In spite of what you may have heard, wine lovers are not perfect. We need New Years resolutions too. Here are mine:
· I will lose 30 pounds (OK, that’s out of the way).
· I will taste every wine I come across that I’ve never heard of before. This is a very rewarding resolution. In 2008 I learned about grillo, a delightful, light, crisp wine from Sicily that tastes a little like green tea. Couple of years ago I tasted a cabernet sauvignon allegedly made in Cuba. One out of two isn’t bad.
· I will try wines from every new wine area I learn about. Ever have a syrah from British Columbia? It’s by Mission Hill, and it tastes of black plums, tobacco, black pepper and red meat. Yes, all at once.
· Speaking of that, I will adopt the philosophy of illegitimati non carborundum (look it up; they won’t let me say it here in English) when people get on my case about my enthusiastic wine descriptions. It’s my hobby. As Billy Joel would say, I have been a fool for lesser things.
· In hard economic times, I will become relentless in pursuit of really nice wines under $10. Last year’s winner was the 2007 Bodega Norton Malbec from Mendoza, Argentina: chocolate-cherry aromas and flavors; soft, ripe and mellow; $9.
· I will take with a grain of salt those medical studies that say wine prevents heart attack, stroke, glaucoma, diabetes, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s. I will take comfort that those researchers are raising some of the healthiest mice on the planet.
· I will taste an English wine, if I can find one (and work up my courage). The British press says that, due to global warming, there are more than 200 wineries today in the sceptered isle. And if English wines are as good as English food, well….
· Oh, don’t write in. There’s nothing I love more than strawberries with clotted cream. (I just wonder how they clot it.)
· Even though Chateau Mouton Rothschild’s price has plummeted by half to less than $600 a bottle, I will not urge a federal bailout of the wine industry.
· I will try not to lose my taste for expensive wines. I will try to cultivate richer friends. (If they have a boat, so much the better.)
Sparkling wine is for celebration
Hooray for sparkling wine. It’s not champagne, and it doesn’t pretend to be. But it’s the same idea -- usually chardonnay and/or pinot noir still wines allowed to re-ferment in the bottle to create those bubbles that make it the beverage of celebration. Usually at a lesser price than champagne.
Sparkling wine is great as an aperitif, or for toasting, especially during the
holidays. Top chefs have also created all-champagne dinners in which different sparkling wines are served with each course.
It’s easy. See what it says on the bottle. If your sparkling wine is a “blanc de
blanc,” it made entirely from white grapes, probably chardonnay. This bubbly is light and frothy, great for toasting, hors d’oeuvres and fish or light chicken dishes.
If the sparkling wine is a prosecco, it's an Italian bubbly made from the grape of the same name. It usually has softer bubbles than other sparkling wines, and it can be dry or slightly sweet.
If the label says “brut,” the bubbly is probably a blend of chardonnay and pinot noir. Yes, pinot noir is a red grape, but the juice is white even in red grapes. It’s just a matter of separating the juice from the skins as soon as the grapes are crushed. Brut bubblies are good for mid-range dishes -- creamy fish and chicken dishes, casseroles and so on.
And if the label says “blanc de noir,” it means the sparkling wine is entirely from red
grapes like pinot noir. There are bubbly lovers who would drink this with prime rib or a
charcoal-grilled steak. Or other red-meat dishes. This can be a bit of a stretch: Try it
and see if you like it.
Rosé sparkling wines have just enough red wine in them to turn that lovely
salmon-to-cherry color, and have tiny hints of tannin from those red grapes. When made
dry, these are great with steaks, or even fruit desserts. If made sweet, they’ll match the
deepest chocolate dessert.
So if you’re a real purist, you could drink nothing but sparkling wine for the rest of
your life. As I was saying, Hooray for sparkling wine.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
• Nonvintage Piper Sonoma Select Cuvée Brut, Sonoma County: crisp and rich and firm,
with lemon/lime flavors; $14.
• Nonvintage J Brut Rosé, Russian River Valley: crisp and full-bodied, with rich red
berry flavors; $40.
RECOMMENDED
• Nonvintage Santa Margherita Prosecco Brut, Valdobbiadene, Italy: frothy, mineral
flavors; $22.
• Nonvintage Piper Sonoma Blanc de Noir Sonoma County: rich, red berry flavors; $17.
• Nonvintage Codorníu Cava, Sant Sadurni d'Anoia, Spain: firm body, green-apple
flavors; $11.
• Nonvintage Jacobs Creek Chardonnay/Pinot Noir Brut Cuvée, Barossa Valley, Australia:
full-bodied and rich, pineapple flavors; $12.
• Nonvintage Domaine Ste. Michelle Blanc de Noir Columbia Valley Sparkling Wine,
Washington: tart melon flavors, crisp; $13.
• Nonvintage yellow Tail Sparkling Wine, Australia: lighty sweet, soft, white peaches;
$10.
• Nonvintage Freixenet Cordon Negro Brut, Sant Sadurni d'Anoia, Spain: light and crisp,
with citrus flavors; $11.
• Nonvintage Domaine Ste. Michelle Extra Dry, Columbia Valley Sparkling Wine,
Washington: lemon-lime flavors, lightly sweet; $13.
• Nonvintage Korbel Natural Russian River Valley, Sonoma: crisp, light, red berry
flavors; $18.
• Nonvintage Mumm Napa Blanc de Noir, Napa Valley: frothy, light, apricot flavors; $21.
• Nonvintage Schramsberg Blanc de Blanc, North Coast, Calif.: lemon meringue flavors,
rich; $37.
Wines for top chefs' holiday fare
So you've been watching TV cooking shows and perusing websites all year, and you're gearing up to try one of their fancy dishes for Christmas or Hanukkah. But you realize those chefs didn't mention what wines go well with their masterpieces.
I've got you covered. Happy holidays!
APPETIZERS
Martha Stewart's mini-Asian crab cakes with wasabi www.marthastewart.com
• 2005 J. Lohr White Riesling, Monterey County: off-dry; white peaches; crisp and fruity; $12.
Daisy Martinez's Cuban black bean soup www.daisycooks.com
• 2007 Martin Codax Albariño, Rias Baixas: ripe pears and melons; rich and creamy; $15.
ITALIAN SEAFOOD
Lidia Bastianich's jumbo shrimp Buzara style www.lidiasitaly.com
• 2006 Placido Pinot Grigio delle Venezie, IGT: light, lively, crisp; $10.
VEGETARIAN
Giada de Laurentiis' Gorgonzola Porcini Risotto www.foodnetwork.com
• 2003 Rutz Cellars Pinot Noir, Sonoma Cuvée: cinnamon and tart cherries,
smooth; $17.
Beverly Lynne Bennett's Moroccan vegetable stew www.veganchef.com
• 2007 Murphy-Goode ‘‘The Fumé'' Sauvignon Blanc, Alexander Valley: rich, ripe and complex, with tropical fruit; tart finish; $12.
HOLIDAY ENTREES
Martha Stewart's roast goose with wild rice www.marthastewart.com
• 2004 Sartoni di Varona Amarone delle Valpolicella: dark cherries and dark chocolate; $34.
Three Guys From Miami's lechon asado (icuban.com).
• 2003 Marquis de Riscal Reserva Rioja, Spain: tart plums and cinnamon; $17.
Paul Prudhomme's turducken (chicken inside a duck inside a turkey; www.chefpaul.com
• 2006 Columbia Crest ‘‘Two Vines'' Gewürztraminer, Columbia Valley, Washington: crisp, lightly sweet lychee flavors; $8.
Christopher Kimball's roast beef loin with mushroom-onion stuffing www.cooksillustrated.com
• 2005 Antinori Tignanello, Tuscany IGT: mulberries and mocha; ripe, powerful, smooth; $90.
Linda Gassenheimer's kosher brisket with latkes www.dinnerinminutes.com
• 2003 Barons Edmond & Benjamin de Rothschild Haut Medoc Bordeaux (kosher): cassis and black coffee aromas and flavors; $31.
CHRISTMAS COMFORT
Rachael Ray's turkey and stuffing meatloaf www.rachaelrayshow.com
• 2006 Black Swan Shiraz, Australia: soft, ripe, black plum flavors; $11.
DESSERT
Ming Tsai's Tahitian vanilla crème brûlée www.mingspantry.com
• 2006 Mission Hills Five Vineyards Riesling Ice Wine, VQA British
Columbia: very sweet, soft; candied orange peel; $20 per one-quarter bottle.
Sandy Moyers' dark Christmas fruit cake www.bellaonline.com
• 2006 M. Chapoutier Banyuls dessert wine (red grenache): red raspberry and chocolate flavors; moderately sweet; $30.
Sherry's a wine for all seasons
Here’s my rant about sherry from last week’s WLRN food & dining show:
Poor sherry. It’s the most misunderstood, misused wine in the world.
If you ever watch a British drawing room comedy, or the antics of Niles and Frasier Crane, you see them picking a bottle off the shelf and pouring it into a thimble-sized glass. Wrong and wrong.
Sherry is wine; when it’s opened, you have to keep it in the refrigerator.
And sherry has marvelous aromas; to properly swirl and sniff, you should pour it into a regular white wine glass.
But when you become familiar with sherry, it’s a marvelous drink. It comes in several styles, so it can be served as everything from an aperitif to a dinner wine to a dessert wine. Here are some of the tyles.
· Fino sherry: The lightest, driest sherry, made from the palomino grape, with a delicate, nutty flavor. In Spain, it’s the standard aperitif wine.
· Oloroso sherry: It’s fuller in body and richer, but still totally dry, with walnut flavors. A good wine with dinner. It’s especially good with lamb. Oh, I have some nice memories.
· Sweet sherries: For these they take oloroso sherry and add various amounts of wine from the Pedro Ximinez grape, which is picked, then laid out on mats in the sun to turn almost into raisins, raising its sugar content. Examples are Harvey’s Bristol Cream, Croft’s Cream Sherry and Old East India Sherry. These are the sherries I would drink with cookies, fruit tarts and so on.
· Super sweet sherries: The sweetest sherries are made from the Pedro Ximinez and/or Moscatel grapes, which are also picked, laid on straw mats in the sun, and dried almost into raisins to concentrate their sugars before fermenting. These are so thick and sweet their favorite use is to be poured over really top-quality vanilla ice cream. Fabulous.
Casa Lapostolle offers good, inexpensive wines
About 100 miles south of Santiago, in Chile's central valley, is a winery called Casa Lapostolle. The soil, the climate and the vineyard workers are Chilean.
Everything else is French: the winery, above, the owner, the chief wine consultant, even the grapes, albeit a century or more removed.
Ninety-seven percent of the wine is exported, to the United States, England, Russia and beyond. Few Chileans ever taste it.
"Only the wealthy people in Santiago can afford it," says Jérôme Poisson, a French-born winemaker at Casa Lapostolle who is on a U.S.tour this fall.
"Chile was never a big wine-drinking country like Argentina," Poisson says. "They drink beer or pisco or boxed wines."
Chile's loss is our gain. Casa Lapostolle wines are great values for the money -- from the crisp and fruity $10 sauvignon blanc to the smooth and powerful $25 Cuvée Alexandre to the shifting, complex, even savory $70 red blend of carmenère, merlot and cabernet sauvignon called Clos Apalta.
The wines are the products of strong personalities, beginning with "flying winemaker'' consultant Michel Rolland. The Bordeaux winemaker guides more than 100 wineries worldwide -- and sometimes is accused of minimizing the natural differences among their products by his insistence on super-ripe grapes and extensive aging in powerfully flavored French oak barrels.
"He visits three or four times a year," says Poisson. ‘‘Once before the harvest, then two or three times during blending."
Blending decisions are made by Rolland, chief winemaker Jacques Begarie and French winery owner Alexandra Marnier-Lapostolle.
"You need a strong personality to work with Michel Rolland," says Poisson. "But she [Alexandra] wants thelast word in blending."
For example, in the 2006 vintage, the $70-a-bottle Clos Apalta wine wasn't quite up to her standards. Poisson suggested demoting some of its grapes to the $25 Cuvée Alexandre merlot eventhough it would cut Clos Apalta production from 6,000 bottles to 3,000.
"She said, ‘Go ahead.' Shehas to take a long-term view of creating only the best quality."
So here’s a tip: If you can score a bottle of the 2006 Cuvée Alexandre Merlot, it'll have some pretty high powered grapes. You read it here first.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
• 2008 Casa Sauvi-
gnon Blanc, Rapel Valley
(90 percent sauvignon blanc,
10 percent semillon): Crisp
and fresh, almost spritzy;
intensely fruity with flavors
of melons and minerals; $10.
• 2005 Casa Lapos-
tolle Cuvée Alexandre
Merlot, Apalta Vineyard (85
percent carmenère, 15 per-
cent Merlot): black plums,
mulberries and bitter choco-
late; smooth, ripe, opulent;
long finish; $25.
• 2004 Casa Lapos-
tolle Clos Apalta, Rapel
Valley: complex, shifting aro-
mas of tar and roses; flavors
of mulberries and licorice;
big, ripe, smooth tannins;
long finish; $70.
RECOMMENDED
• 2007 Casa Chardon-
nay, Casablanca Valley: hint
of oak and mint; tangy tan-
gerines, ripe fruit; tart finish;
$13.
• 2007 Casa Merlot,
Rapel Valley (85 percent
merlot, 15 percent cabernet
sauvignon): black cherry and
herbal aromas and flavors;
ripe tannins, long finish; $13.
• 2006 Casa Cabernet
Sauvignon, Rapel Valley:
aromas of cassis, aged meat,
iodine and oak; flavors of
black cherries and espresso;
firm tannin; good steak wine;
$15.
Europe may rename its wines; it could be war
This may sound like inside baseball, but it may spur foodies and wine fans to start World War III. The European Common Market Organization is drawing up plans to replace current wine appellation systems with two standard Europe-wide denominations.
It means, for example, that in Italy’s Piedmont region, what today are the Barolo, dolcetto and Barbera DOCs would be reduced to a single Barolo DOP.
Wait’ll the French hear that they want to re-label Bordeaux. This is a war that even they could relish.
A wine for anything you want to grill
OK, so despite the heat, I’m reconciled that the Fourth of July holiday is the peak grilling weekend of the year. So here’s my list of a wine to go with almost anything you might decide to grill.
· Grilled oysters, clams, shrimp – a muscadet from France’s Loire Valley; it’s light and dry, so it’s the perfect shellfish wine.
· Grilled vegetables, from onions to eggplant, summer squash, carrots, scallions, fennel – sauvignon blanc; it has an herbal, even vegetal taste that’s a nice match.
· Grilled fish -- pinot grigio; it’s crisp and light, just the thing.
· Grilled chicken breast, skin off – pinot grigio here too; for lightness.
· Grilled blackened fish or chicken – a fruity red shiraz; here you have to match the spices rather than the meat.
· Pork or beef ribs with barbecue sauce – zinfandel; it’s American and patriotic, and it's spicy to go with the sauce.
· Grilled hot dogs – champagne; I always remember that Jimmy Buffet’s restaurant in Key West used to offer a hot dog for $100, and, for another dollar, a bottle of Dom Perignon; can’t beat that.
· Grilled hamburgers – a fruity merlot if you use ketchup, a high-acid chianti if you use mustard; if you use both, have a glass of each. I’m sort of kidding here, but I’ve seen wine writers seriously propose that you have to match the condiment rather than the meat.
· Grilled New York Strip – a big California cabernet sauvignon; the king of wines with the king of meats.
· Grilled fruit – for dessert you can grill slices of pineapple, plums, peaches, even bananas, as long as you keep a close eye so they don’t burn; pop a scoop of vanilla ice cream and you’re in heaven; the matching wine is a sweet, late-harvest dessert wine made of sauvignon blanc and Semillon.
Let's protest the heat with an indoor picnic
As you know, because I complain about it so much, one of my pet peeves is Madison Avenue PR firms that think this is the nicest time of year, weatherwise, for the whole country. Now it has been decreed that Saturday is the date for the Great American Backyard Campout. The idea is to keep you at home so you don’t use gas.
But for Florida, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, at least, that’s like promoting skinny dipping in Minnesota in January.
In protest, I’m declaring Saturday the day for the Great American Indoor Campout. Or, I guess, Campin.
I’ve devised an indoor cookout. Or in. Recipes for outdoors foods cooked in your 68-degree kitchen. I made this a week or so ago, and it was a hit.
First, indoor barbecued ribs. You sear some ribs on all sides, cover them with dark beer with a teaspoon of cinnamon and half a teaspoon of nutmeg and simmer them slowly for an hour. Then you slather them with your favorite barbecue sauce and put them under the broiler long enough to caramelize.
Second, potato salad. Simmer two pounds of potatoes for 20 minutes, cool, peel, cut up and slather with a cup of mayo and half a cup of sour cream. Add a 3-ounce jar of that pretty orange salmon roe caviar, mix and garnish with chopped scallions.
Corn on the cob: Easy. Cover ears of corn with cool water, bring to a simmer, turn off and wait 10 minutes. Done.
Dessert: Watermelon as usually served is too messy for indoors. So, instead, you take a baller to carve out watermelon balls, mix in some chopped mint, put them in large martini glasses and cover with ice-cold champagne or sparkling wine. Even better, use a sweet, red sparkling wine like the Italian bubbly called Brachetto d'Acqui, maybe a Rosa Regale by Banfi.
What to drink with all this? More of that icy cava. Maybe a nice Freixenet Cordon Negro, at about $10 a bottle.
It’s a guaranteed hit. And you didn’t break a sweat.
Winefriends, do you have a good indoor picnic recipe? Send it in. Click on the “comments” icon below. And tell us what to drink with it.
More underappreciated wines
More reader response to my request for the most underappreciated wines in the market.
“Another Iberian Peninsula export that is possibly underappreciated is the sparkling wine from Catalunya (mostly) called cava,” says Gregg Rocket. “Catalans use the same method for making champagne and use Macabeo, Parellada and Xarel-lo grapes to produce a sparkling wine that is tasty and refreshing and often much cheaper than the French champagne. Our favorites include Juve Camps Reserva de la Familia, Segura Viudas and Anna de Cordoniu.”
I agree, Gregg. I like to add a little orange juice to cava to make a mimosa. It’s very nice stuff.”
