Photograph © 2009 George A. Jardine

The last Merlot I was crazy about was also a Switchback Ridge; the ’05 vintage. But I was anxious to get my hands on some of this just-released vintage for two reasons. First, the ’07 vintage was almost universally great all over northern California, and the wine was certain to be fabulous. But perhaps more important to me was that I was lucky enough to have been at Bob Foley’s cellar the morning after the October harvest, and had the pleasure of photographing the destemming of this very vintage of Merlot.

Photographs © 2007 George A. Jardine

There is a lot of sugar here. And that means lots of bees. Bees love the grapes, and are swarming all around the bins during processing. Many of them end up in the wine, but it doesn’t hurt a thing.

The just-picked grapes have a lovely blue color, especially in the morning light.

I think Bob normally does just about everything around the winery himself, including driving his own forklift. He’s on his game and having fun pushing giant bins of grapes around.

Bob likes to drive his own fork lift. Better stand clear!

The process is fairly seamless, but Bob has clearly done this once or twice before. Bob picks up each bin with the forklift, and takes it up to about 15 feet in the air on the way over to the destemmer, and dumps it in.

Bees, stems, leaves… it all goes into la machina.

On a day like this, Kelly Peterson shows up to help and to check out the harvest (it is her family’s wine after all), and Greg Gorman and I just happened to be in the neighborhood, so he puts Greg to work raking the stems out of the destemmer.

Kelly helps gently guide the grapes through the destemmer with a pitchfork.

Bob and Greg examine the stems that come out of the other end. The Healdsburg Machine Co. destemmer doesn’t leave much of anything on the stems, which are recycled back to the farmers as compost.

Not a drop of grape juice is left on the stems after the machine strips all the fruit off.

Every drop of this juice is precious, and is captured and pumped into the fermentation tanks to be held until the actual pressing.

Bob explains a fine point of the process to Greg.

No… we didn’t have to go all morning without breakfast. When we are finished, Bob dishes up some of his just barely fermented ’07 Pinot Blanc. Bob describes his Pinot Blanc as “…a big mouthful of fruit salad.” And a luscious fruit salad it was!

Ummmm… did you rinse out this glass recently, Bob?

And so, after all that, how does the ’07 merlot taste? Pretty darn good, in my book. But this wine is very, very young. Too young to drink, really. When you first pop the cork and pour some into your glass, you get a ripe and lively nose with deep blueberry pie and vanilla notes. On the palate you have bright (but slightly sour!) red cherries, mixed with blueberries and blackberries, that finish into chocolate. This wine is intense and fragrant, with a good acid balance and plenty of tannin. There is no shortage of oak on this wine either, but it’s still an infant, and it appears things will integrate nicely over time. After all, it is a Foley wine. With just a couple of years of bottle age, this wine will undoubtedly round out into a serious and sophisticated contender.

Bob Foley, shaping the taste of fine wine.

The thing that I love about walking into the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver is that, even if I only need to kill a few minutes before an appointment, I know that I’ll probably spot a book that’s worth reading.

And sure enough, the other day I wandered into the Colfax Ave. store and right away the cover of Tom Gjelten’s Bacardi and The Long Fight for Cuba began calling to me from a nearby shelf. I have always wanted to experience (and photograph!) Cuba, so I helplessly began gravitating toward it, arms outstretched. Further, my intense interest in the world of liquors and mixed drinks naturally included rum, so the name Bacardi threw its hooks out to me as well. Like many people, I had no clue that the Bacardi company had its roots deep in Cuban history, so everything about this book conspired to draw me in for the kill.

I barely had it off the shelf, and while reading the subtitle I could feel my credit cards begin to vibrate in my pocket. “A pistol-packing salsa dance of modern history.” Who wouldn’t buy that book? And I wasn’t let down.

Bacardi and The Long Fight for Cuba is a brilliantly woven story of Cuban history as told through the context of the Bacardi family business. And what a brilliant strategy that was. I mean, it’s not like the last 200 years of Cuban history have not been incredibly interesting. But frankly, I’ve bought lots of books like this on the history of various places that intrigued me, and in 9 out of 10 cases I’m asleep 5 minutes into the introduction.

This book is different. The context of the Bacardi family’s struggle to build a world-class business in the face of repeated revolutionary spasms over the generations gives life to both stories. And indeed, they are completely interwoven. The family’s founders were at first torn between loyalty to their ancestral origins in Spain, and the horrific repression with which the Spanish government ran Cuba in the late 1800′s. Eventually the family became revolutionaries themselves, surreptitiously working for a free Cuba as their adopted homeland. So when Castro came along and overthrew the last Spanish dictator, they momentarily saw Castro’s new revolution as a positive thing for Cuba. Eventually the regime’s true colors came out, however, and the Bacardi family business was nationalized.

This is where things get really interesting. How many of us really knew what happened on that island just south of Florida? Gjelten’s finely crafted telling of Castro’s rise to power and the Bacardi company’s eventual success as an international corporation is heartbreaking and invigorating at the same time. And… a very, very good read, while sipping a Papa Doble or an El Presidente made from Bacardi rum.

Marcella Hazan once said of the Italian concept, insaporire, “No matter how alluring the ingredients may be on their own, they must surrender their individual identity for the sake of a more expansive flavor…”

Photographs © 2009 George A. Jardine

It has also been said that insaporire—like the French concept of terrior—does not have an exact translation into the English language, but rather that it is a larger concept, or a method of cooking. The idea of insaporire is generally invoked when describing the transformation that a soffritto undergoes during the preparation of countless Italian dishes, such as a ragù, a brodo, or even a risotto.

So when I first set out to build this dish at home, given that I was not using onion, carrot or celery, and not even starting out with a sauté, the idea of insaporire had not entered my thoughts. But when I first completed it and put a fork-full into my mouth, the term instantly sprang into my mind. It was an explosion of flavor that I was just not expecting from such simple dish.

In my conversations, I’ve variously heard insaporire described as “to add taste” or “to build flavor”. But Hazen expands the concept when she writes that insaporire is all about “the lowering of barriers that confine flavors, the release of flavor that takes place when ingredients intermingle and yield to each other.” And I think this best describes what’s going on in this dish. One would never guess that a simple sauce of tomato, olive, caper and olive oil could have such flavor, but when using quality ingredients, and gently cooking them just to the point of releasing their best flavor, the dish becomes another thing entirely.

Figure roughly one large tomato per serving.

Simply slice up some nice, ripe, organic tomatoes, and arrange them in your favorite baking dish with some sliced olives, capers, a few crushed garlic cloves, a bit of thyme and a sprinkle of oregano. Finally drizzle on a healthy dose of good olive oil, and season with salt and pepper. (Be careful with the salt! In a dish like this, the olives, capers and shredded cheese all bring salt to the party, and it’s easy to over due it.) Roast in the oven uncovered, under high heat until things are bubbling and the tomatoes are soft, but not falling apart. At 400°, that’s probably going to be about 15 – 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, bring some water to a boil and cook your pasta to a fairly firm al dente. The pasta should not be quite finished cooking, because you’re going to finish it in the sauce (this technique should be an entire blog posting all its own…..). Strain the water off of the pasta, and run under cold water to stop the cooking if your tomatoes are not quite done.

When the tomatoes are softened, take the dish out of the oven. Remove the thyme sprigs and garlic cloves, then transfer the rest—olive oil, juices and all— into a 12″ stainless sauté pan. Turn up the heat.

Gently chop up the roasted sauce mixture in a sauté pan over relatively high heat.

Strain the water off of your pasta. When your sauce mixture comes back to a high simmer in the sauté pan, chop up the tomatoes a bit with a spatula, and then add the pasta to the pan. Keep the heat pretty high, and keep things moving around with a pair of tongs, until the pasta is completely cooked and coated with the sauce. If the sauce becomes too tight (and it will, very quickly), or the pasta is not quite cooked at this point, add some white wine or pasta water back into the sauce, lower the heat to very low, and cover for a few minutes. The pasta will finish cooking in the sauce very quickly.

Adding wine here adds acidity, and you may very well already have plenty of acidity from the tomatoes. If you don’t like a really tangy sauce, adding reserved pasta water might be a better choice, but be careful of the salt!

When your pasta is completely coated in the sauce and fully cooked, plate it! Finally, good quality shredded Parmigiano-Reggiano always tops things off nicely.

Finish with a bit of shredded Parmigiano-Reggiano.

I paired this dish with an ’07 MacPhail Anderson Valley “Frattey Shams Vineyard” Pinot, and nearly died and went to heaven.

A big mouth-full of fruit.

Talk about stumbling on a terrific bargain. I walked into one of my favorite little wine shops the other day, and found a line up of 2007 Helfrich wines from France’s Alsatian region that caught my eye. They have a Gewürztraminer, a dry Riesling, and a Pinot Gris, all for under $15.

After having particularly good experiences with recent vintages of somewhat more expensive Sonoma County and Anderson Valley, CA Pinot Gris’, I jumped at the opportunity to taste these bottlings. Good Pinot Gris and Rieslings from CA at times have the somewhat unusual characteristic (for a white wine, anyway…) that they actually improve over a day or two in the fridge after opening. So uncracking the screwtop cap on the Helfrich when it was stone-cold, just out of the fridge and smelling it in the glass, I was pleasantly surprised. Right out of the bottle it had a dense, floral and fruity nose with complex aromatics, that begged me to taste without waiting for it to even get above 40 degrees. And I was not disappointed. On the palate you are immediately rewarded with a mouth-filling fruit that has several intense layers of honeysuckle, ripe apple and apricot. The acid balance is definitely there too, but with so much fruit in your mouth you might not even be thinking about how this wine will pair with food. And of course it does. This Pinot Gris is so interesting that it is great on its own as a sippin’ wine, but also has enough body, acidity and finesse to stand up to strong cheese hors d’œuvre or vinaigrette-based salad starters, and will have absolutely no trouble at all with a fatty roast chicken or pasta dish.

The Helfrich Gewürztraminer and Riesling are similar to the Pinot Gris in style, but I find the Pinot Gris to be the winner here. It’s the boldest. And it makes me think this wine is vinted specifically for the Western market, with its fat, sensuous layers of fruit. It’s almost as big as my favorite new world Pinot Gris, Breggo Cellars’ Anderson Valley bottling. But that’s another review.

Photographs © 2009 George A. Jardine

Making your own fresh pasta for ravioli or agnolotti is not all that difficult, and is well worth the effort. The recipe I’ve worked out is sort of a compromise between a standard one-egg per 3/4 cup flour mixture, and the very rich mixture Thomas Keller calls for in his French Laundry recipe. I’m adding as many eggs to the mixture as I possibly can, and still have it pliable enough to be easy to knead. Adding a tablespoon or so of olive oil helps keep the pasta moist and pliable, too.

Here I’m starting with about two cups of unbleached all-purpose flour, two whole eggs (one yolk broke…) with an additional three yokes, plus a fat tablespoon of good olive oil, just to keep things moist. Keep in mind that you probably won’t need to incorporate all the flour.

Start right on your cutting board or on a marble pastry stone, with the flour forming a bowl to hold the yokes and oil. Use a fork to stir from the center, gradually incorporating flour from the sides of the bowl. When the mass comes together and begins to stick to the fork, switch to a board scraper, and push away the unused flour, incorporating as you go until you have a soft, slightly sticky ball that you can knead without it sticking to your fingers. A great trick is to add tiny amounts of water from a spray bottle if things get too dry. I also find I sometimes have to add more olive oil to achieve the consistency I’m looking for. (Having the right amount of moisture in the dough becomes important when you are rolling it out. More on that later.)

Knead the dough until it is very smooth and supple. Then wrap it up in plastic and throw it into the refrigerator for at least an hour, and up to three hours. (After three or four hours the dough can start to turn gray.) This resting time gives the gluten a chance to relax, and also gives the moisture in the dough time to equalize, allowing all the flour to become hydrated. The resting time also gives you time to set up your pasta machine, mix up your filling, start your sauce, and get some salted pasta water boiling.

My filling here is a mixture of ricotta and parmesan cheeses, sautéed and chopped mushrooms, and blanched and chopped spinach.

Remove the pasta from the refrigerator, cut it in half, and wrap and set half aside for later. Dust everything liberally with flour, and using a pin, roll out half of the dough into a rough rectangle that is no more than 3 inches wide, and about 3/8th’s to 1/4 inch thick. It can be as long as it needs to be… but you don’t want it too wide, as it will gain width when rolling. And you don’t want it too thick, or the rollers will tear it if it is too thick, or too dry.

Dust the rollers with flour, and dust your working surface liberally with semolina flour or corn meal to prevent things from sticking. Set your pasta machine on the widest setting, and roll out your pasta, progressively turning down the screws until it is the thickness you want. For ravioli, I run mine down the the next-to-the-last setting on the KitchenAid, which is “6″. Thinner might be better for agnolotti or plain noodles, but I like the tooth I get from a slightly thicker ravioli.

Lay out those cute little balls of goodness, with just enough room in between each one for a brush loaded up with egg-wash, and room to seal the edges. Once sealed, cut ‘em and cook ‘em.

While they are cooking, I like to finesse my sauce, and bring it up to temperature. I started by cooking the bacon or pancetta bits, pour off 95% of the fat and deglaze with a very light and clear chicken stock (read: homemade…..), then throw in the chopped leeks and red pepper dice, and cook until soft.

I like to get the sauce really rockin hot’ in the pan, and then finish the not-quite-completely-cooked raviolis right there in the sauce. Introducing just a bit of your pasta water into the sauce brings a little starch to the party, and when it thickens, you’re ready to plate it.

Enjoy!

Berkeley Importer Kermit Lynch strikes again with this stunning white wine from the Coteaux du Languedoc. Chateau de Lascaux immediately hits your palate with a wonderful smokey minerality, followed with strong notes of ripe apricots and apple, and then tapers off gently into a long finish revealing an almost perfect acid balance. The beautiful interplay of acid and fruit makes this a fabulous food wine that would easily pair will with hors d’œuvre, chicken dishes or poached or grilled fish. Chateau de Lascaux is a blend of Viognier, Marsanne and Vermentino, with the Viognier bringing its characteristic viscosity, fruit and floral notes, while the Marsanne lends it the stoney minerality.  A killer deal for about $15.

What is good meat? Although that’s the actual heart of the matter that author Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall takes on in this great book, he does not start out with it. Rather, he immediately starts Chapter #1 (“Meat And Right”) with an honest and intriguing inquiry into those gnarly issues that surround the domestication of animals for their meat.

I freely admit that this subject was not top of mind when I began looking for a book to help me gain a better working knowledge of the various cuts of beef and pork. And although a penetrating and intelligent discussion of ethics was not what I expected, after reading just a few paragraphs Hugh had completely captured my attention, and I was hooked. And it makes sense. After all, this is a book that is all about the quality of the meat that we eat. What quality meat is, where it comes from, how to think about it and finally, how to prepare and cook it.

All through my cooking life I’ve been gradually gravitating toward higher and higher quality food. And as I became serious about cooking fine food, my quest for quality ingredients only became more magnified. But all of this seemed to happen without my having a specific story or fully-formed understanding of why quality ingredients mattered. In other words, I began to instinctively feel that I should be buying meat that had been grown using less antibiotics and steroids, but I still would occasionally pick up a sandwich or dinner along the way that I knew to be less than “natural”. I guess I also had the information that large, industrial meat farms were not the most pleasant environments, either for the workers or for the animals raised there. But it all had just not yet crystallized in my mind.

What I did know was that the food world had dramatically changed during my 30-odd years of adult life. When I was first starting to cook in high school, “organic” or “natural” produce meant the small fruit or vegetable that didn’t taste very good, and probably had bugs. Today, I’ve found myself buying exclusively all natural produce and meats, while instinctively leaning toward organic whenever it is available. Why? Because today this is the quality produce. It tastes better!

So while my instinct toward natural and organic meat was slowly becoming more clear, The River Cottage Meat Book came along and snapped it into sharp focus for me. Hugh tells you exactly why pork raised in a factory has a spongy texture, is filled with water, and has absolutely no flavor. He lays out the difference between “good and bad farming”, and backs it up with and a sound explanation of the ethics involved in good animal husbandry, and finally, why it is our responsibility as meat consumers to care, and to do something about it.

Home Cured Pancetta, ala Michael Ruhlman’s Recipe

Refreshing is the best word I can use to sum up this book. After setting the stage for understanding what quality meat is and how it is produced, the author finishes Part One with the more standard textbook material illustrating various cuts of meat and how they are used. Pork, beef, veal, lamb, mutton, poultry and game are all covered in good detail. Part Two of the book is essentially a cookbook, broken out into sections by cooking technique: roasting, slow cooking, fast cooking, barbecuing and preserving techniques are all complimented with multiple recipes.

While I would not rate the recipes in The River Cottage Meat Book to be the most intriguing to my personal style of cooking or entertaining, this book is so solid and unique in its approach, that I recommend it to anyone interested in buying and preparing better meat.

Winner of the James Beard Foundation Award for Cookbook of the Year, 2008.