2009 Vini Ciccariello pinot grigio del Veneto I.G.T. Colli Urbis

The Italian label information just goes on and on. "Bottled by Casa Vinicola Ciccariello s.r.l., Gaeta, Italy." And by the way, what a terrible label as far as graphic design is concerned. Far too much going on, and the black background is no help whatever.

But, for a retail price of about $4 to $5, what a delightful wine. The pinot grigio is not a grape to go tiger shooting with (as historian Paul Johnson once remarked of British prime minister John Major) but this one happily possesses some virtues. It's less woody than its famed compatriot, Santa Margherita, and not as watery as many $5 California examples. It's simply light, reminiscent of an unripe peach barely dipped in a bit of low-cal caramel sauce with a peanut on top, that is if you close your eyes and concentrate really hard -- and its acidity is pleasantly palate-cleansing and thirst-quenching. If you find a bottle, dig out the wallet, or rather fish about in your pocket for loose change, and take the plunge. You won't be sorry.

2007 Stags' (this is important) Leap petite syrah

Color: a murky but jewel-like cranberry
Aroma: cedar and smoke
Tastes: tart plum skins and plump blackberries.

In other words, a very good petite syrah. The grape seems to make wines like this, all purple-y and plummy, thick, zingy, and tongue-tingly. Delicious as it is, I don't find in it the "brutal power" or the tannic weight that our friend Oz Clarke senses in them generally (see Oz Clarke's Grapes and Wines). There is much more brutal power in a young and expensive Napa cabernet which tastes like a raw green pepper and is predicted to be drinkable in five to ten years. This petite syrah is easy-drinking, downright "gulpable" in comparison. But how nice, anyway, to discover that Stags' Leap makes his short list of excellent California producers.

Because you see, the label puzzled me at first. There's that apostrophe, and the implied collection -- brace? "clash"? -- of plural stags. Our Stags' Leap with its fine petite syrah is not the same place as the legendary Stag's Leap, singular, founded by Warren Winiarski, home of Cask 23 cabernet, and of the Stag's Leap S.L.V. cab which outranked mighty French Bordeaux in the famed blind "Judgment of Paris" tasting in 1976. If you hunt about in Hugh Johnson's Pocket Guide to Wine (2010) you'll find the two names listed of course right next to each other, but the famed singular Stag's Leap gets a full paragraph and four stars, while our plural Stags' Leap gets only a clipped cross reference -- "See Beringer Blass" -- and, once you find it under the name of its owner, one star.         

But the experts are always telling us to ignore expert opinions, form our own views,  and drink what we like. (Can one man's top producer be another's one-star harrumph?) So we will.

,

Retail: about $27

Pork chops with sour cherry sauce

From Gourmet's massive 2004 cookbook with the happy yellow cover, edited by Ruth Reichl. (But why do the recipe titles all have to be printed in yellow, too? So hard to see on the white pages.) You'll make a tasty little sauce for quickly pan-fried pork chops, albeit an expensive and a fussy little sauce, too. Unless you have all the ingredients on hand -- in which case, you will have already spent the money -- be prepared to shell out for balsamic vinegar, wine, dried tart cherries, cinnamon sticks, shallots, and a lime, plus the meat; and then there is the measuring out and the mixing of a few teaspoons of this and a tablespoon of that, to be all prepped and ready before you commence cooking. The prepping which professional chefs and bakers say is so important really does matter here, since the meal is so quickly made but does require so many little things.

Pork chops exude such divine juices of their own that I am not sure this sour cherry sauce might not taste better slathered over some needier grilled chicken, over a bit of too-dry duck, or even worked up into a pie filling (it is very sweet). But do please indulge, and decide what you think. Accompany it with an Argentinian malbec -- because they all seem to exude the appropriate tart cherriness themselves. 

You will need (for the sauce):

• 3 Tbsp balsamic vinegar
• 3 Tbsp sugar
• 3/4 cup dry red wine
• 1/4 cup minced shallots
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 1 cup chicken broth
• 3/4 cup dried sour cherries
• 1 Tbsp corn starch stirred together with 1 Tbsp cold water
• 2 tsp fresh lime juice
• 1/4 tsp salt
• dash ground pepper

Combine the vinegar and sugar in a small heavy saucepan, bring to a boil, stir, and boil until reduced to a glaze, about 4 minutes. Add wine, shallots, and cinnamon stick, bring to a boil, and cook until reduced to about 1/4 cup -- about 10 minutes. 

Add broth and cherries, bring to a simmer, and simmer uncovered, until the cherries are plump, about 5 minutes. Stir the cornstarch and water mixture, add to sauce, and simmer and whisk for 2 minutes. Discard the cinnamon, and add the lime juice, salt, and pepper. Remove from heat and keep sauce warm, covered.

Then, pat dry 8 boneless 3/4-inch thick pork chops, and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Heat 2 Tbsp vegetable or olive oil in a heavy skillet over high heat until very hot ("just smoking"). Cook the chops four at a time, turning once, until just cooked though, about 6 to 8 minutes total. Keep the first set warm while you fry the other four.

Serve with the cherry sauce spooned over.

Num.

2005 La Storia petite sirah, Trentadue Winery

Very sweet, very delicious, very purple. Very clean.

Complex, restrained, subtle? -- we think not.
One man told me it has a "bite." Hmm. I think not, unless we mean the bite of alcohol (15.2%).

A harvest date one month later than usual, plus fifteen months' aging in oak barrels (30% of them new, in other words freshly oakier than old barrels), will go far toward explaining this petite sirah's sweetness, high alcohol, and general rich luscious jamminess. You can view the technical specifics, from winemaker MiroTcholakov, at Trentadue Winery's website.

Retail, about $25.

Bottle shot, from Trentadue Winery.

It amazes me to learn how quickly people move around in the California wine industry. I'm accustomed to a more ordinary life, where things go on forever and ever. Remember when we learned by sheer luck that Richard Bruno had left Sebastiani and was now working for Vinum Cellars? Remember, also, how many of the winemakers taking part in last fall's Wines of Chile live blogger tasting had served a half dozen apprenticeships all over the world before settling, no doubt temporarily, in Chile? Perhaps, among these elite of the elite, two years is a lifetime and four an aeon. If Miro Tcholakov is still helping produce Trentadue's La Storia series, he hides it well. These days, he makes wine for his own Miro Cellars, where he specializes in big, "plush" reds -- award winning zinfandels, cabernets, pinot noirs, and petite sirahs. The very first word on his website's home page, descriptive of his wines, is "unrestrained."

There. I knew it.

It's only right to point out that he specializes, also, in relatively affordable wines. Our La Storia is excellent and fairly priced at about $22 to $25. I am sure we can say the same of anything from Miro Cellars, whose pricing runs between $25 and $30. As snooty as it may sound, it is only too bad that most liquor- or grocery-store shoppers will never venture that high -- remember the article about the coming glut of foreclosures in Napa? -- unless and until experience teaches them that it's just the $25 price point which is the magic threshold giving on to real and startling quality. 

Incidentally, "which wine are you?" Marketing rears its cute little head. Go to this page of Miro Cellars and you may take a 5-question quiz which well tell you what (red) wine exemplifies your personality. As luck would have it, I am a petite sirah. 

P.S. Once again "focusing on me," as Jack used to demand in Will and Grace, -- do you like the photo? I don't fuss much with my pictures, hoping that if they aren't professional they are at least colorful and interesting, and perhaps display the charm of rustic immediacy. If you do hanker for the intense clear backlight, the folded cloth napkins and the carefully casual, spilled-crumb composition of great foodstyling, there are many food blogs loaded with resplendently beautiful photographs for you to enjoy. I encourage you to try BitterSweet, founded five years ago by an eighteen-year-old now made good, or Aapplemint, What's For Lunch Honey, or Lobstersquad (this last is filled with drawings, not photos, but they are charming). Visiting Delish.com will further open your world.

Meanwhile, it's a lazy Sunday morning, above; my tablecloth is rustic indeed; I forgot to move the wrapper of butter out of the camera's field; the blue is the kitchen chair that I spray-painted some years ago; and the hint of bright yellow in the background is the dishwashing gloves hanging over the edge of the sink. Retail, about $2.49.

There. 

Image from the New York Post


Trentadue Winery
Miro Cellars

Whole cauliflower with fresh thyme and walnuts

Well, I'm miffed. There I was, "partnering" with an off-Broadway play -- "wine is almost a fifth character" -- and within a week of opening night, they take my badge and link down from their website. Of course they took the other partner's information and link down, too. Maybe they were embarrassed at only having two partners. Maybe the play flopped. Maybe the play is so good that they've soared beyond the need for partners, and are now just rolling in it.

Anyway I've decided to console myself with cauliflower. This is an adaptation (ha ha) of a recipe Martha Stewart once gave on her t.v. show. Her version called for the drizzling of browned butter and sauteed hazelnuts over a whole head of steamed cauliflower. Almost any nuts sauteed in butter will taste good, and the addition of almost any fresh herbs will improve things further. I chose thyme and walnuts. Amusez-vous with your own ideas.



Place a whole trimmed head of cauliflower in a deep pot, and fill with cold water so that the cauliflower is about two thirds submerged. Bring to a boil, lower the heat and simmer for about 15 minutes. Then carefully turn the head over and continue simmering another 10 minutes or so.

Meanwhile, melt butter -- choose how much, I use 1 stick -- in a separate saucepan and when it foams, stir in a cup of chopped nuts and a few sprigs of the herbs of your choice. Don't forget a pinch of salt. Cook briefly until the nuts and butter brown gently.

Drain the cauliflower, put it in a deep bowl, and pour the butter mixture over. Serve it forth and console yourself for whatever miffs you.

Puligny and puzzlement

2007 Louis Latour Puligny-Montrachet Les Folatières (Appellation Puligny-Montrachet 1er Cru Contrôlée).

Very pale tea-rose gold (very clear) -- cornsilk color (the correct descriptor is "straw" but who ever sees straw?)

Aroma: faint paint thinner (minerality?) -- but wine is surely sound -- faint smoke and toasted/burnt marshmallow -- a CA chard would = gourmet caramel candy

almond

teeth-melting acidity

cerebral, intellectually interesting -- yes you want more --

Yes, you want more, but. That teeth-melting acidity becomes throat-scorching, and then it becomes impossible to deal with. You might almost mistake the heat of it for intensely high alcohol levels, and double check the pertinent number on the label. If you do so, you discover it's 13.5%, not excessive, at least by California standards. Are we tasting, in this French fieriness, the results of Burgundy's iffy climate, and of the naturally high acidity that betrays the chardonnay grape's struggle to ripen? -- not forgetting that one of the reasons chardonnay is also the grape of Champagne is precisely because the happy accident of a sparkling wine's secondary fermentation in the bottle provides a saving grace for, and a reason to drink, another unpalatably tart example of "Queen Chardonnay" when she is grown even further north than Burgundy.

We dare to associate a queenly Puligny-Montrachet with the word "unpalatable." Perhaps we should instead simply follow the example of professional tasters in magazines, who briefly discuss a wine and then add the italicized advice "Drink" or "Hold," depending on how long they think it might be cellared and brought to its full goodness. Acid being a preservative and so one of the components that eventually falls away from wine, leaving untroubled goodness behind, my instinct here is to advise "Hold -- for ten years." In that time I can only hope not only that this wine will improve, but that lovers of Puligny Montrachet will not have caught up with me while wielding sharp sticks.

I fear sharp sticks because a Puligny-Montrachet (Louis Latour is only one producer of them -- many winemakers own bits of the same small bits of Burgundy) is, of course, among the very greatest of wines, a classic, a standard bearer. One vineyard, Le Montrachet -- grand cru -- has long given the world bottles of such glory that its village, Puligny, named itself after it, as do even other adjacent vineyards (Bâtard-Montrachet, Bienvenues Bâtard-Montrachet, both grands crus); still other, slightly less magnificent vineyards inside the village, like Les Folatières (premier cru), also get to trumpet their proximity to heaven as we see by the lovely and serious script on the labels. Puligny-Montrachet Les Folatières, all in one reverent breath.

This bottle was going to be the treat we reserved for the three-year anniversary of the blog. Since we have so much enjoyed California chardonnays like Fogdog and Karia, which like to boast that they are made in the "lighter" style of true French Burgundies, we expected a Puligny-Montrachet to be a Fogdog or a Karia, only incandescently better. Perhaps we should have paid more attention to Karen MacNeil's warning, in The Wine Bible, that no Burgundy is as "bosomy" (wonderful word) as even the sparest and most "elegant" California chard. By way of metaphors you might say, there are entrancing French actresses, and then there is Marilyn Monroe. She's just different. It's the climate. 

It so happens that only a few days ago Mr. Alder Yarrow at Vinography, probably the most prestigious English-language wine blog in the world (I should guess Dr.Vino and Fermentation round out the top three), wrote of visiting Burgundy last fall and of tasting through fourteen barrel samples of another producer's Puligny-Montrachet while he was there -- Domaine Jean Chartron. Now in all of his notes on these wines, two assessments repeat most: "lemon" and "wet stones." (Might his "wet stones" equal my minerality or even, heaven help us, paint thinner?) In almost all his notes, he raves. Delicate, delicious, wow, powerful. Incredible, fantastic, delicious.

I'm puzzled. Why does Mr. Yarrow swoon over his Puligny Montrachets, while I judge mine to be savagely unapproachable for at least ten years? I can think of more than a few answers, which I will lay out as they occur to me.

• Mr. Yarrow is much more experienced than me in tasting very fine wines, and is exponentially better able to appreciate the stupendous qualities of anything bearing the name Montrachet. 
• Mr. Yarrow was, last fall, lucky enough to taste the wines of a truly great maker. My Louis Latour is, in contrast, a sort of Gallo of France; consult wine books about "recommended producers" for this as for practically any above average wine, and you will rarely find him or anybody else familiar at the top of the list. You will likely rather learn that few of the makers whom a Karen MacNeil or a Jancis Robinson relish are available to anyone traveling in ordinary circles, even though these writers may cast their nets wide and relish ten or twelve "favorites." This may sound like a whine and perhaps is one. If so, it's a whine I picked up from no less an authority than Oz Clarke. Somewhere in one of his books, possibly his New Encyclopedia of French Wines (1982), he admits that to recommend fine producers is just to tease, since the best of the best go instantly into the vaults of the super wealthy and there's an end. Willie Gluckstern in The Wine Avenger agreed, going so far as to finger, among the super wealthy, a lot of orthodontists.
• My bottle was flawed. (Unlikely. A Honda may be flawed. A Rolls Royce is not.)
• The 2007 vintage in Burgundy was difficult, while the '08 and '09 were good. Lucky Mr. Yarrow.
• My glass was too small. Karen MacNeil says that tasting a great Burgundy in an ungenerous-sized glass is a crime.
• Or, the word and the taste "lemon," repeated so often in Mr. Yarrow's notes, means acidic. So do words like green apple, crackling, laser, sharp, seared, electric, puckering, "saliva bursts from the mouth," zingy, lemon, mouthwatering, lemon, "tart unripe apples," lemon, lemon zest, lemon. Descriptors of cream and softness showed up more frequently in the 2009 tasting notes than in the '08, so perhaps the former was a sunnier, warmer vintage than the latter? In short: Mr. Yarrow found these Puligny-Montrachets just as throat scorching and impossible as I found mine, but he doesn't want to say so for fear of looking like a philistine. Else, how can wines so lemony be so delicious now, especially when the sublimest Burgundies are long since agreed upon to need at least five to ten years' aging "to show what all the fuss is about" (Oz Clarke, again)? 
• Domaine Jean Chartron has changed its cellar work to transform its Puligny-Montrachets into the bosomy wines American chardonnay drinkers want. But then, what of all the lemon-ness? 

Puzzlement. It must be necessary to do more homework on fine Burgundy. Problem: cost. Louis Latour's example above, distinctly not ready to drink, retails for about $55. Le yipe.

2006 Rocca dei Mori Copertino DOC (Rosso)

Lean, meaty, slap-on-the-back, Sunday afternoon, watch-the-game-while-you-fold-laundry wine.

Less briny and acidic than many Italian reds, more of a good, full mouthful of ever-so-slightly aging fruit, but still bearing that whiff of the barnyard that makes Italian wines so interesting. Delicious with something involving mushrooms, butter, and olive oil. Or save it for a big thick hunk of lasagne, one fine Sunday afternoon. Or both.

Oddly, the label tells us nothing about the wine, per se. It relates, instead, the story of the razing of the town of Otranto by an army of 18,000 Turks in the summer of 1480, and of the valiant conduct of the townspeople, who accepted martyrdom rather than convert to Islam as demanded by the Turkish leader Acmet. Otranto, or Taranto, is found along with the town of Copertino in Apulia, on the heel of Italy's boot. Nearby is Lecce, whose name we read in the fine print on the label as the wine's actual address: bottled by C.V.A.  s.r.l. -- Monteroni di Lecce, Italy.

"Copertino D.O.C." identifies this wine as having been made according to certain legal specifications for the Denominazione d'Origine Controllata around Copertino. Generic research in turn reveals that the grape variety used here is primarily negro amaro ("black bitter"), with some malvasia nera -- a red variety of malvasia, not to be confused with the white malvasia that makes Malmsey, the sweetest, richest of madeiras -- added. However, the winery's website specifies that in this case montepulciano is the variety partnered with negro amaro. 

And about that name, "Rocca dei Mori." Such a good firm name. What does it mean? "Rock of" something, I would think. Mori -- not "death," I hope? Then again, 18,000 Turks .... 

Retail, about $14.

Win tickets to A Perfect Future

A new off Broadway play, A Perfect Future, has its world premiere tomorrow at the Cherry Lane Theatre, 38 Commerce Street, New York. Wilson Milam, the Tony Award-nominated director of Martin McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore, will direct. Author David Hay has a cast of four New Yorkers share an evening -- along with the too-freely flowing wine, almost a fifth character -- "exploring the question of whether people can be married and truly love each other when their political persuasions are diametrically opposed."

Will you be in New York in February? Performances run throughout the month and beyond (a new schedule begins February 28th). I can offer my readers a chance to win a voucher for two free tickets to the show, plus I can offer an exclusive discount on tickets to all readers, when you click through the sidebar link to A Perfect Future.

For a chance to win the voucher, you may either email me or simply leave your email information in a comment here on the post. I'll keep the giveaway open for a week, until next Thursday, February 10th, and I'll pick a winner at random. Then I'll notify the people behind the scenes and they will email you your voucher. Don't forget, clicking through the sidebar link will get you an exclusive discount on tickets anyway (regularly $69).

Isn't this fun? Good luck to all in the quest for a perfect future ....