Locavore fun.

I got a call from a coworker yesterday asking me if I wanted a piece of venison. He'd pulled a back strap (filet) out of the freezer and had a small chunk of it left. Of course I do, I said. Not being a hunter and without a reliable source, I've never had the chance to prepare venison, but it has been on my list.

The piece he gave me was a little over half a pound, and I decided to prep it for dinner last night. Figured I wouldn't tell the kid what she was eating until after dinner. With distractions like homework and letters to Santa, I needn't have worried. She hung out in the kitchen while I prepped the meal.

I'd done some research on preparations and came down to the following: quick marinade in red wine, olive oil, salt, pepper, and sage. Three minutes on each side to brown it with a touch of olive oil in a hot cast-iron skillet. Seven minutes in a 400-degree oven. Transfer to a plate and put the skillet back on the stove for a reduction. Reduce the reserved marinade with extra wine and a splash of balsamic vinegar thrown in. Serve with couscous and snow peas.

The meat came off a perfect medium rare. With a drizzle of sauce, it was tender and lean and just phenomenal. The kid even ate her whole serving and gave it two thumbs up. I decided to compliment it with a wine produced only a few miles from where the deer had been shot — Villa Appalaccia's Toscanello. I've wanted to pair this bottle with venison since I first poured it at a wine festival two years ago, and I'm pleased to say my gut instinct was dead-on. The pairing was phenomenal. The layers of fruit and pepper from the sangiovese/primitivo/cab franc blend complimented the flavors of the meat so that holding both in your mouth produced a brilliant synergy of flavor.

The kicker on the whole thing was getting around to telling the kid what she'd had. "I ate deer?" she asked. When I said yes, she said, "Hunh. It was good." One more foodie-parent victory...

a little more wine for now

Following our trip to Barboursville and little time warp in Grand Junction, we continued on to Keswick Vineyards. Unfortunately, I can't recommend Keswick. Their wines weren't necessarily bad so much as underwhelming. A couple of red flags popped up during the tasting, too.


First was the limited number of wines. It's not necessarily bad to focus a wineries output, but since every other winery in the state does Cab Franc and Viognier and half of them do a faux ice wine with Vidal Blanc, I'd hope a winery pushing bottles at prices between $20 and $40 would try to do them a little better or with some distinguishing features. Keswick did not. Red flag number two came when I saw that they were decanting their top pour — a meritage-style — into carafes before pouring. The explanation that the wine was young and we needed the full experience of it suggested they weren't ready to sell it. The final red flag came when the pourer pulled out a bottle of "gourmet" chocolate sauce and Nilla wafers. The chocolate sauce was made with the same wine as the blend (another red flag) and they were very proud of its quality. Word to the wise: it's chocolate sauce. Nothing special. Just chocolate sauce. And any time a winery needs a specialty food item served with Nilla wafers, it suggests their wines may not be up to speed yet.

To wit, this throws Keswick into another category of Virginia Wineries. In this category fall the wineries that sell themselves on the beauty of their location and produce serviceable-but-undistinguished wines. No bottles were purchased here.

After this stop, we decided to sandwich one more C'ville area winery in before heading back to Richmond. The debate was between Kluge and Jefferson. We opted for Jefferson for proximity and decided to save Kluge for another time. The decision proved to be a good one.


Jefferson Vineyards has been around since 1981, but word on the street was that their quality had fallen off in recent years. Our pourer (anyone who has a better term for this please let me know in the comments) was knowledgeable and attentive. She talked about food and what she used the wine for in cooking and pairings. And the wine? Overall, very good. There was a sweet white — oh-so-popular with the habitués of wine tours around these regions — that we didn't care for, but overall the varietals were quite good. We went back to a couple and settled on a bottle of Petit Verdot.

For our last stop of the day, we chose Grayhaven. With its backwoods location, in Louisa County, it's off the beaten path and is a little different experience than the rest. They're proud of their wines and do a good job of making visitors feel at home — including being willing to stay open an extra hour and a half for conversation and tasting. As for the quality of the wine, I'd call it mixed. There are a couple of sweeter blends that are their nod to the tastes every Virginia winery seems required to support. They had a Cab Franc that moved more to the character of a Claret rather than a traditional Cab Franc. I thought it was drinkable while L found it barely palatable. Their Touriga and Chambourcin, however, were quite good and worth buying.


As Virginia wineries go, they represent the smaller, family-run operations that dot the state producing occasionally stunning, sometimes mediocre, and periodically bad wines. As far as such wineries go, however, I'd put Grayhaven near the top.

A little wine for now

Saturday morning, L and I decided to take advantage of a sunny, cool day and hit a few of the wineries out near Charlottesville. We had hit wineries out near Crozet and Afton earlier in January and had tried unsuccessfully to hit a few wineries on the Northern neck early in February.

We plotted the trip carefully—follow a rural route out to Barboursville, then make a circuit of a couple before looping back on I-64. Between Barboursville and Gordonsville, we skipped Horton; the quality of their wines has dropped significantly since the cut the Devil's bargain and started focusing on sweet wines and big events like the Mardi Gras celebration they were running that afternoon. Instead, we headed straight for Barboursville.



Virginia wineries fall into a few tiers. First are the serious wineries that have a real focus and sophistication on the wines they produce. Barboursville falls into this category. Unlike the younger wineries who use their location and/or their architecture as a selling point, Barboursville puts its focus squarely on the wines. (Sure, the location is spectacular and the restaurant and Shakespeare in the castle ruins are nice parts of the experience, but they aren't positioned as the main draw.) And the wines are impressive.



Highlights included a very nice Sangiovese, a Barbera, the Cab Sauvignon, the Nebbiolo, and their Octagon blend. I liked the Cab Franc and Viognier as well, but L wasn't sold on those. We considered picking up a couple of bottles, but in the end just opted for a bottle of the Cab. There were, after all, a few wineries left to go.

By now, it was lunch time. Unfortunately, the restaurant was completely booked up, and we hadn't seen any of the little cafés we'd hoped for in town. The hostess recommended a stop along Route 20 heading south to Charlottesville. We lit out in search of Grand Junction, and nearly missed the place as we came over a hill and around a bend.



To call Grand Junction quirky would be an understatement. The one-room general store and lunch counter offered everything from batteries to local eggs to boxes of pad thai to lollipops and toys. And Vicky, who was holding down the fort, seemed to be just a neighbor or friend who'd popped in to take care of things. She was casual and friendly as she put together our sandwiches. Unfortunately, the menu was light on vegetarian options. L opted for the one veggie sandwich on the menu, and asked for a few minor substitutions. Somehow, this resulted in a turkey and mozzarella sandwich. When we pointed out the problem, Vicky was apologetic and offered us a couple pieces of cake as an apology after she pulled together the correct sandwich.






While Grand Junction won't win any great culinary awards, the food hit the spot and the price was more-than-reasonable. It was like eating in someone's living room, a throwback to a time when the corner store was more than just an anachronism. In the end, we also found that it pays to get to know locals — Vicky filled us in on a shortcut over the mountain to Keswick Vineyards, our next stop.

weekend round-up, and/or a few quick updates

Without further ado...

• Banana passed her swim test on Friday night and celebrated by going off the diving board for two and a half hours. We subsequently spent a significant chunk of the weekend at the pool. I also got a clinic—from our barber—on how to care for fine blonde hair at the pool.
  
  
• The Forest Hill Farmers Market was just as busy and interesting as usual. I stepped back a bit on our purchases this week because we've built a surplus. There were no wildcards on my purchases, but a dairy had arrived this time. Banana was cranky, however, so I needed to scuttle the trip. My hope is that they return next week.
  
  
• I've acceded to Banana's wish for a kitten for her birthday. G-d help us all.
  
  
• Chilled pinot noir is surprisingly good.
  
  
• John McCain will do everything he can to destroy Obama. It's going to be an interesting few months.

More later.

what we talk about when we talk about wine

I volunteered to help my father pour wine at the James River Wine Festival this year. He has poured for one of the better wineries for the past few years, and I joined him this year. It seemed appropriate since this festival is something that brought me to Richmond annually for a few years in the nineties. At that point, the festival was a funky little affair held on Browns Island, downtown where the James River bisects Richmond, and it seemed important to the burgeoning wine industry in the state.

The festival has since been moved out to the far 'burbs west of town, in an odd little pavilion in a corporate park. It has also gone the way of many events that someone here thought they could make better. There are lots of craft vendors selling the usual "art" fare, there are the various random vendors selling things like home window treatments, and there are the requisite cover bands playing "Twist and Shout" one more time. Food is provided by the usual funnel cake/sausage/hamburger/gyro/fries/nachos stand, a crab cake stand, and one lone local restaurant that decided to buy in--without really being able to compete with the funnel cakes or the crab cakes. Hell, I even opted for the traveling crab cake stand and their overly sweet lemonade.

But the festival is supposed to be all about wine, right? Right. Except that many of the people who flock to these festivals know very little about wine. Instead, they know "what they like." As I learned, this means sweet wines. Think Riesling with sugar dumped into it. Or the berry wines hawked by several of the wineries. Some people are so adamant that they will categorically refuse to taste any other wine.

The winery I was pouring for is proud of the fact that their wines are dry. In fact, even their dessert wines have residual sugars as low as three percent. Considering that many of the "sweet" wines poured by other makers push into the 12-15% range, even the dessert wine we were pouring wasn't sweet by some people's standards. It was clear early on that it wasn't even worth trying to get some of the people to try the wines if all they wanted was sweet. (And the winemaker had asked us not to pour the dessert wine frivolously.) There were a number of people who treated it as a slight that we didn't have anything they wanted. What they seemed to forget is that these festivals are supposed to be a two-way street: festival-goers get to try new wines for a small price, and since the wineries are there to sell wine, festival-goers are expected to buy some wine.

After pouring for a few hours, I had the chance to roam around and do a bit of tasting myself. What I found, however, was that there were only a few of the better wineries present: Barboursville, Veritas, Villa Appalaccia, Tarara, Corcoran, and a few others I've already forgotten. Most of the wineries, however, were places like Peaks of Otter which serves a habanero wine and various fruit creations that don't really deserve to be called wine. In addition, there was a whole tier of wineries that also sell treacly, sweet creations, and whose main draw seems to be their proximity to the highway and their pretty tasting rooms. There was one winery, in particular, that I was shocked to see in attendance--their wines were so bad when they opened three years ago, I figured they'd go under.

Ultimately, many of the people who attended the festival wouldn't even get to taste some of the best wines being produced in Virginia. Why? Because of sweet wines and suburban silliness. Or more to the point: when the festival was moved and "improved," attending became less profitable for many of the wineries who care more about interesting, challenging wines. Clearly, there are some that hang on, but even some of those producers have begun to push the showmanship a little bit and maybe even added a few sweet wines themselves.

The owner of the winery I poured for also made a good point. Because we don't have a food culture in the States, we are not culturally attuned to see wine as an accompaniment for food. Yesterday, that was made even more clear: food options were not only limited, they were not at all attuned to third word in the name of the festival. So what we have in the end is an event that is no longer held anywhere near the James River, and for which the wine (or what wine should be) ends up being secondary to the festival.

*sigh*

I could add more, but it's getting late.

oenophilia, pt. 1

[posting from Mclean, VA, on my cousin's new iMac. Color me jealous; the keyboard and screen are beautiful on this machine.]

Thirteen years ago, I put together a mixed-case of wines for my cousin's wedding. Over the years, through a divorce and remarriage, through at least three states, a few of these wines have traveled with her. I discovered this a few years ago when I first came to visit them in Alexandria. Since then, we've talked about the weekend when I'd be able to stay over again and taste these last couple of bottles. This was the weekend.

There may be other bottles involved down the line, but the two that came out this weekend were a Dickerson Ruby Cabernet 1990 and a Renwood Old Vines Zin 1991.

The Dickerson was toast, sad to say. The cork disintegrated when I tried to pull it, and though I had hope that it could be drinkable, it was long-gone.

The Renwood, on the other hand, had a cork in good condition. It split during the pull, but only a little bit was left to push into the bottle. We poured a bit, let it breathe, and tasted it. In 2001, Tom Hill described it as

Med.dark color; fairly strong pungent/smokey dusty/old vine some blackberry/briary some licorice/pungent rather complex nose; slightly sweetish/ripe tarry/licorice/blackberry/briary/jammy very ripe flavor; long tarry/jammy ripe/blackberry/briary/Amador sweetish finish w/ modest tannins; really drinking nicely w/ a sweet fruit character; nicely developed complex Amador Zin.

*
Even at 16 years old or so, this description hits most of the flavor notes. What's most interesting, however, is that the character of the wine has become almost like a young Port. It has all of the above flavors, but with the sweetness of a nice port or sherry slipping in.

It was a very nice wine to sip after the kids were asleep; that's what is most important here. We rarely get that chance since the kids are always around and/or Banana and I have to hightail it back to Richmond. So, good wine and good conversation. What more could you ask for?



*Update: Should have saved the link on that one, but I forgot. Oops.