Back in the Saddle

I haven't written anything in a long time. It's hard to get started again. I've wanted to, but the longer it gets, the more inertia sets in. Perhaps the best way is simply to write something  - anything. Even just a list of recent wines I've loved. If it's fun, I'll write again another time.

The best red wine I've had in some time? A bottle of Beaujolais, but a special bottle - the 2011 Yvon Métras Moulin-à-Vent. This is not so easy to find here in the US, but whoa, it's worth looking for. Here's my note on the bottle: "Honestly, the finest red wine I've tasted in a while. A perfect bottle. Fragrant with fruit, flowers, stones, leaves. Beautifully expressive on the palate with complex fruit and mineral flavors, a structural firmness under the fruit that smacks of Moulin-à-Vent, texturally perfect, long on the finish - I'm trying to mention everything that's great about this wine which starts to feel silly. It really was just a wonderful bottle with a depth and expression of aroma and flavor that is fantastic." Métras is a cultish producer and that might turn some folks off. It turned me off, to be honest. But this bottle converted me. 

Then there's also this bottle, the 2008 Giuseppe Rinaldi Barbera d'Alba. Another one that is not easy to find here in the US. This bottle kind of blew me away. Pure and fresh, absolutely transparent in feel and the earthy minerality is pungent. The wine is so complex too - the finish is a melange of the herbal, the acidic, and the ripe but not overripe fruit (which itself is a melange of bright red raspberry and deep dark cherry). If you drink it now, save half for ay 2 - way better on day 2. I've not had too many Barberas, and I've had none that I loved except for a bottle a few years back by G. Conterno. This one, I loved, LOVED. Is this is what Barbera grown on great soils by a great wine maker is like?

The 2012 vintage of Tissot Poulsard is here and it's really good. For me, this is the Poulsard to buy and drink with impunity these days, as Overnoy is a unicorn and Ganevat costs $50. This wine needs a good decant to deal with the reduction, but it is absolutely delicious. It comes from very old vines and it has no added sulfur (which should raise alarms more than act as a selling point, in my book, but this one does it beautifully). It will greatly please Poulsard lovers but also I think would be a nice way to introduce a friend to the charms of light and weird red wine - it's accessible like that. Cranberries, blood oranges, hard spices, flowers, harmonious and beautifully textured, this wine packs a lot of interest into a very light frame. It costs about $25.

I'm still not entirely sure where I am with this wine. 2010 Weingut Günther Steinmetz Mülheimer Sonnenlay Pinot Noir Unfiltriert, as it is deftly named, might be an intense wine that offers way more complexity, terroir expression, and overall quality than its $23 price tag suggests is possible. Or it might just be an incredibly delicious and balanced Pinot from Germany. I can't tell yet. But I will tell you that I am vigorously enjoying the act of drinking the wine and further exploring this important question.

I still drink white wine. Way more than red, actually. Here are some recent whites that also wowed me:

2007 Fritz Haag Brauneberger Juffer-Sonnenuhr Riesling Spätlese. You know, I look back at my notes from drinking this wine and it's not as though I loved it on paper. But the thing is, I loved it. I've thought about it a lot since drinking it. Maybe it sounds obvious to you if you drink these wines, but the purity, the delicacy, the impeccable balance...it really got to me and I must have more.

2012 Bernard Ott Grüner Veltliner Am Berg. I think this is a great vintage for this wine. It's subtle and quiet, but absolutely delicious and entirely expressive of place and of Grüner. I like to decant this wine, and then there are clean and cooling aromas of sour cream, lemongrass, and green herbs. Quiet, but arresting. And versatile at the table. And about $18.

I dipped into my small stash of the very fine La Bota de Fino Nº 35, and whoa, is it drinking beautifully. This is a Fino selected from barrels in the Valdespino Inocente solera system. The overtly powerful personality of the wine has been tempered a bit and it now thrives on this amazing harmony of aroma and flavor. Complex, savory,  and shockingly delicious.

Just to see what's what, I opened a bottle of 2008 Gilbert Picq Chablis 1er Cru Vogros. It reminded me that it's possible to drink real Chablis, truly satisfying Chablis, elegant and bantam weight Chablis that really smacks of seashells, iodine, and white flowers, for under $30. I like this wine in every vintage I've tasted. This one drinks very well right now, but takes 90 minutes to get there and seems like it will improve with another few years in the cellar. But whoa, when it got there it was rewarding.

That was kind of fun, writing this. For me, anyway.

The Person who Made the Very First Potato Pancake Probably Drank Gruner Veltliner

Imagine this: maybe 150-200 years ago, somewhere in eastern Europe, a person of modest means is thinking of what to cook for the family. It's winter and there's not a lot to choose from. In the cellar there are potatoes and onions. There is a sack of flour. There are some eggs, there is a bit of butter. Perhaps it was in a setting like this one when a person had the brilliant idea of making potato pancakes?

I have no idea at all if this is true. Maybe a trained chef at an Austrian cooking school invented the dish. Maybe the potato pancake was invented 75 years ago, or 300 years ago. Isn't it interesting to imagine how a person, someone who must be a creative and brilliant chef, is able to take familiar and humble ingredients and come up with something that is so delicious that it proliferates the way a potato pancake, for example, proliferates?

I like making potato pancakes with the daughters. The other night they were the center of a meal, along with a little split pea soup and a cucumber salad. Couldn't be simpler - peel and grate 2 russet potatoes. Sprinkle with a little salt and let them sit a few minutes so that they begin to release their water. Squeeze out as much water as you can, add two beaten eggs, a tablespoon and a half or so of flour, some salt, and a tablespoon or two of finely grated onion (more or less as you please). Mix well, fry in butter, et voila.

Although it's important to remove the water from the potatoes before making the batter, this is a forgiving dish. On this evening we got distracted from our cooking for maybe 5 minutes, and still the potatoes continued to release water, or maybe the bond between the egg and the potato began to relax. But there was liquid in the bottom of our batter bowl.

No matter - we lifted out large spoonfuls of batter and pressed them into pancake-shaped discs in a hot pan of butter. This is one of those simple dishes whose aroma will bring neighbors to the front door, the perfect time to come and say hello.

Turn the pancakes after a few minutes when they are golden brown on the bottom. Remove after another few minutes and let them rest a moment on a paper towel, getting rid of some excess butter.

Six year-old daughters can peel Persian cucumbers, and can even help chop them into large chunks, if we hold the knife together. They can salt cucumbers and add a little vinegar, and stir.

They can not, however, drink a glass of 2011 Bernard Ott Gruner Veltliner Am Berg. For this, I feel badly for them, although their time will certainly come. Right now they think wine is gross and don't even want to taste it. The wine, be the way, has improved since last year, showing a lovely airy freshness, herbal and creamy notes, and good balance. A great value at about $18 before any sort of case discount.

With a bowl of split pea soup with chunks of carrot and little bits of ham (calm down, also home made), the humble potato pancake and the humbler cucumber salad make a very good dinner.

The person who first thought to create a pancake out of a few potatoes, an onion, a few eggs, some flour and salt - this is a person who must have enjoyed wine with their meal. Perhaps it was home made from a few rows out behind the house? Maybe it was even a Gruner Veltliner.

A Dinner Featuring the Wines of Bernhard Ott

A few years ago on my buddy Peter's recommendation I bought one of Bernhard Ott's wines, a Grüner Veltliner called Am Berg. I thought the wine was great, and at under $15, a great value too. But when I went to buy more it was gone. Years went by and I continued not to see this wine in stores until a few months ago when all of the sudden some of the 2010's started showing up on the shelves. Finally - the wines are excellent and well priced. Why are they showing up now? There has been a change of importers - Winebow used to handle Ott's wine, but now it will be Terry Theise/Michael Skurnik. Word is the wines will be easier to find going forward and we should be glad for this.

Bernhard Ott's vineyards are almost all located in the towns of Feuersbrunn and Engabrunn in the northwest corner of the Wagram, the region to the east of the more renowned Wachau, Kamptal, and Kremstal regions. I think of the Wagram as the Wachau's less talented sibling. There certainly are some good wines, but the overall potential is less than that of the Wachau and the Kamptal That said, Bernhard took over farming and wine making duties in 1995 and now is to be considered one of the finest, if not the finest producer in the Wagram.

 Photo courtesy of Der Feinschmecker German wine award website.

Bernhard Ott changed the methods of farming at the estate, encouraging cover crops, avoiding pesticides, and now is almost fully certified by Respekt, a new alternative to Demeter in biodynamic certification. He also changed some aspects of wine making, fully embracing the very reductive style that is more and more common among Austria's great dry wines. All closures are Stelvin, the wines are all raised in stainless steel tanks (except for a new amphora wine that I've never tasted), and there is little or no stirring of the lees.

So what do these wines taste like - why do I like them so much? Grüner Veltliner from these vineyards and in Ott's hands tastes fresh and pure, with focused and detailed articulation of aroma and flavor, and with great resonance on the finish. They are balanced and elegant, and yet offer a lot of potency and depth. They are delicious wines and they are flexible with food, and here I'm talking about wines that all cost less than $25 - I had never tasted the top wines when forming this opinion.

As with all Austrian white wines that I can think of, Ott's wines benefit from decanting because they are quite reductive. I decanted the Grüners at 4:30 and we began drinking them at 8:00, and decanted the Rieslings about an hour before drinking them. I made a five-course dinner to pair with the wines, which was a lot of fun in itself. Here is what we ate and drank:

Savory ginger custard with:
Grüner Veltliner Am Berg 2010 and 2011

Yellow squash, cucumber, and mint salad with:
Grüner Veltliner Fass 4 2010 and 2011

Raw Fluke with sour cream, white pepper, and dill oil with:
Grüner Veltliner Stein 2011 and Grüner Veltliner Spiegel 2011

Poached squid, fava beans, garlic, and red chili flake with:
Riesling von Rotem Schotter 2010 and 2011

Vietnamese-style summer rolls with shrimp, pork, and herbs with:
Rhein Riesling 2011

Three of Bernhard Ott's wines were not represented in this dinner. Der Ott is a blend of grapes from young vines in Ott's parcels of Rosenberg, Stein, and Spiegel. And the Grüner Veltliner Rosenberg, probably Ott's flagship wine, was not available, neither was the amphora wine.

The results were quite interesting. The 2010 wines showed beautifully, particularly Am Berg and the Riesling von Rotem Schotter. There was disagreement, however, about the 2011's. No one thought they were as good at this point as the 2010's. Some tasters, myself included, found things to like about the 2011's, while others felt that the qualities of the 2011 vintage were not flattering for this highly reductive style of wine.

I thought Bernhard Ott's wines were delicious and intriguing before this dinner, and I am unchanged in that opinion. I think that Am Berg is among the better white wines at its price point and if you've not had an Ott wine but are curious to try, Am Berg is an excellent wine to begin with. As to Ott's 2011's in general, I withhold judgment. They did not show terribly well on this night, but as one very experienced taster said during the dinner, "Who knows where these will be in a year. Had we been drinking the 2010' a year ago, would we be having the same experience? If Am Berg 2011 is tasting good now, wouldn't you believe that the other 2011's will show better in a year?"

Here are the wines and some notes:

2010 Grüner Veltliner Am Berg, $16. At 11.5% alcohol this is perfectly balanced and expressive, with lovely herbal, citrus rind, and stone flavors. At times I get hints of something like sour cream in this wine. It is in a wonderful spot for drinking right now, harmonious and feathery in texture and just delicious. Friends, as a public service to you, I will tell you the few places where I know you can still buy this excellent wine, in NYC anyway: Sherry-Lehmann and Appellation Wine & Spirits in Manhattan, and Picada y Vino in Brooklyn. There may be others, who knows, but this wine is worth looking for.

2011 Grüner Veltliner Am Berg, $18. A bigger riper wine than the 2010, but still balanced and expressive with lemongrass and citrus notes, and a mineral pungency to the finish. This wine is still coming together, and although I prefer the style of the 2010, I think this is an excellent Am Berg with lots of pleasure to offer.

2010 Grüner Veltliner Fass 4, $22. Fass 4 grapes come from several parcels near the Rosenberg vineyard. It is a richer wine than Am Berg with a rounder feel to it. This one has floral notes to complement the fruit, and is balanced at 12.5% alcohol.

2011 Grüner Veltliner Fass 4, $26 (This wine was donated by Michael Skurnik Wines). Also 12.5% alcohol, but this felt disjointed. One taster asked if the wine had been acidified. I doubt that Bernhard Ott acidifies his wines even in a very warm vintage like 2011, but I don't know.

2011 Grüner Veltliner Stein, $55 (This wine was donated by Michael Skurnik Wines). This is an unusual wine within the Ott lineup. The Stein vineyard is in a part of Engebrunn that technically is in the Kamptal, and the soils are gneiss and chalk in addition to the more typical loess of the Wagram. Ott's vines in Stein are over 50 years old. Several tasters found the same disjointed problems here as they did with the other 2011's, but I really liked this wine and thought it was still improving as we finished it. At 13.5% it felt balanced to me. The nose was rather lean at this stage, but I liked the intensity of the flavors and the wine felt linear to me, not overripe. I would like to taste it again in 5 years to see if it can achieve a better sense of harmony with time.

2011 Grüner Veltliner Spiegel, $55 (This wine was donated by Michael Skurnik Wines). I really liked the pungency of the nose on this wine, with clear and classic flavors of lemongrass and white pepper. Coiled up and young, but seems to have a lot of potential. My sense was that the group preferred this to the Stein, but there were exceptions. And there were tasters who didn't like this wine as much as I did.

2010 Riesling von Rotten Schotter, $22. Most at the table thought this was the wine of the night, and it was indeed a very lovely wine. Clear as a bell, focused, and also ample in fruit and body, very delicious. I enjoyed the variety of flavors - brown spices, flowers, rock, orchard fruit, and all very fresh. Made from red (slate?) and gravel soils at higher elevation than the Grüner vineyards. As a public service to you, my friends, I will tell you that you can still find this wine at Prospect Wines and Fermented Grapes in Brooklyn.

2011 Riesling von Rotten Schotter, $29 (This wine was donated by Michael Skurnik Wines). Strange, because even though this wine comes from a higher elevation than the single vineyard Grüners and therefore might be less ripe, this one felt warmer and more disjointed initially. It improved with time in the decanter, but I don't feel like I understood the wine and I'm not ready to say anything yet.

2011 Rhein Riesling, $59 (This wine was donated by Michael Skurnik Wines). This is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the off-dry wines of Germany, where Bernhard Ott spent some time working at the Leitz estate and fell in love with the off-dry style of Riesling. I liked this wine very much and it was great with our summer rolls, with slightly earthy and airy aromas, and clean and bold flavors. I wanted to go back to this wine when we re-tasted everything, but it was gone, which I take as a good sign.

By the way, just to show that things are not always as they seem with vintage reports (and/or that I don't know what I'm talking about) 2010 was supposed to be a so-so year at best in Austria, while the reports on the 2011 vintage were quite good. Here are three reports on 2011:

From Julia Harding, via the Jancis Robinson website.

From Wine Spectator.

From James Wright via Wine Monger, a commercial site.