Bad-Boy Bubbly

For centuries, there has been a connection between Champagne and women’s figures. The familiar open goblet is supposedly based on the shape of Josephine’s breast (it’s far better, though probably less attractive, to drink it from a flute). Veuve Cliquot’s prestige bottling “La Grande Dame” comes in a bottle that is supposedly modeled on the Ruebenesque shape of the widow herself.

Leave it to bad boy fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier to push the envelope. He’s designed a package for Piper-Heidsieck that squeezes a curvaceous Champagne bottle into a fire-engine red vinyl corset that laces up the front. Just the thing for certain millennial parties, huh? And they’re only $100 each.

Who Gets On the Ark

The latest issue of Slow, the magazine of the Slow Food movement, features some California food products that have been selected for the Slow Food Ark, a theoretical ship of ingredients that are in danger of being lost.

As with all such lists, this one--put together in part by my friend David Auerbach--invites comment. I will certainly go along with Dry Monterey Jack cheese, for example, as made by Vella Cheese Co. in Sonoma. And who could argue with the abalone?

Gravenstein apples are a little shakier; I have yet to have one that really knocked me out (this might change). And the Sun Crest peach, despite having had a quite lovely book written about it (David Mas Masumoto’s “Epitaph for a Peach”), probably wouldn’t stand up in an objective tasting.

But chipotle peppers? In the first place, they are hardly Californian; they come from the Sonoran desert on the Texas-Mexico border. And no one who has eaten in a “Southwestern” restaurant, be it here or in Milwaukee, would ever mistake them for threatened.

Slow, a quarterly magazine, comes with a $60 membership in Slow Food International. For more information, call (877) 756-9366.