bottle&flame
Musings on food, wine, and more
Issue 015 · June 2026
Currently drinking · Gin martini, twistOn the stove · Bangers and roast potatoes
trust your wine people
Featured · Bottle · Wine

trust your wine people

I bought a bottle of Aligoté because a friend posted one on Instagram. It turned out to be one of the best whites I've had all year, from the grape Burgundy spent a century apologizing for.

August 18, 2026Read the essay →
An aside · No. 47
“Cook for an hour and you might learn something. Cook for ten years and you might unlearn the wrong things.
— From a 2019 dispatch

Field notes.

Briefer than an essay, longer than a tweet. Updated whenever something’s worth saying.

Drinking tonight
A 2019 Bourgueil. Cool, peppery, gone in an hour.
On the stove
Brown butter with capers and toasted breadcrumbs.
Reading
Bill Buford’s Heat, again. The Babbo chapters still hold.
Listening
A David Chang interview from 2017 that holds up fine.
Brian Fenn
About the maker

Writing from Lake Oswego.

Bottle & Flame has been a notebook since 2013 — kitchens in London, Shanghai, and now Oregon. Brian cooks from memory as much as from recipes: what a market in Xintiandi taught him, what a Sunday roast in Islington required, what the pantry in Lake Oswego demands on a Tuesday night.