Swine Make Good BBQ (but Bad Wine): Travels with James and Nick in Search of America’s Finest BBQ

27 Oct

There is something therapeutic about seeing trees and towns and wide blue sky passing by you at 80 miles per hour as you sit in a car, listening to good music, on your way to somewhere.  It is an added bonus when those trees are at that moment when they are still lush but where the leaves are no longer green but various hues of yellow, red, brown, and orange.

Such were the trees on the road on the way to Lexington, North Carolina, whose Barbecue Festival my friend James (of The Eaten Path fame), our friend Nick (of the US Patent and Trademark Office) and I attended this past weekend.

bbq26_hmpg

(Thank you to the Lexington BBQ Festival for this poster!)

For those of you who do not know of James by this point, he is one of my good friends from Berkeley who has for the last year called Brooklyn, New York home.  While his more regular contributions to the blogosphere can be seen on The Eaten Path, he also is a huge aficionado of all things barbecued, once spending a few weeks traveling through the Smoky Crescent and eating and observing the best the South had to offer.  It is one of his goals to publish a comprehensive and awesome book on barbecue–a noble goal, indeed.

Thus, when he said there was a barbecue festival in North Carolina I asked if I could go.  I figured I wouldn’t have very many more chances to have a purpose to go to North Carolina, and besides, any reason to get out of DC is reason enough.

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Learning to Budget: or, Finding a Nice $8.99 Bottle of Wine

18 Oct

One of the perks of having a German (ahem, Bavarian) roommate is that he’s quite knowledgeable about beer.  I’m more of a wino myself, so I’m only too happy to defer to his judgment, always excellent, on German beers.  (Then again, I can’t not defer, lest I want stormtroopers to take over my living room.)

That being said, Alex the Roommate decided we should have an Oktoberfeast™ where we would feature delicious German foods, beers, and spirits.  Our Berkeley friend Waiching was gracious enough to provide her apartment (and her large dinner table and large number of chairs) for the feast.  Alex invited two friends from his work and I invited one of my Berkeley friends, Mia, and her boyfriend.  That made for a small but wonderful dinner party of seven.

This isn’t an entry about Oktoberfeast™, however; I did want to mention that Alex outdid himself by making from scratch traditional German fare such as Blaukraut (“blue cabbage”, which is made from red cabbage, red onion, raisins, and apple and seasoned with things like nutmeg and bay leaves) and putting together a three-course beer menu, the highlight of which were incredibly potent “smoke beers” from Schlenkerla.  The first variety was their Märzen, a “dark, bottom fermented smokebeer, brewed with . . . Smokemalt”; the second, which I had, was an even more intense Urbock, “[s]imilar to, but much bigger than the classic [Märzen] style.”  The Märzen smelled of smoked gouda, declared Waiching, but my Urbock smelled of a richly-smoked cut of bacon.  They were very unusual but very delicious and well-crafted.  We followed up the beers with some William Christ Pear Brandy, an intoxicating spirit straight from Germany.  Utterly redolent of pear on the nose, it had a hint of sweetness and coated the mouth wonderfully.  It had a slow, steady burn deep in the stomach and helped me digest my huge, huge meal.

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R. López de Heredia: Ready When You Are

13 Oct

I write a wine column for my law school newspaper.  Unfortunately, they only pay me $10 per column, which will hardly pay for a bottle of good Portuguese Douro.  I will say that there are a number of great wines out there in the $10-$15 range, but there are a HUGE number of even better wines at the $15+ range.

Short of taking out more in loans, a grad student has few options for financing an education in wine.  Luckily, one of those options is hosting wine tastings where everyone chips in for some really great bottles.

So, I’ve hosted a few tastings for friends and for fellow staffers at the Nota Bene, and we’ve been able to try some delicious, delicious wines (and cheese… and patê…).  The first was themed “Summer Reds” and featured lighter reds (such as Beaujolais and Pinot, including a pretty wonderful pinot–the 2006 Radio-Coteau “Savoy” from the Anderson Valley of California).  The second was themed “Spanish Wines”, which is the topic of this particular blog post, and the third will be based around both red and white Burgundies.

We tasted a number of great Spanish wines: three whites and four reds.  The four reds were further subdivided into two groups: two bottles from Rioja, and two from Ribera del Duero.  One in each pair was “Old World”-style (generally aged longer before being released, less assertive oak, leaner) and the other was “New World”-style (released after a fewer number of years, more assertive oak, bigger and fuller profiles).

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Note: Grüner Veltliner–the Perfect Accompaniment to Dinner At An Austrian Cafe

16 Sep

A very quick post on a wine I might forget otherwise. I took a friend out to dinner at Leopold’s Kafe a week or two ago.  Leopold’s, which is a modern Viennese-style cafe/bar/restaurant, is one of my favorite places in DC: it offers very well-executed, delicious food at reasonable prices, as well as outside seating and the best Euro eye-candy you can find in Georgetown.  It is especially good for brunch or dinner and is a great place to take a date, parents, or people you wouldn’t want to entertain at a TGI Friday’s.

I had the steak frites, medium rare.  The “steak” in question was skirt steak, which is often used to make carne asada.  It wasn’t the most tender cut of meat, but it was tender enough and very, very flavorful.  It came with what I took to be caramelized shallots and a sort of creamy chimichurri on top, as well as Leopold’s breathtakingly good frites.  She had the roasted chicken which came with potatoes, warm escarole, and some sort of mustard sauce.  Both dishes were very good and very filling.  After dinner we shared a topfentorte (cheesecake with passionfruit gel, mango, and berries) and each had a kleiner Brauner, which is basically like an Austrian machiato.

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Keeping Your Babies Safe: A Note on “Cellaring” Wine

8 Sep

I’ve been running the air conditioner in my apartment non-stop.  This is not only because it’s been pretty warm here in DC, but because I have a case of wine (with some awesome picks like the 2006 Radio-Coteau “Savoy” pinot noir and a few white and red Burgundies) I’m keeping for two tastings I’m hosting for the staff of my school newspaper.  I’m really paranoid that the wines will go bad.

I’ve had a few bad experiences with wine that was improperly stored.  For instance, my last sentimental bottle of L’Esprit du Silene gave up its spirit after being stored (by my parents) on top of the refrigerator.  More recently, the two cases of wine my roommate and I had “cellared away” in a spare closet turned to vinegar after the cruel DC summer.  But this was nothing compared to the Battle of the Somme-like destruction experienced by my friend and fellow wine blogger Shea during a particularly nasty heat wave in British Columbia.

Of course, the destruction of my own two cases did set me back quite a bit of money.  Just as important as the economic aspect, however, is the frustration of opening bottle after bottle of vinegar in the quest of hospitality or romance.

So how does one avoid this fate?

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Note: 2005 Pierre Andre Saint-Aubin “Les Anges” Premier Cru

2 Sep

I have had much to be thankful for this past week.  For instance, classes started up again and, strangely enough, they’re all pretty interesting (though the amount of reading I have is daunting at times).  I finished up the main portion of a Student Bar Association (SBA) program I was in charge of which consisting of pairing 1Ls with upperclassmen mentors.  I got two more Riedel Vinum Burgundy glasses, and my friend Sharon got a sweet part-time job at Banana Republic (which will result in sartorial benefits for m, I hope!).

Thus I wanted to get a decent bottle of wine with which to celebrate.

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Some Whites We All Can Love: Bourgogne and Bordeaux Blanc

21 Aug

Short posts, short posts.  That’s what law school–and reality–will do to you!

A few posts earlier I rhapsodized about a mesmerizing Meursault I had at Mission Wines.  For some reason I’ve been on a big Burgundy bent for the past couple of months (which probably has its genesis in my trip to Berkeley and the delicious basic Bourgogne I drank there), and more recently I’ve been interested in white wines–specifically, chardonnay.

To celebrate my friend Justin’s arrival in DC from Austin by way of the Pacific Northwest, I am cooking a simple dinner of turkey burgers with guacamole and fries.  I thought that a chardonnay would be a good match for this meal, which is why I took Patrick Deaner of The Wine Specialist’s advice and purchased the 2006 Rully chardonnay from Pierre Andre.  A “Grand Vin de Bourgogne,” it was reasonably priced at $21.99.
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Thoughts: DC and LA / Cremant d’Alsace / Beauty / God / Life

17 Aug

I am in a certain mood right now that defies exact transcription into words.  Surely you’ve been in those moods before–everyone has, if they’ve cared enough to notice.  Perhaps I could define the parameters of that mood by listing some of the songs I’ve been listening to this early morning, this not altogether-unpleasant warm and humid DC early morning.  For instance, on the lighter side I’ve been listening to Oscar Peterson, in his Big 4 incarnation (“You Look Good to Me”) and supporting the “Montreux Kings”–Eldridge, Gillespie, Terry–trio of horns (“(There Is) No Greater Love”).  Charles Mingus (“II B.S.”) has verve but also a dark foreboding to it, something menacing that feels right right about now.  Nick Drake and Elliot Smith.  I haven’t decided on my old standby, Van Morrison.  It doesn’t seem like a Van Morrison type of morning.

———–

I have been incredibly fortunate.  I think that this could be assumed just by the very fact that I even have a wine blog.  At the same time, it is a truth of life that there are struggles, disappointments, and tragedies.

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Another Reason Why I’ll Miss LA

4 Aug

A while back I wrote that there wasn’t a sauvignon blanc that I liked.  How much has changed!  Now sauv blanc is, if not my favorite, one of my favorite white wines.

Now my white grape whipping-boy is chardonnay.  I could swear that I’ve not met a chardonnay that I’ve liked, though that’s not technically true.  Quite a few years ago I had a delicious Carneros chardonnay from V. Sattui at their St. Helena tasting room–so delicious, in fact, that it was priced above my budget.

Not that I ever wanted to dislike chardonnay, what with sentimental memories of Remy from The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles drinking the wine with wonderful abandon.  But more recent memories of horrible cheap chard from the I-House at Berkeley (where 1.5 L bottles of it were kept above room temperature for God knows how long) and horrible, more expensive chard wiped out any affinity I might have had for this most noble of grapes.

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Tears of Morro, Tears of Joy

13 Jun

I’ve been back here in LA for a few weeks now and it’s great. We’ve been having a long spell of overcast, mild weather–perfect light sweater weather. That’s fine with me, especially since I escaped the heat and humidity of the East Coast so recently (as well as the steaming crucible of law school).

Thus, I’ve been able to go to Mission Wines, my favorite local wine spot here in little South Pasadena. I rounded up a crew of the usuals–William, his friend Sam, Chris M. and his gf, Sasha and his gf, and Jack M. from days yore–and we hit up the wine tasting this past Saturday. Manning the bar were the always dependable Dave and Matthew; Kirk from the Rose Bowl committee was there along with a spate of regulars.

The tasting started off with a 2008 Pierre-Marie Chermette “Les Griottes” Beaujolais rosé, made from gamay.  A Beaujolais rosé?  I mean, much Beaujolais is darn close to rosé, anyway.  Nonetheless, this was a nice wine with a vibrant pink color and an austere, slightly coppery taste.  It wasn’t sweet and not overtly fruity.  It was my first Beaujolais rosé, so I was delighted to have it be a positive experience.  

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