I feel a little cheated about our summer here in Los Angeles: despite the recent and, thankfully, short-lived heat wave, summer never seemed to leave the starting gate. June gloom extended into July, wreaking havoc on the heirloom tomato plants I bought at Tomatomania in May (fusarium wilt, I hate you!). Yet, as we approach the Autumnal equinox, my thoughts are already turning from summer to fall, wild mushrooms, winter squash, last-gasp tomatoes and, finally, a new crop of apples.

As if in compensation for our unusually cool summer, the apples seem particularly good this year. Last month, our chef, DJ Olsen, brought us some superb red Gravenstein apples (now, sadly, all eaten up) from the Santa Monica farmers market.  Southern California is not apple country—we are lucky to see more than four or five varieties of local apples at our farmers markets – and Haralson apples, prized in Minnesota, and Macouns, prized in New York, are impossible to find here in Los Angeles. (If you are traveling to the Twin Cities this fall, a free glass of wine to anyone who imports five pounds of Haralsons for me.)  I always feel guilty when I buy apples at the Hollywood farmers market because I should be buying what we do best in Southern California: citrus, plums, and avocados. Yet I crave apples, enough that I always have one or more hard apple ciders on my wine list, so that I can have them all year around.

In anticipation of autumn, we are starting our supper this week with Hans Reisetbauer’s very elegant cider that is so elegant, it is hardly a cider at all. He makes it from his own organically grown apples (I have not been able to find out which variety/varieties he uses), and double-ferments it like a Champagne. It is clear, pale straw yellow, with endless, tiny bubbles. Dry and taut, it captures everything that I love about apples, while also elevating the apple to another level.

Grilled Bartlett pear, house-cured ham,
Rogue Smokey Blue, walnuts
Hans Reisetbauer Apfel-Cuvee

Confit of duck leg, haricots vert frisée salad
Tasting flight of wine
Ferrer-Ribière Vin de Pays de Côtes du Catalanes “Le F” 09
Marcel Lapierre Raisins Gaulois Vin de Table 09
Robert Plageoles Gaillac Prunelard 08

Roast fig lavender honey tart, ice cream
Château Tour de Farges Muscat Lunel 06

A short missive about this Monday’s supper. One word: La Soula. It’s a newish project from Gérard Gauby, mad man genius of Roussillon, who is now growing vines up in the hinterlands of the Fenouillèdes. Cathars once thrived, fought, and were eventually extinguished here, but you can still visit the fortresses they left behind. You can also drink the increasingly wonderful wine from this region, which is south of the medieval museum city of Carcassonne, but far enough north of the Mediterranean to be outside the scope of most tourists (except for those who seek out Romanesque carvings). Gauby, a vigneron who has probably done more to raise the profile of the wines of his region than anyone else, is making startlingly fresh white wines from vines that see blazing heat. How does he do it? Certainly not with spinning cones or spinning plates, but perhaps with spinning quarks?

Salad of grilled lettuce, bacon, first of season apple,
Rogue Smokey Blue dressing
Château Mosse Moussamoussettes pétillant naturel NV (2009)

Grilled yellowfin tuna, fried heirloom tomato,
butter beans, arugula, smoked tomato sauce
Your choice:
Marcel Lapierre “Raisins Gaulois” Vin de Table de France NV (2009)
or
La Soula Blanc Côtes de Catalanes (Gérard Gauby) 2008

Chocolate devil’s food ganache cake,
fresh blackberry sauce
Mas Blanc Banyuls “Vielles Vignes” 1998

For this week’s supper we are bookending our meal with two everyday sparkling wines, modest wines that only ask that you “be here now” and that they be drunk right now, in the summertime.

I am pairing our first course, salade Niçoise, with Valli Unite’s “Brute & Beast,” a rustic and dry frizzante white wine from the southern part of Piemonte. Made by a small co-op from organically grown fruit, it is a blend of cortese, moscato, favorita, chasselas, and timorasso grapes. I do not farm grapes and probably never will, but if I did, I think I would want to farm in this way: collectively, with a group of friends. Classified simply as a “vino tavola,” this simple, fresh, and aromatic sparkling wine is a consummate vin de soif, but one with an added dimension of complexity due to the presence of the local and powerfully good timorasso grape.

Our main course is Niman hanger steak. We are preparing the steak in a sort of indoor-outdoor cookout manner, grilled simply with fresh sweet corn and tiny, just-picked chanterelles. I am paring the steak with a flight of three rustic red wines.

The first wine on the flight is Pedralonga’s “Do Umia,” a red wine from Spain’s Rías Baixas, a region that I mostly know for Albariño, a white wine. The wine is a blend of mencia, with which I am familiar, but also two indigenous grapes that I do not (yet) know much about: caiño and espadeiro. Pedralonga made the first Albariño that made me sit up and take notice; this red wine makes me want to know more, a lot more, about what else Galicia may have up its sleeve.

The second wine on the flight is Marcel Lapierre’s “Raisins Gauloise,” a fresh, young (’09) non-Beaujolais gamay from the old Morgon master. Lapierre makes complex, serious Morgons that push the upper limits of cru Beaujolais; Raisins Gaulois is his drink-me-every-day gamay from a tremendous vintage.

The final wine on the flight is Arianna Occhipinti’s 2007 frappato, a light-bodied yet sanguine wine that I have found tremendously flexible as a wine to pair with meat.

For dessert, we are offering three summertime sorbets (pluot, peach, and nectarine), with which I am pairing J-P Brun’s FRV100. Brun, a grower of very good Beaujolais, saw how vignerons in nearby Savoie made a fun, fresh, off-dry wine from poulsard and/or gamay—why, he asked, could he not make a similar sort of wine in Beaujolais, too? The result is a wine from Beaujolais that is very untraditional (it cannot be legally called Beaujolais because it is both sparkling and off-dry) but also very successful, both as an aperitif, and, as we are doing on Monday, as something to have with dessert.

Salade Niçoise
Valli Unite Brut & Beast Frizzante 2008

Niman Ranch hanger steak, sweet corn, chanterelles
Tasting flight of wine
Pedralonga Rias Baixas “Do Umia” 2009
Marcel Lapierre “Raisins Gauloise” Vin de Table de France 2009
Occhipinti Frappato 2007

Three summertime sorbets
Jean-Paul Brun “FRV100” Vin Mousseux Aromatique de Qualité

For this Monday night’s supper I am offering verdelho two ways: a dry verdello from the Canary Islands, and sweet verdelho from the island of Madeira.

Verdelho (AKA verdello but probably not verdejo and definitely not verduzzo) is a Portuguese grape variety that, notably, is grown on the island of Madeira. From Madeira, you can expect verdelho to be a fortified, oxidative wine with fresh acidity, definitely sweet, but a notch or two less so than malmsey. On the nearby Canary Islands, where the grape has been grown since the 17^th century, verdelho is called “verdello,” and it is vinified dry. Our first verdello/verdelho of the evening is a natural wine from the Viñátigo winery in the Canaries. It is from the Spanish importer José Pastor, an importer of non-boring Spanish wine. It is a dry and full-bodied but decidedly un-zaftig wine–a luscious, lip-smacking mouthful energized by zingy acidity. I am pairing it with grilled poussin, based on the following hypothesis: crisp, flavorful, young chicken skin + this verdello = happiness.

Our second verdelho of the night is a Madeira from the Rare Wine Co, made in collaboration with the Madeira house Barbeito. This verdelho is bottled as one of Rare Wine Co’s “historic” Madeiras, which are meant to reproduce the historical styles of Madeira as they were enjoyed in great quantities in the United States both along the Eastern seaboard and in the South until the end of the 19^th century. It is a fine, relatively young Madeira (though I believe it might contain some wine that is up to 20 years old), and it exhibits strong, varietal characteristics of orange, orange zest, orange marmalade, lemon, toffee, and nuts.

If these wines please you, you should know that I am expecting a shipment soon from the Rare Wine Co., of old Madeiras, some of which are quite rare. I will be pouring them by the (small) glass for a song.

Salad of fennel, citrus, sweet onion, basil
Pfeffingen “Blanc de Noir” of Spätburgunder 2009

Grilled poussin, fried polenta,
summer vegetables, tomato vinaigrette

Tasting flight of wine
Donkey and Goat grenache rosé 2009
Bodegas Viñátigo Verdello 2007
Occhipinti Frappato 2008

Brown butter cake, nectarines,
blueberries, whipped cream
Rare Wine Co Savannah “Verdelho” Madeira

Carbonic maceration is a winemaking technique in which whole clusters of grapes are placed in a vat. If grapes had feelings and could suffer, I would feel bad about what happens next: the vat is closed and carbon dioxide is pumped into it, causing the grapes to suffocate. Don’t feel bad for the grapes, though, because grapes want to be wine! Through a mysterious process that remains not completely understood, suffocating grapes with carbon dioxide makes wine without the intervention of yeast. The result are wines that are distinctively fruity (I also often smell cinnamon and clove) and  low in tannins, making carbonic maceration a useful method for producing wines that are good to drink young and in the summertime when the sipping is easy.

Some feinschmeckers believe that carbonic maceration is a technique that attenuates or erases terroir, and I think they are mostly correct. Carbonic maceration does leave a distinctive fingerprint upon a wine and wines made using this technique have a strong family resemblance, despite their place of origin. That said, it is a technique that lends itself to several variations, several of which will be on display this evening.

The first wine on our carbonic maceration flight is a crisp and crunchy old vine Beaujolais, from the rock star somnambulist J-P Brun. 2009 is a startlingly vintage in Beaujolais, and you can get a preview of just how good it is with a foursquare, basic AOC wine from someone like Brun who makes real wine (look for crus to start showing up a little later on). Brun’s ferments this wine via semi-carbonic maceration, a process in which grapes provide their own natural carbon dioxide. The second wine is a Languedocienne vin de table de France from Axel Prüfer. We’ve poured Prüfer’s wine in the past, but this is a different cuvee, and it is 100 percent grenache. Whereas Brun’s wine is refreshing and diaphanous, Prüfer’s wine is robust and chunky, but still, the fingerprint of carbonic maceration is evident—lots of chewy fruit, a note of cinnamon, and little tannin. The final wine on the flight is a zinfandel from our own shores. It is a  whole-cluster fermented wine made by Mike Dashe in the style of a cru Beaujolais, and it is a rare zinfandel that is low-ish in alcohol and also low in tannin.

Heirloom tomato, buratta, basil salad
Bornard poulsard pétillant naturel NV

Wolfe Ranch quail stuffed with figs,
fig bread – arugula salad
Tasting flight of red wine à la macération carbonique
JP Brun “L’Ancienne” Beaujolais 2009
Axel Prufer (Grenache) Vin de Table de France NV
Dashe Cellars L’Enfants Terrible zinfandel 2009

Grilled peach melba
Patricius Tokaji 3 putts

A few years ago during a trip to Italy, I toured an old and unreconstructed vineyard in the heart of the Chianti Classico DOC region. In this vineyard, no longer exploited for commercially useful wine, I was shown some old school, Etruscan-style viticulture, including grape vines growing 20 feet vertically, supported by trees and high trellises. This ancient form of viticulture, quite common in Italy at one time, has mostly disappeared. The owner of the property, not a winemaker herself, sold off most of her grapes to others, but she did make a bit of rough red wine in her small and primitive cantina (rat shit on the floor). Sergio, a robust man in his 80s, and himself a remnant of an earlier era of mezzadria (sharecropping), happily pointed out healthy rows of the well-known and traditional Tuscan varieties: sangiovese, canaiolo nero and bianco, colorino, and ciliegiolo. And then Sergio stopped and pointed to a row of vines, “I don’t know what these vines are–no one really knows that they are, but everyone here grows them.” These vines were likely an authothonous variety that at one time had a name (or possibly not), traditionally grown in Tuscany but now mostly forgotten, ripe (or not) for rediscovery.

The rediscovery and revalorization of autochthonous grape varieties, which is happening today across Europe, makes for very exciting times for wine drinkers. It’s startling to witness just how rich the biodiversity of grape varieties is, in the face of the insect-borne mass destruction of European vineyards that, by the turn of the last century, had destroyed most of the vineyards in Europe. Some old varieties were lost forever, but thanks to stubborn vignerons who seem to care about their patrimony, some of the old varieties manage to hang on by a thread.

Italy, of course, has an extraordinary diversity of old varieties and I can point to Walter Massa’s rediscovery of the very non-boring grape, timorasso, as one very happy result of the archaic revival. The same process is happening in France (with menu pineau, a white grape that no one really cared about until a vigneron like Thierry Puzelat put it back on the map, and with prunelard, a red grape that was lost until Robert Plageoles rediscovered it); Spain (Ijalba’s varietally bottled graciano, a grape that, in the 19th century, was more highly valued by the Riojana than tempranillo, or the exciting wines from the Canary Islands imported by José Pastor); Portugal (Luis Pato’s wines, both red and white), and to a lesser extent, Austria (gemischter satz).

This Monday we are pouring the rare Slovenian autochthon, pinela, imported by our friends at Blue Danube. This white wine is made by Miha Batič, whose family has been making wine in Slovenia only since the 16th century. Like all of Batič’s wines, the grapes are grown organically and it is fermented using wild yeast. Oak treatment and added sulfur are minimal, and the result, with just a few years of bottle age, is about as honest a representation of what this grape can do that I can imagine.

I do not know what can be said about pinela, a grape for which I have no reference point. Is it a “correct” wine? Without a canonical reference point for judging typicité (e.g., in the Loire, the red wines of Baudry or Alliet are reference points with which to know and judge other reds from the Loire), I cannot say whether it is correct or not, and I guess I do not really care. Futilely grasping for analogies, I can say that pinela does not taste like sauvignon blanc, chardonnay, or furmint: pinela, to bastardize Gertrude Stein, is pinela, is pinela. What I will say, without fearing that I am overselling this wonderful, strange, and complex wine, is that it is medium-to-full bodied, with good acidity on the entry. The wine tastes of fresh pear, and it has a mysterious, curious, and compelling mid-palate of fennel and licorice. I believe we are the only venue for tasting this wine by the glass in Los Angeles, so please stop for a drop.

Wild salmon croquettes with cherry tomato, avocado salad
Bornard poulsard pétillant naturel “Tant Mieux” NV

Grilled black cod, braised fennel and olives with tomato pesto broth
Tasting flight of wine
JP Brun Beaujolais “L’Ancienne” 2009
Lioco Chardonnay “Sonoma” 2009
Batič pinela 2004

Blackberry pie and ice cream
Piétri-Giraud Banyuls

Salad of salt cod, agretti, baby potatoes, tomatoes, walnut oil
Casa Coste Piane Prosecco di Valdobbiadene NV

Slo-roasted Jimenez Farms pork, fennel pollen, roast fennel, olives
Tasting flight of wine
Zoltan Demeter Tokaji Harslevelü 2007
JP Brun Beaujolais “L’Ancienne” 2009
Tissot Poulsard “Vielles Vignes” 2009

Fried pound cake, apricot crème fraîche ice cream
Patricius Tokaji 3 Putts

Jules Chauvet as a young man.

Beneath my deceptive armament of grey-flannel suited banality, and on mornings after drowsy, overstuffed evenings at stately Wayne manor, spent in front of the crackling fire whilst cracking English walnuts and sipping vintage port with a sliver of aged Stilton, beats the untamed heart of a savage. It is a heart that craves adventure wherever it may be found, and on Monday adventure may be found  in our little strip mall wine bar as we serve wild boar sausage and a flight of wild wines that are (mostly) made without any sulfur and are fermented (100 percent) with wild yeast.

Sulfur is not a super villain:  in wine, it does not cause headaches, except for the very few people who are exceptionally sensitive to it. (And for them, wine is hardly the worst offender.) Concentrated sulfuric acid is toxic and noxious to the user, but sulfur is something  that our bodies require in trace quantities and it is an element that exists naturally in soil. It is also a traditional winemaking ingredient that was known in antiquity and that continues to find its place in almost all wine made today. In concentrated form, it is a useful antiseptic, perfect for sanitizing winemaking equipment and the barrels winemakers use for fermenting and aging wine. In addition, sulfur can fix the anthocyanins in a young wine, so that the wine maintains its color as it ages. Sulfur can also be sprinkled directly on grapes when vignerons do not entirely trust the cleanliness of the fruit (for example, with machine harvested fruit) or if a vigneron is worried about offending spoilage yeast or bacteria in her winery or bottling facility.

If sulfur is not a super villain, why would a vigneron choose to omit this useful element? The vignerons who minimize its use or avoid it entirely do so less because it is unhealthy for human beings and other living things, but because they believe that sulfur masks the aromatic complexity of wine, even if its presence also makes winemaking more predictable.

It is not easy to make a good wine without sulfur, and yet there are growers who are having good success with their sans soufre wines. How long do these wines age? I don’t think we have conclusive data on this, but for vins de soif — fresh wines meant to be consumed young, such as the wines we are serving on Monday – who really cares?

Cases in point: I tender to you two French wines, both made without sulfur during vinification or during bottling. The first is a poulsard from Tissot, a wine that has an added dimension of vibrancy and limpidity that is, I like to think, a function of its not having been exposed to sulfur. Tissot does uses a bit of sulfur at bottling for most of his wines, but for this cuvée, he uses none at all. (He’s required by law to state that his wine contains sulfur, because all wines do contain a small amount of this natural element. The only way to make a wine that is entirely devoid of sulfur is to sterile filter the wine.) But whether it’s an absence of sulfur or not, I cannot keep my lips away from this wine that walks softly and carries a big stick. The second sans soufre wine we are pouring is a gamay from Touraine. It is more darkly pigmented than the poulsard, but when you drink them side by side, you can easily see the affinity between these grape varieties.

Fresh flageolets with Broken Arrow wild boar sausage and radicchio
Parigot Bourgogne Mousseaux Rouge NV

Muscovy duck breast, roast fig, frisée and arugula salad
Tasting flight of wine
Tissot Poulsard Vielles Vignes 2009
Marionnet Touraine Gamay 2009
Bondonio Grignolino 2007

Apricot-blackberry bread pudding
Laffite-Teston Pacherenc du Vic Bilh

Our entrée for this Monday’s supper is Alaska white king salmon. For salmon lovers, white salmon is the one and true salmon king. This rare salmon is, except for its coloration, identical to red king salmon and indeed in any given school of red kings a few may be white, for reasons that are not well understood. Some speculate that the color of white king salmon is a function of its diet, whereas others believe it is a naturally occurring genetic mutation. Whatever the origin for the difference in color, white king salmon is more delicately flavored than red, with pale white flesh rather than the deep red of the red king.

To pair with the pale white king salmon I am pouring a pale red poulsard from France’s Jura region. I recently wrote about a different poulsard, and for fear of overselling a grape variety that always speaks with its indoor voice, I will say no more. OK, dammit, I cannot help myself—I am compelled to say one more thing: this poulsard is vinified and bottled without any sulfur at all. The grower does this not out of any health concern, but because he believes that sulfur can mask the delicacy of this wine. It is not an easy feat to work without sulfur, and sometimes the results can be disastrous, a flaw that critics love to use to pillory natural wine. But a small group of vignerons now seem to have a big clue as to how to reduce their traditional dependence upon sulfur, and sometimes avoid using sulfur at all: here is an opportunity to try a beautiful example of a sans soufre wine.

Lasagna of porcini mushrooms and asparagus
Casa Coste Piane Prosecco di Valdobbiadene NV

Wild Alaskan white salmon,
succotash of fava beans, sweet corn, cherry tomatoes, zucchini and black olives
Tissot Poulsard Vielles Vignes 2009

Grilled Robata apricots, boysenberries in crème anglaise
Rare Wine Co. Historic Series Madeira “Boston Bual”