Last week I was in the middle of an insane day, a day too busy for tasting appointments. But I had some on the calendar and it was too late to cancel. I had a clear two hours of work to do in the next half hour to get ready for the start of restaurant service, and I went into this particular tasting with my eye on speed, my brain racing with an intense priority list, and my heart pounding with stress. I was going to speed taste through the wines and then get back to business. 

When I'm focused for work, nothing can grab my attention away from reprinting wine lists, ordering, and updating the wine list. 

Nothing but a miraculous wine, that is. Sometimes, these unexpected sips can give you just the perspective you need in a hurried day. One sip of this, and it was as if the world stopped and everything that was truly important came into clear focus. 

This taste of Etna carricante certainly gave my night a whole new sense of meaning and wonder. I love having a job where aesthetic magic can surprise you on an almost nightly basis. 

Winemaker Alice Bonaccorsi has a vineyard that one might find in a fairytale. Here, the vines rise above swirling volcano smoke that billows from Etna, the sleeping giant that smolders in the backdrop; and ancient volcano cones from thousands of years ago jut their hard lava cones up from the vineyard like stalagtites in a cave. It's a fantastical setting, and the wine is as magical as from where it comes. 

Chef Jeremy Bearman and Wine Director Pascaline Lepeltier of Rouge Tomate in Manhattan, New York need little introduction. Chef Bearman has long been a proponent of sustainable and local foods, and Pascaline is a global champion of organic wines.  A few weeks ago they collaborated to put on an amazing wine dinner focused on special wines from the West Coast (West Coast Winemakers' Dinner: A Tribute to Natural Wines).  The wines curated were a telling cross section of a movement gaining momentum in California and Oregon. 

The line-up included: 

Dirty & Rowdy semillon, 2011
Dirty & Rowdy mourvedre, 2010, 2011
Coturri chardonnay, Grebenikoff 2010
Coturri zinfandel, Estate 2007
Coturri red blend, "Sandocino" NV
Montebruno pinot noir, 2007, 2008, 2009
Hardesty merlot/cab sauv, "Trinity" 2009

Dirty & Rowdy
Of all the wines we tasted that night, I'm going to focus on just one producer-- Dirty & Rowdy-- because, well, I was sitting next to Hardy Wallace, aka Dirty (one of the winemakers) and we talked mostly about his wines. 

I always wonder what it must feel like for hard-working winemakers who see all the grit--  the dusty, bloomy grapes, the bugs and pests, the mess of the crush, all the gross after-stuff of fermentation, the clean up, the unrelenting, backbreaking, sleeplessness of harvest time-- and then see their finished wine in a leisurely setting like a private dining room in a fancy NYC restaurant, packaged in bottles, served by people in suits, and sipped by well-heeled diners. It must be a trip. Wine is a delicate agricultural product that, at times, can seem so far separated from its farm-based source. The wines served with this dinner are all wines that attempt to bridge the separation that can occur after grapes are transformed into bottles wine, and all are made by small-volume winemakers specifically focused on organic farming and natural winemaking. 

At dinner I sat next to one such winemaker, who goes by his nickname "Dirty," (yes, he is the "Dirty" in Dirty & Rowdy). First, a little bit about Dirty & Rowdy. Two guys: one wine blogger (Dirty South Wine), one former food blogger from Atlanta. They frequently collaborated on their websites, and one day decided to make wine. After quitting their jobs they up and moved to California, then set up shop making wines. I love that this can happen for some people in life. 

The label has a pretty cool story. 

Dirty and Rowdy have spent hours upon hours up in the Santa Barbera hills at the mourvedre vineyard with old school weed-whackers and clippers. During the weed-whacking, Dirty puts on headphones, but the whacker still creates a constant drone in the background, an almost lulling sound that can make you forget about the two dangers he is always on the lookout for: poisonous snakes and mountain lions. 

When it came time for a label design, they had the idea to be battling snakes and mountain lions with weed-whackers and clippers. Their artist friend took some liberties and made the snake an anaconda, and the mountain lion a formidable tiger. 

After a few glasses and the normal pleasantries, Dirty said something about terroir that made my thoughts wander to drumming (the other big part of my life). We were talking about mourvedre and his choice to make it. I asked "Why mourvedre in Santa Barbera?" He mentioned that the decision was really driven by what desirable parcels were available at that time and which of those fell in their price range. Practical desire. Or maybe more precisely: Desire limited by the confines of practicalness. Winemaking isn't always a result of when-creative-planning-meets-endless-resources; sometimes it is simply taking advantage of what resources are available to you at a particular time. As a new wine label, Dirty & Rowdy has started off like most new labels do: making wine from contracted grapes, with a solid plan to buy their own vineyards in the near future. The mourvedre is a beautiful and unforeseen result of the collision of need and desire. 

Rhythm, Wine, & Expression
As a semi-artistic expression created out of available resources, the genesis of their mourvedre has parallels in other disciplines. As a drummer, I couldn't help but think of the early beginnings of the drum set. The short version is this: marching bands in New Orleans were called upon to play dance music in dance halls. It didn't make economic sense to split up the band money between a cymbal player, a bass drum player, a snare player, etc., so somewhere along the way, one guy got the idea to stick them all together & play them all himself. It caught on fast, and the individual band members all got a bigger cut because of it. The drum set was created happenstance out of available resources and financial restrictions. Each drummer assembled their drum set a bit differently (as they still do today). The idea of a "drum set" is a universal one, yet the enactment of any single particular drum set is one that is personal and distinct and can result in a highly unique configuration based on available resources. In this way, the drum set is much different from most other instruments that are standardized in form (such as the trombone, the violin, the saxophone, and the modern day piano). 

In one of my favorite books that touches on the subject, Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking (John Mowitt: 2002), Mowitt makes a statement that has stuck in my brain for years: 

You could take out the word "trap set" in his statement and replace it with "wine" or "terroir" and get a pretty profound notion of how we use land to create a wide array of wines. 

Though wine and drumming seem like two disjointed subjects, after a glass of wine I had the courage to mention this thought to Dirty. "Ok," I said, "this may sound kind of off-subject, but I play the drums and how your mourvedre came to be kind of reminds me of how drum sets came to be." If he looked disinterested I had a plan to change the subject, fast. 

Dirty paused, looked at me for a minute, and blinked through his glasses. "You play the drums? I play the drums too, I don't think that sounds weird at all." Both our eyebrows raised and something clicked-- like two random guys suddenly realizing that they both were in the same fraternity but from different colleges. 

It turns out that Dirty is an accomplished tabla drummer who has studied Indian classical music pretty extensively. Is it possible to separate the id of the winemaker/grower from the final product? I don't believe so; and so, I think a brief look at the ideology that informs Indian classical music can serve as a useful prism through which to view the wines of Dirty & Rowdy. 

Indian Classical Music and The Raga
Indian Classical Music traces its deep origins to the Sanskrit Vedas, where the concept of the raga is an integral notion of music. Slightly similar to the concept of a scale (but not quite), the raga is a series of notes used to construct a melody. The raga is integrally linked to mood, time, and place. There are ragas for early morning, ragas for dusk, ragas for the heat of summer, ragas for winter... the idea is that music is linked to the mood of the time and place. How illuminating it is that the etymology of the word raga is hue, and like a hue, a raga is useful in coloring the sonic landscape of time, place, and circumstance. 

A raga has defining parameters, but once inside a raga, a musician has room to stretch and play with improvisation, embellishment, and time. The execution of these sometimes subtle freedoms distinguish good musicians from great ones, and they also allow the musician to tailor the particular performance to what is happening in the moment. 

Is there anything else besides a raga (or music in general) that has the ability to-- each time it is endeavored-- capture and portray a unique collision of time, place, and circumstance? Is there some other human endeavor that also seeks to highlight the beauty and struggle of the passage of time, and then transmit this aesthetic to others in a form consumable by the senses? I'd venture to say that winemaking does just this.  Dirty alluded to this when he once posted on his own wine blog: 

How lucky for us that two wine-obsessed drummers were randomly sat next to each other for this dinner. 
 

The Dinner
And we had dinner.... 

                
                                                                                                                 

      
                                  Cauliflower Custard                                                                             Dirty & Rowdy Semillon 2011

This was a great pairing. The semillon is grown in Yountville (Napa, CA) and fermented in two different ways. Half of it is skin fermented (orange) and the other half is done in a concrete egg. The two batches are then blended. The skin fermentation adds density, weight, tannin, and texture. The concrete egg portion is interesting-- the shape of the egg forces the CO2 back down into the bottom of the egg, so the contents are always in motion and no cap management is necessary. The finished wine is unfiltered, so it's a bit cloudy-- but nothing to be afraid of! The savory aromas and the richness of texture went so well with the custard and cauliflower. 

                      Sardines a la Plancha                                         herbed olive oil                                          Sunchoke Farrotto

This was possibly one of the best pairings of the night. This duck preparation is one of Chef Bearman's classic dishes, and it went beautifully with the Dirty & Rowdy mourvedre. 

Long Island Duck, Moroccan Spices, Fregola Sarda, Baby Turnip, Medjool Date, Beldi Olive, Marcona Almond

Dirty & Rowdy mourvedre 2010 & 2011



And, if you missed it earlier, Dirty & Rowdy and their wives have risked stepping on angry snakes and getting jumped by mountain lions to bring us this high elevation mourvedre from Santa Barbera. Thanks guys! 

Bibliography
Mowitt, John. (2002) Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking. Duke University Press: Duhram and London. 

Last week I taught a class on orange wine, and some really great  interesting discussions ensued.  

My focus in this class was to present orange wines as products of extended skin contact. There are wines that are orange in color for other reasons, such as the Tondonia Rose-- this is a rose wine that has aged to an orange color-- but these wines to me are not orange; they are oxodized or aged roses. When a red wine turns garnet with age we don't change its category from "red wine" to "garnet wine" because the wine is still the same thing-- the garnet is simply an aged version of the red. The same things applies to white wines: when a white wine ages and becomes golden in hue, we don't change its category from "white wine" to "gold wine;" again, because one is simply an aged version of the other. I think the same should apply to roses. When a rose ages and turns orange in color, it is still a rose-- the orange hued rose is simply an aged version of the rose. 

So, despite the fact that many other somms will categorize oxodized roses as orange, I don't; and for the purpose of this class I presented orange wines as white wines with extended skin contact. The extended skin contact-- to me-- is crucial in the definition of orange wine and the possibilities for flavor profiles within orange wines. 

By categorizing orange wines in this way (i.e. leaving out the aged roses and focusing only on extended skin contact), four distinct wine categories emerge:

White - wine made from white grapes that have had little skin contact
Orange- wine made from white grapes with extended skin contact
Rose- wine made from red grapes that have had little skin contact 
Red- wine made from red grapes that have had extended skin contact

Of course there are tons of exceptions (white wine made from red grapes, white-red blends of roses, viognier in cote rotie, etc.) but as an overarching concept of how orange wine fits into the grander scheme of things, I think the above simplified chart makes the common production methods easily digestible. 

By presenting wine production methods and colors in this way, what emerged in the classroom was a pretty big question: If orange wines are an entire category of wine with just as much production potential as rose, red or white wine, why aren't there more of them? Why are so few being produced?  This is a question I ask myself every day, and I'm pretty baffled by the fact that practically nobody is making these amazing wines. This is an entire untapped category of wine production.  Seriously- imagine a world without rose?  Imagine if people never experimented with little skin-contact in red wines and never created rose?  Imagine the gaping hole that would be left in your lifelong sensory wine experience without rose.  The lack of orange wines on the market is an equally tragic gaping hole in our wine drinking experience.  We are really losing out here. 

Other big questions on the table were: 
With such a global demand for high quality rich and powerful red wines, wouldn't this palate also be more inclined to like a tannin-driven, rich orange wine as opposed to white wine?  Is terroir transmitted or partially transmitted through skin contact, and if so, why have more white wine producers not experimented with extended skin contact as a way to enhance the emergence of terroir in their wines?  With the new idea that what we perceive as minerality in wine is actually sulfides and not, in fact, trace minerals from the soil as we had all assumed/hoped, then wouldn't extended skin contact in white wines be a way to actually get real trace elements from the soil into the wine? 


In the tasting portion of the class we went through: 

Shinn Estate "Skin Fermented Chardonnay" 2009 (North Fork of Long Island, NY)
I chose this wine to taste first-- I wanted to lead the drinkers into orange wine with that familiar chardonnay taste, but presented in a slightly orange way. Baby steps! 

Tissot "Amphore" 2009 (Jura, France)
I chose this wine to taste second- it's completely different from the Shinn and immediately showcased the diversity possible with orange wines. 

Paolo Bea "Chiara" 2009 (Umbria, Italy)
I chose this wine to show third- the color is extremely orange and it's such a classic wine with a great taste. 

Coenobium "Rusticum" 2009 (Lazio, Italy)
I chose this wine to show the diaspora of orange wines within Italy, and to show how Paolo Bea's influence spread to Lazio. 


It ended on a very positive note- lots of people who had never tried it before were really interested in finding out where they could get more.

I got together with my girls yesterday (a group of girlfriends in the wine industry). We meet about once a month and blind taste for fun and exercise. Yesterday's theme: "esoteric." Essentially, we all had to bring an odd-ball wine. Here are some of the fun ones that came to the party: 

Bermejo Malvasia Seco (Lanzarote, Canary Islands) 2010

This one was truly interesting. The texture of the wine was creamy and acidic- the texture reminded me of Meursault (but not the flavors). 

That there on the top is the label (pretty minimalistic!). This one has an esoteric bottle design to boot. You can sort of see it on the left-- the lip has a slight pour spout built right in! 

Ricci "Terre del Timorasso" (Piemonte, Italy) 2009

This is a pretty interesting grape native to this region-- small production, only about 50 hectares planted. Smells like fresh bread & ripe pears. Tart acidity, creamy texture, starfruit flavor, and a sizzly minerality that lingers a bit. 

Banyan gewurztraminer (Monterey County, CA) 2011


This pretty inexpensive bottle (about $10ish) turned out to be quite pretty and was a favorite of the group. Persimmon, quince, some lychee, and a great florality; really open fruit with a zingy tartness to it. Really nice. 

And whodathunk? Pretty gewurtz from Central Cali... 

Chateau d'Auvernier chasselas (Neuchatel, Switzerland) 2009

This one was so rich and thick, but still had great acidity. We imagined how perfect it would be with a creamy cheese or a pate. A food wine for sure. 

Paolo Bea "Chiara" grechetto,malvasia,garganega+  (Umbria, Italy) 2009 

If this isn't an orange wine I don't know what is! We ended with this intriguing gem.
Nectar, apricots, beeswax, oregano; soft skin tannins from the longer maceration and an acidity that is almost crunchy-- like a watermelon rind. 

We sat in front of this rustic cellar wall during the tasting. It was a perfect environment for wine drinking. 

As we drank Bea's Chiara, we happened to look up and saw.......

his Sagrantino smiling down on us!