Tag Archives: Orange Wine

Pork chops with braised fennel (recipe) and 2005 Vodopivec Vitovska

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I’m adding a new category to the blog today: de arte copulandi vinorum…

Photos by Tracie P.

1 bulb fennel, washed and trimmed
2 cloves garlic, peeled
extra-virgin olive oil
kosher salt
1 cup white wine
1 cup chicken stock
2 porter house pork chops, about ½ inch thick

Slice the fennel vertically into rounds about ¼ inch thick.

In a wide sauté pan, heat 3 tbsp. olive oil over medium heat. When smoke begins to rise from the pan, add 1 clove garlic. When the garlic has begun to brown, add the fennel rounds, sprinkle with salt, and brown on both sides.

Deglaze with ½ cup white wine. When the alcohol has evaporated, add ½ cup chicken stock and simmer over low heat until the cooking liquids have reduced by half. Transfer the fennel to a mixing bowl, discard the garlic, filter the sauce using a fine strainer, and add the sauce to the bowl. Reserve.

Preheat oven to 200° F.

Gently season the pork chops with salt on both sides.

Add 3 tbsp. olive oil to the same pan used to braise the fennel and brown the remaining garlic clove over high heat. Add the pork chops and brown on both sides (n.b.: it’s important to brown the pork quickly over high heat; they don’t need to cook through).

Once browned on both sides, transfer the pork chops to an oven-ready dish and cover with aluminum foil; transfer to the pre-heated oven.

In the meantime, add the remaining wine to the pan over medium heat. When the alcohol has evaporated, add the remaining stock, the reserved fennel and its sauce, and reduce to desired consistency. Remove the fennel from the pan and reserve and then filter the sauce using a fine strainer (n.b.: in the time that it takes you to reduce the sauce, the pork chops will have cooked through).

Arrange the pork chops on a serving dish and then top with the braised fennel and sauce.

The tannin of the skin-contact, amphora-aged Vitovska was ideal with the fatty, juicy chops and its nutty fruit flavors the perfect complement to the sweetness and tang of the fennel.

Buon weekend, yall!

Peepaw drinks some orange wine (in Orange, Texas)

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lunar

Above: Tracie B’s peepaw (grandfather) turned 90 this month. He and meemaw still live in Orange, Texas where Tracie B grew up. He tasted Movia’s Lunar with us over the Christmas holiday — orange wine in Orange, Texas on the Lousiana border!

This morning, when I read McDuff’s fantastic post about drinking Lunar under a full moon on New Year’s eve and his excellent treatment of the importance of the cycle of the moon in the discourse of natural and biodynamic winemaking, I couldn’t help but remember that we opened a bottle of the same wine, the 2005 Lunar by Movia, with Tracie B’s family in Orange, Texas over the Christmas holiday.

lunar

Above: Tracie B and I shared our bottle of Lunar with the B family as Tracie B was preparing her dumplings for the chicken and dumplings we ate the night after Christmas day.

I highly recommend McDuff’s post to you. And while not everyone is as crazy about Movia’s Lunar as McDuff and I are, it’s worth tasting: whether you enjoy it or not, it pushes the envelope of natural winemaking in unusual and perhaps unexpected directions. I, for one, enjoy it immensely and prefer not to decant it (although winemaker Aleš Kristančič recommends decanting). Peepaw and meemaw both seemed to enjoy it…

In other news…

fellini

Above: Tracie B and I agreed that we would have been better off going to see the new Chipmunks movie instead of the lame excuse for a movie otherwise known as Nine.

I’m going to break my rule of never speaking about things I don’t like here and tell you that the new movie Nine (a musical about the life of Federico Fellini) is a travesty, a lame excuse for a movie, and is wholly offensive to the grand tradition of Italian cinema and one of its greatest maestri, indeed one of the greatest filmmakers and artists of the twentieth century, Federico Fellini.

Here are some of the more awful lines from the movie, sung by Kate Hudson (fyi, Guido Contini is the name of the Fellini character played by Daniel Day-Lewis).

    I love the black and white
    I love the play of light
    The way Contini puts his image through a prism
    I feel my body chill
    gives me a special thrill
    each time I see that Guido neo-realism

It makes me wanna HEAVE. The folks who wrote and made this movie should be ashamed of themselves and should be barred from the movie industry entirely: there is no book to speak of, the songs and lyrics were seemingly written as a high-school drama class project, and the premise (Contini’s inescapable and pseudo-Italianate womanizing as an aesthetic disease) is entirely offensive to the Italian nation and its grand historic artistic sensibility — whether figurative or literary.

There’s no doubt in my mind that I would have found more aesthetic reward and intellectual enjoyment if we had gone to see the new Alvin and the Chipmunks movie, which was screening in the theater next to ours.

Best definition of “orange wine” out there?

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There really is no exact nor canonical definition of “orange wine” out there. But the best attempt to define the often murky and cloudy stuff was scribed by the inimitable Thor Iverson here.

Eric was at the same dinner described by Thor, as was Alice.

One thing you can say for certain about orange wine is that even though there is no succinct, clear cut definition of what it is, you definitely know when you’re drinking it!

Vin Santo: an overlooked “orange” wine? (and a more likely explanation of its name)

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vin santo

Above: Ale posted photos of grapes (Trebbiano and Malvasia) being laid out to dry on reed mats for the Vin Santo that he and his father are making this year.

Scanning my Google Reader feed this morning, I came across these posts by my friend Ale in Sant’Angelo in Colle. He and his father grow Sangiovese and make Brunello di Montalcino for one of the oldest — and one of my favorite — producers in the appellation, Il Poggione.

vin santo

Above: The mats are then hung in the vinsantaia, an attic used especially for the drying of the grapes. Windows on either side of the space allow for ventilation that helps to limit humidity during drying.

Reading his descriptions of harvesting and drying grapes for the production of Vin Santo, it occurred to me that Vin Santo is an “orange” wine. There is no canonical definition of “orange wine,” even though a new “orange wine” movement has clearly emerged among European winemakers, mainstream wine writers, fringe wine bloggers (like me), enthusiasts, and lovers. Vin Santo is generally not made using skin contact during fermentation (one of the fundamental techniques employed in the production of orange wine). But there is no denying that Vin Santo is orange in color.

The rich orange color of Vin Santo is created by the drying of the grapes and by intentional oxidation of the wine.

vin santo

Above: Specially sized caratelli (literally, “small casks”) are used for aging. Many believe that the size of the barrels is one of the keys to the unique flavors and aromas of Vin Santo.

The earliest documented printed reference to Vin Santo is found in Giovanni Cosimo Villifranchi’s Oenologia Toscana (1773). In 1605, Sir Robert Dallington mentions a wine called Zibibbo, which was “dried for Lent” and could possibly be a reference to Vin Santo (see his entire description of grape growing and winemaking in Tuscany here).

Many claim that the name Vin Santo (literally, “holy wine”) was coined in the 15th century when Greek humanist Basilios Bessarion tasted the wine and compared it to the wines of Xantos (see also this entry on Bessarion in the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia). Supporters of the theory maintain that he liked it so much, he exclaimed “Xantos!” and those present understood him to say “Santo!” But I doubt this is the case.

I’ve heard some say that the name is inspired by the fact that Vin Santo can go through a second fermentation in the spring when temperatures rise in the vinsantaia. Like Christ, the wine “rises again.” I doubt this is the case but Dallington’s reference to Lent leads me to believe that dried grape wines were associated directly or indirectly with Easter in his time.

In 1773, Villifranchi writes: “The name that is given by us today to this ‘Vino di Santo’ is believed by some to be owed to Ancoret saints* and the Monks of Soria [Spain] who originally made wine in this manner.” He adds that “others believe that this name derives from the fact that the grapes are typically pressed during the period of the Christmas holidays.”

Whether you call Vin Santo an orange wine or not, it would seem to pass muster with the natural wine dogmatists. Using a “mother” yeast to start fermentation is a sine qua non of Vin Santo production: after pressing, sediment is scraped from a cask from a previous vintage and then added to the newly pressed juice to initiate fermentation. That’s how they’ve been making Vin Santo for centuries (or at least since Villifranchi first described methods of vinification employed in his day).

The only difference is that in Italy, they don’t call it “natural wine.” They just call it wine.

Look for more on Sir Robert in upcoming posts and check out this cool video posted by Ale on his blog today:

* “The recluses of the East in the early Christian centuries” (OED).

Orange wine awaits at the beach

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Above: Not everything we’re going to taste in San Diego on Sunday at Jaynes Natural Wine Summit will be as orange and cloudy as this Picrate (Chenin Blanc from the Loire) that Alice, Tracie B, and I shared last February in Paris.

Seems that everyone who is someone is talking about “orange wine” these days. Last week Eric and Alice attended an “orange wine” dinner in Tudor City (Manhattan) and posted these excellent dispatches respectively, here and here.

Just like the ongoing discussion of what can truly be called “natural wine,” I’m sure some will disagree as to what “orange wine” is exactly but the generally accepted defining element is skin-contact (maceration) during fermentation of otherwise white grapes. Not all the wines included in the “orange” genre undergo maceration but there is most definitely an orange revolution afoot.

Not all the wines Tracie B and I will be tasting on Sunday at the first-ever San Diego Natural Wine Summit at Jaynes Gastropub will be as orange as the Picrate (in the photo above) but there are 29 — yes, count ’em — 29 superbly stinky, natty wines* for your tasting pleasure, paired with Jayne’s “farm to table” menu and DJ Greyboy’s “rare grooves.”

Above: This weekend, Tracie B and I will most definitely be hitting our favorite San Diego taco shack, Bahia Don Bravo. Natural wine and fish tacos, anyone? Yummmmmmm…

If you happen to be in town, please come by to see me, Thursday through Saturday nights at Jaynes and don’t miss the Natural Wine Summit on Sunday!

All of the wines we’ll be tasting on Sunday will be available for purchase at my new snazzy site, 2bianchi.com. Check it out if you have a moment and thanks for reading and for your support! Hope to see you in SD!

And remember, Stay classy, San Diego…

* The expression natty wines was happily coined by my Nous Non Plus bandmate Bonnie Day on our 2009 California mini-tour. I’ve got to be the only wine blogger in the world that uses footnotes, right? ;-)