Now let us praise cabernet franc.
I was going to do this big intro about what the most underrated grape in the vitis vinifera family is these days, but I suppose the title sort of ruins it, doesn’t it?
So let’s get right into it: in my (admittedly worthless) opinion, cabernet franc is a sorely underappreciated grape in the U.S., and across the globe. It’s a grape that is thought of among many wine drinkers as a blending grape, something to lend complexity to Bordeaux blends and some California cabernets and meritage blends. Yet as Michael Steinberger notes, it’s the primary grape in the vaunted Cheval Blanc, and a key player in several other Bordeaux houses of great repute.
Cabernet franc is a grape that can wear many guises. It can be young and fruity, meant to be drunk very young and without painstaking introspection; it can be lean and herbal, lending a thin but potent wedge to drive into big, burly wines from regions like Veneto; or it can be peppery and a little tannic, with a core of spicy fruit, making it one of the great food wines of the world and a terrific bargain to boot. These last kind are the type you’ll most likely see in the Loire valley, where cabernet franc is the primary red grape and where great cab fran-based wines (occasionally bolstered with small amounts of cabernet sauvignon or other red grapes) can be found in such regions as Bourgueil, Chinon, and Saumur-Champigny.
A lot of people think that the movie Sideways dealt merlot a serious (and somewhat unjust) blow, but merlot is still a very popular wine in the U.S.; merlot will abide – it will endure. Cabernet franc, however, has a real bone to pick with the filmmakers. Only a relative handful of American winemakers actually attempt to make this varietal on a regular basis, and Miles’s frank (zing!) summation of his distaste for cab franc in the film certainly did nothing to boost its profile. The inclusion of the Cheval Blanc at the end of the film was certainly meant to be an inside joke to those who know better, but the actual outcome of the film was a net negative for a very fine grape. Cab franc was already struggling to keep its head above water; why throw it an anvil on top of that?
Part of the struggle that cab franc has endured may stem from the somewhat rigid climate it requires in order to really thrive. While it needs heat to fully ripen and preclude weedy, overly vegetal characteristics, too much sun and exposure will roast the grape and rob it of its pungent, zingy pleasure. And in regions of the U.S. that fit this particular environmental regimen, winemakers have more often than not planted varieties that have more established bases of popularity, such as pinot noir, chardonnay, or riesling.
Besides its supporters in the Loire and in spots throughout Bordeaux, there are a few other bastions of cab franc tradition. There are some cabernet francs made in the U.S. that earn high marks – Pride and Lang & Reed come immediately to mind. There are cab franc blends popping up here and there in Italy, either with corvina or other native Italian grapes. And while I generally think that the “internationalization” of wine has led to more wines tasting the same, I wouldn’t be devastated if it also led to more producers seeing what they can do with this unassuming, yet malleable and potent grape.
If you are interested in reading more about Loire reds, please check out Brooklynguy’s post about said wines, which puts it much better than I ever could. Brooklynguy, by the way, beat me to the idea of writing about these type of wines, forcing me to change up my style just to fit in. In the meantime, I wanted to do something to point out some of the better cab franc efforts out there, so I’ve decided to install a new feature that I hope to make permanent, but for the moment can only proffer semi-transiency to: The Cab Franc of the Week, which I will use to showcase a cab franc bottling of particular note. Of course, given my usual price range, the vast majority of these wines will be under $20 at retail, but luckily most cab francs fall under that range anyway (at least the European ones). And so without further ado, the Cab Franc of the Week for this February the 26th is:
2005 Charles Joguet Chinon “Les Petites Roches”
Joguet has been around long enough (four decades) to pick up some pretty positive press for their wines from the Loire. The only red grape he uses is cabernet franc, and his wines are generally built to age longer than most cab francs.
The Petites Roches bottling is a relatively new one to the Joguet lineup, but it certainly doesn’t act like a young wine – this is thick, dry stuff, balanced with fruit but steeled by a thick backbone of tannins that will take at least a couple years to soften. The nose was very nice, draped with black currant and bell pepper. The wine expanded on the palate, pushing the tannins and the herbs but never in a way that felt astringent. There was enough dark fruit to keep some of the strength in check, but if you find a bottle of this and take it home, try not to touch it for a while; I think you’ll be greatly rewarded.
New fixation.
So I’ve been watching a lot of Wine Library TV recently. A little too much, maybe. But I tell you, once you’ve gotten to the point where you are disagreeing on the particulars rather than the parameters of each specific wine that is tasted, you know that you’re dealing with someone who is dealing with wine on the same level that you are. And that’s a good thing.
For those who haven’t been exposed to WLTV, it’s a video blog run by Wine Library, a wine store in New Jersey, and hosted by the store’s director of operations, Gary Vaynerchuk. Each weekday, he sits down with a few wines, tastes them on camera, and gives his honest opinion on their worth, usually ending with a traditional score on the 100-point scale.
It doesn’t sound like much, and if you watch an episode at random, you may not walk away impressed. But Vaynerchuk has a strangely fascinating appeal on camera – very ebullient, quick-witted, and extremely candid. Rather than using his forum to shill for his company, he really tells you what he thinks – if it’s plonk, he says so. And frankly, my favorite moments of the show are almost never the actual tastings, but rather the small moments of humanity that pop up – the playoff beard for the Jets during the NFL playoffs, the odd response to a comment in the Wine Library forums, etc. It’s fun to see someone who is clearly as comfortable in front of the camera as Vaynerchuk. Like Eric Asimov, I’m occasionally left wondering where he pulls his incredibly varied and nuanced list of aromatics from when describing how a certain wine smells, but I respect his palate and his taste, so who cares?
It’s also exciting to see food and wine blogging starting to branch out a little. As the internet takes its first dive into the Youtube era, we’ve really started to see a change in the way that the web affects the world – now there’s video if everything, and you can see it right now if you want to. While the implications are sometimes scary, the power and democracy of it all is pretty awesome. So I’m very happy to see some wine love in this video wave – especially to see it thrive like Wine Library TV has. If I had any equipment at all, I’d love to contribute to the vlog world, but I guess I’ll have to leave that to the professionals. In the meantime, I’ll keep browsing the WLTV archives, looking for great wines (or duds) that I’ve had or wines that I’ve been waiting to try. Check one out if you can – good times for all.
Insert obscene Sopranos quote here.
Bechamel.
Basil.
Sausage. (This is why you do not see pictures of the tomato sauce or ziti. Also, it is why you do not see more pictures in general. I am not very good at food photography.)
Baked ziti. One of life’s great pleasures, both to make and to consume. There are many components of the baked ziti, which makes a chef a bit of a traffic manager as it comes together. But the end result, if overseen correctly, is almost always worth it. This batch was good, but not my best. I think that the fresh mozzarella I used was not quite up to snuff – I should have made a trip to the Cheese Store of Silverlake. Ditto the sausage. Also, using lactose-free milk instead of whole milk in the bechamel probably had an effect, although I don’t know how much of one. Nonetheless, I was satisfied.
Whenever I make something relatively complicated like ziti, I am compelled to break out something from the wine closet. Since we only had one sangiovese-based wine in there at present, we opened our 2005 Avignonesi Vino Nobile de Montepulciano. Vino Nobile de Montepulciano, by the way, is an oddly named wine, since it doesn’t involve the Montepulciano d’Abruzzo grape at all; instead it’s made from the sangiovese grape in Montepulciano. This, to me, would be like making a wine from syrah grapes in Napa and calling it “Napa Pinot Noir,” but whatever. The wine was very nice – a perfume of raspberries, lavender, and cedar, and a plush mouthfeel with some dark chocolate, a floral component, and the Suckling magnet, crushed berries – but I think I liked the Il Lastro Chianti Rufina from last night’s meal at Briganti a little more. The Il Lastro seemed like a more pure expression of the sangiovese grape, and it had more structure as well. The Avignonesi was cheaper, however, so that’s a factor, too. It’s tough to find good sangiovese wines for less than $20, so this might be a repeat buy if I can find another bottle.
One more quick note before I go – the New York Times has an article up about looking for the perfect Italian red sauce. It’s interesting, and certainly contains echoes of feelings and thoughts I have had about trying to interpret and/or mimic the sauces and dishes I’ve had in the homes of my Italian relatives. That said, I’ve never understood the purpose of putting fully cooked meatballs in a vat of tomato sauce. When you do this, you let that wonderful brown, crispy crust on the meatball – one of the meatball’s most winning characteristics – get all soggy with sauce.
I understand that people want their tomato sauce to have that meaty richness to it – that’s why you warm up the sauce in the same pan that you cooked the meatballs in (after deglazing it). Always throw the meatballs into the pot with the spaghetti and sauce when you’re in the last stage of cooking the pasta, after it’s been drained pre-al dente. That way, the meatballs aren’t completely dry, but they aren’t given the chance to go limp on you, either.
I suppose I shouldn’t quibble. The world’s army of Italian grandmothers could probably fill a thousand cookbooks with what I do wrong in my ziti recipe. And frankly, meatballs never go in the spaghetti in Italy – this is an American tradition.But I’m not really looking to cook like an authentic Italian, because I’m not. Meatballs in the same dish as the spaghetti is fine, as long as they have that crust. The ingredients to make great meatballs can and will vary according to what’s on hand and what’s fresh, but day-old bread or fresh bread crumbs are a must. If you want a great resource on making meatballs, though, I would first consult Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Italian Cooking. No Giada for me, thanks.
My voyage to Briganti.
Jonathan Gold, the esteemed gourmand of the LA Weekly, has recently published his list of the top 20 Italian restaurants in the Los Angeles area. It is a list that I can’t really speak to the accuracy of, since I have only been to a less than a handful of the places mentioned: Angelini Osteria, Casa Bianca…that’s it. Not even Mozza yet! And to think I call this an LA food blog (well, half a food blog, anyway). How mortifying. It did make me a little sad, however, that he didn’t make space for the small osteria that I’ve been to half a dozen times, the place that for what it lacks in polish, size, and any semblance of a wine list makes up in idiosyncracy, oversized Sophia Loren posters, and the perfect northern Italian carbonara sauce. Namely, La Buca.
I suppose that La Buca can’t really hold much of a (Roman) candle to the high-octane Italian meccas that Gold waxes symphonic over: Valentino, La Terza, Vincenti, Drago. These are serious restaurants with serious goals, serious wine lists, and serious checks at the end of the evening that lead to serious discussions about fiscal responsibility, debt, and the necessity of eating Chex out of the box at Von’s at 2 in the morning while the stockers are refilling paper towels two aisles over.
La Buca and the new restaurant from the same owner, Briganti, are birds of a different feather. La Buca currently occupies a very small space on Melrose in the middle of Hollywood. (There is an expansion in the works that will probably take effect now any day, but as far as I know it’s still in its original space.) It features pastas and pizzas mostly in the $12-15 range, and entrees in the $16-25 range. The pizzas are very nice, but the keys here are the carbonara – made with egg yolks, not cream, in the northern style – and the gnocchi.
Gnocchi are something that I am particularly picky about, because one of the greatest meals of my life was a bowl of gnocchi I had fourteen years ago in a cramped trattoria in Lucca, made by a woman who was not unlike my own Sicilian great-grandmother, and I have spent the remaining years searching in vain for its equal. I’m certainly not saying that La Buca makes gnocchi as good as the ones I had in Lucca – but for less than $15, they are really quite good: pillowy, as you’ll often see gnocchi referred to, but still containing a richness that coats the mouth. That’s the real key to great gnocchi: richness without heaviness. Not unlike wine in that regard. How interesting. Anyway, La Buca does many things well, if on a modest scale, and if you live anywhere near Hollywood it’s well worth inquiring after one of their scant tables for the chance to be lectured on the true meaning of carbonara or the virtue of arugula pesto.
With a trail of happy evenings at La Buca behind us, and finding ourselves in Pasadena recently, we decided to give La Buca’s newly birthed sibling, Briganti, a spin. Briganti is on Mission Street in South Pasadena, only a few blocks away from the admirable wine shop, Mission Wines. The restaurant presents itself as a very different beast than La Buca; the dim lighting and rattling aluminum furniture are replaced with more traditional dining sights – lots of white, classy muted lighting, and space. Quite a bit of space. Well, at least you won’t get your arm bumped by your neighbor when reaching for the wine. That’s a plus. The menu carries some things over from La Buca, including some of the pizzas and the pasta choices, but no carbonara. Maybe the old lady who cooks most nights at La Buca is the only one with the correct carbonara technique? Who knows. There are a few more meat dishes on this menu, though.
We started off with an appetizer of burrata, oven-roasted tomatoes, and pesto. A dish that really is being served all over LA every second of every day, but there’s no denying that this version did it right: excellent pesto and great tomatoes. Good tomatoes are not normally something you would not see in February, but who am I to complain? They were sweet and had nice texture. For our second course, J had the risotto with mixed vegetables and sausage, while I had the pappardelle with a lamb ragu. I’ve got a bit of a weakness for the lamb ragu, so as soon as I had heard it pronounced as that days’s special, I turned to J and said, “It will be mine. Oh yes, it will be mine.” Even superseded the gnocchi. Both dishes were very well done, with La Buca’s trademark “hominess” in preparation and presentation. My ragu had chunks of carrot, celery, and other vegetable products that were bigger than the little globules of meat, but it tasted really good. J’s risotto was also nice.
We bought a half bottle of the 1997 Il Lastro Chianti Rufina at the restaurant, and it was a very nice wine – exquisitely perfumed with that sangiovese dust and berry mixture, with good structure on the palate. The acids I think were starting to fade from this one, but it certainly held up to the food. A good find.
The service was generally courteous, quick, and smart, although a lot of this might have had something to do with the fact that we were the only patrons inside for the first 3/4ths of our meal. Still, the friendliness of the waiters and busboys warrants mentioning.
All in all, Briganti was a good night out, and could definitely turn into one of our favorite places when we are both in the Pasadena way. Goldie, you can keep your Drago and your Ago and your Spago…well, maybe not that one. Give that one back. But for bang-for-your-buck Italian, it’s hard to do better than the one-two combo of Briganti and La Buca.
Baker’s dos, don’ts, and dozens.
So we’re back from the Bay. Back with a case (plus one) of new wine gifted to us in light of our upcoming nuptials. It was quite a clever theme for a bridal shower – bring a gift, and a bottle of wine. We made out like bandits, and we certainly are lucky to have a generous family (and some generous friends). Thanks, all.
After we got back last night and we’d unpacked every last box and tin, I decided to give the 8×4 bread pan a test drive, so I broke out the lemon poppyseed quick bread mix that I had received along with the pan. And for what seems like the 4,847th time, I screwed it up.
Why? Because of this little fella:
My Westwood oven.
Now, don’t get me wrong – I don’t hate my Westwood. It’s a compact unit, making it a good fit for our tiny apartment. It’s very old – I’m guessing this is a model from the ’50s – so it’s got some retro chic going on. It has a nice range that has been very consistent, and I love working with gas. The stovetop area is fairly small, which makes for some crowding issues when you’ve got more than two pots on the stove. On the whole, though, the range hasn’t really let me down.
But oh, that oven. First off, it’s the kind you have to light yourself. This means that you turn the oven on beyond the “gas on” notch on the oven dial, you light a match, you put the match in front of the gas port, and the oven lights itself. Except that with our match box, lighting matches has been an increasingly difficult activity as the match box’s strike surface has grown too oxidized to use. So now it takes me 2-3 times longer to light a match, which means that there is more and more gas roaming around the bottom of the oven by the time I get the match to the port. Will I someday blow myself up when I screw up match after match, finally managing to light the 7th one and holding it irritatedly next to the port without thinking about what I’m doing? Quite possibly. Say goodbye to Hollywood.
But that’s not even the real issue. That’s the temperature control of my oven. Let me take you through a typical oven experience in my kitchen before I figured out what was happending. Let’s say I want to roast a chicken. I light the oven without killing myself, I set the temperature to 475 degrees, just like Judy Rodgers says, and I wait.
Ten minutes later: Open the oven and check my thermometer. Only 200 degrees. Close oven door.
Five minutes later: return. 250 degrees. Feels a lot hotter, though. Oy. Go catch up on my Scary Go Round.
Five minutes later: 450 degrees. Whoa, that was fast! Well, let’s throw the chicken in there.
Fifteen minutes later: Boy, that chicken is crackling loud. Check it: 600 degrees?! What the hell?!? Check the dial: 475. Wha hoppen? The chicken is looking a little angry at all this heat. Turn down to 400.
Five minutes later: check the oven. Still 600! Turn it all the way down to 200. The chicken is seriously unhappy – it looks like it’s been cooked by a pastry chef with a blowtorch for the last twenty minutes. Charred, yet raw.
Ten minutes later: Now we’re at 550, according to the thermometer. Hooray. The chicken is black on top. Internal temp: 130. I hate my life.
I don’t know if my oven is in any way representative of what ovens acted like in the Eisenhower Era, but if it is, how the hell did anyone get anything cooked properly? There’s something wrong here. I think the problem is the calibration of how much heat is produced at certain points of the dial. Between “low” and “250” on my dial is the same temperature range that most people have set to, say, “on” to “550.” Anything above that is basically nuked. Plus the damn thing gives off so much heat, you can’t even touch the dial with your bare hand after half an hour or so. Don’t even think about touching the handle. And if you’re pulling a pan out of the oven, I’m afraid there’s a two potholder minimum. Sorry, no exceptions. Not even for you, missy.
But after many months of trial and error, error, error, I’ve finally figured out a sort-of plan for how to use the oven and not light things on fire. The secret is knowing when to turn the heat down. There’s a moment when the temperature is just about to make its jump to “blast furnace mode” where it is actually in an acceptable range, at which point you can use it if you do one of two things:
1) Wait until the oven is 50 degrees cooler on the thermometer than what you want it to be, then turn the heat down to “gas on” and put your item in. The temperature will still go up, but if you’re careful and you make a smart guess it will only go up a little bit, ensuring the safety of your food and your baking pan. Or:
2) Wait until the temperature is within 25 degrees of what you want, then open the oven door and keep it open for a good 5 minutes to let the hot air out. This stabilizes the temp enough to allow something to be cooked at a proper, even heat level. Basically, method 2 is a little more reliable and involves a little less guesswork, but it can only be done when the temperature of the apartment is sufficiently cool that keeping the oven open while it’s on is not unbearable – ie, November through March. The rest of the time, it’s back to the estimations of method 1.
For the bread I made last night, I used method 2, but I got impatient waiting for the stabilized temperature, closed the door on my bread too early, and went to reorganize the wine closet. Result? A deep dark crust, not quite black but close. The bread was good, maybe a touch on the dry side but not really a problem, but I wish that I had remembered the golden rule of my oven: Never Leave It Alone Even For A Single Second. It will ruin your day if you do. It cannot be trusted, and it will never be fixed. Ultimately this goes to the core of my problem with baking, which is that it is too much of a precise science for me. It is possible to cook with this oven, I’m sure – I just don’t quite have the fine-tuned skills to adapt to it. I always figure out a way to mess something up, and that I hate the “Here goes nothing!” moment of putting something in the oven, knowing that you cannot do a damn thing to save it at that point – only screw it up more. This is mostly my fault, I know. But the Westwood isn’t helping any.
Of course, today is the day I started my sourdough starter. How will the oven destroy this, I wonder? Will it even get the chance?
Taking off.
We’re going up to the Bay Area this weekend, but I wanted to mention a few things before we leave, as I never know if/when I’ll get the chance to post up there.
There’s been quite a bit of talk today about the relative worth of the Zagat books, most of it stemming from the fact that a piece by SmartMoney (not available online) claimed that Zagat’s grades were inflated and that the ratings in the famous and ubiquitous Zagat guides that should serve as constants – i.e., chain restaurants like the Cheesecake Factory – in fact varied wildly according to location.
To the latter claim, I’ll offer the weak defense that two cooks, given no matter how rigorously identical a set of instructions, will invariably produce two different dishes. Put Nancy Silverton in one California Pizza Kitchen and Johnny Five in another, give them the exact same recipe, and you’ll get two different pizzas (one made with passion, the other with hilarious robot antics). I’m not saying that the variation can be entirely explained through differentiation in the kitchen, but other than wild hypotheses about sociological environment, I don’t know how much deeper you can get into that particular problem. To the former, I would say only that Zagat Los Angeles gives Enoteca Drago a 22 for food, while The Ivy gets a 23 and Panda Inn gets a 21(!). Which is another way of saying that if you really put any stock in the Zagat restaurant ratings, I’ve got a Thai joint I’d like to sell you.
Elsewhere, it seems like half my traffic comes here looking for info about Malm Cellars, so I’ll throw a bone to the lions and say that I tasted a glass of the 2005 Malm Cellars Cross Blend tonight. It was a good wine, a cab-syrah blend that was fruit-driven, yet with decent structure and medium tannins, so it might reward sitting in the cellar for a year or two. At $17, it was a decent price, although I think I would probably rather fork out the extra three bucks for a bottle of the Malm Pinot Noir. Or you could buy the 2005 Lang & Reed Cabernet Franc at about the same price, and enjoy one of the best cab francs made in the US for a good value. The Lang & Reed has a wonderful mix of chocolate and raspberries coating a core of herbs and a tiny amount of mint that keep the wine from getting too fat. A sultry, complex wine that I really like. I often feel like cab franc is what malbec wishes it could be, but maybe I just haven’t had enough good malbec yet. I’ll probably regret those words soon enough.
In other news, K&L Wines Hollywood has yet to open. What the crap! Do they think I can wait forever?
The Table at the French Laundry.
Not yet! But soon. (ish.)
We made reservations there a few weeks ago for the beginning of April, only two days after the wedding. We’re pumped. And why shouldn’t we be? It’s the California foodie mecca. I really don’t want to go in there with sky-high expectations, but frankly, how can I not? How many times can I read about how TFL changed the way someone thought about restaurants or service or food? How many food blog posts can I see that melt over Thomas Keller’s meticulously crafted cuisine faster than a gelee in the Mojave Desert? And this isn’t even counting my most lasting memory of TFL in the media, which was an episode of “A Cook’s Tour,” the old Anthony Bourdain show. In this particular episode, he went to The French Laundry with some friends, and was served a nicotine-infused custard as the final dish of the night. Now that is brilliance. Who can’t love that? It can’t help but affect you. So on that day in April, when I walk across the gravel driveway toward this sign:
I’ll try to do it with an open mind. But no promises.
That’s not what I wanted to talk about, though. Because announcing that we’re going there eventually is not exciting (to you, anyway). But getting a reservation? That’s something else entirely.
To be sure, I should have done some research before trying to get a table the first time. But really, I told myself, if I start calling at 9:58 am, two minutes before the reservation office opens, two months to the day before my preferred day of dining, and keep redialing til I get through, I’ve got a good shot, right? Plus, my parents got in a few years ago, and they told me that they called in their reservation. How hard can it be? Answer: You don’t want to know the answer. I got a message until exactly 10 am, at which point I was greeted with a busy signal that would last through half an hour of frantic redialing. Half an hour! And this was for a Monday night!
I finally had to give up and go back to work. but J called around noon and got us on the waiting list…right below the entire population of Napa County, I’m sure. Oy. I don’t know how my parents called and actually got through AND got a table, but at this point I’m more inclined that they made the whole story up and actually ate candy beans from the hotel room fridge rather than believe they really did this. Lesson #1: Do not try to call in your reservation. Ever.
So what can we do? Well, we can try and bump off everyone on the waiting list in front of us, Kind Hearts and Coronets-style, but that would be 1) time consuming and 2) unlikely to be graced by the voiceover of a wry British narrator, therefore rendering it an activity with limited appeal. There is opentable.com, however. Many people online swear by its power if you are rigorous in your application of its resources. There are specific instructions to be followed if you want to do this thing correctly. If you go online at exactly midnight, when opentable switches to the next day’s reservations, and search the French Laundry’s site, you can (possibly) get a table. You can see the entire set of instructions, which everybody refers to, here.
Sounds great, right? Only one problem with this plan: that page – and the French Laundry mini-FAQ that appears on opentable – states that there are no 2-person tables listed on opentable for the restaurant. Two four-tops, and that’s it.
Ouch.
After about five seconds of anguish, we looked at each other and figured, screw it. What did we have to lose? So we stayed up (for J, who usually goes to bed around 10, this was a major accomplishment), and at exactly 11:59:57, hit Search, and whaddya know…table for 2. 9 pm. Money. And so, Lesson #2: Don’t believe what you read elsewere. You CAN get a French Laundry reservation for 2 through opentable.com.
I’ve done a little experimenting since then, and not surprisingly, it’s a total crapshoot as to how long you have before someone else snaps up the one 9 o’ clock table. It can be 5 seconds after midnight, or it can be 6 in the morning when it’s finally taken. You never know, which is why Lesson #3 is that the best, safest policy really is to do it at midnight. You have a very good shot at getting your table – for 2 or 4 – if you hit Search at exactly 12 am Pacific Time. That’s it. Good luck to you all. Hope that you make it over the wall. I will always be in front of you.
Actually, one more thing on reservations. J and I went to give blood last Saturday, and we stopped by Father’s Office to grab a late lunch/early dinner afterwards. We got there at 3, when the bar opens, and there was already a line a dozen people deep, waiting for the place to open. Amazing! We were lucky to get bar stools, never mind an actual table. On top of that, we got cursed when two people grabbed our stools as we got up to leave. Why? Because the cursers thought that they had secured our perches – one of them had made eye contact with J. What?! I’m sorry, the burgers are still amazing, but I don’t need to put up with this crap anymore. I don’t even want to think about what a scrum it would have been to try this at 9 on a Friday night.
Reservations can be a bad thing, but they can also be pretty darn good. They may make you stay up late, but they most likely won’t get you punched in the Charlie Browns, either.
Burgundy tasting at Silverlake Wine.
J and I went to a Sunday tasting at Silverlake Wine this past weekend, and it was a lot of fun as usual. Silverlake Wine is one of our favorite haunts, and the Sunday tasting is their most ambitious tasting of the regular flights they do every week. We end up making it to about one of these per year; the time we went last year, the featured wines were small production Central Coast syrah. We ended up buying 2 of the 4 wines that day, I think, one for ourselves and one for a gift. Although at $20 per person and with wines usually north of $30 offered for tasting, the financial damage can pile up faster than you can say “Grand Cru Classe.”
This Sunday’s tasting was one I was really looking forward to because I knew the theme was Burgundy and Burgundian wines are my worst area of wine knowledge. Other than some vague ideas about pinot noir, chardonnay, and terroir, most of it is a blank slate for me. On top of that, most of these wines are so damn expensive, I can’t even buy a few to get a foot in the door to the room of knowing something. Since I can’t afford bottles, tastings are going to have to be the way I expand my Burgundy experience. Now is the time!
A quick and very rough primer for the curious on the levels of Burgundy wines:
- Grand Cru – I will never be able to afford these. Apparently they are good. This means very little to me, though.
- Premier Cru – These are also generally very expensive. Although I actually own a Premier Cru Burgundy, and it cost me less than the Village level wine I bought at this tasting. Interesting how that works.
- Village – From what I gather, wines produced at the Village level are given the name of that village’s best vineyard. They can be good to not-so-good.
- Bourgogne – This is the only stuff you will regularly see below $30, and sometimes not even then.
On this brisk day, Silverlake was pouring five wines, starting with an Adami Prosecco Brut as an aperitif. This was nice – not the best Prosecco I’ve had, not the worst. Hard to work up much feeling about it one way or the other, although I do like Prosecco and was glad to have a glass of it.
First up for the main event was the Domaine Raymond Dupont-Fahn Bourgogne Blanc 2005. As George, SLW co-owner, explained it, this wine would normally be a Village wine, designated “Meursault,” except that the owners decided to bring in some dirt to fill in a depression in the vineyard. Oops. There’s the penalty flag…let’s see what the AOC referees have to say: “Illegal enological formation. Fifteen yard penalty, remains fourth cru.” There goes your Village ranking. This was a really interesting wine, though. The nose recalled the exact scent of crusty white bread and artisanal butter. And I mean EXACTLY. It was a trip. On the palate, it offered more bread, although not as much as the nose did, along with a little minerality and some fruit notes – pear, etc. Not much of a finish on this one. A good wine. The bread on the nose was a serious trip. For $31, though – not quite enough “dough” for our dough. Oy. Sorry about that one.
Next up was the 2003 Domaine Ferret Pouilly Fuisse Les Vernays. Domaine Ferret has apparently been overseen through the years by a long line of female vignerons. Cool. This wine was showing a lot of oak – old French oak, if I can be allowed to hazard a guess – but the oakiness came through in more of a rustic, interesting manner than just bread notes. Certainly a rich wine, richer than the first; it had more of a fruit element than the Dupont-Fahn, too, and generally seemed like a more complex and complete wine. This one, unfortunately, was north of $40, and I wasn’t quite enough in love with it to pick it out, so…
The 2004 Domaine Michel Gros Bourgogne Hautes Cotes de Nuits – the domaine of one of the three siblings in the legendary Gros family of Burgundy – was third, and wow did it have a unique nose. Earth. Wet earth. Forest floor? More like a bog. A peat bog. A swamp, even. Okay, maybe not a swamp, but it was impossible not to think of some place wet, green, and mossy when you stuck your nose in the glass. Something that almost smelled like driftwood, except not as salty. Maybe this was a slightly off bottle…hard to say. (That’s the problem with tastings like this – no time to sit around and wait for the wine to evolve in the glass.) If you kept at it, you could also pick up a little chocolate in the bouquet as well. On the palate, this wine buzzed with acidity. There was fruit there; a tight core of raspberry with some cherry notes and some smoke – but this is a wine that needs a couple years at least to tone itself down before it can be properly evaluated.
The last wine of the tasting was the 2004 Jayer-Gilles Bourgogne Hautes Cotes de Nuits. Stick your nose in the glass and wow – that is terrific stuff. This is what I’ve been looking for from the nose of a Burgundian pinot – a perfect balance of earth and fruit. I’m sure there are better examples from Cotes de Nuits and other places, but this is the best I’ve tried. It’s evocative of loam and mushrooms, and at the same time is round and sweet with raspberry and cherry. On the palate, it shows some similarities to the Michel Gros in that it has a good deal of acidity, but at the same time there’s more fruit than in the Gros, making me think that this might be a better bet down the road. Cherries, chocolate, and some spice, followed by a nice finish. I felt like this wine was clearly the best of the flight, and despite the fact that it was the most expensive wine of the day…I bought a bottle.
Yeah, it was expensive – almost $50. Way more than I am usually willing to part with for any bottle. I probably spent too much, but I feel like this wine was what I was hoping to find when I went to this Burgundy tasting, and I feel like it’s only going to get better in the short term. It seems like a good food wine, and since it’s pinot it’s more flexible around a menu than, say, a Mollydooker Shiraz. I’m sure that for my Burgundy dollar, I could have spent my money in a number of different ways that would have provided more bang for my buck, but I liked this wine. So I got it.
So dipping a toe into the Burgundy waters was not too bad. Now all I need to do is find that box of money…
UPDATE: looks like S. Irene Virbila has made the Dupont-Fahn Bourgogne blanc that we tasted here the LA Times’ Wine of the Week. No mention of the bread, though. Whatever. Did she go to the tasting? Were we possibly in the same room at the same time? Perish the thought.
Wine Blogging Wednesday #30: Wrap up.
Tim over at Winecast has posted the round up for Wine Blogging Wednesday #30, the quest for New World Syrah. The entries this time were many (50) and varied (four continents’ worth of wine), and the summary features lots of good writing on a lot of good wine, so if you haven’t already, head on over and peruse the results. Good readin’, good drinkin’. Tim (I hope) avoided a major disaster recently involving frozen pipes, fire, and his wine cellar. I’m no scientist, but I know that frozen water plus fire plus wine equals bad. For someone who probably spent less time this weekend with cellartracker than with his cellar cracker (ugh! sorry!), he did a great job getting everything up, so cheers to Winecast. Check it out.
Good times at Lou.
Over on Vinography, you can read Alder Yarrow’s piece on what constitutes a wine bar. For the most part, I agree with his definition – you need a good wine list, you need to pour many of those wines by the glass and the taste, and you need to have a place to sit down. But what about a place like Lou – places where you can sit down, where they have several size pours for you to try for each of their available wines, and yet their list isn’t that big – maybe 30 different wines per night? The trick is that at Lou, the wines change very often, sometimes daily. While Lou doesn’t have the extensive wine menu that AOC or Bin 8945 does, it still manages to bring in 25-35 interesting wines every night, most of which can’t be easily found in stores, and that’s pretty good for me. I like a place that makes me wish I could buy a bottle of something out in the world; it makes me want to come back and try it again.
We took our second trip to Lou about a week ago. It’s a small, dimly lit place nestled into a crowded corner strip mall on Vine in the middle of Hollywood. Peering into the spaces between the drapes covering the windows from the outside, Lou looks like it could be anything – a gothic upholstery store, a Yakuza strip joint – but once you walk inside, everything looks like it should. There’s about twenty tables in the room, a small bar, and that’s it. Nice wallpaper, a pleasant black-and-white design on the tables. As you might imagine, the space is a little cramped, but not enough to make one uncomfortable.
While we knew from our previous visit that Lou has good wine to offer, we were really surprised this time at the quality of the food they have to offer as well. We were pretty hungry when we arrived, so we decided to make a full meal from the choices on the menu. The menu isn’t really built for this, per se, since they tend to have options mainly limited to appetizers and salads, and they only offer two main courses per evening, but we figured what the hell. Unfortunately, J is not a fan of the pig candy, so my appeal for the good stuff fell on deaf ears. All was not lost, however, because we the first thing we ordered was a burrata salad with prosciutto, candied kumquats and arugula that was excellent – a great combination of salty cheese and meat, piquant and sweet kumquat, and a nicely tart vinaigrette with a bit of citrus. Man, who doesn’t love burrata? What an odd thing to be a Los Angeles specialty, but it’s on the menu of every Italian restaurant in this city, it seems. Anyway, I’m not complaining.
We followed that up with a deconstructed bistro salad, a compartmentalized dish holding chambers of marinated cauliflower, roasted beets, cheese and walnuts. And it was pretty good, too – J was particularly enamored of it.
The final dish was hanger steak with frites, and I was eager to try it because I’ve never had hanger steak before, despite how much I’d read about it and how amazing it was. Verdict? It was pretty damn good – a very flavorful cut of meat. We had ordered it medium rare, and the grill man had left just on the rare side of medium rare, but that was probably better to show off the meat. And the steak frites were very nice as well – crispy on the outside and fluffy inside, with some kind of nutmeg/cayenne spice coating on the exterior. I was really pleased with how well the food turned out here. While I think the preferred method is to sample small things off the menu to match the wine, you could very easily construct a nice dinner for two here on a regular basis. Good deal.
The wine we tried that night was generally a success as well. I opted for a flight of reds from the corvina grape in the Veneto region of Italy. The most famous version of the corvina grape is Amarone, the heavyweight wine of northeastern Italy, but it’s also made into other wines, like the Quinciarelli’s “affordable” option, Primofiore, and it’s also used in IGT blends with various grapes. The first wine was the Venturini Amarone (there were no vintages listed on the menu, so no years for these wines), which was just the kind of wine I’ve come to expect from Amarone – that powerful combination of bitter and sweet fruit that comes from the air-drying of the grapes. I’ve loved Amarone on the few occasions I’ve been lucky enough to try it, and it was great to be able to get a glass of it and not pay an arm and a leg – which a bottle of the stuff will usually cost you. The second wine, also an Amarone, was from a maker called Beretta, and while it was pleasant enough, it didn’t have quite the supple weight of good Amarone. Maybe it just suffered in comparison to the Venturini, but it didn’t seem like it was quite all there. The last wine in the flight was a “Super Veneto” blend (named after the “Super Tuscan” IGT blends of non-DOCG grapes from Tuscany), the Giuseppe Lonardi Privilegia Veneto IGT. This was a blend of corvina and cabernet franc, and it was definitely my favorite wine of the evening. The cab franc’s herbal notes and cool fruit cut a beam right through the heaviness of the Amarone, but the Amarone’s core of fruit still held the day. It made for a terrific combination. Eric Asimov hypothesizes in his blog “The Pour” above that Primofiore contains some cab franc – is this an oft-seen blend? In any case, I was a fan.
Other wines we tried that night included the Blanquette de Limoux “Brut” Rosier NV (pleasant), Clos des Brusquieres Chateauneuf-du-Pape (a little thin, basically unremarkable), and a Ruston Family Merlot (a very nice, meaty wine with good balance and a long finish – the clear winner of the other three). The total bill, for all food and drink, came out to less than $80, which is pretty good for all that we ended up getting. The staff was kind and accommodating, too. In short, Lou is a great little place, and I don’t think it will be too much time before we find ourselves back there.
The Table 