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2007 年，八十八歲高齡的英國小說老將萊辛（Doris Lessing）終於捧回諾貝爾獎桂冠；彷彿為打破「諾獎是死吻」的魔咒，她日前快筆交出新著《艾佛烈與愛蜜莉》（Alfred and Emily）。果真老當益壯筆力雄健，新書虛實交錯，寫小說也寫回憶錄，展示萊辛穿梭現實與想像的高超技法，活力咄咄逼人，探觸文學的極至，證明諾獎不是 送給老作家蓋棺論定的封印。 書名中的艾佛烈與愛蜜莉，原來是萊辛的父母：愛蜜莉出身中產家庭，功課好本可進大學，但她和父親唱反調，改讀護士學校。艾佛烈是鄉下人，離開父母到銀行工 作，不料一次大戰讓他斷送一條腿。在醫院他認識照料傷兵的愛蜜莉，當時她的醫生未婚夫才在英倫海峽意外喪命。兩人隨後結婚，都想擺脫原生家庭，大戰後到波 斯（伊朗）求發展，生下萊辛；舉家又遷到羅德西亞（辛巴威）。萊辛艱困的不快樂童年，在黑暗大陸度過，父母冀圖靠農耕賺錢回英國，但命運捉弄，愛蜜莉精神 崩潰臥床一年，艾佛烈患糖尿病，最後連下田都不能。 婚姻不快樂，先生笑著給她錢最讓她惱恨 萊辛早前出版多本自傳，這些往事並不新鮮，1994年《內在的我》（Under My Skin）書裡說：「多年來我一直揣想：如果沒有戰爭，我的父母後來會如何？」新書落實想法，前半虛構大戰未爆發，兩人迥然兩般的際遇：他們因板球賽邂 逅，但並未共結連理。做護士的愛蜜莉嫁給心儀的醫生，沒有生育子女；艾佛烈豪邁又顧家，如願當了英國農夫，娶太太生下雙胞胎兒子，快樂終老。 婚後失去自我的虛構愛蜜莉，感受婚姻的冰冷，對照真實愛蜜莉在羅德西亞荒野的無援和挫折。「她不愁家用，華服要多少買多少；先生要她打扮漂亮。但她仍是 苦，尤其先生把裝錢的信封交給她的時候。十八歲就自力更生，如今婚姻許多讓她不快樂的事情中，就是他笑著給她錢最讓她惱恨。」丈夫死後，愛蜜莉發現自己有 說故事給小孩聽的才華，憶起書在童年何其重要，用丈夫的遺產成立慈善機構，在貧窮區設學校。儘管她不快樂，卻成了群眾景仰的名人。 燕子就要去英格蘭了，牠們比我們先到 新書一分為二，下半部真實悲憫地回顧挫敗父母一生的戰爭傷痕：艾佛烈常夢到死去的戰友，不停說著壕溝、坦克和炮火的慘烈，想擺脫揮之不去的恐懼陰影。愛蜜 莉親見無數傷兵死去，「我們無能為力」。戰爭粉碎了他們的夢和靈魂，讓他們在非洲困陷磨難和絕望，「母親身上沒有傷疤，但她和可憐的父親同是戰爭的受害 者」。一戰給父母的痛苦影響萊辛的世界觀，「那戰爭像活在我的回憶裡」。 到底寫的是血緣親人，書中萊辛難得真情流露，艾佛烈癡想發財回英國務農，但羅德西亞的田地「小得存不下一毛錢」。愛蜜莉原以為殖民地少不了聚會應酬，帶了 大批衣飾，全沒派上用場。愛蜜莉看到屋前飛過的鳥會輕嘆：「啊，燕子就要去英格蘭了，牠們比我們先到。」父親想法比較正面，他對著非洲清澈的星空感懷： 「這在英國看不到，有時候我覺得這樣的夜色就值得了。」 我想要逃離那段可怕的過往，想要自由 新書還有母女間永恆的戰爭，「那句老話『她為了逃離母親而嫁人』是真理」。萊辛不諱言對母親反感，「我那時痛恨母親」。她仔細描繪母親無用的衣飾，試圖揣 摩母親的不快樂深刻感人；但誠實無隱的筆觸藏不住她怒氣未消，她直言對母親自怨自艾的氣惱：「到現在我還能感受當時的憤怒。」萊辛常抱怨她被誤解或狹隘界 定為女性主義作家，《艾佛烈與愛蜜莉》隱然可見女人要投入工作、不要窒息在婚姻裡的主張，但更深入鑽探切割自我認同與家庭、國族及歷史認同的掙扎，「我想 要逃離那段可怕的過往，想要自由」。 萊辛曾說，寫小說比回憶錄「更能彰顯真實」，她長篇虛構女英雄愛蜜莉為慈善獻身，給母親設想不同的人生，原宥並榮耀一個苦命的女性。在虛構的小說世界，她讓父母完成無法觸及的夢想，兩個失敗的人卻仍值得看重與尊敬，見證了文學重塑歷史的無限能量。 |
2008年8月31日 星期日
香檳酒--萊辛的
2008年8月30日 星期六
Japanese whiskies take world titles
Bitter taste for Scots distillers as Japanese whiskies take world titles
The whisky, distilled near the city of Sapporo on the island of Hokkaido, beat dozens of other varieties, including last year's winner, Talisker 18 years old, produced on the Isle of Skye.
Suntory Hibiki, the brand advertised by the washed-up actor played by Bill Murray in the film Lost in Translation, scooped the award for the world's best blended whisky.
Rob Allanson, the editor of Whisky Magazine, said: "Hopefully this will make people sit up and realise that the Japanese are producing some phenomenal stuff. While they don't have a particularly strong toehold in the UK, they are making great gains which the British market should take note of."
washed-up
adjective 過氣的
2008年8月28日 星期四
The Other Extreme: Low-Alcohol Beers
The Other Extreme: Low-Alcohol Beers
KELLY TAYLOR was tired of the limited choices of beers he found at bars: either insipid lightweights or staggering powerlifters.
MILD BUT FLAVORFUL Many low-alcohol beers are from Britain, but American microbrewers are now concocting their own.
LOW-OCTANE NIGHT Beers that do not pack an alcoholic punch are popular at the Diamond, a bar in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
The German beer Reissdorf Kölsch is 4.8 percent alcohol.
“There was no middle road,” he said. “We wanted to make beer where you could have a few and not have to go take a nap.”
So Mr. Taylor, the brewmaster at Greenpoint Beer Works in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, which brews for several local companies, started the Kelso of Brooklyn label in 2006 to make the quaffable beer he craved. Last year Kelso introduced a Fall Session ale. At 3.5 percent alcohol, it is full of flavor and less alcoholic than Bud Light (4.2 percent).
While many craft brewers are trying to quench the nation’s growing thirst for extreme beers pumped with alcohol, Mr. Taylor is one of a small but growing number of brewers, beer experts and importers who are applying the brakes and turning toward well-made low-alcohol beers.
“A bunch of guys talk in the market,” said Don Feinberg, a founder of Brewery Ommegang in Cooperstown, N.Y., and an importer for Vanberg & DeWulf there. “We’ve all been saying the same thing for about 18 months now, which is, enough of the high octane.”
Mr. Feinberg imports boozy Trappist and farmhouse ales, but in April he introduced a brew from another Belgian tradition: bières de table.
“When I lived there in the late ’70s and early ’80s,” he said of his time in Belgium, “everybody drank it for lunch, from grandmothers to kids.”
His new import, Brasserie Dupont’s spicy, yeasty Avril, is all of 3.5 percent alcohol. By comparison, the brewery’s more famous farmhouse ale, Saison Dupont, is 6.5 percent.
Tom Peters said Avril was selling well at his beer bar, Monk’s Café, in Philadelphia.
“Most people equate Belgian beer with big body and high alcohol, so having something like this seemed like an anomaly,” Mr. Peters said. “First, I had to educate my staff, and now they’re totally behind it. They really like to serve beers without being concerned they have to tell someone who’s drinking 8 or 9 or 10 percent alcohol, O.K., you’ve had a couple, so we have to slow you down now.”
For him, he said: “If I just want one beer, that high octane is stellar. If I want to drink several pints, I want something where I can still have a conversation.”
Other lovers of low-alcohol beer turn to Britain, where a long history of pub culture combined with a system that taxes beer according to alcohol level keeps ales at about 4 percent alcohol. Among British microbrews available in New York, Harviestoun Brewery’s grapefruity Bitter & Twisted, Orkney’s ruby-hued Red MacGregor and Daleside’s mild Old Leg Over exemplify the low-alcohol, full-flavored tradition.
“My brother and I lived in Europe, and we loved English milds because you got a lot of flavor, could have a lot of them, not get drunk, not get full, and really enjoy the taste of beer,” said Jason Ebel, an owner of Two Brothers Brewing Company in Warrenville, Ill. For the opening of their tap house this year, he and his brother, Jim, brewed a nicely hopped 3.9 percent ale, Mild, that was so successful they shipped kegs of it to New York. It has sold well at Bierkraft in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
“I think there’s a good chunk of the bigger players in the craft beer world that are starting to look at this,” Mr. Ebel said.
In fact, some bigger craft breweries already bottle beers that are below 4.5 percent alcohol. Shipyard has included a mild brown in their samplers for years, and Harpoon introduced a Brown Session Ale last year. There are also low-alcohol summer wheats like Magic Hat’s Hocus Pocus.
Last year on his blog, Seen Through a Glass (lewbryson.blogspot.com), Lew Bryson, a beer writer, began championing session beers: well-made low-alcohol brews meant for long nights at the bar. “Unfortunately, we have come to associate low alcohol with low flavor,” Mr. Bryson said in an interview.
That attitude frustrated David Pollack, owner of the Diamond, a bar in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. “It seemed silly to me,” he said, “because I knew of really delicious session beers.” So he took on a mission to increase awareness of them.
The clientele at the Diamond on a recent night seemed to appreciate his efforts, which included a detailed list of his finds in the 3 percent to 6 percent range next to his regular beer board.
“If you order off the session list, you’re not going to go home and have a fight with anybody,” said Kevin Vincent, who sipped his way through a Reissdorf Kölsch (4.8 percent alcohol), then a Tröegs Sunshine Pils (5.3 percent). “And you can get in a few different flavors.”
Liz Geisewite was enjoying a Hop Sun (4.5 percent) from the Southern Tier Brewing Company after a fitness class because, she said, the description said it was light and easy. “Everything I drink after class has to be light and thirst-quenching and refreshing,” she said.
Ms. Geisewite is the type of drinker Alex Hall is going after. In the winter he plans to open the Nomad Brewing Company in Pittsfield, Mass., which will brew a low-alcohol English mild. “We may even convert some mainstream light lager drinkers who could be attracted by its ease of drinking through a session,” he said.
This taste for session beers will grow even in the face of Americans’ growing desire for double bocks and triple I.P.A.’s, said Ron Barchet, who brews Uncle Teddy’s Bitter (4.2 percent) and Donnybrook stout (3.7 percent) at Victory Brewing Company in Downingtown, Pa. “Their lighter body and alcohol are a natural attraction for more mature craft drinkers,” he wrote in an e-mail message.
As Scott Smith, who sells draft session beers in growlers at East End Brewing in Pittsburgh, explained: “People who come for session growlers are like me. They have young kids, so they’ll have a beer after the kids are put to bed. They’re not out on the town. It’s more about the flavor and enjoying a quality beer.”
One sign of changing times is the addition of a session beer category at the 2008 Great American Beer Festival, from Oct. 9 to 11 in Denver. “We realized that the smaller, flavorful, unique session beers made by craft brewers were being lost in the increased interest in extreme beers,” Charlie Papazian wrote in an e-mail message. Mr. Papazian is president of the Brewers Association, which operates the festival.
Microbrewers are experimenting with session beers as much as with big beers. Kelso’s fruity Fall Session is brewed with orange pekoe tea. Mr. Smith’s session series has included such esoterica as kvass, a fermented Russian beer made with bread.
Christopher Leonard, owner of the General Lafayette Inn, outside Philadelphia, said it was a test of his skill to create Lafayette’s Escape, a beer in the style of bière de table, at his inn’s brewery. It is only 1.9 percent alcohol.
“I was looking for a new challenge,” Mr. Leonard said. “I thought, Let’s go extreme the other way.”
He came up with an amber ale that has the peppery, herbal notes of Belgian yeast. “The beer had a residual sweetness, heft and density that made it taste like something that had more alcohol,” he said.
But although attention to low-alcohol beers is growing among craft brewers, there is still “not a lot out there,” said Mr. Pollack of the Diamond in Brooklyn. Because beer with less alcohol does not travel or keep as well as stronger brews, session beers are often available only in draft editions that do not make it to New York.
Moreover, whether beer drinkers will give up the stronger stuff and embrace beers with a low alcohol by volume, or A.B.V., remains to be seen.
On a recent evening at the East Village Pub in Manhattan, the owner, Bill Mackin, was fretting over the Victory Donnybrook he had listed next to Sixpoint Craft Ales’ 6.6 percent Diesel stout.
“The heat hit in the summer; I thought Victory would be more sellable,” he said. “But the Sixpoint outsells it, 2 to 1.”
As if on cue, Pat McCann, in a rumpled softball uniform, plodded in and ordered the Diesel. “I wanted a stout, and I don’t want a 3.7,” he said. “We lost by 12 runs tonight.”
“See?” Mr. Mackin said. “People lose their jobs, they don’t want a low A.B.V. People lose at baseball, they don’t want a low A.B.V.”
That may be the case, but according to those who champion session beer, if you’re at the top of your game and want to stay there, a low-alcohol beer may be your poison.
2008年8月26日 星期二
Making sense of wine《葡萄酒好喝的秘密》
葡萄酒好喝的祕密 Making sense of wine
- 作者：馬特‧克拉瑪/著
- 原文作者：Matt Kramer
- 譯者：梁永安編者：林裕森/審定
- 出版社：大地地理
- 出版日期：2000年0
《葡萄酒好喝的秘密》給了我們一個很重要的提醒：葡萄酒是大地的傾吐，是產地土壤與葡萄品種的唱和。書中把很多有關葡萄酒的神話一掃而光。為什 麼餐廳侍者會在開瓶後把軟木塞拿給我們瞧一瞧？每當這個時候，我們又該做些什麼？另外，有所謂「正確」的葡萄酒杯嗎？雖然克拉瑪的答案基本上是否定的，但 他依然會告訴你，什麼樣的酒杯才分別是喝紅酒、白酒和香檳時的上選。
克拉瑪告訴我們，最初，葡萄酒給他的觀感是「派頭十足、盛氣凌人， 加上它那令人望而生畏的複雜性，還是敬而遠之為妙。」不過，後來他發現「一種葡萄酒的是好是壞，存在著一定的客觀標準，而不只由各人口味決定。」 「葡萄酒以最明確無疑的方式吐露出它們的原產於何地，讓我們有機會竊聽到土地的呢喃。終於，我們有了一本奇書，在書中發現了葡萄酒好的秘密！
2008年8月25日 星期一
2008年8月22日 星期五
Bordeaux starts to look a bit bubbly
Buyers and cellars
Aug 21st 2008
From The Economist print edition
Bordeaux starts to look a bit bubbly
A WRINKLED nose from Robert Parker, a masterly American wine critic, used to be enough to send wine prices down deeper than the Bordeaux cellars where he does his tasting. The popular grape-based alcoholic drink is developing as an asset class, and investors have started to trade derivative products in the form of en primeur, a type of wine future. But a new breed of rich investors and wine drinkers in China, India and Russia have sent en primeur prices so high that not even Mr Parker’s nose can bring them back down.
En primeur is the French term for wine before it is bottled. Speculators are allowed to buy a portion of the stuff in the hope that the wine proves to be a hit with the retail and investment market two or three years later. Every spring a group of investors, wholesalers and wine critics descend on a few established Bordeaux wine producers to taste the fermented grape juice. The system has been employed for years by producers as a way to complement their main source of income. They can earn money while their top wines wait to be bottled and sold. These days, all eyes are on Mr Parker, who sniffs and sips and then awards the wine a score out of 100, which the buyers and sellers in the market use to establish a price. Better wines get higher scores and are more expensive.
But the most recent round of en primeur trading has set a precedent. The vintage was not good but the prices remained high. Mr Parker awarded a relatively low 90-93 points for the 2007 Chateau Lafite-Rothschild en primeur, but cases still went for £2,500 ($4,900). Three years earlier he gave a similar score to Chateau Lafite, and the cases only sold for £950.
Money has flooded into the wine-investment market, routed through some former City traders who have set up wine funds. The Liv-ex 100 Index, which charts bottled-wine prices, has shrugged off the credit crunch and outperformed global stockmarkets. The index is up 9.5% over the past 12 months, though it dipped a bit in July. Meanwhile, the tax on imported wine in Hong Kong was scrapped in March, after dropping from 80% to 40% last year, further boosting Asian demand.
Some suspect that the new consumers sometimes care more about the brand than the quality. (Lafite, for example, is particularly popular in China because of its status.) They also claim that Bordeaux risks alienating its core group of European and American investors and drinkers with high en primeur prices. The old traditions are beginning to change. Some négociants, the wine wholesalers that link the chateaux to the traders, have boycotted this year’s vintage because of high prices. This is a bold move. Refusing to buy up this year’s wine will mean they forfeit access to next year’s vintage. The old-schoolers now find themselves wishing for both a run of bad vintages and a downturn in the emerging economies. Only then, they say, will sobriety return.
2008年8月19日 星期二
三ツ矢サイダー 日本品質 青森産ふじりんご PET500ml
アサヒ飲料、プレミアム果汁炭酸飲料「三ツ矢サイダー 日本品質 青森産ふじりんご PET500ml」を発売
「フレッシュクオリティ製法」は、アサヒビールグループの最新技術であり、飲料業界初となる画期的な製造方法で、果汁炭酸飲料の製造工程で、殺菌 された中味（液体）および容器（ボトル・キャップ）を高度に衛生管理された環境で充填することによって、従来は充填・密栓後におこなっていた加熱処理工程 を省略した点が特長となっている。この製法の導入によって、（1）おいしさの向上、（2）環境負荷低減、（3）コストアップ抑制－－の3つが実現できたと 説明する。
「三ツ矢サイダー 日本品質」シリーズは、厳選された国産果汁のみを贅沢に使用し、「製法」のみならず、「素材」にもこだわった“プレミアム果汁炭酸飲料”として、「三ツ矢 サイダー」ブランドがこだわりつづけている「おいしさ」と「品質」をより進化させた商品。シリーズ名の「日本品質」とは、同商品の「おいしさ」と「品質」 へのこだわりと自信をストレートに表現したものとなっている。
シリーズ第2弾となる「三ツ矢サイダー 日本品質 青森産ふじりんご」は、りんご生産量日本一を誇る青森県で、りんご出荷量の約半分を占める人気ブランド「ふじりんご」の果汁を20％使用。新技術「フレッ シュクオリティ製法」導入によって、「三ツ矢サイダー」ならではのすっきりした爽やかなおいしさに加え、完熟した「ふじりんご」の華やかな香りを存分に味 わえる仕立てとなっている。
パッケージは、りんごの果実と炭酸をイメージした金の泡をボトル全体で表現し、縦書きのシリーズ名「日本品質」と「三ツ矢サイダー」ブランドのシンボル“矢羽根”を堂々と配置し、本格感、プレミアム感および「品質へのこだわり」を表現している。
［小売価格］150円（税別）
［発売日］8月26日（火）