So You Think You Know Wine - The Markham Edition

I have posted these videos in the past to illustrate how professional sommeliers approach wine tasting and their ability, or lack of same, in guessing what it is they are drinking.  In this example we see how three of the best can get tripped up.  Notice, also, their many excuses for failure.  In the end, they just didn't guess right.  Is it all a guess?  I think that what you see them doing is what we have come to describe as "educated guessing".  There is some obvious knowledge and most of them do better at certain types of wine than others but, all around their hit record is probably not much better than chance.  Additionally, keep in mind they are doing only one bottle at a time.

So, this brings me to a dinner party I cooked for last night at my friends Steve and Dion.  They decided to turn the tables and conduct their own wine tasting and they upped the difficulty level by including three bottles which only had one element in common: they were all red wines.  With that in mind, do you think you could guess country of origin, varietal or style, price and year?  This would be a tough task for anybody.  But, it would probably be impossible for a beer drinker with little to no wine tasting experience to even come close, right?

The three wines were: Chateau Tronquoy de Sainte Anne 2006 (Bordeaux France)$25, Bolla Amarone del Valpolicella Classico 2007 (Veneto, Italy)$37, Wolf Blass Shiraz 2010 (South Australia)$17.  No VQA wines were in the tasting (pitty).  These are 3 very distinct styles of wine with a Cabernet Sauvignon, Amarone and Shiraz that are full bodied and still fairly young by their grape standards.

We were asked to rate the wines in order of preference and the results were: Wolf Blass 5 first place votes, 2 second and 2 third; Amarone 3 first place, 2 second and 4 third; Bordeaux 1 first, 5 second and 3 third.  Making the Shiraz the clear favourite of the group.  As far as the rest of the guessing went, only one person managed to get all 3 vintages correct while the only one to guess a correct country and style was...wait for it...YES the beer drinker.  Yours truly was given a lowly score of 0, though I did manage to convince the judges that Bordeaux is not a varietal but rather a region and I did guess it was a Cabernet.  Overall, even the one guest disqualified for having insider information was unable to do better than 4 correct out of a possible 9.  Points for guessing the years were not included in the overall competition but were included solely for the purposes of a tie breaker.

Generally speaking, this tasting was very well done with all wines being decanted and guests were left to take their time evaluating.  I will steal this idea for later tastings but to simplify I think I will limit the tasting to one bottle and see if people can improve their guessing.  I still maintain that there is more guessing than knowing going on, even amongst the pros, and yet I can't help thinking if you were to come across your favourite wine you might just be able to recognize it and walk away looking like a pro.

Wine is a complex product which is complicated by the many flavour compounds that go into it; alcohol, tannins, fruit, sugar and the vessels they are stored in all contribute to the overall taste.  Add to that the changes in our mouths when we eat, drink or smoke; when we last brushed our teeth; what order we drink the different wines.  Then, add the environmental factors of cooking food, perfumes of guests, pets etc.  And the chances of picking out those complex flavours become slimmer and slimmer.  The process was both fun and enlightening with many people surprised at the results.  Conversation about the wines and the second guessing after the fact were also fun.  But, knowing that PK will rub everyone's noses in his victory for the next several months might be the most enjoyable part of the whole experience.

A Brief History of Merlot

Here's a clever bit of marketing that does a great job on the history of Merlot. Cheers!

Hat Tip to Chef Tony Le

THE Definitive List of The Top Ten Cooking Shows

Last week's post got me thinking about my favorite cooking shows of all time and I decided a Top Ten List was in order.  So, here are my top ten favorite cooking shows of all time, but first, I should list for you my criteria for their selection and ranking. 

As you know by now, I hate what I call "recipe shows", those shows which simply have a host demonstrating a recipe and listing off ingredients as they are added.  I find these shows useless and redundant since most come with an accompanying cook book and they do not take the time to thoroughly discuss ingredients and techniques.  Because these shows lack any pedagogical substance they are disqualified from my list.

You might also know about my complete loathing and contempt for Reality Television in general.  Well, even more bile inducing are the Reality Food Shows.  I can't stand any show which needs to manufacture confrontation and direct its reality.  That does not mean that I haven't enjoyed the odd documentary about the food/cooking industry, but these were one-off shows that followed some individual or group of individuals that was less about the characters and more about the experience.  Shows that documented such events as the Bocuse d'Or, Le Salon du Chocolate.  Examples of the reality variety I can't stand are Hell's Kitchen, Tough Cookies, Top Chef etc.

So, to qualify for the list a show must have the following characteristics: it must provide instruction on cooking style, technique or trends.  The host must be knowledgeable, entertaining and instructive.  The show should resist credulous ideas about holistic living, extreme diet or food as cure-all unless they can provide several peer-reviewed studies to support their claims.  The show should help people understand their food enough that a recipe is not a requirement.  So, with that in mind here are my top ten in ascending order:

10)   Molto Mario

Mario Batali is a walking encyclopedia of Italian cooking and is one of America's best chefs and certainly the best still working for the Food Network

9)  Jamie Oliver At Home

I am sure that Jamie Oliver is not the best cook in England.  But, I am just as sure he is their best teacher.  This guy could make passing kidney stones sound appealing.

8)  America's Test Kitchen

This show is produced by the publishers of Cook's Illustrated and is the epitome of instructional television.

 
7)  Good Eats

This is what happens when science meets hunger.  Alton Brown is to American cuisine what Jamie Oliver is to British.

6)  Barbeque University With Stephen Raichlen

Stephen Raichlen knows more about BBQ than most people have forgotten.  Watch any episode and I guarantee you will learn something you didn't previously know.

5)  Mexico One Plate At A Time

I would kill a family of 8 for a chance to spend one day with Rick Bayless in his kitchen.  This is a guy that never appears to be a dick.  Google his name and you will have a hard time finding anyone who would say anything bad about him.  Watching him take a traditional, simple Mexican dish and transforming it into haute cuisine is beyond words.

4) New Scandinavian Cooking w/Andreas Viestad

There are 3 versions of this show with two other cooks but, Andreas was the first and in my opinion the most entertaining to watch.  He has a sense of humour so dry that you can see why Norwegian's have a reputation for lacking one.  But, once you understand his personality, which doesn't take long, you will appreciate why he is on my list.

3) The Two Fat Ladies

I believe I have waxed poetic enough about these two gorgeous birds from Britain in last week's post.  Just watch and enjoy.

2)  Julia and Jacques Cooking At Home

No list of cooking shows would be authentic without including Julia Child and Jacques Pepin.  In fact, I could have filled most of this list with their shows from over the years. But, I wanted to include the rest of my picks and so have placed this show here because, to me, it represents a culmination of the years of experience the two have acquired in producing shows for PBS.  It also has some of the most touching scenes demonstrating the affection they have for one another.

1)  The Galloping Gourmet

Imagine you are nine years old and everything about food fascinates you and your mother has just shooed you out of the kitchen for the tenth time.  It's 1970 and television as you knew it was about to change forever.  Up till now you had a choice of about 4 or 5 local channels.  But, now your house has just been wired with the first cable system on your street and you turn the knob on the set and watch a whole new world reveal itself to you.  As you run through the channels the tube flashes pictures and you watch momentarily, focused solely on experiencing the sheer quantity rather than the content.  But, then your selector lands on a channel you have never experienced before and there on the tube is an overly animated cook who appears on the precipice of utter catastrophe.  You sit back and experience for the first time ALL that you are sure television was meant to provide.  Nothing on that television box would ever excite you this much, until one of the older kids tells you about CityTV and something called the Baby Blue Movies, which were only slightly more risque than Kerr's double entendre and near orgasmic reactions to the taste of his own food. 

So that is my top ten.  But, it was not an easy task and there are several shows that I have enjoyed watching over the years.  So, here is the, rather long,  honourable mentions list:

Gourmet's Diary of a Foodie, Gourmet's Adventures With Ruth, Taste with David Rosengarten, Biba's Italian Cooking, Cooking Live with Sara Moulten, Lidia's Italian Kitchen, The Frugal Gourmet, Great Chefs, Cooking Secrets from the CIA, New Orleans Cajun with Justin Wilson, Chucks Day Off, French Food at Home, The Food Hunter, Kitchen Sessions with Charlie Trotter

 

 

Rule Britannia!

Watch any food/travel show that is set in a non English country and inevitably it will begin with the words "food is extremely important to ______ culture".  Watch one of these shows in North America or Britain and they probably will not start that way.  But, food is just as important to English cultures as any other.  Food is important to human culture, regardless of where it resides.  Culture, in fact, owes its very beginnings to food and cooking.  And the long held myth that an English kitchen is devoid of taste, culture and tradition is an ignorant misconception.  Much has changed in England and North America and many of the world's top chefs are of English, Canadian and American origins.  These chefs will, to a man/woman, point to the likes of Marco Pierre White as an inspiration for their success.  And Chef White deserves much praise; his food has been amongst the world's best for a long time and he has been at the forefront of the English revival in cooking.  Watch this video from No Reservations (the relevant part starts at 4:15 and runs to 11:50)

Chef White is a very talented chef, I would never disparage his abilities or approach to food.  Of course there is a BUT coming.  And here it is:  Chef White and Anthony Bourdain tend to think that no one was sticking up for the lowly cuisine of the peasantry of Britain until Chef White arrived.  The talent is unassailable but the image?  White passes himself off as some brooding culinary version of J.D. Salinger in self imposed exile from the cooking elite.  The whole time continuing to cook food only accessible to the very wealthy.  Go ahead, try and get a seat at his restaurant in England.  I find the opening scene of Bourdain in a recording studio with allusions to the punk movement, ironic.  He finds in White a kindred spirit who believes he is catering to the masses while all the time rubbing shoulders with the most inaccessible chefs in the industry and attending invitation only dinner parties in exotic locations with ingredients found on the endangered species list. 

Bourdain's infatuation with White revolves around a picture of the man at a young age with a cigarette dangling from his mouth and a face framed by a mass of disheveled hair instead of a crisp white chef's hat.  How avant garde!  I fail to see the importance to food of smoking and listening to punk rock.  Before you begin to believe that White's demeanor is a recent phenomenon take a look at this video from the height of his success as a young kitchen star.

Both White and Chef Raymond Blanc (his mentor) discuss cooking with an attitude that they are doing something vitally important to civilization.  One would begin to wonder if, in fact, there is a Nobel Prize for culinary arts (there's not). The food looks beautiful and probably tastes great but, the "one must suffer for their art " demeanor is enough to kill an appetite.  Not to mention the smoking at the table and in the kitchen.

What may come as a shock to the likes of Bourdain and White, and maybe many of you, is there have been two people who held the British Banner for culinary arts much higher long before the likes of Chef White.  These two are amongst my favourite all time cooking superstars and were as hard core as it gets.  I am talking about The Two Fat Ladies, Clarissa Dickson-Wright and Jennifer Paterson.  Their show taught me more about food and cooking than anyone other than Graham Kerr and Jacque Pepin.  Here is a clip:

Tell me that food doesn't look fucking good (there, I used the f word, that makes me hard core, right?).  And if you think the Two Fat Ladies aren't "hard core" check out their Wikipedia pages here and here.  For Christ's sake Paterson died of lung cancer from smoking, surely that beats a dangling cigarette?  And they traveled by motorcycle, Anthony.  For me Dickson-Wright and Paterson embody the ideals of British culinary culture.  Go to YouTube and spend an afternoon watching their videos, they will entertain and inform you with a sense of humour about themselves and their food. 

Now, it is true that the Two Fat Ladies series didn't start until the mid-nineties, about the time that White was receiving his third Michelin star, but, both Dickson-Wright and Paterson had been cooking for a long time and cooking the kinds of meals seen in their shows.  Paterson had been writing about food even before White opened his first restaurant.  And, the food White was cooking in his earliest days was the food of French chefs he trained under, it was not until he "retired" that White transformed his cuisine to the English country style his restaurants cook today.  As far as preparing and eating "snout to hoof" for a television audience, again Dickson-Wright and Paterson were amongst the earliest. 

Does this mean I have lost my bromantic feelings for Anthony Bourdain?  Of course not.  Bourdain has done a lot to remove the mystique from the profession of Chef and let us all in to the world of professional kitchens in a way that we did not have before.  His style of writing and style of his No Reservations show are brilliantly easy to follow and entertaining to boot.  But, keep in mind, this is only one man's experience.  There have always been kitchens that were run without the "punk" attitude and the vulgar language.  And, while a professional kitchen is a stressful place to work it is no less true for many work places like an emergency room, the trading floor of a stock market, a riot, a fire and many others where the consequences are more severe than an offended dinner guest.

What a chef does is provide a culinary experience that helps us escape the everyday hassles of jobs, bosses, family and bills.  There is only one other form of pleasure that provides as much satisfaction but, professionals in that realm tend to end up in jail.  And just like real love is something that we experience in the home, real food culture is also something that is best enjoyed in the home.  In fact, the home cooks, in my opinion, are the ones who are truly maintaining a nation's cultural heritage.  Look, the punk movement so worshiped by Bourdain was born out of the disenfranchised youth of Britain who failed to find relevance in the music of super groups like Pink Floyd and Queen.   Likewise, in matters of food, the mass appeal of street food, greasy spoons and dinner clubs is born from a culture that can't understand paying $300 to sit nervously at a dinner table scared they may be attacked by a megalomaniac chef who didn't like their take on his deconstructed Pot au Feu!

Culture - all the knowledge and values shared by a society - started at the side of a camp fire discussing the days events and the meaning of life while waiting for some slow footed wildebeest to transform into a succulent golden brown and delicious slab of goodness.  That is the very essence of cooking and is best when shared with loved ones in the home and not by professionals in the bawdy house of some Chez I'm Great.  I love the fact that British food is regaining its rightful place as a world cuisine and hope that a return to the food of the peasantry in all cultures will soon replace that of the gentry and I suspect Chef White will continue to draw inspiration from that cuisine.  There does seem to be a mellowing of Chef White, who now endorses Knorr products, and there are several videos where he is featured giving tips for home cooking encouraging home cooks to keep it simple.  Good on him.  And good on British food.

Downpour Downunder

So, if a wine is more expensive it follows that said wine should be better, right?  Well, no.  Both Australia and New Zealand have experienced a cool summer this year and are looking at a developing weather bomb that may damage much of the (already late) grape harvest.  The losses in volume have to be made up and so this might be passed along as higher prices for those wines.  In short, the same factors that dictate price in every consumable are the factors that dictate price for wine: supply, demand, production costs and quality.  Therefor, when enough of the factors are impacted negatively producers are faced with having to increase prices to cover losses and meet production costs or suffer losses and not have funds for the next season's plantings.

Does this mean Australian and New Zealand wines for the 2012 vintage will be expensive?  Well, no.  Producers still have the option of augmenting yields with imported grapes to offset any damages that might occur and, governments have the option of subsidies for crop losses.  However, if you are a fan of these regions' wines, you may have to do your research prior to purchasing to avoid disappointment.  It will also mean depending on barrel tasting to determine the quality.  Certainly, if barrel tasting shows good signs and yields are reduced, the best of each region will come in at a much higher price.  Lower end wines will probably see some "enhancements" through technique and imported grapes and keep the prices within sale-able range.

I will also add, there is nothing to say that the crops will be damaged prior to harvesting and they may reach above average yields, but with a cool summer and late harvest the wine world will be interested to see how the Kiwis and Aussies respond.  And, I think this is just a great illustration of how wine prices are determined and how various regions respond.

The other point of interest is the 2011 season here in Ontario and upper New York wine regions was equally atypical with an extremely wet harvest.  It will be fascinating to, eventually, get to tastings between these four regions' products from the 2011/2012 vintages.  I love my hobby.

Edit: Here is an interesting story that will also illustrate how wine prices are set.