[Tur] Ducken

I am no stranger to the ways of elaborate poultry dishes. There was that Christmas when my mother, sister, and me spent two days on a very fussy duck dish and that tasted like muddy cumin and gave my father mild food poisoning. And there was another, more jolly Christmas when my sister and I boned four birds to assemble into a turducken: turkey, duck, chicken, and Cornish hen. The hen yielded a square of meat about the size of my palm, and the turkey flopped over an entire cutting board. The finished turducken was as big as a bed pillow, and delicious. It yielded a hillock of leftovers, an ocean of gravy, a vat of stock, vivid photos of the assembly process and some serious bragging rights.

That last point got me a reputation for being the kind of cook who doesn’t shy from complicated and perverse cooking projects, which in turn led to a dare to make a turducken over the course of a weekend in the country at a house with a big kitchen. I would be serving about six people, so when I accepted the dare I decided to pare the turducken concept down to its essentials.

Casa Marguery 2006, from Mendoza

The $9 Argentine Malbec is a staple, of a sort; it’s always waiting at the bodega for the when you need to bring a bottle to a friend’s house. It’s an old reliable because the wine’s plushy softness won’t offend, even though it won’t excite, either.

This quality rises in part from the use of American oak, which softens the texture and adds toasty vanilla notes. Over-use of this oak can make a wine taste like a Mounds bar, but a little of it can gently accent a wine. Case in point is the Casa Marguery 2006 Malbec from Mendoza. The wine had aromas of creamy vanilla along with cassis and ripe blackberry. There was a tough of graphite on the palate, with the minerals joined to black fruit and balanced by gentle tannins and cinnamon toast from the American oak. It’s unmistakably a new world wine, but it expresses its soft fruit in a whisper rather than a shout. It says a lot more for it.

The Volcano Lover (of Sicily)

Sicily has a reputation for producing crass plonk for peasants, and so making it the focus of this month’s tasting group meeting was a bit of a gamble. One members was worried about facing an evening in the company of a lot of bad wine, though he bravely showed up to the tasting. The good news is that the region now has a group of good producers making interesting wines from local varieties. While we found a few wines that didn’t sing there’s evidence that winemakers are starting to take full advantage of Sicily’s volcanic mountainsides, sunny days, and cool nights.

La Segreta Bianco 2006, from Planeta – Planeta is one of the first producers to experiment with international varieties. This is a blend of Greciano, Chardonnay, Viognier and Fiano, and while the producer insists there’s no oak in it we thought otherwise. Additionally, the alcohol clocked in at 13% but it tasted like there was more than that. We opened this white wine when it was about 60˚ F, which was a bit too warm. It showed intense aromas of ripe banana peel as well as fennel and briny notes.

When we chilled it and tried it again after a few hours the banana peel scent was layered with aromas of lemon zest and canned pear. There was an exuberant, almost tropical fruitiness to it, though we couldn’t quite pin down what sort of fruit. It reminded me of the fake fruit punch I drank as a kid, in a pleasant way. This wine was $14, and if this indicates quality on the cheap that Sicilian producers can muster all is well on the island.

Carricante Bianco 2005, from Gulfi – A white, made from Carricante and Albanello grapes. This one also opened up with some banana peel, as well as an vanilla-y oak, menthol, an oxidized character and an oily texture. We let it chill and decant for a few hours and it came back a better wine, showing a lot of minerals on the nose and palate with smokiness and citrus oil. Carl envisions sitting on a sunny patio on a hot day with this wine in an ice bucket by his side, and who am I to tell him he’s wrong?

Feudo Montoni Nero d’Avola, 2005 -  The Nero d’Avola grape is an Italian restaurant favorite, but we were a bit disappointed with this one. It had a spicy/animal nose with a bit of pastis to it, but little fruit to speak of and even less fruit on the palate, with a spicy, thin and very tannic finish. It was decanted but didn’t open up over the course of the evening. The wine reminds me of a curled-up hedgehog: all defensive spikes with the tender underbelly quite hidden. Morgan and Carl thought that its faults might not be evident if it’s served alongside a big plate of pasta with red sauce, which isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement.

Outis Etna Rosso 2005, from Biondi – This was the widely-acknowledged star of the evening. The Nerello Mascalese and Nerello Cappuccio grapes for this wine are grown 620 meters above sea level in Mt. Etna’s volcanic soil. The vines are bush-trained, i.e. without a trellis. It had a Barolo-esque nose of leather and flowers with a bit of spice or tar. The pretty, lacy red fruit on the palate was threaded with more spice and cassis to create a very lovely structure.

Tenuta Delle Terre Nere 2007 – This is another Etna wine from further up the mountain. The Nerello Macalese and Nerello Capuccio grapes for this wine grow about 640-900 meters above sea level, in more volcanic rock. Andrew and I thought this wine smelled like cigar ash. It also showed smoky meat and dark, almost raisin-y fruit. It was quite thin on the palate and very tannic, with little fruit and a lack of freshness.

Tenuta di Trinoro Passopisciaro 2006 – The wine is made by a big-shot Super-Tuscan producer, Andrea Franchetti. He is replanting his vineyards so he bought the Nerello Macalese for this wine from old-vine producers on Mt. Etna, from sites all the way up to 1,000 meters above sea level. At first blush the nose on this wine showed a lot of well-integrated oak, with candied fruit and spice: orange peel, fennel seeds, cooked cranberries. It had quite high acid and tannins as well as a bit of ash on the finish. Having been impressed by the 2005 I had higher hopes for the 2006, but on the whole its softness indicated a lack of focus.

Do I Have to Taste a Wild Boar?

Knowing what a reference food tastes like is a good way to learn how to describe wine, as Deb Harkness says in her Serious Eats column. Eating a perfectly ripe strawberry is a memorable experience, and anyone who has savored one would have a pretty good reference for that pretty strawberry scent in a fruity Pinot Noir. Yet food is only half the battle for learning how to discern the various scents and flavors in wine. What if that Pinot exhibits flavors that go beyond primary fruit? How do you taste other common wine descriptors, such as barnyard, or forest floor, or flint? 

 

As Deb rightly observes, just because the descriptors are fanciful doesn’t mean the flavors aren’t there. Taste is wedded to scent, so a remembered smell can translate to a perceived flavor. Anyone who has ridden a horse knows the particular smell “barnyard” evokes: stables, warm leather, horse sweat, and the grassy smell of dried hay.

 

Similarly, I think of the smell of crushed gravel under car tires or the smell of classroom chalk when I taste a wine that exhibits minerality. Of course, the winemaker hasn’t dipped rocks into his fermenting vats; these are metaphors that are used to describe wine flavors, not literal flavors themselves.

 

For scents you have not experienced the reference point would need to be the wines themselves. I’ve been tasting wine with a friend who learned about wine in France, and we’re teaching each other wine descriptors: when he says confiture, I say jammy, and so on. We tasted a Bordeaux in December that caused him to exclaim “hey! Wild boar!” when we tasted it a second time. It had the barnyard scent I knew married to an edge of herbal wildness. That is what I would assume a wild boar would smell like, if I was ever in the woods to smell one. I’ll be able to use this reference point in the future. 

 

So Deb is right about tasting widely in order to know wine. I’d recommend that you sniff widely, too.  

Breakfast Wine: Wine Blogging Wednesday

In my attempts to spend less yet still eat regally I’ve been cooking up a lot of eggs for dinner. For me, a fried egg is a delivery vehicle for the most perfect sauce imaginable: the barely set egg yolk. A saucier could tinker for years without improving upon it, and they’re be no point to all that work, as it takes two minutes to fry an egg then poke the yolk to annoint whatever lies beneath.

So there was really only one way to approach December’s Wine Blogging Wednesday, and that was through an egg carton. This month it is hosted by El Bloggo Torcido and the theme is breakfast foods, and the challenge is to pair a red or white still wine with something you would eat at breakfast. I chose a Côtes du Rhône Villages 2006 from Domaine de Maran to pair with eggs and sauteed spinach and mushrooms. The vegetables were seasoned with garlic and cumin, then I cracked the eggs on top of them and put them in the broiler. The idea was to use the spice in the cumin to echo the spicy notes in the Rhône wine and have the rich egg yolk float above it all.

The Domaine de Maryran is a textbook Côtes du Rhône Villages. It showed pepper, garrigue and red fruit on the nose, and was herbal and spicy on the palate with a nice peppery finish. It has a perfect balance among tannin, fruit and acid, and is really nice for a frigid Wednesday.  Crucially the acid lightened things up, as a heavy wine would overpower the egg and vegetables.

The eggs, however, were a miss. I let the pan sit under the broiler for a beat too long. The eggs overcooked and the dish was dry. What this meal needed was sauce – hollandaise, bechemel, raspberry jam, something to sop up with the paprika-spiked potatoes I served with it. The only bright spot is that the cumin did work nicely with the wine, and the dryness of the dish was an incentive to drink more of it. A week or two ago I made a “flat omlette” with chard from Lulu’s Provencal Table; it was garlicky and delicious, and despite its lack of runny yolk it would be a better match with my wine.

Load on the Gold

Subtle jewelery may make a person look classy, but there’s nothing like really laying on the sparkle. I wrote in September about a halbtrocken Riesling from Steeger St. Jost where I praised the wine’s touch of sweetness for making it more elegant.  Further study and (more importantly) further drinking has revealed to me a core truth about the Riesling grape, at least in its fine German incarnation: sweeter is better, and there’s no getting around it.

The revelatory moment came over Thanksgiving when I opened Selbach-Oster’s 2006 Zelt Himmel Ries auslese. The sweetness in the wine was reinvented as richness on the palate, a phenomenon that makes sense when you think of sugar’s ability to concentrate and unify flavor in food. In the trocken and halbtrocken Reslings I’ve drank in the past I’ve noted a “lack” of a sort – its as if there was a small hole in the fabric of the wine. I’ve begun to wonder if the hole is where the sweetness should have been. The flavor of the Dönnhoff spätelese riesling I tried with my tasting group had the same sense of completeness-by-sugar as the Selbach-Oster, even though it was still too young. Additional research may uncover faults in this theory; I’ll keep blogging in the search of truth.

Beaujolais: The Wild One

Nouveau is what most people think of when they think of Beaujolais, and it’s entirely due to the big splash the wine makes every third week of November. Most wines arrive in stores with little fanfare, but when Georges Duboeuf roars into town with a posse of bikers on Harleys, as he did this year, people take notice.

The annual launch of Beaujolais Nouveau is one of several vin de premeur launches in France, or the bottling and quaffing of this year’s grapes in the form of a wine that has barely had time to ferment. This practice used to be a peasant harvest celebration, but now it’s a worldwide commercial event, thanks to Duboeuf the Beaujolais king and his eponymous wines.

The fly in the goblet is that the wine isn’t as good as the spectacle, as no doubt many people have found now that they’re working through the case that seemed like such a good deal in November. It’s not the Beaujolais grape, gamay, that makes it bad wine; it’s all that rushing around the wine does before it gets to you. A long, slow fermentation improves a wine, as does time to settle before it’s bottled. As Beaujolais Nouveau has barely a month off the vine before it’s ready to drink, there’s no time for it to develop. The inky, bubble-gummy wine that results is festive, what with its multicolored label and association with the harvest, but it’s too bad that many people associate all of Beaujolais with it.

About half of the Beaujolais made each year is Nouveau, and the rest of it is appellation contrôlée (AC) Beaujolais or Beaujolais Villages, or comes from one of the 10 crus in the region. The gamay grape fled to Beaujolais in the 12th century after the Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, banished it from his lands to the north by a decree calling the grape bad for human beings. He was only seeking to protect the quality of Burgundy wines by commanding that pinot noir be the only red grape grown there, but the insult stuck. Beaujolais was a backwater in wine and most other respects until after World War Two, when Georges Duboeuf had his stroke of marketing genius and made the annual vin de premeur festival a worldwide event.

So if you move beyond Nouveau, what’s left?  Bright, quaffable wines, with charming fruit, good humor and a sense of fun, some elegant examples of which are made by Duboeuf. Beaujolais is not generally all that deep, and that’s just fine. And since the 2008 Nouveau is going for about $14 right now, you’re better off spending an equivalent amount for a 2007 cru or AC wine that’s suitable to have on hand for daily drinking yet has a hint of soul.

In November I picked up Domaine Vissoux 2007 Pierre Chermette, a wine with delicate, delectable red fruit with a nice chalky core. There are plenty of Beaujolais winemakers with integrity, like Vissoux; in this case the domaine makes its wines as naturally as possible by using indigenous yeasts, old oak fermentation vats and reaping low yields from the vines. I brought this home for Thanksgiving, and while it would be great with turkey, we ended up drinking it alongside scoops of pâté. The wine is flexible enough to be nice with both.

Côte de Brouilly is a cru known for some of the more robust wines of Beaujolais. By “robust” I mean zippy Smart car rather than Ford F-150. There’s no such thing as a heavy, brawny Brouilly. Jean-Paul Brum makes Côte de Brouilly wines at his Terres Dorées domaine. The wine I tried, a 2007, has an earthy nose with a hint of concord-like sweet grape, with piney earth and tart cherry fruit on the palate. Labels generally aren’t good indicators of what the juice might be like, but the somber black label on the Brun seems designed to draw a sharp contrast with Nouveau in its multicolored wrapping.

The Brum had more earthiness than a Fleurie I picked up, a 2007 from Domaine des Grandes Fers. Fleurie is a cru known for its sweet fruit, and the Grandes Fers delivered with gentle red fruit and a flavor reminiscent of pink SweeTarts – which sounds ridiculous, yet is quite in keeping with the spirit of Beaujolais. A sense of lightness and fun is a hallmark of Beaujolais from the Nouveau on up, which is what keeps this region a café favorite in France. Wine drinking should be so light-hearted here in the United States

(cross posted at the Huffington Post)

Tasting Notes

Group tastings I’ve previously attended have been stuffy affairs, with a leader stringing along drinkers who are either afraid to make an incorrect guess on the characteristics of a wine, or (more often) more interested in drinking it than analyzing it. Fortunately I’ve fallen in with a group of people who love wine and love talking about it, and so our tasting group is much more earnest and enthusiastic.  This was the “getting to know you” tasting, so we all brought bottles we were interested in sharing and tasted them blind. We tasted the wine slowly, with efforts made to root out their secrets: structure, flavors, aging potential. After tasting, we just drank the wines; it was nice to return to the ones I was curious about and just appreciate them. Here are the notes from our most recent tasting.

Dönnhoff Norheimer Kirschheck riesling spätlese 2006, from the Nahe region of Germany: It had a powerful nose of citrus fruits, slate and a bit of pineapple. Carl thought that palate was a bit thin, which was generally agreed with, but since this wine is such a baby it should fill out some if it was given some time to age.

Chateau Marbuzet, a red Bordeaux from Saint Estephe, 2001: This wine was a backwards evolution from pig on the farm to wild boar, stomping vegetation in the forest. Barnyard and (some) chocolate on the nose when first decanted, then after about a half an hour it was classic blackcurrant and graphite Bordeaux. After several hours (no one was counting) when we returned to it, the animal nose was back, and it was wild rather than domesticated, as if the pig had grown bored of the barnyard, and decided to strike out for the hinterlands.

Matarromera Ribera del Duero Crianza 2004: Pure fruit on the nose – a real basket of berries, which initially didn’t come through on the palate but began to show once the wine sat for a bit. The alcohol was apparent in the wine, says Maddy. I was flagging mid-race and don’t remember as much as I ought to about this wine, though I do remember being told that it is the preferred wine of both the prince and the prime minister of Spain.

I have a real soft spot for oddball wines, so I contributed Domaine Des Très Cantous Le Duras 2005, from Gaillac, in France. A bit of very ripe red cherry in this, the rest of the nose is found under a rock. Flint, and something alive, like moss or lichen or another flat creeping organism. Exhibited very fine structure and more cherries on the palate. The fruit got more apparent as we began to hit 1 a.m. and it had been in Olga’s decanter for a good four hours.

Cascina Rossa Barbera d’Alba 2007: A very pretty little wine in the full flower of its youth. Carl described the structure as lacy, which is exactly right – it showed bright red fruit from nose to palate. There was something tropical about it, which Andrew described as papaya and I pegged as banana peel. Carl thought it would be great with panna cotta with a red berry coulis, and I tried to dissuade him from serving it with dessert. It would go great with cheese, though. The nicest part about it was its unpretentiousness: it was a simple, country wine, and wasn’t tarted up with new oak or any other effort to mask what it is. Olga brought this, and before anyone runs out to the store you should know that she bought it directly from the vineyard proprietors in Piedmont, and it isn’t sold in the U.S.

Rocks and Love

Dear Molly,

I’m trying to seduce a young lady who likes Sancerre and riesling.  I’m making dinner for her this Saturday, and I don’t know what wine to serve!  I don’t want to mimic what she serves me.  Help — I need to look cool and confident!  What should I offer?

Signed,
Lovestruck in Los Angeles

Dear Lovestruck,

So you’re in luck, as from your description it seems that your object of seduction has decided tastes in wine. Though they are made from different grapes and grown in different regions, the wines your prospective beloved favors have minerality in common, or, the (paradoxically pleasant) flavor in wine that is reminiscent of stones or gravel. Sharp Sancerres are sauvignon blanc-based wines grown in the chalk and silex soils of the Sancerre region, in the Loire. The wines are known for their flinty core of minerals, as are rieslings from Germany – particularly ones grown on the steep, slate-covered banks of the Mosel-Saar-Ruwer river.

Now that we’ve homed in on your prospective beloved’s preferred qualities for a wine, what bottle should you buy? Since she seems to know what she wants, let’s give her a really nice version of it. I’d stick with a riesling. Sancerre’s austerity and tartness is lovely, but “austerity and tartness” does not a seduction make. In contrast, riesling in its German incarnation can exhibit a delicate filigree of stony structure, refreshing acidity and honeyed fruit. You’ll have more success with this. Get a bottle with some residual sweetness – it will say “spätlese” or “auslese” on the label – as a little sweetness is seductive, not to mention a really lovely thing in a riesling. Wine estates you should look for include Prum, Dönnhoff, Selbach-Oster, Leitz, Schaefer, Schmitt-Wagner and Spreitzer – this is by no means an exhaustive list, but it should get you through a few dates. The rest is up to you.

Braving the By-the-Glass Gauntlet

Dear Molly,

Whenever I ask for a wine recommendation from waiters, I can’t help but feel like they almost always suggest the most expensive glass. Is the most expensive glass generally the best? Or could I be safe with a cheaper glass?

Signed,
Recessionista

Dear Recessionista,

Wines by the glass in restaurants are generally not a good deal. There are five or six glasses of wine in a standard 750-ml bottle, depending on the generosity of the pour. It is unlikely that you’ll pay for a fifth of a bottle when you order wine by the glass, though. By way of example, Juan Gil’s 2002 Monastrell, from Jumilla, goes for about $14-$18 in NYC retail locations. It is sold for $42 on the Craftbar wine list, and pours by the glass at $11. No doubt a budget-minded drinker would be better off taking that lovely, dark and brambly Spanish wine on home and drinking it with takeout Chinese. If you must venture out of your house for dinner, persuade your dining partners to share a bottle with you, which could work out to be cheaper.

But you shouldn’t feel constrained to drink only tap water with your dinner, lest you be ripped off. What you’re paying for at a restaurant is (hopefully) that restaurant’s discernment in choosing wines that complement the food. $42 is good as far as wine markups go - I tend to resent paying more than three times the retail price at a restaurant. When ordering wine, ask the waiter what would pair the best with your entree, not which wine is the “best.”  You might also want to ask him what his restaurant sells a lot of. A wine goes bad as it sits open for a day or so, and I’ve seen bartenders pull an open bottle from the far reaches of a wine cooler and serve this tired wine to customers. Any wine a restaurant pours through quickly would be a good deal in comparison.

A wine’s price is a very rough indicator of its quality. Sometimes a wine costs a lot because it’s good, other times it’s pretense and marketing you’re paying for.  Is an $18 glass of pinot noir tastier and more satisfying than a $9 one? It depends on your budget, your point of view and how badly you want to believe.

Have a question about wine you’d be uncomfortable to ask a waiter? Leave it in the comments!