Tuesday May 18. Talyor is up for dinner. He’s the husband of one of my best friends (who I’ve known since college; she was a freshman when I was a senior). We all used to be neighbors in Colorado Springs. He’s traveled with me to Italy numerous times, to Switzerland and Sonoma as well. He lived in Italy for several years while with the Air Force, and then completed a master’s in International Business in Milano. He knows Italy, and he knows his wine stuff: he is the stone-cold badass maestro of Italian wines. We start with an otherworldly Trimbach Clos St. Hune Riesling from 1996. This is like rolling pear essence-dipped gravel around in your mouth. Insanely long and pure. We follow with an Emidio Pepe Monepulciano d’Abruzzo from 1985, then finish with 1993 Amarone from Quintarelli (tasting notes at end of post). Amazing night, except I forget to drink enough water until the end of the evening and am waking up every 15 minutes to pee.
Wednesday May 19. K, my gorgeous girlfriend, comes up for the night for the Planet Pink event: she loves rosé. The party invite specifies “pink attire required” but neither of us is big on that color, especially where sartorial choices are concerned. I find a pink shirt on eBay. I look like a late eighties prep. Ugh. (I almost wrote “perp” … whoops, Freudian slip.) Dave, the owner of
DiVino and a bone-fide wine geek extraordinaire, greets us at the door – he has dyed his hair bright, bright pink. These people are serious about rosé.
We taste our way through about half of the 65+ offerings. Some thoughts: Rosé has become cool in the last decade. There are lots of offerings – most are at least drinkable but there is still an alarming bit of the sticky-sweet character of many bad rosés. It’s as if producers, as a whole, had some trouble letting go of the cotton-candy notes; that they just couldn’t let go of a hint of sweet; their collectively addled collective unconscious decided that anything pink must have noticeable residual sugar. These are the producers who should have some sense slapped into them with this simple rule: if it’s not for dessert, don’t leave noticeable residual sugar. If they still don’t get it, well, off with their heads. (I guess I’m pretty serious about rosé as well.) Thankfully, many of the offerings are bone-dry and delicious. That’s how I likes them, I do.
Standouts: the seriously cheap Casal Garcia “Vinho Verde Rosé” from Portugal. K tells me it makes her want to peel off her clothes, pour this all over her body, and go running naked though the woods. Wow, all that for only 8 bucks? I order a case.
The Iberian peninsula shows well: currently they are making really great cheap rosé. The Capcanes “Mas Donis Rosat” is excellent. Animus from Portugal gets a nod, as do Marques de Caceres, Bodegas Muga and the sparkling Marques de Galidia Brut Cava. Lovely all. Slightly sweet, but balanced with decent acidity, is Denver’s own Infinite Monkey Theorem Rosé. The US is sadly underrepresented with dry rose, many having noticeable residual sugar, which throws off the balance, doesn’t work with food, makes them cloying, yadda yadda yadda etc ad nauseam. Gruet Brut Rosé from New Mexico, though, makes the cut, as does the surprising Dusted Valley Vintners from Walla Walla. Waters (another Wallyworld denizen) shows brilliantly, though a bit heavy – this is made from 85% viognier, colored up with 15% syrah. Interestingly, the Germanic wines do very well as well – Lucien Albrecht’s Brut Rosé from Alsace, and two bottlings from Allendorf in Germany are knockouts: the Spätburgunder Rosé and the sparkling “Festival Rosé.” Lastly, a really lovely bottling from Valdobbiadene, Italy wraps things up: a Prosecco Rosé from Bortomolino. Great stuff.
Sated and a bit loopy, we head off to dinner at
Tamayo – an upscale Larimer Square “Latin” restaurant about which I have heard decidedly mixed reviews – and find it quite excellent. Lovely flavorful guacamole, with good bite from onions and lime juice, a delicious ceviche of halibut, and a exceptional grilled octopus salad … great way to sop up the excess rosé in the system. Of course, we overdo it by ordering a bottle of Las Rochas Garnacha from Spain – one of the great wine values of the world and 100% delicious.
Thursday, May 20: the
Masi Dinner at
Luca d’Italia. I am not a big fan of Italian restaurants in the US – too many seem like living, breathing compromises. Luca is no different, but at least its food is far better than most. I’ve never had a flat-out bad experience here, but never a great one either. My primary beef with Italian restaurants in the US is, for lack of a better, or more tactful way of saying this … their cowardice.
A digression:
The great beauty of Italian cooking, for me, is the utter simplicity of it. Because Italy never had a unified court like, say, France, which dictated the taste, aspirations and style of a cuisine clearly, Italy is a land of home or “housewife” cooking – what’s commonly called the cucina casalinga. When you go to restaurants in Italy, they typically have the same menus everywhere in a given region – I’m not kidding. It’s as if they all agreed to save printing costs by offering the exact same menu everywhere. Once, with a friend on his first trip in Italy, I was talked into going into an “ethnic asian” restaurant in Rome because he was tired of going to places that “all had the exact same goddamn thing in every goddamn place.” True enough, but the key to appreciating Italian cooking is discovering the subtle differences between kitchens preparing essentially the same foods. Italian Cooking is best appreciated in the same way as jazz – a form of art that depends on a repertoire of standards, all interpreted in subtly different ways. When you hear “All of Me” you recognize the tune, the structure, the changes. What makes jazz so fascinating is that Miles, Ella, Duke, Sarah Vaughan Bird, Ornette Coleman, Satchmo, whoever, will interpret it in a slightly different way so as to make something intimately familiar and recognizable absolutely their own. That’s the essence of Italian cooking.
So when I am eating In Italy, I will literally order the same things 5 or 6 days in a row:
Vitello Tonnato, say, in Piedmont. Or a pappardelle al sugo di cingiale in Tuscany. Or grilled cuttlefish in Sicilia. Whatever it is I order, I like to try a lot of examples. And slowly, the essence of the dish emerges, as do its variations. It’s the essence of Plato’s discussion of the nature of things: what are the characteristics that make something recognizable, and what are the accepted variations allowed in that definition? Bach, it is told, used to play approximately the same thing daily, just keep improvising a new set of harmonic relationships on top of a fixed base. That became the Goldberg Variations, one of the most beautiful sets of music ever. Get it? Good, now go out and EAT. Then both sides of the brain will get it, and the tongue will really, really, really appreciate it. Be sure to get some exercise and drink plenty of water in between, though – it is serious calories.
Pic: Pancia di Maiale in La Morra, Italy. Basically roasted pork belly - all bacon. You begin to understand what I mean about the water and exercise ...
Back to the issue at hand: Italian restaurants in the US. It’s a bit of a quandary: I love Italian food, but rarely eat it in the states. The problem, as I said, is cowardice, or, more tactfully put, a certain lack of nerve. Chefs in the US want to tart things up. They put mascara, eyeliner and rouge on something that is both plainly beautiful and beautifully plain.
Usually, if I am eating at an Italian place in the US, I just get irritated, and need to tell myself it is an interpretation, not the real thing. Like a postcard of St Peter’s instead of standing in the nave of the church itself.
Full admission: I have the opportunity and resources to make these distinctions. I can, and do, travel regularly. Not everyone does. But since I do, and can, why not be precise and exercise the full mental and critical faculties? Why not push myself to understand these things as best I can?
So then. It was with a wee bit of trepidation that I made my way to Luca d’Italia that evening. And I will say I was pleasantly surprised. Not everything was awful, in fact, much of it was good. But a Scottish Salmon Carpaccio? C’mon. It was good, but hardly a match for an innocuous Pinot Grigio – the oily fish and meyer lemon totally overwhelmed the wine. Next course, roasted pork belly, was decent, but marred by the sweetness of balsamic vinegar, which threw the dish out of balance. Yes, the Masi Campofiorin Valpolicella 2006 had good richness and though not made in the ripasso style (as I understood it), had a hint of sweetness to it. But the wine would have been better served by a completely savory dish that set off the sweetness and richness of the wine rather than something that competed with it.
The best dish of the evening, and also accompanied by a very nice wine, was a “Buffalo Milk Teleggio (sic) Ravioletta” (Jesus God, before you print, please spell-check!) which had the great virtue of being simple, direct and unadorned, with a decent and at-the-edge-of-overdoing-it flavor of garlic elevating this dish to almost excellent. (“Almost” because I thought the pasta was 30 seconds overcooked and mushy at the edges.) (I am a nitpicker, yes.) The lovely bite of acidity from the tomatoes set off the 2006 Masi Brolo di Campofiorin beautifully – this is a wine that needs its opposite to fully express itself (30% passito for richness). The combination of the flavors went in a totally different direction than the rest of the dinner – they soared together, rather than feeling chained to each other.
The next course was a letdown after the brilliant simplicity of the ravioli – roast lamb chop with fava bean spaetzle (did we just move to Austria? Even in Friulia this is a curiosity, and once again, misspelled as “spetzel” on the menu) and morels. Lamb is a classic combination with Amarone, as the gaminess of the meat can set the wine off beautifully. This dish was good, correct, but unexciting. Somehow less than the sum of its parts. The 2006 Masi Costasera Amarone was my favorite wine of the evening, and the last drops went far better with the cheeses served for the last course than with the lamb. Though not their top wine, this bottling was my favorite for the purity of aromas, the well-integrated flavors and aromas of dried and fresh fruit, minerals, tobacco and forest floor, and the relatively low level of residual sugar. (Even though Amarone is nominally a dry wine, it often has a few grams per liter residual sugar – the same or usually less than Champagne, for example – so it still seems dry.) Lovely wine.
Another Digression (please excuse me): the best lamb dish I’ve had with Amarone is a plate of grilled lamb chops at the Bottega del Vino in Verona: the meat is served simply grilled (no marinade, just salt, pepper and olive oil, the holy trinity) with a “pesto” of rucola, pine nuts, garlic, parmesan and olive oil. (No Basil!)). The bite and heat of really fresh rucola (arugula) sets off the wine and meat beautifully. Really: they both soar. I had this dish most recently in February 2010 with a bottle of 1985 Masi Amarone; possibly one of the finest meals I’ve had. Not for its complexity and “wow” factor, but for its utter simplicity.
Last course, the aforementioned cheese, was interesting: the restaurant claims to make all these cheeses in their basement, in the style of their Italian counterparts. (Why? How is this better than the original?) (The Taleggio used for the pasta course was also made in-house, according to the waitstaff). While decent, none of these were spectacular, and the 2001 Masi Serego Alighieri Vaio Amarone was a disappointment. I’ve had this wine from this and other vintages in the past, and this bottle was very rustic, a bit reduced, and it didn’t clear up with aeration. Too bad, as I have a six-pack of this wine in my cellar – I think this was a poorly stored bottle and really didn’t show well. I’ve had this before and it should be better, so it gets the benefit of the doubt.
Off into the clear Colorado night, there’s a hint of a chill in the air but spring is here – it is still almost warm! I could have ridden my Vespa!
Friday night’s dinner at
Il Posto and wines will wait for a future post: Part 2. This has gone on long enough!
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1996 Trimbach, Riesling “Clos Ste. Hune” Alsace, France
My first thought: amaaaaaaaaazing. Like river gravel, dipped in pure essence of green pear then rolled around in your mouth. The aromas of clean fruit – pear, apple and hints of citrus – are completely dry, precise and focused, and only a little of the telltale petrolic notes of Riesling remain, but the mineral aspect is off the charts. In the mouth, bone-dry, long dry fruit – no sweetness here – amazing minerals. Finish is a touch short fro a wine of this intensity (only 30 seconds or so …), but hey, it’s almost 15 years old … Drink now-2016. 4.0-
1985 Emidio Pepe, Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, Italy
At first, all cherry cold medicine – I thought we had an off bottle, it was so medicinal, but this burns off with 6-7 minutes of air. What emerges? A combination of dried and fresh black fruits, great slate-y and charcoal-y minerals, musc, leather, tobacco – and the fruit just gets better and better. Licorice and earth on the finish. Drink now-2015. Coming to the end of its drinking life, but lovely. 3.0+
1993 Giuseppe Quintarelli, Amarone dell Valpolicella, Italy
In answer to the first question I always get about Quintarelli: Yes, absolutely, it’s worth it. Even if you only do it once. The combination of the fresh and dried plum, blackberries and raspberries in Amarone is so seductive – and this bottling is so clean and fresh after 17 years it boggles the mind. Still a baby – aromas soar, the flavors linger, the wine is not tannic but still seems unevolved – like a ride down a silk waterslide, but instead of water, it’s raspberry puree. Lovely. Drink now-2025. 4.0+
Big week. Lots went on, wine-wise. Tuesday, a dinner with a friend who knows loads about Italian wine. Wednesday, the “Planet Pink” party and tasting of Rosé wines put on by DiVino wine store on South Broadway. Thursday, the Masi dinner at Luca d’Italia. Friday, a dinner with wine friends at Il Posto.
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