Ham or Lamb?

Thanksgiving, turkey is served but at Easter most people have either ham or lamb. As always with big gatherings, match the wine to the guests first and the food second. After all, they are the ones drinking it, not the cooked meat.

Ham is pork, cured with smoke and salt. To counterbalance the smoke and the salt, most people glaze their hams. The salty, smokey, sweet combination needs to be harmonized with the fruitiest wine you can stand. My first choice would be a German Riesling of Spatlese or Auslese level. Spatlese literally means to pick late. If you leave fruit on the vine longer, it gets sweeter naturally. Auslese means to pick out. As bunches are hand harvested, some of the bunches are noticeably riper, sweeter, than other. These extra sweet bunches are placed in a separate smaller hod attached to the normal size hod on the backs of the pickers. An inexpensive but good Spatlese is the Schmidt-Sohne around $11 a bottle. Most Spatleses are between $20-30 a bottle. I have two from the 2002 vintage, from the same producer but two different vineyard sites. Langwerth von Simmern is the producer, the two great vineyard sites are Hattenheimer Wisselbrunnen and Erbacher Marcobrunn, each around $30 a bottle.

Lamb is easier. Your favorite red wine not Pinot Noir. Yup, this is the show-off meat for any red wine other than Pinot Noir. Bordeaux, California, Italy, Spain, on and on just pick your or your guests favorite. To be fair, some people like Pinot Noir with lamb. I am not one of them.

And of course this year after dinner is done, you can choose to watch the Red Sox play the Yankees in Boston. On a rare warm and dry night in April, if you choose to believe the meterologists.

Trite April Fools Day Wine

Some wines just fool you. Dry Muscat comes first to mind.

Muscats have rich ripe floral and fruit aromas that are reminiscent of sweet fruit salad. You sip them and they are head shakingly dry. No sweetness on the palate at all. Fools me everytime. Most wines made from Muscat family grapes are made sweet or sweet and bubbly. The dry ones from the Alsace, Marcel Deiss is a master,but 30 a bottle are fun to drink. I do like to bring them out and fool wine geeky friends and serve them with dessert. I giggle when I watch them take a big sip and at first they are about to say that the wine is off, but they quickly realize I have duped them again. Haha, wine geek fun.

I must admit I was fooled badly the first time I had one, but I was congratulated for the "closest guess". On an early 1980's trip to Alsace, I was visiting the Lorentz estate, at the time one of the largest suppliers of good quality Alsace wine to the East Coast. After a great tour of the winery and the region by the grandfather, he never left Alsace but his nationality changed 4 times in his lifetime, we had a lunch at the estate and had a tasting of old wines after the meal. The last wine was the guessing one. My guess, a 1953 Pinot Gris, they all giggled at me and congratulated me for best guess. The wine, a 1928 Muscat. At that age all the fruity-floral aromas had faded away and we were left with a stunningly delicious dry white wine. I was only off by 25 years and the grape variety, everything.

Later I found out that the only strain of Muscat that ages that well is Ottonel. I have successfully aged some Muscat Ottonel over 10 years and have met with similar success. Fools the wine experts every time.

Alas, I have yet to find a food item that really sings with this floral dry bouquet of a wine. Just enjoy it for what it is. A fool ya.

The Final Pump

The Moon burst through the clouds in a Biblical style reminiscent of a Charlton Heston movie.

The pumps are silent.

I am exhausted. Another quickie.

I love lamb for Easter. Or just about any other dinner. Lamb makes red wine taste better. With the exception of Pinot Noir. Lots of people like Pinot Noir with lamb, I don't, but it's my blog so there.

My sister-in-law hates lamb, we are going to her house for Easter. No lamb. But, if we were not going to her house. I would bring something yummy and red. This year the 2007 reds from the Rhone Valley of France are fabulous. For a big crowd, any Cotes du Rhone will work. This year the Chateau d'Oupia from Minervois is a knockout. A blend of many grapes it is complex and just tasty.

Off to bed. Sorry

Rain Won

Three surface pumps running for 14 hours and the water refuses to keep pouring back in the basement. Thankfully, the wine cellar is just high enough to escape any damage. And look on the bright side, half the crap I would have thrown out when we retire is already trashed.

Just a quickie, I have to get back to the bucket brigade.

2009 Indaba Chenin Blanc is the white wine of the month, season and probably year. Wonderful peachy-minerally flavors and aromas. Pleases the wine expert and rookie equally. Great appetizer wine before a holiday meal, great cheese and cracker, great book club and all around great wine value.

Back to the buckets.

Rain, rain go away!

Another 3-6 inches of rain due today in the Boston area. Since two storms ago flooded my basement and its now cleared of everything, it's time we go for the world record here and shoot for 41 days and nights. Oh, well.

I wanted a wine to warm me up. Flavors, aromas, alcohol and body, I want it all in one red wine.
Aglianico is the grape, southern Italy is the place, Selvanova is the company and Vigna Antica (old vines) is the quality. Big, spicy earthy flavors and aromas exude from the big and tannic red wine. No red sauce for this baby, I want my favorite cold, dank, dreary day, red wine meat, lamb. And I want the lamb marinated in lots of Rosemary and garlic and olive oil and gin, yes gin, and lemon juice. Roasting that lamb-herb concoction fills my house and the neighbors houses with amazing aromas that get the old digestive juices pumping faster than a sump. I once cooked this dish over the fire in the fireplace, it flares up a lot if you are daring, have the fire extinguisher ready. To make the meal complete, I have to have Garlic Roast Potatoes. The recipe comes out of Jasper White's first cookbook, Cooking in New England. If I remember correctly the recipe is called Freddie's Roast Potatoes. If you do this recipe right, double the batch, you will still run out. They are that good. Heck, it's worth to buy the book for that one recipe but all the others I have tried are fabulous. I even thing the lamb marinade came out of the same book.

Back to the wine. Open and decant the bottle an hour before serving. Same time as the potatoes take.

12 done 588 to go.

South African Syrah

Another great find from this year's Cape Cod Spring Fling Tasting was the Graham Beck The Ridge Syrah 2005 at $29.99 a bottle. Graham Beck is on my short list of best all-around bang-for-the-buck winemakers in the world. Although most of them are under $20 a bottle, this amazing Syrah is a steal at 30.

Syrah and elegance are two words that are rarely in the same sentence. The Graham Beck Syrah is elegant. Silky smooth in the mouth it has typical gamey-peppery syrah flavors without the barnyardy typicity of Rhone wines nor the Raspberry fruitiness of Australian Shiraz, same grape, different spelling. In combination with this elegance is still the power you expect from a Syrah.

This is a great choice if you plan on serving a leg of lamb for Easter dinner. Smooth enough for the occasional wine drinking relative and complex enough for the astute wine drinker. I can't wait to try it with marinated lamb chops on the grill.

Graham Beck makes a few different Syrahs, make sure you get the one that has "The Ridge" on the label.

11 down, wow this is fun!

Next Hot Red Grape

If it looks like Merlot, blossoms like Merlot, changes color like Merlot and ripens like Merlot, it's Merlot!? Nope, and don't be ashamed, it fooled millions of people for over 100 years. It's called Carmenere.

With the advent of DNA analysis of grape varieties, many myths and "truths" have been dispelled in the wine business. One of the biggest is the long thought extinction of Carmenere. Originally in the classic Bordeaux blend it was not replanted after the Phyloxera blight in the late 1800's. What was unknown was that the grape was planted in Chile and it expanded its cultivation range as all wine growers thought it was Merlot. Prior to DNA analysis, the science you used to identify grape varieties was the science of Ampelography, leaf patterns. Today, most Carmenere is picked separately from Merlot and for good reason. Even though the grapes look alike, flower alike, change color alike and the juice in the fruit ripens alike, the seeds in the Carmenere stay bitter for an extra week or two. You just have to wait to make a great wine. In Bordeaux with its cooler climate and shorter growing season, the grape was allowed to die out because 9 years out of 10 the seeds never ripened and you couldn't help but make bitter wine.

Carmenere today is where Malbec was 10 years ago. Consumers are just finding out about it. The wine is smooth like Merlot but has more flavor in addition, the grape produces the same organic compound found in chocolate that gives us that lovey-dovey feeling. I am getting consumers giving me feedback after tasting the wine to the effect, " I don't like dry red wines, but I loved this?!"

In the store today we have one from Cono Sur of Chile, where else. It retails for $9.99 a bottle and in three months time it has gone from obscure to the number one selling red wine. Equally good with all red meats it excels with pork. I remember the Tuscans add cocoa powder to their wild boar stew, so no surprise there.

Caution! Some of the winemakers are not waiting long enough for the seeds to ripen and this makes a green tasting wine. You won't find any yucky Carmeneres at my store, cuz I taste all the bad wines, so you only have to taste the good ones.