Margerum's Dawn of a Mute-Age

Sure, ÜBER-talented (get it?) winemaker Doug Margerum can get away with pointing without being rude. I mean, here's a man who can bake wine and not just get away with it, but sell it to you and make you like it. A few weeks ago Doug presented his latest vinous creation, Mute-Age, at a special series of rolling press tastings (to keep us all safe from COVID-cooties) on the veranda of the super swank Alcazar Suite at Hotel Californian, high above his usual Funk Zone Margerum Wine Company tasting room. He even made sure there were bites to be had, the luxurious chocolate creations of Mike Orlando's Twenty-four Blackbirds Chocolates. It's moments like that afternoon that Santa Barbara is built for--all that's delicious to eat and drink and then you get so much to drink in with your eyes, too. (Just look at the photo again, which doesn't do the glorious afternoon justice. And god, do I miss getting to go out.)

So, what the heck is Mute-Age, you may ask? If it sounds all French to you you're right; it's a play on mutage, which is a way of making sweet wine by, yep, baking it. Doug put some of his Grenache (which is delicious on its own, of course, so that certainly helps as a place to start) in 34 liter demi-johns--think very large tear-drop shaped bottles--and left it on the roof of his winery in Buellton. What he was doing is what the French do (minus the Buellton part, of course) to make Banyuls, their well-regarded dessert wine that comes from near the Spanish border. You see, baking the wine makes it inhospitable to its yeast, which then quit turning sugars into alcohol. More sugar = desserty goodness. In particular, it makes a great match for chocolate, which is actually a tough thing to do with most red wines, despite what years of crappy Valentine's Day pairing might have pretended. Tannins on tannins just means your tongue gets mugged.

But sweet wine, that's a different, happy story. Doug, who does quite a few wine dinners every year (in a normal year, of course), wanted to have something he could pair with a restaurant's chocolate creations, and since he loves tinkering with classic styles (see his Marc or his Amaro that we'll get to it a minute), creating a VDN or Vin Doux Natural was, uh, natural to him. (VDN just means the mutage happens after maceration of the grapes.) The good news is you don't need to know any of the process, which seems partially magically anyway--Doug admitted when they tried the juice a year into its aging on the roof it wasn't showing any Banyul characteristics--but at two years, voila! What you do need to know is it's delicious, rich and unctuous, still holding its now even deeper plum and pomegranate fruit, and a perfect match with Twenty-Four Blackbirds 75% Kokoa Kamili from Tanzania.

Knowing he had to give us more than one taste of something, and having not merely a chocolatier but a chocolate maker at his side, Doug also provided tastes of some of his Amaro. Based on this year's Tales of the Cocktail, amaro might finally have crossed the tipping point from a bartenders' favorite plaything to something more casual cocktail imbibers ask for. Of course, Doug's been making his for seven years based on when I first wrote about it, a delightful if indeed bitter (that's what amaro means after all) mix of fortified wine, aging, and more botanicals, barks, and roots than in a witch's treasured recipe. 

In the multi-varied world of amari (that is the plural), Margerum's sits pretty dead center; it matches well with a Lucano or Ramazzotti, say, if you know some of the more available Italian ones. For those not big bitter fans, it might curl the hairs of your tongue a tad (oh, you know what I mean), but it's nothing like some of the more astringent amari, and far from the medicinal getting-used-to that's Fernet-Branca. Turns out Margerum Amaro also has a great Twenty-Four Blackbirds pair: a 75% Palos Blancos from Bolivia. Wet your whistle with some Amaro, then slowly let a bite of Palos Blancos melt in your mouth and you suddenly are tasting the most delicious Raisinette ever, or so it will seem. I can only imagine the movie you should watch while having this culinary one-two punch (maybe something gorgeous and wistful like Wenders' Wings of Desire?).

And to pile on, Orlando is making an Amaro truffle you can buy at the Maregrum tasting room. You want those, too, the most adult of decadent delights.

Why Can't I Drink It? (TOTC 2020 Home Edition--Day 1)

 

Any long time readers of this blog know I'm a huge fan of Tales of the Cocktail, the annual celebration-cum-conference of all things drink that usually happens late July in New Orleans. (Go search all the posts from our past visits in 2016 and 2012--which means, damn, we were due to go this year too.) Of course nothing is usual this year, but TOTC refuses to give in, even if people can't travel, or sit in rooms together for seminars, or crowd into bars. So it's happening now, online, and it's free for all! You still have time to "attend" the last three days if you want.

So, today I "participated" (this is going to be the land of air quotes, zipping about like the hummingbirds fighting above our nectar feeder) in five events and it's not even 5 pm yet my time and I'm writing this drinking one of those two Vespers you see at the top of the entry in honor of the last event I watched, "The Man Behind James Bond: Ian Fleming presented by Ford's Gin."

In a usual TOTC write up, I'd go on and on about New Orleans, which, to be honest, is a daily tales of the cocktail all by itself, of course, and talk a lot about great meals, large and small, and much sipping of many things. When I've told people I'm going to a cocktail conference, they always assume I spend my days one o-sized mouth shy of being blott-o, but it's rarely that, as there's just so much you sip and taste and dump and skip. And eat. And in New Orleans in July, walk and sweat. 

But to do five TOTC events and have no liquor.... Well, that was weird. But as I watched a very informative Amaro session this morning, I didn't go to my liquor cabinet and pour a shot. I mean, who drinks Amaro pre-noon? If your lunch needs a digestif, you're going to end up like Mr. Creosote. So while this Tales is plenty informative, it seems like a sensory cheat, especially since you don't get to hit brands doing their thing in the lobby of the Monteleone for quick tastes of things between sessions.

Many of the sessions are also pre-Zoom-recorded, too, so there's no chance for interaction, questions, etc. I only did one live session today, "Marie Brizard Low ABV Cocktails," and it was good to have Jonathan Pogash (aka The Cocktail Guru), the session host, reading our comments and responding in real time. But this session also made clear one of the usual red flags for TOTC--on some level it exists for sponsors to flog product. Of course, that means when you're there they buy you things--from drinks to Day of the Dead face paintings to lavish parties the like you only thought you'd read about in Vanity Fair. But when you're just watching someone on your computer, it's not quite the same.

All that said, I got to watch presenters like Chris Blackwell (yep, the founder of Island Records, who currently owns Ian Flemings' Jamaica estate, Golden Eye, and has turned it into a resort) and a host of brilliant writers on liquor, to learn how to make low ABV cocktails, to relish in a fantastic overview of Amari, to have TOTC Foundation President Caroline Rosen say "y'all" and sprinkle me in the linguistic equivalent of powdered sugar from Cafe du Monde's beignets. 

I've got six pages of notes. I left out pretty much any content in this already too long write-up. The folks who took part in the "Storytelling Behind The Bar presented by William Grant & Sons" session I watched would beat me up for not having enough of a through-line here, no doubt, and one of the presenters even teaches at my alma mater Johns Hopkins. So yeah, I'm having a good time (btw, I did take the week off from my day job, like I'm really "vacationing"). But how do I taste more? I'm going to have to figure this out and not pass out.

Margerum Amaro -- When Bitter Is Better

There's the old saw "It takes a lot of beer to make good wine," but Doug Margerum, owner of and winemaker at Margerum Wines, suggests, perhaps, a new saying: "It takes a lot of Amaro to recover from prodigious good wine consumption." Margerum first got interested in Amaro -- the bitter yet beloved Italian digestif -- at wine events. "A lot of sommeliers drink a lot of Amaro, especially Fernet-Branca," he says. "But my interest in Amaro really peaked visiting Italy and tasting homemade Amari. After a huge meal and staying up all night and indulging, the evening always ended with Amari." He knows he is on shaky medical grounds, but wants to insist the Amaro helps settle one's system. If nothing else it shows the insight of the Italian culture with their words for love (amore) and bitter (amaro) so close in sound they're practically a slip of the tongue.

Want to read the rest then do so at the KCET blog.