Notes on the Grands Jours, Day 2

During day two of the GJ, we did the Côte d’Or. Unlike my first Grands
Jours day two, we went from south to north. We started in
Nuits-Saint-Georges, had a snack in the Château de Clos de Vougeot, skipped
through Chambolle, whose tasting is in an old barn, and finished in
Marsannay. The first time I made this trip, I was overwhelmed by the grands
crus. I wanted to be able to say I’d tried Chambertin and Bonnes Mares and
all that stuff. Since that was over, I tried to get around the lines at
grand cru barrels and search more for the character of the places. I still
got around to trying a couple St. Vivants and the Clos de Tart, just to
make sure they were keeping up.

The wines are all wonderful. I’m a wimpy wine reviewer, but I was really
happy with the heart of Burgundy, even though most of it was from an
off-vintage. The quality creates the legends that abound in this place.
Myths abound, too. The storytelling is fun, though, because this is where
wine lovers all congregate, and it’s the people who really care that
perpetuate and inflate all these stories. My head was filled with the
stories. I think I came out with two points that seemed real, anyway, and
were reflected in the aromas and palates of these wines.




The first was that the tannin character of the wines tends to be high at
the ends, and low in the center, like a suspension bridge. Nuits and Fixin
have plenty of tannin, and it smooths out as you get closer to Chambolle. A
writer named John Gilman (http://www.viewfromthecellar.com/index.html)
pointed this out to me, and I found him to be right. Is it that the terroir
naturally makes the wines this way?

Probably to a certain extent. But another thing I heard when my friend
Stephan was talking with another winemaker was the word “Americanization.”
It was in French, so I didn’t understand the whole conversation. I asked
him about it later and he said that it was the word that described modern
winemaking, and it seems to be characterized by more fruit flavor, less
tannin, less acid—in a word, less of everything that helps a wine age, but
helps a wine taste better initially. In a way, this could also mean that
the wine is more controlled to produce these attributes and therefore has
fewer flaws and more factory corrections.




The defenders of the faith demand that if a wine is made this way it’s
flawed. This isn’t a wine flaw we covered in class. As the culture
influences me, I’m beginning to lean toward enjoying the wines of Nuits and
Fixin. They are more tannic, rustic, and real. We tried lots of
ten-year-olds made in this style, and they're fascinating. And they’re a
lot cheaper.

Notes on the Grands Jours, Day 1

Chablis is the first stop on the Grand Jours tour. There, they also pour
Auxerre, Tonnerre, Vézelay, Irancy, and Saint Bris. Saint Bris is notable
since it’s made from sauvignon blanc. It tended to be aromatic and balanced
just under a percent of sugar. I would say the Saint Bris seems to be a
world away from white Bordeaux or New Zealand, and definitely a fun change
from a thousand Chablis.

They do make reds, especially in Irancy and Vézelay. The majority are
thinner than in the south—no big surprise—but also have nice noses and are
not oaky. The reds were acidic and so were the whites. We tasted mostly
2007, a cold year.

When it comes to Chablis wines, I found that a person could make a nice
Cartesian graph to explain them. On one axis, let’s say the X, we have
growth designations from Bourgogne to village to premier to grand cru. On
the Y we have oak. As you move along the X axis, the wines tend to go up in
oakiness.


Anyone can probably guess that as you move up and away, the Chablis also
get more and more expensive. The surprise of the day was that what was
interesting to me didn’t line up directly with the price. The lines of
people at the tables lined up directly with the price. Not that the
expensive stuff isn't good. It is. That isn't a surprise.

There was a really nice, balanced premier cru, Vosgros, that I loved, and
some of the Fourchaume and Montmains were great. My faves had a little oak.
A really smart importer could find some wonderful wine in this region
cheaper than grand cru. Then that person could import it to Oregon and we’d
all be happier.

Also, I might try to find a premier cru Chablis made in Oregon. Let us
know if you have found one.

Notes on the Grands Jours

Bethany and I knew our bags were pretty heavy with seven bottles of Burgundy and a cremant and a vin de paille from Jura, so we were going to switch the load between our bags to even it out. But the one I thought was heavier was already gone when our clerk told us that the second was too heavy. Bethany heroically suggested pulling out the books we’d saved from the Grands Jours de Bourgogne week of tastings, around 20 of them, and our bag was all right to go.
During our trip, including a few dinners and an extra tasting at the Hospice de Nuits, we tasted more than 1000 wines each. It gave me a lot of fodder for blog entries. We started the Grands Jours tastings in Chablis, then tasted the main areas of Burgundy over the next four days from Marsannay down to Pouilly, and I think there’s even another little town south of there, but I don’t have the book. Before that, we were farther north, in Paris, and we had a wonderful night at the restaurant of wine guru Tim Johnston of Juvenile’s wine bar.


Tim came to our table after we’d had a bottle of South African riesling and started chatting. He poured us some Beaujolais and we drank a bit of his birthday-barrel single malt. He found out we were going to Burgundy. After seeing the disgust on his face, I noted that he had no Burgundies among his glass pours. He said something like, “I only have good wine.”
There’s no good wine in Burgundy? Nope. And little good in Bordeaux, either. So if you want to follow the example of a successful restaurateur in your own cellar, you would only purchase Rhône, Bandol, Loire, east-of-France (Germany, Austria) and new world stuff. Now, he did say that he probably wouldn’t like the bottle of Illahe we gave him, either, but I’m blaming it more on the fact that our bottle was made from Burgundy’s king of grapes than it was grown and made in Oregon.
It was a great night. It’s always fun to hear different opinions. (Oh, he also mentioned that he kicked the director of the movie Mondovino out of his bar!) In the following week I tasted some spectacular wines from all over Burgundy. Whether they are priced fairly is another subject altogether.

To the Grand Jours we go!

Brad and I have the amazing opportunity to attend the 10th Grand Jours de Bourgogne. We leave Thursday and start tasting Monday...Every day we go to different Chateaus around Burgundy for the event. I think when I stumble out of this next Friday I will be a little more versed in Burgundy wines.





http://www.grands-jours-bourgogne.com/home-grands-jours-de-bourgogne,797.html?

au revoir,
Bethany

In Search of an Illahe Yeast.

To date, Illahe has done a handful of native fermentations but it hasn’t been a main part of the program. We’ve used a special yeast from Evesham Wood and we’ve used about 10 different commercial yeast. Most of the commercial yeast have given us wonderful results, so we have been happy. Yet from what Michael and I learned at the Oregon Wine Symposium, there may be a good reason to start looking at native ferments more closely.

Dr. Mat Goddard of Auckland University presented his research at the symposium that he had found yeast in fermentations that were genetic matches to yeast found in the vineyard. Not just yeast, but Saccharomyces—the wine yeast. This contradicts the research we learned in school. For example, Charles Edwards says in his book, Wine Microbiology on page 7, “Kloeckera…as well as others present in grape musts such as Candida [et al.] are also called ‘native,’ ‘natural,’ or ‘wild’ yeasts because they originate in the vineyard or the winery.” They are also called spoilage yeast, and they don’t include Saccharomyces. Moreover, in his section on native fermentations, he talks mostly about how spoilage yeasts affect wine.

Neither Dr. Goddard nor anyone else denies that these yeast do exist and do come from the vineyard. The important point is that Saccharomyces, if he is right, does come from the vineyard. But not only this, a vast array of different and interesting yeast with different genes come from the vineyard.

Isn’t this obvious? How was wine made historically if not from Saccharomyces? The explanations I had heard before were that yeast came from the winery walls and equipment and had floated there from oak trees, where they had been found before. Oddly, Dr. Goddard could not find Saccharomyces in the winery, though at some times of year it definitely exists and in great quantities.

The other fascinating thing about his discussion was that none of the yeasts he found were commercial strains, indicating that a wine can be made from its own terroir. Nonetheless, one of the components is bound to be the spoilage yeast of the terroir, so a native ferment will have to be managed closely.

In following Cristom and Eieio (whose excellent vin de terroir I had not too long ago) and many others, Illahe will begin a serious native yeast program this year. In the handful of native fermentations we’ve had, I had assumed they started from other innoculated fermentors. I still think it might have happened that way: a punchdown tool or even a hand moving from one fermentor to another to clean it could have innoculated the must. They were successful and acted like innoculated fermentors, but this research suggests that these wines may have been native Illahe yeasts. Finding a local, strong fermenting yeast would be something that we would love for complexity and uniqueness.

Brad Ford

Tonkatsu with Illahe Viognier

For me to post a recipe is pretty ridiculous since I’m an average cook and there must be twelve better recipes for tonkatsu. But this is the only one with Illahe viognier in it, so I’m going to serve it to you anyway. Tonkatsu was one of the best things my beautiful friend Yone would make for me when I was a bartender in Tokyo.

And this is a beautiful viognier! I just read some thing on the internet dissing it, and all I can add is that if you think everything with the word ‘viognier’ on it must be Condrieu, I would say this is Willamette Valley viognier, and it stands on its own. A perfect balance of pleasing aroma moving between tropical fruit, apricots, pears, apples, to sweet spring flowers, backed up by a lawn being mowed a block away.

Oh, where was I? The recipe. It’s like most tonkatsu recipes I’ve read (whence it derives). Salt and pepper the pork chops and let them rest a bit. That’s a good time to shred up some cabbage, cut a lemon into wedges, and heat up oil in a sauce pan to medium-hot. I used olive oil and it worked just fine, but I had run out of vegetable oil. After the salt has worked its way into the chops, fill a plate with flour, a wide bowl with egg for every two chops, and a plate with panko. I’ve tried it with regular white bread crumbs and it’s okay, but the big panko pieces are nice.

Into the egg bowl, whisk in two or three tablespoons of Illahe viognier per egg along with a tablespoon of Dijon. C’est tout. Dip the chops in the flour, the egg mix, and the panko, and then fry it. Do the first side for about five minutes, golden brown, then flip. I used a meat thermometer since I had thick chops, up to 145F. If you don’t have a thermometer, I would say about 10 minutes for an inch. Put them on a bed of cabbage with the lemon, squeeze on some lemon, and drizzle with soy or teryaki or some nice salty brown sauce. You might even want to look up a tonkatsu sauce if you have ambition.

Make rice if you like, but make sure you have wine left for dinner.

Sunset Magazine vs. Brad Ford

Sunset Magazine had a nice article in it today, that I forwarded to Brad because there were mentions of a few small Oregon towns that we are fond of.

Brad decided to take matters into his own hands, as usual, and write his own top 10 small towns list because he obviously disagreed. I invite you to compare.
Bethany


Sunset Article:
http://www.sunset.com/travel/top-20-small-towns-western-us-00400000040172/

Brad Ford's Top Ten Oregon Small Towns:

10. Astoria.
It has too much yuppie crap in it, but thank God there are some empty buildings, some evidence of manufacturing, fishing, and logging, and the dream of adventure when you're looking out to the mouth of the Columbia.

9. Lebanon.
No town has less yuppie crap in it than Lebanon. There's only one coffee shop, but otherwise the smell of people living on the land is real. I think there's still an A&W.

8. The Dalles.
Beautiful train tracks run right through the middle of this slaughter-town. All the beauty of a port with sun and a dessicated landscape. It's one of the few towns that still has a trace of Indian heritage in it.

7. Pendleton.
It's yuppifying a little, but only insomuch as the rodeo is popular. Otherwise, it's far away from the world and even a little way from the freeway. Luckily, they still don't have jobs there.

6. Tillamook.
Who could dislike a town that gets 80 inches of rain a year? I remember being there on Halloween and seeing the local kids in real costumes all happy and excited. Their parents work in dairies. That's America.

5. Rainier.
It sits on a hill overlooking Longview, which is reason enough for any town to be rated well. A handful of old two-story buildings, a dock on the Columbia, and a couple taverns. You could live your whole life there and never go to Clatskanie.

4. Fort Rock.
This is a really little town. You can't do anything here except wander around. There is a museum run by a nice lady. There's an abandoned gas station. Also, Fort Rock is right there.

3. Harrisburg.
This town is built right on the Willamette and everyone either works in the paper mill or on a farm. I think the mill is open for now, but when it closes down it'll really get good there. This is the kind of place that makes you want to sit by the river and polish off a bottle of Old Charter.

2. Gardiner.
The only viable businesses in Gardiner on the mouth of the Umpqua are a tavern and I think a body shop. It has a few old houses that are reasonably maintained. Thank God it has seen better days, and you get to talk to people at the tavern just thrown randomly into their lives, not fighting it a bit.

1. Hines.
Hines is great because it isn't even Burns. Once in history, someone probably thought something was going to happen in Burns, since it was on the railroad. Now it's just in the middle of the desert. It has the smallest Indian reservation in the state right next to it with a casino, so I've heard. So you can go over there, but neither at the casino nor in Burns are you in Hines, which is clearly the end of the line. Whatever part of California or Seattle you are from, you will go back refreshed from your trip to that motel in Hines secure in the fact that your life is fast paced and fascinating.