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.

[More]

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.

The other night I was at the most recent semi-regular meeting of the semi-official group of sommeliers and editors that I'm part of—our agenda at these meetings is to drink great high-end wine while eating great low-end food—when I made one of those prodigious leaps of insight that happen from time to time to all of us (or most of us, at least). This occurred at Fuleen, in Chinatown, which is the first place I've run into since visiting Nanjing that serves duck tongues, though my colleague Emily Kaiser assures me that you basically can't walk through a restaurant down there without tripping over a bowlful of the things.

But why, you might wonder, would anyone want to eat duck tongues? (In fact, if you're me, the first time you had them you might pause to consider that you never even knew ducks had tongues, much less that people ate them.)

Well, well! The main reason would be because if you deep-fry them with a little batter, they're sort of like really short pick-up sticks with teeny amounts of succulent duck meat on them. Since they tend to come in a large mound—it takes a pretty alarming number of ducks to produce one platter of duck tongues—they're even more like pick-up sticks.

Anyway, the fascinating insight I had is kind of two-fold, part (a) being something along the lines of "hm—you never know when you're going to come across an amazing pairing," and part (b) being that it turns out that the absolute perfect accompaniment for fried duck tongues happens to be a bottle of 1998 Jermann Vintage Tunina, which was lush, satiny, and drinking just beautifully. 

Laura Maniec from B. R. Guest, who was sitting to my left, and Arnaud Devulder of Lever House, who was on my right, will vouch for this. You can ask them. Really. And if you are hungry for a little langue de canard à la chine, scoot on down to 11 Division Street. Tell them Ray sent you. They'll look at you blankly, but still, tell them I sent you.

NBC Today surprised me once again by throwing an unexpected guest into my segment (on wine & chocolate pairing, of course, this being Valentine's week). Susan Lucci. Never seen All My Children, but she's been on it for 38 years straight, apparently, playing Erica Kane—who, according to abc.com is "not merely a woman, but a force of nature." 

Man. I want some major broadcast media site to write something similar about me. "Not merely a wine critic, but a raging tornado of tumultuous vino-opinion." "Not merely a man, but a wine-obsessed alien from the planet Zorbon dressed in a lifelike humansuit and bent on destroying the earth in between glasses of Chateauneuf-du-Pape." Or something like that.

Anyway, Ms. Lucci herself was entirely charming, the segment went well, and you can see it here if you weren't sitting around watching TV at 10:53 this morning (scroll down past the truly alarming picture of Marco Canora's undoubtedly very tasty bolognese sauce).

Luxist had a truly bizarre little item a few days ago about a pair of Berkshire pigs that were fed  barley-soybean meal soaked in 200ml of ice wine a day for forty days, before they were butchered and served up to 82 hungry (and slightly crazy, I'd say) folks at a restaurant called Hillebrand in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Evidently this was supposed to make the pigs tastier—eiswein swine, mm-mm-good!—albeit in some fashion that eludes my rather rudimentary sense of animal biology.

What I love is that if you dig a little deeper, say by tracking down this article in the St. Catharine's Standard, you find out that the idea came from the pig farmer's wife—a veterinarian wine aficionado. Now, maybe I'm odd, but it seems to me that vets aren't really supposed to be in the business of thinking up new ways to make their patients more, um, delicious. But maybe I'm just drawing too close a connection between vets and md's. And, of course, the vet in turn did get the idea from a bunch of Australians, who fed red wine to their cattle to tantalize the Japanese restaurant market.

Me, I'm going right to the pet store, buying a hamster, and uncorking that magnum of '77 Graham's port I've got stashed away in the cellar. Gonna be some mighty fine dining around my house in about two weeks or so...