For this Monday’s supper I am pouring one of my top ten oddball wines of the year: Sottimano’s ”Maté” 2008. You might wonder why this wine is odd, considering that it is made from brachetto, a Piemontese grape used to make anamusing, off-dry and sparkling wine that is decidedly not very odd at all.
So why is this wine oddball? Sottimano’s brachetto is vinified not as a sparkling, sweetish wine but as a dry still wine. And, without the slutty distractions of fizz and sugar, you can better focus on the groovy character of the brachetto grape. And groovy it is! In addition, Sottimano doesn’t shite up the wine with new oak: it’s a consummately honest wine, fermented with wild yeasts and using stainless tanks rather than oak barrels. The wine smells like raspberry pastilles, with a dry chalky saltiness to it and a smoky finish. And, because it doesn’t have the residual sugar found in ordinary brachetto, you can also taste the grape’s sexy bitter amaro character.
I am pairing Sottimano’s friendly but oddball wine with roast beets and Soledad goat cheese. The chalkiness of the wine serves as a nice counterpoint to the earthy unctuousness of the beets.
Salad of roast beets, Soledad goat cheese,
avocado, citrus, arugula
Sottimano Maté brachetto ‘08
Duck ragout, black trumpet mushroom,
house-cured bacon, papardelle
Tasting flight of wine
Le Temps des Cerises Vin de Table Français “Fou du Roi”
D. Ventura Ribeira Sacra “Viña Caneiro” 2007
Hervé Souhaut Sainte Epine Saint-Joseph 2007
Chocolate bonet
Bodegas El Maestro Sierra Pedro Ximenz Viejisimo (50 year solera!)
[...] Mozza with my friends Howard Rodman and Lou Admur. Owner of my favorite natural wine bar, Lou has a wonderful food and wine blog (not so new), where he writes about his wine selection and whatever else makes him culinarily [...]