Blind Tasting and Black Coffee 🗣️🍷

The memories of a scent, of a flavor, can help us analyze a mystery wine—and come to terms with our most poignant memories. This issue features gustatory meditations from a wine scientist and a New York City writer. The flavor nerd in your life would love Modo di Bere.

A Delicious Gift for Delicious People

Can you believe this is the sixth weekly issue of Modo di Bere Magazine? It means so much to us that you are reading it! (Keep reading for an incredible essay by Mitch Levenberg, below.)

You can now purchase a gift subscription for that person in your life who would love Modo di Bere, giving them access to exclusive videos, podcasts, articles and guides. The “Newsletter Drinker” subscriber tier removes all paywalls across the Modo-verse.

Do you have one of these people on your holiday gift list?

-A relative who wants to learn about wine
-A friend with the longest Duolingo streak ever
-A member of your community who deserves to travel more

(Is one of them you?)

If this is the last-minute gift idea you’ve been waiting for, run, don’t walk, to patreon.com/MododiBere/gift

Blind tasting isn’t magic, but it’s pretty cool.

Blind tasting—deducing the grape, age and geographic origin of a wine based on sensory analysis alone—can seem like the wine world’s most mystical practice. Wine flavor scientist Dr. Rachel B. Allison came on the Modo di Bere podcast to break down exactly how it’s done. You can watch Dr. Allison blind taste a wine in the video version of the podcast, and maybe even start to learn how to blind taste wine yourself.

Dr. Allison chats with RT about how she grew up bilingual, thinking in a language the rest of her family didn’t understand. They contemplate whether Montreal’s favorite swear word is actually a wine term, and they discuss how getting in better touch with your own sense of smell is a lot like learning a language.

The video podcast is pretty exciting—please click on the YouTube link and subscribe to our channel, even if you don’t watch the whole video now—but of course you can download and listen to this week’s episode, as always, at this link or in your preferred podcast player.

Mitch Levenberg shares memories of family and flavor

We’re extremely proud to introduce December’s guest contributor, Mitch Levenberg.

Mitch Levenberg has published essays and stories in such journals as Fiction, The Common Review, The New Delta Review, Fine Madness, The Saint Ann’s Review, The Assisi Review, and others. “Write Something,” his collection of essays, was published in 2013. He teaches writing and Literature at St. Francis College.

Rose Thomas is a member, along with Mitch, of the Carroll Street Collective, a writers group that hosts regular public readings at Young Ethel’s, a bar in Park Slope. After hearing Mitch read at Young Ethel’s, RT became a huge fan of Mitch’s memoir essays about food and family.

To support literary work of Carroll Street quality, consider becoming a paid subscriber of this magazine, or show up in person for the collective’s next public reading on January 8, 2025, at 6 pm at Young Ethel’s, 506 5th Avenue, Brooklyn. It’s free, but you will pass by a prominent sign that those who enter the reading room have agreed to buy a drink.

My Father Puts His Book Down

by Mitch Levenberg

When my father puts his book down at the kitchen table, I feel slightly nauseated. “You don’t need to put so much sugar in your coffee. You’ll see that after a while you won’t need it at all.” I think of other times when he gave me advice. Like when I was eight years old.

“Look,” he said back then. “God knows I can’t stand people either. Believe me, no one’s looking at you. And who cares if they are.”

He was talking about going into the swimming pool up at a bungalow colony somewhere in the Catskills. I didn’t want to go in the pool with my shirt off because I thought I was too fat and people would stare at me, and I didn’t want to go in with a shirt on because it would start to balloon in the water and people would think I was even fatter than I was.  

“Well, if you don’t go in,” he said. “I will. No skin off my back.” This made me think of my brother who never took his shirt off in the pool because of the acne scars on his back.

My father walked down the pool steps. He wasn’t the diving type. He never dove into anything, in life or in water. Once he got in the water, he just dunked his head a few times, spread out his arms and legs like a giant bullfrog, and then swam a few feet face down in the water. When he picked his head up, he saw me still standing there staring at him. 

“I thought you’d still be there!” He shouted. Everyone at the pool looked at me. “Mitch, don't be an idiot. Get in the pool! We’re paying for it for God’s sake!”

Now, I had no choice. I had to leave. I grabbed my towel and my suntan oil, waved to my mother, brother and grandmother, squinting slabs of meat lying on their lounge chairs, and went back to the bungalow. 

Once I got there, I was completely alone. There was nothing more depressing and humiliating than sitting alone in a mountain bungalow during a sunny day, so I found a broom and swept the floor, mostly moving dust and dead insects back and forth.

Bungalow, I remember thinking to myself. What the hell is a bungalow? Was it a Jewish word? What in God’s name was I doing here? Can there really be a God if the most important decision of my existence is whether or not to go swimming in a filthy bug infested swimming pool in some godforsaken bungalow colony some place in the mountains?

What even were the Catskills? Jewish mountains? Does God give a shit about any of this, and if so, why?

Questions, questions, and no one to answer them. At least not truthfully. My father dismissed any questions with God in them, and my rabbi at Hebrew school threatened to dislocate your thumb or pull your arm out of its socket if you ever questioned what God said and did, like creating the Earth in only six days and resting on the seventh, as if God could actually get tired after only six days, or that the world was only 5,000 years old, which everyone knew was utter nonsense.

“But what about dinosaurs? “I asked the rabbi once.

“Dinosaurs, shminosaurs,” he said, deciding not to pull my arm out of its socket but to dismissively wave his hand at me instead. 

After sweeping the bungalow floor for a while, I put my head down on the kitchen table. There were still breadcrumbs there from the morning, when we ate some toast and jelly, not too much because we didn’t want to spoil our appetites for brunch.

Brunch was a big deal in this colony, like a town hall meeting of stomachs. There were eggs and pancakes and cereal and bacon and sausages, if requested, and we’d always request it, despite my grandmother getting angry because it would make us look like bad Jews, even though all the other Jews, which was practically everyone else, requested it too. Then we ate and ate like we had never eaten before. I wanted to stop. I really did. But I saw no such inclination on my or anyone else’s part, especially on my father’s. My mother said my father’s stomach was like a bottomless pit. My father’s response: “We’re paying for it, aren’t we?” 

Occasionally, I looked up at the bowls in the middle of the table and noticed that no matter how much everyone ate from them, they seemed to remain full, as if the more the bungalowites scooped up the food into their plates, the more the bowls would fill up again, like some miracle in the Bible. I imagined my mother writing a note to my teacher in September: “Mitchell won’t be able to attend the first day of school today because he’s still eating.”   

The meal we really looked forward to though was dinner. Sometimes it seemed like days went by between brunch and dinner. Every family sat on those big bug-stained, splintered Adirondack chairs under the crabapple trees, just sitting there, waiting, as if they had been waiting all their lives, for the clang of the dinner bell.

“I wish they’d ring that damn bell already,” I cried.

“I know what you mean,” my father said. “My stomach thinks my throat has been cut. But try to be patient. Remember, waiting makes the vacation feel longer.”

Who wanted the vacation to be longer?  A crab apple fell. I got up, picked it up and threw it at my brother. I didn’t throw it very hard, but he managed to catch it and throw it back at me a lot harder. It hit my arm and hurt so much I started crying. “You want to take each other’s eyes out? Is that what you want?” my mother asked us. “Will that make you happy?”  

It would certainly pass the time if one of our eyes were taken out, I thought. No doubt we’d have to walk a mile uphill to the only phone booth around, the one with the wasp’s nest inside it, and then wait for an ambulance to come from three towns away. That would pass the time for sure, I thought. But none of that happened, and all I could do now was stare at the tree and see if I could see the crabapples growing, without them noticing me, because I knew if apples caught you looking at them, they’d stop growing completely. Something like a watched pot never boils, except with crabapples. But I knew that was a complete waste of time, so I just looked for the biggest crabapples  and imagined how much they would hurt if my brother, whose arms were twice as long as mine, threw them at me. That calmed me down for a while. 

Dinner did come eventually. In fact, when the dinner bell rang, I forgot for a moment what it was for. A fire? Is the damn bungalow colony on fire? Did I leave the toaster on? Should we have removed all the plugs from the walls before leaving? But then I heard the voice of reason, of unadulterated hunger, cry out: “It’s about time! Let’s go, troops!” 

And then we all had to help my grandmother, who seemed to have sunk so deeply into her chair, she was hardly visible. 

“Don’t pull her, Frank,” my mother said. “You’ll pull her arm out of her socket. That’s all we need!” 

Eventually, we all helped get her up. I grabbed her legs, my brother cradled her neck, my mother her arms, and after a monumental struggle, we extracted from the Adirondack chair, unharmed. She still screamed her head off. 

“You’re killing me! Help! Someone please help me! They’re killing me!” But no one listened.

“I told your mother we should have left her home,” my father grumbled to me on our way into the dining room, my grandmother dragging herself behind us.

“Come on, let’s get inside before all the food’s gone,” said my father. “I can’t wait to sink my teeth into some of that brisket.” 

That night I dreamt that my father was Lon Chaney, Jr. as the Wolfman, that someone at the colony was found dead in the woods with a big piece of their neck bitten off, and my father would be sitting on his chair all innocent looking except for the blood running down the sides of his mouth. “It wasn’t me,” he kept on saying, but I knew it was.

Now, 40 years later, I am visiting my parents back in Queens. My father sits at the kitchen table behind one of his colossal tomes that stands up straight and tall, on its own metal stand, as if mocking me with its posture, never slouching with its spine bent like mine was getting more and more each day.

When I was seven or eight, around the time we were up at that bungalow colony, I had dreamed about becoming a hunchback like Quasimodo in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” I saw that movie 14 times in one week on Million Dollar Movie, which repeated movies twice a day for a whole week. Like Quasimodo, I wished I was made of stone. I also had a crush on a girl in my third-grade class who looked just like Esmeralda. 

When my father read his book at the table, he too seemed to be made of stone. Then again, so did the rest of us. My mother slumped over the kitchen sink washing out the same glass 40 or 50 times because she was thinking of something else, something she had to do but couldn’t remember. Once, she got so distracted, she turned on the hot water by mistake and scalded her hands. My father looked up, but he didn’t get up. 

I knew it would take a lot more than one of us getting injured for my father to get up from the kitchen table before he finished eating. I always remember his story about the time he was a small boy and went to a steam bath on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with his father and uncle. During lunch in the cafeteria, when they were all eating pickled herring in cream sauce, which my father loved more than anything in the world, my uncle got up to go to the bathroom and slipped on a wet spot on the floor, nearly cracking his skull.

“You could hear the crack from where we were sitting,” my father told me. “We thought for sure he was dead, especially when everyone started to gather around him, except me because I was too busy eating my herring. Can you imagine?” he asked me.

“Not really,” I said.

“I mean that’s how much I loved herring. I mean, I’ll tell you something,” he said to me, “Something I never told anyone.”

“What’s that?” I asked, excited that he had actually picked his head up from his book to tell me a secret.

“I looked over at my uncle’s plate and actually thought of finishing his herring,” my father said. “I remember thinking, if he’s dead, they’ll just throw it out anyway.”

“I guess that made sense.”

“Sure, it did. Especially if they were just going to throw it out. I never believed in wasting food, especially pickled herring. I mean there’s nothing I love more in the world than pickled herring.”

“That’s for sure!” I exclaimed.  “And did your uncle ever recover?” 

“Oh yeah,” my father said, sounding disappointed. “He had a head like an iron post.”

But now, after just a bowl of pea soup, the only soup he can taste anymore, my father suddenly stops reading, removes his book from its metal stand and puts it face down on the table.  If my father is willing to put his book down, what will happen next? 

He looks at me and then at my coffee cup, which is empty but for a lump of sugar at the bottom.

“How much sugar did you put in that?” he asks.

“A lot.”

“Why don’t you try the coffee sometime without sugar?”  

Did he hear me? Has he had a stroke? Has God spoken to him about the sugar in my coffee cup? Maybe he’s hallucinating. 

“Are you still hungry?” I ask.

“No, not anymore. Isn’t that strange?” 

“Yes,” I said, feeling very strange myself.

When he stood up, I saw how wan and pale his face had become, how his jelly apple physique, the thin legs and pot belly, had disappeared. 

“Are you going to pick another book?” I asked him. “You’ve got plenty of books left you still haven’t read.” 

“To be honest, Mitch, I don’t feel much like reading anymore.” 

I feel slightly nauseated. I have chills. My body is shaking. Is this my father’s last book? I look at it now, lying on its side like a great warrior fallen in battle.  It’s a book about Robert Moses, the man I believe was responsible for my father’s road rage. I looked back into my coffee cup and a thousand memories came back to me. The Sunday breakfasts, watching my father read, listening to his comments about books that had nothing to do with me. 

“My God,” he suddenly said, as if to no one in particular. “If not for Robert Moses, we’d have no highways.” 

“But we’d still have all those parks,” I dared to say. 

“Don’t be an idiot, Mitch. If you want to sit in a park, go upstate.”

I stare at my coffee.  All the way to the bottom, where a lump of undissolved sugar lies.  Is this where it ends? Is that everything we were to each other, a lump of undissolved sugar at the bottom of a coffee cup?

“Try it next time without the sugar,” he says.

“I will. I promise” He laughs kind of halfway uncomfortably, as if he were in both physical and mental pain. 

“You’ll see. You really don’t need the sugar.” 

He was right. Since my father died, the more I drink coffee without sugar, the more I like it, and the closer I feel to my father. It was the best advice he ever gave me.