The Wine Camp Blog

The line was long and they didn't take reservations. They said the wait would only be around forty-five minutes, so we decided to stick it out as we'd heard it could be much longer than that. It was with great anticipation that I went to Portland's renowned Apizza Shoals, for what is certainly one of the city's most revered pizzas. The long lines and great press promised a real treat.

After the expected wait, we sat down, ordered and the much anticipated pizza finally arrived. My first bite surprised me. My second confirmed the first. The pizza tasted burned to me. A quick look at the bottom revealed a heavily charred crust. I ventured a complaint to the waiter, who fetched a manager, who informed us, "that's the way we do it." A quick look around the dining room confirmed that this was the case as every table was snarfing down their equally charred pizzas with great pleasure.

Before you think this is a bad restaurant review, it's not. The people at Apizza Shoals are passionately dedicated to making great pizza. Their's is style inspired by great pizzerias in New York and New Jersey and the heavily charred crust is part of the character of their pizza. They go out of their way to use the freshest, high-quality ingredients they can find. For example, they can make only so much fresh dough by hand a day and when it runs out it's closing time. The extra effort they put into their food is reflected by the long lines and packed tables.

What I like best about Apizza Shoals is that they have a distinct vision and passion for the food they create. What I don't like is the pizza and that's my problem, not theirs.

Great chefs and winemakers must make something they believe in, not something designed to try to please everyone. In fact, having a distinct vision means by definition you will be crafting something that some people will love and some will hate. Taking such a position is a badge of courage and personality is a characteristic to be treasured in all things culinary.

This is my problem with wine reviews based on points as it imply's some sort of absolute. That rating a wine 90 points is some kind of quantifiable statistic that effectively communicates the overall quality of a wine is clearly preposterous. In this case my "score" for Apizza Shoals pizza would be irrelevant as it simply is not to my taste. This does not make it bad pizza, as proven by its many admirers. The use of points as a marketing crutch by producers, importers. restaurants and retailers has fueled the boring standardization of so much of today's wine, which more-often-than-not is made using a recipe for scoring success than with passion or vision.

Even though Apizza Shoals was not my favorite, I would rather eat their distinctive style of pizza than the bland pies put out by places trying to please everyone. Needless to say, I feel the same way about wine.

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Pamela at Enobytes graciously invited me to moderate a discussion on their Enobytes Forum on New World vs. Old World Wines: is there really a difference. To help fuel the discussion, I posted this comment:

In my experience there is a significant difference between European (Old World) and New World wines. I do not believe the reason for this is a superior terroir, but a way of thinking. Europeans cannot separate wine and food. I have never met a serious European winemaker whose vision of their wine is tied not only to the table, but to their local cuisine. They also describe the wine in those terms. If you use America as an example of the New World philosophy I think you will see our wines are conceived very differently and and consumed differently and these differences cause them to be made differently.

Let's look at consumption first as consumers fuel the fire so to speak. European consumers do not drink still wines as cocktails, before dinner they enjoy a whole range of aperitifs (including a lot of sparkling wine), but they don't sit around and gulp pinot grigio or merlot. One quick look at an upscale American bar and you'll see a very different picture as a majority of the customers are drinking wine as a cocktail, not as a companion to food. Oddly enough in recent years this includes red wines and a more unlikely cocktail I cannot imagine! This means that European winemakers can make their wines knowing they will be enjoyed with food, but that American winemakers must take into account that their wines will be served with conversation instead of cuisine. The very thing that makes European wines so wonderful with food: acidity, dryness and structure makes them difficult cocktails.

So New World winemakers are met with more than one dilemma. First they must make wine that can work as a cocktail. Secondly, it is more important to their commercial success that their wines taste great when compared to other wines instead of how well they work with food. Success is tied to top ratings by critics using the 100 point scale who taste wines against each other in a context more like an endurance sport. I can't think of something more radically the opposite of what wine enjoyment should be than tasting dozens (hundreds for some tasters) of wines blind in rapid fire succession and then ranking them.

I think it is this combination of the pressure to get points and to please consumers that drink wine without food that causes the major differences you see in New World wines and Old World wines. If you go back to California wines of three decades ago they were not so different from Old World wines. Over the years the demands of the market have forced producers from those more elegant styles of years past and replaced with with the fruit bombs that seem that seem so over-the-top to those who prefer more balanced wines crafted for the table instead of those formulated for competitions.  Certainly there have been many Old World wines guilty of these excesses too as they courted the American market, but fortunately that attack is clearly in retreat.

There is no doubt that some European producers, notably in Spain and southern Italy have gone down this "International Style" of winemaking route. Considering the amount of wine they need to sell, their making what seemed like the best commercial decision at the time is understandable. One commenter noted that he was finding it hard to distinguish between a zinfandel and primitivo and I think that points out why what seems to be a good commercial decision is a bad one. If primitivo tastes more or less like zinfandel, why bother to import it? It seems to me that primitivo would be better off if it tried to have a distinct style. Sicily, a place with wonderfully distinct wines has tried to turn itself into another Australia (often using Australian trained winemakers) and has destroyed its market in the USA. Why drink a nero d' avola from Sicily when a shiraz from Australia tastes just like it for several dollars less a bottle?  Some European producers have achieved short term success using this strategy, but I think in the long term as they become just another big, fruity red wine they will lose their markets to cheaper competitors.

There are many American producers that make wines that would be difficult to identify as being New World in blind tastings, but the majority have chosen a more commercially viable direction and are making the wines that the market and the press like. There is nothing wrong with this as a winery is an agricultural business that has to make a profit. Only when consumer preferences change, either here or in Europe, will it become harder and harder to tell the difference between Old and New World wines.

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The farmer's market is back in McMinnville. Over the winter you slowly forget how wonderful such small things can be. Just a block long with maybe two dozen producers, markets like this hold treasures supermarket buyers, including Whole Foods et al, can't give us. Every Thursday now through late fall you'll find me at the market.

Today's treasure was lion's mane mushrooms. As usual, each visit to a farmer's market I approach without a recipe in mind, letting the local provenance guide me. With the beautiful mushrooms  I added to my bag some fresh organic eggs, chives and the excellent aged Gouda from the Willamette Valley Cheese Company. Warm crusty baguettes from the Red Fox Bakery, just picked greens and a pint of fresh strawberries from a small organic farm guaranteed a perfect dinner.

The meal could not have been simpler:

For two:

4 or more large lion's main mushrooms (or other meaty, flavorful fresh mushroom) chopped into large chunks

2 cloves garlic peeled and smashed

Extra Virgin Olive Oil

A small wedge of aged cow's milk cheese like Willamette Valley Cheese Company's aged Gouda cubed

Minced fresh chives

Salt and pepper

5 large eggs with salt and pepper beaten lightly with a fork - using good eggs is very important so look for eggs with yolks that tend more towards orange than yellow

• Smash the cloves of garlic, add  2+ tablespoons (depends on how big the mushrooms are) good extra virgin olive oil to a non-stick sauté pan over medium high heat (don't let it smoke), add the garlic and cook until golden brown, but not burnt, then remove and discard
• Continuing over medium high heat add the very coarsely chopped lion's main mushrooms to the hot oil and stir fry for one minute.
• Add beaten eggs, chopped chives, cubed cheese salt and pepper and scramble until just cooked
• Serve immediately with fresh salad and bread

To match with this very local food I strangely enough grabbed a bottle from far, far away. The 2006 Domaine de La Gramière Côtes du Rhône, which is produced by two Americans, Amy Lillard and Matt Kling, who are living a dream that many of us have as they are living and making wine in France. I had resisted opening this wine for almost a year now as I felt it really needed a little time to come together and my patience was well rewarded.  The wine has broadened and gained more complexity and aromatics. This is one of those wines that is big to the French, but medium bodied to Americans. I love the meaty, smoky butcher shop aromas this wine has developed along with the bright, ripe black fruit flavors. I think it's going to get better for another year or so, but now that it's this good I don't know how I'll keep my hands off of it that long! La Gramière is imported by Kermit Lynch.

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Technorati Tags: Cooking,wine,Rhone,mushooms

Those that were around the main wine and food forums four or five years ago will remember the tenacious argumentative spirit of Steve Plotnicki. If you weren’t on those boards in the past you probably won’t remember Steve because he was tossed off all of those forums by the moderators years ago. The intense energy and passion that drove Steve into those endless arguments about food and wine led to his banishment from those forums, but also led him to found his own.

That new project became Opinionated About, which anyone who has had an interaction with Steve knows, he is with a brutal passion. One of the first products of Steve’s banishment from the more heavily moderated forums was his own blog and forum, which he appropriately named OA or Opinionated About. The one thing about Steve is that he is only interested in dining as a perfect experience and so his blog for some time has been a virtual window into the best restaurants of Europe and the United States for those of us without his budget or time.

Now this abrasive, but focused passion for fine dining has created a new restaurant guide, The Opinionated About Fine Dining Survey, which can only be described as the exact opposite of Zagat as the reviewers are screened by the irascible Plotnicki, in contrast to the American Idol format used by Zagat and with the same artistic results. The result is a listing of the best-of-the-best restaurants in Europe and the United States. The restaurants in this guide are where to eat if seeking perfect food and wine is your only goal and money is no object. There are no best buys here, just all out hedonistic pleasure. I think the result of his effort is something completely new, a guide for those seeking perfection to those seeking to attain it. One thing is for certain, if you are lucky enough to dine at any of these restaurants it will be something memorable. As a first edition, it is clear that this guide is not all inclusive or prefect in it’s ratings, but who cares at this level. At only $6.95 a copy the guide will cost you less than the valet parking at most of these restaurants. By the way, I am one of the reviewers anonymously sending in my opinions for this guide

I will be sure to have a copy with me each time I travel as, unlike any other guide, I know it lead me to a restaurant that is as passionate about food and wine as I am.

It started out strong, but soon had no chance as the competition overwhelmed it. The 2006 JM Sauvignon Blanc, Klipsun Vineyard was impressive when I took my first sip, but then the unthinkable happened: the food arrived. I was really enjoying the bight, clean and zesty flavors of this wonderfully varietal wine, but what happened next was not fair to any wine, yet is typical on today's menus.

We were dining at Seattle's excellent Dahlia Lounge and the waiter delivered their Sea Bar Sampler, which included; Hamachi sashimi, Dungeness crab with chili paste and tempura crispies, Dahlia smoked salmon with hot mustard, Alaskan halibut ceviche with red chilies and cucumber and Albacore Tuna with sweet onions lemon and ponzu. Everything was delicious, but the first taste of the citrusy ceviche made the formerly crisp sauvignon blanc taste flat, while the rich smoked salmon made it taste thin and so on.  Some fresh bread and butter returned my palate to normal and the JM was perfect with my main course of sauteéd Alaskan halibut with brown butter potatoes (some of the most wonderful potatoes I've tasted anywhere) Brussels sprouts chanterelle mushroom and bacon.

It's probably impossible to select one wine that would be perfect with each part of the Dahlia Lounge's Sea Food Sampler and not necessary as the JM Sauvignon was delicious with almost everything, but it's good to remember that some foods can make very nice wines not taste very good. The only thing I could think of to better handle such a broad range of flavors would have been a just off-dry riesling or a sparkling wine. Perhaps a more important point is that you can't always get a wine that is perfect with the entire meal and that should not be your goal, you can always revert to the water for the mismatched course and return to the lovely wine you've selected when the next course arrives.

Finding good pizza in the USA used to be a pie-in-the-sky proposition. All that was available was the soggy mush made with loads of waxy fake mozzarella and way too old vegetables. When you picked up a slice the sodden crust would collapse under the weight of mediocrity. Of course, the vast majority of pizza in America is still like this, but there is light at the end of the tunnel.

That light hit me the other night while traveling on business. Often you arrive too late and too tired to seek out fine food and the restaurant at hand is the only thing you have the time and energy to consider. This is what happened just the other night in Atlanta when I was lucky enough to walk through the door of Baraonda, an excellent pizzeria a block from my hotel. I ended up with a great pizza, but what’s exciting here is that crisp thin crust pizza made with fresh ingredients and cooked in wood-fired ovens are getting a lot easier to find. There seems to be a growing pizza revolution baking in America these days. Everywhere you turn there are pizzerias investing in wood-burning ovens and paying attention to their ingredients.

Now that there’s good pizza to eat, the next question is what to drink with it. The Italians tend to drink beer or fizzy local red wine, both of which are great matches. Woody or high-alcohol wines are absolutey terrible with pizza, but fresh, zesty young reds that appreciate a bit of a chill are perfect. Dry pink wines are also great for pizza. Good draft beer is a match made in heaven and most pizzerias that invest in these expensive ovens can be depended on to have a range of good micro-brews on tap.

Often when presented with really good pizza like Baraonda’s, I can’t resist trying a bottle on the list that normally would be considered too elite for pizza. That night I was inspired to try the 2001 Vigneti La Selvanella, Chianti Classico Riserva, Fattoria Melini, this Gambero Rosso Tre Bicchieri winner is made predominately from sangiovese grosso aged in large old barrels. It is a complex, balanced and elegant wine that reflects real sangiovese character. The combination of an excellent wine with an excellent pizza made for a lovely dinner. I admit a chilled frizzante barbera would have been a better match, but each glass and each bite was so good on its own I could have cared less.

A great pizza is the ultimate comfort food. Drinking this wonderful Chianti Classico Riserva with it my not have been the ultimate match, but it was very, very comforting. 

Eating seafood in Seattle is always a pleasure, but for me a meal without an equally interesting wine is always missing that ultimate note of complexity and pleasure. Etta’s, part of Tom Douglas’ mini-Northwest food empire, is one of those great seafood experiences and, like all of his enterprises, is an excellent restaurant. On a recent visit there the food was outstanding, but the wine list was not.

For dinner I selected the following courses:

• Stellar Bay Oysters (stellar indeed, some of the best I’ve tasted)
• Kasu black cod, sweet and sour vegetables with ocean salad ( a wonderful mix of flavors and textures)
• Pan seared Alaskan Halibut, beluga lentils, baby golden beets, escarole, smoked ham hock and horseradish crème fraiche ( an excellent dish mixing the smoky ham with the rich lentils and a crispy piece of very fresh halibut)

To match this delicious menu I selected from the wine list the 2005 Cedergreen Cellars Sauvignon, Columbia Valley and here the meal hit a snag. Sure this is a nice wine, but it’s just not nice enough for such thoughtfully prepared foods. A very clean wine that’s certainly acceptable, but it’s nothing more than that. This is a wine more suited to a picnic than fine dining. The notes on the wine list presented this wine as light and fresh as it was unoaked, but as it approaches 14% alcohol, light is not the word you would use to describe this wine. Perhaps this time the fault was more the wine buyer than the winemaker.

A happy coincidence brought me back to the excellent Flying Fish Restaurant  twice on my last trip to Seattle. The quality of the seafood here is simply outstanding as are the creative preparations. Fortunately they have a assembled a tremendous wine list so you can rest assured what’s in your glass will excite you as much as what’s on your plate.

When it comes to food and wine matching, I usually paint with a broad brush as I find as long as the wine and food are great and the harmony close enough that pleasure  is at hand. However, sometimes you get a match that is so perfect that the qualities of both the food and wine are amplified. The Flying Fish supplied such an experience last night when their seared sea scallops with shoestring sweet potatoes, crispy prosciutto and pineapple hollandaise met a bottle of 2001 Josmeyer Riesling. I have been a fan of Jean Meyer’s deft, food-friendly winemaking for years and this lovely bottle did not disappoint. This is a wine at its peak showing enticing petrol highlights over rich aromas of honeysuckle and ripe white peaches. Substantial, but extremely well balanced on the palate, this wine walks the line between depth, complexity and balance with elan. The rich scallops with the salty prosciutto integrated with the flavors of this wine in a way that still makes me salivate just writing about it.

The Flying Fish combines the best of what I love about a restaurant these days. It is casual, but offers a better wine selection and better food than most of its more stuffy brethren. This is a restaurant focused only on actual quality, not just the appearance of it. 

Want to have the full-blown truffle blow out experience dinner at Alain Ducasse’s restaurant? No problem, but the $320 per person (sans wine and tip) tab could be a bit steep. However, that’s not an issue as the Amateur Gourmet  found out. Ask and you shall receive seems to be reality. Faced with an invitation that was out of his budget the Amateur Gourmet decided to ask Alain Ducasse if he and a guest could come for free. Just as you might expect, Ducasse said yes and the results are recorded in a wonderful comic book style photo album recorded here:

http://www.amateurgourmet.com/the_amateur_gourmet/2006/11/chutzpah_truffl.html#more

Don’t miss it!!

I could not believe my eyes. I had to read it twice: “and to my palate even the best paired food gets in the way of a pure and unadulterated one-on-one experience with the wine”

It made me a bit sad. How had the wine experience become so sterile? The comment was made on The Robert Parker Forum by a frequent poster there. It should come as no surprise that such a anti-wine and food comment should come from a forum dominated by points. The world where a giving a wine 89 points instead of 90 can actually devastate its sales.

For millennium humans have chosen wine as the perfect compliment to a fine meal, as a healthy everyday beverage and as an agricultural product worthy of connoisseurship, collecting and study. Yet somehow, in just a few decades of wine appreciation in America we have reduced it to points and a beverage whose appreciation is only confused by food. 

Perhaps we should try to remember that like cooking, while there is art in wine it is not art in itself. Wine is the highest form of agriculture, not a pure art like music or painting. As an agricultural product, its highest appreciation and purpose is to be enjoyed at the table. Taking wine away from the dinner table to be considered only on its own or in competition with other wines rips the soul that Mother Nature has put there out of the wine. Of course, there is enjoyment in pure tastings; verticals, horizontals and every other permutation, but we should not confuse those real pleasures with wines real purpose.

I can’t help myself. Every bottle of wine I pick up makes me think of what to cook. Every trip to the market where I discover wonderful fresh ingredients takes my mind to my wine rack. At a restaurant I can’t help but select my meal and wine with equal attention. It is this harmony of wine and food that brings a wine’s character to its highest level. Everything on our table comes from the earth and wine is just one more color on nature’s delicious palette. 

The appropriate attire for wine appreciation should be white linen napkins, not white linen lab coats.

The years I spent living in Italy changed my concept of Barbecue forever and so my take on this Wine Blogging Wednesday topic takes a decidedly un-American twist. My version of Barbecue now brings up the vision of my friend Massimo sweating over a very smoky fire of real wood instead of charcoal, sipping on a big bottle of Becks and rapidly turning the fresh fish on the grill. While every smoky bit of seafood he tossed on the big platters was delicious, for me nothing could beat the rich, oily taste of the fresh anchovies and sardines.

Massimo marinates them briefly in extra virgin olive oil, onions, lemon and rosemary before tossing them over the hot, smoky fire for just a few moments per side. The results quickly made me forget ribs and burgers. Fortunately for me, in the USA Oriental fish shops are a good source of fresh anchovies and sardines - at least if you ask for them.

While crisp Oregon pinot gris is certainly a great choice for these little beauties, I usually find myself going back to the zesty Italian whites I would have shared with Massimo on such an occasion. While you want plenty of acidity to balance their richness, you also need a bit of body to match their full flavor. This year  a bottle of 2004 Cesani Vernaccia di San Gimignano (imported by the ever reliable Montecastelli) was the perfect foil. With a firm backbone of acidity expanding into  round, mineral, almond and fresh pear aromas and flavors,  this is no simple tourist San Gimignano white, but a wine that will grab your attention - at least until you pop the next anchovy into your mouth.

It was an “in” place with a “name” chef. Racy architecture and mind-dulling pulsing modern Muzak. Everything designed to stimulate every sense possible. The only things missing are simple, clean flavors, that have no chance of survival in these food discos.

There is this compelling and uncontrolled American feeling that more is better…

• more noise
• more flavors
• more color
• more, more, more…

My tuna tartare was overwhelmed by ginger, so what was surely sashimi grade toro was reduced to a searing ginger intensity that destroyed both fish and wine. Every course that followed was cursed by similar excess and obliteration of the prime flavors the dish was supposed to offer. After all, shouldn't tuna tartare taste more of tuna than ginger? What is sad in this more is better insecurity, is that the same chefs producing these excesses are also going out of their way to find the finest raw materials – then burying them under more and more of everything instead of letting their true character and elegance show through.

The same goes for winemakers today, who are harvesting some of the finest fruit ever produced, only to bury it under layers of oak and over-manipulation. The rule for chefs and winemakers should always be that the freshest and most expressive raw materials should be left alone to show their greatness. Add accents and highlights, but don’t destroy their essence. Cooking and winemaking should be like adding the proper frame to a great painting.

Oddly enough, the wine I ordered that night was just the opposite of the over-manipulated food. The  2000 Woodward Canyon Winery Walla Walla Valley Merlot (its OK to order merlot in Washington) was balanced and graceful. It was a wine full of edges and angles, unlike the insipid merlot offered by most producers today. It reminded me of the days (almost 30 years ago) when I discovered wine. A time when merlot was an interesting and compelling varietal only taking the lead in wines from Pomerol and Saint Emilion, before merlot became the wine hated in Sideways - and for good reason. This was a beautiful bottle, lean and firm with great complexity throughout. It was the best part of the meal and I saved my last glass to appreciate after the noisy food left our table in peace.

 

Food and Wine: two words that seemingly go together like ham and eggs. Yet the reality of wine today is that more and more of it does not go well with food. As chefs continue to push the envelope of complexity, the wine industry seems to be veering in two divergent directions. One branch is going down the road of clean, industrial stability with flavor profiles determined by market research and the other going down the points-driven feeding frenzy of more-is-better powerhouse wines.

I recently purchased a bottle of 2003 Peachy Canyon Zinfandel, and it convinced me that when push comes to shove, I’d rather go with blander wines with my meal than wine that could double as fuel for the NASCAR circuit. A clean, if somewhat boring, Zinfandel at 13% alcohol, actually compliments a meal better than the Peachy Canyon that weighed in at a combustible 15.5%. Strange as it seems, commercial can be better than artisan when it comes to wine.

This it the greatest danger of today’s points driven wine criticism. Ultimately it will always reward wines that are at their finest on the first sip or two. However, these very same wines dull the palate after a half-a-glass and do nothing to enhance the food on the table. Not only do they not enhance it, they conflict with food – they very thing a wine is created for in the first place.

Balance, refinement, elegance are all attributes that are as important in the kitchen as they are in the cellar.

They walked up to the bar of a very elegant restaurant and asked for the wine list. After a few minutes they ordered a bottle of Talbott Chardonnay - and that was it. Food was not part of the equation. Not much attention was paid to the expensive bottle of wine. In fact, the only comment made was that it was too warm and they asked the bartender to ice it down. The two of them finished off the bottle without taking a bite.

This drinking wine without food is something I often forget people do unless it happens right in front of me. It is so out of my range of thinking. I just can't separate the two. The fact, of course, is that probably most American wine drinking is done in this way - as a cocktail not as a part of the meal.

This makes an interesting dilemma for winemakers as making wine for cocktail purposes is not the same as making wine that compliments food. The result of this dilemma are an awful lot of "dry" white wines that are not dry at all, as they contain significant residual sugar. That sugar tastes pretty good on its own, but pair that sweet chardonnay up with some oysters and the match is less than spiritual.

The beverage wine industry has nailed down the cocktail wine style perfectly producing sweet chardonnay, flavorless pinot grigio and merlot without a interesting edge to be found. These wines disappear down the palate without distracting the drinker with a lot of character that could interrupt the conversation.

This is why wine drinkers on a budget, that still want interesting wine that goes well with food, almost always have to look to Europe for their bargains as making wine to match well with food is too deeply ingrained in their society to be totally overwhelmed by industrial winemaking. Lovely, reasonable priced wines can still be found in places like Macon, Beaujolais, Loire, Abruzzo, Le Marche and Piemonte among many others.

It is a shame that the American wine industry has totally abandoned this type of wine.

 

Dinner last evening provided a good excuse for nebbiolo - not that excuses are required. Portland's (OR) Caffe Mingo offers particularly satisfying Italian inspired comfort food -- just the thing required for the cutting edge provided by traditionally-styled nebbiolo wines. Owner Michael Cronin has assembled a short, but well chosen wine list to accompany his flavorful fare and the moderately priced 1996 Produttori dei Barbaresco Riserva Montestefano immediately tingled my palate.  These Produttori Riservas are not only a great value, they are a time machine, as they take you back to the way Baroli and Barbaresci tasted decades ago. While many claim the "traditional" description, the Produttori are one of the few who actually practice it authentically. These are wines full of cutting edges and modern-day descriptors of ripe cherries/blueberries/blackberries do not come to mind.  The 96 Montestefano on its own was still lean, tight and unyielding (it needs another 5 or 6 years), but Cronin's food and an hour of decanter time created a true symbiosis as the edges of the Montestefano balanced complexity brought alive the richly warm cuisine.

These days the attention always seems to be on a wine's front, while ignoring its edges. However on the edges is often where the real complexity hides.  The Produttori dei Barbaresco wines may have little front, but they have dramatically satisfying edges.

 

A couple sits down next to me at an elegant wine bar and order a zinfandel and a merlot. The waiter returns with two huge balloon Riedel glasses. The women reaches out with long, painted and manicured fingernails and grabs the entire bowl of the gigantic glass with her small hand. Protruding strangely from her fingers is the long and untouched stem, which sticking out in this fashion threatens the chin of her companion. After a few sips the once glistening glass is now covered with fingerprints that, combined with the lipstick marks on the lip, make the elegant glass dirty and dingy.

 What is this phenomenon? In this era of glasses the size of decanters why do so many people still insist on grabbing the entire glass and ignoring the stem? This is like carrying your suitcase in your arms instead of using the handle. It seems so clear that the stem is connected to a wine glass so you can hold it, it seems very odd that so many people still insist on grabbing the bowl with their entire hand. With the size of todays glassware you need a big hand to successfully hold the entire bowl with comfort.

There are reasons for the stem on a glass besides the elegant look. By handling only the stem the glassware remains sparking clean so that you can enjoy the appearance of the wine and using the stem keeps the heat of your hands away from the wine. 

I know this fits into the unimportant pet-peeve category, but no one seems to be able to explain this behavior. Perhaps Riedel "O" glasses will take over the market. 

Taking advantage of the Holiday to bring out some old wines from my cellar, I grabbed a lone  remaining bottle of 1974 Clos du Val, Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley. This was a wine I did not intend to keep this long, but it somehow had escaped a corkscrew for  almost thirty years after I brought it home. I did not expect much.

 The first sniff changed my expectations with a rush. There was still clean, bright black cherry fruit layered in with the cedary, earthy aromas of elegant old cabernet sauvignon. The wine absolutely filled the palate being expansive and elegant at the same moment. The freshness of the fruit was nothing short of astounding and the complexity humbling. The finish made you long for the next sip. I drained the last drops with a mixture of pleasure and sadness.

When I purchased this wine I was a wine neophyte full of wonder. This bottle brought that wonder back to me. Certainly there can be no better gift to give yourself.

Happy Holidays to all visitors and subscribers to this blog. I sincerely thank the hundreds of subscribers and thousands of visitors that have taken part in The Wine Camp Blog since its launch in November. I remain committed to offering an alternative voice to the established wine media here and on The Wine Blog Forum. It is your interest and support that makes all of this worthwhile.

May the next year bring you good luck and fortune and let's hope that there is more peace in the world in 2006.

Never has there been a time when there is so much interesting wine to drink. That's why there can be no other explanation for a poor wine selection than laziness. Not even cheapness can be used to explain away bad wines as there are too many good cheap wines to keep track of these days. Others plead the need for continuity, but tasty big production wines fill the shelves. No, bad wine lists are the work (or lack thereof) of the lazy. Either too lazy to educate themselves or just too uninterested to take the time.

A recent trip reminded me of this as I was served a really terrible 2002 Joliesse California Cabernet Sauvignon on United Airlines. This burnt smelling and raisin flavored wine was their only red wine choice. United loves to show photos of the famous chefs and sommeliers they use to help them select their wines, but I find it hard to believe that such a mediocre wine ever passed the lips of those famous names. What can be the excuse for selecting such a wine out of all the wines possible? Laziness. They think that just because most people pay little attention to the wine going down their throats, that it just isn't worth their time to do any better. Certainly they can get away with it, but along the way you would think you would run into someone with a little pride. 

Of course, you have to wonder about the people at Joliesse too. With all the lovely, ripe fruit in California, this is the type of wine that they come up with? No Joilesse, United Airlines and all the others like Trader Joe's have only one excuse for the plonk they peddle.

 

The Terrabianca estate in Tuscany is loaded with style, after all the fashion industry provided the financial fuel for this beautiful estate. However, never satisfied with just good looks, the Guldener family has pursued quality both inside and outside of their bottles. The wines of Terrabianca are justifiably famous as each is of superb quality, but wine is not the only excellent liquid that Terrabianca puts into bottles. They also produce a delicious extra virgin olive oil from their Il Tesoro estate in Maremma on the Tuscan coast. To make things more interesting, Terrabianca offers some perfect stocking stuffers (mine please Santa), a range of flavored oils that comes in an assorted gift set of six 100 ml. bottles. The package includes one bottle each of Terrabianca extra virgin olive oil plus bottles of their oil flavored with oregano, basil, white truffles, hot peppers or rosemary. These oils add an easy creative touch to your cooking - and like all things from Terrabianca they look good on your shelf too.