My parents-in-law, Reverend and Mrs. B, came to Austin this week to help us with our move and last night, we took them to one of our favorite dining spots to celebrate their 39th wedding anniversary — yes, 39 years!
It was really only our second night out since we returned from our honeymoon and our good friend and top Austin sommelier Mark Sayre at Trio surprised us with the very same wine that we drank on the second day of our viaggio di nozze, a bottle of Charles Heidsieck, which he just added to his list. The wine has a wonderful balance of toasty and white fruit flavors and its bright acidity makes it super food-friendly.
Thanks, Mark! Who knew you read my blog??!! ;-) It felt like our honeymoon all over again.
And thanks Rev. and Mrs. B for giving us such a beautiful wedding, helping us move, and most of all for having such a lovely daughter!
Happy anniversary, ya’ll! We love you a lot…
And, chef Todd, the chicken wasn’t half bad either (my father-in-law can’t stop talking about the fried, breaded avocado topped with poached quail egg. Delicious!).
Above: Just to be on the safeside, we opened 2004 Brunello di Montalcino by Il Poggione last night at Trio in Austin. Photos by Tracie B.
Tracie B and I were both concerned when, the other day, we read that the 2004 Brunello di Montalcino by Il Poggione had been eliminated from the top-ten wines in The New York Times recent blind tasting panel of 04 Brunello.
Blind tasting can be such a tricky business and in many ways, it removes wine from the terrestrial context in which we consume it (and the way it was intended to be consumed). In blind tasting, our experience becomes metaphysical, in other words, beyond the physical inasmuch as it treats wine as an abstraction. The intention is noble: blind tasting is intended to remove as many “extraneous” variables as possible and force the taster(s) to evaluate the wine purely on its sensorial attributes as an empirical expression of its intrinsic value. But wine, by its very (human) nature, cannot be reduced to pure science.
Even Eric, whose palate I admire greatly, was surprised that Il Poggione didn’t make the top-ten cut. “Some very well-known brunellos,” he wrote, “missed the cut in our blind tasting, including one of my perennial favorites, Il Poggione… A cautionary note about blind tastings: they are snapshots of a wine at a particular moment. I would never say no to a bottle of Il Poggione, even if I did reject it here.”
Never ones to say no to a bottle of Il Poggione, Tracie B and I went to Trio in Austin last night and asked our friend sommelier Mark Sayre to open a bottle of the 2004. Above and beyond our friendship, I turn to Mark when I want the proverbial “second opinion” (and his wine program offers the ideal setting for tasting fine wine in Austin).
Tracie B, Mark, and I all agreed that the wine is going through a very tannic moment in its evolution. We opened the bottle, decanted it immediately, and then tasted it immediately. Then, we put it aside and let it aerate for about 45 minutes.
Above: We also tasted Scarpetta 2007 Tocai Friuliano (bottled by Master Sommelier Bobby Stuckey) with the shrimp croquettes. This old-school wine is one of those “not-for-everyone” wines but just right for me and Tracie B!
At first sip, the wine was overwhelmed by its tannin, but when we returned to it, it had begun to open up beautifully, showing that magical balance of tannin, fruit, and acidity that makes Montalcino (in my view) one of the greatest appellations in the world.
Not everyone made great wine in 2004. As much as the Tuscan wine industry would like us to believe that 2004 was a 5-star vintage, it simply was not: summer heat spikes plagued growers whose vineyards lie at lower elevations.
But, as father-and-son winemaking team Fabrizio and Alessandro Bindocci will tell you, Il Poggione’s vineyards lie at some of the highest elevations in the entire appellation, reaching 400 meters a.s.l. and thus keeping summer temperatures cooler during warm summer months.
I don’t think 2004 will be remembered as a great vintage in Montalcino but I do think a handful of producers made superb wines and Il Poggione was one of them. The wine has many, many years ahead of it in the bottle and will only get better with age. It’s a young buck right now and just needs some patience and aeration to temper the power of its youth.
The je-ne-sais-quoi moment came when Mark insisted that we pair the fried pork belly with the wine: the classic plum notes of the wine and its tannin attained an ethereal nobility when blended with gelatinous fat and caramelized flavors of the dish.
What happened with the bottle that Eric and the panel tasted in New York? We’ll never know: on any given Sunday, even in a laboratory environment, a bottle of wine can be affected by innumerable variables (including how it was handled by the many actors who “touch” it before it reaches the end user).
Our evaluation? In the words of Tracie B, “Mikey likes it!”
Above: We toasted the Longhorns last night at Vino Vino with an orange wine, Paolo Bea 2007 Santa Chiara (since orange is the school’s color) but it didn’t help them push back the crimson tide.
Two years ago, if you would have told me that I’d be “double dating online,” I would have told you to go to quel paese, as they say in Italian. Yes, online double dating. That’s exactly what Tracie B and I did last night when we connected for wine and dinner with the couple behind the fantastic Austin food blog, Boots in the Oven, Rachel and Logan. We started following their blog a few months ago and an exchange of comments led to traded emails and the realization that we had a lot in common. The next thing you knew, we were double-dating! (It’s actually uncanny: Rachel and I were born in the exact same neighborhood in Chicago and practically went to the same Hebrew school, though she’s much younger than I; she did go to the same middle school my older brothers attended.)
Above: The owner of Vino Vino brought in a TV to watch the Texas-Alabama game last night and he debuted his “biergarten” menu. The kielbasa is made in-house and was finger-licking delicious.
We all met up last night at Vino Vino in Austin to watch the game together and check its new “biergarten” menu.
And then, as happy chance would have it, we ran into to couple Nat and Erin, who authors a hilarious but also insightful rant blog about working in the restaurant industry in Texas — To Serve Man (the title alone…).
Above: My eyes were bigger than my stomach and I just had to have the boneless, fried chicken thigh sandwich. Snackboy, I’ve got to take you here next time your in my town!
In honor of the orange-clad Longhorns, we opened a bottle of 2007 Santa Chiara by Paolo Bea, a blend of Grechetto, Malvasia, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc and Garganega (as per Jack’s post on the wine — you can find the blend on the label, btw). It’s an indisputable “orange wine,” a tannic white made from white grapes vinified with extended skin contact.
Man, I love this wine. It’s one of those if-I-could-afford-it-I’d-drink-it-every-day wines for me.
The first vintage I ever tasted was the 2005, which I really didn’t like. But the 2006 and 2007 (even better) are phenomenally good. When I tasted with him in April 2009 at Vini Veri, I asked Gianpiero Bea what changed between 05 and 06 and he told me that he hadn’t macerated with skins long enough in 05. From then on, he said, extended maceration has been employed. And wow, the results are fantastic — a tannic, mineral-driven wine, with rich dried fruit flavors (think apricot) and a rich orange marmelade note. N.B.: in my opinion, this wine should be served cellar temperature, not chilled. (Last night, we grabbed a bottle from the wall at Vino Vino and asked our server to bring over an ice bucket. We chilled it for just a few minutes and then served. It was perfect.)
Unfortunately, as good as the orange wine was, it didn’t help the Longhorns to push back the crimson tide.
In other news…
I was very proud to be included as a “wine influencer” in a Palate Press post entitled Thoughts on the New Year. Guess what I’m talking about: no, not wine. PASTRAMI!
From the “what have you been smoking?” department…
It was like a scene from the Beatles’s Yellow Submarine: I parked outside a Starbucks (so I could get online) on my way back into Austin after meeting with a client in Driftwood, and a flock of bright green parrots suddenly appeared on the grassy knoll before me. I have no idea where they come from or why they are here.
All I do know is that in this cold weather (and with Austin awash in the pumpkin orange of the Longhorns), it can’t be easy being green!
Tracie B and I love to travel. No matter where we’re going, as long as we’re together, the trip to the airport is always a fun one for the two of us.
But the one thing that really sucks about traveling is the awful food options in airports. Even with all of today’s fancy concessions, the food is nearly always a smorgasbord of Sysco-kissed processed foods. Well, friends, I am here to tell ya that there is at least one airport in our country where there’s a local and very tasty food option. It may not look pretty but, man, I was so hungry yesterday by the time my lady and I got to the airport!
Details from the Ginger Bread Charity Diorama at the Four Seasons Hotel, Austin, Texas. Photos by Tracie B.
Maybe it’s the little boy in me… I’ve always been fascinated with culinary anamorphism — a cultural phenomenon whereby food is refashioned to resemble something else, edible or otherwise.
The tradition of fashioning food to look like buildings stretches back to the Renaissance. One of the most famous examples is torrone nougat: on the occasion of the wedding of Bianca Maria Visconti to Francesco Sforza, October 25, 1441, the bride and groom were presented with a nougat replica of the city’s church bell tower, the so-called Torrione (today known as the Torrazzo) from which the sweet derived its name.
Another such example from recent memory is Abe Lebewohl’s depiction of Manhattan’s Twin Towers, fashioned out of chopped liver from the Second Avenue Deli.
The Art of Cooking by fifteenth-century Italian chef Maestro Martino (which I translated for UC Press, 2005) offers many examples of culinary anamorphism, mostly for the sake of recreating milk and eggs on days when they were forbidden by the Catholic church.
Last night Tracie B had to drag me away from the ginger bread diorama in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Austin. Our good friend chef Todd Duplechan oversees the creation and construction of this wondrous little city. Each edifice is auctioned off for charity (last year, a celebrity loved it so much, she paid for it to be recreated and reassembled in Las Vegas, “just so she could show how cool Austin is,” said chef Todd).
Above: Austin loves to keep itself weird and even has a website for the sake of weird. I don’t know the phenomenon’s origins but Austinites love to paint their cars. All of the images were taken using my Blackberry, captured as Tracie B and I drive around town.
Support, Advocate, Heal, Empower, Listen, Inform: saheli means friend in Hindi. Linda Phan, the executive director of Saheli Austin, a non-profit group that provides support for battered Asian women, has asked me to speak about wine and wine pairing at the organization’s November 14 fundraiser event.
A week from Saturday, we will be pairing European and Texan wines with Asian food at Saheli’s “Discover Asia Through Wine” benefit for victims of domestic violence.
Riesling and Grüner Veltliner are obvious choices when it comes to pairing wine with the often intensely spicy flavors of Asian cuisine, and both grapes will be well represented, of course.
But I think we’re also going to have fun with some Rhône varieties and — I couldn’t resist — some Sangiovese from Chianti Rufina as well.
From the Oxford English Dictionary, online edition:
Tex-Mexadj. Designating the Texan variety of something Mexican; also occas., of or pertaining to both Texas and Mexico.
1949 Time 14 Feb. 38/1 Fluent in Texmex Spanish, he had been one of the most promising rodeo riders around Tucson, Ariz… The half English, half Spanish patois of the U.S.-Mexican border region. 1973 News (Mexico City) (Vistas Suppl.) 22 July 7 It is a mistake to come to Mexico and not try the local cuisine. It is not the Tex-Mex cooking that one is used to getting in the United States. 1976 M. MACHLIN Pipeline xx. 246 The voice of Miss Martinez, one of Wilbur’s gestures toward Tex-Mex integration, came softly over the intercom. 1977 Time Out 28 Jan.-3 Feb. 8/2 Cooder’s current concern is the music of Southern Texas, the ‘Tex-Mex’ style.
Ask anyone who follows the food and wine blogosphere: there’s just no avoiding the habanero-fired debate over the definition of “Tex-Mex” cuisine. Being a Southern Californian myself and with only a year in Texas under my belt, I felt obliged to consult with one of the field’s greatest experts and authorities, Guillermo “Bubba” Rodriquez. Here’s what he wrote me.
If you don’t have fajitas, YOU’RE OUT.
If you don’t have queso, YOU’RE OUT.
If you have to ask what queso is, YOU’RE OUT.
Above: A “wet” carne asada burrito at Chuys in Austin.
If you don’t white AND yellow cheese grated on the enchiladas, YOU’RE OUT.
If you don’t have charro beans option, YOU’RE OUT.
If your top-shelf Margarita is not served with Cuervo Gold, YOU’RE OUT.
If the beef in your chili con carne is not ground, YOU’RE OUT.
If your picante sauce was made in New York City, YOU’RE OUT.
If you have ceviche on your menu, YOU’RE OUT.
Actually, if you have any fish on your menu, YOU’RE OUT.
If you don’t know how to make a Mexican Martini, YOU’RE OUT.
In other news…
Hook ‘em Horns! Texas squares off with Oklahoma today. As our good friend Melvin Croaker likes to say, what do Oklahoma and marijuana have in common? They both get smoked in a bowl.
On Friday night, Tracie B’s birthday celebration weekend began with a glass of 1987 López de Heredia Tondonia — one of the best wines I’ve tasted in a long while. Our good friend Mark Sayre at Trio at the Four Seasons always has something crazy and stinky for us to drink when we hang out at Austin’s best-kept-secret happy hour (half-priced wines by the glass, happy hour snacks menu, and free valet parking).
I’ve become somewhat obsessed with chef Todd Duplechan’s fried pork belly. He makes a confit of pork belly and then fries it: when he serves it, the fat in the middle is warm and gelatinous and the outside is crispy and savory. You know the story I always tell about the Rabbi and the ham sandwich he “can live without”? Well, I can’t live without Todd’s fried pork belly. He garnishes with a relish made from seasonal vegetables, in this case pickled watermelon radish and okra.
Later that evening, we met up with some friends at the High Ball (no website but does have a Facebook fan page), Austin’s newest (and only) bowling alley cum Karaoke bar cum mixology and designer beer menu. Tracie B had the “Heirloom”: roseberry fizz, citrus infused vodka, elderflower, rosemary, muddled blackberries. The High Ball hasn’t even had its official, hard opening and it is already packed nightly, Austin’s newest hipster hangout and a lot of fun with its art deco, Bettie Page ambiance and clientele.
Thanks to everyone for coming out to my Italian wine seminars at the Austin Wine Merchant. Last night was Tuscany (that’s our new friend Mary Gordon, front row center). Highlights were 2006 Chianti Classico by Fèlsina (such a great value), 2001 Brunello di Montalcino by Il Poggione (this vintage is just getting better and better, always a fav), 2004 Vino Nobile di Montepulciano by Villa Sant’Anna (old-school Vino Nobile that I thoroughly dig), and 2005 Tignanello (not exactly my speed but always a go-to trophy wine). Coincidentally, Laura Rangoni posted an interview with the “father of Tignanello” Renzo Cotarella on her blog yesterday. “Barrique is like a mini-skirt,” he told her, “not every woman can wear one.” I couldn’t have said it better myself!
Casual was the call for attire at the wine dinner I hosted on Saturday night at Jaynes Gastropub and so I decided to don the above psychedelic vintage 70s disco shirt (recently unearthed in a box that arrived with my library from my Manhattan storage). I’ve never really been able to figure out what it means. On the back, a bunch of grapes transforms into silver balls. On the front, silver balls reveal a convex image of a wine bottle and one of the balls falls to the ground and bursts. There is an upside down dessert sunset that lines the bottom of the shirt (from the wearer’s POV, it looks like a sunset).
I’ll post more on the dinner tomorrow so stay tuned: Australian wines I like! Yes, I actually found some!
Lastly, due to an editing error on my part, one of my favorite wine blogs ended up on the cutting room floor of Tom’s interview: Wayne Young’s blog The Buzz is most definitely one of my daily reads. Sorry about that, Wayne!
In other other news…
Check out this way cool Austin slide show and profile in The New York Times Travel mag. It features the Broken Spoke where I’ve been playing some gigs lately.
Who knew that Austin was such a great place to live? ;-)
Click here to add a comment or query to my Italian Wine Terms Project.
The series of posts began with a post devoted to Italian winery designations. With your help, I hope to create a series of posts that will become a stand-alone glossary.
Posted by Do Bianchi 
