2009 Red Sparkle Apple Wine Update

I'm very behind with posting. Fortunately my computer overlooks my smoking setup, so that I can type away while keeping watch on the now-smoking-bacon from this fall's pig butchering event. Trying to avoid last time's mistake.

I've been meaning to post about my apple wine, as it's been a remarkable success. Phenomenal break through. It now seeming like a lifetime ago since harvest and crushing/pressing, the wine has since fermented to about 12% alcohol, undergone a spontaneous malolactic fermentation that took several weeks, and was aged with medium toast american oak for several weeks. The weather here tanked to -40C or colder, and my cellar dipped into 8C territory, inducing the wines to drop clear. So no fining or filtering.

What does it taste like? Honestly, it reminds me of a very well made old-world chardonnay. It has apple on the palate, but also canned pineapple, and smells of cheese, caramel, and smells shockingly like white grape wine. It has good concentration on the nose and on the palate. Shocking. I truly, truly love it. It has no resemblance to home-made plonk, which was certainly a possible outcome.

More excitement? My Red Sparkle apple tree has produced 100 kg or so of apples in the past two years - amounting to about 5 cases of wine. I made just over 2 cases this year - next year more.

Currently, I'm guessing this stuff will age respectably for few years. We'll see. I have some safely stowed in bins for future consumption to do that research.

Who knew.

4 Wines & A Plate - Rhone [Southern]

Something connected here. Maybe it was the -32C weather that made us appreciate the wines, food and company a little more than usual. Maybe it was the variety and dynamics of some of the wines. Maybe the wines were really just that good. All 4 wines had major critic scores of 90+, so expectations were high, yet the wines still delivered in spades - resulting in the highest group scores for some wines we've ever had, and some stellar QPR showing. The kind that required a quick tally of who wanted how many bottles of 'D'. I scored 3 of the 4 92 or better. PLUS. Plus. How could I forget: I finally, for the first time EVER in our blind tastings, pegged all of the bottles correctly blind.

THE WINES
A: 1997 Chateau de Beaucastel Chateauneuf du Pape
$99.99 Group Average Score: 88.3
The evolution of this wine was astonishing. Decanted for 1.5 hrs, and was stinky, pruny/raisiny at first, with lots of horsebarn, cherry, and leather notes. With time, the funk diminished, and the approachability increased. Tasty and complex, with a fine sticky tannin, long finish of pennies. Light and thin, but seriously interesting wine that at about the 3-4 hr mark showed very well. 92

B: 2005 Château de Saint Cosme Valbelle Gigondas
$50 Group Average Score: 92.8
A crowd pleaser, with a serious fruit quality that was undeniable. It also was showing something new every time - starting with beef jerky/pepper, then herbaceous, then raisin box, chlorine, then celery seed, then floral shop, finally landing on a chassis of gorgeous fruit. The palate was straight ahead and rich. Not a hedonism play: a finessy, quality-of-fruit, and complex wine. 92

C: 2007 Perrin Réserve Côtes du Rhône
$13 Group Average Score 82.4
Previous vintages have been tasted before in our tastings. This vintage was scored 90 by WS, and for the price, it was a must-explore to see if it was appropriately hyped. It was good. Not excellent, or memorable in my opinion. First off, it's tight. It did open after 3 hrs or so, and showed raisin, iron/blood on the nose. The finish is bitter, and it's pretty average on the palate for me. WS 90. KK 84.

D: 2005 Château Pesquié Quintessence
$29 Group Average Score 92.8
Despite the 90-point-for-$12 wine above, this one won the QPR winner of the evening. Rather oak-forward, it was skunky/perfumy, with tar and dark toasted oak notes. Clove and peppercorns, spice, and sweaty mitt hit me on the nose. It was seductive, despite those odd tasting notes. The palate is lovely, sexy, tasty, and an oak bomb. It's a very lovable wine that was fun to revisit through the tasting, was hedonistic, and got rave reviews [88\92\94\94\96\96]. For under the $30 price point, this is one rock star of a wine.

THE FOOD
Despite the affinity for red meats, as usual, I was simply damn tired of red meat and red wine for our tastings. So I went southern Rhone on the menu. Some garlic, tomato, olives, capers, olive oil, herbes de provence, an extra dash of lavender, chicken, on pasta. It was really nice. Of interest is that 'D' was big enough that it didn't really work with the pasta - but worked with the olives. So if you run out and buy it, pair it with something big. The others all did fine matched up with the dish.

100 Point Wine: An Education

An education indeed. That's what I'll call it as it sounds nicer than opulent self indulgence. Our wine tasting group had long talked about trying an obscenely expensive bottle of wine that was supposed wine perfection. I sourced such a bottle. Robert Parker scored it 100. The scale don't go any higher than that. And, as sad as my inner cheapass is to say it, at $325 retail a bottle, it's a fairly good deal in the world of 100 point wines which can easily scoot above the thousand mark. For the record, I'd never spend that on wine at home. Hence the need for an evening to share the cost with similar-minded-wino-crazies.

So what of it? None of us scored it 100 points. It's clearly a beautiful wine, but we had all had wines in the past that we preferred over this. We all could list many bottles we'd had that were in that league, for a small fraction of the cost. Granted it was not at its peak. But I learned a lot from the bottle, and am very grateful for the lessons - most which I knew, but had never had so poignantly and memorably drilled into my brain. Everyone's palate is different, [ie. there's no accounting for taste] therefore no bottle exists that a broad group of individuals would agree is perfect. Which says something about scoring wines in general. Also, the Nirvana that a newbie eonophile believes exists at this point level simply does not. No angels sung. No orgasms were had. It was red wine. Really, really nice red wine. One can have really nice red wine at sane price points if one knows their palate and where to look. I, for one, will be leaving the multi-hunrded bottles to the collectors and multi-millionaires for a good while, quite content to get more pleasure elsewhere. Perhaps not the expected conclusion, but it seems to be far preferable to 'worth every penny', no?

So we moved on. In anticipation of a fine evening, a friend had contributed a remarkable bottle he'd recently acquired: a 1970 Graham's Vintage Port. I don't have a lot of experience with port, so this was additional high-level education. Boozy on the nose, this wine shone on the palate, with a stunningly silky texture and deliciousness. A fantastic experience. We paired it with about a dozen or so items, and found it worked best with dried pineapple, almonds, and chocolate mousse. It has a nice long finish of 'headache the next morning' [sugar, booze, and me just don't get along].

So in the paraphrased words of Gary Vaynerchuk: try lots and lots of wines, and vehemently trust your own palate. Only then will you find true wine-happiness.

4 Wines & A Plate - Tuscany

Long a flogger of French varietals, I figured exploring some Italian varietals, of which there are many, was long overdue. Tuscany well deserves some attention, and I think is pretty misunderstood. The food was kept rustic: game stew. Imo, there were 2 lovely wines, and two boring wines.

THE WINES
A: 2004 Talenti Pian di Conte Brunello di Montalcino, WA93, $65
Nice fruit, wood, clearly lovely, heavy on the strawberry jam. Anise and oak, dense and supple on the palate. 91-92.

2006 Tenuta del'Ornellaia Le Serre Nuove, WA94, $63
Metallic, blueberry, licorice, dill, cinnamon stick, green pepper on the nose. The palate showed cirtus, spice, pomegranate, with mouth coating tannins and a hefty acidity. Paired best with the food. 94+

2006 Monte Antico Toscana WS90, $17
Tight, a little stink, petrochemicaly, some dust. Tannic, acid on back end, with a blech finish. Way not a fan, very disappointed, and WAY don't agree with the Wine Spectator score. 79

'I forgot the vintage, but it doesn't matter' TorrediPisa
Wet fall slough, over and over, pennies, raisin. Generic and average on the palate, just squeaking into 'good' territory. This wine wins the 'tackiest and most unnecessary packaging ever' award. It's lucky it was a blind tasting. 82

Ketchup...from scratch

Having made lard, I've been mucking about [very successfully, I may add] with pastry dough. Which lead to tourtiere. Which lead to copious amounts of ketchup being used, which is how I roll with tourtiere. Heinz. I used it up, yep I did. Onto the grocery list it went.

Then I considered a ketchup a friend of mine had given me, that I also had just run out of. She'd made it. It was pretty tasty. I had a 40lb crop of tomatoes this fall, and had some put up. It was time I gave this a go.

No recipe here. It was some pureed tomatoes from the garden. A small tin of organic tomato paste. Some sautéed onion, garlic, and a tad of celery as a base. Tweaked the acid with white vinegar, the sweetness with sugar. Salt, of course. That's it. Reduced it, immersion blended it, put it through a sieve for texture - and well, it looked like ketchup. Nailed that. Taste? Pretty dang solid. I tend to get jazzed about balancing acid and sugar in general - so ketchup may just present enough of a challenge to keep making it. With very little effort, I ended up with about a quart. That should last, oh, until next week if I keep making tourtiere. Ketchup has been scratched off the grocery list.

Burnin' the Shit out of Bacon

This is not what bacon should look like, just coming off the smoke. This is what bacon looks like when you figure all is going smoothly, and head out with the family shopping for groceries. And instead of coming home to the anticipated wisp of smoke that needs tending, coming home to a huge grease fire in your smoking apparatus. And opening the lid and finding blackness, smoke, and flames. Not the plan. As I swore to myself in frustration, I was grateful that it was my batch, not my friend's batch - which was slated for the smoker next. At least mine's garbage, thought I. And at least this happened safely outside.

So I brought the burnt, nuked, grease-fired, would-be bacon into the house to toss it. But then my wife and I realized it smelled like I just brought in a rack of pork ribs off the grill. It did not smell burnt - it smelled tasty. My mood changed. So I cut into it - and lo and behold, I have a new bacon product of some kind that I need to find a name for. It smells of lovely bacon, but with a grilled-ribs vibe. Char-smoked-bacon? Smoke-seared-bacon? I'm so serving this tomorrow with a big red wine, moose tenderloin, and mushrooms...

Rendering Lard - my new bff

Why, oh why, have I never done this before? I've cut 10 sides of pork in the past 13 months, and never, not once, did I render lard. Stupid. I will forever and ever, from this day forward, consider the leaf lard in the pig a very valuable piece of yield. Not only is it excessively easy to harvest - lightly attached on one side around the tenderloin area - it is the choicest of fats for making pastry dough. Or frying potatoes [ok, duck fat and beef tallow have good reps here too]. Or frying, say, pork. Or, well, anything, really. So why didn't I try it? Stupidity. Only saving grace is that it wasn't wasted - it was simply ground before. Never again.

The process is simple, and has been well documented here and here. I did about half of my stash at 120C in the oven, it took 8hrs give or take, and the smell made me want to barf. I don't understand. It's cooking pork. Creating a product - lard - that is very neutral in general. Some people do it outside, and I don't blame them. I'll likely stick to the oven for the heat control, and I found that any nausea is quickly forgotten once you've gotten on with using the stuff.

I found a lot of methods of storing the stuff. Many use jars, which unless you have a straight sided jar seems like an annoying idea to me when it comes to trying to get lard out. I also have had bad luck breaking jars in the freezer. One cool idea was muffin tins to get individual portions. But I swooned when I read about pouring it into a cake pan of some kind, so that it can be cut into butter-like sticks, and wrapped in convenient portions - which is what I did, illustrated in the photo top left.

So thank you, lard, for filling a void in my life I did not know existed.