Monday, March 28, 2016

Wine/Cheese 1

Wine and Cheese 1

Wines

  1. Duplin, Scuppernong from Carolina.
  2. Attimo Winery, Bull Frog Symphony 2013, Red table Wine
  3. Castle Rock Winery, 2012 Pinot Noir


Cheeses
  1. Yancey's Fancy New York's artisan Cheese. Finger Lakes Champagne, aged cheddar cheese
  2. Mont Chevre Fresh Goat Cheese with lemon
  3. Dofino, Gouda Cheese with Lime
The gouda here was a little over powered with the lime flavor, but it was still very good. I tried this most with the bull frog and quickly switched over to the pinot. I didn't like the bull frog all that much, it was too strong on the attack and did not have a nice transition between front to rear palate. The gouda's sharp yet buttery flavor worked nicely with the pinot, not so much with the bull frog. The scuppernong was too overpowering with the sweetness. I didn't like it at all with the scuppernong. 
This cheese had a lot of flavor and was very smooth. Strong lemon flavor paired well with the scuppernong for me and not so much with the reds. I enjoyed the long finish of the cheese and thought it paired well with the sweet finish of the scuppernong. Not too overpowering on this one. I tried this near the end of our get together and the red wines were mostly empty by the time I had a chance to try this one. I enjoyed it most on bread as opposed to crackers.

This cheese went most well with the red wine, the Pinot Noir. I thought the cheddar worked well with the wine because the acidicy of the wine mellowed out and the flavors blended together very well. It had a slight smoky flavor and the smoothness of the pinot made this difficult to stop eating. I found that Pinot Noir and bread are delicious together, almost too much!




Thursday, March 17, 2016

Wine Dinner 2

Wine Dinner 2

Appetizer

We started out the second dinner with some delicious garlic bread pieces paired with a rose.  This rose was a 2014 Pinetti Notte from Italy. The crisp and fruity taste of the wine paired well with the heavy and strong garlic flavors in the bread. The crispness in the wine and smooth butteryness of the biscuits were a surprising compliment. As well was the extended finish. From a sudden crisp attack on the front palate to a smooth buttery mid palate followed by a long yet appetizing finish this was a nice combination. Unfortunately we were so excited about finally eating dinner that the biscuits were all gone before we took a photo of only them.





Entree

Up next we had the main course of spaghetti with a side of fried zucchini. The entree was definitely filling and a nice follow up to the garlic bread appetizer. Paired with this we chose to drink some red wine. This time we went with a 2014 El Cortijillo Tempranillo from Castilla, Spain. The larger body in this was instantly noticeable. The simple taste of it was also a nice pleasantry as I don't yet enjoy the complex wines as much. Hands down the beef and pasta paired well with this. It was more of a clean drink that has some raspberry or cherry in it. This wine was sweeter at first and finished a little dry and hot, not too bad especially with the extra sauce I had on the pasta. The 13.5% alcohol was a little more than I'd like but it didn't bring this wine down too much.


Dessert

Dessert was a delicious chocolate pie with whipped cream in the crust. Lots of chocolate in a milk chocolate smooth fashion. The pie was ok, nothing super stellar, but enjoyable. The wine was a 2014 Rubus wine selections proprietary reserve red wine from Australia.. This wine was mostly rubired with some durif and shiraz in it. It had a good body to it with lots of black curant flavor. I didn't like it that much to begin with and didn't finish my glass with the pie. The finish was smooth, and that helped a lot, but the oakiness in it did not go over well with me. I gave it a shot and thought of maybe finding a glass of water to finish off dinner.

Conclusion

Overall dinner was a great success. We cooked for a while, talked a lot about the wine and how it paired with dinner and had a great time while doing it! I don't think we would have gotten everyone together in the first place without this course. Looking forward to the next wine dinner. Can't wait to see what we'll come up with or what wine's we'll get to try next time!



Thursday, February 25, 2016

Dinner 1

Dinner and Wine

Appetizer

For the appetizer we had some delicious bread and cheese. The bread was a french baguette while the two cheeses were manchego and Kentucky bourbon bellavitano.


The wine paired with this cheese was the 2012 Michel Gassier "Cercius" Vieilles Vignes CĂ´tes du Rhone Rouge. I enjoyed trying out the difference of wine before and after the bread and cheese. There's something completely different to wine with a food pairing. In this case the smokey flavors of the cheese were brought out while the acidity of the wine was diminished. Secondly, the finish of the wine lasted much longer. Though the Cercius had a nice fruity full body first appearance to it the longer finish wasn't loved. a 14.5% alcohol content in this was easily noticeable without the cheese, and almost potable with. I didn't love this wine but it was fun seeing how the flavors of food and wine worked well together.
 

Main Course

For the dinner we had baked chicken seasoned with mint, rosemary, and a splash of wine from the previous nights dinner. The chicken went well with mashed sweet potatoes and baked Brussels sprouts.

Chickens
And Their Friends

Paired with the main course we tried another red wine, this time the 2013 Maipe reserve Bonarda.

Maipe
I enjoyed this wine a bit more. Mostly because of the lower alcohol content, but also because of the subtle flavors that emerged out of everything. The wine had a smaller body, something that worked well with the various flavors in the main course. This wine has a delicious finish, especially after a bite of chicken and sprouts. Fortunately the bottle was shared by the entire table, otherwise I think I'd have it all to myself.

Dessert

Dessert came next, a delicious raspberry chocolate truffle paired with a not so delicious wine. The truffles had an amazing taste of raspberry in them with a dark but creamy chocolate medium. The wine also had some chocolate flavors in it but the sweetness and strong off cherry taste and smell in the wine did not go well with the chocolate. I don't like sangria's, and this reminded me of a bad sangria.

Till next time, happy cooking and drinking!

Wednesday, February 3, 2016

Winery Visit 1 - Glass House Winery


Glass House Winery


http://www.glasshousewinery.com/

On January 1, 2016 some friends, family, and I went to visit the Glass House Winery in Free Union, Virginia. Thought this was not my first time visiting the winery, it was my first time taking a tour of the wine making process. I'll start out by disclosing that I do have family connections and by no means was I offered anything to write this post.

The Start



Our visit began in a very warm tropical atmosphere inside the glass house that makes up most of the primary building. Banana trees full of fruit hung above our heads as we listen to a live band and enjoyed delicious Mexican food supplied through a food truck. The first wine I saw and smelled while at the winery was while eating lunch. A 2013/2014 Viognier produced from the winery. The glass felt cold and had a mild smell to it. I was told it had a flavorful mid-pallet and was very good.

Enough Rambling

Lunch aside, the tour was the meat of the visit. We began by seeing the collection bins. Large plastic pallets whose life was holding almost a ton of grapes, stems, and juices.  Red wines will have the grapes sit in the bins for about a day to allow the juices to mix with the skins and stems. These bins would then be unloaded into the juice extractor. The pallets below are double walled to hold the wine and any large pressure buildup.

First though the grapes need to be removed from the vines. The machine here shows a tumblr where grapes are designed to pass through and be plucked off large vines from their stems to be fed into the large bins.
Destemmer
Once they are removed from the stems they are crushed to allow the juices to be released from the grapes.
Crusher
Five feet away we also saw some of the machinery that presses the juices out of the grape mixture. The machine below, expensive as it is (25k for the drum alone) has an air bladder that is filled to force pressure onto the remaining skins and stems that collect at the bottom of the drum. Out of this mixture all the juices flow through the small slits at the bottom and into a drip pan ready for collection and fermentation. 
Juice Press
The collected grape juice is now passed into large stainless steel holding tanks complete with cooling rings and yeast!
Fermentation/Settling Tanks
The dimpled ring around the center of the drums is where a chilled glycol mixture is flowed to keep the temperature of the grape juice constant. Below is a photo of the glycol chiller.

Chiller

Following the fermentation room in the basement we saw the holding room or maturation room, This room held both oak barrelled wines and a new plastic polymer based wine container. Though the oak barrels support micro-oxygentation diffused through the wood some of the newer plastic polymer based containers also support micro-oxygenation; though at a slightly reduced rate. Flavor can also be added to the wine to give it an oaky flavor by placing wood chips in the larger stainless steel tanks or in the plastic containers.


Next was the wine tasting portion, though I was only able to smell and look at the wines I did have the chance to see a white wine before any filtration or time to settle out the finer particulates. The wine looked much hazier than I had ever seen a white wine.



Glass House prefers the French style for creating a Pinot Grigio to make in more full bodied. To do this they use a souis reserve and freeze 5% of the juice, still sweet, and add it back the day before harvest. This adds sugar and full body to the wine, yet, keeps it as a dry wine because of the sugar content. Below 1%. Off dry would be between 1 and 3%. The wine itself is supposedly sweet even before adding the wine before bottling. Even though it's sugar content is 0%!

During the winter though, with extremely low temperatures, the wine is dormant, or asleep. The flavors are dormant and the wine is not what it would be come springtime. In the spring the wines wake up. Given this, there's still really good wines to drink in the late winter/early spring.

Up next was a Viognier, which matures like a red wine. Most white wines have a linear sugar content. Over time the sugar gradually increased. A Pinot Grigio or a Viognier both have non linear sugar responses. If you pick it too early the sugar content is nothing, pick it too late and it may be too high which would produce a very hot wine, or a wine with a high alcohol content. Above 23 brix would be a 12.5% white wine, in this case. Above 25 brix you reach a 14% alcohol content wine, above 12.5% you can taste the alcohol, leading to a hot wine, a wine most people dislike. Secondly, anything above 14% alcohol content is taxed differently. There's a large range in reporting the alcohol between 12% and 13.9%, but if you were to report a 14.01% wine as 13.8% you could get in a lot of trouble.

Because the Viognier has issues with it's sugar content vs fruitiness it can be very difficult to balance the flavor and the alcohol/brix content. Some years are better than others with finding a good harvest time!

Premium red wines are typically aged for at least 2 years before sale. Glass House produces a Meritage blend wine, a wine that means a Bordeaux blend. A Bordeaux blend can only be called a Bordeaux blend if it's been grown in a certain region of France. Because of this in the US they're called a Meritage blend if Bordeaux grapes are used. These grapes include Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Petit Verdot and Malbec. This would be a wine with any of these grapes, a blend, or solo, but with nothing else.

Thursday, January 28, 2016

Tasting 1

Tasting 1 - Milestone Cabernet Sauvignon

Name: Milestone Cabernet Sauvignon


Variety: Cabernet Sauvignon
Region: Geyserville, California
Country: USA
Year: 2013
Price: $8.79

Quick Facts

Wine style: Rich and velvety smooth, our Milestone Cabernet
Sauvignon’s luscious, jammy notes of blackberry and dark fruit
are followed by subtle hints of vanilla and spice.

Appellation: California
Alcohol: 13%
pH: 3.8
TA: 6.1g/L
RS: 11.5g/L

Winery review

A beautiful wine, not thin but balanced with oak notes and a full jammy mouthy taste. Not overpowering, so this will go well with cheese, meat, fruit or chocolate. Smooth with a wonderful finish. A great value. 3.5/5

My review

The wine had a nice taste to it, nothing too strong, but still flavors to give it something to be remembered by. I tried it before eating and while eating. This was the first time I tried the “Bird calling” technique and have to say that the rear pallet taste was quite different than without aerating the wine using the technique. I read the description to have an idea of what to look for but couldn’t really tell where the vanilla or the oak was coming from. Trying the meat with the wine was a great paring, maybe the dark fruits and berries were adding to the experience too!



Sunday, January 24, 2016

Week 1

Wine has always been that shirt in the back of the closet that always seems to be a great shirt, but never turns out to be all that great by the end of the day. You try it a couple times each year, but it just never turns out to work all that well. I don't try wine all that often, I do enjoy smelling different wines when those around my are having it with a meal, but the aspect of tasting it has never sat that well with me.

My experience with wine is slim, I've visited vineyards, have siblings that work at them, friends that are extremely knowledgeable, but my lack of knowledge in wine prevents me from fully understanding all of it's complexities and depth. I look forward to learning more about it and what the complete wine experience is about. My typical experiences are around dinner time when I'm offered a small glass, one that I usually turn down.

I can't wait to slosh and make bird sounds when I try my first wine during this course though. I never knew that there were so many different techniques to tasting wine. The front, left, right, and back of my pallet will all finally have a chance to properly taste wine the way it was made to be tasted. Now, if I could only figure out where I left my wine spit bucket....

Moving forward I hope to learn how to properly identify the various aspect and characteristics that wine hold. I currently don't quite understand what makes a full body wine a full body wine, or what a flinty wine tastes like. I had my first lesson on wines when visiting Thomas Jefferson's wine cellar and the history of his classification system on wines, now I'll be able to understand what the tour guides were really speaking about and how impactful Mr. Jefferson's analysis was.