An additional option:
Executive Summary. I will provide all the wine. You will bring NONE. Our original idea was that the price of attendance was to show off your food acumen by bring food instead of wine to share with everyone else. Since that creates problems for people for a variety of reasons, we have a second alternatives for those who can’t bring food or who would poison us if they did. Last night, in consultation with the CEO of the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Hospital fka the Coney Island Hospital (Svetlana Lipyanskaya, who many of you know), we are going to add an alternative to bringing food. Sveta had put me on the gala dinner fundraising committee to raise funds for women’s health and maternity programs in South Brooklyn. Therefore, in lieu of food, you can make a contribution to the fundraising effort by bringing a check to the event payable to South Brooklyn Health Auxiliary, Inc. and making a charitable contribution by giving the check to the CEO, who will be present. How much? Whatever you think is fair, or more if your heart moves you.
If you want to know the history of why, you can read the lower half of this post, but if you are just forward looking, here are the details.
Following the lesson of Mike Grammar’s periodic cellar cleanings and the fact that the biggest burden of a Berserkerfest at home is cooking ten hours of meals for a bunch of Berserkers, we are going to have a reverse Berserkerfest in our back yard in White Plains on August 17, 2024, with Sunday the 18th as a rain date if there are so many people that we can’t accommodate them in house.
What is a reverse Berserkerfest? I provide the wine and you bring the food (preferably the greatest culinary concoction that you can create) to share with other hedonists. Why do it this way? Because at age 72.92 (to be precise, 72 years 11 months and 336 days), I will never drink all the wine I already own and I desperately need help. I am sure that you will be more than happy to provide such assistance.
If you want to come, Pretty Please post below with the number of people and the food you will bring so I can keep track. If you are a vegan, vegetarian, piscatarian, no pork on the fork adherent or have other dietary needs like Celiac’s Disease or you are Lactose intolerant, one of the beauties of this plan is that you will have to work that out with other cooks.
FAQs - - -
May I bring wine. NO, you are NOT allowed to bring wine. That will cause an immediate ejection. I am tired of having these events and ending up in the plus category instead of the minus category.
Will you have anything other than California rocket fuel to pour? Yes, I will have a Bordeaux table, a Burgundy Table, a Wear a Tutu (Loire) table and a Rhone table. Depending on how many people we have, there will also be a Barolo table, a Tuscany table and maybe a Spain table.
What rocket fuel will you pour? I haven’t decided yet, but there will definitely be a Saxum table, a Carlisle table, a SQN table, and a Thomas Rivers Brown table. I will probably have an Aubert table or just a Chardonnay table. If you can talk Rebecca out of some of her private stash, we will have a Black Sears table or maybe mix it into the TRB table.
Any other regions? I suppose we should have an Aussie Aussie Oi Oi Oi table, which should include some 20+ year old Shiraz from down under and a bottle or two of Wendouree.
How about dessert wine? Oh all right. How about dessert wines from around the world - Port, Sauterne, Alsatian SGNs and German Auslese, BA and TBA.
I love to cook, what can I bring? Whatever you want. No Durian. No Ortolan. No cheese that smells like my gym locker. Other than that, prove to everyone that you are the best Berserkerchef. Maybe we will take a vote and award a trophy for the best food.
Can I heat stuff up when I get there. We have a Big Green Egg, a 4 burner propane Weber that is probably on its last legs, a Weber kettle that we use for tailgates, a cheapo backup tailgate grill and a propane burner that puts out something like 75,000 BTUs with a steel wok that is about 3 feet wide. That’s just outside. We also have a gas oven and an electric oven indoors. The guy across the street just built an outdoor brick pizza oven. I don’t even know his name, but maybe we can talk him into something, although I have a pizza stone for the BGE.
Should I bring glasses? I think we have enough, but I have not counted recently. I will post more later. You should definitely bring a charm to put around the stem of your glass so that you don’t lose it.
Where? My house in White Plains. I will post the exact address later but it is easy to find with Google. It is NOT 56 Mansfield Road, which still shows up although we sold it almost 40 years ago.
What time are you going to start? Let’s say 1 pm.
What time are you going to finish? I have no idea. I suspect that it will be soon after the food runs out or 10 pm, whichever comes first.
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Here is the original post:
We had our first backyard Berserkerfest in 2010. BF 2.5 - 5/15 Grillin' in the Burbs - FLANNERY HAS LANDED!!.
And this was the largest bottle - a 12 liter provided by the world famous Croation Cuddler:
We had a smaller one in 2019 (only 62 bottles) and I promised Rebecca that I would never do it again because I’m too old. BUT . . . with age comes an overstuffed wine cellar, so I need to move inventory. The hardest part is cooking all that food for all the rest of you. You try cooking five full dinners over 10 hours for 60+ hungry Berserkers.
NOTE based upon comments below:
THERE is no limit on number of people - or at lest we have never reached a limit - so long as it does not rain. I think that we can handle 80-100 in the back yard and the deck. Over that and you may have to drink while standing in the pool. Although we have a habit of breaking lots of wine glasses at our house, I think we still have close to 100, so unless people want to drink white and red out of separate glasses, that should not be an issue.
I have given this a lot of thought and my solution is a “ReverserFest.” The purpose of this post is to explore people’s interest in the following proposed event, to be in White Plains, NY, on a Saturday during July or August.
I will provide ~100 bottles of wine - a la Mike Grammar or FM III - and the “price” of admission will be that the attendees must show off their cooking prowess by bringing some sort of entree to share with others. I have a BGE, An outdoor Weber propane 4 burner and an outdoor Weber charcoal grill, an indoor gas oven and an indoor electric oven if it doesn’t die before then (age unknown - it was there when we bought the house in 1986), and a bug zapper - a/k/a microwave, so we can reheat things.
The locals will have to bring something, but if you travel, you get a pass, BUT remember that when we went to Falltacular as COVID was starting, we schlepped two full smoked briskets with caramelized onions across the continent. Anyone bringing wine will be expelled immediately because the object of this exercise is to clear out space from my wine cellar so that the homelessness problem (three racks outside the door in the basement plus countless cases that will not fit through the cellar door because the cellar floor is stuffed) will be given homes in slots in the cellar.
Maybe we will make some salads or appetizers depending on what other people plan to bring AND if I can remember who rented it to us, maybe I will again get the chocolate fountain for dessert so that The Toddster can again be photographed eating chocolate covered bacon.
AND Brad Kane, who may or may not have stepped into the swimming pool while taking a photo (he says that it was Greg Tatar), will have plenty of wine to drink and I will waive the Tutu Wearing department. I will have a Loire table with my magnum of 2007 Olga Raffault Chinon Les Picasses and some stuff from Pierre Breton - good guy with his clean and jerk wine poster, Another table will include my lone remaining bottle of 1990 Domaine Joseph Roty Gevrey-Chambertin Les Champs-Chenys (You can read my TN in CT from 2005 if you do not believe that I own such swill), and a selection of Hospices wines from 2005 and 2006Jay Miller will also be able to drink from the table featuring my antique Bordeaux collection, which, if I can find it, includes a 1966 Clos Fourtet and a 1966 Gruaud Larose.
But the Pro Flavor Bourgeoisie will have plenty to drink, because I promise a Saxum table, a wines of Manfred Krankel table, a Carlisle table and a wines of Thomas Rivers Brown table and plenty of others.
So what say you?
