Monthly Archives: October 2010

I’ve been thinking about blood a lot. I blame Kevin and Allan. The two of them just made a big batch of blood sausage, you see, and they have posted on the proceedings several times. (Here, here and here.)

I’ve never tried blood sausage – or any other dish that intentionally used blood as a seasoning and/or thickening agent. (I’m not counting all those those delicious rare steaks I’ve enjoyed over the years.) I admit to sharing in the revulsion to blood that seems common among my fellow meat-and-potatoes Albertans. Blood-based dishes seem like some kind of antiquated foreign food that could only ever be enjoyed by English grandparents. (The irony that many of us Albertans enjoy bloody steak, but consider something like blood sausage disgusting, is not lost on me.)

more please.

After reading their adventures with blood, I added “try blood sausage” and “cook with blood” to my culinary bucket list. In the meantime, I seem to have satisfied my curiosity for hemoglobin with Pinotage – that strange little South African variety that commonly smells of coppery blood, or sausage, or both.

Pinotage is one of those divisive varieties that people either seem to crave or loathe. During my sommelier training in Napa, the subject of Pinotage came up. The three Master Sommeliers leading the class dropped their previously formal, serious demeanors and began positively gossiping about how they despise the variety; they brought up some dinner party in which the guests conjured up various unflattering descriptions of the variety, and were veritably chortling over what was clearly an inside joke.

Since I happen to fall into the category of those seemingly precious few who happen to love Pinotage, I found it all a little annoying. (But mostly baffling; it was just so random.) Tell me, what exactly is so off-putting about the image of falling off a bicycle while smoking a cigarette, and skinning your knee against the tarry road? (Other than the element of physical pain, of course.)

Whatever your personal bias, I recently enjoyed a bottle of Pinotage that would provide a good introduction to the classic South African version of the variety. It was a cheap but tasty wine made by Nederburg, and smelled more of funky wild berries than blood (almost akin to that foxy aroma common to the hybrid varieties, like Baco Noir and Marechal Foch) – though, I did still detected a coppery, metallic undertone.

2007 Nederburg Winemaster’s Reserve Pinotage (Western Cape, South Africa)

From underneath the yellow grass rose an undulating, unceasing hum. Cicadas, and perhaps a cricket or two. It only annoyed those unused to it, and was comfortably nostalgic to one grown alongside it. But he knew he must be careful here; the grass concealed far worse things than talkative insects. Rusted fingers of rebar snagged passing flesh with stinging regularity, and all manner of other highwayside detritus waited beneath the grass to trip clumsy passerby. Still, this was the way home, and he hopped nimbly through the sun-bleached waste on his way to dinner. Already there was the smell of cooking fires carried high on the updrafts, and he was excited to share his news. Soon he would be far away from this humming, stinging place. He would be across an ocean he’d never seen, studying medicine or law. He imagined that in time he might return here, dressed in a suit and driving his own car along the blacktop, safe from these shapeless threats lurking under this dead grass.

The sun never shone brighter than it did on the days he forgot his sunglasses at home. In the stark glare he could see little more than a slit of windshield framed by the translucent red of his assaulted eyelids. He imagined there was an odour to light this harsh, though all he could really smell was the faint remnants of day-old fried potatoes emanating from the crumpled paper bags in the backseat.

It would be uncompromising; at first provocative, but quickly spreading into discomfort as it opened his nostrils. The sweet tang of thawed strawberries spilled across linoleum. The metallic stickiness of a bloody nose.

With pinched eyes and upturned nose, he didn’t see the flash of a car darting sudden left across his lane. The sun had never shone brighter.

The coffee came in individual, one-portion packages. The packages were attached to a plastic strip that was inserted in a revolving dispenser perched on the lunch room counter. There were several different flavours; Breakfast Blend always ran out first. Nobody touched the Decaf. Each office member drank between one and four each day. Most averaged two.

Miguel Cacao existed in a state of perpetual caffeine peak; violins could be tuned to the humming of his nerve axons. He drank seventeen. There was a separate dispenser reserved solely for his use.

Miguel’s wanton consumption ensured that he was the first to exhibit symptoms, though curiously he wasn’t the first to die. Teresa Slate and Paul-Henri l’Épice , who only consumed a cup or two above the average, died nearly a full day ahead of Miguel. Clearly theirs were inferior immune systems.

Last Friday I attended a blind tasting hosted by Kevin Kossowan – Kevin hosts one of these tasting nights each month, and you can read about previous ones on his blog here.

I’m sure Kevin will do his own post on the night, but I wanted to throw in my two cents as well. Sadly, I forgot to bring my camera with me, so I have no pretty pictures to share with you. (Or even any blurry, gee-whiz-this-photographer-clearly-has-had-too-much-wine pictures.) So I’ll have to make do with some other photos I’ve dug up on the internets. Enjoy.

2007 Domaine Faiveley Bourgogne Paulée (Burgundy, France)

Grocery List
Damp stone. Fresh strawberry. Light in body, short finish, fairly high acidity, fairly low tannins. Closed on the nose and palate. You could drink a bottle of this trying to look for other aromas or flavours, only to discover that there actually wasn’t anything there after all.

Flash
Crab-like, she moved along the patch of strawberries, squatting low to the ground and pinching berry after berry as she spied them peeking up from under scalloped leaves. Her bowl was almost full. She reached back to drag it across the grass, closer to her new spot, but encountered resistance. She turned and saw her brother, face guilty with red juice and black seeds. Half screaming and half giggling, he grabbed the ransacked bowl and ran away with it down the row of strawberry plants. She squinted after him, then rolled back off her haunches and began to cry. She was supposed to help her mom make jam, and now there were no strawberries.

2004 Domaine d’Ardhuy Côte de Beaune Villages (Côte de Beaune, France)

Grocery List
Horseradish. So much horseradish. Dust, wet earth, damp grass, a hint of coffee, and an underlying coppery/metallic element. (This latter characteristic was common to almost all the wines we tried. I definitely found my new Pinot Noir trigger.) Sour cherry on the palate, fairly high in both acidity and tannin. A bit of that milky, lactic mouthfeel that I’ve previously noticed on Beaune Burgundies.

Flash
The jar of horseradish slipped through an incision made by the milk carton, tumbled to the ground, and broke open on rock that was still wet from the pre-dawn rain. She swore and stopped abruptly, glaring down at the viscous grey paste that was slowly creeping onto the grass. The plastic bags were cutting into her hands, the coffee had left a foul taste in her mouth and she wasn’t going back to the store. She didn’t even like horseradish. He’d have to do without it, tonight. He’d have to do without a lot of things.

2004 Domaine d’Ardhuy Aloxe-Corton Les Chaillots Premier Cru (Côte de Nuits, France)

Grocery List
Shrimp cocktail sauce – that homogeneous red stuff that comes with a frozen shrimp ring. Lots of metallic undertones. Root vegetables: kohlrabi, turnip. Mushroom and gravel. Easily the most complex out of all the wines here.

Flash
He runs along the gravel driveway up to the cabin, the image of himself as a leopard cantering among jungle vines strong in his mind until he misses a step, falls. Arms and legs grate against rough stones. Torn hands. Tears. His grandmother hears his wails and turns from a bowl stained thick with red pie filling. Steps outside. She stoops to help him up but withholds a kiss or a hug, despite his sniffling. He is getting too old for such attentions.

2007 Byron Pinot Noir (Santa Maria – California, U.S.)

Grocery List
Lots of oak influence on the nose – spice, sweet vanilla, tobacco. Cherry and floral aromas. Initially I enjoyed the texture and mouthfeel, possibly because it was just so different from the rest of them, but it quickly became cloying, almost sickly. The oak overwhelms the fruit.

Flash
What the hell was that smell? He’d been catching whiffs of it for days, but still hadn’t figured out the source. With his nose wrinkled in disapproval, he bounded down the basement steps and threw open the door. Caught in mid-act, his roommate grinned at him sheepishly from a cloud of acrid, sour-sweet smoke. “Sorry dude, I just really needed a cigarette.”
“What the hell kind of cigarette is that? It fucking stinks.”
“It’s this mini-cigar thing, dipped in cherry whisky. Jen brought it back from her trip to Mexico.”
“Since when do Mexicans smoke cherry whisky cigars?”

2008 Viña Casas del Bosque Reserve Pinot Noir (Casablanca Valley, Chile)

Grocery List
Berry bonanza: cherry, strawberry, blueberry. Easily the fruitiest out of the bunch. Slightly metallic, but not nearly as much as the Burgundies. Fairly high in tannin, but they aren’t particularly dominant or too drying at any point.

Flash
I always thought of you as a radio playing in another room. The way you can hear a few strains of melody, but nothing complete. Lacking definition. That’s how I heard you, never clear or strong. Just…hazy. Only your mouth stayed in sharp focus. Small and red. Upturned. Waiting.

A few years ago I stumbled upon the intriguing oddity that is flash fiction: little bursts of prose, provocative in their ability to suggest so much in so few words. Consider all that is being said within this famous six-word story, supposedly penned by Ernest Hemingway: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

When I first discovered the medium, I started reading a great flash fiction blog, Julie Wilson’s Seen Reading. The premise was simple: Julie spied upon a person reading in public, found the book herself, included an excerpt from that book, and then riffed off on her own creative tangent. (Seen Reading has been on hiatus for several months, but there are three years’ worth of archived entries, so please peruse it when you get a spare hour or two; it’s really worth it.)

I absolutely love flash fiction, and I think I can apply the same principles to wine writing.

For quite a while now I’ve been going through a personal dilemma with my wine writing. I find myself completely bored with the usual “grocery list” descriptions of wine, which give you an armload of fruits, the occasional flowery adjective, and little else. I’ve been trying to develop my own style of wine writing that better captures a wine’s essence. However, after much deliberation I can resolutely say that such a thing does not exist. There is not one clear method that is superior to all others in wine dissemination.

The grocery list method works on a basic level; you can give people the general idea of what to expect in a wine, and they can go on to find out for themselves if they agree or not. This is the most common form of wine writing, used by all the major wine publications (Wine Spectator, Robert Parker, Jancis Robinson, Wine Access, etc. etc.) But oh my, they are so boring to read. Seriously, have you ever read through a series of them? You’ve read one, you’ve read them all, it seems.

So I’ve been looking for an alternate to the grocery list method, but unfortunately the only other option seemed to be a heavy reliance on metaphor, personification, or some other combination of literary devices. I’ve read descriptions of wine as a person, as a situation; I’ve heard people compare wines to a symphony, and a painting. None of those options seem particularly viable, at least on their own; they are far too subjective and the author runs the risk of completely alienating the reader. (Or simply frustrating them with obscure personal references, causing them to think of you as a pretentious douche and abandon your writing accordingly.)

I still don’t think there’s any one way that is particularly better at describing wine to a broad audience. However, as soon as I got the idea of flash wine fiction in my head (I believe that moment was around roughly 1:48 yesterday afternoon) I knew it was the one for me. I believe that wine tells a story, despite how clichéd this sentiment has become, and that story is different for every person. So, when I’m discussing wine from this point forward, I am going to phrase it as a little micro story. Take it or leave it.

Ok, I’ll probably still offer the basic info and a brief grocery store description, because I do think it’s useful to know the very basic aromas/flavours of a wine. But you’re going to get stories too, dammit.

I can’t stop thinking about the Pisco Sour.

I’d never encountered this drink before I visited South America. And I haven’t encountered it since. (Well, except for the few dozen I’ve concocted for myself at home since then.)

The pisco sour is similar in construction to any other sour – whisky sour, bourbon sour, etc. etc. You add some citrus juice to a spirit, toss in some Cointreau, Triple Sec or simple syrup for sweetness, add an egg white and shake vigorously with lots of ice. Add a couple dashes of angostura bitters at the end and you’re good to go.

the pisco sour, in all its foamy, lemony glory

Out in the wilds of the Edmonton cocktail scene, it’s fairly easy to wrangle a bartender into making you a sour using some common spirit like whisky or vodka – but they’ll never make it with pisco, and they’ll never add an egg white. Hell, I give bonus points if they even know what pisco is. (A grape-based spirit; essentially a form of brandy.) As for the egg white thing, I guess I can’t really blame them for this. With all the stories of salmonella outbreaks, people are afraid to order their eggs over-easy, let alone slurp a drink that’s frothy with raw chicken embryo. This aversion is expected – but if you think about it, all the booze in a sour would totally destroy any contagions lurking about, so really, you’re actually much safer enjoying eggs in cocktail form than in any other.

At any rate, I’ve been craving the piscos that I first encountered in Peru a couple years ago. Alas, long ago I ran out of the supply of pisco I purchased down there. There is precisely one brand of Peruvian pisco available in Alberta: Soldeica. (There are a few brands of Chilean pisco, but I wanted this to be as close to the piscos I had in Peru. Sorry, Chile. Maybe next time.)

Happily, Soldeica is pretty decent – don’t let the atrocious label fool you. (Machu Picchu is used to sell everything in Peru. EVERYTHING. Slapping a grainy, washed-out photo on a bottle of pisco is pretty much de rigueur.)

yep, they're sure proud of those ruins

Here is the original pisco sour recipe, for those adventurous enough to try it out. Feel free to drop the egg if you’re a chicken (nyuk nyuk).

The Pisco Sour

2 oz. pisco
1/4 oz. simple syrup
1 oz. lemon juice (Freshly squeezed. Don’t even bother if you don’t have fresh lemons. Lime juice also works nicely.)
half an egg white
dash of angostura bitters

Pour everything except the bitters into a martini shaker. Shake. Shake harder. Shake until all the ice is melted and you can’t feel your forearms and the skin on your hands is stuck to the shaker because it’s so cold. Strain into a glass. Dash the bitters across the surface. Enjoy the taste of something you’d ordinarily have to fly halfway across the world to experience.

And because I just can’t resist, here is my own photo of Machu Picchu. I’m sure you’ll agree mine is leagues ahead of the one on that label. Sorry, Soldeica. I still like your pisco.

This month’s Living Proof column in Vue Weekly is up – check it out here. I recently attended a tasting seminar of Bols liqueurs, led by Bols Product Developer Peter van ‘t Zelfde. I had a good chat with Peter before the tasting started, and he did an admirable job educating me in the world of liqueur creation. (And kudos to Peter for being such a patient, friendly person – hell, he even lent me some paper to take notes when I realized that the batteries in my voice recorder had died partway through the interview. Er-hem. Reporter fail.)

Peter and me, in all our liqueur-sipping glory

Also in this week’s issue are a couple of final film reviews I did for the Edmonton International Film Festival. I saw some really great films this year, and even though the festival wraps up tomorrow, I highly encourage everyone to get out and see some cinema.

For the sake of completion, and just in case you happen to be faced with the opportunity of seeing any of these films at a future date, here are links to all of the films I reviewed – in order of most recommended to least. Yeah, that’s right: I play favourites. (I’m also kind of curious to know if I’ll spark any more fury and outrage with my “clearly unqualified” reviewing skills – click on the link for The Pharmacist to see what I mean.)

• Lovely, Still

• Music from the Big House

• The Pharmacist

• Repeaters

• The Untitled Work of Paul Shepard

• Brotherhood