Monthly Archives: September 2010

On Saturday night I had the pleasure of attending a goat cheese tasting at fellow foodie Kevin Kossowan‘s house. Kevin is currently helping to re-design the website of local cheese producer Smoky Valley Goat Cheese, and he needed to compile a comprehensive set of tasting notes for each of their products, as well as provide them with feedback on their strengths and weaknesses.

(Here is a link to Kevin’s video documentary on Smoky Valley. Watch it.)

the table, set for a hardcore cheese tasting

We live in an era in which pretty much every industry is dominated by a handful of gigantic mega-producers; farming is no exception. Small local farmers are constantly in danger of going belly up, despite the increasing interest in locally produced, organic food. Surviving the long, cold Alberta winter is always a challenge, and as a newcomer to the scene – and with only a couple weeks left in the farmer’s market season – Smoky Valley is in particular peril.

Smoky Valley's soft cheeses

So it was with great relish that a handful of local Edmonton foodies gathered to sample their cheeses, offer our feedback and just generally stand behind them. In no particular order, the guest list included Allan of Button Soup, Chris of eating is the hard part, Thea of Slow Food Edmonton, and Valerie of A Canadian Foodie.

Smoky Valley's hard cheeses

I’ll leave the detailed cheese tasting notes to my fellow tasters, and instead offer you my own take on an integral part of the evening: the wine. (No surprise there, huh?) What follows are my tasting notes of the wines we drank, as well as which Smoky Valley cheese made a particularly good pairing.

2008 Paul Zinck Grand Cru Eichberg (Alsace)

You can’t go wrong with Grand Cru Alsatian wine. Ever. This one from Paul Zinck did not disappoint with its luscious nose of tropical fruits – it was like sniffing a glass of ripe passionfruit. Though it was quite sweet mid-palate, there was just enough acidity to keep things balanced.

• Smoky Valley Goat Cheese Pairing: any of their soft cheese would work nicely – the plain chèvre, as well as the Annette and La Maure.

2008 paul zinck grand cru eichberg

2007 Paul Zinck Pinot Gris (Alsace)

I’m already quite familiar with this wine, having served it a few months ago at my last Château Louis wine dinner. It still tastes great, with its nose of tropical fruit and that amazingly fantastic rush of acidity at the end.

• Smoky Valley Goat Cheese Pairing: you’ll also want to stick to the soft cheeses with this wine, especially the fuller-bodied Valençay.

***I totally forgot to snap a picture of this wine. Oops. If it makes you feel any better, the label isn’t that impressive. Actually, it makes the wine look kind of cheap. But it’s a good wine nonetheless. Trust me.***



2005 Château Princé Anjou-Villages-Brissac (Loire)

The Loire Valley is probably my favourite region for Cabernet Franc, and it is also a fairly classic pairing with goat cheese. The Château Princé is all about ripe aromas and flavours of cherry and black plums, with overtones of savoury herbs and wildflowers.

• Smoky Valley Goat Cheese Pairing: this is hard cheese territory – the cheddar-like Tomme and the slightly stronger Farmer’s cheese (a.k.a. St. Paulin) both pair nicely.

2005 château princé anjou-villages-brissac

When Kevin pulled this little gem out of his cellar, I was thrilled. These days it seems like every other Bordeaux vintage is hyped as the “vintage of the decade/century”, but 2004 was not such a vintage – it has been greatly overshadowed by the craziness around 2005. For anyone interested in obtaining bargains (and really, who isn’t?), it’s wise to check out these “off”‘ vintages as they often contain relative bargains.

At only six years old this wine is relatively young; the tannins were still fairly high and I’m confident this could age for another five to ten years. That said, with some decanting it opened up beautifully, presenting a minerally nose replete with black cherry, cassis, raspberry licorice (think Nibs), some dry spice and a subtle smokiness. A lovely rush of acidity keeps the palate sparkling clean.

• Smoky Valley Goat Cheese Pairing: their Farmer’s cheese (aka St. Paulin) is a great match

2004 château de la rivière

It’s been a while since I did one of these round-ups of newsy bits. I blame it on the barometric pressure. Don’t ask.

• Jason over at On Beer has had a busy summer hosting a bunch of cask nights at the Sugarbowl (the next one is this Thursday, September 23) as well as churning out lots of great informative beer articles. Check out his events listing for the lowdown on upcoming beer events around town.

• Kevin Kossowan, locavore extraordinaire, has been very busy these past few weeks touring a bunch of local farms and making mini documentaries on them, as part of his From Local Farms project. Also, he just finished making a big batch of apple wine and  slaughtering a pig from Nature’s Green Acres. Get over to his blog and check it out.

• Allan over at Button Soup has also been busy with various food-related endeavours; I particularly enjoyed his guides to preserving tomatoes and dry-curing sausage.

• The third annual Italia with Gusto wine tasting, a fundraiser in support of the Edmonton School Lunch Program, will be held on October 1 at the Italian Cultural Centre. Over 60 Italian wines to try, yummy appetizers to nibble, and there’s an espresso/grappa bar to boot. Tickets are $65, available in advance only from Vinomania (780-488-7973) and the Italian Cultural Centre (780-453-6182).

• A Taste of Old Strathcona will be held this Friday, September 24, at the Arts Barns from 7 to 10pm. The annual fundraiser features samples of Old Strathcona cuisine, a silent auction, and live entertainment. Tickets are $25, available from Tix on the Square.

• Mark Wendenburg, who was the winemaker at Sumac Ridge for 30 years, is venturing into the realm of contract winemaking. His first client is the neophyte Haywire Winery located in Summerland.

• It’s times like these I wished I lived in B.C.: celebrated Okanagan winery Black Hills will be hosting a 10-year vertical tasting of its flagship wine, Nota Bene, on October 2. If you happen to be down there at this time, you should definitely check it out – Nota Bene has helped Canada gain recognition as a serious winemaking power.

• Here is a fascinating article positing that the future of the Australian wine industry is low-yield, high-quality and organic. I sure hope this comes true – for all wine regions, not just Australia.

• Too fun: you must watch this video of a sommelier attempting to break the Guinness world record for the most bottles of bubbly sabered in one minute. Now check out this blog post and scroll down to see my friend and fellow wine geek, Hayley McRae, as she does the same thing at a recent tasting at deVine. (If you’ve never sabered a bottle of bubbly, you should do it. It’s really fun. But make sure you research the proper procedure first, and never ever ever ever aim that thing at any living creature – or anything you don’t want to potentially dent/break/shatter.)

• In a world where everyone is trying to copyright everything, is it any surprise that this issue has made its way into the world of cocktails? Art of Drink explores the implications of copyrighting in the drinks world.

• A few months ago, divers in the Baltic sea found the oldest bottles of drinkable Champagne in a shipwreck. Now they’ve found a bunch of 200-year-old beer in the same wreck. I seriously need to take up scuba diving.

• It may not be a food or booze event (though you could always sneak a flask into the theatre), but the Edmonton International Film Festival kicks off this Saturday, September 25. I previewed a handful of films this weekend and if that sampling is any indication of the quality of films as a whole, we’re all in for a treat! I particularly recommend The Pharmacist, filmed right here in Edmonton by a bunch of talented local performers and filmmakers, as well as the upsettingly beautiful Lovely, Still. I’ll post a link to my reviews of these films in Vue Weekly as soon as they’re up.

• And last but certainly not least, Oktoberfest is here! Check out this great photo essay of the annual event, which over 6 million people attend. I really wish I was in Munich right now.

photo c/o Matthias Schrader, AP

I have a confession to make, which may come as a shock (and possibly a disappointment) to those of you who thought I was a hardcore wine lover: I have never had a wine epiphany.

It seems like everyone who’s into wine, even casually, has experienced an epiphany with “that wine.” That one glass of vino that slapped you in the face and said, “Nice of you to finally notice me. I will now dominate a large portion of your thoughts and income. Enjoy the journey, my friend.”

People who have had this epiphany can quickly and accurately quote the full name and vintage of said wine, along with where they bought it, where they drank it, what they ate with it, and a few other interesting factoids about the wine – even if it was something unremarkable. They describe it fondly, nostalgically, just as if they were describing a past love.

I don’t have this. I cannot recall any specific wine that made me devote a large chunk of my life to the grape. I got into wine purely by chance – I needed a job during university, and I happened to land one at a local wine shop. Much to my future benefit, it happened to be an independent store, owned and managed by people who actually knew and cared about wine. (I shudder to think where I would have ended up if I had worked at one of those faceless chain liquor stores.)

I was quite the odd duck in that store – the only other woman who worked there was a part-time accountant and she left within a couple weeks of my hire date; all the other employees were men over the age of 30. Most were over 40, actually. I’m sure they found me both amusing and irritating in kind, given that I was a naive 19-year-old girl who had stumbled into the shop by chance and happened to get hired. (In my defense, within half a day of working there I was able to work the cash register better than anyone else, which I think is especially impressive given the fact that this dinosaur of a machine was a year older than I was. I’m certain that for a while, my saving grace was my ability to swiftly change the ink ribbon without making a huge mess and accurately ring through two dozen customers in quick succession after working a three-hour drinking contest tasting.)

It was somewhere in those hazy days of yore when I realized that wine was going to be a permanent part of my life. There wasn’t a specific moment, nor was there a specific wine, when I learned this. When I think back to those days, it just seems as though wine was always going to become a part of me. This fits with several other big events and discoveries that most people learn in a revelatory moment that sticks with them forever – for me, these things usually just became instantly integrated with who I was at the time, like it had always been that way. I have no idea when I learned that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy didn’t exist. At some point I just knew that there was no way these things were real, and this belief was integrated with my life forever after. That’s it – no trauma associated with waking up to find my dad stuffing presents under the tree, or having an older sibling mockingly tease me for thinking that my chocolate eggs were really deposited throughout the living room by a human-sized rabbit.

So there you have it: my dirty little wine secret. I used to be jealous and embarrassed that I didn’t have a wine epiphany to share with other wine geeks. Now I choose to believe that my lack of this experience only means that I was fated to find wine. I didn’t need a special bottle to slap me in the face with the knowledge that I loved wine; I simply walked into that wine shop on my first day of work and was greeted by an entire store of bottles, who casually looked up and said, “Oh hey. Glad to finally meet you. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

I must apologize, faithful readers, for my unexplained absence these past couple weeks. Turns out that buying a house, moving into it, and trying to paint it while you’re moving in, is a process that will consume your life. Completely. I’ve barely had time to feed myself these days – and let me tell you, most of those meals were definitely not worth blogging about.

Coupled with the moving and painting was my laptop’s untimely death; looks like it finally decided to make good on its threats of committing electronic seppuku. Must have been all those samurai movies I downloaded. Or maybe it was that glass of red wine that got spilled all over the keyboard. Er-hem.

Anyways, things are beginning to settle down now so I can get back into the bloggin’ groove again. First topic: apples!

My new house has two rather large, rather old apple trees in the backyard. Observe:

As you can see, they need trimming. Badly. My husband already pruned a few branches that were pushing into the power line, but they are still quite unruly. When the colder weather hits, the shears will come out again.

In the meantime, we get to enjoy their fruit! The first tree, which you can’t really see in the picture above, has already dropped the majority of its apples. This is such a shame, because the previous owner just let them rot on the ground, leaving us with a big, smelly, squishy, wasteful mess. I did sample a couple of the apples that remained on the tree, and they were very tart – perfect for baking.

However, the second tree more than makes up for the wasted fruit of the first: it is loaded with apples, and they are HUGE! I’ve never seen apples this big on a backyard tree before. They are wonderfully crisp, with just the right amount of sweetness, and the texture is superb; they aren’t mealy at all. The only downside? They are so high up I’m going to need a big ladder to reach them!

look waaaaay up, and you'll see...apples!

We’ve set up a couple tarps underneath the tree, to break the fall of the apples that come down before I have a chance to crawl up there and pick them. The tarps also keep them away from the aforementioned squishy mess lurking underneath – my husband raked it up as best he could, but it’s still pretty dank under there.

The question now becomes: what should I do with all my gorgeous apples?