I love to complain

Yesterday, being the true blogging geek that I am, I fired off a (polite) e-mail to the good people at our dear BlogHer ad network. I noted that my headlines don't appear in the rotating list under the ad bloc very often anymore, and I noted that perhaps this was because I don't post about recipes very often. Most of the headlines in the Food and Drink category seem to lead, no-nonsense like, back to blogs with a recipe.

The nice people at BlogHer responded almost instantly -- on a Sunday, no less -- with helpful suggestions. And then this morning, I began my news surf over at Orangette, where I am one of those readers called a "lurker" because I never comment. And lo and behold! Not only did Orangette today give me the idea of perhaps creating a sidebar "Index of food pairings" a la Molly's "Index of recipes" (my, she has a lot of those), but I saw that one of her most recent posts detailed a simple dish of a fried egg on a bed of kale on toast.

Mercy, I thought -- I can do that. My egg is poached, and the greens are spinach, not kale, but otherwise it's the same. Is it all right if the photograph was taken last April? I make this all the time.



Having pillaged the idea from somebody else -- and even Molly got it from a restaurant -- what do I have here? A recipe, just when I had been complaining that recipes are "not my strong point," and could my blog be listed as some other category besides Food and Drink, so that my headlines have a chance to circulate freely out there in that portion of the ethernet that is not quite so devoted to the editorial strictures of "how to." The nice people at BlogHer are going to want to smack me, and who can blame them.

Even the recipe itself hardly counts as one. Make toast and butter it. Boil some water in a shallow pan. Place a handful of fresh spinach into it, stir it, let it wilt -- this is almost instantaneous -- and take it out with a fork. While it is draining on a paper towel, poach an egg in the nice green spinach water. There is only one trick to making a poached egg, and that is to learn, through practice, how to pry the egg gently off the bottom of the pan without breaking the yolk into the water. The egg will stick, and that's that. Neither greasing the bottom of the pan first, nor adding vinegar to the water, nor creating a whirlpool in the water before adding the egg, has ever helped me.

Watch your timing. When you have pried the egg off the bottom of the pan and it is done, lift it out of the water, drain it on paper towel, and place it on top of the bed of spinach which you have piled on the buttered toast. Add salt and pepper, and you are ready for lunch.

Somehow, tea or coffee seem a better match with this than wine, unless it is a dark and snowy winter afternoon and you want a small glass of something powerful, red, and warming with it. Or even -- a sip of tawny port, and then a little chocolate?

And then a nap, probably. You should wake up refreshed, with nothing to complain about.

Crljanek!

Crljanek. Sounds like:

Or even:

Is in fact:

Better known as the Zinfandel grape. A short sidebar in The Encyclopedic Atlas of Wine (chief consultant, Catherine Fallis), sums it up:

"Zinfandel, affectionately called "zin" by Americans, had long been considered a native grape. When proven to be Vitis vinifera, and so by definition, not native to America, theories on its importation abounded. Eventually, DNA analysis confirmed that zinfandel was identical to Apuglia's [Italy] primitivo, though Italian records could only trace the primitivo variety back some 150 years. Searches along the Dalmatian coast brought samples of the plavac mali vine back for analysis, which demonstrated that variety to be an offspring of zinfandel. Finally, in 2001, further detective work proved that zinfandel was the Croation variety crljenak."

My old Webster's dictionary simply asserts that zinfandel is a dry-red wine grape, originally imported from Hungary. It gets a star beside it, meaning that the word zinfandel is an Americanism, but as far as etymology is concerned, the word gets only a question mark in brackets, along with a little arrow sign, pointing left, that I can't reproduce here because the computer reads it as an html tag.

Zinfandel is not one of the noble grapes, meaning that it does not belong in the same class with cabernet sauvignon or chardonnay, grapes capable of making excellent wine almost anywhere they are planted, and capable of making wines that will age well in the bottle. It likes a warm, i.e. non-European climate (hello, California), tends to produce overabundantly (hello, lack of flavor), and when it does ripen slowly and well, reaches very high sugar levels (hello, boring sweetness and/or sky-high alcohol levels). However, under the right circumstances -- old vines in a warm place yielding few but excellent grapes, carefully harvested and vinified -- "it can be an extremely noble claret-style wine" capable of aging and of 16% natural alcohol levels (Jancis Robinson, How to Taste). There is a reason why the best, heaviest, and most expensive California zinfandels boast "Old vine" on their labels. Some of these vines were planted before Prohibition.

Zinfandels, or primitivos if you like, have a spiciness and a rich berry flavor which can be uniformly cinnamon cake-like alone, or can add a definite thick zing to a red blend. Kevin Zraly in The Complete Wine Course recommends them with any heavier meat dish -- anything except fish and poultry, essentially.

And we have not yet discussed what to most wine snobs(though not wine professionals, unless they are simply being polite in order to soothe feelings and sell books) is The Enemy: white zinfandel. This runaway bestseller seems to have been created by bright people in California in the 1970s or early 1980s, when they found they had too much crljenak and not enough white wine grapes; so, rather than let "Crl" go to waste, they treated that weird and sweet and overabundant Hungarian import as if it were a white grape, pressing the juices off the skins to give it only a blush of red-wine color and mixing it with what white they had. It was sweet, pretty, and delicious. They marketed it as White Zinfandel, which is curious when you think about it. It means the winemakers assumed the public would know zinfandel should be a red wine.

It continues to be a runaway bestseller. White zinfandel is said to be the most requested wine in American restaurants, and to account for ten percent of all wine sales in the U.S. by volume. There is a most interesting article on the history of white zinfandel, from wikipedia but collected here at Answers.com, which claims that the money Sutter Home vineyard earned from the accidental creation of white zinfandel enabled that winery to maintain its plots of the "Old Vine" grapes, which otherwise might have been pulled up to allow planting of something more immediately valuable.

Wine snobs, beware. Aesop lives. As with the fable of the lion and the mouse, "don't belittle little things. A friend in need is a friend indeed, no matter how small he may be."

I wonder if Aesop was not occasionally very tiresome? And when will someone make and market White Crljanek? I have the label right here.

The noble grapes: Sauvignon blanc

This is the grape of white Bordeaux, where it is blended with semillon ("the soul of white Bordeaux," according to The Wine Bible, although Frank Schoonmaker did not say that about semillon a generation ago in his Wine Encyclopedia), and may carry the name Entre-deux-Mers or Graves on the label. In Bordeaux the two wines will have spent time together in oak barrels as well, which softens acidities and adds a bit of sweetness.



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In France's Loire valley, sauvignon blanc is made, alone, into Sancerre and Pouilly-Fume, Pouilly being the name of a village and fume deriving from the French word for smoke, referring to the "gunflint" or smoky flavor of the wine. Here, sauvignon blanc will usually live its pre-bottle life in stainless steel, which preserves the fresh-tart, fruity flavors of any wine.


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Sauvignon blanc is also vinified alone in California and especially in New Zealand, where winemakers produce wines that gleam like pale topaz and positively leap out of the glass with delicious grapefruit and lime aromas. According to legend, it was Robert Mondavi who invented the term "Fume Blanc" to stand in for the harder-to-pronounce sauvignon blanc on the labels of his (incidentally, oak-treated) California wines. He must have gotten the idea in the Loire valley, for there the grape is known as blanc fume; but as I recall reading somewhere, flipping the words around to "fume blanc" (white smoke) technically creates a misnomer because it implies that there must be a "fume noir" (black smoke) -- and there isn't.

A glass of sauvignon blanc is going to taste quite the opposite of a glass of chardonnay, if that is typically your white wine of choice. Chardonnay is rich, soft, golden, and opulent. It occurred to me as I sipped an example this week that if I were a winemaker, I would label my chardonnays "Butterwood." It sounds elegant, and it describes what they often are.

Sauvignon blanc is different. In The Wine Bible Karen MacNeil takes pains to point out that the word sauvignon is related to the word sauvage, meaning wild. Not only would the sauvignon vine grow madly if left unattended, it seems, the grape itself gives wines of high acidity and exuberant, aggressive smells and flavors, chiefly of the sort that wine writers call "herbal." Grass, hay, gooseberries -- European writers are kind enough to note that this adjective doesn't mean much to Americans unfamiliar with gooseberries -- green tea, and "meadow" "charge around in your mouth with wonderful intensity," MacNeil says. Grapefruit, citrus in general, and actual fish have come to mind for me when I poke my nose in the glass, especially into a glass from New Zealand. I have never smelled "cat pee," an aroma which, unless it is overwhelming, is not considered a fault in this wine.

Jancis Robinson in How to Taste explains that the sauvignon blanc grape thrives in a cool climate, which brings out its smells, its acidity, and therefore its "piercingly refreshing" qualities. The Loire Valley, New Zealand, and Chile are the coolest regions where the grape is grown. In warmer climes, even in Bordeaux, the grape will get more sunshine, ripen more, become sweeter, and you might say take on flab. Therefore it will need help to be its best -- a rich, bosomy partner like semillon, or the cloaking, you might say, of a sort of oak muu-muu.

This in turn may explain my disappointment at my most recent bottle of sauvignon blanc (see the post below, "Better than water"). It's from California, from a maker that usually does well even though its cellars now belong to the nefarious Gallo. Alas, there may be no help for a warm-climate sauvignon blanc, and so the stuff in the glass was not all Barefoot's fault. (But then, why does Barefoot/Gallo go on making it? Nefarious ....) Jancis Robinson speaks:

"The problem with Sauvignon Blanc in a warm climate is that it can rapidly lose its refreshing acidity and the zippy quality of the aroma. ... the nearer the Equator any sort of grapes are grown and ripened, the less acid and more sugar there will be in the resulting must, and the less acid and more alcohol there will be in the wine. ... The more acid a wine is, the less sunshine is likely to have ripened the grapes and the cooler the climate it is likely to have come from."

This helps. The next time I look for a sauvignon blanc, I will turn to the Loire's Sancerres or Pouilly-Fumes, or to New Zealand or Chile. And what to pair with all that herbaceousness, not to mention cat pee? Hugh Johnson in How to Enjoy Your Wine notes that one classic accompaniment to an acidic and grassy Sancerre happens to be the region's "salty, crumbly, powerfully goaty cheese." Apart from that, the consensus seems to be with sauvignon blanc one wants salad perhaps, but certainly fish, fish, and more fish, in particular luscious shellfish or fish graced with cream or butter sauces. Such sumptuousness certainly deserves a beverage better than water.

Better than water

Oh.

The wine in Rear Window

Rear Window is among my favorite Alfred Hitchcock movies, even though the breathtaking Grace Kelly does not prove herself here the best actress in the world, and James Stewart at times seems to phone in his performance, too. But listen carefully -- there's a wine mentioned and poured in an early scene.

It comes when we first meet Kelly's character ("reading from top to bottom, Lisa -- Carol --Fremont"), in her fabulous white and black Edith Head frock, with her carry-out dinner from Twenty-One waiting at L.B. Jeffries' apartment door. Along with the lobsters, there is wine in an ice bucket. Champagne, we assume. No, nothing so obvious. "It's a Montrachet," she says with soft excitement, and that is all. If you happened to be munching some popcorn just then, you would have missed it.

I simply love it when a scriptwriter of yesteryear matches elegant taste to elegant and sophisticated characters, and assumes that the audience gets it. A Montrachet is the most perfect and sublime of French white Burgundies, coming from an 18-and-a-half-acre vineyard which has given its name to the two nearby villages, Puligny-Montrachet and Chassagne-Montrachet, and to at least two adjoining vineyard plots, Chevalier-Montrachet and Batard-Montrachet. The vineyard Montrachet is an appellation in itself, legally identifying, on any wine bearing its name on the label, that the grapes have come from these 18 acres and satisfy the superb and strict conditions of wine-making there. As this is Burgundy, the grape is chardonnay.

We'll allow Oz Clarke, in The New Encyclopedia of French Wines, to explain what Lisa -- Carol -- Fremont -- (and probably Grace Kelly) knew:

"Given the incredibly meagre amount of Montrachet made -- 30,000 bottles in a good year -- and the extreme unlikelihood that most wine writers have ever possessed a bottle, or drunk it in its mature state more than once in a blue moon, there have been more adjectives expended on this than on any other wine in the world. Those who love white Burgundy dream of Montrachet and, OK, I do too."

Look for it at your local wine shop, and be prepared to shell out some dough for it. I think I have seen it for $35 a bottle to start, which seems oddly reasonable for such sublimity. And be prepared to age it. " 'It needs ten years to sort itself out,' ' a friend of Clarke's tells him in the same book. " 'Don't worry.' "

A gracious award

The links provided through the internet are really remarkable. Sucharita at a favorite blog, whynotblogitout, has kindly given me -- all on her own -- an award as a "Brilliant Weblog," an honor reserved for blogs whose content and/or design are brilliant as well as creative. She got her award from Mystic Margarita, who got hers from ... well, you get the idea. The purpose of the award is to promote as many blogs as possible in the blogosphere. I'm all for that, and thanks to Sucharita, whose window on India remains always fascinating.

The rules governing this award lay down that after acknowledging it, the recipient must pass it on to a minimum of seven other blogs whose names and links should be displayed in a post, and who should also be notified in the comments section of their own blogs. So here are mine, with rambling thoughts and some necessary rule-breaking in between:

Ann Again ... and Again -- Ann in Oregon, who can make funny stories out of anything from swimsuit disasters to the inadvertent misuse of those "plumping" lip glosses to bicycling naked in Portland.

In My Kitchen Garden -- just what it says. A daily escape to a farm in Missouri. Good recipes await.

So far, this delightful award seems to be very much in the gift of talented but everyday, small fish/small pond women bloggers. Interesting questions arise. Does one shoot this award on over to big, important (male) people? People who do have great blogs but who have already been plucked from cyber-obscurity, and have book contracts, or a thousand comments per post, or monthly columns in Bon Appetit? The links and democratization resulting from the Internet are wonderful, but it's undeniable that at some point human nature kicks in and we have hierarchy and professionalism and other lofty things.

Fermentation -- run by Mr. Tom Wark, big important male person. I wouldn't dream of tagging him with even the most well-meaning award, because his response would be WTF and "delete."

Willow Manor -- a fantasy blog in which the author borrows Queen Victoria's shoes, hosts parties attended by Johnny Depp and Anthony Hopkins, and does all sorts of other fun things. Just discovered it today.

Orangette -- the blog I used as a design model for my own. It happened to be a "blog of note" when I first started so I clicked it. Clean. Calm. Softly musing. No ads. Monthly column in Bon Appetit. ...she wouldn't say WTF, but she would gently hit "delete."

An Obsession With Food and Wine -- ditto, except his column is in the San Francisco Chronicle and he would reply politely before deleting.

Such the Spot -- back to reality, "simplified." Darcie in Arizona, making the whole small fish/small pond thing look good.

And that's my seven. Links and democratization go on. To quote Sucharita: "let us try to read more: a blog on the net, an article in the papers, a book, or even somebody's face. The more we read, the more we think. The more we think, the more we understand. The more we understand, the more we realize there is no end to reading. No end to discovery...."

And a nice cool Vouvray, not a celebratory bubbly but something rich and elegant, would go well with it all.

A cabernet from third grade

There are definite advantages to working with a -- well, I won't say wine geek, because that does anyone a disservice. There are advantages to working with a colleague who has thirty-plus years of experience and interest in the wine trade. Last week, I got to taste a California cabernet sauvignon made in the year I was in third grade. This works out perfectly, since my blog friend Ann recently challenged her readers to post a grade school picture.



The wine was a vintage 1973 -- year of crocheted vests and home hair cuts, as you see -- Larkmead, a label that has since morphed, through one acquisition and another, into Frank Family Vineyards. The price, circa 1976 and before bar codes, was a whopping $9.99, which in fact probably was pretty whopping back then. A Frank Family cabernet sells now for about $40. To make the wine still more interesting, my colleague told me that he had opened it sometime in the 1980s and then resealed it with a vacuum pump. It so happened that when he re-opened it a week ago, it had aged a bit past its best, but was not vinegar. So vacuum seals work quite well.

The wine had a pale red ochre color and smelled vividly like port -- brine, raisins, and earth all mixed up together. Its taste was port or sherry-like, too, and it flowed down the throat completely without tannin and almost completely without acids. This is an odd experience when you are accustomed not only to chewing the fruit but also to fighting down the chalky puckerings and needle-pricks caused by the tannins and acids in so many red wines, especially those drunk too warm.

This 1973 Larkmead cabernet had done what young, aggressive cabernets are supposed to do with all their powerful ingredients; it had done what the "noble" grapes are nobly capable of doing. It had aged in the bottle, and all its harshness had ripened into something mellow and new.

I must admit I'm not sure what I would have paired with this at the dinner table. Its fruit taste was just about gone -- no "cassis" here -- and it was so very like sherry that I asked my colleague, if this is the point of an aged cabernet, why not just drink sherry? I suppose there is no answer to that except that the Larkmead would have been perfectly right a few years ago, and anyway -- who wants to drink only sherry?

This bottle was not Esteemed Colleague's only cellar experiment. He also had a half-bottle of a California pinot noir which he had opened in May of 1982 and then resealed and placed in the deep freeze (let's see -- I was a junior in high school). Having just emerged from its own private Arctic after twenty-six years, it too had a pale ochre color, little fruitiness, and an aroma like sherry, although a far fainter one than the cabernet's. It, too, had no harshness going down, even if the acids that distinguish a pinot noir were still there to make the mouth water afterward. How can the miraculous transformations that make a wine age in the bottle, how can the changes that cause wine geeks to rhapsodize about the product being "alive," still take place when the stuff is frozen solid? Apparently, they just can.

I'm not sure what I would serve with this pinot, either. Esteemed Colleague judged it the same as the cabernet: past its best, but at any rate, not vinegar. Best served with notebook and pen, perhaps.

No, you can't do that

Dear me, how I loathe the telephone. In his biography Renoir My Father Jean Renoir -- director of Grand Illusion and yes, son of the painter -- describes his father's reaction to news of the pernicious invention. With this, one may talk to one's friends at any time, an enthusiast gushes. A little bell tinkles and one merely goes to answer the machine and there they are, as clear as if they were in the same room. The master was not impressed. "Like being a servant," he mumbled, and that was that. (He also had a striking thing to say about Galileo, of all people, whom he seems to have regarded as a contemporary. Perhaps all artists and heroes live in some higher sphere where they are continually carrying on the Great Conversation. He said, "that fool Galileo. Always telling us that mankind is not the center of the universe, when no one behaves as if it were true.")

Anyway, at our wine shop we like to take Tender Loving Care of our customers by, ahem, frequently tinkling the little bell in their houses or their back pockets, and summoning them to hear news of fine new wines just in at the store, or of tastings and celebrations being planned for their enjoyment. I always pray to get an answering machine when I dial the numbers. Often I do, sometimes I do not. Luckily, that big important steelworkers' union boss whom I happened to catch in the middle of an important meeting was very kind about it, and said he would be glad to come in and visit very soon.

It must have been a bad telephone karma day. A customer called that afternoon, all ready to present us with a nice sale. He and his wife were planning to give a wine club trial membership, for six months, to friends in Maryland. Could we arrange the shipping for him? Supposing some sort of legal problem arose in our shipping from Illinois to Maryland, could we pack the wines securely enough for him to do the shipping himself?

Certainly we would love to, but. More phone calls. Bad news. No, we may not send wine from our store to Maryland. Maryland says no. (I daresay, as in Illinois, it's the Maryland wholesale liquor distributors who have said no, because wine from a shop in Illinois represents a retail sale that they have had no hand in.)

Then I called the post office. May a private citizen send wine on his own, to friends in Maryland? No, he may not. The private citizen may not send alcohol to anyone anywhere, ever. Apparently, Carrie Nation or somebody like that said no a long time ago. I have heard rumors that people get around this prohibition by simply not telling anybody there's wine in that box, but -- as I explained to this customer when I called to give him the sorry news -- I certainly can't advise him to do that. When he had heard everything he said cheerfully, "You know what the problem is. It's that dirty five-letter word that begins with M and ends in Y." I agreed he was right.

Strike two. Then, later that evening, a wholesale distributor called to respond to a message I had left for her. Could she tell me the price of a case of a particular wine, that a customer of mine was interested in? This lady had had it at a country club dinner, and it was so delicious, and you are the purveyor of it, aren't you...perhaps we could order it ....

No, we could not. "We do not deal with your corporation," this woman told me, really shaking with fury it seemed. Stacks of unpaid bills from more than one source, etc. "We don't like the way you are managed."

Mercy! I am always floored by people who have a reservoir of rage to draw upon when dealing with someone whom -- whatever else is going on in life -- they have in truth never met.

Well then -- if she will not sell us wine, can she at least tell me the price of this wine, so that I have that academic information to give my customer? (Not too tactful to call and say I'm sorry I can't order this wine for you, the wholesaler will not deal with us because apparently too many of us are deadbeats.)

No, she will not. "You'll just use that information to sell something else," she said. Mercy! Once again, we've never met. How do you know I'll do this? Besides, I'm still fairly new at this game. I don't even get the connection here.

But at this point it finally dawned upon me that I was talking to a woman who very, very much wanted to hang up on me -- even though she had tinkled my servant's bell, not I hers -- and so after a last half-hearted attempt at politeness, I "let her go." What fun it would be if she called sometime soon looking for a sale, looking to rebuild a burned bridge, but alas, some things are probably much too much to hope for.

She may have been simply having a very bad day. The guy with friends in Maryland and the steelworkers' union boss may have been in a similar fix, although they didn't sound like it. Bailout failure, stock market crash, etc. All that eventful Monday.

Perhaps we could draw lessons from Renoir, who lived in a time before there were as many gadgets, or as many rushed contacts, or as many laws governing life as there seem to be now. Not content with sneering at the 'phone and dissing Galileo, I'm sure he also didn't worry about his 401k and, as an artist, had no intention of retiring -- and so faced no terrifying prospects of a future of impoverished, rigidly imposed leisure. I'll bet, as a private citizen of a free country, he could send a gift of wine to anybody he liked.

Of course there were drawbacks. The muck and pollution of nineteenth century Paris, for example. No dentistry to speak of. And strange attitudes, whether his own or his society's: the modern world was tinkling its little bell at him, and he believed for instance that the new medications for syphilis took all the "mad insouciance" out of sex and life. Without really deadly risk, there was no joy.

Not sure I agree with that. But Mad Insouciance is a wonderful phrase. I'll have to remember that, the next time I heave a sigh, look at a "top customer" list as long as my arm, and pick up the telephone.