This just in from David and Katie Pitre (below), owners of Tecolote Farm and 2010 Texas delegates to the Salone del Gusto in Turin.
First photo from a dinner with the farmers cooperative group from
Cuneo, Piedmont last night…
And the second photo of Alice Waters addressing the American delegates today at Terra Madre. Carlo Petrini says we’ll have a Terra Madre gathering in the US next year. All is going well.
Third photo taken at Eataly today, we’ll have to try this Treviso variety next year!
Above: Kermit debuted his new album last month in San Francisco at the Great American Music Hall, paired with a menu by Alice Waters.
It’s a funny thing about the food and wine world: so many of the folks I know who work as food and wine professionals have at some point in their lives played music professionally and/or have worked in some capacity of the music industry (myself included!).
When Kermit Lynch called me over the summer, asking me to help him put together a listening party here in Austin, I jumped at the chance: as it turns out, Kermit Lynch “rocker interrupted” and I share a lot of the same tastes in rootsy, Amerciana music and when he sent me a copy of his new disk Man’s Temptation I was blown away by the musicianship and the soulful, gravelly voice behind the microphone. (I wrote a review of the CD here.)
I’ll be presenting Kermit, together with his producer Ricky Fataar, and talking to them about Man’s Temptation as we a few of Kermit’s wines on Monday, November 9 at Vino Vino here in Austin (click for details) and Wednesday, November 11 in Nashville at the Basement, where Kermit’s entire band will also be joining us (see Nashville details below).
I know Ricky’s music through his performances with Bonnie Raitt, John Scofield, and Boz Scaggs but, being the Beatlesmaniac that I am, I am most geeked to ask him about The Rutles and the film All You Need Is Cash, the original mockumentary in which he played George’s counterpart.
You may remember how Kermit and I met, like so many cool things in my life, through the blog.
Earlier this year, Kermit left a comment on a post I wrote about tasting Bandol as Tracie B and I watched American Idol and ate Tracie B’s excellent nachos.
Here are details for Nashville:
AN EVENING WITH KERMIT LYNCH
Listening Party and Wine tasting
@ The Basement
1604 8th Avenue South
Nashville, TN
5 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
$20 (ticket price includes 1 glass of wine)
Above: “Heirloom Radish Salad” at the girl & the fig restaurant last night in downtown Sonoma was delicious (although I regretted taking our server’s advice on freshly cracked pepper).
It strikes me as incongruous that the people who live in Napa and Sonoma are such fierce champions of unadulterated, pure, wholesome ingredients in their food and yet still favor big, oaky, concentrated, tannic Cabernet Sauvignon in their glass.
Above: This Californiano-turned-Tejano couldn’t resist the Texas Burger (topped with jalapeño, guacamole, and salsa) at Taylor’s Automatic Refresher in St. Helena. And who can say no to Chili Cheese Fries?
On the one hand, they favor locally grown ingredients that reflect the colors and flavors of their land and their approach to cooking — à la Alice Waters and Jeremiah Tower — leans heavily toward the simple and direct, with immediate flavors and textures playing the starring role (e.g., the heirloom radish salad above).
And on the other hand, my countrymen speak proudly of the sledge-hammer flavors of their Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, the buttery texture of their Chardonnay (so much of Napa Chardonnay taste more like Napa than Chardonnay to me). I’ll have a lot more to say on this when I can post unhurriedly next week.
Above: There’s no denying it… Tadeo Borchardt makes excellent terroir-driven expressions of Chardonnay at Neyers Vineyards in Napa. We truly enjoyed the wines (despite my previous but as-of-yet not entirely unresolved misconceptions and prejudices about Californian wines in general).
Tracie B and I agreed, however, that we found “terroir” (and the purposeful use of inverted commas here will become more apparent in an upcoming post) when we tasted yesterday with the winemaker of Neyers Vineyards, Tadeo Borchardt, whose single-vineyard Sonoma Coast Chardonnays were excellent — and the Thieriot, in particular, was superb. The company I work for represents Neyers’s wines in Texas and so we had been invited to tour the winery and taste all the wines side-by-side. Tadeo’s winemaking style (minimal intervention and ambient yeasts only) marries well with the cool microclimate of the Sonoma Coast growing sites and tasting the wines side-by-side revealed, in fact, just how site-specific each expression of Chardonnay actually was. We looked at each other and agreed that we had found California terroir.
Only one problem: we (personally) can’t afford it.
So little time now and so much to say. We just got to San Francisco and we’re running out the door to taste at Terroir Natural Wine Merchant and then to the Kermit Lynch dinner.
I know Ricky’s music through his performances with Bonnie Raitt, John Scofield, and Boz Scaggs but, being the Beatlesmaniac that I am, I am most geeked to ask him about The Rutles and the film All You Need Is Cash, the original mockumentary in which he played George’s counterpart.
Do Bianchi 