Natty and Bratty: Natural Coast Wine Fest

 

It would be too glib to say the qualifications for hosting a table at the first Natural Coast Wine Fest on a gorgeous Saturday, April 22, was that you had to pour an orange wine or a pét-nat. Then again, there sure were a lot of them, many delicious, if often funky in the friendliest of ways. Given this was the actual Earth Day, and one of the first weekends after our surprisingly sodden winter, the fest seemed like an open-armed embrace of sunnier seasons. Especially since so many of the wines, even the reds, tasted best with a slight chill, eager to help us lubricate summer afternoons with friends on the porch.

Care to read the rest then do so at the Independent's site.

Vroom with a Cru

 

That's not a wine named for the famous route of song and lore where you might get your kicks, but from something even kickier. In 2003 Kevin Buckler, who is also the founder and CEO of Adobe Road Winery, won, along with his co-drivers, the Rolex 24 endurance race from the GT class in a baby blue Porsche 911, beating the top-tier prototype cars in a feat that has never been repeated.

So, not surprisingly the 2021 66 White Blend is a racy little number (couldn't resist) engineered from 66% Chardonnay from Santa Barbara County and then some Rhone varietals--19% Marsanne and 15% Viognier--from Lodi. While the Rhone grapes come from a warmer growing region, that doesn't mean they step on the aromatic gas in the final blend--this is very well-balanced for how big it is, aged in just 20% new French oak. You don't win races just through speed but control, and this bottling exhibits those lessons, too.

So there's lemon blossom and lychee on the nose, inviting and a touch exotic, and what follows is more fresh citrus fruit, some green pear, and more floral notes. A lovely bottle to start a party with alongside some good gooey cheese or slab of smoked salmon guests can pick apart.

(And all apologies for the post title. I couldn't resist.)

Lapping Up the Fruity, Bitter, and Pungent

 

"Olive oil is a fruit, so olive oil is a fruit juice," David Garci-Aguirre explains to me on a Zoom tasting. "The moment you extract oil from an olive it's at its best." The tasting is sponsored by the California Olive Oil Council or COOC, And Garci-Aguirre knows his stuff, as Vice President of Operations and Master Miller at Corto Olive with 14 years in the field.

COOC has two main functions--certifying olive oil producers who do things the right way and promoting that seal-certified oil to the rest of the state and the world. Despite the gorgeous amount of olive oil trees one might spy touring the state, all of California's production is merely 2% of the oil consumed nationwide. "For the three years I've been with COOC, the mission has been the same, for better or worse," Garci-Aguirre insists. "The climate for consumers is still terrible, as supermarket quality oil is very poor. So we have to find California producers that care and have developed the certification process so customers get fresher oil."

One of the stumbling blocks for this project is the average consumer finds low quality oil familiar and therefore acceptable. Turns out that most production worldwide happens two months later than it does at COOC certified producers. Longer hang-time leads to fermentation, alcohol is the byproduct, and you end up with fusty oil. To top that off, commercial EVO often is a blend of oil from around the world--the sample sent to me was a blend from Argentina, Chile, Greece, Italy, Morocco, Peru, Portugal, Spain, and Tunisia. Turns out that an oil that seems like it should show up in a steamer trunk plastered with exotic luggage labels isn't such a great idea. The sad stuff has traveled distance and sat around. So on your tastebuds is stays greasy and unpleasant.

Light, heat, and air are all enemies to quality. That might make things particularly difficult for those in the Midwest, but here in the Golden State, we have a surfeit of great olive oil--indeed, 65% of the state's oil is now COOC seal certified. Yep, it costs more, but part of that is you get what you pay for. It's also been hard to mechanize harvest, but recent advances lead Garci-Aguirre to say, "It makes me so excited, we are going to be able to democratize fresh olive oil."

So look for the COOC label. Their website will help, and lots of the best you can purchase direct-to-consumer. Perhaps some of it will be like the mind-altering oil made solely from Sevillano sample I got to sip--natural, warming, crystal clean, and no oily aftertaste. It ranked high on all three adjectives in this post's title. Given most of us don't do olive oil shots, it's also good to know that Garci-Aguirre discussed a recent study that suggests the polyphenols in high quality oil protect the integrity of tomatoes, say, during cooking. That oil is going to help the tomatoes on your next designer pizza sing.

Even better, olives make for a sustainable California. In addition to having low water needs, they also score well for carbon sequestration. 

The Galloping Garbanzo

 

First-year UC Santa Barbara student Elaine Skiadas isn’t so much precocious as she is creative and hungry. When the pandemic hit, the Glencoe, Illinois, native took to Instagram to post recipes. “I could just make stuff up and put it on the Internet,” she recalls. Her Wandering Chickpea persona grew in popularity, gave birth to a blog, and even gave her motivation to buy a better camera.

Two years into the project, she got an email out of the blue from Page Street Publishing asking if she might be interested in writing a cookbook. “I thought, ‘This has to be a joke — I’m 17,’” she says. In a Zoom call, the publisher made an offer and gave her a week to decide. She got back in touch in two hours. She admits, “In my head, a book was a goal that was 10 years out.” On April 11, she will become the 18-year-old author of Fantastic Vegan Recipes for the Teen Cook.

Care to read the rest then do so at the Independent's site.

Centuries of Knowledge and Stock Power Kopke Port

 

It would seem trivial to suggest port might have its moment since it's been around for centuries. The Douro Valley, where the fortified wine comes from in Portugal, is the third oldest official wine region in Europe after Chianti and Tokaj. What's more, while that designation for the Douro came in 1756, Kopke has been making wines since 1638. Heck, that's the year Dom Pérignon was born, and I mean the monk, not the Champagne house. If Shakespeare could have lived to 74, he might have sipped Kopke's first vintage. 

That means Kopke's got a track record and a cellar full of deliciously aging wines and ports. I had the great fortune to receive the fancy box of samples you see above in three different stages of unpacking, and then got to take part on a Zoom tasting with Carla Tiago, Kopke's winemaker, and Serge Lozach, managing director of importer Wine in Motion, a few weeks ago. In many ways the hour was an education in port as much as a tasting, so here's a quick report (no pun intended).

It turns out you can use more 100 varieties of grapes to make port, as long as they are native to Portugal. Sometimes Kopke calls the varietals, as they do with their 2012 Colheita Tawny that is equal parts Touring Nacional, Touring Franca, Tinta Roriz, and Tina Barroca, and sometimes they are a bit coy and say "traditional Douro grape varieties." Guess you have to protect the brand. The wines are all fortified to 20% ABV with neutral spirits.

And it's important to introduce the Instituto dos Vinhos do Douro e do Porto, the government-run agency that strictly regulates (and also promotes--could you imagine the ATF doing that here in the U.S.?) port production. They keep an eye on those "brandies" used for fortification, they help decide what it means to call a port a 10 or 20 years old tawny. For that's not a strict math equation, that is, you can't go "current year - # of years on bottle = year wine was made." It's a declaration of style and quality and depth, so a 10 years old might have wines blended in that are older or younger than ten years, but it tastes--consistently--the same. And the Instituto is a big part of that actually meaning something.

Most striking for Kopke is they have helped pioneer white ports, a category the Institute only classified in 2007. The two in the tasting were both fascinating, expanding my mind as to the possibility of port. It pours more golden than white, and both the 2003 Colheita White and the 20 Years Old White were honeyed without toppling into saccharine, and rich with dried fruits, marzipan, and molasses notes. At this point and throughout the tasting winemaker Tiago stressed the "freshness" of the wines, and they definitely felt not just lively but alive, tethered by good acidity to match the sugar. Indeed, all the Colheita--think vintage--bottlings especially seemed evolving, and Lozach insisted when we tasted the Tawny Colheita 2012, to jump ahead a bit, that if we gave in ten more years in bottle, it wouldn't even taste like the same wine.

The 2003 white had a finish that could complete the whole Camino de Santiago (ok, that's in Spain, I know), wile the 20 Years Old White almost had more complexity, if a tiny bit less clarity of purpose. The refinement of the 2003 stood out. What also became clear is how well these wines might pair with a variety of foods. Too often people get stuck in the sweet pairs with sweet mindset, and save port for dessert, but these whites could easily add depth and intrigue to a buttery lobster or a turbot in cream sauce.

The tawny wines also delighted in a completely different register, offering more fresh fruit notes--cherry and plum--but also caramel, cinnamon, even tobacco in the 20 Years Old tawny. 

If you're wondering, since it is a fortified wine, port can last if you store it in the fridge. (Indeed, you want to chill it before drinking, too.) The vintage wines need to be consumed quickly, but the year designates can hold for up to three months. Even though my guess is if you get a bottle from a great house like Kopke, you'll never get close to that deadline.

A Review of "Six California Kitchens"

 

Sally Schmitt’s posthumous publication Six California Kitchens proves you can write a powerful memoir one recipe at a time. Whether the book will become enough of a legacy to vault her into the position she deserves, praised alongside “inventors” of California cuisine—farm-to-table, local, seasonal—like Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck, Nancy Silverton, and Mark Peel, only time will tell. But it’s also telling that Schmitt and her husband of 64 years Don were the founders of the French Laundry in 1978, which they sold to now world-renowned food superstar Thomas Keller in 1994 so they could get out of what they already saw was a rapidly commercializing Napa Valley. And note Keller pens one of the two encomiastic forewords; the other is from the founder of the famed Mustards Grill, Cindy Pawlcyn, who also, alas, generally doesn’t receive the kudos she deserves. 

 So, yes, there is a not-so-secret feminist core to this book, as Schmitt argues against the sad sexist trope “women are cooks and men are chefs” one unfussy but brilliant plate at a time. (In 1952 she graduated from UC Davis with a degree in, of all things, home ec.) Schmitt is also very much a mother, too, that “stumbling block” that often derails a woman’s career. Her solution was simple—have the whole family work for you. Not surprisingly to this day the Apple Farm, the idyllic spot the Schmitts took to in Mendocino County, eventually growing 80 heirloom varieties of apples, making all sorts of take-home products from that fruit and more, and most importantly, teaching cooking classes, is managed and run by Sally’s daughter, Karen, and son-in-law Tim. And Don was there all along, going from an Air Force vet to a banker to a sommelier on-the-fly, especially thanks to all their Napa winemaking friends.

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Toma Changes Hands, Not Direction

 

The essential news is that there is no news — while Tom and Vicki Dolan have sold their beloved Toma Restaurant & Bar, new owners Sam Grant and Julian Sanders insist, “We’re keeping Toma [as] Toma, and then we will build from there.” That means the Foodie Award-winning spot will still be serving up those tuna cones and fresh squid ink pasta. 

Both Grant and Sanders realize, though, that Toma is more than its menu. “The place has such great bones, and its history means so much,” Sanders explains. “There are regulars who had their rehearsal dinner here thirty years ago [when the building housed Emilio’s] and they still come in excited about carrying the tradition on.”

Care to read the rest then do so at the Independent's website.