Getting buzzed
Manhattan’s first mead, perhaps not surprisingly, doesn’t cash in on the ancient, honey-based and high-alcohol brew’s pagan roots.
Nathaniel Martin, 30, who along with his brother, Thatcher, 27, runs the two-year-old company Manhattan Meadery, says most meads have this “Viking niche carved out,” presenting themselves as the thick, sweet, high-octane drinks that fueled the Norse explorers and their seafaring carnage.
The brothers’ first bottling—which hit local shops like Astor Place Wines & Spirits ($12.99) last fall—has a more advanced state of tippling in mind. “This is more like a white
wine you’d drink with pasta or chicken,” says Nathaniel, who has held tastings at places like Astor. “It has a unique flavor, body and complexity. Most people,” he adds, “probably wouldn’t guess it was honey.”
That’s because the brothers, who grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, took a decidedly un-Viking-like approach to its creation. Nathaniel—an environmental lawyer when not
making mead—is an avid home-brewer of beer and wines, making use of his Upper East Side patio to produce 15-gallon tubs of beer and wine bottles that fill his apartment. He’s long been experimenting with beers made with maple syrup and honey, and decided to try honey wine. He spoke with beekeepers at the Greenmarkets about which honeys might work best in a wine, settling on Finger Lakes honey from Tremblay Apiaries. “Weather and season affect the honey so much,” he says. “Every batch has its own personality.”
The brothers—who were roommates until December, when Thatcher got engaged—sampled all the honey wines out there and tinkered with their recipe, hoping to produce
something more drinkable, more elegant.
Because getting the licensing to produce alcohol is difficult and time-consuming, the brothers arranged for Prospero Winery in Westchester to brew and bottle 200 cases of their first release. They hope to produce different vintages, as well as honey-based beverages like “cyser,” a mix of hard cider and honey, and “pyment,” made with grapes and honey.
Nearly six months after the first batch, Nathaniel is still surprised at his success: “I couldn’t believe I’d come up with something that tasted so good,” he says. “Everyone just wishes for that a-ha moment, and this was mine.”
As for any Manhattan-based Vikings, meanwhile, they’ll just have to develop a taste for something a little more refined. manhattanmeadery.com
Just what the patient ordered
If you’ve ever been in a hospital bed, you probably learned that a tray of real food is much harder to find than pain medication— but it can make you feel better in more ways than one.
That’s part of the idea behind the Urban Zen Foundation, a nonprofit launched in 2006 by fashion force Donna Karan to give health care a makeover. The designer’s yen to promote integrative therapy came about after cancer took her husband’s life—she’d seen firsthand how yoga and breathing exercises had relieved his pain in ways traditional treatments couldn’t.
Urban Zen’s goal, says Jamie Naughright, director of integrative therapists, is to teach caregivers to incorporate yoga, aromatherapy, massage and a more healthful diet into treatment. The organization has launched a formal certification program—called the Urban Zen Integrative Therapist program, or UZIT —to bring the concept to health care providers. From a dietary perspective, UZIT will cover contemporary theories in nutrition and their benefits, says Jill Pettijohn, the chef and registered nurse heading the
nutrition training module. She says that includes everything from veganism to raw foods to the simple idea that “naturally grown foods are better than conventionally grown ones,” she says. (The 100 students in the therapist program’s inaugural class have been seen at Mary’s Fish Camp, Westville, Cowgirl and other lunch spots near the Foundation’s Greenwich Street headquarters.)
With the help of Karan’s star power, Urban Zen has partnered with Manhattan’s Beth Israel Medical Center, teaching doctors, nurses, therapists and administrators to integrate alternative therapies into patient treatment—and to make sure those caregivers are taking care of themselves.
A long-term goal, says Naughright, is to bring better food into hospitals. Thus far Urban Zen is paying to have a nurses’ pantry created in the cancer ward at Beth Israel, where all-juice popsicles and organic snacks are available for both nurses and patients. The foundation is also in talks with the hospital’s food service provider. In fact, food has become such an important component of Urban Zen’s outlook that April 16 through 18 they’re hosting a three-day conference on nutrition and diet; most of it will be open to the public, including panels with best-selling doctor-authors Mehment Oz and Dean Ornish.
For Naughright, moving the program beyond yoga has been a critical step toward truly integrative therapy, something she realized when Urban Zen went to New Orleans to help Katrina victims.
“I don’t want to put my foot behind my head. I want some good food, I want some good smells, I want you to massage me,” Naughright recalls hearing from patients. Now, she says, “It’s all coming together.” —RW
The Last Vintage
Armed with only a corkscrew and his unflappable enthusiasm, Bob Ransom could make a New York wine lover out of just about anybody. Since the 2000 launch of Vintage New York, his SoHobased vino-vending tasting bar, retail space and locavore snackery, a decade ago (and, later, its Upper West Side sister shop at 93rd and Broadway), Ransom has been one of the greatest champions of grapes grown, crushed and fermented in the Empire State.
“We felt that if we could create an image for New York wines and push past the fashion barrier we were up against—an image of hokey, down-home country wine that didn’t have a lot of respect— then we could create an opening. And I think we did.”
In two of Manhattan’s most sophisticated nabes, Vintage proudly showcased wines from all three of the state’s grape-growing regions (Long Island, the Hudson Valley and the Finger Lakes, in case you’ve been hiding under a barrel), including Ransom’s own winery label, Rivendell. The alarm sounded in October when the SoHo shop shuttered, and by end of year the Uptown outpost stuck a cork in it, too. Ransom said the very city economics he’d hoped to tap had done him in: “the cost of doing business in Manhattan—it’s exorbitant. The rents, the insurance, it’s almost impossible for small businesses. Being in SoHo gave us panache and style and energy. Unfortunately, we didn’t create a business that could be sustained. It hasn’t made money in 10 years.”
Even though Ransom says it wasn’t lack of interest that wrung him out, it’s difficult for lovers of local wine not to feel disappointed by Vintage’s closing. Still, Ransom insists that lack of fans wasn’t the problem: “There was no question that we were beloved by the customer base and we were every one of our winery suppliers’ biggest customer. [But] the industry isn’t big enough necessarily for such a small part of the market.”
It’s a blow one might expect would stew Ransom in a barrel of sour grapes, but it doesn’t seem to have stained his ardor for the wine biz. “Not necessarily everybody could do the kind of thing that we did,” he says. “It was very egalitarian. A rising tide floats all boats.”
