Category Archives: de cibo

The wonders of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo: 1998 Illuminati Zanna

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In these heady days of single-vineyard Barolo and Barbaresco with designer labels, lieu-dit Brunello with astronomically impossible scores, and the coveted-by-conservative-elites and dreaded-by-liberal-populists Super Tuscans (if, in the course of my research for my upcoming Friuli trip, I come across the expression “Super Whites” one more time, I’m going to heave), we often forget an earlier chapter in the renaissance of Italian wines when grapes like Aglianico (ever tasted a 1968 Mastroberardino Taurasi?) and Montepulciano d’Abruzzo or Montepulciano Nero (1979 Pepe, anyone?) stood proudly side-by-side with their Tuscan and Piedmontese counterparts.

“Montepulciano d’Abruzzo,” wrote Burton Anderson in 1980 (Vino, p. 368), “ranks among the ten most prominent DOC wines of Italy.” (The appellation was among the earliest to receive DOC status, long before the DOCG-system was implemented, in 1967.) Two years later, in Italy’s Noble Red Wines, Sheldon and Pauline Wasserman infer (erroneously) that Montepulciano d’Abruzzo is a clone of Sangiovese Grosso and classify it as one of Italy’s three noble red grapes, together with Nebbiolo and Sangiovese (see the opening lines of chapters 13 and 14).

Last week, on a freezing night in the Goose Island neighborhood of Chicago, at a dingy BYOB Cuban joint called Habana Libre, I met up with three men I’d met over the internet, each bearing fantastic bottles of wine (mamas, don’t let your sons grow up to be wine bloggers!).

Phil, Nathan, and Lars and I got to know each other through wine-related social media (and Lars actually saw my French band play back in Detroit way too many moons ago). And this was the second time the de facto tasting group convened when I was in town. Many fantastic bottles were opened that night, including a brilliant Vouette et Sorbée NV Champagne Extra Brut Fidèle, an incredibly savory Willi Schaefer 2007 Graacher Himmelreich Riesling Kabinett, and a Raveneau 2000 Chablis Vaillons (!!!) — all thanks to my hosts.

But the wine that I can’t stop thinking about is the Illuminati 1998 Montepulicano d’Abruzzo DOC Zanna (above).

Phil had found a small and forgotten allocation of 98 Zanna at a local wine retailer and he wisely picked up as much as he could (at an obscenely low price). I’ve tasted a lot of Zanna in recent years and Alfonso made a point of taking me to meet and taste with his good friend winemaker Stefano Illuminati a few years ago at Vinitaly — great guys, both of them.

But, man, I’d never had the chance to taste a Zanna at 12 years out! This wine showed bright, youthful acidity (the secret to its longevity, no doubt) and rich layers of red stone fruit and crunchy, salty red earth. As I munched on my delicious stewed pork and my lightly breaded and fried flattened chicken breast, the aromas and flavors of this wine danced like wild beasts on my tongue, with sweaty horse and bramble notes, evoking, in my mind, an era when Abruzzo was one of the centers of the intellectual outdoorsman’s universe (did you know that King Frederick II of Swabia, emperor of the Holy Roman empire, named the the region’s capital “L’Aquila,” meaning the eagle, because of his love of the art of falconry?).

An unforgettable bottle of wine, thanks to these dudes. But then again, that’s what you get for making friends on the internet!

Phil, Nathan, and Lars: THANK YOU, THANK YOU! Alla prossima… (and ya’ll know what I’m talking about)…

The best hot dog I ever had happened at Hot Doug’s

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Family matters took me to Chicago and northwestern Indiana this week (more on that later).

Even though my traveling roadshow of social media was keeping me busy (all a dude needs is a camera, a laptop, and wifi), I did manage to take time out to make it to Hot Doug’s, the much hyped and highly touted “encased meats emporium” on the north side of the Windy City.

Everything you’ve read about this place is true: at Wednesday lunch time, with light snow falling and temperatures below 20° F. (no kidding), there was a line around the block. As a devoted lover of encased meats in general, I’d been wanting to get out to Hot Doug’s for sometime and my moment of truth had arrived. I’m here to tell you: it was worth the 20 minute wait I spent in the cold for that dog (I arrived around 11:45 a.m. and by the time I left the wait had increased to probably 45 minutes).

Hot Doug’s is probably most famous for having topped wieners with foie gras. (And owner Doug Sohn, below, gained notoriety when he was among the first to challenge Chicago’s ban, later repealed, on foie gras.) Being a traditionalist in Nebbiolo and hotodoggery, I went with the classic Chicago dog and a Polish sausage (with sauer kraut and mustard), plus cheese fries and a coke (my bill was less than $8 and, btw, when I ordered a large soda, Doug — who waits on everyone — pointed out that refills are free and recommended that I get a small, thus saving me about a dollar).

Hot Doug’s simply does it right. Dogs can be charbroiled, steamed, deep-fried, or fried and grilled, and the classic toppings applied on the Chicago-style dog are impeccably and impeachably aligned with the North American hot dog canon: “Mustard (yellow, spicy brown, honey or Dijon), Caramelized Onions, Relish, Tomatoes, Pickle [wedge not slice], Celery Salt [the sine qua non IMHO].”

I also really dug the Ramones-heavy mix that was playing the day I was there. Forget all the hype and all the paraphernalia (however fun) that surround Doug Sohn’s “emporium”: I highly recommend this joint.

Stay tuned for my harrowing escape from clutches of insipidness in the culinary wasteland of Bruce Springsteen’s America, on deck for tomorrow.

Black-eyed peas and Champagne for New Year’s day

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On New Year’s day, Tracie P cooked up some black-eyed peas with the ham bone reserved from the spiral ham Mrs. B had served on Christmas day. Her buttermilk cornbread (baked in her grandmother’s cast-iron skillet) was unbelievably delicious, especially when used to sop up the bean liquor (as it is called in the south, i.e., the beans’s cooking liquid). Neapolitan-style cabbage braised with onions gave the combined flavors just the right twang of sweet and sour.

And the perfect pairing for those creamy beans? Henriot NV Blanc Souverain, 100% Chardonnay. Ubi major, minor cessat: I am always one to agree with Ed McCarthy when notes that Chardonnay finds one of its greatest expressions in Champagne. This wine was an ideal pairing for the flavors of our New Year’s day meal: its acidity and white stone fruit flavors combined with its elegant fizziness were wonderfully refreshing against the richness of the cornbread, the dolce amaro of the cabbage, and the texture of the legumes.

Black-eyed peas for New Year’s is now a three-year-old tradition at our house and de rigueur in the south. I loved Jessica Harris’s NY Times op-ed on its origins as a New Year’s dish.

What did ya’ll eat on New Year’s day?

First kiss: Tracie P. First sip: Brovia 04 Barolo.

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I dream of your first kiss… And then I feel upon my lips again…

The first kiss of 2011 tasted just as sweet as that very first kiss of 2008. A taste of honey, tasting much sweeter than wine…

Tracie P and I had wonderful New Year’s eve at Tony’s with cousins Joanne and Marty, Dana and Neil, Mary Kelly (Neil’s mother), and prof Jonathan, who took the photos above. Don’t I look like I just won the jackpot? ;-)

That first kiss was followed by a first sip of 2011: Brovia 2004 Barolo.

I have long been a fan of traditionalist Brovia and I finally got to taste at the winery in March 2010 when I was visiting Piedmont with a group of wine bloggers. That’s Brovia son-in-law Alex in front of the winery’s cement vats. (Check out Saignée’s excellent post on Brovia here.)

No pharmaceutical yeast here: Brovia’s wines always captivate with their balance of freshness, purity of fruit, and their power, and this wine drank surprisingly well as young as it was, with not overly generous fruit tempered by mushroom and earth. It was a fantastic way to start our 2011.

I posted some of the food shots from that night over at Tony’s blog, btw: Chef de Cuisine Grant’s risotto is always stellar IMHO, and his rich beef stock carnaroli topped with fried sweet breads were served perfectly al dente that night.

All in all it was an unforgettable night, our first New Year’s as a married couple and a celebration of all the wonderful things that happened for us in 2010. We have lots of adventures (and challenges) ahead of us in 2011 and we’re looking forward to our upcoming trip to Italy (more on that shortly).

But in the meantime, I’m gonna keep on dreaming about that first kiss, tasting much sweeter than wine… Happy new year, everyone!

Tracie P and Tony V

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There’s more to come… but first I just had to share this photo I snapped of Tracie P and Tony V, who was our host for the New Year’s eve holiday.

In our family as in his, we love to talk about food and when Tony V and Tracie P get together, I can guarantee that they will engage in finely calibrated discussions of how and when onion and garlic may be applied (never in tandem!) and how al dente al dente should be. The above photo is clear evidence of this phenomenon!

More on what we ate and drank later…

Our night on the town with Lettie

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One of the more remarkable things that happened between Christmas and New Year’s was our night on the town in Austin with Lettie Teague. Lettie was in Dallas celebrating the holiday with family when Nature, by means of the east coast blizzard, decided not to let her fly back to New York. So, she decided to hit the road and come visit us in Austin, where we took her to some of our favorite spots, like Fonda San Miguel, where we had some huitlacoche tamales (de rigueur). Oddly enough, they were out of our fav Tondonia Rosado by López de Heridia and so Lettie proposed that we drink Gimmonet Champagne instead. The pairing was BRILLIANT!

Later, we took her to another one of our favorite nightspots, Vino Vino, where Jeff disgorged some Puro for her.

And, of course, no night on the town with Tracie P and me is complete without some late-night honkytonking at Ginny’s Little Longhorn Saloon.

Lettie wrote about our evening here. And I don’t care how much ya’ll holler: I ain’t givin’ you the number to the speakeasy we visited! Ya’ll will just have to come down and pay us a proper visit if you want to check it out!

97 G. Mascarello Barolo Monprivato Ca’ d’ Morissio and great food at Tasting Kitchen LA

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The Schachter factor was in high gear on Tuesday night at The Tasting Kitchen in Los Angeles. Good friend David Schachter reached deep in his cellar for a bottle he knew would thrill me (as it would anyone who knows the great wines of the world): Giuseppe Mascarello 1997 Barolo Monprivato Ca’ d’ Morissio, Mauro Mascarello’s top bottling, from one of the great if somewhat maligned vintages of the twentieth century.

The 1997 harvest was and remains a classic example of semiotician Harold Bloom’s “misunderstanding,” what he would have called the anxiety of influence (@Comrade Howard, I know it’s a stretch but I think you would agree!). Similar to what happened for 2000, many American wine writers (and you all know whom I’m talking about) praised the warm 1997 vintage for the fruit-forward, hot (read highly alcoholic) wines it delivered. In the view of most Piedmont producers, 97 was a good vintage… not a great one. Wines from this harvest, in their view, were not “classic” expressions of their territorio. They were good and sometimes great but not worthy of the hype that they attained in their trans-Atlantic crossing.

Winemaker Mauro Mascarello’s bottling of his Ca’ d’ Morissio vineyard (above, visited by me and Tracie P and top Italian wine blogger Mr. Franco Ziliani in February 2010) was an exception to this paradigm: thanks to the unique microclimate of this deservedly famous growing site (owing to exposure and elevation), Mauro is able to obtain Barolo benchmarks even in hotter vintages. In fact, to my knowledge, he was the only Barolo producer in the five core townships to produce his flagship single-vineyard wine Ca’ d’ Morissio for the extremely hot 2003 vintage (that’s the Ca’ d’ Morissio, “Maurizio’s house,” at the top of the hill, btw).

Mauro Mascarello is a remarkable man, a 19th-century man, a man whose spiritual integrity and wholesome warmth are expressed in his warm, sturdy handshake and personal manner. I’ve had the opportunity to meet and taste with him three times now (each thanks to Mr. Ziliani) and I am always as impressed by the man himself as I am by the incredible wines he produces. Many Barolo insiders point to his winery as the most recently canonized member in the pantheon of the truly great producers in the appellation.

One of the hallmarks of traditional Barolo is large-cask aging: Tracie P snapped the above photo of me when we visited with Mr. Ziliani to show how large “large” is at Giuseppe Mascarello! Mauro’s father was in the lumber business and he built the cask in the photo as an experiment in dimension, said Mauro. (For a fantastic English-language profile of G. Mascarello, I highly recommend this excellent post by my blogging colleague Gregory dal Piaz who knows this winery and its wines perhaps better than anyone else in the U.S.)

I am very fortunate to have tasted a lot of fantastic wine this year (and many of the highlights have been in the last few weeks) but 97 G. Mascarello Barolo Monprivato Ca’ d’ Morissio? An astounding wine. Layers and layers of nuanced fruit and earth on the nose, with this fantastic black licorice, almost menthol note that is always a signature in wines from this vineyard. Rich tar and mushroom in the mouth, with harmonious red berry and red stone fruit. But it was the acidity, tongue-splitting acidity, as Tracie P would have said — even in the warm 1997 vintage! — that took this wine over the top. In Italian wine parlance, you often say that the acidity is a “backbone” that “supports” the flavors of the wine: this wine was the embodiment of this notion.

O, and the food at the Tasting Kitchen (yesterday named 4th best new restaurant in the U.S. by Alan Richman in GQ)?

Buckwheat bigoli with lamb and anchovy ragù was my favorite.

I also loved Chef Casey Lane’s unabashed use of heat in dishes like this tagliolini with baby squid (the fact that my WordPress spellcheck knows tagliolini is remarkable, no?). We spoke to Casey before our meal: he is a super cool, mellow guy (unusual for chefs of his caliber) and he’s from Texas! Awesome dude…

Housemade chorizo and roast pork loin were FANTASTIC with the Ca’ d’ Morissio.

Thanks again, David! And congrats, Casey! An amazing meal and an UNFORGETTABLE wine…

Sérgio Mendes favorite wine last night (with Sérgio!)

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From the “I shit you not” department…

It was while Brother Anthony (as he has been duly dubbed by Comrade Howard) and I were doing a little wine bar hopping last night in LA that we bumped into bossa nova, jazz, and funk giants Sérgio Mendes and Gracinha Leporace. We literally saw Sérgio from the street through the window of Osteria Mozza (where we had just left the bar) and he insisted that we come back in and taste his wines (brother Anthony recently recorded with Sérgio, who was having dinner with Gracinha and their agent).

What’s it like to drink Chapoutier 2004 Ermitage [sic] De L’Orée with Sérgio? Unbelievably crunchy and salty and utterly delicious. Sérgio and his entourage were super cool and friendly and fun to hang out with (and he was geeked to see brother Anthony and had high praise for him). I love the white wines of Chapoutier and rarely get to drink them. It was such a thrill to taste such an amazing bottling with Sérgio! Thanks again, Sérgio!

But the wine I can’t stop thinking about this foggy morning in LA (there’s a fog upon LA…) is the 2009 Langhe Bianco by Cavallotto, made from Pinot Nero. Not much of this wine is produced, said my fav LA sommelier and GM at Mozza David Rosoff.

I’ve had some great Langhe Bianco this year, notably from Vajra, Cogno, and Ettore Germano, but this wine simply floored me with its structure and nuance.

In keeping with our tradition of Holocaust humor (one of my all-time favorite posts here at Do Bianchi), I greeted David with a heil myself! I love David and one my new year’s resolutions for 2011 is to spend more time tasting with him. This guy deserves a medal for what he’s doing with Italian wine: his list is the top all-Italian carta dei vini, hands down, in the City of Angels.

Next we headed over to see more Jews at my favorite wine bar in the world, Lou on Vine. Lou is a true rebbe of natural wine and is another one of those folks I just wish Tracie P and I got to see more often.

The squid (above) at the Monday night supper was brilliant.

The rabbit was divine.

I just love everything about Lou on Vine.

How do you like my LA stories? It’s been a long time since I’ve posted in the “de urbe angelorum” category!

My band in a pretty major Google ad campaign launch today

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Yup, that’s me playing a Telecaster…

Whenever I hear one of our old songs in a license or film (and thankfully, that happens often), it always brings back powerful memories of being in the studio and recording. I even remember the sautéed pork chops deglazed with white wine that I cooked for the band the night that we tracked “Allô Allô” in my friend Mike Andrews’s Hollywood Hills studio!

Back then, the band was still called Les Sans Culottes (before the infamous on-stage fish taco fart, the inevitable split in the wake of the fart, the lawsuit, and the dawning of the NN+ era) and since we tracked that song, I must have played it a thousand times live (we used to and still will open the show with it).

Jean-Luc Retard and Céline Dijon wrote the song back in New York City and we recorded the rhythm track in one take. That’s me playing guitar: I played one of Mike’s 70s Telecasters through a Fender Champ (small amps are always the best in the studio). Jon Erickson of Jaynes Gastropub engineered the session and that’s how he and I become friends.

For those of you so inclined, you can hear other tracks from those sessions (Fixation Orale, Aeronaut, 2004) and purchase “Allô Allô” from ITunes by clicking here.

Allô Allô (Hello I Love You) - Fixation Orale

Tracie P and I had have a pretty amazing year professionally, and, wow, this license is the icing on the cake. Suck a lime: I have a whole lot to be thankful for this year.

So many of my dreams have come true in life — opening for Ringo Starr in New York City (!) and a top-10 college radio album have been musical highlights for me… When I left NYC, I thought that all of that joy was behind me. But since I met Tracie P back in 2008, it sometimes feels like the whole world is smiling at me.

Maybe that’s because I’m standing next to a beautiful girl…

Thanks for reading and listening and thanks for all the support for our music over the years!

Parzen Hanukkah (WARNING: CONTAINS EXTREME FUN)

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After being trapped for 1.5 days in the Parzen family web of food, wine, music, and fun, Alfonso was in fine form.

This girl may have grown up in East Texas, but, man, she was born to cook up some mighty fine Jew food!

First things first…

Tracie P’s latkes are amazing… paired SO GOOD with the salty flavors of the newly arrived 2009 Santorini by Sigalas.

Not every Texas brisket is destined to be smoked. Tracie P truly outdid herself last night… served with kasha and lentils…

and fried parsnips… (Jeremy Parsnip?)

And adding a classic dish for Hanukkah from Israel, Tracie P made jelly-filled doughnuts! YES, JELLY-FILLED DOUGHNUTS! Paired with Domaine Cady 2007 Chaume. (Traditionally, fried foods are served during Hanukkah to celebrate the miracle of the oil that lasted 8 days… jives well with Texas cooking!)

Château Pajzos Esszencia 1993 was friggin’ BRILLIANT, our wedding gift from Comrade Howard.

From the Château Pajzos website:

    On top vintages, Chateau Pajzos produces the mythical Esszencia.

    This absolute rarity, gained from the free-run juice of the aszú grapes, is a unique nectar with a honey-like concentration.

    Only 1 liter is produced by 3 tons of aszú berries which represents the production of 10 ha. This wine is the rarest in the world a bottle of 10 cl is the results of one whole hectare.

This wine was one of the most intriguing wines we drank in 2010, with incredible petrol notes on the nose and nutty, earthy tones on the palate, and one of the most captivating finishes I’ve ever experienced in a wine. Incredible… Thank you, again, Comrade Howard, for this amazing gift, shared with people we love…

Happy Hanukkah ya’ll!