Mouthing Off

For a rainy Friday (at least in New York), a couple of sunny South American Sauvignon Blancs that won't capsize your bank account. Both are from Chile, the first from the Central Valley and the second from the Limarí Valley. And, if they make you so full of zip that you find yourself awake at 7:44AM tomorrow (eastern time), I'll be on the CBS Early Show, waxing poetic about how to make a great cup of coffee. Oddly, it won't involve dosing the stuff with wine.

2008 Santa Rita 120 Sauvignon Blanc ($8) No wild complexity here, but definitely a loveable, zesty white: peppery and intense, with lots of gooseberry fruit. Great cookout wine.

2007 Peñalolen Sauvignon Blanc ($12) This is more robust than the Santa Rita, with ripe orange and grapefruit flavors and a little hint of green pepper to remind you that yes, this is Sauvignon. The flavors last nicely. Also a great cookout wine. 

The weekend is here once again (odd how it does that—will have to investigate), and so it seems a couple of good affordable wines are in order. The Guigal should be easy to find; the Montpertuis will take some hunting, but it's worth buying by the case if you can find it.

2006 E. Guigal Côtes du Rhône Blanc ($14) You could drop a couple of hundred bucks or so on Guigal's Ex Voto Ermitage and have one of the great whites of the Rhône, no doubt, but if you exist in the same sort of financial realm as me, a crisp, minerally white Rhône with appealing peach, spice and lemon rind notes for under $20 sounds like a great idea, which this is. (55% Viognier, the rest Roussanne, Marsanne, Bourbolenc, Clairette & Grenache Blanc)

2005 Domaine de Montpertuis Vignoble de la Ramiere Cuvée Counoise ($12) I picked this up at Astor Wines the other day, operating under the basic principle that if Neal Rosenthal is importing it, at the very least it's going to be interesting, and usually it's going to be much better than that. Once again, this proved true. I love this unpretentious red, its scent of wild berry liqueurs, its abundance of bright, luscious fruit, its lightly earthy finish. Just terrific, and an utter no-brainer at the price.

Well, as part of my ongoing attempt to achieve world media domination, I did another TV spot yesterday for local channel CW11, recommending a range of organic, green and etc. spirits and wines. It was much lower-key than the Today show gig, and it got me a chance to recommend Appellation Wine & Spirits, here in NYC, a cool store run by the equally cool Scott Pactor that focuses almost entirely on organic & biodynamic wines and spirits. It also gives me a chance to link over to some recent recommendations I made for organic & biodynamic wines that were an adjunct to my August article on wineries' green strategies (recycling, sustainable energy, using gerbils to power crusher-stemmers, that sort of thing), which I'm keen to do since the recommendations are a little lost on our site.

See? World media domination, but in a responsible way. I do my best to be a conscientious fellow.

So what if it's 95˚ in NYC, I say pull out a big ol' Sicilian red. Or, actually, a nicely structured and not-at-all-too-jammy Sicilian red, as well as a tasty Argentine white. To wit:

2007 Trivento Select Torrontes ($12) I'm sort of perplexed by this white, since neither the winery's website nor the importer's seems to have any info on it, but nevertheless it's in the market, so what the hey. Nice classic floral aroma, juicy melon-citrus fruit—it's not as over-the-top (nor quite as delicious) as Susana Balbo's slightly more expensive bottling, but it's a very appealing white for a fair price.

2006 Feudo Principi di Butera Nero d'Avola ($13) I wrote about this a few months ago, but had the opportunity to re-taste it with the winemaker, Franco Giacosa, a couple of days ago, and I'm still convinced it's a terrific value. The aroma is bright red cherry with a bit of tarry floral action, the flavor juicy and spicy but neither overextracted nor overripe. It's aged in big Slavonian oak botti—"no barriques, no French oak," says Mr. Giacosa. Kudos to him on that choice.

So, I don't know where I've been, exactly, but there are something like 2,700,240,000 of those new 2006 nickels in circulation, the ones with Th. Jefferson facing forward and staring at you with spooky space-alien eyes , and I hadn't seen one until today. I swear, it seems like every time I turn around our goverment has done something else to freak me out.

I calmed down by contemplating my meeting the other day with Jean-Michel Deiss of Domaine Marcel Deiss. Jean-Michel falls into the wise old elf school of French winemaking  (as opposed to the taciturn philosopher school or the passionate wild-haired youth school). He's cheerful and twinkly, while at the same time inclined to saying things like, "The concept of terroir is the concept of profundity."

To which I say, certainmente! (He also said, "What's superficial is just Hollywood. The trailer—sex and suicide—not the substance of the film." So, terroir is the essence, not the flash, oui? And now that I have exhausted all the non-profane French I know, we'll call it quits with the pseudo-clever exclamations.) Deiss had a number of intriguing things to say, in fact. He believes that terroir is a concept that was invented as cultivation of vines spread to northern Europe; in Mediterranean, sunny climates, he says, grapes grow easily and the personality of the wine is the personality of the grape. In the north, on the other hand, the personality of the grape is muted and the personality of the place is able to find expression. He also feels that root depth is absolutely critical if a wine is going to express terroir at all, and says that the vine roots in his Marbourg vineyard—which produces a wine that practically spits terroir in your face, like a vinous cobra—go down more than sixty meters. "Every plant has the fantasy that it will grow to the sun," I quoted him as saying the other day; the context for this is his additional statement that if you foil that urge, the plant instead propels its roots deep into the earth.

Believe Jean-Michel if you like (this northern/southern divide intrigues me, I have to say), but whatever you believe, the man is making terrific wines. The 2005 Marcel Deiss Pinot Blanc Bergheim suggests ripe peaches and apricots, with a dense, earthy texture and crisp, almost tannic note on the end.

Stepping up to two of his premier cru wines, you've got a test-case for non-believers in terroir. The 2004 Marcel Deiss Engelgarden Premier Cru has a smoky, savory aroma with a hint of diesel, and dense, complex, powerfully mineral flavors—there's appley fruit, but the primary sensation is of stones and earth, and tremendous length. On the other hand, there's the 2004 Marcel Deiss Grasberg Premier Cru. Much more fruit forward (and sweeter—44 grams per liter of sugar compared to 21), it's round and a mix of stone fruit and tropical notes, lush where the other wine is forbidding. But the two wines are made from the same grape varieties (Riesling and Pinot Gris, primarily, with some Gewurz in Grasberg and some Muscat in Engelgarten), with the same winemaking technique, from vineyards only 300 meters apart. Engelgarten, though, is cooler and planted on gravelly soil, while Grasberg is on limestone below calcarous/iron-based soils. And so they end up radically different wines.

I'm out the door, so the Mambourg Grand Cru will have to wait until tomorrow, as will Jean-Michel's theory of salivation as a test of wine quality. Can't wait, can you? 

Sometimes it's easy to lose sight of how radically wine lists in restaurants have changed over the past, oh, fifteen years or so. I've been on a sort of Italian-resto-spree lately, and I'm coming out of it thinking that I'm either dreaming or I'm living in a golden age of Italian wine and food here in NYC.

Example One: Scarpetta. I've been a fan of Scott Conant's cooking since the first bite I had of his luscious polenta with wild mushroom fricassee at L'Impero, a dish which, I'm thrilled to find, he's replicated on the menu at his new restaurant, Scarpetta. I've been here a few times in the past month or so, and it's quickly becoming one of my favorite spots in the city, partly because it seems like Conant has finally landed in a place where the ambience of the room is of a piece with the character of the food. I loved L'Impero, but it was a tad formal for my taste; Alto was like watching Cezanne try to paint like Tintoretto or something; Scarpetta nails it. And besides the presence of things like Conant's signature capretto (roasted baby goat, and mighty darn good it is), there's also the smart, adventurous, and fairly priced wine list. We drank a terrific white, the 2006 Vadiaperti Fiano di Avellino, about which I know nothing but that it's packed with flavor and focused all at once. Next, a bottle of the 2006 Hofstätter Lagrein. Its bright acidity played foil to its dark, chewy fruit, and both went ideally well with Conant's rich duck-and-foie gras ravioli, not to mention his fall-apart-tender short ribs.

Example Two: Bar Milano. First off, if you're lucky, then partner Tony Abou-Ganim is going to be behind the bar mixing drinks here, as he was the night I stopped in. I asked him to make me something interesting with rye. He replied with a Rattlesnake, which, according to the 1947 edition of Trader Vic's Bartender's Guide is one ounce of rye, two dashes of Pernod, a teaspoon of lemon juice, a half-teaspoon of powdered sugar, and half an egg white, shaken with cracked ice and (in my case) strained onto rocks. Sublime on a steamy evening, and a good lead-in to poking around Bar Milano's all-Northern-Italian wine list. I bypassed the exceptionally weird 2005 Movia Lunar—I love Ales Kristancic's wines, but this stuff is odd to a fault—and instead settled on a bottle of the 2006 Grosjean Freres Cornalin from the Valle D'Aosta. This is the kind of wine that never, ever, in a million years would have appeared on a wine list back in, say, 1985 or even 1995. Utterly obscure, it was also mighty darn delicious—bright red fruit, potent but not weighty, distinctive and very fresh. Good with duck, you might think. I did, and it was. Plus the duck itself was superb, the skin crisp to a just-so toothsomeness, the meat tender and deeply flavorful (Pekin from D'Artagnan—good to know), the rhubarb compote that came with it a nice tangy-sweet touch as were the earthy, savory lentils.

Example Three: Dell' Anima. One thing I like about this place is that practically every bottle that wine director Joe Campanale offers probably wouldn't have appeared on a wine list back in 1995 (with maybe the exception of some of the Tuscan & Piedmontese wines). The list is like a playground for Italian wine fanatics. In the mood for a little Fumin? A glass of Cesanese del Piglio? Or maybe some Petite Arvine—I was, for the latter, since I was still on my Valle d'Aosta kick. The 2006 Grosjean Freres Petite Arvine (those guys again!) was unctuous and rich; lots of texture, lots of minerality, and very good with avocado & preserved lemon bruschetta, a snack which wasn't exactly Italian but somehow very much was, all at the same time. Next up was a 2007 Romano Clelia Fiano d'Avelino "Colli di Lapio", about the best Fiano I've run across (including the Vadiaperti, much as I liked it). Melony, aromatic, and long, it was substantial enough to go with chef Gabe Thompson's intensely woodsy Garganelli with mushroom ragu (a died-and-gone-to-heaven dish for mushroom fanatics) yet graceful enough to also go with something as evocative of springtime as Thompson's farfalline with asparagus, ricotta salata and hen-of-the-woods mushrooms.

And I forgot to mention: we started off at Dell'Anima with a bottle of white Lini Lambrusco, which is made from red Lambrusco Salamino grapes, just to make things even a tad more complicated. It was like drinking lightly sweet flowers.

Man, this Italian wine-list thing. Esoterica everywhere. But it sure is fun.

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.