It’s one of those commonplace assessments in wine and food matching that red wine and chocolate make a divinely shivery marriage on the taste buds, but it’s not always, and in fact is rather rarely, true. Many red wines are too tannic and oaky to pair with chocolate. Milk chocolate and almost any red wine make a Big Bummer. Best bets are varieties of dark chocolate, with a higher content of cacao than milk chocolate, with a lushly fruity, even “jammy” red wine that balances tannin with acid, late-harvest zinfandels, for example, or uncomplicated ruby ports. (What used to be called “ruby” port is now designated “reserve.”)

We put some red wine to the test with a selection of the “exotic candy bars” from Vosges-Haut Chocolat, which I had been wanting to try anyway. Despite its French name, Vosges Haut-Chocolate is based in Chicago — and we were all fooled by Haagan Dazs, too, weren’t we? –the creation of Katrina Markoff, an American who studied in France. She brings to the creation of chocolate candies a wild spirit of innovation and experimentation. The manufacturing plant in Chicago is certified USDA organic; the company’s “green statement” (vosgeschocolate.com) is as long as its catalog of treats. There are two Vosges Boutiques in Chicago, two in New York and one in Las Vegas, as well as a host of retailers that carry much of the company’s line; trickling down, as it were, some Vosges products are also available in grocery stores, including Fresh Market, which is where I bought five of the “exotic candy bar” line. These are $7 for a 3-ounce package, way more than for a Milky Way at the 7Eleven but not much more than other specialty chocolate bars that have broken into American consciousness with the explosion of “plantation” and other “single origin” chocolate bars.

A word on nomenclature: The federal government regulates the use and terminology that applies to the amount of cacao in chocolate candy. (Cacao is the ground seed of the cacao tree — called kakaw by the Maya — from which chocolate and cocoa derive.)

*Milk chocolate must contain 10 percent unsweetened chocolate, 12 percent mild solids and 3.39 percent milk fat; if you’re thinking, “Whoa, there ain’t much chocolate in a Hershey bar,” you’re right.

*Sweet chocolate must contain 15 to 34 percent unsweetened chocolate and less than 12 percent milk fat.

*Bittersweet chocolate must contain 35 to 99 percent unsweetened chocolate and less than 12 percent milk fat. Generally, what’s called semisweet chocolate has 35 to about 45 percent unsweetened chocolate and bitter sweet has over 50 percent.

Here are the Vosges “exotic chocolate bar” items that we tried:

*The notorious “Mo’s Bacon Bar,” which combines what Vosges designates “deep milk chocolate,” with applewood smoked bacon and alder wood smoked salt. Why “deep milk chocolate”? It rates 41 percent cacao, which qualifies it for the bittersweet category; this seems disingenuous. Anyway, the candy bar is weirdly compelling, with a sort of roasted fat-on-fat quality that achieves an acme of decadence. along with a tiny bite from the smoky salt that feels illicit.

*The “Barcelona Bar” features “deep milk chocolate” — the text explains that it’s “just milk chocolate … blended with a bit of dark chocolate” — with hickory smoked almonds and gray sea salt. This is a good candy bar but not my favorite of this group. I’m just really a dark chocolate guy, and I thought that the smoky-flavored almonds would have tasted better in a robe of darker chocolate. The sea salt gives it a gentle savory snap.

*The “Goji Bar,” also featuring the 41 percent cacao “deep milk chocolate,” was one of our favorite selections. We don’t have space here to go into the controversies that surround what in the West are traditionally called wolfberries; suffice it to say that all those packages in health food stores that tout the benefits of “Tibetan goji berries” are barking up the wrong bush, since goji berries don’t grow in Tibet. (See an incredibly detailed report here.) In any case, the combination of the slightly dark chocolate; the slightly tart berries, which taste rather like, um, cranberries, raspberries, raisins and apples altogether; and the arid, almost puritan bite of the salt made an enticing and paradoxical bit of candy.

*The “Creole Bar” piles on the chocolate experience: Sao Thome “select origin” bittersweet chocolate, 70 percent cacao; espresso, cocoa nibs; and New Orleans style chicory; in other words, a chocolate and coffee extravaganza. Nothing subtle here, just intense, jazzed up flavors that course through your mouth like caffeine a-gogo.

*Our favorite of these items was the “Red Fire Bar,” a concoction of dark chocolate, 55 percent cacao; ancho and chipotle chilies; and Ceylonese cinnamon. Wow, you can feel the heat from the chilies, and their subtle qualities of smoke and tobacco, with undercurrents of dry but slightly sweet cinnamon, which has an effect that’s sensual yet almost medicinal. A risky experience and a great one.

Now the wines:

*Graham’s Six Grapes Reserve Porto. A very attractive ready-to-drink port, deep and rich and mellow, with spicy, grapey flavors of black currant and plum; sweet at the beginning, but tannins grip the finish. Imported by Premium Port Wines, San Francisco. Very good+. About $21.

*Ridge Zinfandel Essense 2003, Stone Ranch, Alexander Valley. At almost five years old, despite the residual sugar of 10 percent by volume, this is close to a dry wine; fruit is black, boldly spicy, rich and wild with touches of blueberry and boysenberry jam. Startling acid activates a plush texture. Excellent. About $30 for a half-bottle.

*Rosa Regale Brachetto d’Acqui 2006, Piedmont. Always charming, always intense; mildly effervescent; strawberry and raspberry, orange rind and Bazooka bubble gum, rich, ripe and juicy but quite dry, lively, vibrant. Imported by Banfi Vintners, Old Brookville N.Y. Very good+. About $24.

*Inniskillin Cabernet Franc ice Wine 2006, Niagara Peninsula. This is one of the great unusual wines of the world. Spiced and macerated peaches, orange rind, strawberry and red currants; hints of apple skin and wild berry; deeply funky; a glorious texture, satin, folded with silk, wrapped in velvet. Imported by Icon Estates, Napa, Ca. Excellent. About $95 for a half-bottle.

The most versatile of the wines with the chocolate bars were the Graham’s Six Grapes Port and the Rosa Regale 2006. In fact, as far as the chocolate bars were concerned the port could do no wrong; there was irresistible synergy between that sweet, potent jamminess and the various elements of the chocolate bars, though I like the combination with the Creole Bar and Red Fire Bar best. Actually, though, the Mo’s Bacon Bar was a difficult match with all the wines; it was just too unabashedly rich.

The Inniskillin was terrific with the Goji Bar, as was the Rosa Regali; the latter’s slight effervescence cut through the powerful richness of most of the bars. The Ridge Essence seemed to capture some essence of the Red Fire Bar, though, surprisingly, it didn’t perform as well with the other bars.

So, chocolate and red wine? Yes, if it’s the right kind of chocolate and the right sort of wine. You can only rely on trial and error, as we did in this experiment, with four red wines that I plucked from the shelf (or fridge) because they were there.

Readers, we did it for you.

The New York Times carries a fascinating and cautionary story this morning on A1 about the global cooking oil crisis. Now this doesn’t seem like such a big deal in America, where people can spend an afternoon at a gourmet food shop deciding which extra virgin olive oil they’re going to purchase, but for people in Africa, Asia and Latin America, it’s a big deal indeed.

Subsistence farmers and their families may be able to survive on the food they grow. but they have to buy the oil with which to cook that food, and the price of that oil is rapidly escalating. The production of soybeans is declining in favor of oil-producing grains and legumes more suited to bio-fuel conversion, while the deforestation that occurs in South East Asia to increase the acreage devoted to oil palm trees — the trees take eight years to mature — is resulting in the loss of habitat for indigenous peoples, orangutans and rare species of rhinos. And of course the manufacturing of palm oil requires carbon-based fuel, leading to pollution and contributing to global warming. It’s the classic spiral of over-population, industrialization, greed, poverty and hunger that leads to protest and insurrection. The story reports that “food riots have erupted in recent months in Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen.”

What, you ask, do these circumstances have to do with wine?

The relevant sentences in the story, written by Keith Bradsher in Malaysia, are these: 1. “Soaring fuel prices have altered the equation for growing food and transporting it across the globe.” 2. “And all this is happening even as global climate change may be starting to make it harder to grow food in some places best equipped to do so, like Australia.”

Let’s remember that before grapes get transformed into wine that they’re an agricultural product like any other. That like any agricultural product, be it wheat, soybeans or apples, they have to be farmed and harvested and, once made into the final product, transported, often over long distances, to viable markets. Think of wine, if you will, as a method of prolonging grapes far beyond their normal shelf-life. Think, if you will, how much it costs to transport French oak to California, Argentina, Chile and Australia. And remember that the vast majority of the wine made in the world is made from grapes grown on huge farms in southern France, in California’s Central Valley, in South Eastern Australia, in Spain and Ukraine. These are not hand-tended, hand-picked and hand-crafted wines; they’re industrial products that require carbon-based fuel for their manufacture, and whatever the advocates of artisan wines may think of this mass-produced wines, millions of people around the world happily gulp them down with their dinners every night.

The point is that because of the costs associated with what will inevitably be the search for new vineyard regions as global warming makes present regions inappropriate for fine wines (or even, more drastically, any wines at all) and because of the rising costs involved in sea, air and land shipping, the price of wine at every level is going to rise significantly in the next few years. In fact, within 50 years the whole notion of wine and wine-making and its consumption may change radically, and wine connoisseurship and collecting may become as arcane as No theater, as obsolete as the sundial. Oh, yeah, ha-ha, yer right, they already are!

Global-warming chart from newscientist.com.
Vineyard image from avalonwine.com.
Image of old wine bottles is copyright jeffshanberg.com.

Readers, this almost slipped by me.

I made the first post on BiggerThanYourHead.net a year ago Sunday, on Dec. 3, 2006, to be exact. A year later — 123 posts, 901 comments and 177,740 visitors to the blog — I’m having lots of fun and I hope you are too. My goal is to keep doing exactly what I’m doing: writing about wines we tried and meals we ate and casting a cold and critical eye on the sometimes sane and often ludicrous processes, language and marketing that gets wine to our tables.

I hope you’ll stay with me and be informed, provoked and amused for another year — and inspired to respond to these posts.

Cheers!

We’ve been going downtown to the farmer’s market at the old railroad station every Saturday morning since it opened for the summer, trying to get there about 9, later than the stalwarts, of course, but there’s still plenty to choose from. Eating locally has limitations in any region — try finding local olive oil outside of California — but it’s immensely satisfying to cook whole meals or even parts of meals using ingredients produced in-state or right over the line in Mississippi.

Pictured here is our haul from yesterday: fingerling potatoes, tomatoes of various sorts, purple cabbage sprouts, carrots, onions, squash, rosemary, garlic, bell peppers, bok choy, opal basil, peaches and blackberries. I used a green pepper, tomatoes, an onion, rosemary and basil and garlic AND local feta cheese we bought the previous week at the market on last night’s pizza.

The market also draws, every other week from east Tennessee, a purveyor of organic, grass-fed beef. Here’s a picture of our New York strip steak dinner with local potatoes, bok choy and tomatoes. You have to be careful cooking grass-fed beef because it’s so lean, but, boy, does it have a lot of flavor.

The dynamic at the market is interesting. One booth, for example, is run by two young men from across the state line in Mississippi, not far southeast of Memphis. Their produce, herbs and flowers are artfully packaged and presented; they offer recipes; they’re obviously aiming at the young foodie audience. Prices are $3.50 for this, $4.50 for that, not really expensive, after all, and it’s all good stuff. Across the aisle, however, is an older couple, just farmers, from the next county. Their wide variety of produce is offered in small basket sizes. They don’t talk much; they don’t provide recipes or advice; they don’t have flowers. But they charge from a dollar to two dollars per basket for their vegetables. As with everything in life, you pays yer money and you takes yer choice.

What does this remind you of: Crushed raspberries, spiced melon and orange pekoe tea; dried Provençal herbs and damp stones; scintillating acid, refreshing liveliness and a hint of dry but friendly tannins?

Yes, I just had my first rosé of the summer. Actually, I’ve tasted a few others, but they were from 2005. This one, from Bieler Père et Fils, Côteaux d’Aix-en-Provence, is from 2006, so it’s scarcely eight months old. It’s made from 70 percent syrah grapes and 30 percent grenache, and as you can tell from the description above, it’s absolutely delightful. The wine is imported by USA Wine West in Sausalito, and should retail for about $10.

We’ll be drinking lots of rosé wines this summer, many from France, where they’re not just from the South nowadays — they’re made in Burgundy and Bordeaux too — but also from Italy and Spain, South Africa, Argentina and California. The secret of a great rosé is that it combines the refreshing, thirst-quenching qualities of a light, crisp white wine with the red fruit, spice and supple body of a red wine. They can be made from any grape that produces red wine — merlot, zinfandel, pinot noir, grenache and syrah, nebbiolo, sangiovese — as long as the grape skins are quickly separated from the juice, a process that lends these wines their ravishing summery colors of muted onion-skin, pale copper-tangerine, sunset-salmon, tarnished peach or even as dark as cranberry-magenta, but not ruby, that’s too intensely red. And remember that, despite the implication of their floral name, rosé wines are not sweet; the best are bone-dry to the point of bracing, chalky austerity.

Served these wines chilled, though not ice-cold, as an aperitif or with ham or cured meats or with such backyard fare as fried chicken, potato salad and deviled eggs. Rosés are the perfect wines for those seductive “P” words of warm weather: Porch, patio, pool and picnic.

Ahhhh, I think it’s going to be a good summer.

Yes, it’s true, readers, I have neglected my website for the sake of this blog, and you have noticed and I’m sorry. At this very moment, however, I posted a “Case of New Releases” page, meaning that every page on http://www.koeppelonwine.com has a date in April. Please take a look, and remember that everything is available to viewers except for the “Members Wine of the Week” and the search function.

And let me announce that early Thursday morning (I mean tomorrow), LL and I are off to Puebla, Mexico, south of Mexico City. We’ll return late Monday night. I am lugging neither laptop computer nor cell phone. I’ll take plenty of photographs, mainly of scenery and food, and I’ll post when we get back.

Eat well and drink well, and, I beg you, don’t put up with any crap.

Sorry to be out of touch, friends, readers, supporters, detractors, what-have-you, but I have been in New York since last Sunday, and don’t return to the fabled Bluff City until early Tuesday morning. I’m sitting in the Starbucks at Third Avenue and East 66th (not quite like Auden’s “low dive”), finally connected to the vast internet through my new laptop computer and typing as fast as I can. I have eaten well and tasted well and just plain drunk well this week, and I will be sharing most of this material with you in posts to this blog and on the website in the next few days. And I’m far from finished. It’s funny how one event leads to another, so I have a big tasting of Faiveley Burgundies tomorrow, debuting the splendid 2005 vintage, and two major tastings Monday. Then it’s handfuls of aspirin and a 6:30 a.m. flight back home.

Oh, it sleeted and snowed Thursday night and all day Friday and most of last night, and now the streets and sidewalks are piled with sleet and snow and slush. Yuck!

Later.

 

 

In the 20 years that I wrote a weekly newspaper column about wine, the single piece that elicited the most response was one I produced five years ago in which I advocated putting all wines under $15 in screw-caps. You would have thought that I had recommended serving pot roast, borsht and haggis at Thanksgiving dinner.
Certainly many correspondents agreed that it was time to end the tyranny of the cork, especially for inexpensive wines, but I was amazed at how many people left telephone messages or sent emails saying that screw-caps would destroy the “mystique” and the “romance” of wine. Well, how much mystique and romance does wine possess when you’re on a picnic and discover that someone — you, of course — left the corkscrew at home, or you’re carefully extracting the cork and it breaks, sending a flurry of little cork crumbs into the wine, or you open a fine bottle to accompany dinner and realize, when the bouquet smells like old socks and damp cardboard, that the cork was tainted by trichloroanisole (TCA) and the wine was spoiled, “corked” as we say? Huh? How romantic is that?

What also amazes me is that for all the discussion there was a few years ago about how corks really did have to be replaced, at least for inexpensive wines, how few bottles under $15 today actually are closed with screw-caps. I taste plenty of wines in this price category, and I would say, roughly, that 90 percent of them are closed with corks. I would say that the producers of those wines are missing an opportunity to endear themselves with the wine-drinking public. Current pioneers in, uh, screw-capping, in California include Bonny Doon, Shannon Ridge and Two Angels wineries, all of which now put all of their wines in screw-caps.
Expensive wines intended for aging finished with screw-caps is another story. Despite the fact that Plumpjack bottles half of its production of top-line cabernet sauvignon in screw-caps, and has no trouble selling them in two-bottle pairs (one of each) for $325 a set, no one really knows how wines intended for aging are affected by screw-caps. Decades of patient study would be required to make comparisons and come to viable conclusions, if there are any. It would be interesting if some of the high-profile producers in Bordeaux and California would belly up to the bar and agree to bottle part of their production with screw-caps and then leave designated cases of screw-cap and cork-finished wines for comparison in the future.

In the meantime, I — and probably every other wine consumer in the country — will be happy to be able to open more bottles of wine without searching for the corkscrew or ending up with a contaminated bottle. How often does that happen, exactly? I don’t know. Three percent of the time? Five percent? Some writers say as much as eight to 10 percent, though those figures seem extreme to me.

Whatever the case, once is too much.

The image of the pair of Plumpjack wines by Steven Rothfield for Glodow Mead Communications.

At the risk of lulling you into slack-jawed insensibility, I have to quote the text on the front on a bottle of Gold, which is, by the way, very difficult to read:

“In the ancient world, rulers of kingdoms long lost and some still part of current memory made wine and mined gold.Their armies fought to keep it and ranged over the earth to obtain it. Legends stretched across the millennia, steeped in mystery and religion. Tales of kings living for generations, ancient tribal leaders speaking of battles they fought hundreds of years before, the holy grail, knights templar, women wise and young, all of their non-believing friends old and gone forever. Their secret … was kept hidden by open display. Sprinkling gold into their freshest white wine they drank to their health, happiness and long lives. This they did with a pure heart, over the very heights of summer and the depths of winter needing to believe that summer would come again. Summer is a time of legend, so let us embrace the golden sun that makes this wine, warms our bodies and hearts. Have fun my friends and be good to each other … 999.9 Pure.”

100 percent pure bullshit, more like. I mean, really, to whom is this exercise in oratory, like something written by Dan Brown with Tolkien and Madame Blavatsky looking over his shoulder, intended to appeal? Certainly not to intelligent wine consumers. Nor will the wine, which is white with real 24K gold leaf sprinkled in it and for all the hype and complicated back-story actually pretty damned boring, though it costs $20 a bottle.

Nothing on the bottle indicates a vintage — it says “Bottled in June, 2006″ on the back — nor are we informed about a region or appellation, only the words “Product of Australia,” or a grape. The wine, we are informed, is bottled by Gold in St. Helena, Ca., but imported by Angels’ Share in Brooklyn.

A letter from Jason Woodbridge, the “proprietor” of Gold, explains that he likes “making wines that break the rules.” He does say that the wine is made primarily from chardonnay with “other varietals that are also aromatic, and rich on their own and beautiful in combination.” The wine is shipped from the “Southern Hemisphere” “in an ocean-going freezer container while still on the lees at 25 degrees.”

Boy, that’s a lot of effort to produce a wine that smells vaguely floral, tastes generically citrusy and sports a modest texture and a bit of bitterness on the finish. I tasted two bottles with similar results.

This whole project reeks of over-determined marketing, shaky syntax and bad faith. Leave the pseudo-mysticism to the pseudo mystics and the winemaking to real winemakers. All that glitters is not Gold.

This has happened to me twice this year at high-end, white-tablecloth restaurants.

I order an entree that comes with cauliflower risotto, thinking, “Hmm, that sounds pretty good.” Waiter brings the plate, there’s a white, slightly lumpy, slightly liquidy substance, I dig in, there’s no rice; it’s not risotto; it’s creamed cauliflower. And when I say to the waiter, “Uh, that’s not risotto,” he replies, “Oh, no, sir, that’s cauliflower chopped to look like risotto.”

I’m the victim of menu wit.

Now is when I want to grab my plate, burst through the metal swinging doors into the kitchen, confront the chef, perhaps grabbing him by the collar and knocking the tocque (or Red Man cap) from his head, and shout, “Risotto means rice, got that, Jack?”

It was bad enough in the 1990s and a bit into the 21st Century when ingredients or elements of a dish described on a menu were placed inside quotation marks to indicate coyly that a little joke was being played on the diner, that chef was exercising culinary cleverness. So a salmon “chop” isn’t like a lamb chop — salmon don’t have chops or “chops” — but a fillet rolled up and sauteed, and a lobster “sandwich” isn’t a sandwich at all but a piece of lobster and other stuff balanced atop a large crouton, and mushroom “marmalade” isn’t marmalade, of course, but mushrooms cooked down with white wine, butter and truffles and lightly caramelized, and so on. Ha-ha.

Apparently, however, chefs are abandoning the tendency to hint at their whimsy, leaving diners to guess why their cauliflower risotto seems, oddly, like the creamed cauliflower their mothers made at home, sans Velveeta.

These matters run about the country’s restaurants in waves, and we will soon see “cauliflower risotto” disappear from menus as surely as the kiwi, the ostrich (thank god) and Parmesan foam. I’m not saying that chefs shouldn’t be creative and work their ways and wills upon ingredients, but it would be nice if they didn’t think they had to be magicians and wave their wands and capes to mystify us with outrageous daring, yoking disparate foods in unholy alliance or manifesting ponderous jollity that falls flat at the table. Just good, authentic, tasty food is enough for most of us.

So, what is risotto? Let’s allow Marcella ‘May Her Name Be Goddess’ Hazan to tell us, from Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992):

“The risotto technique exploits the uncommon properties of certain Italian rice varieties whose kernel is enveloped by a soft starch known as amylopectin. When it is subjected to the appropriate cooking method, that starch dissolves, creamily binding the kernels together and fusing them, at the same time, with the vegetables, meat, fish, or other ingredients in the flavor base. The resulting dish is a risotto.”

The “appropriate cooking method” is the time-honored procedure of standing at the stove and gradually adding warm stock to the mixture of sauteed rice and onions, stirring constantly, a process that usually takes 25 or 30 minutes, until the rice has absorbed all the broth and is cooked al dente. There’s no other way to do it. The rice varieties that work best are arborio and carnaroli.

Notice that Hazan says “creamily binding.” I have never understood why chefs, after cooking, add cream or butter to risotto, which, by its nature, is already plentifully rich and creamy. Additional cream or butter makes risotto, to this palate and stomach anyway, beyond the pale with richness.

The risotto we prepare at home mainly is a shrimp risotto from that funny and poignant restaurant-and-eating movie, The Big Night — The New York Times ran a series of recipes from the movie back then — and the hardest part of this dish is peeling the shrimp. The actual time spent standing there slowly stirring the broth into the rice I find sort of meditative. Think of it as Zen through cooking.