Parzen family jam session
Monthly Archives: August 2014
Let low-alcohol content be your guide to Labor Day wine pairings
Please click here for my post for the Boulder Wine Merchant.
Thanks to everyone for being here this week. It’s been a pretty rough summer.
I hope you have a great Labor Day and drink something swell.
Chef Grant Gordon, rising culinary star in Houston, dies at 28
Image via Houston Press.
Today, the Houston restaurant community mourns the loss of one of its most promising and beloved stars, Grant Gordon, who died on Monday night.
A Houston native, Gordon, age twenty-eight, rose to prominence as the chef at Tony’s, one of the city’s leading fine-dining destinations, where the kitchen earned a top rating from the Houston Chronicle in 2011.
In 2012, he was a James Beard Rising Star Chef semi-finalist and one of Forbes 30 Under 30.
In 2014 he was selected by the U.S. State Department as a culinary ambassador and earlier this month, he and his business partners had announced plans for an ambitious new restaurant to be opened in 2015.
Click here for the Houston Chronicle notice of his passing and here for Culture Map’s profile. As both mastheads reported, the cause of death has not been determined.
Thoughts & prayers for our friends in #NapaQuake
Above: my favorite Napa-based blogger Vinogirl posted this image on her blog Vinsanity yesterday.
It’s never a good time for an earthquake.
I remember the 1994 Northridge earthquake well: I was living in the Hollywood Hills at the time and it was a terrifying experience (magnitude-6.7, 4:31 a.m.).
Today, our thoughts and prayers go out to our friends and colleagues in Napa and Sonoma, where a magnitude-6.0 earthquake struck early Sunday morning.
See this post by W. Blake Gray for WineSearcher.com on the earthquake and its effect on the wine trade there. And see also Vinogirl’s post on her family’s personal experience. And see Antonio Tomacelli’s gathering of images he culled from social media on Intravino.
I’ve read a number of accounts where grape growers and winemakers point out that the damage would have been worse had the earthquake come later in the harvest and the 2014 vintage were in the cellar. Tumbled tanks and cracked casks would have results in bigger losses for wineries.
But it’s never a good time for an earthquake.
Napa and Sonoma friends and colleagues, please know that you are in our thoughts and our prayers.
little drummer girls
Resolution (?) to our October 2013 burglary
Above: one of my Austin restaurant clients had his contractor board up our front door after the burglar broke it down.
The date was October 9, 2013, two days before Tracie P’s birthday, when two men burglarized our home in Austin in broad daylight.
I had left earlier in the morning for my weekly commute to Houston (where we now live) and Tracie had taken our daughters to the grocery store.
One of the men broke down our front door and searched through our belonging for valuables (here’s my post from the week of the burglary). The other waited outside with their getaway car.
The police were able to identify one of the burglars because he took a selfie with our family iPhone and we saw it in our iCloud. He also took a photo of a brand new pair of tennis shoes.
Both men left Texas and went to California. The driver had been pulled over by police in Austin and fled. He was ultimately apprehended in California.
From what we were told by the Austin detective who handled our case, the man who entered our home was killed in Los Angeles in June in a gangland shooting. He was twenty-four years old.
On Friday of last week, the driver accepted a plea bargain. He will spend the next ten years in jail.
In the end, the news of the one’s passing and the other’s guilty plea made me feel terribly sad.
Musical theater meets Riesling (a break from the dreary summer of 2014)
The news has been so doleful this summer that I wanted to share this video, which was debuted last night at my favorite wine bar in Houston, Camerata.
It’s dopey, it’s silly… and it’s just what I needed to cure my summertime blues.
The puns are irresistible and I wrote it up today for the Houston Press.
Indigenous grape pioneer Paolo Rapuzzi has died
Friulian grape grower, winemaker, and founder of the Ronchi di Cialla winery, Paolo Rapuzzi (above, center) has died.
He passed away in his sleep on August 13, said his son Ivan.
Rapuzzi was a much beloved figure in Friuli, where his legacy as a pioneer in reviving indigenous grape varieties continues to shape local viticulture.
He was among the first in a wave of growers who embraced native grapes in the late 1970s.
And his superb wines — especially his coveted Picolit — are treasured by Italian wine insiders.
Please see this profile of Rapuzzi that I wrote for the Colli Orientali del Friuli consortium a few years back.
Google him and you will find that many of my peers and colleagues were inspired by him as well. He was a sweet and gentle man and he shared a little bit of his magic with everyone he touched.
His contribution to Friulian — and Italian — viticulture played a fundamental role in the current Italian wine renaissance.
Extraordinary Piedmont white: 2004 Malvirà Tre Uve (& harvest updates)
On more than one occasion, I’ve heard Angelo Gaja say that white wine is a category with immense potential for growth in Italy.
There are a handful of whites from Piedmont that have captivated the imagination and palates of Italian wine lovers: Gaja’s Gaia e Rey (I remember tasting 1994 with him at the winery a few years ago), Aldo Vajra’s Riesling (he likes to call it “a wife for Barolo”), Ettore Germano’s Riesling (such a focused, brilliant wine), and Walter Massa’s Timorasso (we all remember when this wine hit the U.S. scene and knocked everyone’s socks off) are some of the more memorable.
But they remain just a handful. Unlike Friuli, Campania, and Jesi/Matelica, where white wine is a long established category with myriad standouts and impressive expressions of longevity, Piedmont has yet to make its mark as one of the greater producers of vini a bacca bianca.
I was a little skeptical when my good buddy Nathan hooked me up with a bottle of 2004 Tre Uve by Roero producer Malvirà . I know the winery but, with spotty distribution, you don’t see much of its in wine in the U.S. today.
It’s a blend of Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, and Arneis. According to WineSearcher (and what Nathan told me), 2005 is the current vintage available.
This wine had all the right stuff: freshness, acidity, clarity of fruit (stone and white fruit), and wonderful vibrancy. Ten years out from its harvest, it had depth and nuance and it danced on the palate. Great wine.
It aromatic breadth rivaled some of the great white blends that you see from Collio’s top wineries.
A truly original and exciting wine imho. Could Chardonnay blended with aromatic varieties be the future for Piedmont whites? If this is any indication of their potential, I think the winemaker at Malvirà is on to something great.
In other news…
I continue to receive tragic reports from northern Italy, where seemingly incessant rains have seriously threatened the vintage.
I hate to bear bad news but today I heard about a Lambrusco producer who has virtually lost his entire crop. And a friend from Friuli (Colli Orientali) wrote that some growers are fearful that they will not have any fruit to vinify.
In Tuscany, things are looking up. The vegetative cycle — which started extremely early — is now moving very slowly. The cool weather has helped to balance out the accelerated start (caused by a very mild winter).
If sunny days arrive, one producer told me today via Facetime, they could have a great vintage. It’s all a matter of how much sun they get between now and harvest. She’s in Chianti Classico where they expected to harvest as late as mid- to late-October.
That’s all the news that’s fit to post. Thanks for reading.
Kurniawan, the Rabbi, and the Ham Sandwich
Above: a friend at a major wine auction house once asked me to help out with the authentication of a lot purportedly from one of Italy’s most exclusive producers. In the end, she established the wine’s authenticity by verifying that the corks were branded and not printed (branded with an iron as opposed to printed with ink). The winery began using printed corks after the vintage in question.
Thanks for reading and buon weekend.
Do Bianchi 