Day 2—Spheres of influence at Aspen Food & Wine Classic

ASPEN — The rains returned late Friday night but quit sometime before dawn, a fact I only learned this morning from a giddy couple still heading home after a night on the town. They both were soaked, although more from something in their Reidel glassware rather than anything falling out of the sky. The main focus this weekend for many attendees of the Food & Wine Classic does seem to the be near-endless list of parties being hosted from Starwood to the top of Aspen Mountain. It's a grand life but it does get in the way of actually attending one of the dozens of seminars and demonstrations featuring many of the top names in food and wine. If you're determined, however, you can have it both ways, as renowned Napa chef and winemaker Michael Chiarello demonstrated during his seminar on sustainability titled "The Farm-to-Fork Connection: Creating a Sustainable World at Your Table." "Is anybody else suffering a red-wine hangover this morning," asked Chiarello, an opening line that brought a murmur of agreement from the crowd. "But we're pros, right? We can do this." Chiarello and organic gardener Peter Jacobsen, whose Jacobsen Orchards near Yountville in the Napa Valley supplies greens and other veggies to the French Laundry restaurant, emphasized the "spheres of influence" we each have in making choices on where and what we eat, decisions completely personal but with immense impacts on the world around us. "Eating is an agricultural act," said Jacobsen, quoting poet and farmer Wendell Berry. "And (author) Michael Pollan called it 'voting with your fork.'" He urged everyone to become a farmer. "Plant some basil, get involved in the agricultural process," he said, "Commit creative acts of gardening. Take one small step for farming." We each had a glass of Chiarello's zinfandel at our seat and he asked us to pick up the glass, swirl, sniff and sip. "You can smell the soil inside this wine," he said. But Chiarello, who organically farms 20 acres in the Central Valley, said the switch to better food production (better being my term, meaning fewer pesticides and chemicals) won't be easy. "It took me seven to nine years" to change-over his farm to organic although "after five years we were seeing everything come to life. "Once the soil came alive, I was getting the same yield" as the non-organic producers, he said. But it's not enough to say you're sustainable simply because you're organic, Chiarello warned. "Sustainable is not just organics; part of sustainability is reducing your reliance on other things," Chiarello said. Like, umm, tequila maybe. During an earlier panel discussion on vintage Burgundies, Canadian wine merchant Robert Simpson blamed "a night of tequila" on his foggy manner although he rallied like a trooper during the 90-minute seminar.