Alcohol and Los Angeles have a funny relationship – we Angelenos love to sample a bit of everything, but can’t sample too much of it for fear of, well, sampling too much. Now though, everything is about to get a little more complicated.
It’s generally always difficult to refuse a glass of wine, but it’s especially difficult when it comes from a machine from the future. The Enomatic machine, gaining popularity at fine establishments around our fair, wine-soaked city, uses a patented technology to keep a bottle of wine at the perfect temperature to allow it to stay open and delicious for up to three weeks. How we lived without this for so long is beyond us; restaurants have begun using it to crack open pricier bottles of wine so that before shelling out $200 on a bottle you’ve never tried, you can get a taste and discuss it’s legs, oaky flavor, and decide if it’s what you’re really looking for.
Such pioneering restaurants include Pourtal on Santa Monica Blvd. between Ocean Ave and 2nd Street as well as the new-ish Drago brothers’ outpost Via Alloro in Beverly Hills on Canon and Dayton Way. Other restaurants with an understandably significant focus on wine include Vinoteque on Melrose Ave. and Eva on Beverly Blvd.
There are some among us who are of the school of thought that hard alcohol has just as much business in our glasses as wine does, and worry not – we’re not left out of this intoxifying revolution. Bars and restaurants around town have begun employing “mixologists” rather than bartenders for your drinking pleasure. Your gin and tonic no longer floats with items like an Aviation No. 1 on the menu at Comme Ca, the Absinthe ’75 at the Edison, or the Thug over at the Roger Room. Why not sample them all and hit The Association, Copa D’Oro, or Guys and Dolls to see what they’ve started calling a combination of gin, champagne, and elderflower – we bet it’ll be some riff on “Brass Flower.”
