Mouthing Off

I've been to Fonda del Sol a few times now—it's just down the street from our office, conveniently—and it seems to be on an ever-inclining curve towards extreme tastiness. That's not a surprise to me. When I first met the restaurant's chef, Josh DeChellis, at the culinary festival Madrid Fusión a few years back, he was wandering around gnawing on a black truffle the way one might an apple (the thing was about the size of an apple, too). To my mind, any chef who eats truffles as if they were apples is a man after my own heart. At FdS, DeChellis is channeling his inner Spaniard, perhaps aided by the fact that he was born in Colombia, with impressive success.

The other night I particularly liked a silky scallop tiradito—disks of sweet scallop with shards of hot chilies, dabs of briny sea urchin, and grace notes of cilantro—which wine director Nicholas Nahigian paired with a sympathetically citrus-minerally 2007 Do Ferreiro Albariño (one of the better Albariños around, in fact). Later on, I also enjoyed an incredibly tender Colorado lamb chop aromatized (as it were) over toasted hay and served with tangy sheep's milk yogurt and a lovage puree. In an earlier incarnation of this dish, the lamb was cooked in an earthenware vessel over the hay, the vessel sealed with a bread crust—in that case, the hay, lamb and yogurt were all from the same farm. With the newer version, a 2004 Fratelli Revello Vigna Conca Barolo, surprisingly generous given its intense concentration, and somehow elegant despite that, tasted great.

The pairing that may have worked the best, though, and that was certainly the most surprising, came when Nahigian brought out glasses of Victory Brewing Company's Prima Pils (which, oddly enough, I just used for my 4th of July segment on summer beers for the Early Show) to pair with DeChellis's Alaskan rock fish a la plancha with salsa moluscada de verano, a Catalan (I think) sauce involving surf clams, mussel jus, squid, octopus, tomato water, clam jus, basil and cherry tomatoes (whew). The fish was expertly cooked, the sauce something between a light seafood stew, a sauce, and a sublime essence of ocean, and the crisp, gently bitter Pilsner was perfect with it—and also extremely refreshing, sandwiched as it was, course-wise, between a fairly substantial white Rioja—a 2003 Marqués de Murrieta Capellania—and the even more substantial Revello Barolo.

And there was dessert. But by then, do you really expect I was taking notes?  

I stopped by NYC's Hill Country Barbecue & Market last night for a semi-impromptu blind tasting of tequilas (no rest for the weary, indeed). The general gist of the thing, concocted by Hill Country bar director extraordinaire Jessica Stone and exec chef extraordinaire Elizabeth Karmel, was to determine whether the tequilas I think of as my default faves were actually that when tasted blind against a gang of other candidates. Not a bad undertaking for a Tuesday night.

Out of the blancos, my top pick turned out not to be my usual El Tesoro but a brand that was new to me, El Mayor (about $40) which combined intense agave character (more on the herbal than vegetal side) with a bit of pepperiness and a sleek finish; no rough edges, but no lack of character either. 

From the reposados, my top pick (over some much more recognized brands) was the Siembra Azul Reposado (about $40). It stuck out from the pack partly because the wood notes it had were so gracefully integrated into the spirit itself—several others tasted like wood planks dipped in hooch—and partly because the agave shone through so clear and pure above those wood/spice characteristics. It was eminently balanced, and eminently drinkable as well.  

Finally we went through a few añejos. Gran Centenario, usually my go-to, non-crazy-expensive añejo, ended up my number two after the Sauza Tres Generaciones (about $46), which I thought was appealingly un-vanilla/caramel-ish, with an intriguing salty note to it and a lot of aromatic spice. (I'm not, as is probably clear, a big fan of añejo tequilas that taste more like wood than like tequila.) 

After that we reached the crucial part of the taste test, which was to determine which of our favorites went best with Bluebell Ice Cream (if you're from Texas, you know how great Bluebell is; if not, go to Texas, or Hill Country in NYC, to find out). The answer? El Mayor Blanco and Bluebell Pecan Pralines n' Cream (think of it as an ad hoc añejo with cream and sugar. Sort of). I admit there might be some skepticism out there as to the wisdom of drinking tequila while eating ice cream, but I'm here to tell you that this particular combination is an all-out party in your mouth.

This weekend, Seattle chefs—including F&W Best New Chefs, like Tilth’s Maria Hines, Lark’s Jon Sundstrom and Sitka and Spruce’s Matt Dillon—will head to Smoke Farm for the second annual Burning Beast. Founded by chef Tamara Murphy of Brasa restaurant, Burning Beast is a huge cookout of (you’ll never guess) whole animals, including birds and fish. (For some great photos of last year’s Burning Beast, click here).  The event is open to the lucky holders of the $75 tickets, which are, unfortunately, sold out.

If I lived in Seattle, I’d surely be heading out to the gluttonous feast with a tent and sleeping bag in tow. I’d also bring a few of the best wines I tasted at this year’s F&W’s Classic in Aspen. Many of the wines are admittedly out of my price range and hard to get, but this is a fantasy, after all. A few of my faves:

For the salmon Yes, 2006 is a ripe vintage for white Burgundies, but that fullness works with rich fish. The 2006 Bernard Moreau Chassagne Montrachet Les Grandes Ruchottes ($90; find this wine) has a delicious honeyed quality and a mouthwatering acidity. Plus, the little bit of spicy oak would be great with food cooked over open flame. A less expensive alternative: the long-finishing 2006 Manciat Macon-Charnay Vielles Vignes ($23, find this wine).

For the duck With its lightly floral nose, pretty berry fruit and wonderfully silky texture, the 2006 Flowers Pinot Noir Camp Meeting Ridge ($106; find this wine) from the Sonoma Coast is one of the best California Pinot Noirs I’ve ever tried. A less expensive alternative: the earthy 2007 Mary Elke Pinot Noir ($26; find this wine).

For the pork The 2004 Casanuova delle Cerbaie Brunello di Montalcino ($45, find this wine)  has gripping tannins that would be great with the meat, as well as pretty red fruit and licorice notes that make it nice to drink now. Plus, for Brunello, this is a bargain. An even less expensive alternative: the cherry-inflected 2005 Mastrojanni Rosso di Montalcino ($20; find this wine).

For the lamb Greg Harrington, one of the country’s top sommeliers, left the restaurant world to start making wine in Washington in 2005. The 2006 Gramercy Cellars Lagniappe Columbia Valley Syrah ($38, find this wine) is a lighter-style Syrah that’s aged in neutral oak barrels to preserve its peppery, herby flavors. A bit of Viognier blended into the wine boosts the floral aromatics. A less expensive alternative: the smoky 2007 Copain Tous Ensemble Syrah ($20; find this wine)

For breakfast The cleansing bubbles of a grower Champagne would be the perfect refresher after the piles of beast consumed the night before. Try the bright, nutty Egly-Ouriet Brut Tradition Grand Cru ($70, find this wine).  A less expensive alternative: the creamy Paul Goerg Blanc de Blancs Champagne ($30; find this wine).

The 2009 Food & Wine Classic in Aspen wrapped up this past Sunday, but I figured I'd blog about one or two highlights from it anyway. One of them, not to blow my own horn, was the slightly crazy blind-burger-pairing-old-world-vs.-new-world-wine-smackdown that I ran as one of my seminars on Friday. 

What I did was pick three pairs of wines, one from Europe and one from the U.S. in each case, and pair them with a series of mini-burgers prepared by Ryan Hardy, the immensely talented young chef at Montagna at the Little Nell. The audience—more than 120 people; the room was jammed—tasted each pair of wines with the appropriate burger, then voted on which wine worked best. It was a hoot, unsurprisingly, helped along substantially by the insanely good burgers.

The winners? With a crabcake slider served with a tarragon aioli, the fave wine was from Italy: the 2007 Nino Negri Ca'Brione ($35), a lightly honeyed, spicy, richly citrusy blend of Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Incrocia Manzoni (a hybrid of Pinot Blanc and Riesling), and, even weirder, a small proportion of Nebbiolo fermented without its skins so the juice remains white. White Nebbiolo, you bet. Regardless, it was a lovely wine, and if you happen to be serving crabcakes with a tarragon aioli, go for it.

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It takes talent to match just the right wine with a dish. Some would also argue that it takes talent to match the perfect handbag or heels with a dress. That makes Elisabeth English, the owner of Nantucket's Current Vintage, super-talented. After selling her interest in Provisions (the island’s beloved sandwich shop) to Amanda Lydon and Gabriel Frasca, English opened this wine-and-fashion boutique. The year-old shop has a tightly edited selection of more than 150 wines with an emphasis on boutique labels and a particularly exciting selection of American Pinot Noirs and Burgundy. English also stocks vintage and designer clothing, jewelry and shoes. Here, she shares her picks for what to wear and drink at quintessential Nantucket summer outings:

’Sconset Picnic
Clothes: Vintage 1950s sundress and ankle-wrap espadrille
Wine: Domaine Bart Rosé, Marsannay, France

Madequesham Clam Bake
Clothes: Vintage 1960s Lilly Pulitzer floral maxi and a pedicure
Wine: ’07 Curran Grenache Blanc, Santa Ynez, California

Hulbert Avenue BBQ
Clothes: Vintage 1970s Jordache jeans, embroidered Mexican top and gladiator sandals
Wine: ’05 Kangarilla Road Shiraz-Viognier, McLaren Vale, Australia

This past weekend I had the good fortune to attend Taste Washington, an extravaganza of Washington State wines put on in a few places around the country every year. I was at the mothership incarnation of the thing, in Seattle, a mighty cool town (like you need me to tell you). For me, festivities started off with a seminar I led, in which three of our former F&W Best New Chefs—Johnathan Sundstrom of Lark, Jason Wilson of Crush, and Ethan Stowell of Union (and Tavolàta, How to Cook a Wolf, and the new Anchovies & Olives)—chose some of their favorite Washington wines to pair with recipes made with some of their favorite Washington foodstuffs. 

I left it to the chefs to do most of the talking, meanwhile enjoying the heck out of the pairings they'd come up with. First up, Ethan Stowell produced a local mussels-fennel-citrus salad—details forthcoming, as I was too busy moderating to take notes—to go with the 2007 Mark Ryan Klipsun Vineyard Viognier ($29) from Red Mountain. Along with the other Viogniers I tasted throughout the weekend, it made a strong case for Washington as an impressive source for New World Viogniers that can balance the grape's natural lushness against a good spine of acidity.

Wilson, next up, brought an intensely luscious stinging nettle vichyssoise with grilled shigoku oysters—I'm going to see if he'd be game to run the recipe for this here, because it was pretty insanely delicious—to go along with a 2007 O’Shea Scarborough Klipsun Vignoble Semillon ($20), also from the Klipsun Vineyard on Red Mountain. It was a sort of oddball but appealing wine whose floral-herbal notes went strangely well with the chlorophyll-herby taste of the nettles.

Finally, Sundstrom paired his pork rillettes with fleur de sel butter—no sadness there—with a dry Riesling from the Lake Chelan region (headed toward an AVA designation later this year, apparently). The wine, the 2006 Vin du Lac Lehm Dry Riesling ($45), was flinty and focused, its crisp acidity and green apple fruit an ideal foil to the rillettes' porky richness. The ultra-local butter, by the way, came from a two-cow dairy on Vashon Island, whose young proprietor cooks a couple of days a week at Lark. 

I'll mention a few other highlights from the event in my next blog, along with the red wines that we poured at the seminar just for the fun of it, but this was a mighty nice way to start the weekend. 

There are breakfasts, and then there are breakfasts.

The other night for dinner I opened up a bottle of the 2004 Scherrer Winery Russian River Pinot Noir ($36, click here to find it) and was struck all over again by what a terrific winemaker Fred Scherrer is. I have no idea why his wines continue to fly under the media-buzz radar, since to my palate they're as distinctive and expressive as any of the more hyped Pinots floating around these days, if not moreso. 

The '04 is drinking wonderfully right now, with a deep well of dark cherry fruit at its core, svelte tannins, and a lightly citrusy/orangey edge to its acidity that I vaguely recall Scherrer saying was, for him, characteristic of RRV Pinot grown on Goldridge soil (I can't pin down when I heard him say that; a phone interview I think, but quite a while ago).

The wine's impeccably balanced, and it went really well with the very simple Italian chickpea soup I'd cooked up (rosemary, garlic, chickpeas, tomatoes, chicken stock, a drizzle of Capezzana olive oil, plus some stellar olive bread from Caputo, a local Brooklyn bakery—yum. Great Autumn evening sustenance). I'm sure it would also go well with a long list of less unlikely dinner choices (on a similar soup note,for instance, it would also make a great partner for Peter Pastan's fresh shell bean soup, from our October issue). I think for the price it would be nearly impossible to find a comparable RRV Pinot. Seriously.

Since I'm in the Bay Area for our annual American Wine Awards event, I took the opportunity to head over to the East Bay and grab lunch at the Chez Panisse's Café. Seemed like a good idea, since I haven't been there in thirteen years and, after all, it's Chez Panisse.

Something about the dark, wood-beamed, stained-glass space made me feel rather as though I were having lunch inside a particularly well appointed Hobbit hole—go figure—but the kitchen still has that ability to turn out mundane-sounding dishes like "avocado and beet salad with citrus vinaigrette" that pretty much blow you away, simply because of the quality of the ingredients. The same was true of the aïoli served with a perfectly cooked (and very flavorful) piece of Northern halibut—the garlickiness of the aïoli had the subtle, perfumed character of fresh farmer's market garlic rather than the hoary pungent heads of the stuff, imported from God knows where in China, that lately have been turning up at grocery stores near me.

Anyway, the point is that the wine I had to go with all this, a 2007 Domaine Tempier Bandol Rosé ($35), is a wine to put to rest any comments that rosé can't be serious stuff. It was luscious, not in a fat, overripe, fruit-jam way, but in a tongue-caressing, silky, substantial-for-a-rosé way. Great strawberry and raspberry fruit notes, but what impressed me most was the texture, which was just plain seductive. Kermit Lynch imports it, and it certainly isn't cheap (especially for a rose), it's still more than worth picking up.

I was out the other night with a pack of sommeliers (and my erstwhile colleague Kate Krader) for that once-in-a-while get-together that we have, the purpose of which is to eat cheap food and drink high-end wine. This has led in the past to the not-entirely-surprising discovery that Quintarelli Amarone goes pretty darn well with the cowboy steak at Hill Country (which is effectively most of a cow, seared) and the somewhat more unpredictable discovery that '98 Jermann Vintage Tunina goes well with the duck tongues at Fuleen, which I wrote about here. 

Anyway, this time Bernie Sun, wine director for all of the Jean-Georges restaurants and a man of as noble spirit as he is skilled with grill tongs, hosted us all at his Upper West Side apt., which happens to have that key grilling necessity, a back yard. We were not an army, but we did eat the food of an army, including a long-bone steak that looked like something one Cro Magnon would use to whomp another Cro Magnon on the head with, a pile of merguez (or was it andouille?) sausages, a small bay's worth of shrimp, a Wagyu ribeye that utterly failed to meet the "cheap food" criteria but was mighty darn delicious, some vegetables to which I paid no attention whatsoever, and—key to this rambling account—lamb chops.

The weird thing was that the wine that without question went best with the lamb chops was a 2001 Domaine Leflaive Puligny-Montrachet Les Pucelles 1er Cru. Of course, wearing my normal pairing hat (it's blue, with stars on it), I would never think to pair aged white Burgundy with grilled lamb chops. But wearing my "it's open, so that's what I'm drinking, and plus it's Leflaive, and I'm no fool" hat, I did so anyway, and it was fabulous. Something about the deep spiciness and savory qualities of this white seemed to intensify the flavor of the meat in an uncanny way. Nor am I out of my mind; or at least if I am, then Arnaud Devulder of Lever House, who agreed with me, is out of his mind as well. And I know Arnaud, and he's sane. So there you have it.