Alien Spacecraft: Drinkable or Smokable?

Lots of restaurants are having cigar nights these days, so it was only a matter of time before one of them--West Hollywood’s Eclipse, on April 10--held a combination cigar and winemaker’s dinner featuring the wines of Bonny Doon.

Why especially Bonny Doon? The flagship product of that winery, which has specialized in the grapes of southern France, is named Le Cigare Volant.

Refined palates may detect a “tobacco-leaf” aroma in this wine, made from the same grape varieties as the famous Chateauneuf-du-Pape, but the real reason quirkish winemaker Randall Grahm chose that name was that during the great flying saucer scare of the ‘50s, the village of Chateauneuf-du-Pape passed a law forbidding cigares volants to land in its precious vineyards. (The French think of flying saucers as flying cigars.) The winemaker’s dinner on Eclipse’s patio featured aged El Sublimado cigars from the Dominican Republic and five vintages of Le Cigare Volant.

Peppering his semi-whimsical commentary with quotes from German philosophers and Alice Cooper, Grahm had just gotten to his crusade to “break the dominant Chardonn-ocentric paradigm” when a familiar-looking figure strode briskly in front of him onto the patio. “You can take the stage, if you’d like,” Grahm offered.

“I don’t follow amateurs,” quipped interloping cigar-lover Milton Berle. Uncle Milty, as it happens, used to write songs with Grahm’s grandfather, ASCAP co-founder Lou Herscher, in the 1920s.

Anyway, It’s Still a Bad Idea to Eat Matches

The things that catch your eye about “An Appetite for Passion Cookbook,” edited and compiled by Lisa Fine and Ivana Lowell (Hyperion: $15.95), are the cover art--rather reminiscent of “Like Water for Chocolate”--and the note that its foreword is by that novel’s author, Laura Esquivel. However, the “foreword” turns out not to have any clear relationship to this book. It’s Esquivel musing about the spirit in which she wrote “Like Water for Chocolate,” the fact that she loved Coca-Cola until the Vietnam war and (no kidding) her belief that the spirit of Woodstock lives on.

The recipes, for which aphrodisiac claims are none-too-subtly suggested, come not from Esquivel but mostly from celebrities such as Nan Kempner and Marla Trump, restaurants (Le Cirque, Auberge du Soleil), a Houston caterer and various books. In bookstores.