A Pair of Wines from Argentina

For my second review I take on two wines, both $20.99 suggested retail price (though you never know what those high-end groceries will charge), both dark reds, both 100% varietally unblended, and both from the century-old Luigi Bosca winery in Mendoza, Argentina. The grapes for each were grown in desert regions receiving less than 10 inches of rain annually - in case you find that morsel interesting. I do. They also were grown in a region where summer is winter and vice-versa. Can you comprehend such craziness? Want more? Rivers here flow up, you're cold when it's hot, cats bark and water burns. Yet red wine, oddly enough, is still red. Let's drink it.

Luigi Bosca 2007 Pinot Noir, Argentina. The wine smells of strawberry and mushroom, and sweet spices like pepper and cassis. In the mouth it begins with broad and heavy fruit, deep and purple (yep, I can taste colors - can't you?), some strawberry, and a pull of tannins against the mouth. Savory, earthy notes follow closely behind, including some smoke and bacon.

Luigi Bosca 2006 Malbec, Argentina. This wine is savory on the front, fruity on the back. It smells a bit tart and smoky - the way I like my wines. Earthy flavors - including moss and wood - are softened faintly by fruit, but the lingering impression is dark, syrupy honey dripping off a smoked ham (I'm not making this up), with wood and coffee flavors thickening the entire experience. Finally, on the finish, the tannins kick in. Very nice. Said to age for up to 10 years - but I couldn't wait.

A Review of Wines

Wine may be the simplest of alcoholic beverages, consisting of fermented grape juice only. Yet somehow it has become dauntingly complex. Wines are differentiated by region, vineyard, variety, winemaker, yeast, barrel, time, year and other factors. Thus, while all wines are virtually identical genetically and at first taste, each is absolutely unique. Thus is justified the esoteric pastime of writing reviews, and thus I begin. I will focus now on assorted reds.

1) From Bodega Septima in Argentina, the 2007 Malbec. This was a new variety for me when I tasted it a year ago. It reminded me of a Syrah - smelling of cherry and ham, and with flavors of bacon fat, leather, and even some tomato and onion, oddly enough. A dry wine, it puckered the mouth a bit. These tannins would probably mellow with years, leaving a great wine.

2) From Pietra Santa in Central California, the 2006 Sassolino. A blend of primarily Sangiovese and Merlot, I believe the qualities that I find here are attributable to the former, which in my experience is a spicy and charismatic wine. The Sassolino smells of dried herbs and cherries, and in the mouth flavors of honey, bacon and ham open up, balanced by a savory essence of forest and wet moss.

3) From Robert Mondavi, the 2006 Napa Valley Merlot. This wine's aroma is extremely lush and ripe, vibrant and alive on the tongue with juicy blackberry and jam. A tannic body tugs at the mouth.

4) From Gordon Brothers, the 2006 Columbia Valley Cabernet Sauvignon. This is a tremendous wine. Redolent of black prunes, licorice and woodiness, it tastes of black raisins and bacon (hmm, they all do, it seems), with vanilla in the background and lingering on the finish. Spritzy, zesty and acidic. Very nice.

5) From Rancho Zabaco in Sonoma County, the Dry Creek Valley 2007 Reserve Zinfandel. It is a black-purple wine, and I immediately smell hot plums and alcohol, deep cherry and spicy, savory meats. At first sip it bites with strength, then explodes with fruit and maple-like spice. It is juicy and ripe and as strong as it tastes, at 14.9% ABV. It finishes long and lasting in the mouth.

Gu on the Roads

Among us who ride the roads on two wheels and without engines, there is a lower life form among us. He is human, yet bears the mind of a three-year-old. He frequently takes easy bike rides in the Marin Headlands, and he dresses up theatrically like he is setting out on a heroic expedition. He even packs rations for these little trips - as though the ride is so strenuous and challenging that he wouldn't make it home without food - and the most popular snack for this sort of idiot is that gooey gel junk in the foil packets. Firstly, the waste of the packaging bothers me. I would eat a banana (if I really needed food on a short morning ride), but for these sportsmen bananas probably don't carry the showy superstar glitz that they think a packet of processed sugar-shit does. So they buy their Gu. The fact that the foil is not biodegradable doesn't bother them, either, as it does me, and I swear that once every mile I see the wrapper of some cycling energy food thrown on the ground. I recently did some photojournalistic work on the roads of Marin, and posted beside this entry is just the sort of scenario that I'm talking about - and believe me: I have a dozen more of these photos.

NOTE: If you are a woman and you disagree with the stylistic choice of pronouns above, then I apologize. I acknowledge that women, too, have the capacity to be just as inconsiderate, infantile, careless, and lazy as any male cyclist with a packet of Gu dangling down his chin.

My Skin!

Why the hell are the google boys advertising anti-wrinkle skin cream on my blog again? I take this personally.

Spanish Quarter Wines

I just discovered a new line of Spanish wines. I did some inquiring with the publicist about the label, which is a curiosity I'll describe in a moment. It seems the Codorniu Group, which distributes the wines - a red and a white - has wised up to the fact that Americans prefer wine labels without the fuss, excitement and endless vowels of most European labels. American shoppers want to see wine bottles bearing a single grape name and perhaps a year, and that’ll do for most of us. On Italian and French bottles, so it seems, there are too many long and self-indulgent words, vineyard names, bodega names, appellation names and producer names. There meanwhile are often no grape names at all – the most important part, some might think, considering that this is wine we're discussing.

Spanish Quarter wines have alleviated this label matter. The new company has released two wines in bottles that portray the simple high spirits of a Spanish plaza on the labels. It appears to be a Sunday afternoon or festival time. The colors are as vibrant as flower bouquets at the feet of a toreador, and the happiness of the scene is easily read by the American wine-drinking simpleton.

The Cabernet-Tempranillo blend is a hugely fruity wine. One should taste cherry, blueberry and cranberry up front, traces of dark matter – namely pepper and licorice – lingering in the shadows, and mint in between. I tasted the wine with a plate of sulfur shelf (a.k.a. “chicken of the woods”) pulled from a Golden Gate Park eucalyptus tree and sautéed long and slow with olive oil, garlic red onion, Lepiota rachodes and pear cider and served over porcini-steamed brown rice drizzled with California olive oil (yes, Spanish oil would have been appropriate, but I am not a pairing nerd).

I tasted the 2007 white blend of Chardonnay and Albarino without food. The wine was clean and smooth and it polished the palate with soft flavors of pear, peach, honey and mead. The bottle’s label asserts that the wine encapsulates the spirited essence of Spain, and the label’s imagery depicts blue skies over a horizon of turreted old towers. A wide open plaza in the foreground bustles with folks building human towers, kicking soccer balls and promenading about the square. Fun stuff.

The Spanish Quarter labels can be likened to a coffee table book the same way a nice Burgundy label might be likened to a piece in the New York Times, and while the Burgundy is infamously sophisticated, sometimes a guy just feels like a good picture book.

Mushroom of the Year: The Prince

So, it's November and the summer of San Francisco is, I suppose, finally over. I kept no accurate tally, but between June and the present I must have brought home 400 Agaricus augustus, also known as The Prince. The season began, I suppose, when my brother and I discovered the mushroom along a major roadway near San Francisco coming back from a diving trip. We found a clump of fresh ones about 30 in number. We brought home half, because they were so beautiful but left the other half because we assumed, as is usually safe to do with fungi, that the mushrooms were not edible. We identified them at home, however, by the white fuzzy stem, the shaggy golden brown cap, the sheer size of several (almost a foot across) and the distinct almond aroma wafting from the shrooms. These, we learned, were a species of the same genus as button mushrooms and Portobellos, but far more spectacular and considered one of the best mushrooms there is. I returned on my bike to the patch that afternoon and retrieved the rest. All summer in irrigated portions of the city's public parks I continued to find them. The largest may have been a foot tall and 14 inches wide. Very few were infested with bugs, and all evidence would suggest that at my most lucrative patches, there is no other mushroom hunter in town frequenting the spots. Several days ago I found the most impressive specimen. Its stem was two inches thick, its cap 10 inches wide and the thing was dense and massive. I steaked the cap, dipped them in beaten egg, and made Prince French Toast - three nights in a row. I've also dried several and ground them into powder for use in breads.

And so I take my hat off to The Prince, the mushroom of the year. Second place goes to Lepiota rachodes. Third, to the fantastically freakish Sulfur Shelf, preferrably known as Chicken of the Woods. Lastlty, porcinis, of which I found a few dozen on the high summits of the city in pine patches of intense fog drip.

The rains have begun, though, and all ground will be fair game until April.

Prickly Pears and Pigs

I struck a hot deal at a local grocery store - about eight pounds of prickly pears for two bucks. Does anyone have any simple suggestions for a recipe? Act quick or I swear I'm going to juice and ferment the things into prickly pear cider.

Unfortunately, that's as far as I can get through this entry without lapsing into the realm of wild mushrooms. In Golden Gate Park, the gardeners just dumped four tons of flower cuttings on top of my favorite Lepiota patch, so screw them. My hope is that the mycelium will spread outward to find breathing room again and continue shooting up those little shaggy caps I love so much. Recently, on a bike ride, as I passed a strip of roadway median grown over with pines, I saw that a number of mushrooms were sprouting from the black earth below. Evidently, this was one of those occasional patches that gets blessed by reclaimed water year-round. I pulled off to have a look and found, aside from a number of Amanitas and other non-edibles, about 20 porcinis rotted and squirming with maggots. This was a spot to remember. I found one intact that day, and have since returned every other day. I pulled two out there yesterday. However, this patch clearly has another guardian; I've found mushrooms carefully covered with pine needles that were exposed the day before, and I even saw yesterday an empty hole with white mycelial crust at the bottom - a porcini pocket! I wonder how big it was, who took it home, and how it was cooked. I fret to think that that patch is being scoured right now, but it comforts me some to know that the land is being stewarded.

Any fresh porcini recipe suggestions out there?