Plants

There are many prized vintages from Valpolicella, a postcard-perfect town near Verona, Italy, known for its rich, slightly sweet wines. Over the years, however, as many of these wines have gotten only sweeter, one vineyard, Bertani, has remained true to the old traditions. The result: a complex, unusually balanced wine called Amarone. Our wine correspondent sets out in search of its secret.

While Japanese master craftsmen command up to $100,000 for turning bamboo into a fishing pole, aspiring younger makers can barely find anyone to take them on as apprentices. And this isn’t the only time-honored Japanese craft at the brink of extinction. How could this happen in a country that, for centuries, has served as a model of hand-made perfection?

Where else would you expect to find a band of techno-scientific beer geeks except in the industrial side of San Francisco, Ground Zero for start-ups? Join our fermentation correspondent as she travels to the outer edges of beer flavors with the boys of Method Beer.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to find the indigenous artists outside of Pátzcuaro without a guide. We went with Jaime Hernández Balderas, from animecha tours, animechatours@yahoo.com. He is a native of Pátzcuaro, knowledgeable about the history and crafts, and speaks excellent English. Expect to pay about 2000 pesos a day for a guide ($120). Local…

Dr. Drew Ramsey, one of the founders of “National Kale Day,” now observed annually in October, has watched the media attention to Ernie Hubbard’s findings with some amusement. To him, the whole idea of a nation eating kale in dangerous excess is absurd. Even today, after all of kale’s trendiness, “The average American eats 2…

Back in 1978, John Emsley, a British chemistry professor and science writer, summed up the case against thallium, a heavy metal that is one of chemistry’s basic elements, for The New Scientist. “If ever an element was cursed at birth, that element was thallium,” he wrote. The mystery writer Agatha Christie also knew a thing…

A California biologist found toxic levels of heavy metals in kale, got slammed for it on the internet, and then found evidence that at least one of the toxins could be even more troublesome than he had thought.

Our burly white pickup truck is rolling down the highway about 10 miles east of Oaxaca, Mexico, when the ominous dilemma that will define the future of mezcal rises into view. To my left, sitting beside me on the pickup’s bench seat, are Cuauhtémoc Lopez, a mezcal maker who is carrying on his family’s traditional…

In Brooklyn, a former nuclear engineer borrows from the Caribbean’s traditional methods of distilling rum, reviving America’s first spirit in the process.