Bogart Did Not Sleep Here

Casablanca… ah, yes. Humphrey Bogart steamily kissing Ingrid Bergman. Morocco in the 1940s. WAIT. Wrong Casablanca. The pastoral vineyard-filled valley of Casablanca in Chile has no relation to the iconic WWII movie of the same name. Chile’s Casablanca (the word means white house) is named after the Chilean town of Casablanca founded in 1753 under the original name Santa Barbara Queen of Casablanca (English version) in honor of Doña Barbara de Braganza, wife of Fermando VI, King of Spain.

Retsina is a pungent, resin-flavored wine from Greece. Which of the following tree resins are used to create it?

A. Cypress

B. Pomegranate

C. Olive

D. Pine

To make retsina, small amounts of resin from the Aleppo pine tree are added to savatiano grape juice as it ferments. Retsina’s distinctive piney flavor with a turpentine-like aroma is delicious when paired with many Greek meze (small appetizers served like Spanish tapas). Resinated wines have a long history in Greece: traces of pine resin have been found in Greek wine amphorae dating back to the 13^th century B.C. Now, retsina is made all over the country, although most is made in Attica, the wine region that surrounds Athens.

“He planned dinners, of enchanting aromatic foods that should be carried under the nose, snuffed and then thrown to the dogs … endless dinners, in which one could alternate flavour with flavour from sunset to dawn without satiety, while one breathed great draughts of the bouquet of old brandy.

— Vile Bodies (1930) by Evelyn Waugh, as quoted by Charles Spence in Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating

Bogart Did Not Sleep Here

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