In the cellar (April 16, 2011)

[Cole Kendall]

originally posted by Jeff Grossman::
- Buon Italia has a stand that sells hot food but it's not so good; the shop, however, brings in foodstuffs from Italy (I went on Saturday to buy Bronte pistachio cream)

My cookie source in Milan had just put together a big order of Bronte pistachio cream for a foreign client and I picked up a jar to see what it was. I also got the recipe booklet and tried it as a pasta sauce the other night (the same recipe that's on the jar with onions and a little pancetta with some cream added).

What do you do with it? How much does it cost here (I think it cost me something like six or eight Euros)?

Cole

 

[MLipton]

originally posted by Mr. Doghead:

Try retasting the 2009 Causses Marines, which I haven't seen yet, in a month or two... The Marcillac vineyards are newly acquired, so maybe they're not fully brought into the kind of culture the owners would like.

Alas, the '09 is the last year for the CM Marcillac: diasagreements about vineyard management practices with the vineyard owner have led to a severance of the relationship.

Mark Lipton

 

[lars makie]

originally posted by Mr. Doghead:
Marcillac, something I tried forever to sell or to buy in NY until a then-newish Wine Traditions finally made Teulier available and broke the ice, is not always green any more than cabernet franc or mencía is always green. Speaking of Cros/Teulier, his wine of choice is the old-vines version, but the basic is still cheap and very nice.

Try retasting the 2009 Causses Marines, which I haven't seen yet, in a month or two. New wines from here can change a lot in that time, like many other things, but it's especially true here. The Marcillac vineyards are newly acquired, so maybe they're not fully brought into the kind of culture the owners would like. But they're on the steep slopes, so the wine will have that initial reserve I mentioned. If you want to see greenish Marcillac, you'll usually find it at Matha. Here your something green is a component that should integrate before too long.

My early reference for this place was a grower named Costes, who I haven't ever found here. There was one other I have never seen again since the early '90s.

Anyway, patience on the CM. This is an exciting grower.

Great information. I agree, keep trying the CM Marcillac, Joe. I love it immensely.

Unfortunately, you won't get many vintages to see how they change and grow. Causse-Marines were unable to reach an agreement with the owner of the Marcillac vines (Domaine du Mioula) and the 2010 will be the last vintage. Maybe they will find another plot or buy from another source, but for now it looks like they won't be making it any more.

 

[SFJoe]

The 'green' to which I refer doesn't taste like the pyrazines of underripe or overcropped cabernet. Different thing. Suppose I'll have to wander down the road and find another Marcillac sometime. Any suggestions?

 

[lars makie]

originally posted by SFJoe:
The 'green' to which I refer doesn't taste like the pyrazines of underripe or overcropped cabernet. Different thing. Suppose I'll have to wander down the road and find another Marcillac sometime. Any suggestions?

The one that is always recommended to me (and that Mr. D suggests above) is the Domaine du Cros. They seem to make what most think of as a benchmark Marcillac. Philippe Teulier makes two wines the Lo Sang del Pais which is the early-drinking, younger vine one and a Vieilles Vignes version where the vines are between 50 and 90 years.

I think that would be the other place to look for quality Marcillac. I don't think the Domaine du Mioula wines make it to the States. They also have an old vines version that would be interesting to try (Patrice Lescarret who makes Causse Marines is/was the consulting wine-maker there).

 

[Cliff]

I have never aged Cros' old vine version. The Sang del Pais scratches an itch that CRB used to get for honest, modest, country wine. The green note I get isn't underripe; it's more herbal.

 

[Brad Kane]

originally posted by Jay Miller:

originally posted by Scott Kraft:

originally posted by SFJoe:
CounterpointI don't love Amy's breads, mostly.

Hippie bread. Can't stand it. Apologies, Jeff.

Back when the first opened on 9th avenue around the corner from my apartment they were a godsend. Sure there are a few better places nowadays, but I still have a great fondness for their semolina with black sesame seeds. And their layer cakes are very good - moist and flavorful.

All I know is Jeff Connell makes a helluva rye bread.

 

[Jeff Grossman]

originally posted by Cole Kendall:
My cookie source in Milan had just put together a big order of Bronte pistachio cream for a foreign client and I picked up a jar to see what it was. I also got the recipe booklet and tried it as a pasta sauce the other night (the same recipe that's on the jar with onions and a little pancetta with some cream added).

My 190g jar is made by Cartillone and does not have a recipe on it. It was the only brand in the shop (and not one of the ones I'd identified on the internet).

What I'm a little disappointed about is that it says "Pistacchio di Bronte (min. 30%)" but I had hoped for something with a known higher content.

What do you do with it? How much does it cost here (I think it cost me something like six or eight Euros)?

$10 here. This is my first time buying it. It is going to become gelato. (I also have a LeNotre recipe.)

 

[Cole Kendall]

originally posted by Jeff Grossman:

originally posted by Cole Kendall:
My cookie source in Milan had just put together a big order of Bronte pistachio cream for a foreign client and I picked up a jar to see what it was. I also got the recipe booklet and tried it as a pasta sauce the other night (the same recipe that's on the jar with onions and a little pancetta with some cream added).

My 190g jar is made by Cartillone and does not have a recipe on it. It was the only brand in the shop (and not one of the ones I'd identified on the internet).

What I'm a little disappointed about is that it says "Pistacchio di Bronte (min. 30%)" but I had hoped for something with a known higher content.

What do you do with it? How much does it cost here (I think it cost me something like six or eight Euros)?

$10 here. This is my first time buying it. It is going to become gelato. (I also have a LeNotre recipe.)

My "Pistacchio di Bronte" is from Azienda Agricola Galvagno and is (min 50% with sunflower oil and iodized salt) and 190g. URL is www.aziendaagricolagalvagno.com but does not work; it seems Galvagno is a lawyer in Milan who also produces pistacchi (see here:
http://www.bronteinsieme.it/6bro/i_web1.html )

Let me know how the ice cream comes out. The recipe booklet has lots of savory stuff as well.

 

[Mr. Doghead]

Cros is the big grower and promoter of Marcillac. The old-vines version doesn't seem to appear every year, and does not seem to find its way out of the D.C. area in any quantity. The basic bottling is very reliably honest and often complex wine - the 2009 is especially potent and cellarable and a bargain for the money. These do benefit from short-term aging, which is as long as I have managed to hold off.

I would expect had Causses Marines been able to do hippy farming for a few years in that Marcillac vineyard they would have made positively great wines. The red sandstone and red clay main slopes in Marcillac are first-rate vineyard sites. All that's required is sufficient love of the mansois vines and care and respect in the cellar and beautiful, special wines will follow.

Worth noting, the vine is well suited to the area. Fully ripe examples of these wines will in most years carry a well-digestible level of alcohol. These wines are more about the baseline complexity the variety gives in this soil-exposure context, not power or booze. No need for the growers to load the vines with grapes or to do crazy trainings to hide the grapes to get good hang times or to avoid porty weight. Nor are they plagued by lack of potential alcohol. Also, the wines can and do carry a bit off tannin and do need a little patience early on, in spite of a deserved reputation for being nice to drink young.

Back to addresses, I regret that too few growers still work the fields and fewer push for quality. And fewer export. It's a hard life in the little hillside-vineyard regions of Europe, where a lot of labor is required to do things badly, let alone well. Especially when the produce of your toil usually fetches so very little lucre in return. People don't want to be peasants anymore, yet a lot of them aren't comfortable trying to market wines against the flow of tradition and perceived stature at the prices they would need to charge to make this lifestyle attractive. We lose vineyards to dynamics like this. In fact, Marcillac is a holdout in a general region that has essentially lost appellations to attrition.

Thanks to the pushes made by a lot of us in recent decades to expand the range of possibilities in wine availability and public acceptance of diversity in wine, we're privileged to have unprecedented access to worldwide wine and to have uptake of it. When Teulier's wine first came to NY, I had to hand-sell every $5.49 bottle after cajoling the wild-man distributor to ship it up from Falls Church. Now I see it on restaurant wine lists, and doing well in Rhode-fucking-Island. What a world we've made. Previously unheard of crap from bunghole outposts from Tasmania to Tokaj now chatters from the shelves not just because mechanized, modernized, reefered geekery made it possible, but because the capitalist death spiral made it necessary. With a massive shift of money from the rest of the world toward a loose but tiny plutocracy, assholes and overenthused others drove up the prices of traditional wine reference points and their neighbors into the realm of the absurd. People benefiting from the hosing of the poor and the elimination of the middle class found themselves with a lot more money available for indulgences. So the rest of us needed wine, beyond the former jug wine and distillate-bound stuff that now occupies most affordable bottles from the Nuits or Napa or the Langhe or the Libournais.

And here's why I bring this up. With all the possibilities for us on the drinking end of the market, for the growers in Marcillac-Vallon or Kobern or St-Pourçain looking up their slope every morning, they have to deal with the fact that their wines are expected to be among the affordable ones we presumptuous buyers dug up, whatever their relative merit and however hard they were to make. So the very movement that on its positive side makes all these things available also serves to hem in bunghole growers and to do little to alleviate downward pressure on their prices. With all the interaction people have with the world market, they see how liitle room they have to maneuver, and the temptation to bag all the hard work grows. What's saving some of these family vineyards in Europe may be the difficulty young people have finding viable alternate career paths.

Still in Entraygues, for example, finding any growers is the problem, before we talk about good ones.

Back to Marcillac (please forgive the rambling; I don't socialize much anymore), don't give up on the CM just yet.

For more growers, there's not much. Matha wines are uneven, but they never lack flavor. When they're on they integrate their herbs in a strong black raspberry core.

As I said, Costes was great in a natural-wine kind of way, back in the day, but the wines never made the boat to the US. I miss the layered black fruit and chewy earthiness of the ones I had and I wish I had seen more of them. But who knows now.

There are a few more, but what we can find here, I don't know.

 

[SFJoe]

Mr. D., not sure I agree that global demand hurts prices for backwater wines. Didier and Catherine, for instance, say that no one in France wants to pay their (crazy low) prices for something with a Touraine AOC, but people in export markets are willing to listen. Ditto Marc Ollivier, etc. etc.

The local markets seem to me to say, "Oh, Marcillac, that's no good," while the export markets might say, "Marcillac? What's that?"

 

[Levi Dalton]

originally posted by SFJoe:
Mr. D., not sure I agree that global demand hurts prices for backwater wines. Didier and Catherine, for instance, say that no one in France wants to pay their (crazy low) prices for something with a Touraine AOC, but people in export markets are willing to listen. Ditto Marc Ollivier, etc. etc.

The local markets seem to me to say, "Oh, Marcillac, that's no good," while the export markets might say, "Marcillac? What's that?"

Totally believable, in my experience.

 

[Jeff Grossman]

originally posted by Mr. Doghead:
...they see how liitle room they have to maneuver, and the temptation to bag all the hard work grows. What's saving some of these family vineyards in Europe may be the difficulty young people have finding viable alternate career paths.

I think you're still depressed, Robert.

 

[David M. Bueker]

originally posted by Levi Dalton:

originally posted by SFJoe:
Mr. D., not sure I agree that global demand hurts prices for backwater wines. Didier and Catherine, for instance, say that no one in France wants to pay their (crazy low) prices for something with a Touraine AOC, but people in export markets are willing to listen. Ditto Marc Ollivier, etc. etc.

The local markets seem to me to say, "Oh, Marcillac, that's no good," while the export markets might say, "Marcillac? What's that?"

Totally believable, in my experience.

It makes sense, though I've worked through more than my fair share of Marcillac at lunch and dinner in casual places around Paris - introduced to it by the folks at our facility in Antony.

 

[Joel Stewart]

originally posted by Jeff Grossman:

originally posted by Rahsaan:

originally posted by Joel Stewart:
And "victuals from upstairs" means there's like a deli on the ground level?

Something like that

Working from this list...

Every time or nearly every time:
- Amy's Bread makes wonderful breads in many varieties
- Dickson's is the source of the wonderful roast beef, pates, rillettes, etc.
- Lucy's Whey sells mostly artisianal US cheeses

Sometimes, or for non-cellar food shopping:
- Buon Italia has a stand that sells hot food but it's not so good; the shop, however, brings in foodstuffs from Italy (I went on Saturday to buy Bronte pistachio cream)
- Chelsea Market Baskets has a wide selection of chocolates and jams, some of which are good
- Chelsea Wine Vault has an OK selection of wine, really, but I never bother to buy there; I think they are the owners of the cellars
- Fat Witch makes brownies, always too sweet
- Jacques Torres is a famous chocolatier and his stuff is good; I buy often
- L'Arte del Gelato has a store in Greenwich Village that is always splendid; this outpost is a bit hit-or-miss
- Manhattan Fruit Exchange is a gigantic green-grocer; I'm rarely in the mood to carry groceries home from here because I'm usually carrying wine but it would be worth it for some things
- The Lobster Place is extremely good; they offer both raw and prepared foods; Jay is sometimes kind enough to buy from here for our visits downstairs

Gotcha....looks like you're set up pretty well for victuals.

 

[Ice Cream Man]

originally posted by VLM:

originally posted by David M. Bueker:

originally posted by Jeff Grossman:

Rhys 2008 Pinot Noir "Bearwallow Vineyard" - apparently, Rhys obtained this vineyard too late to do anything about the grapes so they pressed what was there; simple, syrupy, sweet, frooty; pretty darned ordinary

A very surprising assessment, especially considering John Gillman's effusive praise for the wine, with notes that are essentially opposite of your comments. I wouldn't normally bring up a critical review, except that John's palate usually lines up as pretty much Disorderly.

John's wrong and Jeff is right. His notes mirror mine. It especially stuck out when tasting all the wines together.

Considering that this wine was delivered within the last four to six weeks, I would give it the benefit of six to twelve months in the cellar to settle down from travel shock before I passed judgement on this wine. Channeling Rimmerman.

 

[Levi Dalton]

Whoah!

Dog Head. Coad. Ice Cream Man.

I mean, how long, really, before Iverson is rocking out the triple entendres and Hoke Harden is posting Bourbon tasting notes?

I give it...well...seriously, they are probably here already.

 

[Oswaldo Costa]

Reads like a list of Batman villains. There must be an equation in fractal or chaos theory that predicts the seemingly random peridicity of these returns.

 

[David M. Bueker]

originally posted by Ice Cream Man:

originally posted by VLM:

originally posted by David M. Bueker:

originally posted by Jeff Grossman:

Rhys 2008 Pinot Noir "Bearwallow Vineyard" - apparently, Rhys obtained this vineyard too late to do anything about the grapes so they pressed what was there; simple, syrupy, sweet, frooty; pretty darned ordinary

A very surprising assessment, especially considering John Gillman's effusive praise for the wine, with notes that are essentially opposite of your comments. I wouldn't normally bring up a critical review, except that John's palate usually lines up as pretty much Disorderly.

John's wrong and Jeff is right. His notes mirror mine. It especially stuck out when tasting all the wines together.

Considering that this wine was delivered within the last four to six weeks, I would give it the benefit of six to twelve months in the cellar to settle down from travel shock before I passed judgement on this wine. Channeling Rimmerman.

6 to 12 months seems rather extreme.

Out of curiosity I opened a bottle of the 2008 Bearwallow last night. It's 2 wines in one right now - all fruit up front and plenty of structure lurking at the back end with no integration of the two. I found it neither syrupy nor overly sweet, but also didn't find it to be particularly interesting right now. We'll see what time does for my few remaining bottles.

 

[VLM]

originally posted by Jeff Grossman:

originally posted by Mr. Doghead:
...they see how liitle room they have to maneuver, and the temptation to bag all the hard work grows. What's saving some of these family vineyards in Europe may be the difficulty young people have finding viable alternate career paths.

I think you're still depressed, Robert.

No, I think that is spot on. The hope for many of these vineyards in unfashionable places is that the children do not have bright career opportunities, so they stick around and hopefully grow to love it.

I think people, you city folk especially, romanticize agriculture and particularly wine. No one really wants to be a peasant, but the hope for these vineyards is that some capable people have no choice.