The noble grapes: riesling, part 2

The noble grapes: Riesling, part 1

The striving after ripeness explains German wine labels.

If a bottle of riesling is the product of that first harvest, it will carry the term Kabinett on its label. If it is a product of a second harvest, it will carry the term Spatlese (pronounced SHPAIT-lay-seh -- although people do struggle with this one, rendering it "Spall-teese" or "Spayte-lace," or, like me for a while, "Shpaht-lace"). If it comes from even a third harvest, it will be called Auslese, and will have been harvested in individual bunches. A fourth harvest gives us Beerenauslese (BA), meaning the gathering of individual grape berries left so long on the vine that they are not only very ripe but have been attacked by the beneficial mold botrytis, and so are even more shrunken and their sweet juices concentrated. Trockenbeerenauslese (TBA) means the wine comes from the harvesting of individual grape berries fully dried (trocken) by the mold. Finally there is Eiswein, made from grapes harvested and crushed while frozen. The ice carries away the grapes' water content and the wine is therefore made from the sweetest, most acidic, most concentrated juices possible.

These six words therefore don't necessarily indicate the increasingly sweet taste of the wine; rather they annouce the level of ripeness of the grapes at harvest. Each higher level of ripeness will mean a richer-feeling wine, but only the three ripest styles -- Beerenauslese, Trockenbeerenauslese, and Eiswein -- will invariably be sweet because the sugar levels in these grapes have been able to climb so high. The three lower levels of ripeness -- Kabinett, Spatlese, and Auslese -- can still be fermented completely dry.

And coping with these six words already means that we have in our hands a bottle of the highest quality of German wine, a Qualitatswein mit Pradikat or QmP, meaning quality wine with special characteristics. Having this also means that we hold in our hands the results of a sunny, warm year in the best German vineyards. If the year's weather was not so good, we might hold instead a Qualitatswein bestimmter Anbaugebiet or QbA, simply a quality wine from a specified region. German wine labeling laws lay all these standards down. A "QbA" is not allowed to announce the ripeness levels of its grapes, because they were not remarkable enough to brag about. It can only announce roughly where in Germany it is from.

All this still leaves a positive forest of German words on the labels of fine rieslings, on the labels of fine German wines in general. These comprise announcements not only about the region but about the district, collection of vineyards, and specific vineyard which made the wine. There are also announcements that the wine was bottled on the estate (address included), and proofs of its having passed inspection (the Amtiche Prufungsnummer, or A.P. testing number, the last two digits of which represent the year of testing).

Germany is anxious that you are shown exactly what you are getting in your riesling, because the very fact of growing grapes and making wine there is such a feat and a triumph. But where, for instance, in this QmP and QbA and A.P. and "spall-teese" complexity do we place our (probably) first experience of German wine -- the humble and inexpensive grocery-store Liebfraumilch?

Liebfraumilch, meaning "milk of Our Blessed Lady," is a QbA wine made of a blend of riesling plus other German grape varieties like Kerner, Muller-Thurgau, and Silvaner, the first two of which are crosses of the riesling grape themselves. Being of QbA designation means it is still a qualitatswein -- QbA wines sometimes specify only that on the label -- and therefore still above the category of Landwein or Tafelwein, what would be the everyday quaff of the German consumer except that it seems Germany doesn't produce much of anything ordinary to begin with. Most authorities agree that only about 5 or 10% of the country's wine production is not "qualitatswein," and almost none of the lower-tier stuff is exported.

So that means Liebfraumilch is high-quality product? I'll confess I have never actually tried it. Karen MacNeil in The Wine Bible is polite: it's "pleasant, basic, and slightly sweetish," she says. The best-known example is Blue Nun, which most people seem to remember, with a laugh, as something belonging to the 1970s. As of The Wine Bible's publication date (2001), Blue Nun was still "the largest-selling German wine in the English-speaking world."

Sunday risotto

Risotto is often our Sunday dinner, because we tend to have a roast chicken for Friday or Saturday, and so the carcass is available Sunday to make a chicken stock, which is the beginning of the risotto recipe I follow from Lidia Bastianich's Lidia's Italian Table.



I prepare the chicken stock and start it simmering at about 2:30 or 3:00 in the afternoon. Then I can wander off (not too far away) for a while and do something else. Lidia explains that risotto takes only about 16 minutes to make once you start the rice cooking (!), so there is no pressure to stand slaving in front of the stove all day.

The real cooking begins with warming a lot of olive oil in a big heavy pot. Lidia calls for a few tablespoons, but I use an ample 1/2 cup, based on a recipe from Wolfgang Puck which is more generous in its liquid measurements. In the oil, I heat a chopped onion and sometimes a chopped leek. A clove of garlic is also a good thing.



When the onions and garlic have softened and turned golden, I add 2 and 1/2 cups of short grain, pearl, or arborio rice, or plain risotto if I can find it. I stir it for a few minutes, until the edges of the grains "become translucent." This is hard to judge. I watch the clock and reason that three minutes is three minutes.

Then I add a cup of white wine and a little salt, and keep stirring. It is from this point on that Lidia claims the cooking process should take 14-16 minutes and then you are ready to serve. For professionals, perhaps; I've found that's not enough time to soften the rice, and I suppose in turn my risotto probably comes out "less than perfect" -- each kernel not "retaining its al dente texture in a creamy suspension."

The wine is absorbed into the rice and onions very quickly. After that comes the tedious process of whisking the hot chicken stock by ladlefuls into the risotto, stirring after each addition so that the rice absorbs another dose of stock and the cooking process is never interrupted by the addition of anything cold. Slowly, the rice expands and fills half the Dutch oven. When it is soft and palatable -- which sometimes requires more time, or the judicious ladling in of some hot water from the pot of carrots I happen to have simmering on the stove -- I add a small hunk of butter to it, stir that in, and set the Dutch oven on a back burner to carry on by itself. At dinnertime, it looks like this:

I have a pot of carrots boiling next to the risotto because I have recruited my teenagers to peel and chop them, and because Lidia recommends a bed of buttered mashed carrots, spiced with nutmeg, to go underneath each person's helping of rice. It is a tasty accompaniment.

A really ambitious cook would plan a nice meat to go with all this Vegetarian Delight. Cornish game hens, or a pork tenderloin would be delicious. However, we usually make a meal of the risotto, and I add quickly wilted and buttered spinach to the menu, for the grownups. Who knew that the big, ugly, locally-grown spinach would be so much better and cheaper than the elegant looking "baby spinach" leaves from California?

Freshly grated parmesan cheese can be stirred through the risotto, or sprinkled atop each serving, as desired. Or both. Lidia says that any leftovers are good fried the next day as a pancake, but I find this turns the risotto unpleasantly chewy. Far simpler to zap it all in the microwave, carrots and all, and call it lunch.

The wine: a chardonnay, rich and buttery? A viognier, similar but slightly more acerbic? A very fresh and crisp Italian white, or a light (red) Valpolicella? The possibilities are endlessly delightful.

Guilty pleasures, or: yippee ki yay

... and by the way, the champagne that the evil blond terrorists are swigging near the close of Die Hard 3 is Dom Perignon. What, they couldn't afford Veuve Clicquot?

Getting pepper steak right

An update: to this, add a clove of diced garlic, a small piece of peeled diced fresh ginger -- think of it as a "clove" of ginger -- and sliced fresh mushrooms, patiently seared in butter over high heat so that they brown rather than steam. Most delicious. November 12, 2010.

When I was growing up, pepper steak was one of my favorite meals. Although I am sure we had it year round, I associate it with summertime, open windows, and pitchers of iced tea on the table, glowing amber in the afternoon sun. It was just a stew of beef and green peppers -- not to be confused with the genuine steak au poivre, which is a slice of beef rubbed with astonishing amounts of cracked black peppercorns and quickly pan-fried -- but it takes some thinking out. Naturally, the way you cook it will determine what cut of beef you buy, or vice versa.

My dad made it as a fairly long-cooking stovetop stew, and I've made it both that way and in a crock pot as an extremely long-cooking stew, with the help of recipes calling for good-sized doses of soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, canned tomatoes, and ground ginger. Both those preparations enable you to buy big, economical pieces of beef chuck that will soften with the passing hours. Both preparations also leave you with a dish that is rather muddled and smothered-tasting; somehow bell peppers seem happier when not cooked to oblivion. I've eaten pepper steak in restaurants, where the meal comes to the table far more speedily. There are seared slices of much more tender beef, cooked in butter, presented still rare and bundled with strips of green pepper and onion that remained a little too crunchy for me.

So, what to do, especially if the family requests pepper steak at 2:00 p.m., when the slow-food, cooked to oblivion version really should have been in the oven by noon? I have attempted restaurant style pepper steak before, and failed -- good beef wrecked by too many crock-pot ingredients, or too much sauce boiling the meat to shoe leather in a moment of forgetfulness. This time I went to the store and picked a few pounds of a cut of beef that would prove tender and cook quickly, but not be jaw-droppingly expensive. My goal for the day was not to ruin that meat ...




... and yet not to serve it looking a color that I would call Supermarket Red. I saw beef that color some months ago, at a wine tasting, in fact. An aspiring young chef came to the store for a special occasion and prepared a series of appetizers to accompany wine (or vice versa). It was very nice, but he offered to everyone some slices of barely seared beef tenderloin that were terrifying in their inner redness. In their inner redness they might have come straight from the supermarket styrofoam tray. Apparently they were safe. Nobody came back and sued us. If nothing else, it taught me a little more confidence in my beef cookery. If this young man is a professional and can serve that without risking jail time at the behest of the Health Department, then lighter shades of pink must be all right at home.

So I began at about 4:30 in the afternoon with my usual ingredients, a sliced onion, olive oil, and a chunk of butter. And my workhorse heavy-bottomed frying pan, bought when we were first shopping excitedly for pots and pans before we got married, and he wanted the Magnalite he grew up with and I wanted the copper-bottomed Revereware I grew up with. We compromised and got a few of both, and the Magnalite has proved more valuable to me, even though we did worry a bit about rumors, in the '90s, that it causes Alzheimer's.

After the onion cooked to softness and the sliced clove of garlic had warmed a little on top of it, I added the sliced green and red peppers. After they had softened -- but not to oblivion -- it was just past 5:00 and time to add the beef. Only a few at a time, as the cookbooks say, and only seared to inner pinkness. Then they went on top of the vegetables in a bowl, to be returned to the pan after I had devised some sort of sauce for them to finish in.

A sauce of what? Canned tomatoes are far too much. One tomato will do, a little water, and a pinch of ground ginger, and a snippet of fresh basil from the pot on the steps outside. (Don't be too impressed. It's the only herb I have been able to grow all summer. I also planted wax beans, late, and was able to harvest I think seven of them.)



A tomato in water can boil as furiously as it likes and harm nothing. In the meantime I cooked rice and a pot of green beans (alas, rather tough). By 5:20 I was ready to pile the beef and peppers back into the pan, warm everything, and serve it forth, as M.F.K. Fisher would say, at about 5:30. No soy sauce, which is glorified salt. (I wonder what real Japanese soy sauce tastes like?) No Worcestershire, which is glorified God knows what. I tend to agree with Marion Cunningham, who in her most recent cookbooks has been saying that no recipe should call for more than five ingredients, including salt and pepper.

This was about the best I've done with pepper steak, in terms both of ease of preparation and, more importantly, of meat not ruined. "How's the beef?" I asked, continuing, "I was very careful with it." It was all right. A few pieces even verged on being Supermarket Red, which I considered almost a personal triumph.

The wine on hand: a Thomas Fogarty Gewurztraminer, whose sharp spice and full body proved a surprisingly good pairing.

The wines of Muslim Europe?

I only visited Europe once, twenty-five years ago, and I was too young at the time to understand remotely where I was or what I was looking at. As a matter of fact I was near the German wine heartlands, but didn't know it. We all drank white wine with everything because Europeans didn't drink or serve water or milk, and because we could drink -- there was no drinking age and nobody "carded" us. I thought it all tasted terrible.

In the succeeding years I've been reading eyewitness reports which insist that the Europe I glanced at, certainly the Europe of a generation ago and the Europe recorded in books and movies from yesteryear, is imploding. Low birthrates and generous welfare state policies -- designed partly to encourage people to have children -- have created a vacuum into which have poured millions of immigrants from North Africa and the Middle and Near East. They do the work that there aren't enough Europeans to do, and/or they sign up for the welfare benefits that European nations are taxed so heavily to provide. And they are all Muslim.

The word Muslim doesn't imply that we instantly suck in our breath and draw our skirts aside as if from something awful. What it does mean, according to the eyewitness reports that ring louder each year, is the presence in Europe of a new demographic, eager to live better than it did in Nigeria, Egypt, or Pakistan, but also passionately religious and filled with real loathing for a civilization which it considers absurd and infidel.

We don't hear much of this in our mainstream newspapers and TV broadcasts. I'm not sure why. Fear. Disbelief. The fact of the implosion's not happening in our own backyard, at least not yet. Miseducation or over-education, perhaps. From high school on we're all taught to be open-minded and to recognize the flaws and brutalities in American history, in Western history, we're taught to admit imperialism's and aggression's force anywhere except where they simply can't be: permeating a worldview different from ours. We've been bad. If the other is truly different, diverse, then the other must be good or at least neutral, and in need of tolerance and understanding.

Anyway I have not seen, with my own eyes, evidence that Europe is becoming Muslim. I have not seen a thousand mosques in London alone, I haven't seen the rings of grim, violent "immigrant" suburbs around every major city in France, where -- so I read -- French law no longer exists and French police do not venture. The historian Bernard Lewis says that Europe absolutely will be a Muslim subcontinent by the end of the century at the very latest. An eyewitness like Bruce Bawer actually predicts that very soon, perhaps in twenty years or less, some Western European nation will cross the threshhold and be the first to live under sharia, Islamic law, because a simple majority of its population will wish it so. He thinks it will be France, but suggests the Netherlands, Britain, and Sweden are all in the running. In his book While Europe Slept he claims that young Muslims in Sweden wear t-shirts announcing "2030: we take over."

To the American who grew up with even a cursory acquaintance with the sunny tales of Robin Hood, and misty Jane Austen, and gemlike Renaissance art, and all sorts of other wonderful things, this is beyond incredible. I asked an eyewitness two years ago, my college instructor in French who visits France at length several times a year and was then in the process of buying an apartment in Paris, whether she agreed the nation was becoming Muslim. She shook her head firmly. "No."

I wouldn't know. I don't trust her firm "No" because it doesn't explain where all the other eyewitness reports are coming from. It seems unlikely they're all made up out of whole cloth and agree with each other, too. But if the other eyewitnesses are right, if they are not exaggerating because they are filled with hate and "Islamophobia," then it seems obvious that Europe is soon going to have -- among other things -- a problem with its wine industry. Islam forbids alcohol.

Thirty-five years ago, in tracing the history of wine production in the former French colony of Algeria -- which had made oceans of the stuff, under French supervision, for French vin ordinaire -- Frank Schoonmaker wrote of what might be hoped from the now-independent nation's vineyards. His prose turned positively Gibbonesque.

It is an unprecedented problem, to say the least, and if the Algerians succeed (as is to be hoped), it will surely be one of the few times in human history that a people manages to produce, in world competition and on an enormous scale, something that they are unwilling, on account of religious scruples, to consume. (Frank Schoonmaker's Encyclopedia of Wine, fifth edition, 1973).

Ah-so. Are we to say the same, soon, of the wine trade in a majority-Muslim Italy, France, or Germany? -- shall we speak in terms of an "unprecedented problem" in those countries? Can we envisage a time, perhaps in our lifetimes, when the vineyards of the Haut Medoc (Bordeaux), the Cote de Beaune (Burgundy), or Chianti go unharvested or are even torn up for religious reasons?
This sounds so ridiculous as to not even merit the dignity of being called alarmist. There are still vineyards in Algeria, and they seem to be doing fairly well, thank you. Wine is made in Lebanon -- one pertinent website notes delicately that wine was a normal consumable in this part of the world, from remote antiquity until the 8th century, "when wars stormed over the area." Wars launched by whom against whom, for what reason, is not explained. Wine and beer are made in Egypt. Production is increasing elsewhere in the Arab world.

But there's a strange and chilly feeling surrounding comparisons of French or German wine making to Lebanese or Algerian wine making. Cold comfort would be the expression, I think. It's cold comfort, too, to remember one Muslim poet, Omar Khayyam, who nine hundred years ago wrote lovingly of wine and other pleasures. This is now. I wonder if the owners of vineyards and the makers of wine in Piedmont now, in the Loire Valley, along the Mosel or in Rioja, are looking ahead twenty years and seriously considering what to do when all this is ... what? Illegal? Taxed to destruction? Poured out righteously on the streets?

It's possible to imagine sunnier alternatives. Maybe wine, on its ancient native ground, will prove so delightful to the new demographic that it will take to it with refreshment and joy, and Bordeaux and Burgundy will thrive as usual among customers a simple majority of whom happen to be named Mohammed and Noor. Maybe Europe, "taken over" or not, will never allow one of its noblest products to be stamped out, vines, casks, knowledge, skills, terroir, millenia of history, and all. Maybe at the worst, their winemakers would emigrate, and bring their traditions to the New World. But that's cold comfort, too. One becomes alarmist, and imagines empty chateaux, and birds fluttering among untended pinot and riesling vines, gorging on the harvest of the quiet, abandoned slopes. Sharia is sharia.

We'll see. It is beyond incredible to have to conclude with a phrase so trite, but really I can light on no more logical conclusion. I search other wine websites for thoughts on wine in Muslim Europe, but I find little or nothing. Maybe better-informed people than me know it's a non-issue. We'll see.

The myth of the "patio sipper"

The wine gods may reserve particular punishments for me on this one, but the more I sample wines, white, red, and in between, the more I conclude that in fact it's those light, refreshing summertime whites that are not necessarily perfect for sipping all by themselves. It may be I think this because I am more partial to red wines anyway. Their rich cherry colors and caramel-berry flavors -- not to speak in generalities, of course -- just seem to have vigorous stand-alone personalities in a way that whites do not, at least not always. Some people distressed at what's happening in the wine industry these days would agree and say, but of course: hideously jammy reds, their acids softened with malolactic fermentation, teetering on the brink of port-style alcohol levels, are becoming the uniform cocktail sippers that the (American) market wants.

Another argument lies there, but at any rate I find that a white wine, a sauvignon blanc filled with grapefruit and lime aromas, a steely German kerner (new to me), a zesty and slightly lemony Spanish airen (also new), develop so much more fully when they stand happily next to a meal rather than when alone. After the first few sips, a solitary white is like an acerbic schoolmarm -- virtuous and clean, brisk and no-nonsense, but needing some company around her. A cat, a geranium, perhaps a nice fireplace or a cozy pot of tea. Something to eat.

My theory on this was recently confirmed when I happened to put together a delightful pairing. This wine,



... that steely dry Kerner (a cross of riesling and the red grape trollinger) new to me, and a recipe for "Salmon-Cucumber Salad" from a vintage cookbook-pamphlet picked up at my favorite antique store in Crown Point, Indiana. Yes, it's that antique store -- the one that supplied the props for the scenes Johnny Depp filmed right across the street, at the old jail, for his upcoming Dillinger movie. So it's almost like I've met him. Anyway the recipe, from the Culinary Arts Institute in Chicago circa 1956, goes like this:

Drain, flake, and put in a bowl the contents of
1 1-lb. can of salmon
Chop and add:
1 medium size cucumber
4 stalks celery
Add:
1/4 cup mayonnaise
2 Tbsp. lemon juice
1-2 Tbsp. capers
1 Tbsp grated onion
1 tsp. monosodium glutamate (the headache powder?! Why was this de rigueur in the fifties?)
Few grains pepper

Mix together lightly, chill, and serve. Garnish with melon balls and water cress.

The recipe calls also for the addition of "Creamy Celery-Seed Dressing" at the time of serving, but since this is nothing more than the throwing together of small quantities of ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, and celery seed -- and more msg -- into a mixture of equal parts mayonnaise and sour cream, and sounded ghastly, I omitted to make it.

The marriage of plain salmon salad and the kerner wine was very good. I highly recommend it for a lazy summer holiday weekend.

And I'm a heretic about that, too. Yes, September is still summer. As Dr. George H.T. Kimble pointed out in Our American Weather, another gem of the fifties, September is "one of the loveliest months of the year -- a month which, whether we spend it by seashore or inland lake, bears itself like a gentleman and dresses like a woman in love. It is a month to be embraced, not discarded, lingered over like a vintage wine, not swallowed like a pill." So true. (He also writes that it's senseless to start school in the early heat of September, "when polio is stalking the corridors." The things we forget ....)



Incidentally, this pleasant little cooking pamphlet must have been written at a time, or for an audience, that found wine unacceptable as a meal time drink. Another recipe, for a dish of lavishly spiced, sweetened, and creamed crab, shrimp, and lobster, stuffed into avocado halves and garnished with fresh tomato and cucumber, is admitted to need -- rather schoolmarmish -- "an equally noble beverage to enhance it -- and what more suitable than full-bodied coffee, poured steaming hot and fragrant over crystal cubes of ice?"

What, indeed?