Ras el Hanout, Brickhouse Pinot Noir and a stray bottle of pomegranate syrup

I finally had the chance to visit the The Spice and Tea Exchange, which opened a couple of months ago on Park Avenue, Winter Park. As an almost 20 year devotee to Penzeys Spices it is hard for me to stray but I also feel very strongly about supporting local businesses. Owners Bryan Behling and Jeffrey Schrader purchased the franchise for Winter Park and moved here from Tampa, a story not unlike one of my own franchisees, so I feel even more connected.

The store is very warm and inviting, with lots of herbs, spices, rice and teas, but also salts, sugars and accessories. I found the partners to be very friendly and helpful, answering my questions and giving plenty of advice for using some of their blends. I picked up a few things but my favorite acquisition was Ras al Hanout, a classic spice from the bazaars of Northern Africa. After a quick run through The Cheese Shop, a few doors down, for a half pound of Coolea (my favorite cheese, maybe after two year old Parmigiano-Reggiano) and a piece Cypress Grove Purple Haze I headed home for dinner.

Ras al Hanout is a spice that translates to "head of the shop", or the best blend from the store. In ancient times a shopkeeper's blend was a source of pride, and they often employed hashish as one of the ingredients in order to ensure their customer's enthusiasm. Thankfully that is not the case today, with a common blend including lavender, dried rose petals, allspice, peppercorns, cloves, cinnamon, cardamom and in my bag, something that looked like a little pine cone. After toasting in a pan until even more fragrant, I pounded the concoction into a fine powder that made the whole house smell like fall. My target meat was a couple of pork tenderloins, destined for grilling over oak charcoal. After I rubbed the mix into the meat I left them to dry in the refrigerator for a couple of hours and started looking for wine and accompaniments.

While digging in the 'fridge I found a bottle of pomegranate syrup from a trip to The Spice House in Chicago last summer. The pungent, sharp tang of the syrup seemed perfect with the spices in the meat so I pulled the bottle out of the back and started to rethink the wine. Originally I was going to open a collection of whites I bought this week but now that I was into a flavor as strong as pomegranate I figured the natural paring became Pinot Noir. After rooting around the cellar for a few minutes I found a 2002 Brickhouse Pinot Noir from Oregon, a wine I never intended to keep this long. I pulled the cork, dumped the wine into the decanter and went about working on some saffron rice and zucchini for side dishes.

The preparation for this meal was easy. After a couple of hours under the coat of spices I squirted olive oil on the tenderloins and rolled them around the grill for 15 minutes, part direct and part indirect heat. The sides came together easily enough but my pride and joy was the sauce. One cup of beef stock reduced to 1/2 a cup, then a 1/8 cup of pomegranate syrup, a squirt of honey, a generous pinch of the remaining Ras el Hanout and I let the whole thing reduce even farther. Then I finished the sauce with two tablespoons of frozen butter and a few drops of heavy cream. Absolutely mind blowing.

The wine showed perfectly, starting as a fruit bomb of little more than raspberry jam, then evolving with notes of new leather, pomegranate (see?) dried cherry, thyme and bay leaf. The meal would have been perfect but I forgot to make a clafoutis of prunes soaked in Sauternes that I started to prepare mid-week.

No big message with this post except maybe shop local, from those who have a passion for what they do, and don't ever throw out a bottle of pomegranate syrup, you never know when you will need it.

Chardonnay without wood, why bother?

In the 1970's consumer trends toward wine drinking shifted from red wine to white, catching many of the early California wineries by surprise.  For decades if Americans drank wine it was usually red and most vineyard land was planted to varieties like Zinfandel, Carignane and Cabernet Sauvignon.  At that time Bob Trinchero, the head of Sutter Home winery, adapted his production of red wine towards a style of European wine, rosé in order to accomodate these tastes.  (From what I understand the original versions of Sutter Home White Zinfandel were almost dry, but the wine was gradually sweetened as consumer acceptance grew.)  This is a good example of how wineries adapted their production in reaction to consumption trends.  

More troubling is a current trend by wineries that reminds me of the old saying, "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink."  In this case the metaphorical horse is Chardonnay produced only in neutral, stainless steel or fiberglass vessels.  To me, in most cases, these "unwooded" Chardonnays are an example of wineries pushing their own financial agenda ahead of making the best possible wine.  We have found very few customers who embrace the style, more often opting for Pinot Grigio, Sauvignon Blanc or European, dry white wines in leu of unwooded Chardonnay.  (I mention this to every winery representative we meet, pushing an unwooded Chardonnay, and we are always told that we buck the trend.  Later, in confidence, most distributor reps tell us we are dead on the money and to please continue our candor.)

So I have to admit that I smirked a little when reading a recent Wall Street Journal review of unwooded Chardonnay.  I rarely agree with the observations of Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher, (the couple who write the WSJ columns) but in this instance I think they are dead on.  There are a couple of compelling wines that do the category justice, but most are just bland and uninteresting.  Several years ago winemaker Dave Ramey, who I feel is one of the best in the country, told me that Chardonnay lacks the qualities needed to stand on its own and needs to oxidize in wood a bit to develop complexity.  Even older barrels, long leached of their oak flavor, can provide the right environment for Chardonnay to develop and evolve into a complex wine.  To be fair there are a few sites in the world where Chardonnay achieves a distinctive character, but they are few and far between.  

So why the push by wineries for this style?  We used to hear that chefs were demanding unwooded wines to not mask the complex flavors they were trying to achieve.  While this is a good argument, how much wine as a total of the percentage is sold in such restaurants?  More likely it has to do with the cost of good quality, French oak barrels rising about $800 each in the past couple of years.  When you calculate that most barrels only produce about 300 bottles, that is almost $3 a bottle in just the cost of wood.  (To give you an idea of the financial impact of this, figure that every dollar spent in production must be multiplied 6 to 10 times to achieve the retail price.) If winemakers can "make" the wine interesting using specialized yeast strains and fermentation techniques in reusable tanks, think of the cost savings.  The greatest example of this to me is the Mer Soleil Silver label.  The wine is made using the same fruit as the regular Mer Soleil label but aged in large, concrete tanks, and sells for the same price.  When pressed about the lack of price disparity despite the lower cost of production, their representative told me that, "concrete tanks are very expensive."  Of course they are, but they also last forever.

So I would love to say this is a call to action but it is not, just a commentary that my observations have been correct all this time.  Unwooded Chardonnay is fine as a category if you are afraid of too much flavor otherwise, there are too many good options for white wine drinkers that offer real complexity.