Please join us on Saturday, August 21, when we host an eight-course feast for Ed Behr, publisher of The Art of Eating magazine. Started as a humble newsletter in the mid-80s, The Art of Eating has grown into one of the most satisfying sources for long-form food and wine writing in the English language. Ed is committed to the idea that what we eat and drink can and should have sense of place—terroir—and, to that end, each issue narrates a new chapter on the revival and sustenance of traditional food ways.
The current issue, for instance, features a long-form piece on pork in the United States – a follow up to another long-form piece (issue 51) that focused on hog raising and how it affects the flavor pork. If you care about the quality of the pork you eat, both of these pieces are necessary reading.
Past topics include:
- “The Baguette,” a meditation on bread, disguised as a social history of the baguette (issue 73-74)
- “A Particular Taste: Vin Jaune and Other Traditional Wines of the Jura” (issue 72).
- “Beaujolais: The Goal of a Gulpable Wine (issue 67).
- “A Dry-Aged Steak” — the reasons for dry aging — the cuts — bone in or bone out? and how thick? — red wines for steak — a sharp knife — materials and design — and how to sharpen a knife (issue 47)
At a time when mainstream food and wine journalism often resembles lifestyle advertisements, The Art of Eating is opinionated, sometimes cutting, and always engaged and engaging – it is an oasis for intelligent, passionate thinking about what, how, and why to eat and drink.
I have invited a few of our favorite local food luminaries to help celebrate Ed’s visit to Los Angeles, including Patricia Tsai of ChocoVivo chocolates, Kirk Anderson of Backwards Beekeepers, and Christopher Schubert of Rancho La Viña walnuts. We will be featuring their products in our special supper.
The price of our supper includes a free subscription to The Art of Eating.
Please call us at 323 962-6369 after 5 PM to reserve.
When: Saturday, August 21, at 6 PM
Where: Lou, 724 Vine Street, Los Angeles (323) 962-6369
Cost: $75
Menu
Castelvetrano and Ligurian olives, candied almonds
Garlic toast
Chateau Mosse “Moussamoussettes” pétillant naturel ros NV
Burrata panzanella, speck
Occhipinti Sicilia Frappato 2007
Warm farro, greens, almonds,
tomatoes, olives, pumpkinseed oil
Batič Pinela 2008
House-cured pork and beans
Le Soula Côtes Catalanes Blanc 2008
Smoked Muscovy duck breast,
roast fig, frisée, arugula, walnuts
Graci Etna Rosso 2008
La Nogalera walnut cake,
Silver Lake honey ice cream
Primitivo Quiles Fondillon 1948
Tasting of ChocoVivo bittersweet chocolates
Degustation of Banyuls
Domestic artisanal cheese
Château Tour de Farges Muscat de Lunel 2006
 Truth in labelling
 Rufolf Steiner Picking on biodynamic viticultural practices because they are “bizarre” is a fun sport. Sure it’s fun; it feels just like picking on that dork with the high waters and pocket protector, back in 7th grade. But I say, fuck conformity! If the wine is good, let a hundred flowers bloom: I am happy to see vignerons letting their freak flags fly. I am interested in learning that the grower of my favorite Faugères experiments with Biodynamic preparation 500 (the infamous dung-stuffed cow horn treatment), but I just don’t get that worked up about it, just like I wouldn’t get too worked up if I learned that he pruned his vines while wearing a tinfoil hat. I am willing to accept that there are people who hold beliefs that are strange to me, and yet their strange beliefs may affect my world regardless of whether or not they make any sense to me. So, I’d like to make a pragmatic rather than Platonic argument against rejecting bizarre beliefs out of hand: Regardless of the strangeness of means, I may like the ends (natural wine) or hate them (National Socialism).
On the other hand, I might become troubled and full of doubts if I learned that I’d been duped, and the Faugères wine that I loved was made by Round-Up, rotofermenter, and Lalvin RC 212 yeast.
Ribolla gialla is a grape that the Friulani have grown for at least as far back as the 14th century; the Slovenians and Greeks have worked with it for a lot longer than that. It is a grape that is experiencing a modest comeback, and I really dig it when it is made in a rich, oxidative style. (Most recently at Lou, you might have tasted Marjan Simčič’s ribolla, a Slovenian wine that is aged on the skins of the grapes for six months.)
 Popcorn Sutton Dan Petroski, the winemaker for Larkmead, has a new side project in which he is making wine from Napa-grown ribolla gialla. Dan sources his grapes from Luna Vineyards from vines planted in 2004. I have not tried his new wine yet (it was bottled in early March), but he has promised to bring it by later this spring for me to taste, and taste it I will. (He tells me that it fermented to dryness at under 13 percent alcohol—yay!) However, despite the grape’s incontrovertible provenance, Dan got into trouble with the revenoors (cue banjo) with his wine: the TTB refuses to recognize ribolla as a legitimate grape variety and as a result, Dan cannot sell his product as a varietally labeled wine. We’ve got plenty to fret about in California, including overcrowded prisons, underfunded pensions, and crumbling infrastructure (a warning to my customers travelling west on Melrose—beware of the hellish pothole on just before El Centro), and now we can add more worries: what kind of state is this when a man can’t make a livin’ from the honest fruit of his own labor?
It is a fun game, pondering possible grape worlds and the grape varieties we might have planted if latter day Napa and Sonoma, sixty or even twenty years ago, had taken cues not from Bordeaux and Burgundy, but from, let us say, Friuli, or the south of Italy.
The history of wine grape growing in California owes a great deal to southern Italian immigrants, and it is thanks to successive generations of Italian American grape farmers that we have any old vine plots left at all. During the post-Prohibition era, however, we turned our backs on our heritage and now you will hear people disdain Italian-style, promiscuously planted field blends as arising from simple-minded, peasant thinking, “they didn’t know any better, and it is how they always planted.”
In most wine drinking regions, e.g., California, France, Italy, there is an implicit dichotomy between the north (Napa, Bordeaux, Piemonte) and the south (Temecula, Roussillon, Sicily). On our shores, this binary opposition arises in part from the superb Bordelaise-patterned, Cabernet-based wines that Russian-born, French-trained André Tchelistcheff began making with Georges de Latour at BV in the late 40s. It is fair to say that the Napa style, as we now understand it, follows Tchelistcheff’s footsteps, though if you have tasted Tchelistcheff’s wonderful wines from the 60s, you can imagine he’d have a thing or two to say about Parker-driven monster Cabs. Given his training and background, Tchelistcheff probably never tasted a southern Italian wine he liked, and given the underdeveloped state of the southern Italian economy during his lifetime, any nero d’avola he might possibly have tasted would have been quite a rustic specimen.
Today, cabernet, chardonnay, pinot noir, and to a lesser extent, syrah, get all the glory, but here is a question: If we had to replant our vineyards in California, starting from scratch, what should we plant?
I, for one, would like to see more nero d’avola, a grape that thrives in heat, yet is capable of retaining great acidity. It’s not a grape with a very long history of making great wine, but the lesson we are now learning is how interesting and delicious wines may be made from some of the traditional grape varieties we formerly dismissed as rustic. Some of these varieties never had to rise to any level of quality in the past (mencia in Spain, blaufränkisch in Austria are just two examples), and consequently, I do not think we have any idea yet where their upper limit lies. The Italians once (and still do) glugged inexpensive, rustic nero d’avola as a simple, everyday drinking wine; if you located a bottle of nero at your local wine shop here in the US, let’s say twenty years ago, it would have been a four buck wonder to enjoy while eating takeout pizza and watching Twin Peaks. However, taste a contemporary nero from Sicilian growers like COS or Arianna Occhipinti and the scales will fall way from your eyes—they are not aping Napa, but they are revealing something nero has been waiting patiently to tell us all these years.
Dan recently e-mailed me the 2009 California Grape Crush report, which is essentially a lengthy table showing the number tons crushed for each grape variety grown in our fair state. (The category named “other” is for grapes that are either unknown or fall below the threshold of countability.) The table shows 2008 and 2009 data side by side. Here is a quick summary of some interesting things in the table:
| |
Tons harvested
|
|
|
|
| |
2009
|
2008
|
|
Percent increase |
| Syrah |
132,260.40 |
102,230.50 |
|
30 |
|
| Pinot Noir |
155,834.00 |
105,678.10 |
|
48 |
|
| Nero d’avola |
259.4 |
72.9 |
|
55 |
|
| Tocai |
145 |
123 |
|
18 |
|
| Trousseau |
23.6 |
15.2 |
|
55 |
|
| Ribolla gialla |
9.5 |
5.6 |
|
70 |
|
Nero d’avola has a long way to go before it catches up with pinot noir, but I am rooting for it. Trousseau at 23.6 tons harvested, is up 55 percent in 2009, enough to make about 1400 cases. And as of yet, there is no ploussard planted—imagine the coolest parts of the Sonoma coast or Marin, planted with Savoyard varieties rather than pinot noir. I have no idea if they would flourish there, but it is fun to fantasize. Meanwhile, hear, hear for ribolla gialla, a grape that might make beautiful music in California, if the TTB will only let it sing.
“Wine is a good companion that makes a great occasion of a single meal. It aids digestion and adds an air of graciousness to your table. ”
Here’s a typical night at Lou (note the glass of Puzelat menu pineau):
 A typical night at Lou Like what you see? Click to download a PDF (5 MB) of the entire McWilliams catalog, ca. 1966 (unearthed and scanned by via Jason Carey).
Here are some groovy wines we have recently received, and here, briefly noted.
Ventura Ribeira Sacra “Viña do Burato” ‘08
Drink this wine and learn why mencia is one of the most exciting grape rediscoveries to come out of Spain in the past ten years. Losada’s Viña do Burato is from organically grown grapes that are wild yeast fermented. The wine never sees any oak. 80-year-old vines planted on granite terraces so steep, tractors fear to tread. This fresh, ultra-dry, light-bodied, honest wine is only 12 percent alcohol. We serve it on the coolish side. That sound you hear? It is your lips smacking, my dear, as you guzzle this cranberry-juicy and floral wine.
Peillot Bugey Mondeuse ‘06
We have been pouring a wonderfully funky mondeuse for the past month from Trosset and now it is time to move on to a mondeuse from a different grower, none other than the witty and acerb Franck Peillot. Mondeuse, you dark but not brooding bad boy, who knows what you have been up to? A colleague described mondeuse as a cross between a Loire cab franc that has not had all the grass beaten out of it, cru Beaujolais, and a northern Rhône syrah. I agree. Peillot’s white wines get all the glory, but he makes pretty darn good reds, too, including a fine pinot noir.
Milos Plavac Mali ‘05
Another fun Croatian red wine from our friend Frank Dietrich. Plavac mali is a grape that is indigenous to Croatia, and while it is a genetic relative of zinfandel, grape genetics are pretty much a tangled up mess: this wine tastes nothing like zin. Frano Miloš is a minimal-intervention winemaker and leaves this wine alone for more than a year in old, quite neutral Croatian oak barrels. A veritable Penzey’s catalog of red spices, wet rocks, loads of acidity, hardly tamed by all that time in barrel.
Julien Fremont Cidre “Greniers” ‘08
We are going to be running a cider flight next week, so I will blab more about this cider then. For now, know that “Greniers” means attic in French, and Fremont makes this cider from apples that he first partially dries in an attic for a month before he crushes and ferments them into this complex apple wine. This is a cider that I bet even Ed Behr will fall for.
 The pompous sign at the entrance to Terres Dorées Jean-Paul Brun is a quality-minded winegrower of moderate scale. He produces wines across several AOCs, mostly Beaujolais but also small amounts of Condrieu and Côte-Rôtie. To me he is something of a rock star, a winegrower who makes a range of wines that are natural, fresh, foursquare, and unconfected. We have poured quite a lot of his Beaujolais blanc at my wine bar and also his groovy sparkling gamay, FRV100. There are other Brun wines to adulate about, but what strikes me about the man in person is that he doesn’t talk about his brand. Sure, he frets about the graphic design of his labels but in his tasting room there are no souvenirs to buy, and no T-shirts or tschotskes to take home (I would, admittedly, be happy to purchase a JP Brun T-shirt).
I do not mean to single out Brun, and lest I present him as a black clad Lower East Side antihero, I assure you that he is comfortably bourgeois and prone to snoozing after a meal (or before).
 JP Brun snoozing at supper
That said, it would be naïve and wrong to think that he expends little energy on his brand simply because he is guileless: Brun is too busy growing wine and does not have extra time to devote to building a brand. What Brun wants to talk to you about are his vines, the soil they grow on, and the vintage. What matters most to Brun is his product—the product is king, not the brand.
 Back-clad antihero
Inside the branding weltanschauung, the product is the tip of a pyramid and the brand is the much wider base. For Brun, his product is the base and the brand is the infinitesimal tip of the pyramid.
I was in France recently with l’Equipe Dressner. We tasted Brun’s ‘09s in his chai and I tried hard to be-here-now, but as we tasted, I thought about Gary Vaynerchuk (no jokes about thinking of England, please…tasting the wines was an unalloyed pleasure). Vaynerchuk URGES us to do what we love; good advice, to be sure, and certainly, Brun is doing that without any urging from Vaynerchuk. But for Vaynerchuk, you’ve also got to get out there and let your little light shine through 24/7 brand building–brand salvation lies in practicing transparency through the intelligent exploitation of social media. This is a form of neo-social Darwinism: those unable to brand themselves must sink to the bottom of the meme pool and die. Cannot build an effective brand because you fail to use Twitter or blog, can only use these tools in a haphazard fashion, or cannot pay a brand manager to do it for you? Tough shit. For a grower like Brun, who wants to speak to you about his vines, the diverse soils they grow on, and the vintage, the product is king. Perhaps for Brun his product speaks for itself, is its own brand. How much energy does a vigneron have left when 99.99 of his or her focus is on the product? Every CPU cycle you spend on growing your brand is one less cycle you have left to spend on growing your product—it is a zero sum game.
 Walter Brennan sez: biodynamics is intellectually fraudulent! We pour a fair amount of biodynamic wine at Lou. Right now, we are pouring six or seven biodynamic wines but just two have a Demeter certificate on their label. Most of the vignerons who make these wines practice a loose form of bio-d, which means that they are not eligible for Demeter certification but nevertheless borrow many of the methods of biodynamic farming. Beyond the tomatoes and chilies growing in my backyard, I myself am not a farmer and have not much more than a dilettante’s acquaintance with biodynamics. I have only a simple, vulgar, and hedonic relationship to bio-d: I know (and this could very well be the Hawthorne effect) that a lot of the growers that keep my daylights lit are, for whatever reason at this historical juncture, choosing to farm following the kooky teachings of Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian philosopher who himself was not a farmer.
I do not believe that you need to accept everything about bio-d or anything at all to enjoy these wines. I mean really, you do not have to be Jewish to love Levy’s Jewish Rye Bread, you do not need to accept Jesus as your savior to dig the Sistine Chapel, and you do not need to be a follower of Steiner to dig biodynamic wines.
One of the principles of the SF Chron’s 2009 Winery of the Year, Nick Peay, thinks that bio-d is “intellectually fraudulent.” I am not interested in arguing that Peay is wrong, just as I’m not interested in proving that Steiner or Maria Thun are right—theories cannot be proven. It does seem that Peay is laboring too deep in the backwoods of Sonoma County to notice or pay attention or care about what is happening in the wine world beyond the confines of the 101 freeway. Peay, I am sure, is a very nice man, but here he comes off like a crotchety old hermit mumbling invective, but only to himself. The irony of Peay’s assertion, of course, is that it is itself intellectually fraudulent to dismiss something simply because you find it funny, odd, or discomfiting. Perhaps UC Davis (Peay is an alumnus) is not the all-knowing, all-seeing oracle of wine growing.
 Butterfly label on Courtois's "Originel" I will say something rather superficial about this wine: I love its deliriously psychedelic label. Ok, I’m glad I got that out of the way: what about the wine itself?
Julien Courtois is a vigneron who lives and works in the Touraine region of France’s Loire valley. He grows both red and white wines on soil that’s flecked with quartz (silex), and uses no synthetics in his vineyards and chai, bottling with the barest minimum of sulfur (for export only—no sulfur is used for bottles sold in France).
Courtois does not use synthetic herbicides, pesticides and fungicides, but does use biodynamic herb and mineral preparations on his vines, and fertilizes his vineyard soils with composted farm animal manure. Very much a poster boy for vin naturel.
 Sliex (flint) soil Courtois’s “Originel” is a blend of two old and unique Loire varieties, menu pineau (aka arbois, but completely unrelated to the geographical Arbois of the east of France) and romorantin. Menu pineau is old variety that only exists today because of the efforts of a few stubborn vignerons who refuse to give up on it. Although it’s traditional to the region it was not replanted following the destruction of European vineyards by the phylloxera louse at the end of the 19th century.
I’ve poured another wine made from menu pineau, Thierry Puzelat’s Brin de Chèvre, a wine that was a minor revelation for me: nutty, slightly oxidized, complex and also texturally relaxed. Courtois’s wine adds another menu pineau data point for me—I cannot comment about this wine’s typicité, but I really dig it. Tight as a fist when first opened, it reminds me of a dry, dry, dry sagardo cider from Spain’s Basque region.
 I’m nuts about walnuts. We use a fair amount of walnut oil at Lou and you’ll often find walnuts on our menu, sprinkled on a seasonal salad or used in a dessert. I’ve travelled to Gascogne, the heart of France’s walnut country, and enjoyed vin de noix (see my recipe, below) as well as gateaux aux noix there, and I’ve even made my own vin de noix (just two bottles left of the 2007 vintage–it seems to improve with age). Although it is possible to get good, sweet walnuts most of the year in California, I look forward to this time of year when a new crop of Jim Haag’s Yolo red walnuts have been harvested. These distinctive, red colored walnuts have a creamy-mellow taste with a backbone of tannic bitterness. Usually, I prefer to eat walnuts with a light roast, but Jim’s Yolo red walnuts are delicious raw: it’s almost shame to roast them. I’m fanatical about walnut freshness, which means keeping them refrigerated (hot kitchen + raw nuts = rancidity), and given the cramped confines of Lou’s kitchen this sets an upper limit as to how many pounds of walnuts we can buy–I try to buy enough to last a few months. We’re expecting our shipment of Yolo reds early next week, and I’ll make sure to call them out on the menu.
Vin de noix
Step 1
40 green walnuts, washed and quartered (available in the late Spring)
20 walnut leaves
2 1/2 cups neutral spirits, the higher the proof, the better (in Los Angeles, the highest proof Everclear available is 151 proof)
Place walnuts, leaves, and spirits in an inert container. Cover and store in a dark cool place, shaking the mixture every day for two weeks. At the end of the 2 week period, you’ll have something that looks dark, murky, and evil.
Step 2
5 bottles of red wine (nothing too tannic, as the walnuts will add plenty of their own tannin)
2 1/2 cups sugar (more or less, to taste)
1 stick of cinnamon
1 crushed cardamom pod
The zest from 2 lbs of organic oranges
Dump the result of stage 2 into a large, food grade plastic pail. Add everything from step 2, cover, and store in a cool place, shaking mixture every few days for a few weeks, perhaps three or four.
Step 3
The walnuts are now downright gross looking, and the leaves have been reduced to a sludge. Strain everything into another container, and then let it settle for a day. Rack (siphon) back into the (cleaned) plastic pail, and then you’re ready to bottle. I find that the flavors take a few months to marry.
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