Organic Wine and Food Matching

Domaine Vigneau-Chevreau in Vouvray. Vouvray is like the girl with the Scarlett Johansson sweetness, Bette Davis wit, and knockdown Grace Kelly beauty that made all the boys in high school too dumbfounded to ever ask out (except for the dumb jocks, who’d never get a yes).  Yet Vouvray is a thinking man and woman’s white wine because it takes brains to see through the flowery, intoxicatingly perfumed qualities of the Chenin Blanc (the required grape of this AOC ), and look into the wine’s soul: the effortlessly acidic spine of the fruit grown in the Loire River Valley’s cold yet maritime moderated climate, and the deep, almost poetic substrata of flavor contributed by the soil (layers of flinty stone and clayish limestone over a plateau of solid limestone – the ultimate grape growing medium).  Earlier this month I ran into one California’s more intelligent, and artistically multiplisitc, winemakers named Larry Brooks (a founder of Acacia, former GM of Chalone, and now propri...

  Collette wrote of France’s Jurançon: when I was a young girl, I was introduced to a passionate Prince, domineering and two-timing like all great seducers… My lifelong affair has been with Domaine Tempier’s Bandol rouge , which began in the early 1980s, when I was first introduced to the French imports of Kermit Lynch.  In the beginning, I did not understand the compulsion: it was a red wine that always seem to have a spirit – whether it was in the mysterious, earthy, scrubby, leathery notes that often seem to engulf the aromas of berry liqueurs in the nose, or the slightly sparkly, lively, lilting quality in the texture of the wine itself, almost belying a meatiness of tannin and dried grape skin flavor. Bandol is, after all is said and done, a wine that never seems light or heavy, lean nor fat, zesty but never sharp, delicious with a stew of meat, and delicious with a stew of fish. In short, the perfect lifelong companion.  A few years years later, reading the c...

The highest elevation plantings of Garnacha and  Cariñena in Bodegas Marco Abella In recent years, the red wines of Priorat DOQ , from the mountains of Spain’s Catalonia, have become the El Toro, the Cyclone, The Incredible Hulk, the Aerosmith Rockin’ Roller Coaster of wines for vinous thrill seekers: heady, exhilarating, palate and mind blowing packages, black as the Egyptian night, that make you want to get out the kitchen and rattle those pots and tastevins. The 2004 Clos Abella Priorat Porrera (about $70), by Bodegas Marco Abella , is by no means a peak of perfection: there are blemishes, such as bludgeoningly high alcohol (fine with me, as it were), and a balsamic-like volatility that, depending on your point of view, is either like a distracting mole or a seductive, throttling beauty mark, just sweetening the pot of luscious berry, sticky licorice, gunflint black tea and tarry, stony notes in the concentrated aromas and flavors.   Slate ( llicorella) soil in M...