Monthly Archives: November 2010

2001 Grattamacco and why Sangiovese makes all the difference

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Speaking Italian well has its perks: when Italian bigwig producers and enologists come to Texas, I generally get an invitation to dinner and am always seated next to said bigwigs.

Last night, I was the guest of Tunisian-born pharmaceutical giant Claudio Tipa and his enologist, Milanese-born Maurizio Castelli, called a “Tuscan legend” by my friend, top wine dude and author, David Lynch in his Vino Italiano.

I’ve never been a big fan of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot grown in Tuscany, but I’ve always had a weak spot for Grattamacco. Despite the fact that it’s way out of my price range, I’ve had the good fortune to taste many older vintages over the course of the years.

Contrary to what one might expect, Claudio and Maurizio were very much alla mano, as the Italians say, easy-going and fun to talk to and I thoroughly relished Claudio’s account of the day he told erstwhile Okie oilman and fascist importer Bob Chadderdon to go to quel paese. I was also fascinated by what Maurizio had to say about his work in Georgia, the obstacles of making wine in a war-torn country, and the grand potential of that region to become a world-class producer of fine wine.

Grattamacco has remained true to its roots, as conceived by its founder Milanese industrialist Piermario Meletti Cavallari, in 1977: Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Sangiovese aged in large recycled cask.

While other Bolgheri producers have ripped out their Sangiovese, Claudio stood by the original owner’s vision when he purchased the estate’s hill-side vineyards in 2002. It’s the Sangiovese that gives the wine its trademark acidity and in my view, what makes it taste like Tuscany.

The 2001 was stunning, with earthy tones and bright, nervy acidity. The 03, 04, and 05 were honest expressions of the vintages (far from spectacular IMHO) and the 2006 showed immense promise for its future. (From what I’ve tasted so far, a lot of people made great wine in Tuscany in 06.)

I also really liked Claudio’s 2008 Montecucco Rigoletto, an entry-level wine from his flagship Colle Massari. It was everything I want a Montecucco to be: juicy and grapey, with bright, bright acidity and balanced alcohol. The Ciliegiolo was the star of this blend with Sangiovese and Montepulciano, giving the wine that classic cherry note on the nose that reminds you that Montecucco is a sibling of Morellino and not Montalcino.

The Colle Massari Vermentino was also very good, unctuous and aromatic, honest and real. Chef Todd Duplechan’s foie gras Boudin wasn’t bad either.

Did I mention that Italian majors have all the fun?

In other news…

TGIF: Thank G-ja it’s Friday! I’m so tired of working and am very much looking forward to the weekend with that super fine lady of mine.

Buon weekend, ya’ll!

No regrets, Coyote: French grapes in Friuli at Ronco del Gnemiz

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Bobby Stuckey

Above: Ubi major, minor cessat. Master Sommelier Bobby Stuckey (left) really knows his stuff and when it comes to Friulian wines, he’s at the top of his game. It was fascinating to travel and taste with him in Friuli. Ronco del Gnemiz, where he and Lachlan source some of the fruit for their Scarpetta label, was a favorite visit for everyone (for the cast of characters, click here).

In some ways, the wines I tasted that day run contrary to everything I desire in Italy wine: they were made from French grapes, grown in Italian soil, and vinified with pharmaceutical yeast. But I loved and love them… unabashedly and unconditionally… no regrets, Coyote. They were the wines of Ronco del Gnemiz in the Colli Orientali del Friuli, a winery that I have followed since my earliest days writing professionally about wine in New York more than 12 years ago.

Above: More than once, Bobby talked about “Friuli’s secret weapon, Sauvignon Blanc.” In our tasting of a vertical of vineyard-designated Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc at Ronco del Gnemiz, I found myself writing things like “fantastic balance,” “extreme elegance,” “rich but angular,” “gorgeous acidity.” This 2006 Sauvignon Blanc, above, was fantastic.

One of the first things that nearly every Friulian winemaker will tell you is that Friuli was completely destroyed in the First World War (Friuli was on the front line between Italy and the Austro-Hungarian empire). Between the two World Wars, wine production was not a priority for a people whose farmland sat on the edge of the Italian monarchy and then fascist regime. And it wasn’t until Italy’s “economic miracle” of the 1960s that a wine fine industry began to emerge in this uniquely positioned growing zone, with its ancient seabed ponca soils, its ventilation arriving from the Adriatic, and a “natural shield” (as Petrarch would have called it) provided by the eastern Alps.

When Serena Palazzolo’s father purchased the Gnemiz estate in 1964, long before California would make Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon the hegemonic favorites of consumerist culture, he planted French grapes. (Gnemiz, btw, probably comes from the Slovenian nemitz meaning foreigner.)

Above: Chiristian Patat (center), Serena Palazzolo, and their eldest son Jacopo. As crazy as it sounds, I felt like I knew Christian and Serena from tasting their wines for so many years. And I knew that we were going to become friends. As it turns out, we have a great deal in common and Serena and I missed each other at the University of Padua by just a few years! We did indeed become friends and they are going to appear in a very special post, probably my favorite moment of my Friuli trip… Wonderful people…

French grapes have been grown with stunning results in Friuli since that time. (I’ll touch on this later in the series of Friulian posts.) And Ronco del Gnemiz is widely considered one of the greatest expressions of the Colli Orientali del Friuli.

Pharmaceutical yeast, explained Christian when the subject came up, is key to their approach. They’re not using cultured yeast to impart flavor to the wine. They use a neutral yeast to initiate fermentation because they want alcoholic fermentation to be completed before malolactic fermentation can begin. In doing so, they are able to maintain the gorgeous acidity in their wines that gives them such longevity. Their oak regimen consists of 25% new barrels, with the rest being recycled 4 times before being discarded.

I can’t think of any other region in Italy where modern winemaking techniques are applied with such extraordinary results. Of course, there are many who utilize technology excessively in search of high scores and Californian consumers. But most, Ronco del Gnemiz chief among them, exploit modernity judiciously, not with an eye to the American consumer but rather with an ideal of world-class winemaking.

And I can’t recommend Ronco del Gnemiz enough. I love the wines, period, end of report, and no regrets, Coyote.

The least Piedmontese of the Piedmontese wines

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Envious as I am? Click here to read my translation of top Italian wine blogger Mr. Franco Ziliani’s post on a “truly moving” vertical tasting of the “least Piedmontese of the Piedmontese wines.”

Just wait until the mimetic desire kicks in…

The best little steakhouse in Texas

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texas beef

Above: Now THAT’S a fine piece of meat! Bone-in rib eye is the preferred cut for steak in Texas.

Now, mind you, Pearland, Texas is not exactly on my beaten path. In fact, it’s a suburb of Houston about 40 minutes south of the city.

Last night, I gladly made the schlep with cousins Joanne and Marty to have dinner with their friend Deedee Killen at her family’s Killen’s steakhouse in Pearland. For months now, my cousins have been raving about the amazing meals they’ve had there and so last night we made the plunge.

texas beef

Above: The key to Chef Ronnie’s iceberg wedge with blue cheese was the creaminess of the dressing.

As much as Texas is known for its beef, its love of beef, and its tide of steakhouses (Dallas has its own “steakhouse row”), I have to admit that I’ve been disappointed with my own personal steakhouse experiences here. But all that changed last night.

texas beef

Above: Chef Ronnie’s crab cake is made with hand-shredded crab meat as opposed to ground. This was, hands-down, the best crab cake I’ve ever had.

The American steakhouse is like a sonnet. Using a rigid and highly codified format, the steakhouse chef is like a poet who has to assemble the same elements given to every troubadour and that artifice must be delivered within the confined space of 14 lines. The success of the poet and steakhouse owner is based on the ingenuity with which that reassembly takes places. Scanning and parsing dishes and the packed house at Killen’s on a Tuesday night, I’d have to rank Killen’s in the same league as Shakespeare.

texas beef

Above: The American steakhouse canon is happily frozen in the 1950 and 60s. Is that a baked potato the way you remember them from when you were a kid or WHAT?

Down at Killen’s, which retains the homey air of a family-friendly restaurant while allowing plenty of wiggle room for the fat cat high rollers, they’re still talking about a 2008 visit from Food & Wine executive wine editor Ray Isle (a great guy and super fun to taste with). That meal landed Chef Ronnie and family in the magazine’s Top Ten Best Restaurant Dishes 2008 for their bread pudding.

texas beef

Above: Even I ate dessert last night. Tracie P will be the first to tell you that I rarely enjoy sweets. But, man, when it’s this good… Chef Ronnie makes the brioche in house.

There was even more than one bottle of wine I could drink on the list, which had judiciously restrained pricing on all the usual suspect Napa Valley “Cabs,” a refreshing surprise for the steakhouse category, where 300% and 400% markups are generally the norm.

Marty and Joanne couldn’t believe how much I ate. I was like that little kid, who gets taken to a steakhouse for the first time, and just can’t believe how big the baked potato is. Everything you want a steakhouse to be…

In other news…

Tracie P on Greco di Tufo…

Ribolla and guacamole, Nebbiolo and chili dogs with the Uomo Armadillo

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chili dogs

Above: Italians and I are fascinated by hotdogs. Last night Tracie P and I shared a meal at Man Bites Dog and Torchy’s (south Austin) Trailer Park and Eatery with the “Uomo Armadillo” (Armadillo man, above left) and his daughter Marta.

Supreme Italian wine blogger Mr. Franco Ziliani will probably defriend me on Facebook for this: last night I paired 2006 Barbaresco by Produttori del Barbaresco with a lipsmackingly delicious chili dog by Man Bites Dog at the South Austin Trailer Park and Eatery.

bastianich

And that’s not all: we also paired a gorgeous Ribolla from the new “Adriatico” label by Bastianich with chips, guacamole, and salsa. (The fruit for this transnational project by the Bastianich empire comes from Simčič vineyards.)

adriatico

I know that it’s a sin but what were we to do when the Uomo Armadillo showed up with the 06 Barbaresco and the 07 Morgon by Lapierre in tow?

chili dogs

The 07 Lapierre Morgon was brilliant with the dogs, btw. The 06 Barbaresco was tight but opened up nicely… (Uomo Armadillo and his buddy Massimo, who was also there last night, have visited Lapierre for his annual blowout party and we all raised a glass to remember the iconic winemaker who left this world for another last month.)

This was certainly an extreme and decadent pairing but I also believe wholeheartedly that the folks who make these wines intend them to be served at the dinner table and with people you care about. In the U.S. we tend to fetishize our wines and are overly selective IMHO in how we “apply” them. Rest assured, they were applied very well last night!

And on the subject of chili dogs, here’s a less pretentious dog that I bit into a week ago Sunday at Ginny’s Little Longhorn when Alice Feiring was in town and we took her to play Chicken Shit Bingo at Ginny’s Little Longhorn Saloon.

adriatico

And in case you’re wondering about the Uomo Armadillo: we actually met thanks to Mr. Ziliani, whose blog we both follow. Uomo Armadillo (Alessandro) comes to Austin from Milan every year in the fall to get his honkytonk on. His happy obsession with the Groover’s Paradise even earned him a song…

Thanks for reading! More on Friuli tomorrow… And in the meantime, check out Tracie P on Fiano d’Avellino.

Tracie P on the wines of Campania

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Tracie P is blogging again! :-)

Click here to read her post on the wines and grapes of Campania, the first part in a series on Italian wines.

Friuli! Day 1: Valter Scarbolo and how he reshaped the way Americans think about Italian cuisine

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Today’s post is the first in a series on my recent trip to Friuli with sommelier Bobby Stuckey and chef Lachlan McKinnon-Patterson, owners of Frasca in Boulder.

Above: Valter Scarbolo (pronounced SKAR-boh-loh), right. His family’s landmark restaurant La Frasca in the province of Udine (Friuli) helped to create a new paradigm for Italian food in the U.S. That’s Shelley Lindgren of A16 (San Francisco) and Joe Campanale of Dell’Anima (New York) in the foreground. When Valter speaks, North American restaurateurs listen intently.

Few if any Italian food and wine insiders, I’m sure, would disagree with me: the first place you need to eat when you visit Friuli for food and wine tourism is Valter Scarbolo’s La Frasca in Lauzacco (not far from Udine).

When I arrived in Friuli in mid-September, the first place my good friend Wayne took me to eat was Valter’s place. (Here’s the post I did the next day on our amazing meal.)

Above: Among other key elements to contemporary Italian cuisine in the U.S., Valter has introduced a generation of North American restaurateurs to the concept of “cult prosciutto,” in this case Prosciutto d’Osvaldo.

A note on the term frasca… frasca (Italian) or frasčhe (Friulian) means simply branch. Linguistically and culinarily, it represents a wonderful instance of metonymy (“the action of substituting for a word or phrase denoting an object, action, institution, etc., a word or phrase denoting a property or something associated with it,” OED online edition). In Friuli, a frasca was a roadside stand where producers of cured meats, cheeses, and wines would set up shop to sell their wares. Some believe a branch was placed by the side of the road to draw attention to the stand, while others believe that the vendors would display their products under the shade of a branch. Of course, where wine, prosciutto, and cheese are sold, customers will want to taste with the producer. Ultimately, the term frasca began to denote (as a metonym) a place where patrons gathered to eat (there is a kinship here with the word trattoria). Today, the term is regularly used to denote a restaurant, although Valter’s venue, “La Frasca,” remains the frasca by antonomasia.

Above: One of the amazing dishes that didn’t make it into my post about dinner with Valter Scarbolo was this orzotto, a “risotto” made with barley instead of rice, chanterelle mushrooms and squab ragù.

We all (or at least some of us) remember the “Northern Italian Cuisine” revolution of the 1980s, when restaurants in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco seemed determined to expunge “Southern Italian Cuisine” from their menus. In fact, it would more properly be called “pseudo-Northern Italian Cuisine” because the true regional Italian cuisine shift toward the north didn’t take shape until the Bastianich-Batali powerhouse Babbo opened in New York City in the late 1990s.

With the rise of the Bastianich empire in the late 1990s, a new generation of high-end American diners were introduced to Friulian cuisine, first through the Istrian clan’s Frico bar in Manhattan, which I believe opened in 1996 and closed in 2007 (see Eric the Red’s 1996 review here), and then later through Frasca in Boulder, which was opened by Bobby and Lachlan in 2004 (IMHO, one of the top-five Italian restaurants in the U.S. today).

I can tell you from personal experience that both sets of restaurateurs view Valter and his restaurant (which can trace its origins back to the 1960s) as a paradigm for Italian cuisine and hospitality.

Above: The Tagliolini “San Daniele,” actually made at Valter’s using prosciutto by D’Osvaldo, which is made in Cormons, not San Daniele.

The Friulians are an industrious people. Valter is the apotheosis of that spirit and his bright personality and spirtuality express themselves in the metrics of his family’s wines, his superb cuisine, and his warm hospitality. Anyone who knows the man personally, I’m sure, would share my impression.

To know Valter is to know true Friulian gastronomy and I consider myself lucky to know both.

There are many places I’ll be taking Tracie P to dine when we go to Friuli for our vacation in February. But the first will be Valter’s Frasca.

Next up: Ronco del Gnemiz, one of my favorite Friulian wineries…