structure — which is made of concrete block, insulation and a metal cage — was sprayed with concrete, an extremely labor-intensive technique that “created a building that looked as monolithic as possible,” Mr. Murphy said.

The top floor — the designated living area — is a long loft-like space divided into three areas: a living room with a piano, an open kitchen and a casual sitting area with a fireplace and flat-screen television. It has slate-gray floors coated in an epoxy, a finish often used on museum flooring, Mr. Murphy said; the walls and ceilings are made of a similar-colored plaster.

Sloping glass walls offer views of snow-covered fields and one of the neighboring thatched houses.

Throughout the top floor, they have installed a constellation of bare incandescent light bulbs in different shapes and sizes that screw directly into the ceiling, creating a night-sky effect.

All four bedrooms are on the ground floor and have glass walls facing east, so they get plenty of sunlight in the morning.

“We get so much light in here,” Mr. Murphy said, “that some mornings when I bring Sylvie her tea, I have to bring her a pair of sunglasses as well.”

But the teenagers, he said, love the basement — a 1,335-square-foot space that doesn’t get any natural light, but does have a home theater, a spinning disco ball and a set of drums. The Murphys plan to add a fitness area, office space and a library.

Only six months after moving in, everyone seems content. Mr. Murphy recalled something a friend told him just a few weeks ago. “This house is so like you — on one hand, it’s strange,” the friend said, “and doesn’t appear to fit in. On the other hand, it’s comfortable and charming.”

NYT: Try the Red: Napa Learns to Sell

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February 17, 2010

By KATRINA HERON

NAPA, Calif.

TOM DAVIES was driving last fall down Highway 29, the two-lane blacktop that serves as the Napa Valley’s main drag, when he saw something that literally stopped him in his tracks. “There was a sign on the side of the road that said, ‘Cabernet Grapes for Sale,’ ” he recalled, still incredulous that economic desperation had forced a Napa grower to hawk the region’s hallowed fruit like a load of zucchini.

In the 30 years that Mr. Davies, the president of V. Sattui Winery and Vineyards, has worked in the Napa wine business, he has never seen a sight quite so unsettling. “Grapes were left hanging on the vine last year,” he said.

This unusual predicament is not easily remedied at a time when vintners are awash in wine. Highly touted Napa releases in 2009 did not sell out, which means that inventory is backing up, which in turn means that much of the 2010 grape harvest will essentially have nowhere to go. Some winemakers have even debated skipping a vintage, which would amount to wiping a year off the calendar.

Not so long ago, it seemed a given that Napa wines would forever be immune from oversupply.

But in 2009, sales of wines priced at $25 and above dropped 30 percent nationwide, according to Nielsen. While global wine sales increased, California wine shipments fell for the first time in 16 years. Searching for a way out of the crisis, many Napa wineries are increasingly pinning their hopes on direct-to-consumer sales.

The hottest topic in the business is the so-called “retail room,” meaning the combined forces of the winery tasting room, the now-ubiquitous wine club and, most of all, nascent e-commerce.

This isn’t exactly a new idea — the winery tasting room became a profit center during the boom years, offering a preview of the possibilities. But on average, direct sales make up a meager 10 percent of local winery revenues, according to Brian Baker, a vice president at Chateau Montelena who presided over a recent symposium in Santa Rosa, Calif., on the subject.

For some in Napa, stepping up their retail business means the kind of sales pitch more often associated with a Rachael Ray recipe roundup than a boutique cabernet. Cakebread Cellars serves up a range of food-and-wine-pairing videos set to bouncy instrumentals. And two weeks after Lehman Brothers collapsed, Mr. Davies and a colleague started an online video series called “The Wine Guys,” in which they are not afraid to discuss the unique characteristics of petit verdot while unveiling special deals available exclusively on the V. Sattui Web site.

“The concept of the ‘winemaker’s minute’ is starting to catch on,” Mr. Baker said. Chateau Montelena’s site proudly features video snippets from the 2008 movie “Bottle Shock.” This loose retelling of how Chateau Montelena’s chardonnay took first prize at a tasting in Paris in 1976 “has created a kind of Disney effect for us,” said Mr. Baker, adding that “Shockers” often make up 75 percent of weekend traffic to the winery.

If taking charge of marketing and distribution looks like a silver bullet, it also scares the pants off a good many vintners. It demands technological and social-networking prowess, for which this particular valley is not known. It’s also expensive. But a new acronym has crept into the local lexicon: ERP, or Enterprise Resource Planning, which refers to integrated technology systems that let all the different parts of a business operation talk to one another. It’s heady stuff for wineries just learning to analyze and deploy data on their customers and discovering that a Webmaster may be as important to their future as a winemaker.

Mike Grgich, the founder of Grgich Hills Estate, distrusted computers so intensely that for decades he insisted on handwritten accounting. No more. At 87, Mr. Grgich recently bellowed to his staff: “We have to upgrade everything! Get me Facebook and Twitter!” recalled Ivo Jeramaz, a vice president at the winery who is also Mr. Grgich’s nephew.

“We nearly fell off our chairs,” Mr. Jeramaz said.

Those who attended the symposium on direct-to-consumer sales listened in rapt attention to a keynote speech on Gen Y — also known as the millennials.

Rick Bakas, a panelist at the symposium, joined St. Supéry winery last August with a title heretofore unknown in the valley: director of social media.

St. Supéry, which produces 100,000 cases a year, now has the requisite Facebook fan page, in addition to which Mr. Bakas has inaugurated Napa cabernet and pan-California virtual wine tastings via Twitter.

“Where wineries need to focus most is on signing up new wine club members through social media,” he said, rather than rely on cementing relationships with tourists who drive up to the tasting room.

Mr. Baker estimated that only about 20 percent of Napa wineries are on Facebook so far. Mr. Bakas, who last worked at a Web start-up that folded, said his spiel on new marketing techniques still meets with bewilderment and reticence in some quarters. “Wineries will say they say they can’t afford to learn about social media,” he said. “I tell them they can’t afford not to, and the economy is pushing the reluctant ones whether they want to or not.”

In short, Napa’s winemakers are in the throes of a classic market disruption. They can’t go backward, and the way forward is still largely unknown.

The only certainty is that they can’t stay where they are.

“When I talk to my local colleagues, they try to deny what’s happening at first,” Mr. Jeramaz said. “Then it comes out that their sales are down 30, 40, maybe even 50 percent.” At Grgich, sales are off about a third. “In 2009, 20,000 cases went unsold,” he said. With sales in free-fall, the wholesalers who distribute wines to restaurants and retail stores have demanded — and received — price cuts.

“It’s an understatement to say it’s a buyers’ market, even for a smaller distributor like me,” said Lou Bock, whose wholesaler business is based in San Francisco. “The guys in Napa are shellshocked.”

“Wineries that need to move inventory have gotten desperate,” said Peter Mondavi Jr., president of Charles Krug Winery. Like a few other major, time-honored brands with ample lower-priced offerings, Krug has been shielded to date from such dire scenarios.

For the less fortunate, haggling from wholesalers is merely insult added to continuing injury: Recent consolidation in the distribution industry has left many wineries believing they’re getting the bum’s rush. Distributors, they say, pay attention only to their biggest accounts, while small independent wineries, which predominate in Napa Valley, have to figure out ways to promote themselves.

But even wineries with good distributor rapport need to recognize that times are changing, Mr. Mondavi said. “Direct-to-consumer sales are becoming more critical,” he said. “We want to grow that segment of our business.”

This may seem a no-brainer for Napa winemakers in an era when many industries are cutting out the middleman and going straight to the end user. It’s a bit more complicated than that, thanks to a long history of state-mandated prohibitions on direct shipping. According to Steve Gross, director of state relations for the Wine Institute, an industry trade group, 38 states and counting have dropped their shipping embargoes, but wineries typically still need a separate license from each state where they do business.

Distributors, meanwhile, will continue to control a major portion of the wine market, given that only 10 states currently allow a winery to ship directly to their retail outlets and restaurants.

For customers, the potential advantages of the drive toward direct sales include better prices, more varied selection and long-term personalized service. For the wineries, the immediate lure is the chance for a bigger bite of the profits.

“Let’s say our chardonnay’s suggested retail for a one-bottle purchase is $60,” Mr. Jeramaz said. “When we sell through a distributor, we give them a steep discount — we only get $30 for that bottle. If we give the customer a 20 percent discount, it’s a better deal for them and for us.”

But the notion of offering discounts at the winery is still radical in much of Napa. At many tasting rooms, one feels warmly welcomed into a curious time warp, where tasting fees and wine prices are the same as (and sometimes higher than) they were before. On a recent Saturday, Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars was selling its 2006 merlot for $45. Earlier in the week, the same bottle had been spotted on the shelves of a couple of Target stores in the Bay Area priced at $31.99.

For Michael Haley, a grape grower and aspiring local politician, Napa’s vaunted prices — nobody batted an eye at bottles costing $100 and up — are themselves a major part of the challenge. “For a good while now, Napa’s specialty has been high-end wine, and that business has fallen off a cliff,” he said. “We’re talking here about a major case of denial.”

In fairness, not all of Napa’s wineries went to the last decade’s velvet-rope party. At Smith-Madrone Winery, in the hills above the town of St. Helena, the brothers Stuart and Charles Smith produce 1,000 cases of wine a year from their own grapes and sell them for $30 to $45.

Devoutly untrendy — Charles Smith’s desk in the wine shed doubles as the tasting counter — the Smiths came to feel like an anachronism in recent years. “We got a hard time from other vintners,” Stuart Smith recalled. “They said, ‘Why don’t you raise your prices? You make everybody else look bad.’ ”

Today, the Smiths appear to be ahead of the curve, beneficiaries of both their moderate prices and their early decision to tend to their customer list with the same care they lavish on their vines. This year is going to be every bit as bad as 2009, Stuart Smith said, “and we would be in very tough shape if it wasn’t for our on-site and Internet sales.” He added that Smith-Madrone never placed undue faith in its distributors, three of which went out of business last year.

Though they anticipated the pitfalls of the traditional sales channel, the Smiths along with a good number of their brethren are feeling pinched by another legacy system, this one home-grown. The trouble is that, in the eyes of Napa County’s body politic, not all wineries are created equal.

At issue is an increasingly controversial piece of red tape known as the Winery Definition Ordinance. Enacted in 1990, it piggybacked onto a use-permit system set up in 1974, a date that quickly became the dividing line between the haves and the have-nots. Among other things, the ordinance dictates the number of guests a tasting room can admit in a day — and whether they can just show up or need to make an appointment — what kinds of memorabilia the wineries can sell and what kinds of events they can hold.

Generally speaking, elder-statesman wineries like Charles Krug, Sutter Home and Beringer, along with historic-winery descendants like Rubicon Estate, are exempt from the strictures. (Not always, though: some years back, Francis Ford Coppola was ordered to remove an illegitimate espresso cart from the Rubicon terrace.)

“What we have created, in effect, is class warfare,” said Mr. Haley, who is running for a spot on the Napa County Board of Supervisors with a pledge to overhaul the regulations and let a thousand marketing incentives bloom. New pricing structures, delivery systems and technology are crucial, Mr. Haley said, but they can’t help Napa compete in the 21st century “if we hang on to our anticompetitive habits.”

Dario Sattui, who started his wine business in 1975 with borrowed money and a VW bus for a bed, offers a glimpse of what life for Napa’s new guard may look like were freer trade the norm.

His great-grandfather, Vittorio, made wine and sold it out of a storefront in downtown San Francisco. Following in his footsteps, Dario Sattui created a line of mostly inexpensive wines for sale directly to consumers. No wholesaler or retailer has ever gotten hold of a V. Sattui label.

Mr. Sattui’s marketing acumen extended to securing commercial zoning for his property, a loophole that makes V. Sattui one of just two Napa wineries (the other is Krug) allowed to host weddings. V. Sattui is the friend-of-the-people winery, the Everyman. The tasting room, where $5 buys a “classic” tasting, also sells Coke and Red Bull, and an adjacent deli gives the Dean & Deluca outpost across the road a run for its money.

If Napa’s high-minded denizens consider Mr. Sattui’s winery garish, they are in awe of his prescient direct-sales approach. V. Sattui’s wine clubs have 40,000 active members, and today about 35 percent of its business is done via mail order or on the Internet, with the balance handled on site.

Mr. Sattui instigated the legal challenge to the distributors’ lock on wine shipments that culminated in a 2005 United States Supreme Court ruling paving the way for wineries to sell directly to out-of-state consumers. Like Mr. Bakas, his goal now is to get Napa with the program, using his own experience as a guide. “Making wine — that’s the easy part,” Mr. Sattui said. “It’s selling it that’s hard.”

NYT: As Girls Become Women, Sports Pay Dividends

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February 15, 2010, 4:05 pm

By TARA PARKER-POPE
Stuart Bradford

Almost four decades after the federal education law called Title IX opened the door for girls to participate in high school and college athletics, a crucial question has remained unanswered: Do sports make a long-term difference in a woman’s life?

A large body of research shows that sports are associated with all sorts of benefits, like lower teenage pregnancy rates, better grades and higher self-esteem. But until now, no one has determined whether those improvements are a direct result of athletic participation. It may be that the type of girl who is attracted to sports already has the social, personal and physical qualities — like ambition, strength and supportive parents — that will help her succeed in life.

Now, separate studies from two economists offer some answers, providing the strongest evidence yet that team sports can result in lifelong improvements to educational, work and health prospects. At a time when the first lady, Michelle Obama, has begun a nationwide campaign to improve schoolchildren’s health, the lessons from Title IX show that school-based fitness efforts can have lasting effects.

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 required schools and colleges receiving federal money to provide the same opportunities for girls as they did for boys. Relatively few students, male or female, participate in intercollegiate sports. But the effects in high school were remarkable. Just six years after the enactment of Title IX, the percentage of girls playing team sports had jumped sixfold, to 25 percent from about 4 percent.

Most research on Title IX has looked at national trends in girls’ sports. Betsey Stevenson, an economist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has taken it a step further, focusing on state-by-state variations.
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“I looked to see what it means to add sports to girls’ lives,” she said. “How does it change things for them?”

States with large boys’ sports programs had to make bigger changes to achieve parity than states with smaller programs. Looking at the state-by-state statistics allowed Dr. Stevenson to narrow her focus, comparing differences in sports participation with differences in women’s educational and work achievement.

So her study untangles the effects of sports participation from other confounding factors — school size, climate, social and personal differences among athletes — and comes far closer to determining a cause and effect relationship between high school sports participation and achievement later in life.

Using a complex analysis, Dr. Stevenson showed that increasing girls’ sports participation had a direct effect on women’s education and employment. She found that the changes set in motion by Title IX explained about 20 percent of the increase in women’s education and about 40 percent of the rise in employment for 25-to-34-year-old women.

“It’s not just that the people who are going to do well in life play sports, but that sports help people do better in life,” she said, adding, “While I only show this for girls, it’s reasonable to believe it’s true for boys as well.”

Another question is whether Title IX has made a difference in women’s long-term health. In a carefully conducted study, Robert Kaestner, an economics professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, compared rates of obesity and physical activity of women who had been in high school in the 1970s — as Title IX was taking effect — with similar women from earlier years. Controlling the results for other influences, like age and changing diets, Dr. Kaestner was able to tease out the effects Title IX had on women’s health.

He found that the increase in girls’ athletic participation caused by Title IX was associated with a 7 percent lower risk of obesity 20 to 25 years later, when women were in their late 30s and early 40s. His article was published this month in the journal Evaluation Review.

Dr. Kaestner notes that while a 7 percent decline in obesity is modest, no other public health program can claim similar success. And other studies have shown that even a small drop in weight can lower risk for diabetes and other health problems.

There is still room for improvement. Today about 1 in 3 high school girls play sports, compared with about half of all boys. And participation varies widely by state, according to Dr. Stevenson’s research. Southern states like Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee still have big gender gaps, while Northern states like Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Vermont are closer to parity.

“While we have more girls than ever before, we still have far more boys playing sports than girls,” said Nicole M. LaVoi, associate director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota. “The research clearly states that when anybody, boys and girls, are physically active, they can reap developmental and health benefits. But we haven’t reached equality yet.”

NYT: Now at Starbucks: A Rebound

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January 21, 2010

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

SEATTLE — Young people wearing hoodies and chunky glasses are sipping microbrew beers and espressos, nibbling on cheese and baguettes made at a local bakery and listening to a guitarist strum and sing.
The scene could be at any independent coffeehouse around the country. Instead, it is at a Starbucks-owned shop called 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea.
The new store, one of two in Seattle’s trendy Capitol Hill neighborhood, grew out of a series of brainstorming sessions by a group of Starbucks employees after Howard D. Schultz, Starbucks’ chief executive, told them to “break the rules and do things for yourself.”
The directive was part of his effort, since he returned as chief executive two years ago, to turn the struggling company around by injecting the multinational chain with a dose of the urgency, nimbleness and risk-taking of a start-up company.
“We lost our way,” he said. “We went back to start-up mode, hand-to-hand combat every day” to find it. “And with the kind of discussion and focus that probably we had not had as a company since the early days — the fear of failure, the hunger to win.”
There are indications that Starbucks’ turnaround efforts are working. On Wednesday, the company reported that in the first quarter, which included the important holiday season, net income was $241.5 million, up from $64.3 million in the year-ago quarter.
Revenue climbed 4 percent, to $2.7 billion. Same-store sales were up 4 percent, reversing steady declines. In the last year, the company’s stock has nearly tripled to $23.29, though that is still significantly below the record high of nearly $40 in 2006.
But even if Mr. Schultz, who bought the first six Starbucks stores in 1987, still sees the company through an entrepreneur’s eyes, it is no longer a start-up and its stores are not local coffeehouses. Some analysts wonder whether Starbucks is refusing to accept its new identity.
“That kind of resonance it had at one point is going to be hard to recapture,” said Bryant Simon, a history professor at Temple University and author of a book about Starbucks titled “Everything but the Coffee.” “It’s his own sense of the brand overtaking what’s doable right now.”
When Mr. Schultz returned in January 2008, Starbucks had just posted its first quarterly decline in the number of transactions at stores in the United States. As the chain opened a record 2,571 stores in 2007, the onetime growth stock lost 42 percent of its value.
Then, in a one-two punch, consumer spending plummeted, and Starbucks, selling a luxury rather than a necessity, was one of the first to feel the pinch. Meanwhile, competition emerged from a new corner of the market when McDonald’s began serving espresso.
When Mr. Schultz, standing at the bar in one of the new Seattle shops and sampling espressos with whole milk, talks about Starbucks, he uses phrases like “the authenticity of the coffee experience” and “the romance, the theater of bringing that to life.”
But that does not match the reality of many Starbucks customers, who rush through each morning on their way to work, or many of its former customers, who have rejected the chain’s cookie-cutter shops in favor of small local shops that serve more carefully made coffee.
Mr. Schultz’s first job upon returning was to halt the marathon store openings, lay off 1,500 United States store employees and 1,700 global corporate employees and figure out how to get the remaining 150,000 to think like employees of a scrappy little company that just wants to serve a good cup of coffee. Starbucks’ coffee buyers, for example, had chosen only varieties of beans that were produced in large enough quantities to supply all Starbucks stores. They rejected coffees made in small batches, which artisanal coffeehouses specialize in. Mr. Schultz changed that. “We’re not one size fits all.”
Even as Mr. Schultz tries to manage more like a start-up founder, he has given in to traditional big-company ideas that he had previously resisted. Last year, Starbucks embraced customer research surveys and ran its first major advertising campaign.
Entrepreneurs, more than traditional chief executives, “keep shaking things up and pulling the stakes out of the tent because they like the mud and the chaos of reinventing, and Howard has a bit of that in him,” said Warren Bennis, founder of the Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California, who has known Mr. Schultz since the mid-1990s.
But he has also noticed that Mr. Schultz has developed “more gravitas, more depth.”
Mr. Bennis added, “I don’t think he’s going to become the classic entrepreneur who can invent but doesn’t manage.”
Mr. Schultz brought Cliff Burrows, who was managing stores abroad, back to Seattle to run American operations. One of the first discoveries he made talking to customers seemed basic, but had been lost in Starbucks’ push to open stores.
Coffee drinkers in the Sun Belt, it turns out, prefer cold drinks, while those in the Northeast generally like drip coffee and those in the Pacific Northwest drink more espresso. Yet the executives in charge of regions of the country were divided along time zones and out of touch with what different customers wanted.
Mr. Burrows shifted the geographic divisions. “All of a sudden you start to see it’s not a numbers game — it’s about consumers influenced by where they live,” he said.
Mr. Schultz also recruited Arthur Rubinfeld, who had left the company in 2002, to return as president of global development in charge of choosing sites and designing stores. To shed the sameness, Mr. Rubinfeld is trying to give each store a feeling of “local-ness,” he said, reflecting the neighborhood and its architectural history.
At the University Village store in Seattle, for example, there is a long communal table hewn from an ash tree that fell in the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle, and it is lined with electrical outlets because at night it is filled with students studying.
At the Starbucks stores in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, bunches of wildflowers sit in mismatched jugs on tables found in antique shops. Beans are ground to order and poured through a cone like those used in artisanal coffeehouses. On the outdoor patio, coffee grounds are piled in a bucket with a handwritten sign encouraging neighbors to take them for composting in their gardens.
One customer, Joshua Covell, was visiting from San Francisco, where he said he never went to Starbucks. “All the Starbucks have that cookie-cutter feel,” he said. “It’s natural not to like corporate giants, but you can see they’re trying.”
But Sylvia Lee, a doctor who lives in the neighborhood, said she was excited when she saw the shop was opening — until she discovered it was owned by Starbucks. “No one wants to be the duped customers won over,” she said.
For Starbucks, the stores are partly learning laboratories. Some of the things they sell, like small-batch beans and brewed-to-order cups of coffee, will appear in other stores.
But they are also venues for Mr. Schultz to scratch his start-up founder’s itch. He said he planned to open similar stores in other cities, complete with local artists’ work and salvaged furniture. “I think we’ll be able to scale this in a similar fashion at a lower cost.”

NYT: Crowds in Times Square Celebrate 2010

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January 1, 2010

By SARAH WHEATON

Hundreds of thousands of revelers welcomed the new year in New York City’s Times Square, despite the rain, slushy streets and heightened security, capping worldwide celebrations that often emphasized the hopes for a more peaceful tomorrow.

The poor weather and tight security could not dampen the otherwise festive mood in midtown Manhattan, where the cast of the Broadway show “Hair” was among the acts to perform. People wearing oversized 2010 glasses rushed to grab hats proclaiming “Happy New Year” that were tossed into the crowd. But the mood of the times was perhaps best embodied by the famous ball that dropped at midnight in Times Square - which was “more energy efficient than ever before,” organizers boasted, with its 32,256 Philips Luxeon Rebel LEDs and covered in 2,688 Waterford crystals.

The celebration followed spirited festivities elsewhere. In Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, about 2 million people, most of them dressed in traditional white, gathered at Copacabana Beach. In Hyderabad, Pakistan, the street was dotted with little white lights, emanating from candles that peace marchers were holding. In Venice, a high tide that flooded low-lying parts of the city, including St. Mark’s Square, coincided with the midnight celebration.

And in the United States, the attention naturally was focused on Times Square.

"Coming here is a dream that many people have," said Francisca Lopez, 47, a tourist from Mexico, as she waved a noisemaker in the air. She had staked out a coveted spot on Broadway between 46th and 47th streets with her teenage son and daughter. "This is the first year that we’re living it."

In an interview on a live Web cast offered by the Times Square Alliance, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg reflected on the weather.

“Everybody always says that when you have a wedding and it rains, everybody’s going to be happy and have good luck,” Mr. Bloomberg said, standing under a blue umbrella. “This sort of guarantees that 2010 is going to be a great year.”

Gustavo Postal, 23, a Brazilian from Sao Paulo,, was part of the crowd that had spilled up Seventh Avenue to Central Park, huddling under awnings and doorways for shelter from the drizzle.

“I think it’s a great time to be here,” Mr. Postal said. “I think the weather is good. Not too cold. I’d rather it snow.”

About 20 minutes later, he got his wish, as small white flakes began to descend around 10:30 p.m. Many others wishes would descend from the sky at midnight, written on paper, with two tons of confetti at midnight.

The police department estimated that about a million people were gathering at the site. They were joined by thousands of officers, including 250 rookies, dispersed throughout the crowd, including some in plain clothes.

The tight security was evident at 50th Street and Broadway, where an officer kept watch over a damp pile of bookbags, which were prohibited inside the police barricades. Their owners had stuffed the contents of the bags in their pockets and abandoned them.

Elsewhere, celebrations were marred by tradition taken to the extreme. In the Philippines, hundreds of people were injured by gunfire and firecrackers — the result of a belief that loud noise will scare away evil spirits. A quieter ceremony took place at Zojoji, a large Buddhist temple in Tokyo, where worshippers released clear, helium balloons into the night sky.

In Las Vegas, officials closed Las Vegas Boulevard, as well as exits leading to the Strip off Interstate 15, The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported, in preparation for an anticipated 315,000 tourists gathering on the street famous for its ritzy hotels and gambling palaces.

Colin Moynihan and Karen Zraick contributed reporting for this article.

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December 6, 2009

36 Hours in South Beach, Fla.

By DAMIEN CAVE

SOUTH BEACH gets a lot of abuse from residents. Too much cologne, critics say; too expensive, too crowded. But like other American meccas of decadence, SoBe still has an irresistible, democratic pull. For everyone from the pale Iowa retiree to the Bentley-driving rapper, it remains the place to strut shamelessly. And even jaded locals still indulge. They may not be taking photos. And perhaps they’ll be dressed a bit more causally, but bet on this: They’re checking in with the classics and keeping up with the latest trends like everyone else — except they don’t need to flaunt it.

Friday

5 p.m.
1) ON THE BOARDWALK

The beach never gets old. For the timeless South Beach experience, amble along to the wooden boardwalk that extends from 21st to 47th Street before city planners replace the raised platform with a ground-level path. Take in the views: on one side is the ocean; the other, the crumbling, yet-to-be-renovated Art Deco hotels that offer a Pompeii-like look back at Miami Beach when diving boards and peach walls still dominated. Then dive into the present at an of-the-moment spot: the rooftop pool at the Gansevoort South (2377 Collins Avenue; 305-604-1000; www.gansevoortsouth.com). Sip a SoBe Carnival (cachaça, pineapple juice and muddled basil; $13) and enjoy the views of either the ocean or the party people.

7 p.m.
2) MUSIC, NOT DANCING

House. Salsa. Hip-hop. South Beach has many soundtracks, but few musical institutions here are as beloved as the New World Symphony (541 Lincoln Road; 305-673-3330; www.nws.edu), an orchestral academy founded by Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony. Providing mixed-media extravaganzas one night, free student concerts the next, it manages to be both high-brow and accessible. Be sure to compare the symphony’s current Art Deco home at the Lincoln Theater to its future headquarters: the building designed by Frank Gehry going up a block north.

9 p.m.
3) DESIGNER EXCURSION

You could follow the herd to Prime Italian (101 Ocean Drive; 305-695-8484; www.primeitalianmiami.com), where Kobe meatballs are a specialty. But lighter, slow-food fare (at better prices) can be found across Biscayne Bay at Fratelli Lyon (4141 Northeast Second Avenue; 305-572-2901; www.fratellilyon.com). Just the fresh cheeses and artisanal olive oil make it worth the trip. Plus, you’ll leave with energy to dance. So go straight to the Florida Room at the Delano (1685 Collins Avenue; 305-674-6152; www.delano-hotel.com), where on most Fridays Angela Laino belts out funk and soul backed by a band rich with brass.

Saturday

7 a.m.
4) SANDY STRETCH

In the 10-plus years that October Rose (yes, a real person) has offered yoga on South Beach (www.yogasouthbeach.org), it has become a 365-day-a-year institution. Sometimes there are as many as 20 people near the usual lifeguard stand at Third Street, each donating about $5, but on one recent morning, only a single limber student could be seen: Tommy Tune, the song-and-dance legend who happens to be a regular. “This is my real love on South Beach,” he said, looking relaxed after his latest session, “it’s yoga.” And since all that locust posing will make you hungry, head to A La Folie (516 Espanola Way; 305-538-4484; www.alafoliecafe.com), a hidden French gem where a butter-sugar crepe with a cappuccino costs only $6.50.

11 a.m.
5) VINTAGE AND VIXENS

Sure, you could buy something new. The malls would love you for it. But why not be both cool and conservationist by going consignment? Fly Boutique (650 Lincoln Road; 305-604-8508; www.flyboutiquevintage.com) is overflowing with few-of-a-kind items, from Emilio Pucci scarves for less than $100 to classic Levis and even Louis Vuitton luggage large enough for a move to Europe (though the trunk will cost you $1,495). Beatnix (1149 Washington Street; 305-532-8733; www.beatnixmiami.com) offers a costume-centric mix, heavy on the polyester. It’s also where South Beach’s vixen bartenders buy their get-ups. For $149, Beatnix will make a corset-tutu combo.

1 p.m.
6) COOK BOOKS

Miamians sometimes joke that their most popular independent bookseller — Books and Books — should be renamed Book and Book because of how little residents read. Regardless, the food and service at its South Beach cafe (927 Lincoln Road; 305-532-3222; www.booksandbooks.com) are as consistent as Carl Hiaasen’s sense of humor. The Key West crab cakes ($12.95) are rich in flavor, but not too heavy, and the homemade cupcakes and Illy espresso might explain why Malcolm Gladwell and other writers spend hours lollygagging at the outdoor tables. Or maybe it really is the books: after all, the store did expand last year.

3 p.m.
7) FORE!

Now it’s time for some brawn. Try hitting a large bucket of balls ($12) at Miami Beach Golf Club (2301 Alton Road; 305-532-3350; www.miamibeachgolfclub.com). As you hook your drive toward the not-so-distant Atlantic, try to imagine the view in 1923, when the course opened, or during World War II, when the Army rented the course for $1 a day and tossed smoke grenades all over the greens.

8 p.m.
8) GO GATSBY

Travel back in time again. First stop, the Betsy Hotel (1440 Ocean Drive; 305-531-6100; www.thebetsyhotel.com), newly renovated to capture an old-fashioned charm that flappers could appreciate — especially in the surrounding sea of neon. The hotel’s restaurant, BLT Steak (305-673-0044; www.bltsteak.com), part of the upscale steakhouse chain, essentially sits in the lobby. All the better for watching the wealthy and established mix with the young and skimpy. The popovers and aged beef aren’t bad either, though prices are best forgotten in a drunken haze: dinner for two with wine and dessert costs around $170.

11 p.m.
9) HIGHS AND LOWS

Remember when the villains of “Goldfinger” cheated at cards, or when Tony Montana in “Scarface” declared “this is paradise” by the pool? It was at the Fontainebleau (4441 Collins Avenue; 305-538-2000; www.fontainebleau.com). And after a two-year, $1 billion renovation that may end up bankrupting the owners, the FB is back. If you can get past the velvet rope, sashay downstairs into Liv, the hotel nightclub where weekends usually include a big celebrity (Jennifer Lopez was a recent visitor). If that fails, drink martinis in the lobby, designed by Morris Lapidus, which was also restored. The famous bowtie-tile floors remain, as does the staircase to nowhere, designed solely for grand entrances. Finish the night down to earth, with some cheap beer and pool at Mac’s Club Deuce (222 14th Street; 305-531-6200), a classic dive bar that draws drunks, drag queens, cops and traveling executives.

Sunday

9 a.m.
10) THE DEEP END

South Pointe Park, at the tip of South Beach, has been treated to a $22 million facelift, and while it looks fantastic, some of the best sights are in the water. The pier is a great place for snorkeling, surfing or fishing, with stingrays, bright tropical fish and lots of colorful locals. You can rent a full snorkeling package for $20 a day at Tarpoon Dive Center (300 Alton Road; 305-532-1445; www.tarpoondivecenter.com).

12 p.m.
11) SOAK AND GO

Reliable regeneration can be found with brunch and a good cleansing at the Standard hotel’s spa (www.standardhotels.com), part of a 1920s motor lodge that André Balazs turned into a holistic oasis a few years ago. Massages start at $125 for an hour, but for $25, try soaking in a private tub overlooking Biscayne Bay, where cinnamon, mint and honeysuckle flower will attempt to detoxify your soul, or at least your body. Finish up by the pool with an ahi tuna niçoise salad ($18) and an Arnold Palmer — that would be half lemonade, half iced tea for all you non-Floridians.

THE BASICS

With most major airlines flying to Miami, getting to South Beach is easy, which is part of its appeal. A recent online search found American flights from La Guardia starting at about $200 for travel in mid-December. Taxis from the airport to anywhere south of 71st Street in Miami Beach are a flat $32.

Despite the recession, several hotels have recently opened. Among the swankiest is the W South Beach (2201 Collins Avenue; 305-938-3000; www.wsouthbeach.com), where every room offers ocean views, a Bose sound system and enough gray marble in the bathrooms to make you feel like you’re in a hamam. Rooms start at $384.

The Gansevoort South (2377 Collins Avenue; 305-604-1000; www.gansevoortsouth.com) has 334 rooms with slightly higher prices, from $395, in a building it renovated but still shares with longtime residents (who use a separate entrance). The enormous pools are a highlight.

Midbeach — which means more cab rides — sits the Fontainebleau and its $1 billion renovation (4441 Collins Avenue; 305-538-2000; www.fontainebleau.com). Rooms start at $429 plus a $12.95 resort fee.