Drink

Try making up your own cocktail. It's hard. Really hard. Cocktails are balanced chemical concoctions, delicious flavors and fun textures that result from a trick of various dancing ingredients, and usually, when you come up with a cocktail idea and try to make it — even if you’ve read great theory books — it is either too sweet or too nothing, too flat. The best way to come up with one, then, is to play on existing templates. It’s not difficult to make your own sour or spritz, but the best of the best, perhaps the most fun cocktail ever, is the espresso martini. And no cocktail is easier to play with. Many of today’s classic cocktails trace their heritage to the Prohibition Era, but the espresso martini comes from the swinging nightlife of 1980s London.

On Washington’s U Street, nestled between a dry-cleaners and the city’s most notorious gay gym, lies Exiles, a modest Irish sports bar marked by a warm blue neon sign and a Bills flag. “It’s a Bills bar and they’ll play a Jets game for me,” boasts Carmen, a local sitting at the long wooden bar. Red Liverpool soccer scarves drape over bottles of whiskey. A large Guinness bell hangs in the middle of the bar. “What can I get for you darling? I almost didn’t recognize you with your glasses on,” says a tender voice with an Irish accent. It’s Donagh. Pronounced “DUN-AHH” according to a sign at the bar. He’s a bartender and one of the owners. “Donagh and Paul will make you feel right at home...

For a country like Ireland, as devoted to its faith as to a good party, the fact that St. Patrick’s Day falls during Lent poses a problem. The saint himself is said to have broken his fast during Lent, eating meat instead of fish, for which he was so apologetic that an angel came to give him comfort. Put your meat into a dish of water, the angel said, and it will turn to fish. This Patrick did and was very pleased to see that the angel was right. The meat had turned to fish, and he could partake of it without guilt. The Irish call this miracle “St. Patrick’s Fish,” and feel no qualms about eating a pork roast to celebrate the day. You can also keep a holy day and drink to excess, if you’re drinking for the right reasons. St.

Sometimes, I pretend that I worked the wine beat thirty or forty years ago. I picture myself in formal wear, kicking back in gilded settings, sipping perfectly aged first growth, trading bons mots with winemakers. We’d spend hours solemnly considering the slow, steady, seemingly eternal rise of wine culture, and how inevitably it would soften the cruder edges of society. It would be so merry, yet cerebral — but also something we could feel good, even morally superior, about participating in. Instead, I’m in 2024 wearing yoga pants and guzzling mineral water (must hydrate!) by myself holding Zooms with winemakers, sweating over the fact that scientists say climate change imperils up to 73 percent of the world’s current wine-growing regions.

If the dozens of cartoonish stereotypes that flood my mind when I think of France — grand Bordeaux estates, snails and frog legs dripping in garlic butter, elegant women striding down the Champs-Élysées, a glittering Eiffel Tower at night — a stein of hoppy beer is nowhere to be found. France is not known for its pints. And yet, much to the concern of its vineyards and winemakers, that could be changing. “There has been a real explosion of breweries all over France in the past few years,” says Alexandra Berry, a Paris-based beer and hops sales consultant and the author of From Earth to Beer: The Expression of Terroir in a Glass. “General sales in wine have started to decrease in France in part because the industry has started to seem a little dated and overrated.

What’s the next big thing in California wine? Everyone knows about the great Cabernets and Chardonnays of Napa. Most people would say that Sonoma is a close runner-up, with some excellent Cabs and Chards and Pinot Noirs, especially in the Russian River Valley. There are Zinfandels, the original plus-size wine, which is the sort of thing people like who like that sort of thing. But let’s travel south to the Central Coast, between San Francisco and Los Angeles. There is plenty of good (if not great) Cabernet and Chardonnay there as well. But the region is perhaps best known for Rhone-style, Syrah-favoring wines. Get ready for something new: some luscious red wines built largely around Touriga Nacional and Tinta Cão, two of the grapes used to make Port in the Douro region of Portugal.

The downtown streets of Georgetown, Texas, are a grid of pastel storefronts and Victorian architecture, centering around the domed and columned Williamson County Courthouse (named after the judge known as “Three-Legged Willie”). America’s fastest-growing city looks like a time capsule from the old Southwest. But thirty miles south, Austin — or “Silicon Hills” — is undergoing a tech boom. Microsoft, Musk’s gigafactory and a host of tech startups have unleashed a flood of yuppie commuters into Austin’s surroundings, rapidly transforming not just Georgetown, but what we think of as quintessentially Texan. Rodeos, the Alamo, cowboys and outlaws — will we one day think instead of smartwatches and Bill Gates? I doubt it.

I was born in Wisconsin and I’ve learned a curious thing traversing it. There appears to be a state law requiring at least one bar at every intersection of its rural roads. I’ve noticed this most often driving at night: there’ll be a neon sign advertising Old Style or Leinenkugel’s hung in the front window of what looks like a farmhouse living room, and several cars nestled up against the house like sucking pigs. There is something homey about a rural bar. The knotty pine, the “first dollar” framed above the cash register, neighbors ironing out local prejudices and asserting the superiority of the Packers despite any evidence — if anyone’s brave enough to produce some.