Red Wine with Fish

In addition to contributing to the Chehalem posting this month, I opened a bottle of my own for a personal entry. I purchased it at Square Deal Wine in NW Portland.

The 2004 Barmes-Buecher was somewhat petrolly on the nose (which I like very much) with stone fruit and an “almost orange” quality that made me wonder about botrytis. It was very dry, very, very, almost too dry with a touch of marmalade and a touch of sweetness on the finish which was very long with hints of peach and grapefruit rind. And where is where it falls apart. It was fairly nice but went a little out of wack on the finish. The bitterness, which I sometimes like in a Riesling was too much because it overwhelmed the positive qualities.

It didn’t pair particularly well with the souffle I made and it started to fall apart after a bit in the glass. Not something I would cellar and not, I think, something I would buy again, particularly considering all the great options out there for delicious dry Riesling.

I haven’t done a Wine Blog Wednesday in a while for one reason or another. Finally, the stars aligned and I was able to do participate. And it was Burgundy, which certainly is adds incentive.

I didn’t have a huge amount to choose from but I was in Vinopolis a few weeks ago and managed to pick up a the 2005 Domaine de la Folie Rully Clos La Folie. I liked it quite a lot, although I get the feeling it could have used a little more bottle age.

When I first opened it, the nose was very faintly of toasted rice and not much else. After a while it opened up to sweet cooked pear. Flavors of lime, mineral and spice came out after a time, although for the first 20 minutes or so, the alcohol was very noticeable. Fortunately, as the other flavors grew, that seemed less apparent. The finish was fairly long with lemon peel and spice.

Overall, a very good wine for just over $20, it just took a little while to come around. The cooked pear flavor nicely complimented the pork chop with braised apples the wine accompanied.

This was a very nice topic and worth further exploration.

Yum Factor: **
Interest Factor: **
Value: ***

I am a Pinot drinker. Even the bigger ones tend to be lighter bodied than any other red wine (Beaujolais excepted). They go great with most foods and can be consumed all year round. I love them. So when I have to find something from the Rhone, I am a little at sea.

Buying this Bila-Haut was a little bit like playing darts with a blind-fold. I was at a wine shop, which will go nameless, which has a good selection of not-that-hard-to-find, high-end wines for a little more than you really should pay for their Burgundy tasting and because I was afraid WBW was two weeks ago, I grabbed this bottle, one of the few Languedoc-Roussillons they carry. So the odds were against something transcendent. Luckily, I am too sloppy to play the odds.

This wine was marvelous. The nose was black berry and dark cherry; hints of fig and an underlying current of bacon fat (sort of like a Cote Rotie on steroids); cocoa and wet pavement (thanks to Sydney for that great descriptor). The palate was huge with bacon, plum and cedar. The long, long finish was fig and bittersweet chocolate. And the texture: wow! big and velvety. This is a monster wine.

Apparently this is an M. Chapoutier which shows up nowhere on the bottle. Just the comment “… a well known Rhone producer has transformed his magic to the Languedoc and created a wine with finesse.”

Finesse? Well I guess so. This wine has layer upon layer of flavors and while it was a bit like getting hit in the face with a piece of wood, this was one ornate and delicate piece of wood.

So, I see you can have power and elegance in one package. I am going to have to broaden my thinking about the warm weather varietals. I don’t think Pinot will ever cease to be my favorite, but I may be adding more favorites. The problem with wine, is that the more I learn… the more I want to learn more.

Update by request: this wine retailed for $23 but I think you can get it considerably cheaper.

This month’s Wine Blog Wednesday was an interesting one. Participants were required to find two wines, one a “reserve” and the other a not so “reserve” and compare them. From my point of view, comparing the same vintage was important because it is such a critical variable. This made finding wines something of a challenge since some many wineries hold back their reserves… for that matter many countries require longer aging time before wineries are legally allowed to release a reserve wine.

But I did it. Well, sort of. The reserve isn’t technically a reserve, but it is a higher-end bottle. German vintner Heymann-Lowenstein puts a little “1″ and a bunch of grapes on his single-vineyard Rieslings, to indicate they are the superior wine. The question was, did we agree?

To keep things interesting, and to keep the tasters honest (there were four of us), we tasted blind. As it turned out, the “reserve” was a strong favorite. The non-reserve was definitely good, but it didn’t have as much going on, it seemed simpler, sweeter and to me, a little more rough around the edges, than the single-vineyard wine which was just lovely.

Notes follow:

#1: 2005 Heymann-Lowenstein Rottgen (The “Reserve”)
A nose of grapefruit, lime and orange blossom with noticeable mineral/petrol quality. It’s off-dry with bright acidity and pink grapefruit on the mid-palette. The finish is honey. Texturally, the wine is full, but with a bit of CO2 spritz.

Yum Factory: ***
Interest Factor: ***
Value: * ($45)
#2: 2005 Heymann-Lowenstein Schieferterrassen

Similar qualities but a bit sweeter and fuller textured but a little harsher on the palette. The nose is less pronounced and without the blossom quality. A little more of that spritz. Still very nice and works well with the Gruyeres cheese.

Yum Factory: **
Interest Factor: *
Value: ** ($25)
These are both excellent wines, but in this case, the “reserve” definitely won. It was blind and it was unanimous. I definitely would like to do this one again. I was briefly tempted by a couple of Red Burgundies, but it seemed criminal to spend that much money for a nice 1er Cru Burgundy and then drink it 5-10 years before it is ready. I think next time, I would go for something cheaper and more common to see what “reserve” means in more broadly distributed wines. Generally I think it means more oak and riper fruit. I look forward to seeing the other WBW postings to confirm that theory.

The Pouilly-Fume was another recommendation from Gabriel at Portland Wine Merchants, my favorite wine shop. They have never led me wrong before, so when I need a WBW wine for a topic I don’t know much about, I head on over.

My research suggested that goat cheese, tarragon and quiche are good matches for a Pouilly-Fume. So I decided to do a salmon quiche with chevre and taragon. On the side I served a goat cheese from Deux-Sèvres and fell back on old habits to serve a caesar salad.

The pairing was, overall, successful. The tart minerality of the wine nicely cut through the richness of the quiche and cheese. It wasn’t one of the transcendent moments where the wine and food become much more than the sum of their parts, but apart from the caesar–which kind of smothered the wine—the matches were quite successful.

Individual notes are available on the 2002 Domaine Masson-Blondelet Pouilly-Fume Les Angelots. A recipe for the quiche will be posted when I am not too tired to write it. Stay tuned.

This WBW month’s theme is, apropos the season, wine that pairs with grilling. Given that I had so recently blogged about grilled salmon with Pinot, I thought I would do something different. Grilled food and Zinfandel are another classic combo and I have some very nice Zins left from when I was drinking more big wines.

I thought it would be interesting to try and pair a Zinfandel to something that had Zinfandel in it, so I concocted a Zin-based barbecue sauce and a Zin-based marinade for skirt steak. Both used 2004 Ravenswood Vintner’s blend. The skirt steak was marinated for about 10 hours and then grilled extremely hot over mesquite. I served it with grilled summer squash and tortillas.

To drink, I chose a 2000 P. Coturri Family Vineyards Zinfandel which was thankfully intact despite having gone through some unpleasant travels since I bought it in 2001. Unlike my previous attempts for WBW, this match was about perfect. The smokey sweetness of the Coturri went beautifully with the smokey sweetness of the meat and sauce.

Individual notes are available on the P. Coturri Zinfandel, and the food preparation.

The list is up and it looks like many of the participants had more luck than I did finding a wine they liked, although it seems several people were not impressed by the green flavors that many of the low-alcohol reds tended to have, as did my choice.

I haven’t given up based on one uninspiring bottle, however. There were a couple of nice looking Bordeaux bottles and even an Oregon Pinot or two that I could try.

When I went in search of a low alcohol red, my favorite wine shop
was closed so, knowing I wasn’t going to have much time to spend before WBW, I just picked something up while I was food shopping at my local New Seasons grocery store. My choices were limited. There were a number of reds at 12.5% exactly, but only one below the magic number. I couldn’t remember at the time whether it had to be below 12.5% or 12.5% and below. It didn’t really matter, however, since there was only one Loire wine available, which was what I was interested in trying.

When I first opened the bottle I thought it was corked. The nose was musty and fruit undetectable. After about 10 minutes, the must diminished and the fruit appeared. The nose was still incredibly earthy, but with with a nice peppery bite and a scent of beet. The palette was bone dry and earthy with sour cherry, cranberry and a touch of green bitterness. The wine finished with more beet and a hint of spice.

I am amazed that this is the same varietal of all those fat Argentinean Malbecs I have had. It reminds me more of a Beaujolais with it’s light body and peppery flavors.

I drank this with ricotta, ham and spinach stuffed chicken and corn. The food was neutral enough not to interfere, but hardly an inspired match. Knowing nothing about the wine, I opted to play it safe. In the future, I would pair it to one of the following:

• a potato dish with the skins on
• mushrooms
• nutty cheese
• gamy bird, simply prepared

This wine isn’t my ideal style, but it was nice nonetheless. I like the WBW event because it forces you to try something that you usually wouldn’t. I suppose that is the point.

Update: I tried it again the next day and it seems to have “bulked up” for some reason. Maybe it is my imagination. The fruit was still pretty meek and the pepper flavor diminished. Still not terribly complex or exciting.

The results of the Fabulous Favorites Festival held by Lenndevours‘ Wine Blogging Wednesday and Is My Blog Burning? are now on-line. You probably already saw that at Red Wine with Fish, I chose to do… wait for it… yes, Red Wine with Fish. You can also see Cab with Lamb, Syrah with Steak, Rosé with Mole and a number of other great combinations. Check out the WBW and IMBB summaries.

I have been reading about Wine Blog Wednesday for a while but, for one reason or another, have never been able to participate. The theme for this month’s event was Fabulous Favorites Festival in which one was to pick a favorite wine and pair a food, or vice versa.

I love salmon, simply grilled. It is one of my favorite foods in the world, so that was my starting place. Rather than go out and buy something, I decided to match from my own cellar. I was pretty sure I wanted to go with Oregon Pinot, which is a classic salmon match, but I couldn’t decide which one. I ultimately decided on the 2002 Chehalem Oregon Pinot Noir Reserve because it is one of my favorites and it isn’t a fruit bomb.

The salmon was slow-grilled, almost smoked, over mesquite hardwood but with applewood chips which adds a wonderful taste and aroma to the fish. The sides were simply steamed green beans and pesto mashed potatoes.

For desert, Sydney made shortcake with mixed fruit and whipped cream. For that we matched a 2002 Oremus Late Harvest Tokaji from Hungary.

The first match was good, but I think I could have done better. An earthier Pinot Noir would have been a better with the applewood smoked salmon or perhaps, a gentler treatment of the salmon, poached or even grilled without the applewood. The Chehalem is a very elegant wine and clashed slightly with the smokiness of the fish.

The desert match worked quite well. The Tokaji enough acidity to stand up to the dessert, but it wasn’t so sweet that you couldn’t taste the fruit. I would certainly match this wine with a fruit-drive dessert in the future, particularly a fruit dessert that has some tartness.

Individual wine notes are available here:

2002 Chehalem Oregon Pinot Noir Reserve
2002 Oremus Late Harvest Tokaji