The Endless Valentine: Tracie P (née B) and I still feel like we’re in a dream. Ever since our wedding day, it seems like everywhere we go, someone wishes us well for our marriage or makes something special just for us, like this heart-shaped desert that Francarlo Negro served us just last week at his Cantina del Rondò in Neive (a stone’s throw from Barbaresco). Remember him? He was the author of “The Smell of Money Guides the Evolution of Taste,” which I translated here before leaving for Italy a few weeks ago.
For Valentine’s Day yesterday (our first as a married couple!), we decided to go to one of our favorite spots here in Austin, Ginny’s Little Longhorn Saloon.
It was our first time going out since we’ve returned from our honeymoon and our first time “on the town” as a married couple. Ginny was so sweet and insisted that our money was no good at Ginny’s. Lonestar beer never tasted so good…
An Austin honkytonk, chicken shit bingo, and chili dogs (above) are a far cry from the sunsets of Tuscany, the Langa hills of Piedmont, and the Vatican museum in Rome where we were just a few days ago. But, man, it sure feels good to be home with my beautiful bride. The endless Valentine makes it feel like the honeymoon hasn’t ended…
In other news…
It’s been a busy Monday morning over here at Do Bianchi Editorial: I just spoke to Giacosa enologist Giorgio Lavagna and I’ll be posting answers to Ken Vastola’s questions regarding my previous Giacosa post tomorrow.
Every since we got on a plane, two Wednesdays ago, to leave for La Jolla for our wedding, life has been nothing but a dream: the preparation for the wedding, the rehearsal dinner, the ceremony (the incredible moment the stunningly gorgeous Tracie P née B appeared to walk down the aisle!), our first kiss and embrace as wedded couple, the reception, the Bollinger NV rosé (and the 1998 Grand Dame!), New York, Sant’Angelo in Colle, Bologna, Barolo, Barbaresco, Rome, and then finally the long trek homeward. At the end of those two weeks, Tracie P and me were ready to come home.
The best news? Next week, we finally move into our first home together, a little house we’ve rented on the north side of Austin.
As hard as it is to come down from the high of the last two weeks, we’ve been enjoying the afterglow of these magical days, cooking at home and staying in to watch movies at night.
In Tracie P they found a cover-girl as their materia prima. In me? Well, they found the same old schlub I’ve always been. But, hey, Tracie P must see something in me, right? I guess she loves me for my brain… ;-)
After breakfast in Rome and chips and pints for lunch at Heathrow’s Terminal 5, we got back to Texas last night safe and sound.
I know that Terminal 5 has had its problems but I’m happy to report that our passage there was seamless and the beer had a great head on it.
The “Gaiorny” of it: our server at Enoclub in Alba used a cart made out of a Gaja “original wooden case” to open the bottle of Bruno Giacosa 2004 Barolo Falletto that we drank with Giacosa enologist Giorgio Lavagna and Franco on Sunday at lunch. Tracie P and I couldn’t help but note the “gairony” of the modern vs. traditional dialectic going on there. It’s fun to walk into Enoclub, Alba’s most chic wine destination, and hear your lunch companion say to the hostess, “we have a reservation under Giacosa.” It raises an eyebrow or two, even in this jaded Hollywood of Italian fine wine.
I began compiling my notes from the Giacosa tasting yesterday on the plane and will post them tomorrow after I catch my breath. Thanks, everyone, for the notes and messages: we have so many tales to tell from our trip but the Giacosa tasting was the “money shot,” as we say in show biz. You might just be surprised to read what Bruno had to say about cultured yeasts, reclassification of Rabajà, and how often he changes his casks.
Last weekend’s 3-day bachelor party… well, let’s just say it left me and brothers Tad and Micah a little hazy. By the time it was over, it was most definitely time for a “Blood Mary morning” and so, to make their culinary Trifecta complete (they’d already had some great Texas steak some great Texas bbq), it was time for Tex Mex at one of Austin’s classics, Chuys. My morning started with a Michelada — essentially a bloody Mary made with beer. Chuy’s features $3 margaritas and bloody Marys on Sunday, btw, I wonder why?)
The Wild Burrito, above, is a “wet” burrito made with slowly braised tender stringy beef and Hatch chiles. Some might argue that the inclusion of Hatch chiles and the Sonora-style “wet” presentation would betray New Mexico and Arizona roots of this dish. But who needs dogmatism on a bloody Mary morning? Needless to say, I did my best “James Brown” imitation, as Tracie B likes to tease me, consuming this dish.
Deluxe chicken enchiladas, above, are essentially, enchiladas verdes, with sour cream added to the salsa verde. An Austin original, Chuys has become a Texas franchise chain restaurant. But it’s everything Tex Mex should be: cheap, colorful, delicious, fun, and a perfect cure for a hangover!
Fajitas are an undisputed signature of Tex Mex cuisine. Some will argue that they originated in Austin while others will claim Houston. No one will deny that they have become a calling card of Tex Mex cuisine from sea to shining sea.
Thanks, again, to brothers Micah and Tad (below), for coming out and giving me a great “lost bachelor weekend” here in Austin. I can’t think of better way to end it than with a blood Mary morning!
Check out this amazing video of Willie doing “Blood Mary Morning” way back when before he was even playing his signature guitar. If that ain’t Texan, I don’t know what is!
BBQ ribs, dry-rub brisket, and smoked sausage… that’s about as salacious as my bachelor party got. My brothers have been in town and we’ve spent the weekend eating WAY too much food, seeing some great shows (including a SMOKING show with Gary Clark Jr. and the Greyhounds last night). The pièce de résistance was dinner at the Salt Lick in Driftwood, Hill Country. Click on the photo for the “centerfold” shot. Mmmmmm finger-lickin’ good…
Salacious enough for you, Brooklyn Guy? And, Eric, as you well know, the Salt Lick is strictly BYOB, so, fyi, I paired with a Bohemia.
Texas is famous for its pecans and its beautiful women. Need I say more? Pecan pie at the Salt Lick comes à la mode (about as sexy as my bachelor party got!).
While my brothers were in town (Tad center, Micah right), they “had my back” when the San Diego Kid (that’s me) squared off with the Houston Coalminer at the Sicilian Showdown. But more on that later this week…
I’ve had a blast showing them “my Texas” and I can’t think of a better way to celebrate my soon-to-end bachelorhood than with my brothers, who flew in from San Diego for the occasion. :-)
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: “Pasta in bianco,” literally “pasta in white,” one of my favorite things to eat. Pasta dressed simply with extra-virgin olive oil, salt and pepper, and chili flakes.
In the wake of holiday feasting and the unusually cold weather here in Texas (making it all the more challenging to head to the gym!), Tracie B and I have been indulging lately in one of our not-so-guilty pleasures: pasta in bianco, literally, pasta [dressed] in white.
Bring a large pot of water to a boil and then add a heaping handful of kosher salt (“enough to make it taste like seawater,” is the way Tracie B likes to put it). Cook a short or long pasta to the desired firmness (some like it more al dente than others). And then toss with extra-virgin olive oil, salt and pepper to taste, and chili flakes (if desired). Sometimes I’ll throw some finely chopped flatleaf parsley in as well.
After bread and wine, pasta in bianco (which can also be made using butter in the place of olive oil), is one of G-d’s true gifts to humankind. And it’s also one of the most healthy things you can eat. South Beach diet? Atkins diet? Hogwash! If you want to slim down or just stay trim, avoid protein and meat. Eat easy-to-digest starches dressed with the “good fat” of olive oil. When I first lived in Italy (more than 20 years ago) and pasta and rice became the central ingredient of my diet, my health (and life) changed radically for the better.
Above: Librandi is a high-volume winery in Calabria that makes well-priced food-friendly wines. They’re highly affordable, clean, and delicious. Calabrian and Apulian wine represent some of the greatest value in the market today.
I got a lot of feedback from yesterday’s post on the Calabria riots.
Last night, with Calabria on our minds, we opened a beautiful wine from Calabria that we love, Cirò Bianco: Calabrian Greco vinified in stainless-steel by Librandi. Bright (but not tongue-splitting) acidity, balanced minerality, and low alcohol (and a more-than-reasonable price) made this wine an ideal pairing for our pasta in bianco.
In other news (from the “recommended reading” department)…
Eric did a wonderful post yesterday poking fun at the fine art of pairing fine with junk food, The Match Game.
I imagine Eric knows the famous beer of San Antonio from his days as a grad student at University of Texas at Austin.
That’s San Antonio and Austin music legend Doug Sahm with a can of Pearl in the photo left (courtesy of Pogzilla via IWG). (I’m sure you know Stevie Ray and Jimmie Vaughan as icons of the Texas music scene but locally, Doug Sahm is considered its über-hero.) The Pearl Brewery is in the midst of a veritable renaissance these days: the facility itself and the adjacent retail and restaurant complex has become one of the top food and wine destinations in Central Texas. Definitely worth checking out…
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!
Above: In Texas, they take their football seriously. That’s Tracie B’s cousin Grant at a recent Longhorns game. When he found out we were getting married, his father Terry, my favorite uncle-to-be, called and congratulated me and then politely requested, “but please don’t get married during the playoffs.” UT is playing Alabama in the championship tonight at the Rose Bowl.
I’m not exactly what you’d call a “jock.” Don’t get me wrong: I stay in shape and have long enjoyed the competitive sport otherwise known as “jogging.” All of my brothers were highly accomplished athletes in high school and beyond. But me? I got through my teenage years on good grades and playing guitar. Let’s just put it this way: Tracie B loves me for “my brain,” not my biceps. ;-)
Well, I live in Texas now: as Anne in Oxfordshire pointed out the other day, I “care about where the apostrophe is” but when in Rome…
Tracie B and I will be watching the game tonight at our favorite neighborhood wine bar, Vino Vino: I can’t think of any other city in the world where you could watch a college-football championship game and sip on a slightly sparkling Favorita (blended with a little bit of Moscato) from Piedmont with an alcohol content of around 11.5%. (It’s the Grangia by Tintero, one of our cannot-live-without wines.)
Do Bianchi 
