Art, Food, and Fun

🍷 Tell Me Wine — Piemonte: Beyond Barolo
📅 Friday, 23 October 2026
🕖 19:00
📍 Leiden — exact address shared with confirmed participants

When people think of Piemonte, they tend to think of one thing.

Nebbiolo.

And, more specifically, Barolo.

There are worse problems for a wine region to have.

But Piemonte is much bigger — and considerably stranger — than its most famous wines suggest.

For the next Tell Me Wine, we’ll travel across one of Italy’s most diverse wine regions, moving well beyond the usual image of prestigious Langhe reds to discover the many different landscapes, grapes and winemaking traditions that coexist within Piemonte.

From Alpine and pre-Alpine vineyards to the hills of Monferrato and the Langhe, Piemonte changes remarkably from one area to the next.

So do its wines.

We’ll taste at least 12 wines, exploring familiar grapes alongside varieties and appellations that receive far less international attention — different colours, styles, soils, elevations and approaches to winemaking, all within the same region.

The idea is not to find “alternatives to Barolo”.

It is to understand why Piemonte cannot really be explained by Barolo alone.
As always, we’ll taste the wines together rather than simply drink them: looking at the places they come from, the people who make them, the grapes, the techniques and the cultural context behind what is in the glass.

And there will, of course, be food.

The wines will be accompanied by a selection of snacks and products connected as closely as possible to the areas we’ll be travelling through, because Tell Me Wine works better when the landscape appears on the table as well as in the glass.

### 🍷 How it works

The tasting includes:

• At least 12 different wines
• A guided tasting and introduction to each wine, producer and territory
• Regional snacks and accompaniments
• Plenty of context, stories and discussion along the way

No previous wine knowledge is required.
Curiosity helps.

### 💶 Price: €40

The price includes all wines and food served during the tasting.

### 👥 Maximum 12 participants

Tell Me Wine is deliberately kept small so that we can taste, talk and actually sit around the same table.

Please note that clicking Attend on Meetup does not automatically confirm your place.

After you RSVP, I will send you a private payment link. Your place is confirmed only once payment has been completed.

Places are allocated to the first 12 people who complete payment.
The exact address in Leiden will be shared with confirmed participants.

***

One region.

At least twelve wines.

And considerably more Piemonte than Barolo.

See you at the table. 🍷

📅 Sunday, 25 October 2026
🕒 15:00
📍 Amsterdam Centraal — city centre side

New York was once called New Amsterdam.

That much is fairly well known.

But what exactly connected Amsterdam on the Amstel to a small Dutch settlement on the other side of the Atlantic — and what can the streets of Amsterdam still tell us about the colonial system that connected them?

Welcome to Eau de Colony, a new series exploring the relationship between the Netherlands and its former colonies through the places where that history is still visible today.

For our first episode, we stay in Amsterdam.

During the 17th century, Amsterdam became one of the great commercial centres of the world. Its merchants, institutions and city government were deeply involved in overseas trade and colonial expansion, from Asia to Africa and the Americas.

Across the Atlantic, the Dutch West India Company established New Amsterdam at the southern end of Manhattan, the principal settlement of the colony of New Netherland.

It was a commercial outpost, but also part of a much larger colonial system: one built on the displacement of Indigenous populations, the exploitation of land and resources, and increasingly on enslaved labour.

In 1664, the English took control of New Netherland.

New Amsterdam became New York.

But the connections between the two cities did not simply disappear.

### 🚶 Amsterdam, seen differently

We’ll meet at Amsterdam Centraal and walk through the historic centre, looking for traces of Amsterdam’s colonial past in places that many of us probably pass without thinking twice.

Along the way, we’ll move between Amsterdam and New Amsterdam, using the story of Manhattan to explore the wider world of the Dutch West India Company, Atlantic trade, slavery and the extraordinary wealth that transformed Amsterdam itself.

This is not just a story about somewhere far away.
It is also a story written into Amsterdam’s streets, canals, buildings and institutions.

And, as with all Eau de Colony events, the idea is not simply to talk about colonial history in general, but to discover what that history looks like when we go looking for it on location.

### 🍖 After the walk: Pendergast

For those who would like to continue, we’ll cross the Atlantic one last time — at least gastronomically — and head to Pendergast.

Pendergast is one of Amsterdam’s most convincing takes on an American barbecue restaurant, specialising in slow-smoked meats and the classics of US barbecue culture: brisket, burnt ends, pulled pork, ribs and plenty of sides.

Dinner is optional and separate from the walk.

If you are interested in joining us at Pendergast, please answer YES to the dinner question when you RSVP.

Once I have an idea of numbers, I’ll contact the restaurant and then get back to everyone who selected dinner with the final arrangements, price and payment details.

### 👟 Practical information

We meet at 15:00 outside Amsterdam Centraal, on the city-centre side.

Expect a substantial walk through central Amsterdam, so comfortable shoes are recommended.

The exact route will remain a surprise.

Participation in the walk does not require joining the dinner afterwards.

***

Four cities.
Four colonial connections.
And a history whose traces are often much closer than they appear.

Welcome to Eau de Colony.

📅 Thursday, 29 October 2026
🕗 Meetup: 20:00
🎶 Concert starts: 20:30
📍 BIMHUIS, Amsterdam

Not every Art Food and Fun event needs an elaborate historical narrative, a five-stop route or a questionable geographical mission.

Sometimes the concept is simply:
this is really good, and we should go hear it.

Hear Me Out is a new AFF series dedicated to concerts I think are genuinely worth paying attention to.

The idea is not to create another generic concert calendar. I’ll select individual shows because there is something particularly interesting about the artist, the project, the venue or the musical context — often from the more adventurous edges of jazz, experimental music, contemporary composition, electronics and whatever else refuses to sit neatly inside one genre.

You don’t need to know the artist beforehand.

That is rather the point.

For the first edition, we’re going to BIMHUIS for the Chicago Underground Duo, the long-running project of Rob Mazurek and Chad Taylor.

### Chicago Underground

Mazurek and Taylor have been playing together for around three decades, emerging from a particularly fertile moment in Chicago when jazz, free improvisation, electronics and the city’s post-rock scene were increasingly colliding with each other.

And despite the word “duo”, trumpet and drums are only the beginning.

Their music moves between improvisation, groove, electronics, percussion and abstraction, constantly shifting between something recognisably connected to jazz and something much harder to categorise.

Their latest album, Hyperglyph, is their first Chicago Underground Duo record in more than a decade and was released by International Anthem, the Chicago label that has become one of the most interesting reference points for the current generation of adventurous jazz and improvised music.

Mazurek is also known for projects including the Exploding Star Orchestra, while Taylor has played with an extraordinary range of musicians across contemporary jazz and experimental music.

So if your idea of jazz stops somewhere around saxophone, double bass and polite applause, this may be a useful corrective.

### Tickets

The concert starts at 20:30.

There are both standing and seated tickets available.

I’ll personally be standing, so if you want to stay together during the concert, I’d recommend choosing a standing ticket as well.

There are also two particularly useful options if you have a cultural membership:
🎟️ We Are Public — the concert is included.
🎟️ Subbacultcha — the concert is also included with the Subbacultcha membership/card.

Otherwise, you can simply buy a regular ticket directly from BIMHUIS.

For this series, everyone is responsible for arranging their own concert ticket or membership reservation. RSVP’ing on Meetup does not reserve admission to the concert.

We’ll meet at BIMHUIS before the show and go in together.

### About Hear Me Out

This series will probably appear a little less regularly than some of the others.

No attempt to cover everything. No obligation to follow one genre. No mainstream-versus-underground purity test either.

Sometimes the shows will also happen to be included in programmes such as We Are Public or Subbacultcha, which makes this a good excuse to actually use those memberships for some of the more adventurous things hiding in their calendars.

The only real criterion is:
you should probably hear this.

📅 Friday, 30 October 2026
🕗 20:00
🎶 Show starts: 20:30
📍 OCCII, Amsterdam

One night after Chicago Underground Duo, Hear Me Out changes atmosphere completely.

No electronics. No trumpet and drums colliding with avant-garde jazz.

This time, mostly some wood, steel strings, ten fingers — and a musical tradition that has spent more than sixty years finding increasingly strange things to do with an acoustic guitar.

For Hear Me Out #2, we’re heading to OCCII for a double bill by Glenn Jones and Liam Grant, two generations of musicians connected by the tradition usually known as American Primitive guitar. OCCII describes the evening as one of “raw American Primitive fingerpicking”; the current bill also includes French project 12V5 and DJ Nerf.

### Glenn Jones

Glenn Jones first became known through Cul de Sac, the Boston band whose music occupied its own territory somewhere between post-rock, psychedelia, minimalism and experimental music — and which famously collaborated extensively with former Can vocalist Damo Suzuki.

Since then, Jones has become one of the major contemporary voices of the American Primitive tradition pioneered by John Fahey.

Across ten solo albums, he has developed an extraordinarily personal language for six- and twelve-string guitar and banjo, using unusual tunings, partial capos and intricate fingerpicking to make music that can feel simultaneously ancient and intensely autobiographical. OCCII highlights precisely those self-created tunings and techniques as central to his playing.

His music carries traces of Fahey, Jack Rose, John Jackson, old 78 rpm records and decades spent inside the American underground — but it rarely feels like an exercise in revivalism.

These are pieces that behave more like memories: detailed, slightly elusive, sometimes funny, sometimes melancholic, and never particularly interested in showing off simply for the sake of it.

### Liam Grant

Then there is Liam Grant, representing a much younger generation taking the same vocabulary somewhere else.

A guitarist and improviser from New England, Grant works with modal forms, long-form improvisation, ragas and propulsive fingerpicked pieces that openly inherit the world of Takoma Records, John Fahey, Robbie Basho and Peter Walker, as well as later figures such as Jones himself and Jack Rose.

But there is a rougher, younger energy to it too.

His music is deeply attached to the landscapes of New England, while his approach brings a kind of DIY/punk attitude to a tradition that can otherwise risk becoming overly reverential.

His 2025 album Prodigal Son, recorded around 6-string, 12-string and lap steel guitar, helped establish him as one of the younger musicians currently pushing this vocabulary forward.

And there is something particularly nice about hearing Jones and Grant on the same night: not master and imitator, but two generations using the same basic materials and arriving at rather different places.

### Two nights, two completely different concerts

If you’re coming to Hear Me Out #1 the evening before, this is also a good demonstration of what I want this series to be.

Thursday at BIMHUIS:
Chicago Underground Duo — avant-jazz, improvisation, electronics, rhythm.

Friday at OCCII:
Glenn Jones & Liam Grant — acoustic guitars, fingerpicking, repetition, memory and American folk traditions pulled slightly out of shape.

No genre requirement.

Just music worth hearing.

### Tickets

Doors open at 20:00 and the show starts at 20:30.

At the moment tickets are:
€10 presale
€12 at the door

Tickets are arranged individually; RSVP’ing on Meetup does not reserve admission to the concert.

We’ll meet at OCCII at 20:00 and go in together.