Rather sour, with a tame astringency, this is a great pairing for pots of beans; simple, light cheeses; rabbit and pork chops.   Nothing too special about it, with the fruit flavors being mostly grapey, with a bit of vague berry and cherry.  The finish is pleasantly toasty with a hint of chocolate beans.  Really, this is a wonderful food wine for the price, able to pair reasonably well with a wide variety of foods.

Standard Method:

1)      Buy the highest quality steak you can splurge on.  You’re going to cook it rare, so it should be great.  These instructions are for grass-fed beef, by the way, which dries out a bit more easily than grain-fed.  Grain-fed beef can be cooked a tiny bit hotter and/or longer.

2)      Preheat your oven to 425 and put on an apron or old clothes.

3)      Rub both sides of the steaks with coarse sea salt.  If it is a filet mignon, rub it with highest-quality butter, too, to help keep it from drying out.  Try Straus: it tastes great, it’s local, it’s sustainable and it has a high smoke point.

4)      Pour a thin layer of grapeseed oil onto a skillet and turn it on high.  You want the oil to get ridiculously hot.  Canola oil is a decent substitute, but don’t use any other type of oil; you need a really high smoke point.  DO NOT USE OLIVE OIL or you will turn everything bitter and fill your kitchen with smoke.

5)      Keep your eyes on the oil and let it heat up to the point that it is just about to start smoking.  It starts to get a bit “shimmery” for lack of a better word.  After doing this once or twice, you’ll get it.  No big deal if a wisp of smoke comes off of the oil, but you must put the steaks in immediately then.

6)      Your goal is only to sear the whole steak shut.  Leave the steak on for about two minutes, depending on its thickness and the heat of the pan.  Flip it and leave the other side on for only one minute.  Sear filet mignon for a bit less.  While each side is cooking, coarsely crack some black pepper on.

7)      Now put the skillet with the steaks into the oven.  Again, depending on thickness, you want to put a filet mignon in for only 4 minutes and other cuts in for about 6 minutes.  Let it sit for 5 minutes before serving.  It still cooks during this time and this ensures that the steak stays juicy after cutting.  Serve with coarsely ground pepper.

8)      All these times depend on the piece of meat, how accurate your oven is and how hot your pan is.  Use a meat thermometer to measure the center and get it right.  Very rare is 100 degrees Farenheit, rare is 120 and medium rare is 126. 

Butter-Grilled  New York Strip

This method may not be too healthy, but it tastes great.

1)      Drop a pound of butter into a heat-safe dish.  Use more or less depending on your steaks and the size of your dish.  Using your stovetop on its lowest setting or your oven on its lowest setting or any other heat source, melt the butter.  You want it warm, but not warm enough to cook meat (100 degrees works well).

2)      Ideally, the  New York strip (also known as Delmonico or entrecote), will sit completely covered in butter, but you may have to flip them regularly if they don’t.  They should be able to sit at least half-covered in butter. 

3)      If they are completely covered, let them sit for half an hour, if they are not fully covered by butter they may need to sit for as long as an hour.  Your goal is to get them warmed up and get the butter into the steak’s grain. 

4)      Meanwhile get the grill going using mesquite hardwood (you can use hickory, if you like, but I prefer mesquite).

5)      Sprinkle coarse sea salt on each side of each steak.  Sear the steaks for about 3 minutes on each side, after the flames have died down.  See above instructions for measuring doneness and serving instructions.

Variation:  For a bit more flavor and doneness, take the steaks off for as brief a time as possible after searing them and cover the mesquite chips with fruitwood branches that have been soaked for half an hour in water (depending on how green they are). Good choices include grapevine trimmings, cherry branches, stone fruit trimmings (like peach and plum) and pomme fruit trimmings (like pear, quince and apple).  Alternatively, you can just drop on soaked mesquite or hickory chips.  If you know someone at a large winery, they may have access to oak cubes, staves or chips that have been sitting in wine or, of course, grapevine trimmings. 

Close the grill and leave the steak in there for 5 to 10 minutes.  This is a good technique for lesser quality meat and less special wines.

Cheers,

Gabriel Froymovich

1)  Aromas of Blueberry or Blueberry Juice almost invariably indicate a syrah or a Rhone Blend.

2)  Full-bodied wines with jammy raspberry or jammy dark fruit, like black plum, cassis or blackberry are likely to be zinfandel.  The jammiest ones are from Dry Creek Valley.

3)  A tea-like taste, accompanied by an astringency that leaves the mouth feeling dry is likely to indicate a Merlot or some Bordeaux.

4)  Bell pepper is a quality found in older and poorly made young Cabernet Sauvignons, Bordeaux and cuvees (blends) of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and/or Cabernet Franc.

5)  Tart cherries, accompanied by black or white pepper, is often indicative of pinot noir from the Russian River Valley.  If it is pinot noir, most of the bitterness will come from the barrels, so the bitterness will correlate to the taste of wood, toast and/or vanilla.

6)  California Chardonnay:  California chardonnays are characterized by heavy barreling and malolactic fermentation.  They will taste of wood, vanilla, toast, cream and butter.  A buttery aroma is a near 100% guarantee.  More expensive chards will have a balance of these flavors and fruit; less expensive chards will have little apparent fruit and taste woody.

7)  Other Oak-y Whites:  Some other whites are oaked, including fume blanc, which is an oaked sauvignon blanc, so watch out.  If the wine is highly acidic, which will taste tart and cause the sides of your mouth to fill with saliva, then you are not tasting a chardonnay and sauvignon blanc is a good guess.

8)  Tropical fruit flavors, high acid and grassy or other green notes indicate a sauvignon blanc, likely from the Marlborough region of New Zealand.

9)  Gewurtztraminer is highly aromatic and known as a spicy white.  The flavors can vary but common ones include litchi, pepper, gingerbread, vanilla and honeysuckle.

10)  Light gasoline, tar and other petroleum product smells from a white wine is almost certain to be a Riesling.

Bonus Tips:  Alcohol tastes sweet, so you can’t taste it in wine.  If you want to guess the level of alcohol in a wine, inhale deeply through your nose.  You can sense it at the top and back of your nose, right your you feel ice cream headaches.  Poorly made wines will seem like they have more alcohol than they actually have.

Acidity provokes salivation in the corners of your mouth.  The most common acidic red is probably Barbera, which will have little bitterness or woody/oaky flavors.

Bitterness is a function of tannin.  It can come from barrels or from grape skins.  The most tannic wines are generally cabernet sauvignon and petite sirah.

Appellation:  The appellation is the indicator of where the grapes came from.  The system for how this is described varies from country to country.  Typically, the more general the appellation, the lower the quality of the wine.  So, a wine labeled as ‘California’ will typically be of lesser quality than a wine labeled ‘Dry Creek Valley.’  The appellation can tell you quite a bit more than general quality, too.  A Dry Creek Valley Zinfandel, for example, can be expected to be high alcohol, full-bodied with a jammy, intense fruit quality.

Varietal:  The type of grape, of course, has a great deal of influence on the taste of the wine.  Remember, though, that it is only one factor, and the other factors can create great differences in the varietal’s expression.  For instance, cabernet sauvignon grown in cooler conditions may have much more vegetal aromas than what you are used to.  Matching varietal to vineyard is incredibly important.

Climate:  The weather patterns of a region, a vineyard, or even a specific row of vines has a great effect on the grapes.  For instance, colder areas tend to create more acidic wines with lower levels of sugar.  Similarly, some areas get more fog, which helps protect more delicate grapes, like pinot.  Temperature can vary by a couple degrees even within a vineyard.  Climate varies a great deal from year to year, which is why some vintages tend to be better than others.

Aspect:  This is the orientation of the grapes to climactic factors, particularly the sun.  A south-southeast facing slope in California will produce grapes with more concentrated flavors, due to sun exposure.

Growing methods:  The way the vineyard manager does his job affects the grapes, of course.  Much of this is somewhat arcane knowledge, but typical issues involve watering schedules, pruning, crop load per acre, training styles and pest control.  Take, for instance, the amount of crop per acre.  If many tons are grown per acre, the wine will have less flavor.  Viticulture is an area where the winemaker also tends to try to exert his or her influence.  One prominent example is the decision on when to pick, based on the taste of the grapes and the amount of sugar in the grapes, which is often a negotiation between the grower and the winemaker, even if they work for the same entity.

Miscellaneous:  There are many minor issues that arise that fit only partly into the above categories.  A common example is the effect (not always negative) that diseases and pests can have.  Picking and sorting of the grapes can also have a significant effect.

In my next entry, I will tell you about the grapes I chose to purchase this year and how all these factors play into that decision in practical terms.

Most of the time, with a small production, the winemakers are sanitizing (cleaning) equipment, which is tedious and boring.  The only interesting thing that can happen during sanitation is to nail someone with a high-pressure spray of 180 degree water, which is the bad kind of interesting.  In fact, not much interesting happens in wine production that is good.  The most exciting thing I’ve ever seen at a winery, was a tank full of hundreds of gallons of chenin blanc explode - again, the bad kind of interesting.

Still, I plan to report on some of the steps in the winemaking process.  Understanding the process of production is one of the best ways to understand wine in general.  After all, the wine production process is the second most important influence upon a wine’s character.  It is also the second influence chronologically.  The influences on a wine, in order of chronology and degree are: viticulture (growing the wine); vinification (producing the wine); storage and transportation of the finished product, whether long-term or short-term; and service (what glass you are drinking from, what you just ate, etc.)

 Most of the work for this harvest season is behind me, but I’ll try to do this chronologically.  The next article will be about procuring and selecting grapes.  

But how do we know if a wine is good, great, outstanding or none of the above? We can rely upon the Wine Spectator or Robert Parker, the most influential wine critic of all, to tell us which wine is best or measure quality by the price of the wine as a function of demand. There is no guarantee, however, that these guides will lead us to a wine for our own palate. In any case, what is the point of using prices or reviews as guides without an understanding of the criteria upon which they are judged?

Parker readily admits, in the movie Mondo Vino, that he simply rates whichever wines he likes with a high score. He makes no claim to be objective, beyond the principles of blind tasting, nor does he claim that his palate is in any way more valid than someone else’s when making a subjective determination. We can assume that he has a better shot than any of us at estimating alcohol levels or picking out which two glasses of a series of glasses are the same wine, but his opinions about which wines are good may not be much more useful to you the opinion of your son used to drinking boxed Franzia in his dorm room.

The use of price as the final arbiter of quality was the method of the 1855 classification of Bordeaux. The wine traders of Bordeaux rated the chateaux of the region by price, separating them into first through fifth growths, with only four chateaux being listed as fifth growth, though Chateau Mouton-Rothschild was promoted to this category in 1973. This notable promotion aside, the classification is essentially static. Yet it is still a great influence on the prices of Bordeaux, though many Americans would find little to love in some of these incredibly expensive bottles. How likely would you be to purchase a $300 bottle, which you would have to age at least a decade, only to find that it may still be too acidic or tannic and that this wine is nothing like the fruit-driven Australian and Californian wines you love so much?

So are there some solid, unchanging principles that indicate that a wine is of quality? Karen MacNeil, author of The Wine Bible, dedicates a section of her book to explaining what she believes these principles to be. She includes varietal characteristic, harmony, expressiveness, connectedness, integration and complexity. According to her, even if you don’t like a wine, you can, if trained well enough, determine its quality, which is not subjective.

The staff at University of California at Davis, the greatest wine research center in the country and maybe the world, generally disagrees. According to them, wine tastes are a fashion with styles coming and going and high-dollar fads like heavily-oaked chardonnays, older-vintage ports and merlot-based blends from Pomerol all eventually fade.

Since many centuries before the 1855 classification, the Greeks, with their ancient love of wine, have enjoyed retsina, an aromatized wine treated with pine resin during fermentation that would cause most of the world’s wine critics to gag.

I conducted a blind-tasting experiment at my own home with a group of low-budget wine drinkers, who rarely consume something that is worth more than $8 a bottle. Those wines which would score highest among critics were consistently beaten out by wines that are distinctly flawed. I’ve also noticed that when selling wine, the more a consumer knows about a wine, the more the wine is appreciated as a good wine when it is drank.

So, after all this flip-flopping about what makes a good wine, what is my answer? What makes a wine great is the joy that it brings. For me, wine usually brings me joy because of its appeal to all of my senses, with my sensual faculties as the judge of that. Wine can also provide a particularly pleasant intoxication, which is also a definite factor. Of course, a wine can pin together a good dinner and, together with good company, can play an important part in creating some of the most memorably happy times of my life.

Not that there is any shame in buying a wine for reasons other than the taste. For my parents’ anniversary, for example, I wouldn’t buy them a $12 bottle of Argentinean Malbec, no matter how good it tastes, even if I know they would love it. Why give them wine that is made on a large scale with little of the love that they feel for each other and no association with the festivity of a wedding anniversary? No, I am almost certainly going to give them a bottle of sparkling wine, likely Champagne. They know what Dom Perignon is, and revere it as something special. On the other hand, they would be delighted by an Iron Horse Wedding Cuvee, though they have never heard of Iron Horse, because it tastes great and has an appropriate name. In either case, I think that I, my parents, Robert Parker and price lists would agree that these are high-quality wines, perfect for two people celebrating a wedding anniversary.

Let me know what you think makes a good wine…

I saw berries that I did not recognize.  Their taste was most similar to an odd berry that would grow long, to about the size of a child’s finger, that I found in India, but only in one specific spot outside of the town of Rishikesh; it was sold at a relatively exorbitant price.  These ones at Maket Hall Produce were labelled as bushberries, grown in California, though the receipt listed them as black raspberries.

I did some research and found that bushberry is basically an overarching term for any berries that grow on bushes like raspberries, blackberries, thimbleberries, etc.  So they were bushberries, but what kind?   Black raspberries taste nothing like raspberries or blackberries, which fit this case, but they don’t grow in California.  Finally, I pinpointed the taste, like something between grape gummy candies and artificial blue raspberry flavoring.  Further research indicates that they are blue raspberries, also known as blackcap or whitebark raspberries or, confusingly, sometimes also called black raspberries.  They are delicious and should be tried.  I never knew that blue raspberries were real, and am even more surprised that the artificial flavoring is a decent approximation of the real thing.

The other “fake” fruit I bought that day was a pint of “champagne grapes.”  They’re little tiny, seedless, purple grapes on small-stemmed, tight, but large clusters.  They are nothing like real Champagne grapes, which are primarily pinot noir, pinot meunier and chardonnay.  Though they are a bit more difficult to eat than large grapes and not nearly as pleasing to bit into, but the taste is worth it.  This was the final of my fake fruit quandaries; they are called “champagne grapes” as nothing more than a disingenuous marketing tool.  They are actually an ancient Greek cultivar, known as Black Corinth.

How much time do you spend wandering through the boxes of wines at Jackson’s Wine & Spirits or debating between a $10 and $16 bottle at BevMo wondering if it’s worth the extra $6? Too bad there’s no public agency to evaluate wine and spirit deals in Lamorinda.

Now there is. The Lamorinda Wine Society is delivering unbiased appraisals of the wine deals in Lafayette, Moraga and Orinda. We scour the local wine shops for the best deals on wine and spirits and find out about local events. Check out our deals below and then read a bit about us.

Take a peek at our Wine School and The Notebook, full of information on many aspects of the world of wine and spirits. The Kitchen is where we keep our food-related articles. Information on the wine shops mentioned can be found at the end of this document.

Top Red Wine

Querceto L’Aura Chianti Classico

Full of black cherry and black plum, this wine has a great backbone. A wonderful accompaniment to red meat, which really brings out its earthy notes. As the wine opens up it becomes considerably more generous and supple. Finding a great Chianti Classico for this price is nearly impossible. Here’s a great one, just make sure to give it time to open up by decanting it and then pouring small pours into large glasses at least a few minutes before serving.

Top White Wine

2006 Dancing Coyote Albarino

This is an amazing wine for the price. Though it is full-bodied, it is also very crisp, with fresh acidity and a fruity aroma. Like a bowl of lemons and passionflower. The interesting duality of being crisp enough to go with seafood, yet full-bodied makes it ideal for scallops, lightly sauteed in butter; buttered swordfish steaks. It is also versatile enough to pair with both oysters and heavy cheeses.

Top Spirit

Prunier Axel Gay

Prunier is not one of the best known of the Cognac houses, but their Axel Gay Cognac, from 100% Grande Champagne grapes, is phenomenal, as good as many Cognacs two or three times its price. Many Jackson’s regulars already know about this great find, because they push it, and deservedly so. Currently, Bevmo has it for a bit less than Jackson’s.

How it works:

Please note that we do not include deals that are simply lower prices or sales on commonly known wines and spirits. For instance, Silver Oak is a well-known winery and we will not include a $55 bottle of Silver Oak in our deals, just because it is the best price in Lamorinda. Similarly, we will not carry items like Wild Turkey, just because it is on sale for $14 somewhere. Instead, we try to bring you deals that are a bit harder to find than just comparing prices. Please let us know if you find something we have here for cheaper at another source in Lamorinda.