Floridians are not used to this type of weather. When I arrived at the Bistro yesterday morning it was less than 50 degrees inside. I pumped up the thermostat to no avail…the heater wasn’t starting. I’m smart enough to check the pilot but it turns out this furnace doesn’t have a gas pilot light.
Luckily, I have some considerate HVAC friends that came to my rescue. Bill Hogle from Hogle’s Heating and Air (click for more info), arrived at the Bistro in no time. Quite a testament due to the amount of calls they have received since the cold weather moved into Florida and everyone realizing that their heaters were not working. Bill located the problem and replaced the thermostat. Bingo was his name-o!!!
We have HEAT and it’s a beautiful thing!!!
No matter how cold it is outside the Bistro is toasty and it’s nice to have friends in strategic positions.
Layer Cake Wines would like to thank Jim Rawe for his write up of Layer Cake Wines for the SunHerald online.
“In vino veratis” is a well-traveled Latin saying that translates to “in wine there is truth.” This phrase originated during Roman times because public officials believed that if they drank wine during meetings it would be easier to discern if someone was untruthful. Today I would say that the truth can usually be found in the bottle.
Layer Cake makes several wines that taste quite nicely, but it is hard to guess the price.
Layer Cake Wines are unique for several reasons, least of which is that they are produced in four of the top wine-growing regions in the world: Napa Valley, Calif.; McLaren Vale, Australia; Mendoza, Argentina; and Puglia, Italy. Layer Cake’s founder and winemaker, Jayson Woodbridge, named the wines from something his grandfather used to tell him: “The wine, if properly made, was like a great layer cake, fruit, mocha, chocolate, and hints of spice — and rich, always rich.”
Layer Cake wines are also unique in that each of the different wines is produced using 100 percent of the same type of grape. The idea behind Layer Cake was to produce wines that tasted like they were in the $60 range, but retail between $15 and $25 a bottle.
The 2008 Layer Cake Shiraz looks very deep and dark in color, with a nice aroma of plum. This powerful Shiraz contains a lot of black fruit, and I could taste a significant amount of cherry, all the way to a smooth finish. This wine is produced in the McLaren Vale region of South Australia, an area renowned for Shiraz.
The 2007 Layer Cake Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon contains aromas of black currant, and tasted quite creamy and soft with flavors of dark fruit and mocha. Although I didn’t taste this wine with food, it was obvious that it would be excellent alongside a grilled steak. This Cabernet is priced at the upper end of the range.
The 2007 Layer Cake Primitivo that hails from Italy required some time to open up, but once it did, it tasted of ripe plums and white pepper. These flavors should not come as much of a surprise, as the Primitivo grape is identical to the Zinfandel.
I thought the 2007 Layer Cake Malbec proved to be elegant, with copious flavors of black fruits and a long, spicy finish.
This is a wine that would complement just about any roasted meats. The grapes used to make this wine were grown in Mendoza, Argentina — an area that produces some of the best Malbec anywhere in the world.
In closing out the year, I offer a toast using words attributed to John Wayne: “Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. “It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.” Salut!!
Jim Rawe, a family attorney in Bradenton, Fla., is an avid collector of fine wines. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at jimrawe@gmail.com.
Recently, I decided that my parents might enjoy a night of dinner-for-two, since we don’t have a wide variety of restaurants nearby and they don’t get to enjoy each other’s company in their often busy home environment. So, I decided to set them up at a table in our newly finished lounge area and lavish them with a four course meal, complete with wine pairings.
They accepted my offer, so last night, I cooked them a nice meal and put on some good music–date night! I wanted to start them off with a signature cocktail and “bar snacks,” so when they first went up to the lounge, I greeted them with brown butter-vanilla-sage and chestnut honey cocktails, bottarga popcorn, and white pizza flatbread. I thought the woodsiness of the drink wood go well with the tarragon in the pizza crust and that the infused brown butter in the vodka would go well with the butter in the popcorn.
After they had some time to relax and enjoy their happy hour, I brought up their first course: individual ratatouilles with seared baby octopus on top. I layered sliced zucchini, squash, eggplant, tomatoes, and onions in our small earthenware dishes baked them, covered, so that the herbs (tarragon, thyme, parsley, and lavender) as well as the garlic, would permeate the vegetables. I had marinated the baby octopus in saffron, sherry vinegar, and tomato, and when I seared it, it curled up nicely to sit on top of the fragrant vegetables. To go with the “clear” saffron flavor and fresh vegetables, I chose a Robert Mondavi Fume Blanc, which had nice acidity and brightness.
Later, when they had finished their ratatouille, I brought them their salad course, which was kale and roasted root vegetables (parsnips, beets, and sunchokes) with lemon and olive oil and parmigiano regiano. Since the root vegetables were earthy and the parsnips were almost smokey, I paired the salad with Watermark Merlot from the Napa Valley, a light but dry and smokier wine. Normally, I would have started with the salad, but because it went better with the red wine and offered a break in heavy food, I thought it was a good idea to serve it second.
My next course was the heartiest one: braised lamb shoulder blade chops with chocolate and porcini ravioli paired with Green Meadow Pinot Noir. I thought that the nice marbling in the chops would lend well to braising, so I simmered the chops in wine and stock for a couple hours. I made a chocolate pasta dough and filled it with ricotta into which I had mixed porcini powder. To serve, I reduced the braising liquid, added some currants, and then finished with a little dark chocolate. I thought the warm fruit flavors from the wine would go well with lamb, and by adding currants to the sauce I bridged that idea. Also, the chocolate in the sauce and pasta went well with the fruit flavors and rich lamb. The porcini echoed the earthy and slightly gamey (not in a bad way) lamb flavor, and so the dish was very harmonious.
Before the grand finale, I sent out a refreshing bite–the first sweet dish. I made a sweet sake-miso reduction to go under a quennele of beer ice cream, and then I finished it with chopped salted nuts. It was the quintessential bar food turned dessert, and I knew it would be good for my mom, who doesn’t quite care for sweet things.
Finally–the finish–puffy eggnog. What is puffy eggnog?, you ask. Well, I basically made eggnog and turned it into a cloud-like mousse by aerating it in a cream charger. Even though it had the strength of a good nightcap, it was at once a voluptuous cloud. My parents truly loved it. And so did I.
During all this time (school, uni, first years as a professional) I cooked once in a while. My favourite dishes to prepare were cebiche (raw fish marinated in lime juice with onions, chillies, sweet potato, and corn) and pasta. I baked desserts once in a while, too.
As mentioned before, I had a new friend called gastritis, who magically appeared around the time when I started traveling for work. Whoever thinks that traveling as part of your job is cool has obviously never done it or has a job that doesn’t involve programming software in the client’s office. Anyway, I had a few trips over the world, I really enjoyed having the opportunity of visiting places like Hong Kong, but I hated the stress and long hours that were involved in almost all of my trips.
On June 2005 I was in Mexico City, programming an accounting software and wondering what should I do with my life. As I left the office at lunch time and went to this cool restaurant in which you built your own salad with really yummy ingredients, it stroke me like lightning. I knew I wanted to cook for a living.
I stayed a few weeks in Mexico and after getting home I started getting quotes from all cooking schools I knew of. Le Cordon Bleu was my first choice but it was really expensive and classes were only at daytime (meaning I would have had to quit my job and lose the money income I needed for the tuition fee). Most options were unviable because of the starting times but there was this school just a block away from my office with a one-year program in which classes started at 6:30 pm. That sounded perfect, so I started studying on September 2005. I told my boss that I wouldn’t be able to travel anymore during the next year because I had enrolled in a course (I didn’t mention what kind, but he eventually found out).
I was very short of time at that moment but still managed to train, work, study, be in a band, and have a boyfriend. Soon after starting the program I began preparing desserts and selling them at my office and my sister’s office. So my typical day was something like this:
6 am: Wake up
7 am: Taekwondo or weights
8 am: Take a shower and go to the office
6:30 pm: Get out of the office, walk 100 meters, wait until being able to cross safely the Javier Prado avenue, enter the cooking school, change my clothes and go into the classroom/kitchen
Anywhere between 9:30 and 11:50 pm: Go home. Three days a week prepare desserts and package them.
Go to sleep.
I had lunch with Alvaro (my current husband) on Wednesdays and spent more time with him on weekends. On Saturdays, after going to the gym, I met him in his kung fu class and then we went to his house. On Sundays I played tennis, had lunch and went to rehearse with the band. Alvaro went with me and read a book or something while we rehearsed.
This went on for a while until my energy was completely depleted. First I stopped playing tennis, then I started skipping training days. I gained weight as a consequence of cooking and tasting food every day, but I tried to adhere to my eating and training plans outside from the classes. Later I quit the band.
I noticed a few things changing within me during that year (besides my body fat, of course). One is that I became increasingly interested in nutrition. I began to think that maybe that was another career path I should think about (I still think that, but haven’t done anything about it yet).
The other thing is that my palate evolved very quickly as a response to constant exposure to prime quality ingredients and dishes prepared by top chefs. While it was true that my interest for highly processed foods decreased as a result of my healthy eating awareness, my tastebuds started to demand better prepared food. This is what anyone would from cookery students, but I was surprised to see that the vast majority in my class chose KFC for group lunches and fried super fresh salmon and sole sashimi as soon as the Japanese Cuisisine teacher left the kitchen.
I began to truly appreciate all dimensions of food and wine: smell, texture, taste, depth, contrast, temperature, harmony, layout, colour, etc. Naturally, I started to expend more money, both when eating out and when buying groceries for cooking at home. My family and Alvaro got some side effects too: yummy food and body fat increase.
About a decade ago, there was a very active ABC movement among the wine community. ABC stands for Anything But Chardonnay.
The country was awash in rivers of Chardonnay, it was being ordered in bars and restaurants by the glass and bottle in amazing volumes.
The Chardonnay grape produces a juice that, when fermented, yields wine notes of crisp green apple and possible tropical notes like pineapple if cold fermented. Wine made from Chardonnay can seem sour in its tartness.
A secondary fermentation, malolactic fermentation, can transform malic acid notes of tart green apple to lactic acid notes of butter and cream.
Another winemaking method of changing Chardonnay’s flavors is to age the wine in oak barrels instead of holding the juice in stainless steel tanks. The oak barrel can impart notes of oak, toast, clove, caramel, butterscotch, and vanilla on the Chardonnay. Additional, more intense oak flavors are achieved when the Chardonnay is fermented, not just aged, in oak.
I think Kendall-Jackson is largely responsible for the enormous increase in Chardonnay’s popularity.
Kendall-Jackson sourced Chardonnay grapes from all over California, and ran all of the juice through malolactic and held the wine in oak barrels. The result was a buttery wine of oak, toast, cream and vanilla. Kendall-Jackson sold so much wine that other wineries were making Kendal-Jackson Chardonnay through custom crush relationships, as much as 250,000 cases of a label at a time.
People came to expect all Chardonnays to taste of butter, toast, cream, and vanilla. Soon, other wineries were hiding the varietal character of Chardonnay, the unique fruit notes, by increasing their use of malolactic fermentation and oak aging.
There was a time when all Chardonnays were boringly the same. Bottles of oak and butter, the fruit nearly gone.
It was said that if you put a rock through malolactic fermentation, held it in oak, and slapped a Kendall-Jackson label on it, it would taste of oak, toast, cream, and vanilla, with very little fruit, and someone would put it in their mouth to find out.
Thus was born the ABC crowd. Anything But Chardonnay, give me something that tastes like grape, varietally correct, Sauvignon Blanc, Semillon, Chenin Blanc, Marsanne, Riesling, Gewurtztraminer, Viognier, Pinot Gris, anything still held in stainless, anything with fruit notes please.
If you have seen the incredible wine movie Sideways, you heard Miles, the main character, pronounce, “If anyone orders Merlot, I’m leaving. I am not drinking any fucking Merlot.”
Like Chardonnay, Merlot is often boring, bland, uninteresting, yet easy to drink with very little varietal character getting in the way. Miles could just as easily have declared, “I am not drinking any fucking Chardonnay,” but it wouldn’t make much sense for Miles to visit Santa Barbara, a big grower of Chardonnay, and complain about the varietal.
Does this mean that I never drink Chardonnay, or that I recommend that you don’t?
No.
The great news is that in the last decade, wineries have decided that malolactic fermentation and oak aging are winemaker tools, but they don’t have to be used fully, or at all, with every Chardonnay.
Chardonnay, which was nearly uniformly boring as everyone chased Kendall-Jackson’s style because of Kendal-Jackson’s sales, is now an exciting wine to taste.
There are now wineries choosing to forego malolactic fermentation with their Chardonnay, and have clear tart green apple notes in their releases. Other wineries are choosing to put only a portion of their Chardonnay juice through malolactic and blending it with juice that hasn’t been put through this secondary fermentation.
Similarly, some wineries are holding their fruit in stainless steel tanks instead of oak barrels and allowing the fruit free rein. Other wineries hold some of their juice in stainless and some in oak and blend the juices to have notes of fruit and oak.
With blends possible ranging from no malolactic or oak to 100% malolactic and oak, the possible winemaking choices are nearly infinite. The great news is that winemakers are using these tools in different percentages and making wines that are unique, even exciting.
Now you can visit a tasting room and taste a Chardonnay where one third of the juice was fermented in oak, two thirds in stainless. Of the two thirds fermented in stainless; one third was aged in new french oak, one third was held in new american oak, one sixth in one year old American oak, and the remaining sixth was aged in stainless. Sixty percent of the juice underwent malolactic fermentation. Complex. Unique.
Chardonnay, once boring, predictable, is now a fun wine to taste. With winemakers using the tools I’ve talked about, and many others, differently, the finished wine is often a surprise. To me that makes wine tasting Chardonnays much more enjoyable.
For your Spanish travels to the wine region of Jerez here are some popular ones to try, voted for at a tasting session hosted by The Sherry Institute of Spain at the Spanish Embasssy in London the top ten Sherries were:
John Harvey & Sons Ltd, V.O.R.S 30 Year Old Rich Old Oloroso
Bodegas Hidalgo – La Gitana, Triana, Pedro Ximenez
Gonzales Byass, Del Duque, Amontillado Muy Viejo
Bodegas Sanchez Romate, NPU Amontillado
Fernando di Castilla, Antique Oloroso
Bodegas Perez Marin, La Guita, Manzanilla
Bodegas Lustau, Puerto Fino
Bodegas Valdivia, Sacromonte, Pedro Ximenez
Sandeman, Royal Corregidor, Rich Old Oloroso
Williams and Humbert, Dos Cortados, V.O.S. 20 Year Old Pal Cortado
For more information and tasting notes see Decanter.com
I managed to spend most of yesterday cooking for last night’s dining experience and in the melee of ‘plating up’ (ahem) managed to completely forget the photos. Which is a pity as the food looked pretty fab, even if I do say so myself. Anyway, dinner consisted of:
Prawn Soup
Braised Beef with pot-roasted vegetables
Poached Pear with Chocolate Sauce, Pear Syrup and Ice Cream
I also did a veggie main of open ravioli with butternut squash, spinach and mushrooms.
Finally, there was a goodly portion of wine and whisky. Happy New Year.
