Oh Give Me A Rhone…

Rhone wine is a hot commodity these days, and with good reason: they taste great and they are often half the price of wines with equivalent quality from higher profile areas. For every $50 California Cab I can show you a handful of Rhone wines priced $25 and under, so if you’re looking to include some wines in your gift giving (even if that means giving to yourself), let me offer some pointers about one of my favorite wine regions.

First, the Rhone (or more properly, the Rhône) refers to both a river and the wine-growing region along the banks of the river’s long valley in the South of France. The Rhone begins in Switzerland, but the wine lover’s area of interest starts somewhere south of Lyon (very close to Burgundy) and heads south through the great cities of Arles and Avignon to empty into the Mediterranean around Marseilles. For us wine lovers there are two Rhones, the northern Rhone where Syrah predominates, and the southern Rhone. A classic Northern Rhone wine is Côte Rotie, made only from Syrah – its name means “roasted slope,” a reference to all the sun on the vineyards. Further south, Grenache, Mourvedre and other grapes put in an appearance, most notably in the wines of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, so named because in the 13th century the papal court relocated to Avignon, thus the “new chateau of the pope.”

Last Christmas I was in Paris for a few days and stopped by a wonderful wine shop called “La Dernièr Goutte,” which means “the last drop.” It’s a quirky, personable shop owned by Juan Sanchez, who moved to Paris from Miami ten years ago and is now one of the city’s wine stars. The night I went three winemakers were in the small Caves, each conducting a tasting in a space hardly bigger than a closet. It was drizzling outside and one of them, Jean-Paul Jamet, offered me a glass of his Côte-Rôtie with the admonition, “It’s the perfect wine for winter.” He nodded sagely when I agreed and suggested it was pretty good just about any time of year. “Yes, Syrah offers much to love” he said and winked.

I can’t disagree, but I also like the elegant blends from the Southern Rhone. Benchmark wines like Côte-Rôtie, Hermitage and Châteauneuf-du-Pape have been attracting new levels of interest among wine lovers seeking a new tasting experience. I noticed that at the major Hong Kong wine auction earlier this month, Rhône wines brought in some of the highest prices of the event. Clearly, the Asian market is moving past its fascination with high-ticket wines from Bordeaux and Burgundy.

That isn’t to say there aren’t great deals to be found in the Rhône – there’s plenty for those of us with a normal wine budget, starting with the $10 price tag attached to many wines called “Côtes-du-Rhône.” These come from vineyards scattered over a huge area, and the quality depends on the person who blends the wines. Some of my favorite producers are Delas, Chapoutier and Jaboulet, whose Parallele 45 is a consistently successful blend of Syrah and Grenache and can be found for about $8 if you catch it on sale.

I like wines a bit more intense than the average Cotes-du-Rhône, so I look for the wonderful middle tier where the wines are named after specific villages, each with their own character. Vacqueras in the South is hard to say but easy to recognize on a shelf; St. Joseph and Cornas, both in the North, are easier to pronounce and just as appealing in the glass. Jean-Luc Colombo makes a Cornas priced under $40 that is a joyful addition to any holiday table.

Once you get into Rhone wines you will discover there are dozens of producers and while you can always rely on any wine from one of the super-negociants (or blenders) of the region like Guigal or Chapoutier, your best bet is to find a retailer you like, someone who is as good at listening to you as at telling you what you ought to like, and build a relationship. Create a dialogue, try wine and report back on what you liked and didn’t, and soon you’ll have a wine coach who knows your taste and makes recommendations of wonderful wines before anyone else encounters them. Finding that person might just be the best gift of the season for any wine lover.

Three Little Pigs

The one question about wine I’m asked more than any other is “What’s your favorite wine?” The second most frequently posed question is “What wine do I have with…”? The first question is impossible to answer (I like a lot of wines), and the second question, I suggest, is mis-phrased. I think the real question should be “I have this wine I want to try – what food goes with it” rather than the other way around.

Many once unyielding rules have been dismissed by modern wine lovers who have learned to drink the wines they like with the foods they like, assuming the sum of two pleasures has to be a good thing. In fact, there are reasons for some of the wine world’s rules, many of which are based on chemistry; it’s a lot easier to remember a few simple rules than the science behind them. Unfortunately, not knowing the chemistry, it’s easy to misunderstand the rule. Let’s think of the adages as guidelines and not rules – they’ll come across as a lot more flexible.

I put the wine first because basically wine doesn’t change the taste of food, but food very definitely can change the taste of a wine. Take the old adage of white wine with fish and red wine with meat – a tannic red that is savory on its own will taste positively bitter and metallic with many fish, where (here comes the chemistry) there is neither fat not salt to balance the tannin. Cab with sushi? Disaster. Less tannic Pinot Noir with sushi? A little better, but the acidity can still be a problem. Non-tannic and fruity Riesling with sushi? Heaven. A lot of food and wine pairing guidelines are really aimed at preserving all the deliciousness of the wine on which you’ve spent your hard earned resources. I experienced a great case in point the other night.

For the past three years my friend Jamie Futscher and I have collaborated on and auction lot for the Miami Wine & Food Festival. Jamie is the wine buyer for Sunset Corners Fine Wine and Liquors and the possessor of an excellent palate. She’s also a wonderful cook and someone had the idea that given my background as a restaurant critic and Jamie’s as a sometime caterer, wouldn’t it be fun to pit us against each other – not only our cooking but our presumed skills at pairing wine and food. The resulting “competition” that for some reason has come to be called the “Wine Nuts Throwdown” surprised both of us in not only selling for a good price at the annual charity auction, but each year selling twice to meet the spirited (and let’s be honest, the spirit-fueled) demand.

Last Friday we prepared the first of the two dinners sold at the 2012 auction at the home of one of the festival’s patrons and a much admired wine collector. Given that our host had doing some autumn cleaning of her cellar, she came up with a number of wonderful wines that were each the last bottle of their kind in her collection. There were two wines from Sine Qua Non, the quirky Central Coast cult winery where Manfred Krankl indulges his passion for Rhone-style wines that are seldom made the same way twice. There were two 1995 Bordeaux, a pair of Champagnes (one in magnum, which definitely changes the wine’s profile over time), an American pinot noir, a bottle of the cult cabernet

Screaming Eagle, an extraordinarily well aged Port from a great vintage and a few other treasures. Our challenge was to find food to pair with the wines rather than the other way around. I’ll talk about some of our pairings and offer some wine tasting notes in future posts, but want to focus here on one in particular.

“Three Little Pigs”

A great example of “thinking outside the bottle” was finding a pairing for Jamie’s “Three Little Pigs,” pork belly cooked three ways. Each of the three approaches to the fatty meat had a degree of sweetness and that vagueness that always plagues pork – is it a red or white meat? The meat leans toward white, but the treatments, all three of which involved Asian flavors, varying amounts of spice and sweetness and pan searing, pushed the meat more toward the red end of the spectrum. Jamie and I independently arrived at the same solution: a wine with the good acidity and mineral flavor of a white wine, but a dense texture more typical of red and a hint of sweetness to balance the sweetness of the meats. The host had the perfect wine right there in the cabinet – a rich, almost unctuous Pinot Gris from Alsace. In the hands of a winemaker like Olivier Humbrecht, this Pinot Gris from the Grand Cru Heimbourg vineyard ends up almost oily in texture, with a ripe floral bouquet (a perfect foil for the Asian spices) and a bit of sweetness that, far from being cloying (as it might have been on its own) helped the wine stand up to the fat and to the sweetness of the glaze on the pan-seared pork belly.

On paper, I like pinot noir and Beaujolais with pork, but you can’t eat paper. You need to look at the ingredients in the food, abandon preconception about meat needing heavy wines and think instead about the basics – sweet, sour, salty, bitter and that most elusive of taste sensations, umami, the savory quality of food. In this case, all the taste elements came together by going with a white wine rather than a red. There were great reds on the table that night, but none would have gone with Jamie’s Three Little Pigs as well as the Pinot Gris. Or, more to the point, none of our other dishes would have gone as well with the Pinot Gris as did the pork.

I love the mysteries of how wine and food go together, and the only way to find ethereal pairings like this one is to practice, practice, practice. It may wreak havoc on your diet and cause you to reevaluate your exercise program, but it’s just about as much fun as a wine lover can possibly have.

Summer Wine for Summer Time

The next Wine Walk & Shop is coming up July 10 – Don’t Miss It!

For our Summer Wine Walk & Shop on Miracle Mile, retailer Jeffrey Wolfe and Miami Wine & Food Festival Director Lyn Farmer have gathered a collection of wines that are ideal for a warm summer evening. Our tasting begins at Seasons 52 restaurant with Honig Sauvignon Blanc, a beautiful and elegant wine from Napa Valley that Stephanie Honig describes as, Juicy, refreshing, (and) medium bodied” filled with “aromas of honeysuckle, grapefruit, and lemongrass mingled with mango, kiwi, peach, and grapefruit rind.” It’s a veritable fruit cup waiting to start you off on our tasting.

Next comes Vietti’s Arneis, a lovely and slightly floral white wine from Italy’s Piedmont Region. In an area best know for red wine, this is a white that has a lot of character; it’s crisp and refreshing and, if you haven’t encountered Arneis before, you are in for a treat. After the Arneis, our wine tour on the Mile takes you to Argentina and the country’s iconic white wine, Torròntes. This very aromatic wine smells juicy but is wonderfully crisp and dry in the mouth. The Coqueña winery is in Salta in the far north of Argentina where the Torròntes flourishes in high altitude vineyards. It’s very elegant and, dare we say, downright sexy.

At our next stop we start our transition to red wine with a beautiful rosé from Spain. Bodegas Muga produces an outrageously good dry rosé from a blend of both red and white grapes: Garnacha, Viura and Tempranillo. It gets just a kiss of oak from two months of barrel age so it stays fresh and delightful.

The first of our red wines is from Sicily, a region that, like South Florida, knows how to stay refreshed in warm weather. COS is a winery that is getting rave reviews for all its wines, and especially for a delightful red made from the indigenous grape called Frappato. One reviewer said this wine made her want to “call all your friends and invite them to come round to share the pleasure.” Come to think of it, that’s what we’re doing with Frappato at our Wine Walk.

The next red wine is from Northern California’s Edmunds St. John winery located just north of San Francisco. Winemaker Steve Edmunds is making a delicious wine from the Gamay grape, the same grape used in France to make Beaujolais. His wine, called “Bone Jolly,” has lots of fruit and a hint of black pepper; it is, Steve says, “fun to drink and complex at the same time.”

Our final red before the sparkling finale is a beautiful Malbec from Argentina. Tikal’s “Natural” Malbec is made with organic fruit to produce a very pure, natural expression of all the blackberry and mocha flavors for which Malbec is so popular. What I love about this wine is its balance – it feels big and opulent but isn’t over the top or jammy, it is just fruit and elegance in a glass.

We wrap up on Wine Walk & Shop at Wolfe’s Wine Shoppe where owner Jeffrey Wolfe will be pouring an exceptional Champagne, Chartogne-Taillet’s Cuvée Ste.-Anne. This is one of the currently fashionable “grower Champagnes,” produced by a family that grows all their grapes and makes all their own wine. It is a stunning Champagne and a great way to end the Wine Walk. Except that isn’t really the end: when you’ve finished your taste of Champagne, feel free to purchase any of the wines you’ve tasted on the Wine Walk – Jeffrey has them all at a special discounted price for our imbibing strollers. Then, collect your gift bag and head across the street from Wolfe’s to Angelique’s Euro Café where many of the wines on the tour are featured and available for a dinner with other tasters you’ve met along the way. And don’t worry – when you arrive for the tasting, go ahead and valet your car at Seasons 52 – it will still be delivered to you at Angelique whenever your are ready to wrap up your evening. All in all, we’re expecting to have a great time – I hope you can join us

Lyn Farmer, Wine Lover and Director, Miami Wine & Food Festival