Category Archives: Food and Wine

Wine Warning!

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Why Not To Love It.

The Wine Guy
WINE COLUMN
MONDAY, MARCH 1, 1999
BY ALEX MARSHALL

There are a lot of reasons not to get into wine. I’ll tell you a few.

One: It’s expensive, or easily can be. While a few good cheap wines still exist, it’s becoming more difficult to find quality for less than $10 a bottle. That can be a lot to spend if you drink wine daily.

And the more one learns about wine, the more one is inclined to spend. You begin the taste the difference between an okay and a great Pinot Noir, and you are lured upward along the price curve as your tongue pursues mre intoxicating flavors.

So great is the reality distortion field of wine, that when you really get into it, you find yourself nodding your head in agreement when an article refers to a $50 bottle of Bordeaux as “affordable.”

Two: It can be obscenely complicated. Only a full-time professional could know the thousands of makers and dozens of sub-regions that exist in one major wine region alone of France. And to be really good, one should have actually tasted a substantial portion of those wines.

With wine, you have layers of information and knowledge lying over one another that influence a bottle’s taste and role: grape variety, the region, vintage year, accompanying food, and what else you are drinking. All these different facets interact with each other, making the subject interesting but hideously complex to all but those who persevere.

Three: Wine is an orphan in our culture, a mistreated step child. On the one hand, Thomas Jefferson loved wine and drank it daily. On the other hand, the rest of us have mostly not grown up with a bottle of wine on the table, as in France, Spain or Italy. You won’t find it served at McDonald’s.

Fourth (but not least): It can be incredibly pretentious. When you combine arcane fields of knowledge and large sums of money you are sure to get people named Buffy standing around talking about the bucks they dropped on big-named bottles of Burgundy.

Okay, that’s it for the negatives. This set of difficulties — expense, complexity, pretense and the ambiguous relationship wine has with our culture — will form a backdrop against which I hope to show readers wine’s more appealing aspects. They are:

One: Nothing goes better with conventional western cuisine than wine, despite its tortured history here. Whether it’s Hamburger Helper, or filet mignon, a glass of red wine cuts through the grease, sets off the flavors, and aids digestion. Until Americans convert en masse to Thai or Mexican cuisine, one should learn enough about wine to enjoy the simple pleasures of drinking it with much of what one regularly eats.

Two: Those touted health effects of wine are not just hype. A glass or two of daily really does calm the blood and clear out the arteries. Peasants have said as much for years, and now science is backing them up.

Three: The complexities of wine become oddly comforting as one grows older. As I approach middle-age, it’s strangely reassuring that there is a field I can devote the rest of my life to and never master.

Four: I like that wine has no redeeming social value. It is a purely sensual pleasure, good because it is good, and bad only if one does not like the taste. Drinking a great glass of wine is like staring at a great painting, enjoyable only for itself. For someone who can be overly inclined to think about “the big questions” of society, history and politics, wine can be a comfort.

So that’s it. If you choose to go along for the ride, my mission is to find good and great bottles at reasonable prices, and to together find our way through the forest of dollar signs and hype. With that in mind, allow me to introduce:

Great Wine List of The Month: Meredith Nicolls, the new owner of Cafe Rosso in Ghent, has put together a marvelous short wine list and hit on a clever way to introduce it. He calls it “21 for $21 on 21st.”

Translated, that means that he is offering 21 bottles of wine, all for $21 each, at 21st Street in Ghent where Cafe Rosso is located. Putting all wine at the same price helps people try different wines and different types of wines, without fretting. It is a marvelous counterpoint to the list that subtly encourages one to trot up the price curve until you arrive at the $100 bottle of California Cabernet.

Nicholls, a first-class chef and former owner of “Meredith’s” at Willis Wayside in Virginia Beach, provides a sampling of some of the best wines from around the world. He has a Viognier from France, a Pinot Blanc from Alsace, a Barbera from Italy, and a Rioja from Spain. He avoids relying too heavily on California. It’s a list that both a novice and a connoisseur could love. He also offers five or six wines by the glass each night. All this with good food at good prices.

Nice job, Meredith!

Those Old Rules Can Come In Handy. Just ask James Bond.

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WINE COLUMN
First Published in PORT FOLIO MAGAZINE
SEPT. 23, 1999
BY ALEX MARSHALL

Knowing and paying attention to the old rules can come in handy. Just ask James Bond.

When the Russian agent managed to point a gun at Bond’s heart in the novel “From Russia With Love,” Bondmentally kicked himself for not realizing at dinner an hour earlier that the blond gentleman across from him was not who he appeared to be.

The gentleman’s English accent had been perfect. But, while chatting with Bond over a nice filet of sole, the beefy guy had ordered a glass of red wine. Bond had noticed this curious behavior, but only now, with his life in danger, did Bond realize that this had been the sign the proper English gentleman was actually a Russian agent.

Bond got out of his predicament, needless to say, and went on to give more lessons on food and social etiquette, which are always woven into every Ian Fleming novel.

But how about that advice about red wine and fish? Does it still hold true?

Absolutely. As a general rule, red wine and fish do not marry well. The tannins and stronger flavors in a red wine often set off a violent chemical reaction with a white fish that can be not only unappetizing but downright unpleasant.

I say this defiantly, in the face of a wave of words from various wine writers who have been proclaiming of late that red wine certainly does go with fish. These nouveau trendsetters say all rules are off, that God is dead, that all is permitted. They will find a way to marry a 20-year-old Bordeaux with a mess of catfish.

Don’t you believe them. In general, red wine goes badly with most types of seafood, unless the seafood is heavily masked by other flavors. I am a conservative in this, but I am also correct. There are some exceptions. But these are ones that prove the rule, not break it.

Salmon, an oily dominant fish, goes well with Pinot Noir, a Rioja or any lighter red wine. The oiliness and strength of the fish holds up against the red wine. I love ordering Salmon in restaurants, for I get to enjoy fish and my favorite color of wine, which is red.

Salmon is the only fish I have found that goes well regularly with red wine.

But a sauce or spice can change the flavor dynamics. Dump a red sauce on just about anything, and a red wine will go well with it. A spicy shrimp Creole or jambalaya has no problem holding up to a Cote du Rhone. But when the primary flavor you taste is tuna, sea bass, scallops or oysters, shun the temptation to be daring and go red. Be a traditionalist instead. Go white.

But what type of white? As a general rule, a Sauvignon Blanc, whether it is from California, Bordeaux or Sancerre, is a my favorite white wine with almost any type of seafood. The crispness frames the fish well, without covering up its delicate flavors. A Chardonnay, by contrast, can overpower fish with its oak and vanilla flavors.

But there are plenty of other white wines to choose from.

A good place to try for yourself is at the Dockside Inn Restaurant in Virginia Beach, in the shadow of the Lesner Bridge, next to Henry’s. The Dockside Inn, which is partnered with the Lynnhaven Seafood Marina, has one of the finest wine selections in the area. The wine department is more like a wine store. It is housed in a small store immediately adjacent to the large restaurant dining room. With most wines, you can go in, pick out your bottle on the extensive shelves, and order the same bottle off the wine list in the restaurant a few feet away.

And oh, what a selection. Just with whites, you can find an extensive collection of Rieslings, Gewurtraminer(sp), Sancerres, Viogners and many others.

The palate and pocketbook behind the wine is Angelique Kambouropoulos, who with her husband Costas, own and run the marina and the restaurant. The wine selection is Angelique’s department.

Angelique agrees with me that Sauvignon Blanc is often her reflexive choice with seafood, because of its crisp acidity. She is fond of those from New Zealand.

Although now she deals with wine professionally, her passion for wine began when she was selling real estate in Northern Virginia 15 years ago. She loved the way it made food taste better, she said. Eventually, she began planning the wine list for her husband’s restaurant.

“I love quality,” Angelique says, as she contemplates her row after row of well-bottled shelves. “I don’t care how long it takes to sell a great bottle. I want the best.”

She offers about 30 wines by the glass. It helps people learn about wine to be able to easily taste a variety of different wines, she said.

I forgot to ask her if she is a fan of James Bond. But on matters of the grape, she agreed with him. When it comes with flesh from the sea, white is usually right.

Sweet is Neat

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First Published in Port Folio Magazine
By Alex Marshall

Learning to sneer at White Zinfandel, or any wine that is sweeter than not, is one of the first steps in wine education.

‘I’d like something dry,’ you say proudly when the waiter asks. ‘I hate sweet wines.’

But as your palate develops, you learn that some sweet wines are fantastic, with subtleties and depth of taste. They can vary from the sweeter Rieslings and Gewurztraminers, to ports and muscats, to the creme de la creme of dessert wines, Sauternes and German ‘eisweins.’

The trick is balancing the sweetness with flavor and crispness. While a pinkish white Zinfandels can taste like Kool-Aid — sweet and not much else — a good sweet wine has a sharpness that sets off the sugar on your tongue.

Some sweeter wines, like a Rieslig, are usually drunk with meals. They are thin and often low in alcohol, so you can drink them in big gulps with a plate of sauerkraut and Bratwurst. I love them (the wines, that is.)

But the kings and queens of sweet wines are what we usually call dessert wines. They are thick, and often have a honey-suckle like flavor. In America, they are usually drunk with or after dessert. In France, they are common as aperitifs before dinner. Whichever, they are wonderful.

Most are ‘late-harvest’ wines to some degree, meaning the wine makers have allowed the grapes to hang on the vines and grow extra-sweet, even to the point of shriveling and rotting. The best — the most famous is from Sauterne within Bordeaux in France — are infected with Botrytis, ‘noble rot,’ a fungus that dries out the grapes even further. The result is juice super concentrated, and super sweet.

The less expensive dessert wines usually seal in sweetness by adding straight alcohol to stop the fermentation process before the yeast has eaten up all the sugar. This is also how Port is made. With a Sauterne, the juice is so sweet that the wine can ferment fully and still remain sweet.

Sauternes are wonderful. They can also cost $600 a bottle. I’d say $70 or $80 is typical. But other sweet wines are quite affordable, and quite good. Over the last few years, I’ve had fun trying out various ones. I’m excluding Port, which I consider a separate category. I’m referring to the usually white, late-harvest wines. They are nice after dinner, with a special dessert, or just a small glass late at night. You see them in half bottles usually, and costing between $8 and $15. While this may seem like a lot for a half-bottle, you don’t drink the wines in large quantities so they are a pretty good deal. A single half bottle will do for an average size dinner party.

One of my favorites is Muscat de Beaumes de Venise. It comes from the town of the same name inside the Cote Du Rhone region in France. It has a wonderful, honey-like flavor and golden color that is similar to a Sauterne but at a fraction of the price. Most I have tried have been very good.

Across the river from Sauterne in Bordeaux is the little town of Cadillac. Wines from this appelation are similar to a Sauterne, but at a tenth of the price. You can find quite a few half-bottles around town — Chateau Haut-Roquefort is one — and all I have tried have been very nice.

The last is a favorite of David Blackstock, former owner of Cracker’s on 21st Street. Drunk with the cheese by the same name, it’s an incredible experience, he says. But Blackstock also says there is nothing like a real Sauterne.

‘It has got a lot of character beside the sweetness,’ Blackstock said. ‘I push people to buy a real Sauterne if they can possibly afford it,’ but to avoid the cheaper ones.

California, never one not to try to do better what France did first, has a number of sweet wines. Robert Mondavi makes several interesting ones, which come in small bottles with cute labels.

The Virginia winery, Barboursville, makes a slightly fizzy sweet wine, Malvaxia from the Malvasia grapes. It comes in a tall elegant bottle that looks like a rolling pin.

Taste Unlimited has a broad selection of dessert wines in half bottles. Steve Stewart, the wine guy in there Ghent store, recommends the Framboise by Bonny Doon. Produced by the infamous Randall Grahm, it’s made from raspberries and is rich enough, says Stewart, ‘to pour over ice-cream.’

Sydney Meers, owner of the now-defunct Dumbwaiter in Norfolk, was known for the variety and style of dessert wines you could order at his granite-topped bar. Now working as a painter and a for-hire private chef, Meers said one of his favorite dessert wines is ‘Essencia,’ an Orange Muscat made by Andrew Quady in California. Quady also has a black muscat wine called ‘Elysium,’ and a low-alcohol Orange Muscat called Electra.

This last is interesting. They obtain a low-alcohol wine — just 4 percent — by stopping the fermentation process by chilling the wine, rather than adding alcohol.

Meers is also a fan of Beaulieu Vineyards’ ‘Muscat de Beaulieu,’ which is $6 to $8 for a half bottle. Meers says that he also finds some affordable and tasty Sauternes from time to time.

My own experience with affordable Sauternes has been mixed. B & G sells a full bottle of Sauterne for $20. It’s not bad — thin, but with good flavor. But I also remember trying one cheaper Sauterne that was ghastly.

But leaving aside Sauternes for now, I encourage any wine lover to move from dry to sweet once in a while, and try some of the numerous sweet wines available. The good ones will make you feel like a god, sitting on Mount Olympus, sipping your nectar.

Searching For The Heart Of Darkness

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BY ALEX MARSHALL
WINE COLUMN FOR PORT FOLIO MAGAZINE
JAN. 11, 2001

The fluid in the glass was black and dark, as if someone had emptied out his fountain pen into a glass of water. I eyed it suspiciously, then swirled, sniffed and tasted.

It was wonderful. A rich assortment of tastes cascaded over my tongue, backed up by a healthy dose of tannins. It was like a variation of a good Bordeaux.

I smiled appreciatively at the waitress. I had never heard of the wine she steered me toward: Madiran. I was in a small, French restaurant in Manhattan, Chez Bernard on West Broadway. It had classic French food at reasonable prices — and a wine list worthy of a three-star restaurant in Paris. The waitress had steered me away from the $2,000 bottles of old Bordeauxs, and to this wine I had never heard of, Madiran, for $30.

Madiran, I would learn from her and others, was a small region near the French-Spanish border. The makers used the local “Tannat” grape mixed with more familiar grapes like Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon. The Tannat grape, whose name derives from “tannins,” gave the wine its dark, inky blackness. The one I had enjoyed, a 1996 Chateau Bouscasse by Alan Brumont, was one of the best rated, it turned out.

Impressed with this wine from an unfamiliar region with an unfamiliar grape, I called up some of my wine buddies to get their thoughts.

Phil, who imports wine for a living out in Portland, Oregon, was impressed. “You’ll see a Madiran on the lists of most restaurants in France,” he said. “But it’s not very common in the United States.”

Phil had two on his wholesale list, both made by Domaine Berthoumieu.

After Phil, I called up Jim Raper, my former boss at The Virginian-Pilot and a wine enthusiast par excellence. Raper, who is now in Lexington, Va., had lived near the Madiran region in France for a while. He noted that the Madiran is close to where Armagnac is produced, the competitor to Cognac. He remembered enjoying a bottle one afternoon.

“I was up in there, on the way to Biarritz, and stopped and bought a bottle in a grocery store,” Raper recalled. “It was a 1989. It was fantastic.”

Although still not well known, Madiran is slowly being discovered. Bonny Doon, the iconoclastic California wine company, has begun importing a Madiran. Owner Randal Grahm has called it “Heart of Darkness”, in honor of its color, and slapped on a wild smear of a label designed by Ralph Steadman.

Country Vintner of Richmond is distributing it in Hampton Roads.

“They are big, inky, very different wines, made from old vines,” said Pat Dudding of Country Vintner. “They are awesome, because they have such intensity.”

So I had fun both drinking and investigating the origins of my “Madiran.” But speaking more generally, Madiran is an example of the type of lesser-known but excellent wines you should keep an eye out for. Once found, you get the benefit of a good wine at reasonable prices — and the pleasure of telling your friends about it.

What other nice wines are out there?

David Hollander, with National Distributing Company in Norfolk, said he likes the California wines from the Monterey and Lake County districts, which he said produce great wines but are less famous than nearby Napa or Sonoma.

“You aren’t paying for the expensive land,” Hollander said.

Peter Coe of Taste Unlimited said bottles of Rhone wine from the Costieres de Nimes appellation are flying off the shelves. They retail for $9.95 a bottle.

The trick is to trust your taste buds. Many now expensive wines were not so a decade or two ago. I know people who used to buy Ribero del Dueros, the well-known Spanish wine that ranges from $20 to $50 a bottle, when the were $6 a bottle.

They are kicking themselves now for not buying several cases.

In Paris, The Wine Bar Is The Place To Drink Some Wine

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FOR: PORT FOLIO MAGAZINE
BY ALEX MARSHALL

PARIS — It was with some trepidation that I first walked in off the sidewalk into the small establishment on the narrow Rue Daguerre near Montparnasse with the words “Bar A Vin” written across its front glass window. It was 11 p.m. on a Wednesday night, a strange hour. In Paris, it was neither late, nor early. An uncertain hour.

I had been headed home to my nearby hotel bed, having eaten a full dinner down the street and decided I needed a good nigh’s sleep. But I couldn’t resist the pull of this small restaurant. Inside, I could see people huddled around the small bar, talking and laughing while they swirled liquid in glass goblets.

I was about to enter what I would discover was one of the better examples of an institution that still exists in Paris, the wine bar. Ranging from fancy to casual, it’s a place where you can order a variety of carefully-chosen wines by the glass, and talk with both staff and customers about their various merits or lack of them. The environs can range from fancy crystal and tablecloths, to dirt floors. They are a great place to sample a lot of wines, and gain a familiarity with different regions and grape varieties.

My wine bar had bare wooden tables and no formalities. In fact, the “Bar a Vin” seemed a step back in time. The customers, mostly in their 30s and 40s, were dressed without any fashion in particular. It had a tile floor, a pewter metal bar, and an old coat rack in the corner. A soft yellow light spread across the whole restaurant, giving everyone a soft glow.

But it also had the air of a thoroughly neighborhood place. Everyone knew each other, or so it seemed. When I entered, everyone turned and looked at me, a tall, obviously foreign, stranger. They weren’t smiling.

The waitress behind the bar, who was pretty in a kind of timeless Gallic way, with a thin face and aquiline nose, came over and said shortly in French, “What do you want.” I had hardly had time to even glance at the blackboard where the names of ten red and ten white wines were scrawled.

“Give me a minute,” I stammered. She shrugged and walked away. When she came back, I ordered a glass of “Chinon” quickly, thrown off by her bluntness.

Chinon is the region in the Loire Valley named after the city of the same name there. Made with Cabernet Franc, the wine can be like a Bordeaux in its better years, that is austere and flavorful. But this one tasted mostly just austere.

As I sipped the wine, I looked around the restaurant. This was a place for people serious about wine. The half-dozen men and women grouped at the pewter bar were having fun, laughing talking and of course smoking. But they were taking their wine seriously. At each swallow, they would sniff deeply of the glass, tilting it to the side so as to favor one nostril. This seems to help odors penetrate one’s head more deeply. Once the liquid was in their mouths, they would aerate it by sucking air through it, which makes a gargling noise.

After Chinon, I tried something called Vin D’Ardeche. This was a small named region inside the Cote Du Rhone. The wine was marvelous, really special. It had a huge, intense jammy taste, with little tannins. It was similar to an Amarone from Italy, with its raisiny full taste.

I was starting to make inroads with this crowd. The guy behind the counter, who was the manager, recognized I wasn’t a complete slob. He poured me some “Saumur,” the red wine from the Loire valley, and I won points when I noted that it was made with 100 percent Cabernet Franc grape.

The manager seemed classically French. Years of drinking wine had not given him the bulbous nose and layers of flesh sometime typical of wine lovers; instead, it had cured and condensed him. He was lean, with dark hair and a taught face showing a 11 p.m. shadow.

Beside me, an older man, dressed more formally dressed in a tweed sport coat, was talking intensely with the bartender. He turned out to be the owner of the Saumur vineyard that had produced the wine I had just tried. He started talking very animatedly to me about his theories of wines and vineyards.

The Loire Valley has traditionally been considered too cold to produce wines as good as Bordeaux and Burgundy. But global warming, he said, would change this.

Then he started criticizing American wines, particularly those from California. They were, he said, like a woman who used too much perfume. They deliver the “attaque spectaculaire” that unexperienced wine drinkers liked, but which was similar to a woman who wore too much perfume. The odor you were appreciating was more of a created effect, rather than the natural odor, like the natural scent of a beautiful woman.

I was grateful to this Frenchman for conforming to national stereotypes. Not five minutes into a conversation about wine, and he was comparing them to women. Great! I considered running further with this metaphor. Could California wines be considered like their women? Too “easy”? Did French wines require more finesse in their approach, as did their women? I had better stop such thoughts.

I was feeling better. From the tall, awkward, foreign stranger who they looked at suspiciously, I was now the tall awkward foreign stranger who they looked at with some amusement.

The wines the restaurant served said a lot about wine drinking in France. The establishment served almost nothing known to your average American wine drinker. I had noticed this trend in other restaurants and brassieres I had visited. The famous wines were too expensive for daily drinking.

I wrote down the red wines the “Bar a Vin” was serving that night: St. Joseph, Alsace Pinot Noir, Patrimonio, Chinon, Bandol, Cote du Rhone, Cairanne, Vin D’Ardeche, Anjou Village. These were regions, not grape varieties, as is the tradition in France.

I asked the bartender why he didn’t include more well-known regions. “Because Burgundy and Bordeaux are too easy,” he said. “You open a book and there they are.”