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Some friends came over for dinner on Saturday, one a writer finishing a novel, who didn’t ask any questions about my novel or my schedule. The last thing he wanted to talk about was writing and I don’t blame him. Another friend, visiting form the city, said he felt sorry for me, isolated out here in the winter—he knew Anne had been in Florida all last week. I tried my best to convince him there was no need to feel bad for me, that I was actually having a good time and glad to be writing full time. New York and all the rest of the world will be waiting when I get back. In the meantime solitude is welcome, and in fact, when you’re really writing there’s a powerful feeling that company of any kind is the

When I first met Lora Zarubin I never could have imagined that we would find ourselves locked in adjacent cells in the police station of a provincial French town at 3 in the morning. In fact I never thought I’d see her again after our disastrous first encounter, which took place in 1995 at the Grill Room of the Four Seasons hotel. My friend Dominique Browning had recently been appointed editor in chief of House and Garden and she’d decided to ramp up the magazine’s coverage of food and wine. She’d already hired Lora as food editor and Lora was quite adamant that there should be a regular wine column. Dominique, a longtime friend, knew about my passion for wine, and she thought it would be interesting to have someone outside the field write about it. When she

 Just back from Burgundy. Yeah, I know, sounds great. If I had a bottle of La Tache for every person who’s said how lucky I am to get paid to taste wines in places like Napa and Bordeaux and Burgundy I’d be one very happy wino, but the reality of the wine writer’s job—even a part timer like myself—is not necessarily as glamorous as it sounds. Sometimes you wake up in the morning in your rented apartment in Beaune with a little bit of a mal de tete, (aka a gueiles de bois) and that handheld shower thing is not really working and you stop at the café and grab a really bad coffee, which is pretty much the only kind they have in France, and a really good croissant, (though there are bad ones too) before driving

“This is your turf, Jay,” George said, as we navigated the buckling sidewalk on the Lower East side. “I feel a little out of my element.” We were trying to find the bar where we were to give a joint reading, after jumping out of the cab at the wrong spot. At that moment a goth girl with multiple piercings shouted, “Hey George! George Plimpton!” as she passed us. And I realized at that moment that George was never really out of his element, that he was at home, and known, almost everywhere. He was an explorer, and he was an icon, his silver mane and his weathered patrician features as recognizable as his flutey, inimitable accent, that seemed to combine old New York and Cambridge, Mass with a little bit of Cambridge, England. I’ve been thinking about

No less than the farm, the city has it seasonal rhythms, although here the autumn, rather than the spring, is the season of rebirth and renewal: the time to shake off the torpor and idleness of August, the season of openings—of plays, restaurants, galleries, the season when the big books are published, the fashions of the following year unveiled on the runways, the big charities hold their benefits as the gingko trees turn yellow, Fashion Week giving way to the Film Festival and the big gallery shows in Chelsea, the opening of the Metropolitan Opera and the City Ballet and the art auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s and Phillips de Pury which will tell us how rich the rich are feeling this year. Even for those who aren’t Jewish, the new year in New York begins in September.

1. Drink less, but better. I don’t necessarily expect to keep this one, but I like to make it every year, and at the end of the year I can tell myself I’m batting 500; even if I don’t drink less, I do tend to drink better as I learn more and as the older wines in my cellar reach maturity. And it’s my firm belief that the better the wine, the less it hurts you in the morning.

2. Drink more Riesling. Riesling is one of the food-friendliest wines in the world, and every wine merchant and sommelier you encounter will think you’re cool if you ask for it. Germany is the source of the world’s greatest Rieslings, which tend to be low in alcohol and high in refreshing acidity. Many people are scared away by

Spending a week on the Amalfi coast in June is pretty much my idea of nirvana, but I’m a little depressed about the fact that in all that time and despite a twenty-hour layover in Naples I had only one pizza. And strangely enough it was at a Michelin one star restaurant in Positano, in the San Pietro hotel. But damn was it good, much better than the wood-grilled dorade for which I had high hopes—the only disappointing fish I had on the trip, strangely flavorless, possibly not entirely fresh. The view almost made up for it though—we were perched on a cliff about five hundred feet over the Mediterranean. The wine was good, too: I was drinking from a mag of 2001 Terre di Lavoro—tried to drink locally while there, and there are some great reds in