A Good Year for Chocolate?

From France’s Loire – the valley of kings and castles – come the only chocolates in the word with a vintage date, according to owner Pierre-Jean Sauvion of the Sauvion wine estate in Muscadet. It was there that his grandmother invented the candies, called "Les Genevieve" after their inventor, out of her desire to make sure that nothing would go to waste at her family winemaking estate. The hand-made chocolate candies, shaped like wine barrels, are filled with a mixture made from the dried-out grapes (raisins) in the vineyards that were not appropriate to use in winemaking because of their lack of juice.

The limited production candies are made each year but in varying amounts; production is limited by the size of the grape crop in any given year. The winery says the candies can sell out at any time, but customers can “reserve” an order at the beginning of the year. 

I tasted them and they are delicious. The cost is $16.50 for 20 chocolates or about $13 for 15 chocolates at the winery’s Chateau Cleray in Vallet. They are also available at CARLI, a pâtissier and chocolatier in the city of Nantes.

Pairing Wine and Food

For all you wine geniuses out there, there a new book to consult about matching food with wine, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Wine and Food Pairing. I asked Jeannette Hurt, one of the co-authors of the book (the other is Jaclyn Stuart) what she learned while researching the book that surprised her about wine and food pairing. "One of the best ways to pair is to try to match aromas of wine with flavors of food. Another thing I learned is that if you're not sure of a wine's aromas or if you are a newbie with aromas, one of the best ways to familiarize yourself with aromas is to head to a store like Trader Joe's and buy a bunch of foods that match wine aromas - dried cherries, fresh peaches, vanilla, herbs, etc. - and then to sniff the actual foods and then stick your nose in the wines. That's a much better way to gain sensory reference to aromas, and having that, it's much easier to pair wines. For example, some sauvignon blancs are known to have gooseberry aromas, but if you don't know what a gooseberry smells or tastes like, how can you pick out that aroma in a wine?"

Actually, the gooseberry comparison has always struck me as arcane -- how many people know what a gooseberry tastes like? Maybe they're more common in certain parts of the country, but I'd never seen or tasted a gooseberry until I purposely sought them out after reading descriptions by other wine writers (especially British ones) about the gooseberry component in Sauvignon Blanc.  I still think grapefruit and tart citrus such as lime describes most Sauvignon Blanc better because people are familiar with those tastes and smells.

Some of my favorite pairings: oysters and crab with Sancerre or Muscadet; Cabernet with steak; and Champagne or sparkling wine with French Fries or potato chips.

Tea for You

I've written about tea for Wine Enthusiast magazine and before in this blog. Tea and wine have many things in common -- besides being my two favorite beverages. They are both grown with the same attention to detail and require the right soil, climate and care. They are both delicate drinks that are appreciated by connoisseurs in much the same way.

Recently, two new books about tea came across my desk that I wanted to share with readers. Both by the same author, Lisa Boalt Richardson, a certified tea specialist, Tea with a Twist and The World in Your Teacup would make wonderful gifts for any tea fans.

If you enjoy tea, you're probably familiar with the English tradition of afternoon tea or the Japanese tea ceremony. What's nice about  The World in Your Teacup is that the author focuses on tea traditions in even more unexplored locales like Iran, Kenya and Morocco.

Tea with a Twist: Entertaining and Cooking With Tea presents equally unusual and creative tea partiies like an Indian Chai High Tea and a Mexican Fiesta Tea Party. Learn more about and order both these books from Harvest House Publishers.

Dry Rosés

Springtime may be a good time for dry rosé but in my book, any time is appropriate. You will see rosés in the press because it's the time when most are released due in part to the fact that writers like to write about them as springtime or picnic wines. But that's just marketing, If, like me, you like to sip on dry, French-style rosés during the spring, summer, fall and at holiday parties, look for these recent releases that I found enjoyable and reasonably priced ($7 to $18).

Rosé wines are made from red or black grapes --Pinot Noir, Syrah, Cabernet Franc -- in much the same way red wines are, except their skins are allowed to soak with the grape juice for only a short time – just enough to tint the juice that delicious salmon, pink or red color. They're not for aging, but for drinking young. The wines listed below all have the extra weight and fruit intensty that a red wine provides over most whites but with a lighter body and more refreshing acidity than most reds.

Dark as cranberry juice and most intense in flavor are 2008 Meyer Family Cellars Rosé (Napa); 2009 La Jaja de Jau, (France); and 2009 Blackbird Arrivitse (Napa). They range from 12.9 to 13.5% alcohol.

Paler in color, more delicate in flavor and a touch more acidic are 2009 Les Deux Rives Corbieres Rosé ; 2008 Domaine de Nizas Languedoc Rosé ; 2008 Chateau de Lancyre Pic St. Loup -- all from France; 2009 St. Supery Rosé  (Napa); and Antech Limoux Emotion, Cremant de Limoux (a sparkling wine from France). These range in alcohol levels from 12% to 13.5%.

Bordeaux Fan?

With much speculation about the 2009 vintage of Bordeaux floating around, I spoke with Robin Kelley O’Connor, director of sales at New York’s venerable Sherry-Lehmann Wine Merchants, about the effect of the economy on Bordeaux sales in the United States.  He was just back from Bordeaux where he tasted more than 1,000 wines from the latest vintage. For 20 years, O'Connor was Trade Liaison spokesman for the Bordeaux Wine Bureau in North America, and he served as the president of the Society of Wine Educators from 2003 to 2007.

O'Connor told me he was a fan of Bordeaux both personally and professionally. “For both quality and quantity, it is the single greatest wine region in the world. I love Burgundy, California, Germany, Spain and others but it really comes down to the magic of what Bordeaux can produce, its staying power and the mystery of how the wines age for so long. I’ve promoted $10 bottles as well as $500 bottles, but it’s the workhorse wines that keep everybody in business there.“

Although he has seen his store’s customers (Sherry-Lehmann sells to 42 states, Mexico and Brazil) trade down within the Bordeaux category ever since the 2008 economic downturn, they have stayed loyal to the region.

O’Connor began teaching consumer-friendly educational events at Sherry-Lehmann’s mid-town Manhattan store in 2008. “When we do Bordeaux tastings and seminars, we sell out immediately. There is more excitement than for other regions we offer, even when the prices are high. People really are interested in tasting the wines but also in education so we bring in the owner or winemaker. Many times the attendees have bought the wines already and so it makes sense to come and taste and decide when to drink them.”

His prediction for the 2009 vintage: It's a great vintage, comparable to the 2005, but it won't sell as vigorously because of the economy.

Read more from O'Connor about the American appetite for 2009 Bordeaux in my interview with him in Decanter magazine's June issue, which contains a full report on the 2009 Bordeaux vintage.

Boxed In

Do you avoid boxed wines because you think they are cheap, inferior plonk? I would have been with you if I hadn’t had the opportunity to taste so many over the past few years and discover that most all of them are drinkable, enjoyable wines. Not to mention great bargains.

The most recent I’ve tasted is from the Octavin Home Wine Bar. The 2009 Silver Birch Sauvignon Blanc from Marlborough, New Zealand, was outrageously good for $24 for the equivalent of four bottles! If you, too, have a taste for tart, you will be very pleased with this wine.

I probably would not serve it to guests, but only because the bag-in-box presentation still has a stigma attached to it – although the octagonal box it comes in is the most attractive container I’ve seen yet. (Yet for casual drinking at home, the box with the spigot is actually preferable to selecting, opening and storing four bottles). I think younger wine fans will get over this stigma quicker than older ones -- or may not acknowledge it to begin with -- and as wine producers compete for that younger generation of drinkers, we will be seeing more and more of them. After all, even in the fortress of wine tradition that is France, the bag-in-box wine category is the fastest growing today.

Octavin also makes Monthaven Winery 2008 Chardonnay from California’s central coast at $24 and 2008 Big House Red for $22. Both octagonal boxes contain the equivalent of four bottles.

That's Italian

The V. Sattui winery in Napa Valley, the most visited winery in the most visited wine country in the United States, is celebrating the 125th anniversary of the Sattui family in the wine busines, and late last week I attended a luncheon in San Francisco’s Italian North Beach neighborhood to help celebrate. It was held at the venerable North Beach Restaurant -- worth trying if you visit San Francisco – just two blocks from where Vittorio Sattui, great grandfather of Dario Sattui, the winery's owner, first established the V. Sattui family wine business in 1885.


It turns out, according to Victor Geraci, a historian with the enviable title of “Food & Wine Historian” at the oral history office at U.C. Berkeley, that Italians have played a pivotal role in founding and cultivating the California wine industry.


During Prohibition, the Sattui family went into the insurance business. But in 1972, Dario Sattui – a true Napa Valley original -- restarted the family wine business while living in a windowless van with his girlfriend -- “soon to be my wife and then soon to be my ex-wife.”

Things were promising back then in Napa Valley. “I had everything going for me. No money. No knowledge. I had a one year plan to make money. If I’d known a lot I would have done it like everyone else and it would have taken 10 years to get a nickel back,” Sattui told the luncheon crowd.

When the V. Sattui Winery opened, “You name it we didn’t have it -- no cash register, no bottling line, nothing but a $15 calculator, a bare bones budget,“ said Sattui, who has taught classes at U.C. Davis in how to start a winery with no money. From the beginning, he only sold his wines direct to winery visitors -- the first in Napa Valley to do so -- and had picnic tables “where other wineries had signs that said ‘Keep Off The Grounds.' " He used to pay customers to sit at the tables when it drizzled to attract people cruising by on Highway 29. “The simplest things worked. Thank God I didn’t really know what to do.

"My dad was a cab driver. I’m just an average guy. I believe that average people -- as long as they don’t realize how average they are --can accomplish a lot. If you try long enough and hard enough, you can only fail so many times.”

You still can’t buy V. Sattui wines anywhere but through this winery in St. Helena with a cult following. The values this cult worships have nothing to do with today's hot new wine but rather with a warm, family atmosphere and a relaxed, non-snobbish approach to quality food and wine.