At First Glass

Beer, again

2009-11-06T05:31:00.000-06:00

I do envy beer drinkers. "Having a beer" just sounds relaxing and refreshing. Except for real beer connoisseurs, and of course they exist, it seems one does not, with beer, worry over the experience as one can with wine -- as in, will I understand what I am drinking? Will I detect the hints of raspberries, tar, earth, and leather? Is the temperature right? With what shall I pair it?

No. Instead, you just have a beer. I indulged recently because a customer at the store raved about a particular brewer, and said, judging by our brief conversation, that he was sure I would like this one. The bigger boutique sellers are overrated and unimpressive, he said. Among other brief lessons he also said that you can always tell the difference between a lager and an ale, by pouring each into a clear glass, and inspecting them. A lager, of whatever color, will be clear because lagers are so filtered; an ale will be cloudy because they are not. I'm not sure he's quite right. My beer was clear, but said "ale" on the label.

Well, at any rate, I had a beer over the weekend. I gave it two pours into the glass, just like he said, to develop a good head and let it oxygenate and give off some of the gas that gives you gas if you slurp it down from the bottle. And I drank some. I suppose it was very fine, but alas, the pleasures of beer escape me. If you want to replicate the experience, dissolve one aspirin in a glass of water, and drink that. I've had different beers before, the "hoppy" ones, and to replicate those, I'd suggest you dissolve a dozen aspirin in water, and drink that.

I have an elderly colleague, legendary in the south side's wine business, who has been kindly asking me every time he comes in to the store how I am getting on. When I first started I confessed to him my lifelong ignorance of beer. He was laboring along beside me lugging a case of wine, dressed in his dapper suit and tie, trench coat and newsboy cap, aged eighty-six (he, not the cap) -- and he shrugged with a slight grin. "You haven't missed anything." I felt reassured.

Being rueful about beer also reminds me of this scene from the old novel I Claudius, in which two barbarian brothers holler at each other (across the Weser River in A.D. 16) about their different tastes in refreshing liquids. The one brother, loyal to the Romans, has become a wine snob:

HERMANN: You're wrong, brother. That wasn't me. You must have been drinking again. You were always like that before a battle: a bit nervous unless you had drunk at least a gallon of beer, and had to be strapped to the saddle by the time the warhorns sounded.

FLAVIUS: That's a lie, of course, but it reminds me what a barbarous gut-rotting drink your German beer is. I never drink it now even when there's a great consignment come into the camp from one of your captured villages. The men only drink it when they have to: they say that it's better than swamp water spoilt by German corpses.

That tasting note is a bit unkind, I fear. Aspirin-water would have been quite sufficient.

The belle of aisle 15, and other random thoughts

2009-10-31T05:42:00.001-05:00

My goodness, time still flies when you're being professional. At the grocery store we are in the middle of what's called OND, October-November-December, in other words, the busiest time of the year. Today is Halloween and it's a Saturday, so it will be a day when we count on impulse buys and good sales to help us "blow out" lots of merchandise. The corners of the receiving dock, which runs the whole back length of the store, are piling up with Christmas product of all kinds. Since the back of the house operations, you might say, are staffed mostly by men, certain weeks of OND even get certain epithets of their own. "B----- to the wall" (it rhymes) describes the week before Thanksgiving, I'm told. God knows how they describe Christmas.

So: random thoughts. To my surprise, the belle of the wine aisle -- no, it's not me -- is of all things, vermouth. It sells amazingly well, two cases a week of Gallo's brand, plus a decent enough amount of Tribuno. Martini & Rossi does not move too much, and Noilly Prat hardly at all.

The bread and butter of the liquor department (if you'll excuse the grocery store metaphor here): vodka and gin. In addition to all that vermouth, it would seem that someone somewhere is still drinking classic martinis.

My favorite customer so far: the little old lady who just wanted a little bottle of vodka, because her friend said the best health regimen you can follow as you get older is to soak raisins in vodka, and when they are well-soaked, to eat no more than seven raisins per day. Why, her friend went on vacation and forgot her supply of raisins, and just didn't feel right the whole time! -- But we couldn't find a really small bottle of vodka. Oh well. She bought the standard size anyway. We agreed if you run out of raisins, you can always drink the vodka.

And speaking of classic drinks, I was able recently to pick up, at the local discount book warehouse, a copy of Charles Schumann's American Bar for $7.99. I have been studying it at night, to learn more about spirits and liqueurs. And a good thing, too, because yesterday I had customers asking about Cherry Heering and cachaca, and I was able to not be completely ignorant about both. And who knew? American Bar is for sale through the catalog Acorn -- for $85.00! If you can get yourself to the big half-empty strip mall near the corner of 178th and Torrence Avenue, within sight of the huge Torrence Avenue interchange on to the I-80/94 expressway, why, I can get it for you wholesale.

And, as you move from O to N yourself this weekend, enjoy another video on the Paso Robles harvest, from Dina Mande at Paso Harvest Films.

Pasoharvestfilms Ep 10 - Austin Hope & Harvest Festival Weekend from Dina Mande

Moroccan meat loaf

2009-10-22T11:58:00.000-05:00

This Moroccan meat loaf, from Simply recipes, has become a kind of base or mother recipe in our house, because of the delicious five-spice combination it taught me to add to many other beefy or meaty dishes: generous spoonfuls of paprika, cumin, and curry -- it makes you feel so virtuous to actually use those spices up, while they are still fresh, in less than a year -- plus smaller but equal parts of cayenne pepper and cinnamon. (Just a quarter teaspoon of each will do.) Moroccan meat loaf also gives you a chance to use the ground lamb you bought at the local specialty meat market, which unfortunately doesn't sell duck breasts. Ever.

Moroccan meat loaf

It's a huge recipe, calling for no less than three pounds of meat -- two of ground lamb, one of ground beef. Mix the meats together in a bowl. Preheat the oven to 350 F.

Heat 2 Tbsp olive oil in a heavy skillet, and then add 1 carrot, 1 onion, and 1 stalk of celery, all diced; plus about 6 cloves of garlic, diced; and a 3-inch piece of fresh ginger, diced. Cook for about five minutes, until the vegetables start to soften.

Next, add your new magic Moroccan five-spice powder (with salt and pepper, of course):

1 and 1/4 tsp kosher salt
1/4 tsp black pepper
1 tsp each curry powder, ground cumin, and sweet paprika
1/4 tsp cayenne powder
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon

Mix and stir the spices into the sauteeing vegetables, just for a minute or two until the spices release their aromas. Then remove all from the heat and let it cool for five minutes.

Stir the vegetable-spice mixture into the ground meats. Mix in 2 eggs, 1 and 1/4 cup bread crumbs (or not, if you are keeping this gluten free), 1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro, and 2 Tbsp chopped fresh mint (or not, if your grocery store didn't have it that day). The original original recipe also calls for saffron, which Elise of Simply Recipes omitted because she doesn't like it. So there.

After mixing the meat loaf thoroughly, put it in a greased 1 and 1/2 quart loaf pan, which you then place in a second pan. This pan you will fill with water, to reach halfway up the sides of the nested pan. Place this arrangement carefully in the preheated oven, and bake the meatloaf for 1 and 1/2 hours, or until the meat is cooked completely. Let it rest for 10 to 15 minutes, and then unmold it onto a serving platter. If you wish to augment matters with a pomegranate barbecue sauce made with pomegranate molasses (wha-ha?), you will find the recipe back at the source. Elise says that isn't necessary, and I believe her.

Can you see both pans, and the water level?

The meatloaf is delicious with almost anything -- some rice, some polenta, some fresh tomatoes; perhaps for your accompanying wine you'd like an inexpensive and unambitious riesling or gewurztraminer, which will know its place at the table: it will be more interesting than tea, but also smart enough not to try to really compete with cayenne and cinnamon.

And for handy future reference, that very useful Moroccan five-spice combination is:

1 tsp. curry powder
1 tsp. sweet paprika
1 tsp. ground cumin
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1/4 tsp cinnamon

Norma Shearer's apple shortbread meringue, updated with Pama

2009-10-19T06:59:00.001-05:00

This may take a few minutes.

Last week I learned about a recipe contest sponsored by the good people making Pama, the pomegranate liqueur (the packaging alone is lovely). To enter this contest -- and anyone can do so -- you must create an original appetizer, entree, or dessert featuring at least 3 Tablespoons of Pama, and submit the recipe to the company's Facebook page by November 15th. The grand prize is a trip for two to the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, Colorado, next June.

What does this have to do with Norma Shearer? Not much, but I'll make it fit.

Occasionally I like to take the train downtown and visit the Chicago Public Library, to have a look at the cookbook section on the fourth floor. I pluck from the shelves the oldest and oddest books I can find, and copy down recipes from authors with names like Jinx Kragen (Saucepans and the Single Girl, 1965), or books firmly titled Food For Men (by Glenn Quilty, 1954).

On my last excursion to the library, I caught sight of a thin black book spine squeezed in among all the others, its lettering all worn away from the passing years. I took it out and found I had in my hands something called What Actors Eat When They Eat!, published in 1939. It's a substantial collection of recipes ostensibly offered up by the big Hollywood stars of the day, including one of the biggest, Norma Shearer. Of course, what the book also is, is a genuine production of the old Hollywood studio system, whereby the public's adored favorites were made by their employers to behave themselves, dress appropriately when out, make pictures as assigned, get married and/or have their names used to sell cookbooks as needed, and otherwise carry on more or less like extremely glamorous civil servants who knew on which side their bread was buttered. All in all, not a bad system, and I'll bet they enjoyed more true privacy than their poor, liberated, paparazzi-harassed professional descendants do now.

At any rate, on Norma Shearer's page we find, beneath her well coiffed and bejeweled studio photograph, two desserts, one for "Chocolate Antoinette" and one for "Porcupine Dessert with Vanilla Sauce." Chocolate Antoinette is not very interesting, simply a good chocolate pudding covered in a meringue. The "Antoinette," of course, refers to her movie Marie Antoinette, released in 1939. All the recipes in the book pertain somehow either to the stars' roles or to their backgrounds or tastes, real or perceived. Clark Gable submits a manly "Hunter's Breakfast," Merle Oberon something suitably exotic. And so on.

Miss Shearer's second proffered dish, the Porcupine Dessert, is a little more intriguing, and it's this which is going to lead us eventually to our pomegranate liqueur contest. Porcupine Dessert is essentially a simple shortbread crust, such as you would bake to go beneath a lemon bar or a date bar recipe, piled with a stewed apple-raisin-and-sherry filling, and then topped again with a meringue. To render the whole thing a "porcupine," the instructions say to cover the meringue with precisely arranged slivered almonds to represent the animal's spines, and then add two raisins for the eyes, finishing with grated pistachios to represent the grass he is sitting on. The resulting mental picture strikes me as ghastly and unnecessary. Besides, what was the connection between Norma Shearer and porcupines? Could it have been some sort of reference to her birth in Canada? -- albeit Montreal hardly qualifies as a wilderness outpost overrun with porcupines.

I have summarized the recipe loosely, but not much more loosely than it is in the book. The authors gave "Chocolate Antoinette" the full treatment, with measurements and proper directions; "Porcupine dessert" is thrown off in the casual way of really old cookbooks, which make assumption that the reader understands this:

Bottom: One cup flour, one-half cup butter, one-fourth cup sugar. Mix well together and bake. Filling: Apples, raisins, citron, sherry, and sugar. Cook long and slowly. The filling is piled high on the bottom crust, covered with meringue and long pieces of almonds ....

And that's it.

I think -- and here comes our entry, with trepidation, into the pomegranate liqueur contest -- I would replace the sherry with Pama, or PAMA as it apparently should be called, and perhaps mix the apples with more fruits. Berries and dates might be nice. After assembly, the meringue topping should be briefly browned in the oven.

And that's it. The question is, would this constitute, as the contest rules insist, an original creation? What Actors Eat When They Eat! is almost, almost out of copyright, and anyway the Porcupine thing is not a recipe as we accept them now. This may require deep thinking.

And who was Norma Shearer, actually? One of my favorites, to begin with. She was a bit like the Demi Moore of her day. A very big star and a big moneymaker, pretty in a sort of determined, angular way, half of a high-powered Hollywood marriage, and a terrific onscreen weeper. In 1938, when Gone With The Wind was about to go into production, she was for a while considered the absolute shoe-in for the part of Scarlett O'Hara. But rumor had it that the very character was going to be rescripted to fit her, and her weepiness. In a private letter, author Margaret Mitchell acknowledged this as a jaw-dropping development which would "thereby [make Scarlett] a poor put-upon creature instead of a hellion." The public, too, was not enthusiastic about Norma Shearer for this role, and in the summer of 1938 she graciously withdrew from consideration for the part -- or her studio made her do so, or made her be gracious about it, or some combination of those circumstances. Or so it seems. She may have been powerful enough in her own right by then to make her own decisions and write her own announcements. She said, according to the Hollywood papers, "I have decided that I should not play Scarlett. I am convinced that the majority of fans who think I should not play this kind of character on the screen are right. I appreciate tremendously the interest they have shown." For the quotes here, consult Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With The Wind" Letters, 1936-1949, edited by Richard Harwell and published by Macmillan in 1976.

And for a taste of Miss Shearer's poor put-upon screen work -- a rather harsh judgment, I think -- watch The Women, Marie Antoinette, Romeo and Juliet, Idiot's Delight, or The Divorcee. There were many more, but I'm not sure how easy it will be to find gems like The Stealers (1920) or He Who Gets Slapped (1924). Better, perhaps, to spend the time baking porcupines.

In which I upload a video (re: the California harvest)

2009-10-17T09:01:00.002-05:00

Recently, independent filmmaker Dina Mande-Gould contacted me to suggest that my readers might like to know about her short web video series on this year's harvest in California's Paso Robles wine country. I visited her site, Paso Harvest Films, looked at her most recent posting, Episode 7, and found the film delightful. If you're fond of armchair traveling and want to have a peek at a real California winery, from the fields to the tasting room in films shot just in the last month, you might like this.

The winery featured is Clautiere, run since 1999 by former fashion designers/welders/landscape designers/restaurant owners Terry Brady and Claudine Blackwell. On the website's map, Clautiere is shown just east of the town of Paso Robles, which itself is located on California's southwestern coast about midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. That's a big stretch of territory to pore over, with your bifocals or without them -- but look for Pismo Beach ("and all the clams you can eat," as Bugs Bunny would say) and then move your finger north just a bit. You should find Paso Robles.

The town lies at the heart of the AVA, the American Viticultural Area, of the same name. It's in San Luis Obispo County, which is not an AVA itself, but which is part of the million-acre Central Coast AVA, and which -- the county, that is -- also contains the AVAs of Edna Valley, Arroyo Grande Valley, and York Mountain in addition to Paso Robles. Paso Robles is itself an amply sized AVA, weighing in, you might say, at over 600,000 acres. Compare the tiny size of El Dorado AVA, on the other side of the state in the Sierra Foothills, or Cole Ranch to the north in Mendocino County, which boast only about 400 acres and 60 acres respectively and produce, well, all those enchanting looking little wines that we none of us are likely to find on our grocery store shelves. A glass of Windwalker, anyone?

The point of all this name dropping is to fix, in my own mind, exactly whence cometh the California wines whose label appellations do show up frequently enough to start to sound familiar. Many labels, even on grocery store shelves, say Paso Robles. Quite a few even say Edna Valley or Arroyo Grande. Have you seen or purchased, for example, Adelaida Cellars, Claiborne and Churchill, Eberle, or Treana wines? They all hail from Paso Robles, where cabernet and zinfandel grow well, incidentally. And that makes them neighbors of Clautiere, which you can visit, virtually, above.

Thanks to Dina Mande Gould for her "shout out" as all the cool people say. I look forward to sharing more of her films, and I'm proud to announce I'm even sort of topical with this one. Her ten web episodes on the harvest were intended be finished in time to help celebrate the Paso Robles Harvest Wine Weekend from October 16-18 -- which event began, um, yesterday.

An image for the Chateau

2009-10-15T06:00:00.002-05:00

A 2008 Ruffino Chianti, $10.99. Fine, elegant, exactly what you expect, no less -- and no more? Would this image say what I mean, at Chateau Petrogasm?

"In what deestrict of Italy 'ave you voyaged most?"

2009-10-07T07:00:00.002-05:00

The above is a quote from one of the six most delicious novels ever written, all comprising the Mapp and Lucia saga of the great, the superbly great E.F. Benson. The splendid BBC production filmed in the mid 1980s, wherein almost every actor was perfect for his role and the town where the show was filmed perfect too, was called by the same name; the six collected novels can sometimes be found in an omnibus edition, Make Way for Lucia, but if you own the individual copies then you are the proud possessor of Queen Lucia, Lucia in London, Miss Mapp, Mapp and Lucia (in which the Titanesses meet!), The Worshipful Lucia, and Trouble for Lucia.

Throughout the books Lucia is forever maintaining the fiction that she can speak Italian, and of course every time she is caught out in her lie -- meeting or more often avoiding native Italian speakers, usually managing to sail away still trilling "buona notte!" -- she simply recovers from the blow to her scholarly reputation by some brilliant excuse. How could she be expected to understand the Neapolitan dialect, spoken by that opera composer "who is like a huge hairdresser"? She couldn't understand his English, either. Does that mean she does not know English?

No indeed. The huge hairdresser/composer, Signor Cortese, is one of the first to discover that Mrs. Lucas (the wife of Mr. Lucas and therefore La Lucia, just as the wife of Signor Giocondo was La Gioconda, better known as Mona Lisa) -- does not really know a shred of Italian. They attend a party together in Queen Lucia. He accosts her with a rapid-fire question she can't answer. She replies "Si, tante grazie." He looks puzzled and asks:

" 'In what deestrict of Italy 'ave you voyaged most?' "

And everybody snickers, while Lucia answers " 'Rome -- adoro Roma' " and her equally hapless husband perks up and inquires (in Baedeker Italian) of the famous composer " 'whether he was not very fond of music ....' "

Cortese happens to be the name of a grape, too, a white grape used to make fine wines in Italy's Piedmont region, and I wonder if this is a little joke on author Benson's part, or simply meaningless happenstance. He does have a gift for easy references to practically anything in the whole corpus of Western knowledge, musical, Biblical, liturgical (his father was the Archbishop of Canterbury), historical, or literary. There is a minor character in Lucia in London, for instance, named Rex Greatorex, and you would think surely he's made that one up, until you leaf casually through your old abridged copy of Samuel Pepys' Diary one day and find there was a Greatorex, in real life seventeenth century London. Ecco!

Signor Cortese's pointed query about the deestricts of Italy comes to mind because I have decided I really must learn Italian wine. In her Wine Bible Karen MacNeil recommends studying one grape variety at a time, so as to become thoroughly familiar with each before moving on, but I find that approach a bit dull. Studying a country at a time seems more fun, and carries with it the opportunity of armchair travel.

(Incidentally, while stocking wine at work the other day I did have a sort of wine knowledge epiphany -- although it's one that more experienced oenophiles would probably laugh at. There I was, kneeling down, peering into the dim recesses of the lower shelves, "fronting and facing" the jug wines, when I thought: surely none even of the noble varietals are that remarkable in character, such that a Cavit, Bolla, Livingston, Gallo, Beringer, Woodbridge, Glen Ellen, Leaping Horse, Sutter Home, Yellow Tail, Black Swan, Turning Leaf, or what have you chardonnay, or pinot grigio, is going to be truly different from every other jug of that single varietal. What keeps consumers brand-loyal to their own particular jugs?

I dare to say a varietal, a merlot, is a merlot is a merlot -- unless it is grown in those places and vinified in those ways which mankind has learned does make a difference in the final pleasures of a glass of that varietal. You want a real merlot, full of character, at its best, so as to understand the point of liking them? You probably want a Pomerol, a Bordeaux from the appellation where our French friends have been making and drinking merlot for many a long year. A riesling? You probably want something from the Mosel-Saar-Ruwer, where our German friends ... you get the idea. My gigantic epiphany that Jug Wines are Necessarily Tasteless (because mass-jug production Waters Down whatever interesting flavors the Grape Ideally Has) underlies what wine writers reflect upon, so calmly, when they notice the gap between what they love and review and what the average American drinks. It seems, from glancing at his archives, that blogger Alder Yarrow posts annually on this discrepancy. He posts annually on it because he responds every year to the Restaurant Wine report, which comes out each fall, loaded with information on the popularity of jug wines (read his latest reaction here, from September 19). I'm humbled, he writes, to know that it's Americans' taste for Sutter Home white zinfandel that keeps the whole wine industry afloat, and I'm grateful to have access to the very different kinds of wines that I do. (He lives in San Francisco.)

I believe him when he says he's humbled and grateful. But it's funny. The people buying and drinking the jug wines are doing exactly what wine writers say they should, what they say Europeans have always done. Drinking what they like, and treating wine as a part of everyday life. What they are missing is the epiphany-like experience of tasting a wine that soars beyond product and becomes, well, something that well-drunk people have epiphanies about. Mr. Yarrow thinks that, every year, some American wine drinkers must jump the jug ship and start buying wines that say Pomerol on the label, and he finds that prospect encouraging.)

All this massive digression has led us far from where I wanted to go, and that was Italy. The reason I have decided I must learn Italian wine is because it seems to me, of all those varietals and all those jugs and then all those Pomerols and other, um, San Francisco-type wines circulating up in the stratosphere above our plonk-y heads, it's Italian wines that truly seem different, different enough to catch the eye and startle the tastebuds of the person who lacks decades of well-drunk experience. Chiantis, for example. They're not too much more expensive than a notch-above-jug, Lodi red wine, and yet they remind me of raspberries, olives, and horses. I find that very intriguing after my umpteenth bottle of shiraz or cab or cab shiraz, once again going down more or less like barbecued chocolate syrup. Italian wine ... don't the words themselves trill crisp and luscious off the tongue? No wonder Lucia stood fascinated by it all. And then that recent prosecco, for example. Delicious, why -- it made me enjoy an extra dry sparkling wine. Why are Italian wines different?

In what deestrict of Italy shall we begin our voyage? I can't decide whether to start in the north, in the heavyweight wine production areas of Piedmont or the Tre Venezie, or in Chianti's home of Tuscany, or in the south, in Sicily with its ancient Greek ruins and its marsala or nero d'avola. What would Lucia do?

" 'Me must fink,' " she would say, in the baby language that she and her best friend and cavaliere serviente, Georgie, occasionally indulge in. Oh, and as for almost every actor being right for his role in that splendid BBC production, the only one miscast was the nice lady playing Olga Braceley, Lucia's first nemesis. Why an overmade-up, beefy, six-foot laughing hyena, when Olga was written as beautiful, gentle, kind, and sweetly happy? Me must fink.

This is why people stay in the wine business

2009-10-02T07:46:00.001-05:00

Samples.

It's all about the samples. The more you sample, the more you learn, and the more you learn, the more you enjoy the wine and want to stay in the wine business, to learn more about even better wines, and be better able to appreciate more samples. It's wonderfully circular.

I've been able to try close to ten new and, for me, somewhat high end wines in just over a month; one was five years old and one was ten, and that's unusual, too. Most wines on the grocery store or liquor store shelf are, of course, fresh from the bottler, and meant to be drunk up right away. So, what adds to the beauty and interest of all those samples is that not only is there always something a wholesale distributor wants you to carry in the store, maybe two or three things for you to try, but there's always some aging thing tucked away in the back room, purchased, buried and forgotten until inventory time, when everything is dusted off and counted again. Why look! A Benziger cabernet from 1998 -- we sold all the rest, it's probably past its prime, but try it -- and here's a Napa Cellars '05, that should be just about right. And then Wholesaler X is asking us to try these, here's a pinot noir, another cabernet, here's two chardonnays -- one's in a new "green friendly" lightweight bottle -- and here's a prosecco. Brand new. Let me know what you think.

I'd be glad to. I don't know of too many other businesses in which this kind of homework features so routinely and pleasantly. Maybe if you work at a bakery or florist's shop, you carry home the excess. But, after a certain point, how much more is there to learn about a doughnut or a carnation? Wine is different.

And the prosecco was absolutely delicious. LaMarca was the brand, an extra dry sparkling wine from Italy. It was my first experience of actually enjoying a very dry wine. I begin to "get it." Funnily, though, it seemed to lose all its lively fruit flavor within just a few hours of the bottle being opened; so I announced this very same puzzlement and complaint on Facebook, and I got an answer right away, but I'm sorry to admit I forget who the answer came from. It was either the nice people at Snooth or the nice people at Local Wine Events (I'm a fan of both). Whoever it was explained that proseccos are very delicately flavored to begin with, and since most of our sense of "taste" comes from the aromatics we smell, any bubbly wine tends to lose those aromatics quickly as its own bubbles effervesce them away. Ah so.

Which means, of course, I'm going to need more samples.

P.S. A little more on spotting an "authentic" prosecco, from Blog au vin.

Etuveed shredded carrots

2009-09-25T07:22:00.002-05:00

This happens to be one of the most perfect vegetable side dishes you could ever prepare, and it comes, as might be expected, from our friend Madeleine Kamman's New Making of a Cook. It's called "Etuveed shredded carrots," and while the hand grating of one and a half pounds, six to eight carrots to start with might be a bit tedious, it does turn out to be well worth it. Besides, possibly you own a food mill, which will make the job easier.

Peel and grate, roughly, the carrots. Then, melt about 3 or 4 Tbsp olive oil in a heavy bottomed pan, and when it is hot, add a chopped onion. Cook the onion slowly and gently, until it becomes soft and smells delicious. A little browning of its edges will do no harm.

Dump in the carrots. Stir them and salt them lightly to extract some water from them -- vegetables that are "etuveed" steam mostly in their own juices.

Cover the pot with a lid, and then add a little nutmeg (1/4 tsp), lemon juice (about 1 Tbsp), butter (think generously -- 2 to 4 Tbsp), and a splash of white wine -- perhaps 1/4 cup at most. Cover and cook all this gently for about 20 minutes, until the carrots have absorbed all the seasonings, wine, and butter, and are soft and delicious. Sprinkle some parsley over them at the last minute.

Any white wine is good for this recipe, but chardonnay seems especially appropriate. Madeleine suggests the wine might be replaced with apple cider, too, which is something I have not tried yet.

You want these carrots, the next time you have a roast chicken or any white meat, including pork, veal, or fish. Trust me (and Madeleine). You want them.

Managing your online wine cellar

2009-09-19T07:36:00.001-05:00

Somebody has to do it.

Wine drinkers who poke around on the Internet are likely to be aware of online wine cellars, where you can log in and type up a list of the bottles you have in your home, record what you opened last night and what you thought of it, prices, and so on. Two of the most familiar sites are CellarTracker and Cork'd. CellarTracker has been around for five years and boasts a database of over one million consumer-generated wine reviews -- everybody recording what they thought of last night's wine -- and a log of ten million bottles. Cork'd, brainchild of two web developers each named Dan who work on an iceberg floating between Massachusetts and Florida (the site says so) was founded in 2006 and bought in May of 2007 by New Jersey based wine wunderkind Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibrary TV.

Occasionally I have visited CellarTracker in order to look up a particular wine that I have tried, and find out what other people have thought of it. (This is crap, I'll sometimes read, which is a rather unhelpful wine note all around.) CellarTracker's look is so busy, however, that it's discouraging for a start. And when I first logged in to Cork'd, I found that the site kept telling me "no one has reviewed that wine yet -- be the first" when in fact I was trying to be the first. I gave up.

Which brings us to Vinut, a newer on line wine cellar launched in January 2009. Full disclosure: the nice man running Vinut contacted me to say he had stumbled upon my blog (insert woo hoo here) and thought my readers might be interested in the site. I took a look at Vinut, and indeed found I was interested in it. Its look is beautifully clean, for one thing, and for another, this on-line cellar tracker is for you, the individual: you log in and use it as an aide-memoire regarding what you have bought and tasted. That's all. As the nice man wrote in an email to me, he found on investigating the market -- other cellar management websites -- that with many of them "things were getting more 'social,' which I didn't find necessary." Exactly. All you really want, especially if you are a novice wine drinker, is some place to store your notes besides that ratty notebook sitting on your desk which you also use as a scratch paper pad and coffee cup coaster. Let's face it: seeing things elegantly totted up on a computer screen somehow looks more serious and worthy. And fun. It's fun to get a clear picture, a screen shot, of just how many bottles you have tried. Maybe a lot more than you think, which makes you feel serious and worthy. If you want to open your Vinut cellar to genuine friends, people whose email addresses you actually know, you may do so, but this is not the place to meet new wine friends who all agree this is crap. "Everyone for himself," as Joseph puts it.

Navigating Vinut, however, will prove a learning experience immediately, which is certainly a good thing. When you log on to start chronicling your wine drinking experiences, the first thing the site will ask you is the name of the vineyard of the wine you wish to record. Required information. You can't go further without knowing it. For the shopper accustomed to buying wine by those attractive, clever, artistic labels which so many winemakers' marketing departments dream up -- Earthquake or Big Ass or Buy This Crud or whatever -- then you have Woodbridge, Woodbridge, and Woodbridge, or you have the lovely little family owned operations in Meaningful Valley, California, which name their wines Meghan Schuyler after a beloved granddaughter -- for the shopper accustomed to all this, the idea of wine coming from a vineyard is a jolt. Oh. The vineyard. That matters? Well, let's see: in my coffee-stained notebook I have a note about a wine I tasted at Ye Olde Wine Shoppe in December of 2007. My handwriting reads, "Castell del Remei, Spain, Gotim Bru 2005 Costers del Segre." Lord have mercy, I have no idea which of those is the vineyard. Maybe none. I at least understand Spain is the country.

Luckily, Vinut will not kick you off your own cellar steps if you type in the wrong thing, but it is uncanny how much it does know. I put in Costers del Segre and found the name already listed in the drop-down menu for Spain's regions. Ah so. Vinut's forcing the user to think about and remember wine in these terms might just represent the very boost needed to get you over the wall from ignorance to connoisseur-ship, or at least to a wise and cheerful appreciation of what wine is. Vineyard, country, region; then vintage year and producer; finally, cute label identification, if any. Wine as miraculous but understandable product of collaboration between nature and man, not as perplexing, incognita temptress, nor as bottled uniformity to be shunned in astonishment if its price rises above $6.99.

(My actual tasting note for what we at Ye Shoppe called Gotim Bru was "average good red blend, not too dry," which makes me cringe now. Gee, how discerning.)

I like Vinut. If you visit and notice that one or two users' contributions, highlighted on the main page, are in German, there's a reason. Vinut's founder was born in the United States but has lived long enough in Germany to be bilingual. Vinut itself exists in two forms, English and German. "Your browser settings will choose the appropriate language for you," Joseph writes. Uncanny.

Incidentally, enjoy this post from Vinography, three years ago, on "Why community tasting note sites will fail (my emphasis)." Vinography makes an exception for on line cellar management sites like CellarTracker -- or, by extension, Vinut. And Vinography agrees with me on CellarTracker's atrocious look, "what must be one of the most godawful web application interfaces I have ever seen. The thing simply stinks ...."

Uncanny.

Occitanian soup, freely translated (and another entry into my Culinary Hall of Fame)

2009-09-14T06:56:00.002-05:00

Madeleine Kamman -- I am tempted to say, the great Madeleine Kamman -- remains my favorite cooking writer. Her New Making of a Cook and When French Women Cook comprise in themselves a complete cooking library, although I admit I prepare very few dishes from the latter; as she says in her introduction, most of its recipes are meant for entertaining and so are too elaborate for everyday. What is great about Madeleine, however, and what is evidenced in both books, is not only that she respects and teaches the science and the whys of cooking, which is always a great help (once you learn why your onions burned or your dough was tacky, you won't repeat mistakes endlessly), but that she has deep family and professional roots in France's and therefore the West's cooking heritage. She prefaces many of the recipes in The New Making of a Cook by saying, this is the authentic way (and why), this is the way I was taught and why, this is the no-shortcuts method which you must know in order to understand, etc. The cynic could argue that any writer on any technical subject is likely to claim that whatever he learned at his grandmother's side is authentic and in danger of being lost by foolish hustle-bustle modern man -- but Madeleine, whose attitude anyway is never lofty and judgmental like that, does seem to know her material. She knows, for example, that if you want to taste something like the fermented fish sauce of ancient Rome called garum or liquamen, "try to find on the French Riviera and in the backcountry of Nice a true pissalat, which by now has become a rare form of true liquamen."

Well, okay. Needless to say, I'll trust her on things like mashed potatoes or a good roast chicken.

Today's recipe is from the "Happy Marriages" chapter -- i.e., soups -- of The New Making of a Cook. I have had to translate Occitanian Soup into a somewhat less robust version of the original, not having access to confit fat, walnut oil, or pancetta. Not that it's anyone's fault but my own that I don't have access to these things. Confit fat, for example, is a kitchen product that you understand perfectly well you could make yourself, once you carefully read Madeleine's instructions about it. It's simply any animal fat, but usually duck, that is used as a kind of deep bath in which to cook a salted and spiced meat. Then the meat and fat are cooled and stored in a jar until wanted, the fat of course solidifying on top of the meat to act as a seal. So for a recipe calling for confit fat, you would reach into your cellar or fridge and spoon out a bit of it from the jar. The whole affair probably represents a cooking technique dating from the Stone Age, Madeleine says, "when meats were cooked in water in a large animal skin stretched like a pouch over an open fire. ...when one cooks meat this way and lets it simmer a long time, the water eventually evaporates, leaving the meat to finish cooking in its own fat." Incidentally, the spice mixture she likes best, to sprinkle on the meat you intend to cook in confit, comes from the village of Beynac in the Perigord (see page 786).

Need I elucidate why she takes pride of place in my little Culinary Hall of Fame?

But, the soup. In the very authentic version, you will start by soaking dried beans overnight in water. Then you'll cook them briefly and set them aside. Then, you'll brown pancetta and onions in confit fat, and add to them loads of chopped vegetables -- cabbage, leeks, carrots, turnips, and celery, plus a big bouquet garni of 20 parsley stems, 1 large bay leaf, and 1 "very large" sprig of thyme. Toss all of it and let it cook briefly, then cover the vegetables with water and cook about 15 minutes, then add the beans and their water and cook about 35 more minutes.

Meanwhile -- authentically, again -- you'll prepare, first, a persillade. This is a combination of 3 large cloves of garlic, diced, along with 1/4 cup of minced fresh parsley. Once this is ready in a little bowl, add half of it to a sausage mixture of ground turkey, goose, or duck meat plus Italian sausage removed from its casing, plus an egg and a cup of breadcrumbs. All of this mixture you will shape into six patties, which you'll then wrap in blanched, softened cabbage leaves. Tie these packages with kitchen string, and drop them into the soup to cook. They will be done after about 40 minutes' simmering. The right amounts of salt and pepper, of course, are for you to judge all through your cooking.

Finally, to serve, you will remove the string from the meat packages, and stir into the soup the other half of that persillade sitting in the little bowl. And you'll have a grated hard cheese handy to sprinkle on each individual portion. "A dry sheep's milk cheese from the French or Spanish Pyrenees" would be best, or a Pecorino Romano. (I used a Parmesan.)

May I, respectfully, translate? I think it's all right if I do. Somewhere in the 1100 page depth of her book Madeleine writes that over the years, she has learned to appreciate and accept the simple reality of other people's tastes.

Melt a nice-flavored combination of fats in a heavy bottomed pot. Butter and olive oil are excellent. Add and stir, soften and wilt, some chopped onions, leeks, carrots, celery, and Savoy cabbage. (This last, and the leeks, make a real difference.)

Stir in some herbs, like parsley, thyme, and basil. Fresh thyme is one of your very best friends in the soup pot.

Add water to cover the vegetables. I like to add a packet of peppercorns and coriander seeds stapled into a paper coffee filter, which substitutes well for the cheesecloth you don't necessarily need to buy.

Simmer the soup as long as you like. Apart from the preparation of the beans, even Madeleine's authentic version only really cooks for perhaps an hour or an hour and fifteen minutes, counting the forty minutes the sausage and cabbage packages will "finish cooking with the soup." The longer the better, however.

Do, by all means, make that persillade and stir half of it into the soup at the end. I think it's considered acceptable to moisten it with a bit of olive oil, too. If it doesn't give you a new and lifelong passion for fresh garlic, it will at least keep Dracula away for the night.

And about the sausage and cabbage packages. I believe there's no harm in making meatballs instead. A pound of ground beef or veal, mixed with half the persillade and the egg and breadcrumbs, may be formed into small balls and the balls simmered 15 minutes in a separate pot of salted water. Add these to the soup -- no strings attached -- and carry on.

When you sit down to dine you will almost, almost feel you are somewhere in the Perigord, which incidentally is just where those French boys found the Stone Age cave paintings in Lascaux in the 1940s. Perhaps our ancestors then -- to be fair, Frenchmen's ancestors, wouldn't you know it -- painted so beautifully because they had just eaten so well. Confits, and things.

Madeleine must have the last word. This is one of the wisest things I think I have ever read: and it's in a cookbook.

"There is something instructive to be found everywhere and the more points of view you allow yourself to understand, the more you will become truly yourself by keeping what you like and discarding what you do not."

Alexander Valley cabernet sauvignon, 1979

2009-09-08T07:00:00.000-05:00

Ought one to store one's wine upright in the back of a liquor cabinet for thirty years? Hmmm. Well, surely they'll make more.

What's interesting is that, according to Alexander Valley's website, the winery was built in 1975, so this vintage may have been the very first and certainly had to have been among the first.

In thirty years, the wine had done what good wines are supposed to do when they age: all its mouth-puckering tannins were gone, its color had altered from mulberry youth to nut-brown age, and its taste was all sherry, pecans, and baked date syrup, if there could be such a thing. This cabernet probably reached its prime ten years ago, for it certainly did not thrill the party enough to finish the bottle -- and when it comes to it, people drink up what they like.

But it was fun to bring to a Wine 101 tasting the following week, so that everyone could literally hold up to the light and see two examples of the same type of wine, made thirty years apart. Some actually gasped as they watched the brown liquid pour into the cup. But it didn't get drunk up that night, either.

So I still have half the bottle. May I cook with it, or will it ruin any dish?

Wine news: the harvest begins

2009-09-02T05:00:00.000-05:00

It seems 2009 will be a year to savor both for bordeaux and burgundies. The summer weather was near-perfect in both regions, that is, after that hailstorm in Bordeaux in May which wiped out a good portion of the crop. Grapes are small and intensely flavored, and should therefore produce wines of concentration and "structure" -- wines that have enough tannins and acids in them to give them interest in the mouth and age-worthiness in the bottle. (For an idea of what you're missing in this way, try a nice jug wine, as I did recently. It tasted exactly like pink water.) Decanter magazine quotes wine makers in both areas as comparing the 2009 vintage to the 2005, itself of legendary quality.

This is the sort of knowledge that wine lovers need before they buy a bottle three years from now, when whatever of the 2009 vintage that has escaped wealthy collectors finds its way to retail shelves. Write yourself a memo, and happy hunting in 2012.

Decanter: Burgundy predicts magnificent 2009
Decanter: Bordeaux: 2009 could be the next 2005

Beer

2009-08-30T07:00:00.000-05:00

Beer.

Beer beer.

Beer beer beer beer beer beer.

Beer beer beer beer beer, beer beer beer beer beer beer, beer, beer beer beer.

Beer.

Beer beer beer.

The grocery store where I now (thankfully) work has a very nice wine aisle -- the only aisle in the store with faux wooden flooring, which makes me feel special -- and it has a fifteen-door beer cooler. Directly behind you as you stand facing the cooler is a wall of beer about 15 or 20 feet long, boxes of 6 packs and boxes of 12 packs and boxes of 18 and 24 packs, stacked higher than your head. Next to the wall of beer is a smaller tower of beer about the size of a sequoia in circumference, mostly 12 packs of specialty brews, and next to that is another tower of beer, perhaps 12 feet high, facing the deli. In close proximity is another tower of beer, of the same proportions, facing the bread aisle.

So I positively dreaded what had to come sooner or later, my first day spent restocking the beer cooler. I know nothing about beer, except how it's made, a little, because one of the first article titles I claimed for Demand Studios this past spring had to do with "using dry yeast to replace Hefeweizen yeast." And so I researched a bit into beer making then. (Originally I had hoped that title would lead me to learning and writing something about bread, of which I am not totally ignorant. No such luck.)

Anyway. Ten a.m. Saturday morning. Third day on the job. Make a list of what we're low on and restock the beer cooler from supplies in the beer walls and from the back room. Make sure to especially keep up with the "9 to 5" stuff, the Bud, the Miller, the Busch, that sells like hotca -- well, like beer.

Okay. I ended up with a list of forty or fifty items to restock, and then had the challenge of finding it all.

As the bloggers all say: Oh. My. God.

Who knew? I know that to make beer you start with malted grain and you mix it with water and add hops and you "pitch" yeast into the wort, and if you use top-fermenting yeasts you'll make an ale and if you use bottom-fermenting yeasts you'll have a lager, an invention of the 19th century and its concomitant technological marvel, refrigeration.

But the marketing? The packaging? Who knew? Oh my God.

Miller, Miller Lite, Miller Lite 6 packs, 12 pack bottles, 6 pack long neck bottles, 12 pack, 18 pack cans, 24 pack cans, Bud, Bud Light, Miller High Life, Miller High Life Light 24 ounce cans, Miller Draft, Miller Draft Light, Old Style, Michelob, Lite, Light, Draft, Draught, cans, bottles, 12 pack 6 pack 18 pack 12 ounce bottles 24 pack cans, Corona Extra, Corona Light, Coronita 5 ounce bottles 6 pack, Sam Adams Seasonal Ale Summer Ale Draft Light Lager Summer Beer Classic 12 pack, Mike's Hard Lemonade, Mike's Hard Berry, Mike's Hard Cranberry Lemonade, Mike's Hard Lime, Mike's Seasonal pink-ribbon-for-breast-cancer 6 pack. No kidding. It goes on and on.

I do believe I walked five miles yesterday in that store, just going back and forth between the cooler and the back room, learning beer. In short order, my list of What We're Low On became an exercise in nullity. There was always some detail re: beer that I had failed to write down on my list, necessitating my going back again to confirm matters. No no -- that's Miller Genuine Draft Light 12 ounce bottle 6 pack, plastic bottles. I even tried filling a shopping cart of random things from the back room and pushing that out to "the Floor," reasoning that some of it surely would be needed. No such luck. I had cleverly put my hands on everything we were not Low On. A young co-worker passing me in the back room looked down on me from his approximately eight-foot height, smiled and said, "Just walkin' back and forth all day, huh?" And I burst out, "Oh my God. I'm learning beer. I know nothing about beer. I'm doing this one 6 pack at a time ...."

Which I was. But, by golly, after about four hours of this -- plus keeping my eye on the wine aisle, helping customers, and setting up a wine tasting -- I began to understand beer. And when my boss returned to the store, by golly I had that cooler stocked to the doors with the "9 to 5" stuff. Then he finished stocking the more obscure products with me. Who knew that Beck's non alcoholic beer is called Haake on the shelf price ticket, but Beck's on the packaging? Why would any marketing department do that?

Oh my God. But at least the day is under my belt. Beer, beer beer beer beer, beer beer beer beer beer, beer beer.

Beer beer.

Beer.

Off I go

2009-08-26T06:06:00.000-05:00

... and very lucky that the wine department of a local grocery store kept my job application for the better part of a year. Stocking shelves, part time, twenty minutes from home? You got it.

In which I, too, cook with Julia

2009-08-18T05:39:00.001-05:00

Everyone came out of the movie (Julie & Julia) marveling at being "so hungry ... just starving." We went out to eat at our new favorite local restaurant, a Middle Eastern/Mediterranean place that specializes in lamb-stuffed grape leaves, fried kibbeh, shish kebabs, and baklava. And Turkish coffee, which is the closest I get to cardamom. By itself cardamom is $14 a jar at the grocery store.

The next day I took out my French Chef Cookbook -- I don't have the actual opus, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, though I promise I will soon -- thinking I might find a nice simple chicken recipe, quick to prepare on a hot summer day.

I found it. The first recipe in the book is for Supremes de volaille a blanc, chicken breasts poached in butter with wine and cream sauce. In the movie Amy Adams says, in a voice over as Julie Powell, that when you cook along with Julia Child, you cook with butter. And butter. And more butter. She's right, and what is odd is that it must be the butter and cream that make the dish. That, and the cooking of the meat just a point, just to the point of perfect doneness. Not that I got there, but I came pretty close. Those two factors must be the source of the flavor. Otherwise, they were just chicken breasts.

You begin with 4 supremes, half chicken breasts taken from a 2 to 3 pound chicken. In the 1960s, when Julia was buying provisions to cook on television, I suspect these were fairly small pieces of meat. Today, chickens are raised to mature as fast as possible with breasts as big as possible -- I seem to recall my brothers, who work in the wholesale meat business, telling stories of chickens ready for market 6 weeks after being hatched, and of their breasts being so big that the birds can't stand, but topple over from the weight. What manufacturers want, ideally, is an egg that just hatches fast growing, no maintenance breast meat, and they've nearly gotten their wish it seems. Not that they are some sort of bad guys. This is what consumers want, too.

Anyway, I bought the usual skinless boneless chicken breasts, modern, large, and lumpy, and I bought enough for a family of five. Already I was anticipating having to quarrel with Julia over her cooking time for these supremes. Six minutes in a 400 F oven, after a brief "roll" in hot butter? I don't think so.

You rub the meat with drops of lemon juice, some salt, and white pepper. Then, you heat 4 Tablespoons of butter in a heavy casserole until it foams, and quickly roll the breasts in the butter. Lay a circle of wax paper over the meat, cover the casserole, and put it in a preheated 400 degree oven.

This is the first time I did actually cut a piece of wax paper to fit a pot, and use it according to directions. I am not sure what good it does. Logic would suggest it helps steam the meat by acting as a much more close fitting lid than the pot lid can be.

Julia advises checking the meat for doneness after 6 minutes, and giving the breasts a minute or two more if they feel "soft and squashy" to your fingertip. For my part, I go in terror of undercooked meat, and so don't trust any old fingertip but must cut even supremes open at their thickest part to see if they are done. And I don't trust "carryover heat" to finish the job, either. All told, my 21st century supremes needed 16 minutes to finish, not six.

Upon removing the chicken to a warm platter, address yourself to making the sauce. Simply boil up the juices until they begin to thicken and reduce, and then pour in successively 1/4 cup stock, 1/4 cup wine, and finally 1 cup heavy cream. Boil and reduce away -- that's the cream reducing in the photo above. I must admit I cheated when it came to the stock and the wine. On hand, I had neither stock (not even canned broth), nor port, Madeira, or vermouth. I used the dregs of a bottle of an interesting but inexpensive white Rioja, and no stock at all.

But the cream -- ah yes, the cream. There it is. Add the last few drops of lemon juice to it, plus something green -- Julia says parsley, I had fresh tarragon -- and taste a spoonful, just like a professional, just like the characters in the movie. When you watch people tasting things in food movies, you might be skeptical there in the dark and think, for heaven's sake, how different and revelatory and sublime can it be? My cream sauce was not sublime but it was very good, and revelatory in a small way. After all, these were just chicken breasts, but my goodness, my goodness, yes, there is a way to do this right.

(Our wine for dinner was another grocery store selection, a bottom-shelf sauvignon blanc from Gallo's own Barefoot Cellars.)

Non-French killjoys, the veraison, and my new club -- more random thoughts

2009-08-14T12:47:00.003-05:00

Not only in France are the killjoys at work, pulling shocked faces at the union of rose petals and champagne in advertising art. In Alabama, it seems, they don't like pictures of naked ladies with thick streaming red hair flying through the deep blue cosmos beside winged bicycles -- on wine labels. Like so:

(Image from the Wine Spectator website.)

Heaven knows what the wine, a cabernet sauvignon called Cycles Gladiator from Hahn Family Wines in Soledad, California, tastes like, but the Alabama Beverage Control Board has banned its sale. It used not to, oddly enough. I take a sort of proprietary interest in the label because I've seen it before. It used to be offered as a framed poster through a gifts, curiosities and home interiors catalog, Wireless or Signals perhaps. Originally the artwork served as a late 19th century French bicycle ad, and a smashing one, too, in my opinion. Leave it to the French of the Belle Epoque to sell bicycles via naked women flying through space. This must have been before an unpleasantly powerful, and thirsty, minority among them became killjoys.

It's time for the veraison in Missouri, as seen in the picture at A Day in the Life of a Missouri Winery. The veraison occurs when the grapes begin to soften and change color as full ripeness and harvest approaches. These grapes are seyval blanc, a French-American hybrid.

And, as Captain Jack Sparrow says in one of his less twitchy moments in Pirates of the Caribbean, "I'm havin' a thought." I think I'll start a club, right here in this space.

Still thinking of the Decanter story about the Champagne producer Moet & Chandon having to pay a big fine for devising an ad campaign juxtaposing images of pink rose petals with wine -- it's illegal, apparently, in France to gull consumers into believing that alcohol, beauty, and pleasure may go together -- I've decided to throw down a pink gauntlet. Preferably velvet, and embroidered. Incidentally, this story of the fine and the anti-alcohol lobby "jubilant" about it does date from January of 2008, but I like to think that At First Glass, like the mills of God, "grinds slowly but grinds exceeding small." I've decided to seek out, make, solicit, publicize, and otherwise celebrate, from time to time, just such promotional images, anything which slaps a wine glass or bottle out there, next to a pretty woman or flowers or crashing waves or whatever, and says Yes by gum, maybe it does equal "a euphoric approach to life." I call my new club the Pink Rose Euphoric Wine Imagery Anti-Killjoy Defiant Seduction Club (and Virtual Gallery), or PREWIAKDSC (and Virtual Gallery).

Please feel free to submit images. Notice, our acronym is longer and cooler than ANPAA (Association Nationale de Prevention en Alcoologie et Addictologie). Mind you, I have nothing against the good work of fighting human addictions, which are serious. But to ban the appearance of pink roses? Because it might trick somebody into thinking wine is nice?

No.

The Pink Rose Euphoric Wine Imagery Anti-Killjoy Defiant Seduction Club and Virtual Gallery begins here.

Old news, and French killjoys -- a few random thoughts

2009-08-12T08:24:00.007-05:00

We have a large used bargain book warehouse nearby, where I like to go and shop sometimes. It's just next to the empty "big box" storefront which used to be a Sam's Club, until the Sam's Club left town to re-establish itself in the next town down the street, which has lower taxes -- now there's an interesting concept. I believe it was Margaret Thatcher who said, the facts of life are conservative.

Anyway, at the book warehouse I picked up a copy of the Wine Spectator from January of 2009. It's a good issue to keep, for it has a list of "the most exciting wines of 2008," specifically the Top 100 wines of the year, plus "our guide to great champagne." I am glad to tell you that the best wine of the year, for the Spectator's editors and writers, was Casa Lapostolle's 2005 Clos Apalta, a traditional Bordeaux blend of carmenere, cabernet sauvignon, merlot, and petite verdot from Chile's Colchagua Valley. If you see it, expect to pay $75 per bottle; but more good news is that there are a few wines of $17 or $18 on the Top 100 list, and even one of $12 (Leasingham 2007 Clare Valley riesling, Australia). One wine on the list has earned the full, the magic 100 points -- Chateau L'Evangile Pomerol, of course a red Bordeaux (merlot-cabernet franc), and from the glory year of 2005. Expect to pay $260 a bottle, but expect not to find it, either.

I thumb through the Spectator, and at the risk of sounding snarky I wonder who finds this overwhelmingly rich and informative magazine really useful, coming out as it does twice each month or so. This one issue, perhaps so well stuffed because it dates from the end of a year, would suffice as a study guide for me for a year. Score after score of wine reviews, never mind the profiles of wine industry giants who have taken on new and exciting positions Here, following upon well known fifty-year careers There, and even the ads, some of which are breathtakingly beautiful, amount to little lessons (what is "fleur de champagne"?). I can only surmise that the magazine serves mostly as a shopping guide for very knowledgable people who have a monthly wine budget, and want fresh advice on the best value purchases for the next fortnight's next fifteen or twenty bottles -- or cases, possibly.

This particular issue also features a little story, in the front-of-book Grape Vine column on page 14, about the French postal service yanking from circulation a lovely little stamp "personalized" for a wholesale wine distributing company called La Compagnie des Vins. (I gather it would be as if Southern Wine and Spirits had its own, legal and usable United States Postal Service postage stamp. Now there's a moneymaking concept ....)

The stamp's artwork shows a colorful, pretty, cartoon like woman, a sort of female Caravaggio Bacchus only less overripe and sinister looking. She looks out at us happily, wearing her crown of yellowing grape vine leaves, deep blue grapes dangling at her rosy cheeks. She carries a glass filled with red wine just near her pretty red lips. The background is lime green and stark black, at once modern and cheerful.

La Poste pulled it, "deeming it illegal, right up there with images of war crimes and pornography." The manager of La Compagnie des Vins is quoted as saying " 'in the current climate, winemakers or merchants are considered more dangerous than cocaine dealers.' "

What current climate? For some time now, bloggers and writers have been noting uneasily and perplexedly that France -- Lord have mercy, France -- has an anti-wine movement which seems to hold the whip hand over the French government. Winesooth wants to know why. Tom Wark at Fermentation suggested his own simple plan to destroy the French wine industry more efficiently. He was referencing a story from Decanter, one of many, about a potential law that would have actually forbidden wine tastings in the country. When directives policing wine consumption and advertising do pass into law and are enforced, it's France's main temperance group, the Association Nationale de Prevention en Alcoologie et Addictologie, that exults. They "were jubilant," for example, in 2008 when Moet & Chandon were fined 30,000 euros for running an ad campaign in which a champagne bottle appeared next to some pink rose petals, evilly uniting images of alcohol with beauty. Holy smokes, we can't have that.

The Brenner Vineyards Historic District, Doniphan County, Kansas

2009-08-08T08:58:00.003-05:00

A friend who collects stamps and other interesting documents recently gave me this, an envelope or "cover." Inside is a wine order written in English on a German language form. Destination: the Jacob Brenner Wine Company of Doniphan, Kansas, May 1904.

The customer, John Gruenewald of Wayne R.F.D. Q. (?) Nebraska, ordered ten gallons of Red Seal at $5.35, "extra packing" for 25 cents, and requested "wine corks not to (sic) big" for another dollar. Grand total, $6.60. Incidentally Mr. Gruenewald also had that excellent handwriting which bespeaks the epoch of fine-nibbed fountain pens and painstaking schoolboy classes in penmanship.

I hedge my bets and say it appears to be a wine order only because how can I know, before doing some historical digging, the intent of the customer confidently filling in a German language form? What with the corks and the packing and the gallons wanted, it looks as if the customer might have been ordering wine making supplies, not potables for his cellar.

But no. How remarkable are the tools which the modern world -- only a little more than a hundred years after Mr. Gruenewald placed his order -- gives you for historical digging. I have only to click "new tab," and open a few windows, and there laid out before me is the history of the Jacob Brenner Wine Company.

The Brenner family, led by brothers Adam and Jacob, arrived in this extreme northeastern corner of Kansas (here it meets the states of Iowa, Nebraska, and Missouri) from Deidesheim, Bavaria, in 1857 and 1860. The federal census for that latter year lists Jacob Brenner as a grape grower. Adam and later Jacob's son George would all settle down to the wine trade virtually in each other's backyards for years.

Strangely, though, the Brenners unknowingly arrived and began to farm, build houses, and sponsor churches just when the local town, Doniphan, began a long and irreversible economic decline. Only founded in 1852, the town seemed beautifully situated for both agriculture and commerce: its farm lands were rich, it stood right on a bend of the Missouri river handy for river transport, and after 1870 it was a stop on the Atchison and Nebraska railroad -- also a good thing for grain transport. Adam Brenner built an $18,000 grain elevator at this time, which tragically burned to the ground in 1872.

But Doniphan's main problem seems to have been simply that there were other, bigger towns nearby, to which businesses and populations naturally gravitated. Atchison, Leavenworth, and St. Joseph, Missouri, all beckoned. Still, human lifetimes and perspectives are short in the great scheme of things, and from the 1860s through the 1890s, the Brenner family did well by its wine, as Doniphan with its new grain elevator did well by the Brenners. Adam and Jacob each ran separate enterprises. For a time Adam owned the biggest vineyard in the state of Kansas (75 of his 450 acres), plus a warehouse on Main Street in Doniphan that held 30,000 gallons of wine. Jacob planted 15 of his 40 acres to vines, and a generation later, in the 1880s, his son George also planted about half his land to grapes and owned a cellar with a storage capacity of 10,000 gallons. They grew native North American species, like white and red Concord, catawba, Salem, Virginia Seedling (this is the excellent Norton or Cynthiana), and more obscure varieties with names like the Taylor Bullit, the Goethe, and the Martha. Brenner wines shipped throughout the Midwest and as far as the east coast. A reporter from the Doniphan Herald sampled the product and wrote about it in May, 1872:

"We visited the wine cellars of the Brenners this week, and to say that we enjoyed the sparkling fluid from the 1,000 gallon cask, would not half express our delight in that visit. Such delicious wines are not found elsewhere in the United States. Those Brenner wines are getting a reputation not to be excelled anywhere in the country. Hermann has heretofore claimed the laurel in wines, but Doniphan now so far surpasses her in quality that Hermann must stand aside. It will be observed that the wine went to the Herald editor's head in short order."

This was eight years before Kansas passed an amendment to its state constitution forbidding the manufacture and sale of alcohol, except for medicinal or sacramental purposes. The Brenners' wine businesses survived after 1880 partly because they promoted their product as medicinal and sacramental. (Being surrounded by wine-loving German immigrants may have helped.) By the mid 1880s, when Atchison newspapers warned travelers of Doniphan's poor roads and "unsuitable" river landing, the Brenner vineyards had become the sole bright spot of the area. The family still employed masses of schoolboys during harvest time, so many that Doniphan schools did not reopen until late September; in the best years the Brenners turned out 150,000 gallons of wine a season.

Adam Brenner himself left Doniphan for Atchison in 1885. He died there five years later; his brother Jacob died the following year, in February 1891. Four months later, on one night in June 1891, the Missouri River rose, flooded and completely silted Doniphan's railroad yards, and then retreated to a new channel, leaving the town landlocked as well. (This is precisely what Mark Twain describes the Mississippi doing, with equally appalling randomness, in Life on the Mississippi.)

In the next two years, as if throwing down a gauntlet at fate, the second Brenner generation, cousins who were the children of Adam and Jacob, founded two new businesses, the Jacob Brenner Wine Company and the Doniphan Vineyards Wine Company. Both lasted about twenty years or less. The Jacob Brenner Wine Co., from which our John Gruenewald ordered his Red Seal in 1904, was liquidated in 1912.

By the 1930s and '40s, the Brenner properties had passed out of the family's hands and into the ownership of other people, who farmed and raised new families there. Early 21st century Doniphan, Kansas has a population of about fifty.

All this information comes from the application, addressed to the U.S. Department of the Interior in 2004, to place the Brenner Vineyards of Doniphan County on the National Register of Historic Places. The application was researched and written by Susan Jezak Ford, a Kansas City architectural historian and historic preservation consultant, who was herself hired by the Doniphan County Heritage Commission after they had received a grant from the Kansas State Historical Society to explore a preservation project in the county. As she points out, the old vineyards themselves are not a part of the Brenner Historic District, since they are now devoted to other agriculture. The "contributing" properties are a church, a two-story winery building, a barn, corncrib, and pump house, a smokehouse, and the ruins of Adam Brenner's house and winery. All comprise about five acres of land west of the town of Doniphan, on bluffs that "once descended to meet the Missouri River." Ghostly residents of Doniphan, if they could come back from that June night in 1891, would probably grimly whisper would that it were so.

Photo courtesy Susan Jezak Ford

The Brenner Vineyards Historic District was approved and added to the National Register in 2005. Hermann, Missouri, which "had heretofore claimed the laurel in wines," is located about 270 miles east across the state of Missouri, and constitutes a major midwestern American Viticultural Area or AVA. Stone Hill Winery, established in 1847 -- ten years before Adam Brenner arrived to become "the father of Doniphan" -- lies in the Hermann AVA.

And Mr. Gruenewald's order lies on my desk. I hope he enjoyed his ten gallons of Red Seal.

"Frenched" green beans

2009-08-03T07:32:00.002-05:00

So that's what it means. From Madeleine Kamman's When French Women Cook.

You use a vegetable peeler to strip away the unpleasant string of the green bean. It exposes the seeds inside. This is why, in pictures on bags of frozen green beans, and in pictures in old cookbooks, properly prepared beans look as though they have those strange oval-shaped holes along their sides. Who knew.

Drop them in boiling water, and boil vigorously, uncovered, for 6 minutes. Madeleine Kamman says that, too. Perhaps a minute more if they are quite thick, but you will want them thin and in season anyway, in late spring and summer. (I will take oath that truckloads of them are being put in cryogenic storage right now, to be brought out looking remarkably good, but a tad chewy in the mouth, at Thanksgiving. Otherwise no bean in its right mind should appear fresh and piled high in supermarket bins in late November.)

Drench them in butter, a squirt of lemon juice, and plenty of salt. They will accompany anything. Their own perfect vinous accompaniment -- a sauvignon blanc from New Zealand, surely?

Sour coon pfeffer (racoon pickled in onions and sour wine)

2009-07-26T15:11:00.008-05:00

I ask you.

(Photo from wikipedia.)

I have become passionately devoted, if I wasn't already, to library cast off book sales, and especially to rummaging about on shelves and in boxes thereat, hunting for old obscure cooking pamphlets. There's no end to the gems, from no end of sources -- very often from foodstuffs manufacturers or kitchen appliance manufacturers (whose recipes can be quite good), or from women's civic groups or church groups. A recent favorite is Right eating ... keeps you swinging' published by the Carnation canned milk company in 1964, and intended for an audience of older teens and young adults about ready to go out on their own for the first time. ("Why be healthy? Because it's so much more fun than being unhealthy." Very true.)

Now I happen to have been just thumbing through Favorite Recipes from New Glarus, Wisconsin, published by the New Glarus Tourism Association sometime before September 3, 1977, which is the date inscribed inside the cover by a previous owner of the pamphlet. It looks very clean and unused, by the way. Many of the recipes in this one are followed by an explanatory little sentence, as "a family favorite," "an Amish favorite," "we have prepared this for Christmas in our home for 55 years." I'm sure the ladies were all encouraged to tell a little something about their treasures, when they sent them in to be considered for inclusion in the pamphlet. And every single recipe is followed by the name and address of the proud donor. On every page the pale brown typescript opens up vistas of generations gone by, and of a thousand private lives on a thousand shady American streets. Is the Kundert family of New Glarus still making Zueri Bieter every Thanksgiving? And is Mrs. Purdue of Canyon Road East in Puyallup, Washington, still known -- or perhaps her daughter or granddaughter is -- for Apples Wilhelm Tell? (She very properly credits Marcel Forster of Marcel's Pastry Shop in Seattle with the apple concoction. "I have changed it somewhat.") I'm indebted to a Mrs. Snyder of Mullens, West Virginia, for a recipe for Mock Oysters which is, incredibly, nothing but elderberry blossoms fried in butter.

But nothing is more incredible than this, which I give in full, not forgetting the unorthodox spelling of raccoon. It's on page 33, and comes from the New Glarus fire department, which seems perfectly right. Only strong men could cope with it.

Sour Coon Pfeffer

8 to 9 racoons
salt and pepper
onions
pickling spices
sour wine

Clean all fat from racoons and cut up. Soak one day in strong salt water. Then drain and rinse. Place in stone crock, a layer of meat at a time, salt and pepper each layer and add a few slices of onion to each layer. Put pickling spices in tea balls or sack (1 pak to 4 racoons). Cover with sour wine; let stand 3 days in refrigerator. Using the wine it was soaked in, cook in a roaster at 350 F for 2 and 1/2 hours.

Serves 40.

I'll bet it does. And I'm puzzled by the idea of having access to a whole lot of sour wine. What kind of wine, originally? Did the firemen buy it up cheap and let it sit around for a year or two? But then, procuring enough of that ingredient would in a way seem to be the least of the cook's problems here.

Because, really. I ask you.

I think we had better stick with this.

Fenn Valley, from the Lake Michigan Shore Wine Festival

2009-07-23T08:00:00.001-05:00

What I particularly looked forward to trying at the Lake Michigan Shore Wine Festival was Fenn Valley's red blend, Capriccio, which I had tasted at a friend's house within the last year. Amid the hubbub of that big-tent, county fair style Fest, I peered about like a tourist anxious to see the right things, and luckily there it was: Fenn Valley's table, ice buckets, wines, signage, and staff. I handed over a ticket and got my one ounce pour. I sipped, nodded sagely, and was satisfied. Just as good as I remembered.

Capriccio is a very friendly, fruity red blend made up of about 70 percent chambourcin and the remainder Meritage, that is, the remainder the Bordeaux blend of cabernet franc, cabernet sauvignon, and merlot which American wine makers may legally call "Meritage" if they wish. One pronounces Meritage to rhyme with heritage, although many people say mehr-ih-TAJH because the spelling of this invented word looks so French. My hastily scribbled notes say helpfully, "fruity, medium body -- !!" One hundred point scales are quite beyond me as yet, although at least I've given up explanatory smiley faces.

Chambourcin is a hybrid grape introduced, according to The New Wine Lover's Companion, in France's Loire Valley by Joannes Seyve in 1963. Further information from Appellation America -- which is now a subscription-only website, by the way, although its cached pages are still available gratis -- tells us that despite these details, chambourcin's origins remain mysterious. M. Seyve "based [the Chambourcin] on a number of undetermined Native American species and Seibel hybrids," and it seems in turn there are a large number of these, developed by French hybridist Albert Seibel (1844-1936). The New Companion credits Seibel with ten in just one short paragraph.

The point of hybridizing grape varieties, of course, is to get two parent plants of different species to pass the best of their characteristics to a new variety. Mixing the gene pools of Europe's vitis vinifera and North America's vitis labrusca has long been a tempting challenge: growers want, say, a pinot noir's fine elegant flavor with a Concord's hardiness and abundant production (not that that particular marriage has ever been attempted to my knowledge, but gracious mightn't it be interesting?).

All this makes the chambourcin a 47-year-old hybrid of hybrids of hybrids. And it seems M. Seyve hit something of a jackpot with this one. Appellation America calls the plant "high yielding, cold resistant, disease resistant, and extremely vigorous," its grapes thick skinned and high in tannins and acidity. That's the recipe for a wine of good structure -- in other words, a wine which gives you something to chew on besides sweetness or jamminess or an alcohol kick. It is widely planted in its hybrid home, the Loire, as well as in the northeastern and midwestern United States, in Canada, and in "the humid conditions of" Australia's Hunter Valley.

All that remains to be found out is the reason for chambourcin's name. My French dictionary tells me, on the page where that name should be, chambrer means to keep something under lock and key, or to keep (wine) at room temperature. Good to remember, next time I have access to some nice Capriccio.

Suburban duck breasts

2009-07-20T10:07:00.006-05:00

To invent dinner when you have no recipe; and to pretend that nice, dark meat chicken thighs are duck breasts when you have no duck breasts:

... and you've tried finding them. The supermarkets don't carry them. The local little specialty meat market doesn't carry them. (You've asked.) All those in-the-know urban, professional people who live around the corner from bustling quaint gourmet shops and write excellent recipes for magazines and books don't quite realize. But, since a certain cut of beef was once sold as "City chicken" in the days when chicken was more expensive than beef, shall I now christen chicken thighs as "Suburban duck breasts"? Why not? If it will bring me eternal fame I might consider it.

But really.

... saute chopped onions and celery in olive oil or butter or a combination. Add sliced mushrooms and sliced fresh garlic.

Remove the vegetables from the pan, and then briefly brown four or five boneless, skinless chicken thighs. The thighs are sold nicely rolled up in the shrink wrapped tray. Open the meat out and flatten it to be sure that it starts to cook and continues to cook thoroughly.

When the thighs are lightly seared, return the vegetables to pan, add a quarter cup or so of wine, and simmer gently for about half an hour. Any herbs like thyme or tarragon would also be a good addition now.

Thicken the gravy and serve with mashed potatoes or brown rice.

Just about any wine would go well with this, I think. A rich malbec, a Rioja if you are in the mood for a red, or a riesling or perhaps one of those flavorful but strangely woody pinot grigios -- the millenium has arrived again, I finally tasted a Santa Margherita -- if you are in the mood for a white.

How rose wines are like colored moccasins

2009-07-15T10:49:00.007-05:00

Years ago, my high school French teacher would once in while give us a treat, and allow us to relax from studying grammar and vocabulary long enough to discuss French culture in English. Among other updates and commentaries, she said to us once that it takes about two years or so for French fashions to reach the midwest, but that they inevitably do. They travel first to the east coast, then they jump to California, and then they filter back to us here in our sunny plains and humid forests. (Astonishingly cool plains and forests, as it happens, at least here in my little ecosystem. For the first time ever, I have had to shut windows at night, to keep out the July chill.)

One day, circa 1979, Madame warned us that in a short time, we would all be wearing brightly colored moccasins. She had just visited Paris, and that was what the young women, BCBG (bon chic, bon genre) were wearing on the street.

We all gasped in revulsion. Surely not. Moccasins are brown, why -- they are made of leather, the Indians wore them, they are dignified and natural, they muffled the brave Sioux's footfall as he paced the thick woods silently hunting deer and things. Who would be caught dead wearing such an absurd cultural thievery as colored moccasins? Madame just smiled knowingly.

Needless to say, within a few years, there they were in the stores and on girls' feet. Abruptly, yellow and blue and pink moccasins looked "cute." What happened to change our minds? Nothing, it seems, except that it became clear by some sort of planetary osmosis that of course colored moccasins are French. Q.E.F. (quod erat faciendum, "which was to be done").

These memories have returned because last night, at a Wine 101 presentation, a young woman asked me a question I couldn't quite answer except by saying "it may just be the fashion." It was an answer that explained nothing -- but possibly everything. This young woman had been to Paris two years ago, and had been surprised there to notice the constant serving and drinking of rose wines in the cafes. Why roses? She expected Parisians to be drinking, well, something else. Stronger stuff, perhaps.

My humdrum little answer, sometimes it's just a matter of fashion, makes sense to me because dry rose wines are popular in this country, too. Right on schedule. Professionals first noticed that sales were trending up about two years ago; today the trend continues and this spring, French producers worried about a potential change in European law which could permit roses to be made in a sort of quick 'n' easy way, no doubt to take advantage of that thirsty market. (The proposed law change was scrapped after protests about dilution of quality.)

Why roses, why now? A dry rose is delightful and refreshing, but objectively no more so than a chilled white or even a mix of Beaujolais and water, a blend that Beaujolais producer Didier Mommessin touts as "the most refreshing drink in the world" (quoted in Kevin Zraly's Windows on the World Complete Wine Course, p. 93). I suspect any gaps in that "why now?" logic can often best be filled in, whether we are talking about wine or shoes or lots of other cultural products, with reference to that simple Q.E.F. The French are doing it.

Ready to dip your un-moccasined toe into the sea of dry rose wines? Here are three to start with, all ranging in price from $5 to $15:

Frontera Rose, Concha y Toro, Chile
Santa Digna Cabernet Sauvignon Rose, Miguel Torres, Chile
Bonterra Rose, Bonterra Vineyards, Mendocino, California -- blended from sangiovese, zinfandel, and grenache grapes, all organically grown. This one is available only at Whole Foods.

This is a map of Burgundy

2009-07-11T14:38:00.006-05:00

Really. Of course you must ignore the wooden porch steps, and in your imagination transport the six stones inside the borders of France. Place them in order in a small region in the east central part of the country, just down and to the right of Paris. Then you may proceed.

At the top left, the white stone represents Chablis, home to fine crisp chardonnays, held in stainless steel and not oak. The red and green stones down and to the right represent, together, the Cote d'Or, comprised of the Cote de Nuits (red) and the Cote de Beaune (green). The little white rock next in line is the Cote Chalonnaise, which is quite small on real maps. Next, the larger white stone is the Maconnais, producer of everyday good chardonnays -- famed Pouilly Fuisse comes from here. And last, the red stone somewhat in shadow stands for Beaujolais. This is the area that makes easy quaffing gamays -- appropriate that it should be in shadow, in fact, since its wines are so different from Burgundy's fine pinot noirs and since Beaujolais often is not thought of -- or discussed in wine books in the same chapter as -- Bourgogne.

When forming a mental picture of Burgundy, do put this in the forefront of your thoughts:

for the heart of Burgundy is the Cote d'Or. The name is either a contraction of Cote d'Orient ("east slope"), because all the vines face east to catch the sun, or it means "golden slope" because the vines' foliage turns golden in the fall. Wine writers don't agree. Regardless, these two sections, the Cote de Nuits, producing almost entirely red wine, and the Cote de Beaune, producing about 70 percent reds and 30 percent whites, are the source of the sublime things that conoisseurs collect, and that movie oenophiles from Claude Rains to Paul Giamatti rave about happily. Grace Kelly, too. Montrachet (chardonnay) comes from the Cote de Beaune, Romanee Conti (pinot noir) from the Cote de Nuits.

If you like history and especially like reading about medieval dukes and queens on long summer days -- so much easier to imagine jousts and pilgrimages and fluttering pennons now, than when the cold wind is howling and the snowplows thundering down dark winter streets -- you might know other mental pictures of Burgundy. Something like ...

...they are not necessarily all Burgundians, but they lived and posed when the dukes and other grand folk in Burgundy were served by artists whom Renaissance Italy could well envy. (All the images come from Olga's Gallery.) And note the background: do we see grapevines? Perhaps not, but it is summer.