In case you haven’t picked up on it already, I have a thing for sweeteners.  Which is not to say I have a sweet tooth; I don’t really care for white sugar, and I can go for weeks or months without dessert and not miss it.  While the great triumph of white sugar is that it’s had all flavor stripped from it (New! and Special! Now with Absolutely No Flavor!), I revel in the unique flavors of other sweeteners: palm sugar ground with ginger, fireweed honey, blue agave syrup, sorghum, treacles or molasses, panela, demerara, turbinado, and muscovado sugars.  If you recall, I’ve even made my own fruit syrups, by soaking prunes in bourbon and armagnac, apricots in Sauternes, and dried apples in applejack… 

And now I’ve added vincotto to my flavor arsenal.  Vincotto is Italian for “cooked wine.”  It’s not actually made from wine, but from the “must” or juice of red grapes that would usually go into wine.  It’s basically the same product as saba or sapa, which come from northern Italy, while it’s called vincotto down south.  Apulia, in the heel of Italy, is a traditional area of production, whereas this hand-produced version hails from Sicily.  All these sweeteners date from the days before refined sugars, when honey and reduced fruit juices were the only sources for a little sweetness in life.  Cooked down for the better part of day, the result is still a free-flowing liquid, but one with all the flavor of a rich molasses, except that it’s still got a grapey, fruity lightness at the heart of it, and maybe just a whiff of smoke from the cooking fire.

What do you do with vincotto?  In addition to pouring a little over fruits, ice cream, baked goods, and desserts (or even oatmeal for breakfast), it’s great in salad dressings and also provides a wonderful counterpoint to savory foods.  Drizzle it over chunks of a firmer, grating cheese, such as Italian Piave or Parmigiano Reggiano.  Vincotto is also a great ingredient to use in meat sauces.  For my pickled tongue (the pork tongue in the Club, not the tongue in my mouth), my favorite sauce is a mixture of vincotto with an “essence of fig purée” that comes from Tuscany.  Adding a splash of good, but inexpensive, balsamic vinegar balances the sweetness.

At $16 for a 250 ml bottle, it may seem pricey, but not for the flavor it packs.  A bottle will last you many months, if not the better part of a year.  Many authorities on Italian cooking will tell you that if you blend a little vincotto with a good red wine vinegar, the result is actually superior to a real 15- or 25-year old balsamic vinegar from Modena, which costs $100 or more.

This vincotto is available from the Sausage Debauchery Store.  But, if you’re a local and a Club member, send me an email to place your order instead of ordering directly from the store, and you will pay just a fraction of the regular shipping and handling charges as Scott will bundle our orders together.  In a few weeks, Scott is bringing in a fig vincotto and a peperoncino vincotto, and then we’ll be cooking!  When I grill under my grape vines for the first time this year, I’m gonna drizzle the finished skewers with that peperoncino vincotto and dream I’m in Calabria!

I’m probably just late getting to the party, but I have only recently discovered how marvelously Dan Schreiber’s Salted Dark Milk Chocolate pairs with red wine!

Especially the less tannic, more fruit-forward, international style of wine that’s still dominant.  I first tried this “red wine” from Chile when it was on Piccadilly’s tasting last month and was immediately won over by this blend of Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Carignan, and Cabernet Sauvignon.  I am not usually a fan of the soft, easy-pleasy wines made from Merlot, but this but this one is quite a bit more serious while still being easy on the tongue and on the wallet.  It’s a Jorge Ordonez selection, so you’d expect it to be a great value, but unlike some of his Spanish wines, which now taste more like Vanilla Creamsicles from all the toasty American oak they marinate in, this wine spends a few months in French oak barrels.  Just enough to give it some backbone and smooth the edges of this concentrated and seriously ripe blend.  It’s a great value for $10 or so.

And yesterday, I had my first chance to try Dan’s new “Pious” bar, made with one ingredient: cacao beans.

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I had a good time with some good friends at Piccadilly’s special tasting yesterday (30+ wines for $3).  Ok, Ok, I should have mentioned this earlier and listed it on the Events page (Sorry, Paul, my bad!), but then I would have had to body surf from table to table.  Besides, it completely slipped my mind until I saw the text from R at 3, reminding me that the tasting started in a couple hours.

Although sipping wine with friends is a simple, civilized pleasure, I really enjoy a tasting like this as a chance to make new discoveries, to get a kind of snapshot of what’s going on in the world of wine.

A good balance of the wines were from the “old” world, but the style of wine-making most in evidence was “new” world, with the emphasis on freshness and fruit.  The big discovery here was Robertson Winery, from South Africa.  While more and more new world wines have tried to make themselves over in the style that Robert Parker likes, with concentrated, jammy fruit and a background of creamy vanilla from toasted American oak, I find such wines cloying.  (Someone else I know has called them “slutty.”)  The wines from Robertson were a refreshing departure from this model: fresh, clean, bright, and light.  Their Shiraz was nothing like the Australian version, almost pale in color, delicately scented, and refreshing to drink, rather than pounding your palate into submission.  All of their wines were a good value, but the lower end ones, at $9 a bottle are a great deal.

But, contrary to the way most tastings go (downhill, that is), the last wine I tasted was the best.  The simple vin de table, Plan Pegau, from vineyards in and around Chateauneuf du Pape, stole the show.  Because it’s a blend that includes grapes from outside the area, they aren’t even allowed to list a vintage, but they manage to get around this restriction by giving it a lot number: lot # 2006.  While all of the wines I had tasted smelled fine, faultless, this is the first one that was perfumed, scented.  Instead of giving it all away, announcing right up front who and what it was, this wine was alluring, beguiling, elegant and elusive, suggesting depths that it was in no hurry to reveal.  Is it just a coincidence that the winemaker is a woman, Laurence Feraud?  Perhaps.  Whatever the reason, at $16 a bottle, this wine was more enticing and ultimately more satisfying than other wines in the tasting costing twice as much.  My neighbor, Mary, gave it 10 out of 10, her only perfect score of the evening.  Enough said.

Just finished reading this small book by Alice Feiring, a wine writer I hadn’t heard of before. Like the wines she champions, the book can seem a little thin, patchy, and doesn’t quite bring it all together in one neat package, but her soul is clearly in it and that’s enough to make it interesting and to keep you engaged. Although she makes too much of demonizing Robert Parker Jr., it is refreshing to read someone championing smaller, quieter, more interesting and traditionally-made wines. She loves wines from the Loire, particularly its cabernet franc, and that alone is reason enough to love her. She also has good things to say about French gamay, a grape that the annual flood of Beaujolais Nouveau had made me despair of ever being interesting, so I’ll be on the lookout now for some worthier representatives.

She doesn’t make wine recommendations–except to mention a few estates and a few importers–which is a pity, but you can track those down on her blog if you’re interested. Here are just a couple quotes from the book that stuck with me:

Speaking of recent Burgundy vintages: “Without the earthiness from the stems, the wines were all fruit and acid. They didn’t work. Destemming reminds me of the strange habit of peeling an apple or carrot, not eating the skin of a potato or cutting the bloom off a Camembert. It reminds me of those who don’t enjoy the smells of sex, and those who have to keep hand sanitizers in their pocket” (202).

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OK, if you’re such a loser that you have nothing better to do on a Sunday than cruise the internet and read people’s blogs (particularly the blogs of ultralosers, who have nothing better to do on a Sunday than post on their blogs), here is your reward, your sweet vindication:

Find the retailer nearest to you who is selling Giovanni Puiatti’s “Le Zuccole” cabernet franc from Friuli, and, as soon as their doors open, buy all that you can. In Urbana, the older, 2003 vintage is available at The Corkscrew for $10 a bottle, which is a steal of a deal. If you’ve followed this blog at all, you’ll know that I don’t recommend much wine. There is an ocean of mediocre wine out there, as well as a lot of very decent wine, selling for very decent prices. Only once or twice a year do I find an elegant, beautifully-crafted bottle of wine, low in alcohol but high enough in acidity to partner perfectly with food, going for $10 or less, and only then do I have something to write about.

Of course, if you like big, alcoholic, over-oaked, smack-you-upside-the-head-with-fruit wines that slip their tongue in your ear with the first sip, then this ain’t for you. Although cabernet franc can have fresh raspberry fruit flavors and even rich chocolate and pepper aromas in really ripe years, I most appreciate its dark side or down-to-earth side: the funky, meaty, vegetal, and herbaceous flavors that develop with a few years of bottle age. The summer of 2003 was a scorcher in Europe (remember people dropping like flies in France?), and so, as you would expect, the wine shows great concentration and ripe fruit for the price (although what I taste is less raspberry than that sour Morello cherry that makes Valpolicella so beguiling, as well as a hint of blackcurrant). The amazing things is that, under these conditions, he still managed to produce a red wine with only 12% alcohol and enough acidity to allow it to age beautifully for the past 5 years. Maybe part of the secret is the “metodo Puitatti,” developed by his father, which ferments and ages the wine entirely in stainless steel, without any exposure to air. The result is a very pure and clean varietal wine, well-balanced and smooth, that’s perfect with grilled meats, sausages, funky aged cheeses, and rich charcuterie.