One Hundred Percent Pure Love

Today’s pairing is for the last bottle of Layer Cake Malbec I have. There’s a little more around, but, after tasting it for the first time a year ago, the 100% Malbec from Mendoza is just hitting it’s stride. Let’s put it this way, just the smell alone of roasting chicken is a perfect pairing for what has evolved into a very robust glass of wine, Layer Cake Malbec. So my pairing is one of the land where the wine was borne. A simple roasted chicken with mirepoix top heavy in garlic and rosemary.

Ingredients:
3-5 pound Chicken Whole
4 Spanish Onions
4-6 Heads of Garlic
6-8 Carrots
1 Bunch Rosemary
Sea Salt
Cracked Black Pepper
Olive Oil, a little virgin, but not too pure or it will burn and can be over kill
Unsalted butter

~ Roasting Pan
~ Cutting boards X2 (NEVER PUT RAW CHICKEN ON A SURFACE YOU WILL USE FOR OTHER PREPARATIONS).
~ Mixing bowl, salad bowl or any bowl that has enough room for your cut mirepoix

Preheat your oven to 450F

Technique:

As your oven is heating, you should be able to clean, dress and season your bird. I always start by rinsing off the chicken in ice cold tap water and removing (in the sink the neck and giblets that are in the chicken). Allow to dry for a moment on some paper towels, but, you DO NOT WANT TO PUT YOUR CHICKEN ON YOUR CUTTING BOARD. I typically use one board for the raw chicken and then place in the sink immediately. There is no room for error on this.
To prepare your mirepoix:

~ cut your onions into four wedges
~ cut your carrots into nice size chunks (2 inches long). If the carrots are very big, you may want to cut them in half (length wise) first
~ cut the garlic heads in half

I don’t peel my mirepoix/aromatics; I like the rough side and use the roasted vegetables as a piece of dinner. I prefer to have the skins involved, but that’s up to you.

In bowl, place your cut mirepoix and coat with Olive Oil, season with salt and black pepper and put to the side.

Chicken:

~ Lay breast side up in a roasting pan. (Yes, you can truss your bird, but, I am at home and the chef isn’t watching, so it’s optional)
~ Season the entire bird (including the cavity) with salt and black pepper. Don’t forget the wings…you know you eat those first.

OPTION: In a professional kitchen, I would typically lift the skin covering the breast meat and put a mixture of chopped rosemary and garlic so the fat would carry that flavor throughout the flesh. Today, I am not that professional, so it’s up to you.

~ Once the chicken is seasoned, pour the bowl of mirepoix around the body of the chicken. I like to fill the cavity at this point with a little bit of everything including a few sprigs of my fresh rosemary.

~ Add as much rosemary as you prefer to the mixture; I tend to leave it right on the ‘sprig’ as opposed to removing the leaves. It makes it easier to remove at the end and by that time, the rosemary will have done it’s job.

Drizzle olive oil over the entire bird; not too much, she should just shine once you rub it into the flesh.

Place in the oven.

It’s going to take close to an hour for the bird to cook. Typically, I start the oven at 450F to

Crispy skin is the real treat with a roasted chicken

With this type of Fall cuisine, I tend to add two sweet potatoes to the oven while roasting the chicken. You are going to need to have a starch with your meal and honestly, sweet potatoes and yams are nearly a perfect food.

They will do better at the lower temperature so if you chose to crisp your skin at 450 and then reduce the heat, add the potatoes when you turn down the oven. Otherwise the sugars will caramelize and burn in the sweet potatoes. But, once done, you really only have to cut the potato open and scoop onto the plate.

The chicken is done when the skin between the leg and body ‘cracks’ when you pull it or the internal temperature is 165F. It’s protocol to allow any meat to rest before carving, so I would advise allowing the chicken to cool a bit and the juices to disperse while preparing your plates.

Scoop a healthy portion of your yams/sweet potato into the middle of the plate.

Place your favorite roasted mirepoix around the plate as they have been roasted, seasoned and brought to perfection with the drippings from the chicken

Carve slices of chicken breast and place on top of the sweet potato

Serve!

Jayson Woodbridge in the vineyard with Commander Roo

Jayson Woodbridge is not a man who takes shortcuts. It’s what has made him very successful at producing a much-sought-after, super-high-end Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon under the whimsical name Hundred Acre, which sells easily for $250 and up a bottle.

“When you look at the genesis of something, you could make a hundred little shortcuts that would save you time or money or whatever,” he said. “All those little shortcuts turn into a mountain of shortcuts and will kill you. You’re never going to reach the absolute peak you could hit.”

At the high end of winemaking, he’s not alone in his zeal. But he’s one of a very few with this climb-Everest-or-die-trying mindset who are also making wines for $15.

“It’s got the perfect name, the image it conjures up is automatically attractive,” said Martin Reyes, wine buyer at St. Helena Wine Center. “It sounds delicious and sure lives up to it, always full and luscious wines, you get a lot of bang for the buck.”

His inspiration is personal. A few years ago, Woodbridge, who didn’t grow up with money, felt that with Hundred Acre he was betraying the memory of his humble Sicilian grandparents, who made wine at home as well as pizzas and cakes by hand. So he came up with another line of wines, Layer Cake, made as precisely as Hundred Acre but for a much more reasonable price.

“I realized my grandfather never could have afforded a bottle of Hundred Acre,” Woodbridge said. “It would have been out of his reach … that I had never made a wine that the everyday man could buy and enjoy with his family, that didn’t break the bank.”

He started tasting hundreds of wines in the $15-$20 range, finding himself ultimately unimpressed. The offerings were dominated by huge corporate wineries with large overheads and little imagination. With his lean, mean team and maniacal approach to pursuing perfection, Woodbridge figured he could do better.

So he began to search out fruit sources in some of his favorite wine regions of the world, places he felt he could get great fruit at reasonable prices. He would still rely on high-end winemaking techniques, employing the same people who make Hundred Acre to make each and every Layer Cake wine.

He then sat down and designed a simple black-and-white label to evoke the lovingly prepared cakes he recalled his grandmother making for him as a boy — the ultimate symbol in his mind of something handmade with love. He placed the details of his grandfather’s homespun, home-winemaking teachings on the back.

“My grandfather said to me the vines live in the ground and the ground has layers in it like grandma’s cake,” he explained. “It goes down into those layers and pulls the chocolate and mocha and blackberry jam and strawberries and all these flavors out of the ground, and he explained the taste and smell of it was layered, too.”

The core Layer Cake wines include a shiraz from South Australia, an old-vine primitivo from Puglia, Italy, and a malbec from Mendoza, with a Cotes du Rhone syrah added in 2007 along with a Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon. Woodbridge and his team of winemakers, including Helen Mawson and Hundred Acre consultant Philippe Melka, see the choices as a type of passport, a way for people to explore and taste from some of their favorite wine-growing areas.

“There’s never been one label made by the same team flying around the world and doing this,” Woodbridge added. “My personal mission is to make something really affordable and really stunning and show the wine world this is what can be done at this price point.”

He explains the key, in addition to low overhead, is that he takes a lower profit on the wines, taking that money to buy better fruit and induce the farmers with whom he works to let him pick when he wants to pick. He also thinks he’s better attuned to know what an American wine drinker will like in an Australian shiraz, Argentine malbec or Italian primitivo, a varietal genetically identical to what we know in California as zinfandel.

The project requires at minimum four harvests a year, a pace Woodbridge welcomes as a chance to absorb a constant flow of information. He likens it to having the chance to live four times the average life span. The wines are made, bottled and labeled in their country of origin and then shipped to the United States, where they land in specialty retail shops or high-end grocery stores. At this point, the demand far outweighs what Woodbridge and his team can supply.

Despite Layer Cake’s runaway success, as with Hundred Acre, if Woodbridge isn’t happy with the end results in any given year, he simply won’t make the wine. It happened in 2007 with the Australian shiraz; a 2008 vintage is out now. The quality, he says, just wasn’t up to his standards.

Woodbridge looks at it instead as a chance for people to try his other wines, the dark and brooding malbec grown at 4,500 feet elevation in the Andes mountains, or the inky, spicy old-vine primitivo from Puglia. Or even a Napa Valley cabernet, made in a fashion similar to the way Hundred Acre is made and aged in the same French oak barrels used to age the pricier wine.

Never one to pass up an interesting opportunity, Woodbridge has just finished bottling a 2007 pinot noir sourced in part from Carneros’ stately Stanly Ranch that will go by the label name “Cherry Pie.” His grandmother made those, too.

More than 250 regular internet shoppers were surveyed in this effort using an opt-in, third party panel. While Bold Software, LLC funded the research, their name and all product/trademarked names under their control were never transparent to the participants. The goal of this effort was to investigate the overall benefits of live chat software – not to investigate one particular provider.

Free to Download