Beato Food and Wine, where I am currently working as the Assistant Wine Director, is celebrating our first anniversary today. Live in or near Seattle? We invite you to join us tonight. Please visit the restaurant's web site for details on our food menu and wine list, featuring Pacific Northwest and Italian wines.

We are also offering some of our reserve list wines by the full or half glass:
Allegrini 1999 Amarone Della Valoplicella (half 12. full 24.)
Bartolo Mascarello 1997 Barolo (half 14. full 28.)
Paolo Scavino 1990 Barolo 'Cannubi' (half 19. full 38.)
Rocche dei Manzoni 1989 Barolo 'Vigna d'la Roul' Riserva (half 19. full 38.)

Everyone who dines with us tonight will also receive a slice of birthday cake, a Trampetti Olive Oil Orange Cake, on us. There are still some tables available starting with when we open at 5pm.

Nope, I have not yet fallen off the face of the earth. I spent the month of September finishing up a bunch of projects in preparation for traveling the month of October. (Italy, wine, NYC marathon...busy travel times!) Now that I'm back, I'm working full time at Beato Food and Wine. 

I do have plans to eventually take my wine musings to a new blog. At this point, it looks like that won't happen until early 2008. 

I'm pretty excited for the celebration of the one-year anniversary at Beato. We'll be opening some magnums and offering both full and half glasses of each wine. We're telling our newsletter subscribers first about what wines we'll be pouring, so if you are in the Seattle area, sign up before Friday, Nov. 23 to get the announcement. (Hint: Vintages include 1990 and 1997.)

I came across this Craiglist post, To All the People Looking for Writers, as I was sniffing around for some new markets for writing jobs. It is a very on-point rant to all those "job" posters (you know who you are) seeking writers to work for "exposure" instead of for pay.

I've run across this attitude towards writers plenty in the food and wine trades for sure. I wish I could say the belief that writers should work for free or for very little was limited to certain fields. That simply isn't true and it is pretty disrespectful, actually. Good professional writers have developed their skills through education, disciplined practice, and adapting based on well founded criticism from editors, teachers, and clients.

Anyone with some amount of literacy can write. However, if you need a writer who can meet (or hey, what the heck, even help you figure out) your objectives and your deadline in an appropriate tone and voice -- well, this excerpt from the spoof ad makes my point quite clearly...
If you want professional writers - PAY THEM.

To that I might add this amendment, if you can't pay in dollars, find something else of value to offer as a bargaining chip. And, no, "exposure" is not of value to professional writers. Since most of us have already figured out how to blog for ourselves or to self-publish, how would writing for your blog give us better exposure than writing under our own name or online pseudonym? Seriously, think about it.

Blog Update
I haven't abandoned you, dear readers. I am in the beginning stages of a redesign for my web site. I may well be moving my blog in the coming months. Rest assured, I will leave a pointer from here to the new location if and when that happens. In the meantime, keep sipping wine.

Restaurant Update
I'm excited about the upcoming wine dinner at the restaurant where I work. It's our first and the food menu looks de-lish! The wines are indeed unique and I'm looking forward to having the opportunity to meet the Charrère sisters. There are very few tables left for the Azienda Agricola Les Crêtes wine dinner at Beàto. If you can dine very early (5pm) or very late (9pm), call soon to make your reservation.

I see I haven't posted in a while. Partly, that's because I've been in the midst of some career changes. I am still working part-time at Beato Food and Wine. My schedule there has stabilized a bit with Tuesdays and Sundays being my regular nights. In the near future, my schedule will shift again and I will be there Tuesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights.

I've been keeping busy planning, writing, designing, and consulting for a couple of private clients in the restaurant and wine trades.

Tonight, it's h-a-w-t in Seattle. Not sure exactly what yet...but the beverage of choice will be cold.

One half of what I heard tonight is true: Ovio Bistro is closing. We shall see if the other half holds true. I'll post it if I can find public verification...suffice to say, someone bought the business so, from what I hear it won't be vacant long.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next three sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

The book:
Wines of Italy: il gusto italiano del vino by Patricia Guy. (ISBN: 1-55949-881-1)

Page 23:
There is no 5th sentence on this page, turning to the next, I find:
On the palate, it is slightly astringent.

Synonyms
Bianchetta Genovese, Bianchetta, Gianchetta, Trebbiana, Trebbiano locale, Termosci, Trebbiana Bianca, Trebbianadi Sarzana.

Food Pairings
Aperitif, or with fish or snail-based dishes.

Note: The text comes from an entry about Albarola, a blending grape used in Ligurian wines.

Another photo from Mike Pirnat. This one does a pretty nice job of capturing the new sign and awning at West Seattle Cellars. I remember folks not loving the green when the building exterior was first painted. Now, I think it provides a very nice contrast to the colors used for the new sign.

Yup, so far this is my favorite "people picture" taken at the APEX tasting room by one of the gals who works there. I'll pull in a few more from Mike's flickr set another day. (Mike Pirnat, the fellow with glasses on the right in this picture, acted as trip photographer all week.)

Brief notes on dinner:
Tuna steaks from our favorite purveyor seared and served over blanched sea beans with a sage butter sauce. Also, salad of Romaine lettuce with baby carrots and English peas.

A little over a week ago I succumbed to the nasty cold that is going around in my area. (And here I thought I dodged that particular viral bullet when February and March came and went and I remained uninfected. Ha!) This unwelcome bugger managed to interfere with my plans to dine out at some of the NUE restaurants. (Steelhead Diner...I will brunch there soon, I swear.) I managed to make it, cough and all, to Ibiza Dinner Club last night to meet a couple of friends for dinner.

I was pleased that most of their dishes on the 3 for $30 menu were the same size as the dishes on their regular menu. I was over the moon that when the general manager opened a bottle of wine for us and I could actually smell it.

The worst part of this bloody cold has been that I lost (temporarily, thank goodness!) all ability to smell anything. Because of this disability, I suggested one of my friends sample the wine for soundness instead of me. A bit of the aroma of the wine made it over to my nostrils as the wine server poured some for each of us. The moment that cherry/berry and spice made it to my nose, I was elated. I hadn't even planned on having a full glass of wine. The fact that I was smelling again so distracted me that by the time I remembered that I was going to ask for a taste rather than a glass pour, my glass was already full. Better still, I was able to note a bit of the wine's evolution during our meal.

The wine?
1998 La Rioja Alta Reserva Vina Arana

My notes? (From memory)
Nose of berries...cherry and strawberry dominated with hints of spice. On the palate, a bit austere without food. With dinner, it took on a bit more complexity...earth and dried herbs, maybe even a little dried tobacco.

John Dunkin Hartley, who worked as a server in many places in my area of town, passed away suddenly. I remember first meeting him at Easy Street Records & Cafe. The last time I saw him was the first time I made it in to Jak's for lunch...just a few weeks ago.

The official obituary was published today.

He was 31 and it was an aneurysm that stole his sass.

It's spring and I decided it was time for a face lift. Not sure if I will keep this look or if I will eventually choose another. For today, I like these colors.

I just got back from a trek to wine regions in eastern Washington (the state in which I dwell). My travel companions were aquamindy  and exilejedi  . I borrowed Aquamindy's notebook so I could record some brief details of our adventures. Once ExileJedi recovers from last night's wine-drinking adventure, he will post some photos from the trip.

I'm not posting tasting notes because I didn't take any. I may add a series of posts with more details and reflections later.

May 1, 1007 - Walla Walla

K Vintners
Tasted: 2 wines
06 Columbia Valley Viognier, 05 Cougar Hills Syrah.

College Cellars
Stan Clarke gave us a (very fun for us) tour of Enology Center at Walla Walla Community College, including a quick car trip up to the vineyards that the students maintain and at which they are engaged in trying out various trellising techniques on Sauvignon Blanc and Semillon vines.

Tasted: 1 wine
04 Columbia Valley Syrah

Leonetti Cellar
No wines tasted because none to be sold.
Ben Leach told us the story of the winery buildings and gave us a tour of the winery facilities.

Basel Cellars
Tasted: 6 wines
06 Columbia Valley Sauvignon Blanc, 04 Columbia Valley Claret, 04 Columbia Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, 03 Walla Walla Red Wine, 04 Columbia Valley Ode to Merriment, 04 Columbia Valley Syrah.

Pepper Bridge Winery
Tasted: 3 wines
04 Columbia Valley Merlot, 03 Walla Walla Cabernet Sauvignon, 02 Walla Walla Cabernet Sauvignon

Morrison Lane
Tasted: 3 wines
03 Walla Walla Sangiovese, 02 Walla Walla Syrah, 03 Walla Walla Nebbiolo

May 2, 2007 Walla Walla --> Yakima Valley
Abeja
Tasted: 3 wines
05 Washington State Chardonnay, 04 Columbia Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, 05 Walla Walla Syrah

Woodward Canyon Winery
Tasted: 9 wines
05 Columbia Valley Riesling, 05 Chardonnay, 03 Walla Walla Chardonnay, NV Red Wine, 05, Columbia Valley Nelms Road Cabernet Sauvignon, 04 Columbia Valley Syrah, 05 Walla Walla Cabernet Sauvignon, 04 Columbia Valley Artist Series Canernet Sauvignon, 04 Columbia Valley Old Vines Cabernet Sauvignon.

APEX Cellars
New winemaker, Jean-Claude, gave us a tour and lots of tastes including one barrel sample of a Brian Carter Cellars wine. Jean-Claude has been working with Brian over the past few years as Brian hands over responsibility for winemaking to him.

Tasted: 4 barrel samples, 11 wines
(barrel) Brian Carter Cellars Oriana, (barrel) 05 APEX Merlot, (barrel) 05 APEX Syrah, (barrel) 06 Tempranillo, 05 APEX II Sauvignon Blanc, 06 APEX Dry Riesling, 05 APEX Chardonnay, 00 APEX II Merlot, 00 APEX Rastelle Vineyard Merlot, 04 APEX II Columbia Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, 02 APEX Cabernet Sauvignon, 99 APEX Solstice Cabernet Sauvignon, 02 APEX II Syrah, 02 APEX Syrah, 04 APEX Syrah.

Canon De Sol
Tasted: 4 wines
05 Vigonier, 04 Merlot, 04 Syrah, 03 Meritage.

May 3, 2007 Red Mountain -->Yakima Valley
Hightower Cellars
Kelly Hightower met with us. We also met a new winemaker, Brent, who will be producing Cote-Rotie style wines from Syrah under the name of Goedheart Family Wines.

Tasted: 3 wines
04 Merlot, 03 Cabernet Sauvignon, 04 Red Mountain Red Wine.

Hedges Family Estate
Tasted: 9 wines
05 CMS White, 05 CMS Red, 04 Hedges 3 Vineyards, 05 Hedges 3 Vineyards, 04 Hedges 2 Vineyards, 04 Hedges Limited Bella Villa (South Block) Merlot, 04 Hedges Limited Bella Villa (North Block) Syrah. 

With lunch of nitrate-free sausages and spinach salad, 06 Hedges CMS Rosé and 06 CMS White.

Chandler Reach Vineyards
Tasted: 4 wines
06 Yakima Valley Red, 04 Yakima Valley Corella, 03 Yakima Valley Merlot, 04 Monte Regalo.

May 4, 2007 Yakima Valley
Willow Crest Winery
Tasted: 4 wines
06 Pinot Gris, 04 XIII, 03 Collina Bella, 06 Lemberger Rosé.

Thurston Wolfe
Tasted: 7 wines
06 PGV, 06 Rosato, Dr. Wolfe's Family Red, 05 Horse Heaven Hills Lemberger, 04 Horse Heaven Hills Syrah, 04 Destiny Ridge Cabernet Sauvignon, 05 Zephyr Ridge Petite Syrah.

I was surfing around for some Italian wine news this morning when I came across a blog. A blog written by a fellow who represents Italian wines in parts of the U.S. I just spent the last 45 minutes or so somewhat randomly reading his posts because his personal tone and the way he weaves his observations in to stories completely captured my attention.

In a post for the new year, Alfonso Cevola has this advice in response to those who ask him "How can I find these wines?":
Taste, taste, taste. Get a notebook, write them down, make a note of something for heavens sake. You cannot remember it all. Do you want in the game or do you want to keep having someone telling you what to like what not to like, what to drink, what to think?

I give this advice, in my own way, often. And, as someone who tastes a lot and takes notes more often than not, I can assure you that having jotted a note is no guarantee the memory of the wine will stick. The exceptional ones do. Exceptionally good, exceptionally bad. Those are few and far between.

What I have found to be true is this: those notes in my own little shorthand leave me clues. Clues to how the wine tasted to me that day. Clues that jog my memory. Sometimes, the clue reminds me I thought my palate was off that day. (It happens...some days no wine tastes good to me. That's when I fall back on my technical training...but that's a whole separate discussion really.) More often, the clues bring back enough of the flavors and the feel that I remember I wanted to try that wine again or to avoid it or that it just didn't interest me much at all.

You don't have to learn this system or that in order to jot your wine notes down. Sure, it can help. By all means, learn one of the 100-point systems if it boosts your confidence in evaluating a wine. The important thing is to pay attention, find a few words that mean something to you, and jot them down. I count as essential these facts: producer, vintage, and wine name. With these elements in hand, you can discover much more about how your tastes compare to those of wine critics or bloggers, or to those of the sales reps in your favorite wine shop. If you want to, that is.

Practice this a while and you will find a vocabulary that works for you. Don't follow blindly what others say: not Robert Parker or Steven Tanzer or Jancis Robinson or me. Your list, after all, consists of little sign posts to point you back to that wine that surprised and delighted you. This is the way to learn YOUR palate.

Yup, I'm blogging on a Saturday night. Chef Mike is in the kitchen whipping up a duck dish for dinner. No night on the town for us for a few weeks...we are saving up our "dining out dollars" for when some out-of-towners visit in the near future.

Alas, though I had the foresight to snap some photos, I did not take detailed notes on the wines (see below for basics). I can say, (sing it with me, folks) One of these wines was not like the others. The Piemontese wines did have certain fruit flavors (cherries & plums) in common, though each was unique. In spite of blend and vintage differences, they all opened up over the course of the evening, especially the Amarone.

The wine that seemed the best fit for our first course was a toss up for me between the Faletto and the Quartetto. Le Grive was a bit too soft for the crunchy green beans drenched in a creme fraiche over tomato confit. As for the rabbit? Well, hands down, the sweet, dense, dark Amarone won out with Le Grive a close second.

The wines:
2003, Forteto della Luja, Le Grive. (Monferrato) 80% Barbera, 20% Pinot Nero.
Giancarlo Scaglione has become famous for a late harvest Moscato, a wine he began making with encouragement from Giacomo Bologna. I found some other interesting facts about this winery in Italian when I dug a little deeper. It is one of the first in Piedmont, if not all of Italy, to use solar energy to power the production of its wines.


2001, Cascina Bongiovanni, Faletto. (Langhe) 50% Cabernet Sauvignon, 30% Barbera, 20% Nebbiolo.


1999, Poderi Aldo Conterno. Quartetto. (Langhe) Blend of Nebbiolo, Barbera, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot.


2002, Azienda Agricola Tommaso Bussola, Amarone 'bg'. (Valpolicalla). 40% Corvinone, 25% Corvina Grossa and 20% Rondinella.

From my husband's email to our tasting circle:

"insalata:
Green beans and tomato tartare salad (may not go well with the theme
of red wine. Oh well, I guess we'll need to open a white, too.)

primo:
Sweet potato agnolotti in beef broth

secondo:
Easter bunny with rosemary (when I saw rabbit at the store, I just
couldn't resist!!) :)"

Full report later, after wines have been tasted.

I have once again enabled Anonymous Comments. This means you do not need to have a LiveJournal account to leave a response to any of the entries here. I have left Comment Screening enabled as well, which means that if you do comment, it won't be public until after I have reviewed it.

Like many bloggers, I like to learn a little about you, my readers. If you drop by from time to time, jot me a note. I'm always intrigued by what draws people here. Let me know how you got here and why you come back.

Cheers!

Paris Hilton to be new face of Bordeaux

Sadly, the bit about the canned Prosecco is no lie. You won't find Prosecco in cans in Italy, however. Italian laws prohibit it. There are forces at work that may well make the cans more collectible than they are today if the loophole being exploited by the producer gets closed.

Yes, the naughty thumb of science may have prodded the earth, as E. E. Cummings said, but there's nothing wrong with thumbing dollar bills in the direction of promoting a tastier food supply.

Or, heck, I could have used a lot of other headlines to draw your attention to this post. Instead, I will pull a few quotes with the intention of getting you to read the whole article (Amber Fields of Bland, By Dan Barber, New York Times, January 14, 2007):

On flavor
Now, after the uprooting of a thousand years of agrarian wisdom, we chefs have discovered something really terrible -- no, not that the agricultural system we help support hurts farmers and devastates farming communities, or that it harms the environment and our health. What we've discovered is that the food it produces just doesn't taste very good.

On agricultural insurance
...crop diversification should be exactly what insurers want: it helps to prevent the kind of natural disasters that insurance policies protect against, say, a devastating insect infestation. (Of course, it gives food lovers precisely what they want: more diversity, more variety, more flavor.)

On produce provenance and truth in advertising
We stamp "Made in the U.S.A." on blue jeans and cars -- but Americans can't find out where their food was grown. If Congress passes -- and enforces -- a rule in the 2007 bill requiring country of origin labeling, we'd be more informed about the origins of our food supply and, to the great fear of our corporate brethren, we might ask a lot more questions. Questions like ''Who's growing our food?'' and ''How's it being grown?'' are not easily answered anymore, especially when a package of frozen ground meat can have animal parts from as many as 20 countries.

(Allow me to introduce a brief tangent here:
20 countries!! See, understanding what's in your food may be as challenging as understanding what's in your wine. The same holds true for pet food, even.

All you have to do is read the latest news (Canadian Press or CNN) on the current pet food recalls to be given a reason to think a little harder about our food sources. The chemical now believed to be at the source of poisoning hundreds or thousands of domestic cats and dogs is a wheat gluten from Asia that was processed by an as yet unnamed supplier in the U.S. which was then shipped to Canada where it was made in to pet food. This seemingly harmless ingredient, wheat gluten, was found to be tainted with a pesticide that is outlawed in the U.S.

Back to the quotes from the NYT piece now...)


On the costs of indulging big business agriconglomerates
The meat we end up buying at the local farmers' market is relatively expensive because, through the workings of agricultural legislation, conventional meat prices are unnaturally low. I'm talking about the big boys -- the Smithfields, the Tysons and the Archer Daniels Midlands of the world -- which the farm bill subsidizes in the form of direct payments for grain (their feed is then artificially cheap). In doing that, we indirectly subsidize industrial farms' pollution; the health care costs (associated with animals bursting with corn fat, or animals reared on a constant cocktail of antibiotics); and the costs of insuring these companies against food-borne illness (brought on by a system that's run amok -- or should I say that runs in muck, with animals living in their own waste).

Good gastronomy evolved out of good farming -- the best chefs have merely delivered on what farmers have worked out over several centuries. A tomato bursting with flavor, or an impossibly juicy leg of lamb, is no accident.

Thanks to this post in wine, I found this eParker page on which the merits and faults of one particular additive, MegaPurple, were debated over a year ago. No doubt there are other relevant discussions over there...I'm not an avid reader of the eParker boards.


Photo credit: Randi Lynn Beach / LAT. As published in What's really in that wine?

( More on my pro-and-anti label stance(s)... )

To sum up:
I'm not opposed to regulating what goes on a wine label in the U.S. I do question the way it is currently being done.