huevos con vino

I was poking around the lovely new Domaine Drouhin Web site yesterday evening, and I noticed something interesting.  When I joined the club last year, I noticed a few key details that intrigued me:

• After 2 shipments, you could cancel your membership (which I have absolutely no intention of doing at any point)
• You get either 3 or 6 bottles of Louise, their flagship and highly limited Pinot Noir, depending on which level you join (Classique or Classique Plus)

Well, I checked the DDO Direct fact sheet last night and I noticed two interesting changes since I joined the club:

• After 3 shipments, you can cancel your membership now
• Louise is offered “when an annual allocation becomes available,” which means you might not receive any at all!

Very interesting.  I think I know what happened here:

1. Many people joined DDO Direct just to get a few bottles of Louise.
2. After 2 shipments, of which the 2nd was Louise, a bunch of people cancelled their club memberships.
3. Domaine Drouhin noticed this behavior and changed the rules to avoid this situation in the future.

I am fully and completely supportive of Domaine Drouhin on this one.  I think the way they have changed their DDO Direct club setup makes perfect sense; I know when I signed up, I thought about how easy it would be for people to take advantage of the arrangement and snag some Louise without having to buy any Arthur Chardonnay or Laurène Pinot Noir at winery prices.  I think that’s sad, although I realize that many people probably signed up after consuming a few samples of Domaine Drouhin wine at the winery itself, and then when they sobered up they didn’t want to spend $100-$300 every few months on wine.  I pity those fools.

Anyway, I’m excited to see that the DDO Direct club has slightly more stringent rules to prohibit this behavior, but I do hope I can keep receiving Louise in the future.  I’m curious to know if they think their next vintage will yield far less Louise, which could also explain why they discuss an allocation queue in their club brochure.  Interesting…

A New York chef, a girl who has visited 46 of the 50 US states, and an amateur wine blogger walk into a sushi restaurant.  Sounds like a terrible joke, but it is in fact what happened last night at Nishino. 

Nishino is a place that I’ve talked about before, but it’s worth reviewing how good this restaurant can be.  Of the 20-30 times that I’ve been there, I have only ever experienced 1 subpar meal, and that was on a Sunday evening when all of the regular chefs were apparently on vacation, so I can overlook that single occurrence.

Last night we waited for a little while, which caused the management some concern.  They came over and apologized to us at least 8 times; the owner even called me by my first name when she apologized after we had been seated!  Brilliant service.  Definitely a big point in their favor.

By the time we were seated, it was about 8:45-9 PM.  The New York chef and I each ordered the omakase meal, which is essentially 6 small dished selected by the head sushi chef.  However, the New York chef had a shellfish allergy: no clams, mussels, geoducks, shrimp, octopus, squid, or oysters.  Quite the challenge.

The kitchen was more than up to it.  Here’s what I had; the New York chef had replacements for all of the shellfish:

• Tako with purple pickles and a sweet miso glaze; hamachi wrapped in fried soba noodle; smoked smelt roe inside a cucumber rose (the roe were unbelievably good)
• Citrus ceviche with tako, hotate, mirugai, and a few other choice cuts of sashimi (outstanding)
• Green salad with fried lotus root and escolar sashimi
• Curried halibut cheek over mushrooms and swiss chard
• Sushi - kampachi, hamachi, arboretum roll (incredibly delicate with jalapeno skins inside of it), king salmon
• Dessert - fruit plate with coffee, mango, and strawberry mochi

I’m forgetting a course, but that might be because the New York chef and I split two large bamboo shoots full of top-quality Umenishiki sake.  Of course, since sake is a type of wine, I can talk about it in my blog, right?

I do love sake…particularly the higher end sake varieties that have delicate flavors at first, but that come to life when you eat, say, smoked smelt roe.  We thought about having some wine with dinner, but I convinced the New York chef to give good sake another try.  We never looked back…and my fiance even had some from time to time throughout the meal.  She enjoyed it quite a bit.

Toward the end of the night, we bought a round of beers for the sushi chefs, who were quite enthused about that.  They sent us some incredibly high-end sake to taste; it was more robust and fruity than the Umenishiki.  I’ll have to try that one next time.

If you ever come to Seattle and you are in the mood for excellent sushi, you need to try Nishino.  That said, make sure you don’t try it on a night when I need to book a table…ha ha!

I had drinks with two pastry chefs last night, one of whom works in Seattle (I won’t say where, obviously).  I noticed that she was drinking wine with her dinner so I asked her which Seattle restaurants she likes best from a wine perspective.  She mentioned a few interesting places:

• Mistral
• Sitka and Spruce
• Elemental

Of the three, she liked Sitka and Spruce the best, but she had curious things to say about Elemental.  For example, the gratuity is included in the final check, apparently.  Also, she said she wound up tasting 20 different wines when she went there because the owner just starts pouring tastes as soon as you walk in.  She claimed this restaurant was more about the wine rather than the food, although the food was good.  Sitka and Spruce is apparently more about the food, but they have a good wine list.  Interesting.

We kept talking about wines; she claimed that, as one of her chef friends says, wine is an agricultural product.  We talked about what that means with regard to “wineries” such as Radio-Coteau or Williams Selyem, where all of the grapes are procured and the winemaker’s expertise does not necessarily extend to farming.  This topic came up in part because I mentioned that I had just purchased 6 more bottles of 2004 Radio-Coteau “La Neblina” Pinot Noir (which is true).

(NOTE: I thought about writing an entirely separate post about this Radio-Coteau development, but I’ll just say this instead - I was offered 12 bottles of La Neblina and 6 bottles each of 2 different Syrah releases.  The Syrahs sold out just a few hours after I got the e-mail notifying me about this final allocation sale for 2006.  Scary.  I wanted to buy some of the La Neblina anyway as I loved this wine when I first had it, so I made the purchase yesterday.  The wine is entirely sold out today.  Pretty exciting!)

Eventually I told everyone at the table that I had been reading up on wine barrels and cooperage lately.  I believe my fiance called me a “wine nerd,” which warmed my heart a little bit because that’s a lot better than being called a “wine snob.”  I guess I’m just fascinated with all of the different factors and decisions that combine to make a wine good, bad, or ugly…and of course that distinction is qualitative and could be different for every single consumer.  Amazing. 

I guess that’s why wine appeals to me more than beer at this stage of my life: Beer is delicious and there are thousands of types, but any given brewer may only make 5-10 different beers.  Each beer is a different style and each beer should taste the same regardless of where you bought it, when you drink it, etc. (with the exception of beers that you age for a few years, which are a bit more like wine).  Wine, however, can taste wildly different depending on when you drink it, what you’re eating with it (if anything), what mood you’re in, where you are, etc., etc.  Very qualitative indeed.

Finally, I’m getting married next Friday (September 1st).  I’m very excited, although it means this blog will be a little less current for a while (a week or two).  For the record, I’m going to serve pheasant, salmon, or tortellini at the reception dinner, and the guests will have the option of purchasing a glass of 2003 Domaine Drouhin Pinot Noir with their meals.  Only $9/glass, too ($28/bottle is my cost), which is by far the cheapest rate I’ve seen for a glass of this particular wine.  I get all of the unopened bottles too, although I do have to buy them…but at $28/bottle, I’m okay with that.

After I get married and go on my honeymoon, I’m going to give some thought to where this blog will head in the future.  Should I keep using it as the personal recording device for all of my wine-related thoughts and comments?  Should I try to start reviewing wines and restaurants in a more formal way?  Should I interview local people in the industry since the resulting conversations might be of wide interest?  Or should I just do all of these things as I see fit?  Comments are welcomed.

After months of holding a bottle of 2002 Pirramimma Petit Verdot, I finally decided to open it tonight as an accompaniment for my fresh wild grilled salmon and sesame ciabatta.  Pirramimma is a McLaren Vale winery from Australia; they are one of the few wineries that I can find with a Petit Verdot varietal release. 

I have been fascinated with this varietal for a while after I learned that it’s one of the few Bordeaux red wine grapes.  It’s also the most valuable grape in the world, if you use price per pound of picked grapes as your metric.  At least, that was true last year when I read about grape prices.

So, here’s what I thought of this wine tonight (note - this wine went through a few trips from the fridge to room temperature over the last several months, which is never a good thing):

• Aroma: Very rich on the nose; a bit of eucalyptus and possibly menthol, but it was really just eucalyptus I think.  Black fruit, possibly some violet, and vanilla essences as the wine opened up.
• Flavor: More black fruit and a bit of concentrated cassis syrup with some peppery, spicy complexities across the palate.  Very rich and mouth-coating with balanced acid and tannins.  Some buttered bread flavors in there as well.  A little hot on the palate too; the wine has a fairly high alcohol content and it shows a bit (at least during the first hour after opening the bottle).
• General impression: Not bad at all…somewhere between a cabernet sauvignon (black fruit) and a cabernet franc (violets).  As time wore on, this wine became more vegetal and less appealing, although it tasted good when paired with a tomatillo salsa.

Would I buy this wine again?  Sure, I’d love to save a case somewhere in the back of my cavernous wine cellar, right next to the BMW Z8 and the humidor.  But realistically, I don’t think I want any more of this wine when I could drink, say, Pinot Noir from Ketelsen or Domaine Drouhin.

I finished reading the first part (the narrative part) of Haeger’s book, North American Pinot Noir.  The second part is all about different US-based producers of Pinot Noir, including some of my favorite wineries.  It’s a great reference book, although it is now a few years out of date, so I’d love to see a revised version come out soon.

Toward the end of Part 1, Haeger mentions the UC Davis Wine Aroma Wheel.  The wheel breaks down the different possible aromas that a glass of wine might have, or at least the wheel starts you on the path toward identifying all the competing elements wafting from your Riedel Vinum Burgundy glass.

I am quite sensitive to copyright infringement issues, so I will not redistribute a photo of the wheel here.  It costs money to buy the wheel and I respect the work that the professors and researchers at UC Davis put into their aroma wheel.  However, I do want to talk about the wheel a bit, so I’ll assume you have your own copy of the wheel handy as you read the next few paragraphs.

First of all, as a novice wine connoisseur (which sounds like a contradiction in terms to me), this aroma wheel is massively helpful.  For example, now I know I wasn’t crazy when I tried a wine recently and smelled eucalyptus.  According to the wheel, that means I detected a “fresh, herbaceous or vegetative” aroma.  Nice.

The wheel is also helpful because it organizes the different possible aromas into a hierarchical system.  As a technical communicator, I love information design.  I also love archival systems and text structures and other highly nerdy elements of a well-designed document or diagram.  And as a functional diagram, this wheel excels.  I’m sure Tufte would like it, anyway, which may not be all that important actually.  He would like the fact that the colors of the wheel mesh with the information design: purple indicates fruit, green indicates herbaceous or vegetative, brownish/orange indicates woodsy, and so on.

One aroma description that is missing from this wheel is mineral; perhaps petrichor could be included too.  Haeger uses “wet stone” and “mineral” quite often in his descriptions of good Pinot Noir.  Typically these descriptors come with regard to mouthfeel and flavor, but I know petrichor is mainly an aromatic experience.  It’s nice, though, to have this wine aroma wheel as a reference point, or perhaps a jumping-off point for describing wine in greater qualitative detail.

I am tempted to order a wheel and memorize it.  I’d hate to whip out my wine aroma wheel at a fine restaurant; I want to preserve the illusion that I’m actually a famous but visually unidentifiable food critic who wouldn’t balk at ordering a $1500 wine.