A Tasty Touch Of Acid

In ancient Greece the physician Hippocrates prescribed it as an antiseptic. In the Italian city of Modena, precious bottles of aceto balsamico are still handed down like heirlooms. And at trendy dinners in Los Angeles, where the piripiri meets the mahimahi, it's as spicy a table topic as what went awry with Robin Hood.

We're talking serious vinegar now, the familiar sour wine (a literal translation of the French vin aigre) that has become the condiment of the hour -- and not just to sprinkle on salads or pickle veggies. As diet-conscious customers shun butter and cream, top toques at grand-luxe restaurants increasingly use it to give low-cal piquancy to their creations. At Manhattan's Montrachet, chef Debra Ponzek uses champagne vinegar as a basis for lemongrass sauce and dollops cider vinegar into a ginger sauce for roast duck.

Both rice-wine vinegars -- vital to Oriental cuisine -- and dark, mellow sherry vinegars are fast sellers at specialty stores around the country. Even more popular among foodies is Modena's aromatic, sweet-sour balsamic variety. Alas, most of the cheap brands on the U.S. market bear little resemblance to the syrupy real stuff, which costs as much as X.O. Cognac.

Why settle for plain when you can get it flavored? Enid Stettner's Wild Thymes, of Medussa, N.Y., bottles 25 different kinds of herb and fruit vinegars, including such exotica as Opal basil, hot pepper and blueberry. (The labels, happily, offer some clues on culinary use.)

Making one's own, as a growing number of amateurs have discovered, is not hard either. All you need is some decent wine and a starter kit (cost: $79 or so), which includes a barrel and a "mother" -- the bacterial agent that in three weeks or so transforms the wine into acetic acid. There can be a downside to the hobby. Jeanette and Pierre Garneau of Nantucket, Mass., started producing small amounts a few years ago and now sell 1,500 bottles a year to New England specialty stores. The problem, says Jeanette, is that "we always smell like vinegar."