This was mentioned in The New York Times food section last week, a “carpaccio of tomatoes.”

Now friends, you may slice a tomato thick or you may slice it thin, but no matter how thin you slice it, it’s still just a sliced tomato. And a sliced grapefruit — not an easy matter anyway — is not a “carpaccio of grapefruit,” which I have seen on menus; it’s just a sliced grapefruit.

Most people who love food, especially Italian food, know that beef Carpaccio is a dish that consists of paper-thin slices of raw beef served with olive oil, arugula and Parmesan cheese. It was invented by Giuseppe Cipriani of Harry’s Bar in Venice and named after the great Venetian artist Vittori Carpaccio (1460?-1525/6). The point is, I mean my point is, that “carpaccio” is not a technique; it’s a dish, which could (one grants) have some acceptable range of variation — one pictured here has truffles, which seems like over-kill — but still must necessarily operate within its proper sphere. I could see lamb Carpaccio, for example, treated in the regular manner, but I have also been served shrimp Carpaccio and octopus Carpaccio, and I would say that those concepts are beyond the pale.

Today, you see, carpaccio has become the new napoleon. What I mean is that 10 to 15 or more years ago, witty (or desperate) chefs expanded the notion of the luxurious dessert called a napoleon — layers of puff pastry alternating with pastry cream, whipped cream or jam and topped with fondant icing, traditionally with combed brown and white stripes — to mean any group of ingredients stacked in layers. Hence, lobster napoleons, hence sweetbread and foie gras napoleons. The limit, for me, was reached at La Maison Blanche, in Paris, in March 1990, where I was served a “napoleon” that stacked, carefully, eel with eggplant and zucchini. Sorry, but that sounds like vertical ratatouille to me.

(What I chiefly remember about the restaurant is that a large white German shepherd-like dog was sleeping right inside the front door, blocking the way in or out. Nobody paid attention; they just stepped over the dog. The French are sort of lovable after all.)

The connection between the dessert and the short Corsican conqueror seems to be the remarkable resemblance that the pastry napoleon bears to Napoleon’s Tomb at Les Invalides. Ha-ha, no, I made that up, it’s probably an association with napolitain, the French adjective for Naples.

All right, F.K., you’re saying, you’re on one of your tears again.

Well, hell, yes, of course, because words have meanings and they matter, and the names of things, the names by which we know them — napoleons and carpaccio — have meanings and they matter. When those words and names are blurred and forgotten, we have lost something irreplaceable. When some master chef of the “Slicing and Dicing” class at the Culinary Institute of America blithely says, “O.K., apprentices, carpaccio those tomatoes for me and napoleon them on the plates,” we have doomed ourselves a little.

I’m just trying to keep that from happening quite so soon.

The image of the beef carpaccio at top is from abc.net.au; the second carpaccio (with truffles) is from atmospherebistro.com. The napoleon is from grahamdavies.net; Napoelon’s tomb is from sagarmatha.com. Thanks to all.

Here’s a test. What kind of wines do these descriptions, from the June 15, 2007, issue of The Wine Spectator, refer to?

1. “Superripe and exotic, with layers of rich tropical fruit and hints of apple, melon and pineapple.”
2. “Unctuous and nectarlike, with layers of ripe apricot, peach, vanilla and butterscotch flavors.”
3. “Rich and concentrated, with a mix of buttery pear, fig and melon flavors.”
4. “Intense, spicy … with lush flavors of butterscotch, ripe peach, honey and golden raisin.”
5. “Ultrarich … with lots of depth and concentration to the fig, toasty oak, hazelnut and melon flavors.”
6. “Spicy and rich, with loads of ripe apricot, candied orange and pineapple flavors.”
7. “Rich, creamy … with vanilla, pear and fig flavors.”
8. “Very elegant … with lots of ripe peach, pear, baked apple and spice flavors.”
9. “A rich … core of pear, apple and spicy fruit, … roasted marshmallow taste on the finish.”
10. “Very spicy … with dried fig, baked pineapple and ripe apple flavors … flanked by floral and creamy notes.”

Ready? The answer is that 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9 describe highly-rated chardonnays from California; 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 refer to top-rated dessert wines from Austria. That’s right, dry table wines meant to be consumed with food like salmon or tuna and luxurious sweet wines meant to be savored at the end of a meal with dessert (or by themselves) are reviewed in much the same terms.

Perplexed? Puzzled? Nonplussed?

Don’t be. The tasters at WS have always preferred their California chardonnays to be so over-oaked, so super-rich and creamy, so tropical and toasty, so filled with pies and cakes and roasted fruit that to sensible folk they’re undrinkable travesties of what chardonnay should be. But WS gives the high scores; winemakers pay attention; people who like wines that pay homage to the grapes they’re made from lose.

Whew, I’m getting bored with California chardonnay. I’ll stay off this topic for a bit.

Imagine that you are a bottle of Chianti, created from grapes won by soil and climate and human sweat from a well-tended vineyard on a picturesque Tuscan hillside, nurtured in a winery with educated craft and hard-earned knowledge, bottled and corked and sent out into the world with hopeful expectation.

How do you — the bottle of Chianti — get from that sun-burnished hillside, that ancient stone winery, to a table in a city in the United States of America?
You take a circuitous path. There’s the broker in Florence who makes the deal with the importer in New York that brings the wine on a boat and, if you’re lucky, in a refrigerated container, called a “reefer,” to these shores. The importer has contracts with wholesale distributors in many states, though perhaps not all over the country if it’s a small importer, and ships the wine by truck — and if you’re lucky it’s a refrigerated truck — to various cities within its territory. The wholesale distributors in those cities, in turn, sell the wine — you, the bottle of Chianti — to retail stores, restaurants and bars with whom it has dealings. And in one of those stores, somebody buys you and takes you home.

Think of the costs involved: The cost of farming the grapes and making and aging and bottling the wine; the cost of trucking it to a seaport where it’s loading onto a ship; the cost of unloading the wine and taking it to the importer’s warehouse; the cost of promoting the wine, paying the marketing firm for advertising or at least for setting up a few lunches for journalists and retailers and restaurant people; the cost of shipping the wine inland, to Albany and Baltimore, to Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Louisville and Atlanta. The cost to the wholesaler of storing the wine — and too many wholesalers, by the way, do not have chill-rooms for wine — and paying their employees who are out hitting the stores and restaurants to sell the wine, and finally the retailer, who has rent and insurance and overtime and so on.

It seems like a miracle that we can still buy nifty little Spanish and Italian wines for $8 and $10. It also seems as if the guy getting the short end of the stick is the farmer working in the vineyard.

Anyway, I bring up these matters, and specifically the bottle of Chianti, because I recently bought at a retail store in Memphis, a bottle of Chianti 2003 produced by the firm of Giacomo Mori. Let me say this right now: In almost 23 years of writing about wine, this is the best “basic” Chianti level wine I have encountered; it’s a model, an exemplar, of what Chianti ought to be.

Let me remind readers, briefly, that three levels of Chianti exist: First (and so familiarly) is Chianti, produced in a large area of that name between Florence and Siena, large enough that quality varies widely. The image of Chianti as a light, cheap acidic wine consumed in inexpensive Italian restaurants, dripping candles stuck into the empty bottles, persisted for generations and perhaps has finally faded, because quality is improving. Next is Chianti Classico, a smaller region (though perhaps too large for consistent quality) in which the blend of grapes and barrel aging are subject to regulation, as is the case with the smaller and theoretically more prestigious category, Chianti Classico Riserva.

So, the point is that I bought this Giacomo Mori Chianti 2003, and it turned out to be terrific. It’s packed with spice, black fruit flavor and floral elements, all of these of the fresh and dried nature, as well as black tea, orange rind and soft, chewy well-integrated tannins. Unlike so many red wines in Tuscany today, this one is aged in large casks, not small oak barrels, so there’s little oak influence. The chief character here: Lovely purity and intensity, balance and integration.

The average retail price for this wine is $19 or $20, though an Internet search revealed princes ranging from $15 to $23. Whoa, FK, you’re saying, I like my Chianti to run about $12 or $14. I mean, we’re talking about a simple, basic wine here.

I understand that, but there’s nothing simple about the quality, the authenticity or the integrity of this wine. I think it’s definitely worth $20.

On the other hand, I paid $34, and I’m pretty steamed about that.

As I have pointed out in this post, myriad factors contribute to the cost of a bottle of wine in its progress from birth to the customer’s wine-glass, and I don’t expect a wine made in California or shipped in to New York to cost the same in Memphis as in those places. But a little better ratio would be nice. I recently wrote with high praise, for example, on this blog and on my website about the Logan Sleepy Hollow Vineyard Chardonnay 2005, from Monterey County. The suggested retail price is $18; I paid $20. OK, two bucks more. I can live with that.

However, charging $14 more for a bottle of wine than the average national price seems not just, well, downright mean but counter-productive. The retailer may be justified in passing on his expenses and the cost from the wholesaler to the customer, but how many consumers, realizing that they have paid 70 percent more for a wine than the average price, will decide not to shop at that store?

The Giacomo Mori Chiantis — there’s also an excellent single-vineyard “Castelrotto” — are Marc de Grazia Selections imported by Vin DeVino in Chicago.

I’m in the grocery store, standing at the fish counter, there’s a little sign:

“Fresh Farm-Raised

Atlantic Salmon

$9.99 lb

Chile”

Wait, I think, wasn’t I taught …? Don’t I seem to remember…? Didn’t I make an A in geography? Or a B?
Drive home, drag out the atlas, blow off a little dust, find South America, let’s see, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, right, here it is.

Just as I suspected, Chile is on the Pacific Ocean, not the Atlantic. Well, gosh, that’s a relief.

What madcaps, trying to confuse me that way.

Still bought the salmon, had it for dinner.

I’m a great admirer of wine importer and food entrepreneur Dan Philips, whose The Grateful Palate in Oxnard , California — http://www.gratefulpalate.com — is a trove of edible treasures, including the well-known Bacon of the Month Club. Philips is one of the best American importers of Australian wines, specializing in small producers with big aspirations; among several dozen labels he imports are Burge Family, Hazy Blur, Henry’s Drive, Kay Brothers, Lengs & Cooter, Lillypilly, Trevor Jones and The Willows. Philips was also partner with Sparky Marquis in the widely acclaimed Marquis Philips label, an enterprise that broke up last year.

So I was enthusiastic when a clerk in a local retail store recommended the 3 Rings Shiraz 2005 from Australia’s Barossa Valley (about $16 to $20). The label is another Philips partnership, this time with grower David Hickinbotham and winemaker Chris Ringland. I assumed that this would be a pretty bold expression of the shiraz grape; I didn’t expect a travesty.

Five or six years ago, I was in Los Angeles for a comprehensive tasting of Penfolds Grange — yes, it was an extraordinary event — and before the tasting began, Australian writer and wine-maker James Halliday rose to his feet to say a few words, and the first sentence he uttered has stayed with me: “The three most important elements of wine are balance, balance and balance.” I think this aphorism should be tattooed on the backs of the hands of every wine-maker and producer in the world as well as hung, in the form of embroidered samplers, in every winery, chai and chateau.

Halliday was not calling for well-mannered, wimpy wines, holding little fingers a-curl as they sip milky tea. He was asserting the fact that the greatest wines, at every price range, should reflect harmony and integration in all their components: fruit, acid, tannin, alcohol and — the most dangerous factor — oak. (Well, alcohol level has become a vital issue too.) Even deep, large-framed young wines intended for aging, Bordeaux classified growths, California cult cabernets, Barolos and so on, however tannic they may be in infancy, should display a sense of innate balance and order; the balance may shift and change over the years, but it’s always there.

Which brings us back to the 3 Rings Shiraz 2005.

This opens with a super-ripe, fleshy, meaty bouquet that teems with scents of macerated and roasted blackberries and blueberries as well as a touch of zinfandel-like boysenberry. In the mouth, the wine is exceedingly plush, velvety and voluptuous and, at 15.5 percent alcohol, offers a considerable amount of that high-alcohol raisiny plumminess and jamminess. The wine is starting to taste, in fact, like something you might rather spread on toast than drink with a meal with the other grown-ups. The spicy factors increase as the wine slides over the tongue, becoming not only dominant but strident and austere, and the wine concludes unpleasantly in a welter of incoherence.

My palate was not grateful.

I single this wine out, because of its origins, as a prominent example of what happens when producers value power, intensity and simple-minded texture over wines that balance feeling good and tasting good. It is not, I assure you, the only example.

I was searching the Internet trying to find label art for the Hess Allomi Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon 2004 — and never did find any, even on the winery website, which is irritating as hell — and landed on the wine-selling site, WineChateau.com, the motto for which is “Your Low Price Guide to Good Taste.” What I found left a bad taste in my mouth.

WineChateau.com is having a sale on the Hess Allomi 2004. Regular price, $34.79; sale price, $25.39.

Lucky buyer, right?

Except that the suggested retail price of the wine is — ta-dah! — $25.

I thought you would like to know.

The site is found at http://www.WineChateau.com