Tuesday, October 21 2008

What's It All About?

Cal! Don't look so sad!

Ah, Limited Edition season. For me it forms about one-third of my entire work year. It’s not just being on the road from the beginning of October until the middle of December: there’s a lot of work involved in choosing and testing the Limited Edition varietals, the commercial equivalents for tasting purposes, and the recipes and food items that match up with them. Once that’s done I put together a one-hour presentation on regions, grapes, flavours and foods for use across Canada, the USA, England, Australia and New Zealand, etc. etc.

It occurs to me at this late date that when I say ‘Limited Edition Tasting Event’, some folks might not know exactly what I mean. It’s simple enough in concept: we partner up with a retailer who wants to show off this year’s Limited for his customers, show up and give a talk about the wine, do some Q&A, and then try the wines with some food.

One thing: the wines themselves are not Winexpert kit products. In Canada this would be illegal under all circumstances, and there’s no getting around it. We could do it in some places in the USA, but there’s a hitch: none of the kits exist yet, except as 3-litre benchtop prototypes. In some cases we’ve only just gotten our hands on the juices from Europe by November. So we go to the local wine shops and purchase commercial equivalents. They’re not always exactly what we’ll be doing with our kits, but it gives folks a good idea of the aromas and flavours they’ll see in the Limited Editions.

The format is interesting. A lot of folks would like to do formal tasting, which involves having all the wine in front of you, at your place at a table, and being guided through each wine individually. This is fun, and very educational, but it doesn’t work in groups bigger than about 20 people—too much confusion and pouring difficulties, plus you need 5 glasses for everyone. If we had a tasting for 200 people that would mean procuring over 1,000 glasses!

What we do instead is a festival-style tasting. In a big room we set up chairs theatre-style and I do a stand-up talk. It’s a lot like stand-up comedy in some ways. Who would have thought that my (mercifully) short time as a club comedian would be my most valuable job skill? At the end of the talk I demo tasting one of the wines, encouraging people to develop their sip ‘n’ spit techniques and off we go: around the edges of the room are five tables, one with each of the five LE wine equivalents and most often the food pairings that go with them. Attendees can then get a sample of the wine and the food and try them together.
This year the five varieties are:

• January white: New Zealand Marlborough Gewürztraminer and New Zealand Gisborne Merlot. We pair the Gewürz with a fried spring roll and plum sauce for dipping. Because it’s off-dry, the Gewürztraminer works fabulously with the spicy, flavourful spring roll, and the acidity balances the oiliness of the deep frying. When it’s dipped in the plum sauce it’s a sensation: the sweetness and fruitiness of the sauce cancel out the residual sugar of the wine and it suddenly becomes crisp and much more structured, while still being able to balance the flavours of the spring roll.
  
• January red: New Zealand Gisborne Merlot, paired with aged cheddar cheese. This is interesting because under most circumstances cheese and wine are terrible partners. Cheese is very high-fat and savoury. When it’s paired with a strongly tannic red, the tannins get stuck in the fats and disappear. The fruit quality is blunted by the savour of the cheese, and the whole combination is more often deflated rather than elevated. But a strongly fruity red like the Merlot, which is heavily scented with black cherry can deal with a distinctive, intense aged cheddar easily, and because the tannins are mellow—more ‘mouth-filling’ than astringent or swingeing—it plays nice with the fats as well.
• February red: South African Swartland Cabernet Sauvignon. This red is a hulking brute, full of brawny tannin, juicy blackcurrant and blackberry fruit and intense structure. We’ve split the pairing, and some folks are pairing it with a piece of grilled beef, which is a Cab classic, the fruit singing a duet with the savoury grilled bit of the meat and the tannins doing a pas de deux with the rich marbling of the meat. The other food pairing is dark, bittersweet chocolate. The tannins in the chocolate match an enhance the wine tannins, while the slight sweetness exaggerates the acidity, bringing the juicy-tart blackcurrant notes to the forefront. If you’ve never had red wine and chocolate before, I highly recommend it. If it’s available in your area, try the Swiss brand Lindt, in the 65% Cacao-style. Mmm!
  
• March white: Alsatian Dry Riesling. When most folks hear Riesling they automatically think ‘sweet’. Not so this wine: it’s dry, dry like licking a rock dry, dry as a desert in the dry season. That makes it very assertive, with traditional Riesling aromas of apricot and green apple supported by crisply tart acidity. The cool thing about it is how good a food wine this dryness makes it. We pair it with smoked salmon and lemon, but the trick is to try it in stages. First the wine to set your palate up to the dry, structured aromatic wine. Next, a bite of the salmon, and how the salty-sweet-smokey salmon makes the wine seem less acidic and slightly more fruity, as the salt and acid compete for attention from your taste buds. Next, squeeze a bit of the lemon on the salmon, taste that and try the wine again. It will suddenly seem very fruity, and almost as though it has a hint of sweetness. Finally, finish up by biting the bit of lemon and then trying the wine. Zounds! It tastes almost like fresh, unfermented grape juice: sweet, rich and aromatic. It’s a startling transformation, and well worth trying on your own.
  
• April red: Italian Piedmont Dolcetto d’Alba. I utterly adore this wine. It has that great combination of fruit, tannin and structure all in such fine balance that it hits your palate like the best of all possible worlds: happy cherry/licorice aromas, tannins enough for structure, but softness enough to make it dangerously gulpable. It also has firm acidity (kind of a hallmark of Italian reds) and a delicate almond-y note in the finish. We pair it with pizza generously sauced with tomato. The acid in the tomatoes pairs with and cancels the acidity of the wine, enhancing the fruit, and the cheese works brilliantly with the moderate tannins, and the fruit works with savoury pepperoni and other toppings—it might be one of the three or four greatest food pairings in the world.
  

I usually grab a glass of wine and hang out to answer questions afterwards. In every place I go there are always great questions, and surprisingly enough after nearly a decade of doing this, new ones all the time. If you can make it to a tasting, maybe you can try your luck at stumping me—a prize to the first person who manages it this year!

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