1979 … Sony introduced the Walkman, at a price of $200 (average monthly rent in 1979 was $280).  Margaret Thatcher was elected British Prime Minister.  The YMCA sued the Village People for libel because of their song of the same name.  Finally, in October of that year, Mrs. RE Bunker of Bartlett TX apparently wrote to Southern Living magazine suggesting its readers serve cauliflower as a main dish. 

If you’re fresh out of cauliflower, you’re in luck.  It’s currently over 50% off at the Safeways in our area and on Safeway.com for home delivery (regularly $3.99/pound , you can buy it now for $1.99/pound).  You can also find green cabbage for half off (currently $.49/pound) and broccoli for $1.68/pound (regular price per pound – $1.98).

Having an assortment of cruciferous vegetables in my fridge, I thought Mrs R.E. Bunker was on to something.  The recipe is essentially cauliflower with chunks of ham and a crunchy topping, baked in cheese sauce.  Sort of like a mac and cheese without the mac.  It looked like it might turn out a little heavy and, well, awfully white to me so I tinkered with the recipe a bit.  First of all, the original recipe called for cheddar cheese but since I didn’t have any I substituted goat cheese.  I thought it made a good substitution; the texture was the same but the goat cheese gave the dish a lightness and tang it would not have had otherwise.  Then, instead of using just cauliflower,

Something else from 1979 that seemed a little too white.

I used a mix of broccoli, cauliflower and red cabbage and increased the ratio of vegetables to sauce by about 50%.  When it seemed like it might not be quite saucy enough I stirred in a few serving spoons of greek yogurt.  Then, instead of topping the casserole with buttered breadcrumbs, I used slivered almonds.  Just about any kind of nut or seed would work here.  Finally, after plating, I dusted each serving with a few dashes of smoky paprika. Et voila – a perfect main dish casserole that I’m sure Mrs. RE Bunker would approve of!   

It also made a great excuse to pop open a bottle of one of our newest finds, Bodega Hiriart Lágrima Rosado 2010 ($13).  The Lágrima Rosado, or Rosé, is 70% Tempranillo (called Tinta del País locally), 15% Garnacha (Grenache), and 15% Verdejo, a white wine grape. While most French rosés are made only from red wine grapes, Spanish rosés sometimes have white wine blended in for freshness, acidity, and also to preserve the wines longer.  The wine is a beautiful magenta color and when you drink it you can taste a lot of fruit upfront, which is wonderfully balanced with a nice tannic finish.  It was a terrific companion to the casserole , the fruitiness complementing its smoky ham and paprika flavors, but was fresh and tannic enough to cut right through the cheese sauce.  Now onto the recipe.

Main Dish Cauliflower (& other stuff)

Ingredients:

1 quart or so of any one (or a combination of ) cauliflower and/or broccoli florets, shredded red or green cabbage

1 cup cooked chopped ham

1/4 cup butter

1/4 cup flower

1  1/2 cups milk

1/2 pound goat cheese

1 cup slivered almonds

Approx 1/4 cup Greek yogurt 

Smoky paprika

Salt, Pepper 

Directions:

Steam florets for about 15 minutes or until tender.  You do not need to pre cook the cabbage.  Mix vegetables together, then place in a greased 2 quart casserole.  Sprinkle with the ham. 

Melt butter in heavy saucepan; blend in flower and cook until bubbly.  Over medium heat, gradually add milk, stirring constantly until thickened and bubbly.  Add cheese, stirring till melted.  Salt and pepper to taste.  Spoon sauce over vegetables and ham.  At this point, if it doesn’t look quite “saucy” enough to you, you can mix in a few big spoonfuls of greek yogurt.  Should not take more than 1/4 cup or so.  Then sprinkle almonds over casserole and bake, uncovered, in a 350 degree oven for 30 minutes. 

Serve with a dusting of smoky paprika and a green salad on the side.

This book appeals to the geek in me. It's well thought-out and there's lots of great information. But a little dry (no pun intended).

I read both books and they got me thinking about how the average wine drinker is supposed to know whether a wine is natural, authentic, naked, or whatever.  How do you find out if the producer uses the yeast that is found on the grape skin, or adds yeast?  Whether the winery adds tartaric acid or other acids?  Whether the grape growers spray for mold?  Whether the winemaker uses micro-oxygenation?  You could ask the winery, look at its website, e-mail the winemaker, etc.  But if you’re in a wine shop and looking for a more-or-less natural wine vs. one that might be called more conventionally produced, you have to read the label or maybe a shelf tag (if there is one.)  It’s likely that the label won’t tell you much if anything about how the wine is made.   There might be some lovely prose on the back label, but it’s usually not that useful.  I find it impossible to compare one wine’s characteristics to another that way.  And words like “natural” which are undefined by regulation could mean practically anything.  I skip right over them.

So how do you get this information on a wine label?  I think it can be done, but it will take a lot of thought from people more concise and artistic than I.  I’ll have some thoughts on this below, but first let’s look at some of what is and isn’t allowed on labels.

Plenty of opinion here, but a fun read. If you want to know why you should care about wines like these, this is the book for you.

In many blog posts this past fall, natural wine advocates suggested that mandatory ingredient labeling would go a long way to helping consumers identify natural wines.  I think that we will all be very, very old before this happens.  In the meantime, though, winemakers are already allowed to list ingredients on their labels if they want to.

TTB, the federal agency that regulates alcohol, has some guidelines about ingredient lists on wine labels – mostly about placement, size, and wording.  So at least the way I read it, there’s no issue with listing things like grape juice or other ingredients as long as the producer can document what gets put on the list.  (If you’re looking for additional info on wine labeling regulations, click here.)

The problem is that ingredient lists cover what’s in there, not what’s not in there.  There are two categories of things not there.  One is materials like yeast and egg whites (used for clarifying the wine), for example, which are generally filtered out before bottling and so aren’t actually in the finished product except perhaps in trace amounts.  TTB doesn’t make provisions for what might be considered processing ingredients, but they might be allowed with proper wording.  Particularly for things that could be considered potential allergens like yeast or egg whites.

The other “not there” is more like “We Never Use…” and I think this is what natural wine advocates are looking for on a label.   It’s a minefield, really, in part because TTB says nothing about it.  But FDA does.  So even if TTB were to approve a “No Fungicide” label, you can bet that a bunch of wine producers would take TTB to court over it, citing FDA practice.

A good analogy is the effort to get FDA to require labeling for genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in food, which is something I worked on a little back in my enviro advocacy days.  We didn’t succeed.  I’m not equating agricultural and manufacturing processes for wine with GMOs specifically, but the effort taught me a lot about what FDA allows on a label and why.

Back when I did enviro advocacy work, we tried to get FDA to require labeling for foods containing GMOs. At that time, Campbell's was using vegetables modified with tobacco genes in its soup. We didn't create this image, but I wish we had -- two instantly-recognizable brands together.

First and foremost, U.S. labeling requirements refer to the actual materials contained in the food, and not the way it is manufactured.  GMOs are considered part of the manufacturing process in most cases, and so aren’t required on the label.  There might be an exception in the case of allergens, such as people who are allergic to shellfish eating food from animals containing modified genes with some material from shellfish, and FDA punted that one for further study.  (FDA does allow some other allergen warnings on labels.)  But otherwise, no dice.

While acids, colorants, and flavor enhancers in wine would probably qualify as ingredients, it seems to me FDA’s GMO determination would apply to certain farming methods for wine grapes on TTB-approved labels.  For example, we don’t see pesticides and fungicides listed on food labels, even if those chemicals were used in growing the food, so it’s unlikely that TTB would require wine producers to include them in wine ingredients.

Likewise, it turned out that FDA wouldn’t allow products made without GMOs to say “Made with no GMOs” or “GMO-Free,” although this labeling is allowed in Europe.  While some of FDA’s reasoning was specific to GMOs, FDA made two points that are directly relatable to natural wine labeling:

Oops -- that's Naked Wine, not Naked Winery. Damn you, Google Image!

(1)    Saying that something is free of GMOs means there’s absolutely zero GMOs in the product whether or not you intended to put them in there.  At this point, GMO material has carried all over because of wind, bees, and other means.  There’d be almost no way to verify that this was true.  Likewise for claiming that wine or wine grapes are free of pesticides or fungicides – there’s virtually no place on this planet where you won’t find some of those chemicals in the soil or water.  Even the Arctic.

(2)    Labeling a product as GMO-free invites the consumer to infer that products without that label are somehow unsafe or inferior.  (Sorry, folks, but let’s face it – why else would you say it?)  Since all the evidence to date suggested that foods containing GMOs were identical nutritionally to those without them, and that GMOs caused no harm, FDA wouldn’t allow it.  The same would probably apply to labeling such as “No Chemicals,” “Pesticide-Free,” or “Fungicide Free” for wine.   And since TTB already requires labeling for wine with sulfites above a certain concentration, I’m not sure that “No Added Sulfites” would be allowed, either.

What FDA does allow is voluntary labeling that has sufficient explanations of what you mean, as long as you can back it up.  For example, rather than saying “No GMOs,” a milk producer could say “Our cows are fed with grain grown from seeds not developed through biotechnology.”  A bit clunky, although it opens the door to wine labeling that says “Our grapes were grown without the application of synthetic pesticides and fungicides.”

Because of this, I think that there’s a combination of ingredient labeling and text that could accomplish the aims of natural wine advocates.  If the producers of natural wine were willing to spend a little money to investigate and develop labels, I imagine they could do it.  A few caveats come to mind, though:

(1)     It would have to be simple and not too wordy.  I tune out wine labels with “stories” on them right away – if I want significant reading material, I’ll stick to the newspaper.  People can go to the winery website if they want more details.

(2)    The producers would have to agree on three or four simple sentences that they’d all use on their labels, putting them in the same place on each and every label and bottle.  That would make it easier to get the word out about it.  Very specific language would also allow consumers to guard against the wine equivalent of greenwashing (making companies and products appear to be more environmentally friendly than they actually are.  Would we call it redwashing or whitewashing?).

(3)    I’m not sure exactly how a producer would document statements like “Our grapes were grown without the application of synthetic pesticides and fungicides.”  Organic or biodynamic certification might work in some cases (since organic grape production doesn’t allow those chemicals, and biodynamics discourages their use).  But these certifications have other criteria and require other practices that producers might not want, and you can’t use the words organic or biodynamic on a label without the proper certification.  An alternative would be for these producers to create their own third-party certification tailored to the specific claims they’re making.

Am I just being naive about this?  Have wine producers tried something like this before with or without success?  Would it help customers in choosing wine?  I’d love to hear your thoughts, so please let me know.

—————————————————-

Cy and I have been hibernating and watching a lot of television this month.  We don’t have cable, so we watch the PBS Create channel, which pretty much runs cooking shows all evening long.  One of our favorite TV cooks is Lidia Bastianich.  Recently we saw her make a recipe of dried figs stuffed with nuts, honey, and spices and baked in a sweetened pomegranate juice sauce.  It looked like a great cold-weather dessert, so I decided to try it with a few variations.  I’ve always loved figs with blue cheese, so I thought a more savory blue cheese and walnut filling would be nice.  I also wanted to use up some of the sweet red wine sauce I had in the freezer, so that replaced the pomegranate.  But I also wanted to have some creaminess and little chunks of blue cheese in there, so I turned to Giada De Laurentiis’s when-in-doubt-use-mascarpone trick and added some to the filling (along with grated lemon zest, another one of Giada’s when-in-doubt standbys.  And in case you’re wondering, I watch Giada at the gym since she’s on the Food Network).    Whipping some more mascarpone with heavy cream made a nice topping.  In the end, a killer dessert that’s not too sweet.

A few recipe notes:  I don’t like using red wine aged in oak for cooking like this, so use a medium-bodied red wine not aged in oak instead.  But don’t hesitate to use leftover wine in this recipe, because you’re cooking it for a while and you’d probably never notice the difference between leftover wine and wine from a freshly-opened bottle, providing the leftover wine hasn’t spoiled or oxidized.  As for the figs, I found partially dried Mission and Calimyrna figs in a pouch in the grocery store.  You need about a pound total.  The Mission figs are smaller and you’ll use a lot more than 24 for the recipe.

Since the dessert is kind of savory, I think an elegant red wine would pair nicely.  Try Domaine de Montvac Gigondas ($27).  It’s earthy, spicy, and has a little leather and tobacco in there along with the very ripe fruit.  Lots of flavor and it makes you feel warm – with or without a fireplace.  Even without the burning log channel on cable.

Bon Appetit!

Tom

Baked Stuffed Figs with Red Wine Sauce

Serves 6-8

4 ounces mild blue cheese (preferably Gorgonzola Dolce, but any one you like will do), divided use – bring about 1/3 of it to room temperature and leave the rest in the fridge

1-1/4 cups toasted chopped walnuts

¾ cup mascarpone cheese, at room temperature, divided use (this is most of an 8-ounce container)

1-1/4 cup dry (unoaked) red wine

½ cup sugar

Juice and finely-grated zest of 1 lemon

1 pound dried figs, Mission or Calimyrna

½ cup cold heavy whipping cream

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.  Combine the wine and sugar in a small saucepan.  Bring the mixture to a boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar.  Boil for a couple of minutes, then take it off the heat and let it cool until it’s just warm.  Stir in the lemon juice.  Pour the mixture into the bottom of a ceramic or glass baking dish that’s large enough to hold the figs touching one another.  (a 10-inch round dish or 9 x 13-inch rectangle or oval).

Mash the softened blue cheese with a fork in a medium-sized bowl, then mash in ¼ cup of the softened mascarpone and the grated lemon zest.  Mix in the walnuts.  Take the remaining blue cheese from the fridge and crumble/cut it into very small pieces.  Gently fold the pieces in with the walnut mixture and set aside.

Using a pair of scissors, cut the stem off the top of each fig, then make two perpendicular vertical cuts down through the top almost all the way to the bottom.  You’ll have an x-shaped cut in the figs, but they should still hold together.  Fill the figs with the cheese and walnut mixture, then gently press them back into shape.  Put the figs cut side up in the baking dish with the wine sauce in it.

Cover the dish with foil tented so that it doesn’t touch the figs but still sealing the dish.  Bake for 20 minutes, then remove the foil and continue to back for another 25 – 30 minutes, basting twice with the liquid from the bottom of the dish.  The figs should be tender and looking just a little dry on top, and the cheese should be just oozing out a little.  Bake for a few more minutes if necessary.  Then take the dish from the oven and let it cool for 15 minutes.

Before serving, combine the remaining mascarpone and the heavy cream in the bowl of an electric mixer, and whip until it looks like softly whipped cream.  Divide the figs among the serving plates, drizzle the sauce from the dish over the top, then top with a little of the mascarpone cream.

So when he and Cy came over last Saturday I was in the mood for something different – an actual cocktail for a change. I used to drink cocktails , but aside from the occasional margarita or rum punch, these days I rarely do. When I’m not drinking wine from First Vine, I enjoy ordering wine out because I like to try different things and also it’s interesting to get a sense of what’s being poured around town.

Those were the days ... sigh

Poking around Yes! Saturday afternoon, I came across a couple of good looking mixers I’d not seen there before; Powell & Mahoney small batch lemon sour mix and also a ginger mix. While I’m generally not much for mixers of any kind I am a sucker for pretty packaging so I grabbed the sour mixer and went on my way. That night I mixed 1 part vodka with 1 1/2 parts sour mix, poured it into tall glasses over crushed ice then added a seltzer top off. The cocktails were terrific – the P& M sour mix is super tart and lemony with just enough sugar. It also contains bitters which gives it a nice herbal finish with a little bit of a bite. Head and shoulders above the syrupy chemical tasting schlock you usually find at the supermarket.

To go along with the vodka collinses, I made a quick smoked trout cheese ball that we served with crackers. For the cheese ball, take a softened 8 oz package of cream cheese and combine it with 6 – 8 ounces of flaked smoked fish ( I used trout but bluefish, salmon or any other smoked fish would work here). Add the juice of 1/2 a lemon, a tablespoon or 2 of horseradish or wasabi, and 3 or 4 tbsp chopped parsley. After mixing well, put it put onto plastic wrap and roll it into a ball. Roll the ball in whatever chopped nuts or seeds you have on hand (I used small roasted pumpkin seeds) then chill in the fridge for a few hours.

If you’d like to pair a wine with this after all, I’d go with a super dry white wine. You’re going to want something slightly acidic to cut through the richness of the fish and cream cheese (which is why the puckery vodka sours worked so well). But at the same time your wine should be assertive enough to stand up to the wasabi / smoky tastes. First Vine has a couple of Gaillacs you may want to try , both would pair very well with the cheese ball and make great aperitifs in general. These wines are from the same Languedoc producer and they both retail for $12/bottle.

The first wine is the 2008 Gaillac Blanc Sec, which was made using Mauzac and Muscadelle grapes. The Mauzac grapes are the oldest varietal in the region and contribute a sort of green apple or pear quality to the wine. The Muscadelle is slightly floral and makes a wine that is light bodied and dry. The second wine is the 2010 Fraicheur Perlee, which contains Mauzac, Muscadelle and Loin de L’oeil grapes. This last varietal adds depth and crispness, giving the wine a fresh and sparkly quality ( as the name “pearl” implies). Either way you won’t go wrong !

Our tree doesn't look quite like this one, although we always have a lot of wine bottles underneath it.

The bottle bags under our Christmas tree reminded me that people in the wine business get a lot of free wine.  There are bottles to review, samples for potential purchase, and invitations to tastings (almost always with accompanying gift bags of wine).  It’s like Christmas several times a year.

Even when they’re consuming wine for business reasons.  Wine writers often receive two bottles of each wine for review because one might be less than perfect.  So while they take the tasting seriously and try the wine in various ways, more often than not they have a bottle left over to drink another time.  The same with samples for potential purchase – producers and distributors nearly always send at least two bottles of each.

Still, people in the wine biz have to buy wine sometimes, both for themselves and to give as gifts.  Which made me wonder, what do they buy when they’re actually buying wine, as opposed to drinking it for free?

I know a few wine writers and met a bunch more this summer at the Wine Bloggers’ Conference.  So I sent e-mails asking some of them.  The responses were fun to read, and reminded me why I like their blogs so much.  I learned a lot, too.  So this week’s post is a roundup of their recommendations.  I think you’ll enjoy it – after all, you can’t buy first vine wines all the time (well, you can, but we appreciate that you need to try other wines to remind yourself how much you like ours ).

Curse you, Jon, for making me even THINK about going in here...it would totally kill my urbanite reputation!

Jon Thorsen’s Reverse Wine Snob blog states up front that wine doesn’t have to be expensive to be good.  He doesn’t review anything that costs over $20, except for an occasional splurge.  While he started out buying the wines he reviews and still buys many of them, the success of his blog has led to his getting a lot of wine samples (no complaints there).  No matter how he gets the wine the process is the same, trying the wine over a couple of days with and without food.  Each post is short and to the point (something I clearly haven’t mastered.)  Jon sent me three quick picks for gifts he’s giving these days:  Altovidium Catalayud Evodia Garnacha from Spain, and two from Argentina –Famiglia Meschini Premium Malbec-Syrah, and Kirkland Signature Malbec.  All of them scored a taste rating of at least 8 out of 10, and they cost less than $10 a bottle, which sounds like they’re worth trying without hesitation.  These wines might just force me to get in the car and drive to Costco, something I never do.

Tom Wark is Executive Director of the Specialty Wine Retailers Association, which is how I first had contact with him.  He describes Fermentation as “a blog set inside the world of wine public relations – where the media, culture, and I mingle.”  I read Fermentation every day and wish I had Tom’s knowledge and writing ability.  While he doesn’t review wine, he has plenty of opportunities to taste it.  When he buys wine, he wants “something I’ve not tried before or something interesting.”  Among these:  Bordeaux from years the critics say aren’t the best, Australian “Stickies” (sweet dessert wines), Austrian Grüner Veltlingers, and California Pinot Noirs from colder climates.  I think the range of choices is pretty cool.  Even “bad” Bordeaux is still interesting wine, and nothing says summer in a glass to me like Grüner Veltlinger.  I haven’t tried any of the stickies yet, but I used to love northern CA Pinots – something I’ve gotten away from drinking since starting first vine.  I think it’s time to try them again.

Joe Roberts’s 1 Wine Dude is a go-to site for learning about wine, wine reviews, and great discussion.  The reader comments are as entertaining and thought-provoking as the posts, and a tribute to how well-respected he is.  He had a simple answer to my question:  “When I buy, I usually go for good Mosel Riesling.  It’s not inexpensive, but it can be some of the best, most beguiling and longest-lived wine on the planet.”  I agree.  When I was a kid, my Dad did a lot of work in Germany and when he’d buy wine for us to drink, he’d get mostly German wine, primarily from what was then called Mosel-Saar-Ruwer.  So at a young age I was exposed to wine with unpronounceable names (definitely not the names of the grapes) and that had specific terminology on the label to tell you the quality level.  No wonder I don’t have any problem with the French AOC designations!  I really liked them then, and I still like them today.  We didn’t buy the great Mosel Rieslings when I was young, but I love them when I drink them – they’re considered to be some of Germany’s finest wines and can age for 50 years or more.

Don't just wander around in a daze -- bring a list of some of these recommendations!

Now for two bloggers I know personally and who wrote longer replies:  David White, who writes Terroirist, and Derek Swanson, who writes Weekly Wine Pick.  Terroirist is a daily wine news roundup, and also has occasional thought pieces on wine (some of which David syndicates to other publications).  Terroirist has weekly interviews with wine makers and others in the wine business (including me), and reviews of what the Terroirist team has been drinking lately.   (Amazingly, David also has a day job.)  In his reply to my e-mail, he admitted that he buys way too much wine.  But when he goes out to a local wine shop to buy wine for himself, “I’ll likely be buying one of two things.  1) If it’s to pair with food, I’ll probably pick up a cool-climate Syrah or Pinot from California.  2) If it’s to drink for the sake of geekery, I’ll look for something that’ll surprise my palate — and looking to the wine shop staff for advice. Maybe a Fruilian white wine, maybe an old Bordeaux from a no-name producer, maybe something completely esoteric.”   U.S.-made cool-climate Syrahs are interesting wines.  When a producer calls the wine Syrah instead of Shiraz, I find it generally means that the winemaker is trying to make a wine that’s more European in style, rather than bigger, fruitier wines from Australia and other warmer climates.  But the end result is usually a hybrid of the two, and it’s fascinating to try the different ones.

Derek started Weekly Wine Pick with a premise similar to this post:  asking someone in the wine business for a wine recommendation each week.  Over time, it evolved into more, and now includes restaurant reviews, event listings, general wine reviews, and lots of other content.   “I find great value in Syrah-based wines from all over.  The Rhône of course is prime, but there are some sweet single-vineyard values out there from south of Napa and Washington State.  I’ve also been really keen on Marsanne and Roussane blends from places like Paso Robles.  I’d be remiss if I didn’t recommend Cru Beaujolais.  Lots of character in those wines for a few dollars more than most entry-level French wines.”  I really enjoy the nuttiness and spiciness of Marsanne and Roussanne too, they add a lot to white wine blends.  And the non-nouveau Beaujolais wines are finally beginning to catch on here in the U.S.  I think maybe that didn’t happen sooner because too many people unwittingly drank “old” Beaujolais Nouveau, the wine that’s meant to be consumed shortly after bottling and not for very long after that.  But Beaujolais produces wines that are meant to age, too, and they’re delicious.  And pretty inexpensive, too, at least for now.

David and Derek shared a couple of other hints as well.  David suggested that once you’ve found a wine from a producer you like, you should consider buying other wines from that producer and buy across years too.  Getting to know particular wineries and winemakers can provide hours of enjoyment, and once you’ve been buying you’ll get the opportunity to try the really good stuff they make (the stuff they save for their repeat customers and put aside for themselves).  David’s favorites include Peay Vineyards, Failla, Copain, Rivers-Marie, Rudius, Williams Selyem, Kutch, Rhys, Myriad, and Outpost.   No wonder he says he buys too much wine!

Derek told me that he’s always trying to learn more about wine, and that the wide range of selection in the marketplace today makes it easy to try a lot of new things.  The trick (other than finding time to drink it all) is not spending too much money.  “I’ve become a big fan of online auctions.  Winebid.com and Acker are two of my favorites.  The auctions allow me to create ‘watch lists’ of wines I think I might like, and gives me the time to research price and vintage info on other websites.  Winebid.com is really user friendly, and they refresh their offerings weekly.  They do a nice job of offering pictures of the actual bottles for sale too.  The monthly Acker auction requires a bit more knowledge, as it is displayed in a list format.  I’ve gotten some killer deals on both sites.”  Tom Wark also mentioned using wine auctions as a way to find older wines that might not be available in your local wine shop.   I haven’t tried them yet myself, but it sounds like fun.

If you followed this sign and bought any in 2010 and still have it, throw it away now!

Lots of things to try.  Check out the bottles you got over the holidays (or any others you have) and see if there any of the wines suggested here, or take a list of any that sound interesting to your local wine shop and get some recommendations in your price range.  Let me know what you think about the things you try, too.  And if you have any Beaujolais Nouveau from 2010 lying around, throw it away now!

————————————————————

We finally had a blast of cold, and it got me thinking about winter soups, which are usually rich and satisfying.  But it’s January, which also makes me think about eating better.  After all, we want to impress all those people we’re suddenly seeing at the gym for the first time, right?  So I took a look at my old recipe file for ways to make some of my favorite soups a little lighter.   This week’s recipe for Barley, Corn, and Kale Soup fits the bill.  My original recipe had diced ham in it, but I found I could caramelize some onion and get just as much flavor.  Keeping the barley cooking liquid for the soup makes it thicker too.

Caramelizing the onion takes time, but the barley has to cook for 45 minutes or so anyway, so you’ll have the time to do it.  You can use chicken or vegetable stock, just make sure you like the taste of whichever one you’re using.  When I first started making this soup, it would take me an hour just to get the kale ready – washing it, removing the big stems, and cutting it up.  But these days you can find packages of pre-washed, cut kale in the supermarket, so it’s a snap to get this together.  You probably won’t use all of the kale in a package for the soup, but it keeps well in the fridge and you can cook the rest of it up with a little garlic as a side dish for another meal.

Serve a light-bodied red or a sturdy white wine with the soup, depending on what you like.  If you’re not using a holiday gift wine, try Cave la Vinsobraise Ambre ($12) a blend of Grenache and Syrah, or Domaine Chaume Arnaud La Cadène White ($20), a blend of Viognier and Marsanne.   I’d recommend serving both, but we have to have a little moderation somewhere!

Bon Appetit!

Tom

Barley, Corn, and Kale Soup

Serves 6-8

1 cup pearl barley

2 quarts chicken or vegetable broth or stock

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 large onions, diced (divided use)

2 cloves garlic, finely minced

1 10-12 ounce package frozen corn kernels

1 lb washed and cut up fresh kale

1-2 tablespoons soy sauce

Salt and freshly-ground black pepper

Bring 2 cups of broth and 2 cups of water to a boil in a small saucepan, add the barley and a half-teaspoon of salt.  Turn the heat to low, cover the pan, and simmer the barley until just tender, about 45 minutes.

Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a soup pot (preferably nonstick).  Add one of the diced onions with a half-teaspoon of salt and some pepper.  Stir well, then turn the heat to low and put the lid on the pot.  Cook slowly for 15 minutes.  Then uncover the pot and continue to cook the onions, stirring occasionally, for another 20 minutes or so.  They should be lovely and brown.  Add the other diced onion and cook for another 5 minutes (add a little more olive oil if you need it), then add the garlic and cook for 2 minutes more.  Pour about 2 cups of the broth into the pot and scrape up the bottom of the pot with a wooden spoon to remove any browned bits.

Add the cooked barley plus its cooking liquid to the soup pot, along with the corn and a tablespoon of soy sauce.  Then add the rest of the broth.  Simmer until the corn is thawed out, then add the kale, a couple of handfuls at a time, and stirring until each addition wilts down.  Cook for 15 minutes.  Add some water if the soup looks too thick – although the kale should let out enough liquid to keep it from getting pasty.  Taste the soup and add another tablespoon of soy sauce if you like, along with salt and pepper to taste.  Serve hot.

Based on an old recipe I had for Cuban style black beans and rice, I put together a quick chili last week using black beans and ground bison I discovered at Harris Teeter. Yes, the Harris Teeter on PA Ave … I did not need to make the trek to Northwest!  I also saw it at the 14th Street Safeway over the summer but haven’t looked for it there recently.  Bison, in case you’ve never tried it, is a great beef alternative. Not only are the bison sustainably and humanely raised, but bison contains only a fraction of the saturated fat beef does. It’s also nutritionally superior to beef, with higher levels of iron, protein and Omega 3′s. Last summer we made a lot of bison burgers cooked on the grill and found them super juicy and flavorful in spite of the relatively low fat content.

Here’s the general idea for a quick chili that will serve about 4 – 6 with leftovers:

Sauté a chopped onion and a few cloves of garlic in a few tablespoons of olive oil until soft. Meanwhile, sauté a pound of crumbled ground bison (could also use turkey, beef, lamb or veggie crumbles) in a separate pan in another few tablespoons of olive oil until it’s a medium pink. Add salt, pepper and a few shakes of Worcestershire sauce. Drain and set aside.

To the pan with the onions and garlic, add a 16 oz can of drained black beans, a 32 oz can of crushed tomatoes, a few heaping teaspoons each of cumin, coriander, chili powder, salt and ground black pepper. Simmer together for about 10 minutes. Add the ground meat and simmer for an additional 10 minutes.

I serve this over rice and at the table pass bowls of grated cheese, chopped avocado, chopped cilantro, lime wedges and , of course, lots of hot sauce for garnish. It’s also good spooned into warm tortillas or taco shells.

Pair this with a sturdy everyday red wine. Malbec is one varietal to look for – its got a lot of body and a nice fruity but in most cases balanced taste. The Malbec grape is relatively low maintenance and disease resistant, therefore making it easier than many other grapes to grow. So you can find many inexpensive but tasty Malbecs at pretty much any wine shop or grocery store. You could also peruse First Vine’s “Everyday reds” section; it’s full of the typical food friendly Grenache/Syrah blends that Southern France is famous for.

My father with my grandmother, Margit, in Vienna in 1935.

As I mentioned in another post, my father lived in southwestern France from June 1940 to early 1943, from age 5 to 8.  Back in May, Cy and I started planning a trip to France to visit some of our wine producers and we asked my dad if he wanted to come with us.   He did, and also asked if we could help him research his time in France and take part of the trip in Hérault, one of several places he and his family stayed as they repeatedly fled the Nazis.  He hadn’t been back to that part of France since he left it in 1943.  He wanted to locate and visit the grave of his sister, who died in August 1942, and also see if there was anyone in the village where he lived who remembered his family.

And so the research began.  First, we had to identify the name of the village, which Dad couldn’t recall precisely enough to find it on a map.  To those of us who can remember practically every street address we’ve ever had, this might seem strange.  But we didn’t live through a war and can’t really conceive of what things were like for people in Europe during World War Two, especially Jewish people.  Even though Dad was in Hérault for more than two years, he and his family arrived there as refugees and it wasn’t home in the sense that we think of it.  After doing the research and taking this trip, I was surprised not by his not remembering things, but by how much he does remember despite the constant upheaval.

A view from the village of Ceilhes, where my grandfather was sent to work in the mine for two years during the war. You can see the mining and smelting compound in the distance, that's where my grandfather worked and his family lived.

Which brings me to the second reason for writing this post.  Many of us will be with family during the holidays.  I encourage you to talk to some of the older generation about their lives.  You may be surprised about how much they remember and how much you can learn from them.  The internet is a big help, but there’s nothing like getting the story from the people who lived it.

The research wasn’t easy, but we were lucky that there were some things, and especially some people, to point us in the right direction.  My father had a card from the funeral home that handled his sister’s remains, along with a letter from his father in the early 1960s that pointed us to Cimitière Saint-Lazare in Montpellier.   I learned that we could probably locate my father’s sister’s death certificate, which would give us the name of the village where the family lived.  And most of all, our wine producer and friend, Jean-Baptiste Pietavy, who lives in Hérault, helped with tracking down people, making telephone calls, and especially (as you’ll read below) with his persistence and willingness to help.

The worker housing in the Usine. The detached homes were for the supervisors, and the barracks-like buildings were where the workers lived, including my father and his family.

My father, Thomas Natan, was born in Vienna, Austria, in December 1934.  His parents were shop owners and they had a relatively prosperous, middle-class life in the city.  From the reading I’ve done about Jewish culture in Vienna between the wars, my father’s family seems to have fit right in.  While we think of America as a melting pot, Vienna was also one from the 1880s through the late 1930s for Jewish people from all over eastern Europe.  My grandmother Margit was born in Vienna in 1902, but much of her family came there from Hungary in the 1880s or 90s.  My grandfather Matyas was born in 1897 in what’s now Poland but was part of Austria-Hungary before World War One.

City Hall in Ceilhes, on top of the village school. My father and Mme Parent attended this school. The building looks exactly the same today, as does the rest of the village.

Austria was annexed by Germany in March 1938.  My great aunt Stella, Margit’s youngest sister, told me many years ago about the stunned, sinking feeling they all had watching the Nazi soldiers parading through Vienna.  Stella left for London that summer and remained there through the war.  Shortly after, Matyas fled to Brussels, mere hours after Nazi police came to his home looking for him (luckily he wasn’t there at that moment.)  About a month later, Margit sent my father to Brussels by train with a couple who was traveling there, and soon followed after selling off as much of their business and personal property as she could.

My grandfather, Matyas, in a photo taken after the war.

They chose Brussels because Matyas’s mother was living there.  And there was also a sizeable Viennese Jewish refugee population in Brussels at the time.  So while far from ideal, there was a little familiarity at first.   But Germany invaded Poland in September 1939 and while Belgium was officially neutral, any sense of normalcy evaporated.  Suzanne, my father’s younger sister, was born in March 1940, and six weeks later the Nazis invaded Belgium.  The family, including Matyas’s mother, got in a taxi and headed for France.  In all, about 40,000 Jewish people living in the Netherlands and Belgium fled to France in May 1940.

My grandfather was immediately arrested and put in a POW camp when they crossed the border, since he was an Austrian male of fighting age.  My father, along with his mother, grandmother, and sister, went to Paris and Margit set about visiting the resettlement office there to get them out of the city.  Around the time France signed an armistice with Germany in late June, Margit and her children were in Graissessac, a village in Aveyron in southern France.

Ceilhes is northwest of Montpellier, along the border of Hérault and Aveyron. It's pretty inaccessible, so it's not a surprise that the German army didn't bother anyone there at first.

My great-grandmother stayed behind in Paris, and we don’t know what happened to her afterward.  Officially, roundups and deportations of Jews in Paris were limited at first to foreign-born men in 1941 and then broadened to foreign-born women aged 16 to 55 in July 1942.  Assuming she had registered with the police in Paris as Jews were required to do, she would have been older than the 1942 cutoff.  But foreign Jews in France weren’t treated the same as those born in France, either by law or socially.  And by 1943, all bets were off as far as what would happen to any Jewish person anywhere in France.

In fall 1940, my grandfather was given a choice of staying in the POW camp or working in a mine and smelting facility in Hérault.  The mine was in a village called Ceilhes, as we learned from Suzanne’s death certificate.  The workers were provided with basic shelter housing, and my grandfather was able to have his family there with him.  It was pretty much a subsistence life.  As we learned from talking with people in the region, food was scarce during the war, and it was actually illegal to transport food from one village to another.  So either you had to travel covertly at night and barter with people from other villages, or make do with what was there.

Dad and his sister, Suzanne, in Ceilhes in 1942.

Unfortunately, although my grandmother tried her best, the family suffered from malnutrition.  Especially Suzanne, who was born while they were already on the run.  She got sick in late July 1942 and had no chance of fighting it off.  By the time she was taken to a hospital in Montpellier, it was too late.  She died of encephalitis on August 18.  My father contracted typhus later in the fall, and he went into the same hospital.  He survived because the nuns who worked in the hospital kept him there even after he recovered, so that he’d have a chance to eat well and gain a little weight.

My father and his parents left Ceilhes early in 1943, and I’ll continue their story in another post.  For now, I’d like to tell you a little about our visit.  Once we learned that Ceilhes was the village where my father lived, we contacted M. Cambon, the mayor, by e-mail and told him we wanted to visit.  I asked Jean-Baptiste to follow up, and he told me the mayor would be expecting us.

A view of the Usine, with the village of Ceilhes in the background.

When we arrived, M. Cambon gave us copies of photographs of the mine area, called Usine Métallurgique de l’Orb.  The whole area is now under a lake – the river was dammed outside the village in the late 1950s, covering the entire facility, and the photos are the only evidence the mine was there.  The mining and smelting company produced lead, arsenic, and galena (we didn’t try any fish caught from that lake, believe me).  Some of the photos show the buildings on the property where the mineworkers lived.  My father remembers it as a small, bare-bones compound a couple of kilometers from the village, and the photos confirm that.  The school and city hall are in the main part of the village and are located in the same building, which looks exactly as it did in the 1940s.  In fact, the village looks frozen in time, at least as far as I can tell.  It didn’t jog my father’s memory, but M. Cambon confirmed that my father’s family was indeed in Ceilhes, and there were two other Jewish families there as well.

Mme Hugette Parent, her daughter, and M Cambon, the mayor of Ceilhes.

M. Cambon then introduced us to Mme Hugette Parent.   She came up to my father and grabbed his hands, saying she never imagined she’d ever see him again.  They went to the village school together, and Mme Parent remembers his family too.  Mme Parent’s parents, the Sicards, lived on a farm just outside the village, and Mme Parent said that my grandmother would visit Mme Sicard with Suzanne.  Mme Sicard gave Margit vegetables and milk when she could.

As I read this over, it sounds like a clinical recitation of facts, but it was really a little overwhelming.  I had thought that my father might be the only living person who remembered Suzanne while she was still alive.  That Mme Parent did too was very touching.  She told us about Margit’s first visit to Mme Sicard after Suzanne died, and how they had all cried together.  It was really lovely to hear Mme Parent’s stories.  And it wasn’t all somber – she was surprised to hear that Margit had been born in 1902, since Mme Sicard was born in 1916 and Mme Parent thought that Margit looked younger than her own mother!  (Besides the obviously good genetics Margit was a city girl, after all, and as Collette said, nothing ages a woman like living in the country…)  Mme Parent also told us that Margit corresponded with her mother after the war, so she knew that the family had survived, but didn’t know that my dad and his parents had moved to the U.S.

Mme Parent and my father in Ceilhes, in the city hall office above the school they both attended in the early 1940s.

It was a wonderful visit.  We spent the rest of the afternoon in Roquefort eating cheese followed by a trip to the Millau Viaduct, rested up in Montpellier the next day, and then went to the cemetery the day after that.

As I mentioned, Jean-Baptiste was a big help in getting information.  No more so than with locating Suzanne’s grave in the Cimitière Saint-Lazare for us.  He got no response calling the cemetery administration so he called the Rabbi of Montpellier’s largest synagogue and asked for help.  Three days later, Rabbi Didier Kassabi called him back to tell him the location of Suzanne’s grave.  When Jean-Baptiste said he wanted to visit her, Rabbi Kassabi told him that at least part of the gravestone would be horizontal and that he should bring a whisk broom to clean it off plus some chalk or talcum powder to highlight the carving.  He also told Jean-Baptiste that it was customary to bring a stone to leave on the grave of a Jewish person to show that he or she hasn’t been forgotten – generally it’s just a small stone no bigger than the palm of your hand.  But Jean-Baptiste didn’t know that and brought four fairly large rocks from his vineyard.  It was very sweet of him and made me smile when I saw the photos he sent – it was as if he were trying to make up for all those years when it’s likely that nobody visited.

Jean-Baptiste’s photos were bright and sunny, and didn’t convey the sadness of the place.  The Cimitière Israélite Ancien is a very small part of Cimitière Saint-Lazare.  It’s all the way at the end, as far from the main gate as you can go, and completely walled off from the rest of the cemetery.   As is typical of Jewish cemeteries, there’s no vegetation at all, only rocks, because by tradition there can’t be anything that’s alive there.  It gives the cemetery a barren, other-worldly feeling.  Especially compared to the rest of the cemetery grounds, which are lush and green.

The Jewish section of the Saint-Lazare Cemetery in Montpellier, where my father's sister Suzanne is buried.

Suzanne’s grave is small, befitting a small child, and unadorned.  It has a simple horizontal concrete stone on top with her name and a Star of David carved into it.  As I looked at it, I wondered how my grandparents had been able to afford it in those days, simple though it is.

Suzanne has always been a bit of an abstraction for me, since growing up all I knew about her was that she had died very young.  Other than his memories, my father has two photographs of her and a drawing done from one of the photos.  And now here we were at her grave.  Time and the elements have made the stone nearly illegible, and we spent a few minutes tracing the carvings with chalk to be able to read them.  Crouching next to her gravestone with our pieces of chalk made me feel a little closer to her, and to my grandparents, too.  Dad, Cy, and I then put our own small stones on Suzanne’s grave.  As we left, I looked at the neighboring stone, for a woman who died in 2007.  It’s much larger and fairly elaborate, and the number of small stones on it showed that she’s well-remembered.  I found myself hoping that the next time the woman’s family comes to see her, they’ll notice that Suzanne hasn’t been forgotten, either.

——————————

Jean-Baptiste Pietavy, one of our wine producers and friends in Hérault, with his wife Adeline at their house in Beziers. J-B helped us research my father's childhood in southwestern France.

As I said earlier, I’ll write about the rest of our trip in another post.  I wanted to end this one with a holiday recipe from my father’s side of the family, but my father said more than once that Margit wasn’t much of a cook.  Like many Austrian women of her day, though, she knew how to make apple strudel.  Strudel takes a lot of counter space and time, even if you use pre-made phyllo dough, and it’s really better if you eat it within a few hours.  After seeing recipes for baklava cups – basically a few layers of phyllo cut into squares, fitted in mini muffin tins and filled instead of made in a big sheet – I thought they could be adapted for strudel cups.  They’ll keep for a few days stored in an airtight container, and are a lot easier to serve than slicing a big strudel.

A few hints:  Since phyllo dough sheets from the grocery store are about 12 inches by 16 inches, you can butter, stack, and cut them on a baking sheet so you won’t make a buttery mess all over the counter.   You’ll want about a tablespoon of filling for each strudel cup, but any leftover filling you have is delicious on top of ice cream or stirred into yogurt.  I’ve suggested using golden syrup in the filling because you want it to stick together, otherwise it will fall apart when you bite into one of the cups.  Honey would be more traditional for baklava, and it’s fine if you want to use that instead.  But I think that honey overpowers the apples a little bit, so use a mild one.  Plus it’s worth having the golden syrup around, it makes a delicious sweetener for drinks instead of simple syrup and is great on scones or biscuits.  The crumbs in the recipe also act as binder, and they’re traditional in strudel and baklava.  Austrians love to use leftover cake crumbs in a lot of baking recipes, and if you have leftover cake, by all means use it.  But dried bread crumbs, graham cracker crumbs, pulverized vanilla wafers, or even ground-up plain biscotti work just as well.

That's me with Gäel Pietavy, Jean-Baptiste and Adeline's son, who was five months old when we visited.

You can serve the strudel cups with champagne, of course, or with a shot of rum, or a dessert wine.  Try Les Secrets du Château Palvié Doux ($28), a blend of Muscadelle and Loin de l’Oeil, a grape native to southwestern France.  It’s lightly aged in oak, and the vanilla essence from the oak goes beautifully with the apples.

Whatever you serve for the holidays, we first viners wish you all safe travels, and a wonderful time with family and friends!

Bon Appetit!

Tom

Apple Strudel Cups for My Grandmother

Makes 24 cups

1/3 cup very finely chopped walnuts

2 tablespoons currants, or raisins cut in half

1 teaspoon rum

1-2 Granny Smith apples

¼ cup dried bread crumbs, or pulverized graham crackers or vanilla wafers

1 tablespoon plus one teaspoon sugar (divided use), plus a little extra for sprinkling

A pinch of ground cloves

A pinch of salt

1-2 tablespoons golden syrup, or honey, or a combination of the two

1 stick of butter, melted (divided use), plus 2 tablespoons butter for browning the apples

12 sheets phyllo dough

Equipment:  2 mini muffin tins each for making 12 muffins, or one large tin

If you’re using frozen phyllo dough, put the package in the fridge to thaw the night before you want to use it.  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F before assembling the strudel cups.

Mix the currants or raisins and the rum in a small bowl and set aside.  Peel one of the apples.  Then cut off a small slice from the bottom so it sits upright on the counter.  Cut vertically around the core of the apple, making four apple pieces.  Cut each piece into ¼-inch slices, and then into ¼-inch cubes.  You’ll want about 1-1/4 cups of apple cubes for the recipe.  One apple may be enough, if not, use some of the second apple.

Melt the two tablespoons of butter in a large nonstick skillet and add the apple cubes, spreading them out into a single layer.  Cook them for a couple of minutes on each side.  When they begin to soften, sprinkle on 1 teaspoon of sugar and turn the heat up to high.  Keep mixing and watch carefully – the moisture should cook almost all away, and the mixture should turn a little brown but not burn.  Remove the apples from the skillet onto a plate and let them cool until just barely warm.

Mix the walnuts, bread crumbs, 1 tablespoon sugar, and the pinches of salt and cloves together.  Stir in 2 tablespoons of melted butter, 1 tablespoon of the golden syrup, the currants with any remaining liquid rum from the little bowl, and the cooled apples.  Mix gently but thoroughly.  The filling should just stick together.  If it doesn’t, stir in up to another tablespoon of golden syrup, and that should do it.  Set the filling aside while you prepare the phyllo.

Place one sheet of phyllo dough on a rimmed baking sheet, and brush it gently but thoroughly with melted butter.  Put another sheet on top of it, butter, and proceed until you have a stack of six buttered sheets.  Using a sharp knife or a pizza cutter, cut the phyllo into 12 squares – 4 squares by 3 squares, each about 4 inches on a side.  Gently fit each square into the cups of the muffin tins.  Make another buttered stack of six sheets of phyllo.  Then spoon a rounded tablespoon of the filling into each phyllo-lined cups and pack each one down gently.  Add more filling if they look a little low, or if you have more and want to put it in.

Fold the phyllo edges down over the filling.  Brush each cup with a little of the remaining melted butter, and sprinkle each one with a little sugar.  Bake until the edges of the phyllo are lightly browned, about 20 to 25 minutes.  Let them cool enough to handle, then remove from the tins.

“In Italy, six-hundred forty;

In Germany, two-hundred thirty-one;

One hundred in France; in Turkey, ninety-one;

But in Spain…but in Spain there are already one thousand and three!”

With our two new producers, first vine now has three Spanish wine producers.  So I shortened the line from mille e tre (1,003) to just tre (3) for the title of the blog post introducing some of our new Spanish wines.  Congratulations to the winners, who each got two bottles of Bodega Hiriart wine for guessing correctly.

Here’s my favorite rendition of the so-called Catalogue Aria, a concert performance by bass Erwin Schrott.  It was part of a gala concert honoring Spanish tenor Placido Domingo. Schrott (who usually sings Don Giovanni and not Leporello) “reads” the list of conquests from the gala program with Domingo’s photo on the cover (complete with putting on his reading glasses and facial expressions of admiration for the big numbers).

Erwin Schrott as Don Giovanni, with Ana Maria Martinez as Donna Elivra in a production at Covent Garden in 2007. The New York Times critic had nice things to say about Schrott's voice, and much more about the way he looked.

I like this version for two reasons:  first, Schrott is tacitly (or not-so-tacitly) addressing the rumors of Domingo’s own womanizing, which have been floating around for years.  And second, Schrott is smokin’ hot.  In opera, we often have to make allowances for less-than-ideal physical attractiveness (hence the term “opera hot” as opposed to just plain hot).  Not so with Erwin Schrott.  Sometimes it’s nice to see a production of Don Giovanni and not have to imagine why all the women on stage fall for him.   (Voice is “everything” in opera, but that doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate some of the other aesthetics, now does it?)

Cheers!

Tom

Here's an idea for the leftover turkey!

I had this same dilemma last week and ended up making a faintly Thanksgiving themed matzoh ball style soup, using the leftover stuffing to make “stuffing balls”.  The process was very easy and the end result received rave reviews!

If you’ve made a stock out of your leftover turkey carcass, all the better.  Or you can just start by using  store bought chicken or vegetable stock .  Into about a quart of stock, simmer a few cups of roughly chopped whatever vegetables you have on hand.  I used carrots, celery, onions and white potatoes, then simmered for about 15 minutes, or until vegetables started to soften. 

Meanwhile, mix a few cups of stuffing with 2 beaten eggs.  Mixture should be the consistency of very moist stuffing and should hold together almost like ground beef when shaped into a ball.  With your hands, make golfball sized balls with the stuffing.  Pour enough canola or other flavorless oil into the bottom of a large frying pan.  When oil gets hot, fry the stuffing balls in the hot oil until the outsides are golden brown.  Drain on paper towels and set aside.

At this point your broth should be hot and vegetables soft.  If desired, you could also add any cooked meat and keep the heat on until meat is heated through (ex: shredded turkey, chicken, meatballs or sliced sausage).  Add 4 or 5 handfuls of washed baby spinach, arugula or other baby green.  Stir in and keep on heat just until wilted (this should take less than a minute).  Remove from heat, ladle into 4 large soup bowls then drop a few stuffing balls into each one. 

Since both the homemade stuffing and homemade stock I used were highly seasoned to begin with I didn’t use any additional seasoning in the soup, and passed salt and pepper at the table.  But you may want to, taste as you go and adjust the seasonings accordingly.

If you don’t have any stuffing left over, don’t you wish you did   This soup was so good it might even be worth making stuffing expressly for the stuffing balls!  The Jenkins Row HT has some really nice looking French and Sourdough loaves on sale for $2.99 apiece (regular price is about $3.50), which would make great stuffing.

Now, how about a glass of wine to go with that?  With Thanksgiving type foods, you can never go wrong with a nice dry rose.  With its dry yet fruity character, a nice dry rose has an incredible knack for tying the sweet/savory tastes togather.  Try this dish with any of first vine’s “summer pinks” , ranging in price from only $10 – $13/bottle retail. 

Bon appetit!

The logo of D.O. Cigales, the wine region where Bodega Hiriart is located.

Silly me.  Everything in this business takes longer than I think it will, and the wines didn’t arrive in DC until just before Thanksgiving.  But despite the delays, the wine is here, rested, and ready!  From two different producers – Bodega Hiriart and Bodega Traslagares, neither of which had exported to the U.S. before.  Both are in the province of Castilla y León, northwest of Madrid.  I’ll introduce Hiriart in this post, and Traslagares soon.

Bodega Hiriart is in the village of Cigales, in a wine region also called Cigales, and wine has been produced there since the middle ages.  Cigales received its Denominación de Origen (D.O.) in 1991, recognizing the region for its wine and setting out growing and production rules for wines that are labeled as D.O. Cigales.

While there’s plenty of red wine in Cigales, made from Tempranillo (called Tinta del País locally) and Grenache (called Garnacha in Spain), Cigales is famous for its rosés, or rosados.   Like French rosés, they’re made mostly from red wine grapes, pressed gently and the juice stays in contact with the skin for a very short time.  But in Cigales, winemakers blend in up to 20% juice from white wine grapes.  The two white grapes in the region are Verdejo and Albillo, although they’re not generally used to make white wine for sale there.

Bodega Hiriart's underground winery was constructed around 1750, and you can still visit parts of it today.

Why does Cigales allow white wine in rosés?  Primarily to add brightness, via acidity and citrus flavors not found in red wine grapes, especially those grown in hot, dry climates like Cigales’s.  (Many red wines in the region used to have a little white wine blended in for the same reason.)  The acidity also preserves the wine for longer, and rosados from Cigales have no trouble keeping for two or more years before drinking them without losing freshness, unlike some French rosés.  There are a fair number of Spanish rosados that don’t use white wine grapes, but many of them instead contain tartaric acid, which winemakers are allowed to use for acidity (it’s sometimes used in red wines, too).  By requiring white wine grapes in the rosados, Cigales accomplishes this freshness and acidity naturally.

Hiriart's new winery, built on top of the old one.

All this focus on rosados isn’t to say that the red wines aren’t excellent.  While they’re not as well-known here in the U.S. as wines from neighboring Ribera del Duero, I think they’re every bit as good.  They follow the typical Spanish red wine naming conventions I’ve talked about before, but with slight variations in rules.

Now a little about the winery.  The Hiriart family began making wine in about 1750.  They’d lived in Cigales for a long time before that and were sheep farmers by profession.  The winemaking came about through trade with people in the Bordeaux region of France, which had been France’s powerhouse wine exporting region since the 12^thcentury.  The Hiriart ancestors learned about grape growing and winemaking there, and created their winery underground like others in Cigales, primarily for temperature control.  Their original fermentation and storage vessels were made of clay, and you can still see some of these at Bodega Hiriart, although they’re not used anymore.

That's Hiriart's Export Manager, Roel Diterwich, surrounded by Paula and Angela, who were working for Bodega Traslagares at the time. Roel is from the Netherlands, and he and his girlfriend moved to Spain because, well, it's Spain, right?

The Bordeaux connections of the Hiriarts and other families may be responsible for rosados being so popular in Cigales.  The wine that they would originally have had in Bordeaux wasn’t what we think of as today’s Bordeaux-style blends of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot.  In the middle ages, Bordeaux produced something more like rosé in color.  (It was called Clairet in France, meaning pale.  The English changed the name to Claret as the wine became popular there).   It seems logical that the Clairet tradition came to Cigales as well, and continues today in rosados.

Patricia Prádanos is the winemaker for Bodega Hiriart. Roel told me she's camera-shy, so he had to take this photo in secret for Hiriart's Facebook page.

(Naturally, I have another French-centric theory:  Cigales is also the French word for cicadas, one of the symbols of Provence, where of course they drink lots of rosés.  Well, it makes perfect sense to me, anyway, and it’s just as interesting even if it’s less likely.)

Back to our story…Hiriart’s clay vessels were eventually replaced by concrete tanks, which were used up until four years ago, when a new winery was built with stainless steel tanks for fermentation.   The new winery is right on top of the old underground winery, requiring significant engineering expertise to shore up and hold the weight of the new structure.  It’s a nice combination of modern and tradition.

Hiriart produces two reds, a Roble and a Crianza.  We’re importing the Roble.  It’s 100% Tinta del País, and aged in oak for four months.  The oak aging softens the tannins a bit, although there’s still a little astringency there.  But also ripe fruit flavors, and even a little hint of something like cinnamon.  It’s a great wine with lamb, particularly the local Lechaza, lamb that’s still milk-fed and hasn’t yet started pasturing.  But of course, you can try it with any lamb – the simpler the preparation, the better.

The label for Hiriart's Lágrima, designed by local artist Manolo Sierra.

We’re also importing one of Hiriart’s three rosados.  The Lágrima is 70% Tinta del País, 15% Garnacha, and 15% Verdejo.  While Hiriart makes a rosado aged in oak, this one is aged in steel.  It has startlingly fresh fruit flavors, a little strawberry and raspberry, but not too much.  Plus enough acidity to stand up to more foods than other rosés might, but not as much as a white wine would have.  A perfect pick for fish and seafood, and also Thanksgiving dinner – so if you eat turkey for Christmas, think about trying it.  (It also looks beautiful on the table, which never hurts).

When you’re at a big wine and food show, it’s sometimes hard to decide which wines to try.  I noticed the Hiriart wines right away, though, because of their distinctive labels.  They were designed by Manolo Sierra, a well-known artist in the Cigales region.  The labels reminded me of paintings by Michael McGuire, who lives and paints in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Cy and I take a vacation every summer.  So I look at a bottle of Hiriart’s wine and think of vacation.  And the wine’s good, too!

——————————

**You’re probably wondering about the title of this post.  It came to me out of the blue.  It’s a little obscure, but I’m sure some of you will recognize it immediately.  The first three people who identify it and explain why I changed it from the original (there’s a hint on that in the sidebar) will get a free bottle of the Hiariart Roble and Lágrima, with the following caveats:  1)  The wine must be delivered to an address in Washington, DC where the person is allowed to receive it.  Work addresses are OK, but we’re generally not allowed to deliver alcohol to federal or city government buildings.  No Maryland or Virginia deliveries, no exceptions.  2)  E-mail your response to first dot vine at verizon dot net.  3)  Your e-mail must include delivery address information and a telephone number for contacting you.  4)  You must be at least 21 years old to participate, and someone over 21 must physically sign for and take delivery of the wine – we’re not allowed to leave it on people’s doorsteps.  Good luck!

The label for Hiriart's Roble, designed by local artist Manolo Sierra.

Now for the recipe.  Sausages poached in wine are popular as Spanish tapas, but the sausages are usually poached in red wine.  Roel Diterwich, Hiriart’s Export Manager, told me that in Cigales they serve chorizo or salchicha cooked in rosado.  Spanish chorizo is a dried, spicy, cured sausage that can be cooked or eaten as is, while salchichas are generally uncured (or only lightly cured) and have to be cooked before eating.  Mexican chorizo is usually uncooked and is more like a salchicha, but it works just as well in this recipe.  You can also use Italian sausage (probably better without fennel seeds), or turkey or chicken sausage if you’re not in the mood for pork.

Chorizo poached in wine is an excellent party dish, simple to prepare.  Cook the sausages whole in wine along with some garlic and herbs, then slice the poached sausages and brown them while you reduce the cooking liquid a bit.  Put the browned sausage slices back in the liquid for a few minutes.  Then spoon everything in a shallow bowl (or leave it in a nice casserole, if that’s what you used to cook it in), put out some crusty bread and toothpicks, and let your guests have at it.  It’s good at room temperature or warmer.

You can cook and serve the dish with the Lágrima ($13) or serve it with the Hiriart Roble ($14), depending on the intensity and spiciness of the sausage you choose.  Nothing wrong with using two different wines for a meal, especially if you’re cooking with one of them.

¡Buen Apetito!

Tom

Sausages Poached in Wine

Serves lots of people as a party finger-food dish

1 pound sausage in casings:  chorizo (dried, cured Spanish sausage), salchicha (uncured, uncooked Spanish sausage), Mexican chorizo (uncooked), Italian sausage (uncooked, preferably without fennel), or spicy turkey or chicken sausage (uncooked)

4 garlic cloves, smashed and peeled but not chopped

Herbs:  2 sprigs fresh rosemary (good with Spanish chorizo and some spicier sausages or salchichas), 2 sprigs fresh thyme (good with most sausages), or a few fresh basil leaves (good with Italian sausage)

2-3 cups rosado (rosé) wine (a bottle, or a little less)

Extra-virgin olive oil

Salt and freshly-ground black pepper

Prep the sausages:  If you’re using Spanish dry chorizo, go ahead and take the casing off if you can.  Leave the casings on the uncooked sausages.  If the sausages aren’t in links already, cut them into about four-inch lengths.  Prick the sausages all over with a fork or a small, sharp knife.

Put the sausages in a skillet or stovetop-safe casserole dish that’s big enough to hold the sausages in a single layer.  Add the garlic and herbs, and enough wine to cover the sausages (you may not need an entire bottle).  Bring the liquid to a boil, lower the heat, and cover the pan.  Gently cook the sausages for 20 minutes.  The Spanish chorizo should have plumped nicely, and the other sausages should be cooked through.  (Do-ahead note – at this point, you can let the sausages sit in the poaching liquid to cool, and refrigerate for a day.)

Remove the sausages from the liquid with a slotted spoon, then pour the liquid into a small saucepan.  Bring it to a boil, then lower the heat to medium-low and reduce the liquid by about a third while you finish the sausages.

Meanwhile, let the sausages cool for a couple of minutes so you can handle them.  Remove the casings and slice the sausages into ¼ to ½ -inch pieces.  If the sausages don’t look particularly fatty, add a bit of oil to the skillet, then heat it up, and brown the sausage slices (no need to add oil if it’s a non-stick skillet or if the sausage has visible fat pieces in it).  When the slices are brown, add the reduced wine mixture and scrape the bottom of the pan to remove any browned bits that are stuck there.  Taste the sauce for salt and pepper, then cook everything for another minute.  Turn off the heat, cover the pan, and let it sit for 10 minutes – longer if you want to serve the sausages at room temperature.  Serve with plenty of bread.