The Chamber's Flavors of Florence and Awesome Auction

Coming up this Tuesday, November 13th (Dad's Birthday!), I will put what I know about cooking to the test.

At one point, for the blink of an eye, I created a catering company that centered around foods like chicken salad, spaghetti and simple sandwiches for events and businesses. It was a good time and I learned a lot, but got away from my love for wine and beer. Now, I have a chance to bring it all together.

In a few weeks, I will go up against this town's best. They are going to come up with some delicious food. Many will be complex, some simple. I'm going to come up with a hybrid of this: MY version of Creole Gumbo.

In Louisiana, most of the gumbo will be divided into two categories: Creole and Cajun. For those of you that don't know, Cajun is more chicken and andouille sausage based. Creole is more seafood based (There is also a dish known as gumbo z'herbes, vegetable based for lent). What I want to do is almost combine the two.

Now I love both versions of the gumbo, but there are aspects that I would like to "enhance." Please, nobody from New Orleans hurt me for what I'm about to write: I love the tomatoes and okra combination of Creole gumbo. I also love the chicken and andouille aspects of Cajun gumbo. That, with a little spice know how, combine for the gumbo that I love to make. Why added spice? Because in this cooler time of the year, if you don't take advantage of adding a little heartwarming spice to a hearty dish, well in my opinion, you are just missing out on opportunity.

Now this blog is supposed to be about wine, but it won't happen this time. Gumbo (or many soups/stews for that matter) doesn't exactly pair well with wine because of the viscosity of the stew. Maybe a prosecco or sparkling wine would do nicely, but I would like to recommend something to you that people from the Bayou have known for years: Schwarzbier. This beer is essentially a blackened lager, and if you are from Louisiana, you simply know it by this name: Dixie Brewing Company Blackened Voodoo Lager. There is a catch... with the exception of the andouille sausage, I want everything coming from South Carolina, so I will use our version which is Charleston's own Westbrook "Dark Helmet" Schwarzbier.

For more information on this event, copy and paste the following link to your browser:
http://pdfoodie.com/wordpress/2012/10/13/flavors-of-florence-celebrity-chef-competition-promises-to-be-a-winner/


Wish me luck in this and if you have a creative name for my hybrid Gumbo, leave a suggestion in the comments area. Thanks!

--Cheers!!!

My Mission Statement

I can still remember the first bottle of “wine” I ever drank. It was back in my fraternity days at USC and it was a bottle of Boone’s Farm Piña Colada. My God that tasted awful! I didn’t like it then and well, let’s just say that I really don’t like it now. The second bottle I ever had was a bottle of Foxhorn White Zinfandel I served when I cooked my then girlfriend a “gourmet” dinner of well, let’s just call it “Chicken Finger Parmesan.”

Why am I telling you this? From these simple roots, I grew a passion for what I do professionally. I needed a job to pay for bills in college and little did I know then that this simple job would grow into something that I absolutely love. I love the fact that I can educate, or at least try to educate people on a subject that seems so elusive to some. I love to help people know: why we drink wine.

In March of 2006, I lived in Columbia and worked at a little place called The Gourmet Shop. One night in March, we hosted a wine tasting to arguably one of the best winemakers at the time and unequivocally one of the best wineries in the world. The winemaker’s name was Jean-Bernard Delmas, and the winery’s name was Chateau Haut-Brion. Monsieur Delmas brought all of his wines from the elusive and often underrated 2001 vintage (one of my personal favorites) from France’s famed Bordeaux region (specifically, Graves). We tasted through the wines over the course of 3 hours in a sold out, jammed packed room and Monsieur Delmas commanded the room, never talking down, never talking above people. He was a very down to earth man, even for a Frenchman. I was so impressed by his demeanor and his wine, that I risked my rent money for that month to buy his La Mission de Haut-Brion and had him personally sign the bottle. It said “To Bob and Millie, here is my love for yours.” I later gave it to my parents so they could celebrate their 46th anniversary. They don’t quite remember the dinner they had, but they remember the bottle and they talk about it to this day. Now I’m not telling this story to show what a great son I try to be (Love you Mom and Dad!). I tell it so that I can say this: Wine Tells a Story.

I’ve said this before and the realist in me will say it again: It’s wine. You drink it. But there can be so much more to wine than just that. Red wine is remarkable in that when you drink it in moderation, it can help lower your cholesterol. But past that, there really is a romance to it. Wine does tell a story. I think specifically to the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” when Mary and George Bailey finish a home for the Martini family:

“Bread... that this house may never know hunger.
Salt... that life may always have flavor.
And wine... that joy and prosperity may reign forever. Enter the Martini Castle.”

It may not be the first chapter like a first date or moving into a home. It could come later on to mark a big promotion. It can close the chapter with a wedding. It could come at the end to celebrate love lost. You could have it like my parents did on their anniversary, and subsequently every anniversary since.

Even those among us that don’t drink wine, we wait for that one moment after midnight in the new year when we watch that ball drop and for one moment, everything is right in the world and no matter what happens, hope exists while we sip our bubbly. We drink scotch, bourbon and vodka to unwind, but we have wine with dinner. We tailgate with beer and liquor, but we celebrate with Champagne. It’s for the best times and times to come. It’s why we drink wine.

Why my Hands were torn up and why bees are annoying
(Winemaking in Oregon, Part 2)—by Joshua Mason

Before I set out for Oregon a few weeks ago, I had one purpose: to come back with purple hands. What I didn’t realize was that having just purple hands was in fact, lowballing it.

Before the grape harvest is in full effect, winemakers have to take samples of their grapes to see how far they have progressed. Not only this, but performing tests let the winemaker know when precisely to harvest, and can schedule a harvest around these results. As an added bonus, outside wineries that would like to purchase grapes are curious and want to know how the crop is coming as well. This is where I came in after helping clean equipment in the winery.

Now, you just don’t go to a spot in the vineyard and pick a few grapes. The vineyard itself is divided up into select parcels, called “Blocks.” The goal of separating the vineyard up like this is because one style of grape that may thrive in one area may do poorly in another. To give an example of the winery I was at (Maysara Vineyards), there is a serious elevation change from the main entrance to the highest point of the property. Eyeballing it, it is a difference of around 800 feet. At the top of the highest ridge are windy conditions and at the lowest, very calm. Different styles or “clones” of the Pinot Noir that is grown there thrive in each and as a result, provide different, complex aromatics and tastes that will come through in the final product. Given that there are many blocks, many different samples must be selected. In this case, there were more than 21 different samples pulled.

The winemaker, Tahmiene Momtazi would hand select these samples and fill a 5 gallon bucket with grapes from that particular block to bring to me. My job was twofold: to hand crush the grapes into juice so that the juice could be lab tested, and combine the tested juice samples together to help create homemade yeast that would be used to help ferment the juice from sugary juice into alcohol.

How to explain the simplicity of hand crushing: put the grapes and stems into a strainer, take your hands and push as much juice through the strainer into a graduated cylinder. There is a problem with this. The strainer is metal and my hands are not. After a while, the metal starts to tear away the skin. Not enough to make you bleed, but enough to let you know that your hands will soon become raw. Also, you get first hand (no pun intended) experience as to how the skins of the grape color the wine. Yes, skins give wine color. They also give hands color. By the time I was done with this process, my hands were so purple that outsiders would think that I hand painted the end zones for the Minnesota Vikings. Just to let you know, my hands were purple, skin was torn off, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world and would do it again in a heartbeat!

There is one tradeoff to crushing the grapes that is not good: bees. Bees love this juice as though they had found an oasis in the desert. Whether using the crusher or hand crushing, bees tend to swarm to not only the juice, but the grapes before they are crushed as well as the leftover grape skins. They aren’t there to sting you, they just want some of that nectar and if you get in the way of it, they will try their best to get you out of the way. That is why once again, cleaning everything is essential. I digress…

Now once each sample is crushed, they are taken into the lab to, amongst other things, get tested for their “brix” level. Long story short (and simplified), brix signifies the amount of sugar in the grape. Brix is measured either with a hydrometer or a refractometer. These tests actually seek out the amount of sucrose in the sample to give an exact figure. However, wine has many other compositions besides sucrose that combine for sweetness. So the tests are an approximation. Why is this important? Simple, when you ferment juice, you need to use yeast that is also being made to convert sugar into alcohol. If you know how much sugar is in the juice, you will be able to predict the final amount of alcohol knowing that each percentage of brix equals about .55% of alcohol. I say “about” because once again, the brix level is an approximation. The target for a great brix level in Pinot Noir is 24. Samples that were sent to the lab hovered between 23 and 25 brix, making this an outstanding harvest.

Once the tests are performed, the samples were combined in a container that resemble water cooler containers and then warmed up by simple use of an electric blanket covering the vessels. This will become the yeast that starts fermentation down the road for what critics and winemakers alike are calling the best vintage in Oregon in the past 50 years.

In my final article in this series, I will talk about the fermentation process and my final days at the Maysara winery.

--Cheers!

Making Wine in Oregon, Part 1—by Joshua Mason
This past week, I had taken a working vacation with one purpose; to make wine. The winery I was given the opportunity to work was at Maysara, a little winery tucked away in the hills just Southwest of McMinnville, Oregon. To give you an idea of where it is, go southwest of Portland for about 40 miles to the heart of the Willamette Valley.
Maysara is under a sort of rebirth. The once tiny winery is currently building what locals call a “palace” of a new winery that will more than quadruple their size (Approximately 42,000 square feet) upon completion in a few months. This new palace is the brainchild of owner Moe Momtazi, an engineer by trade who has passed the winemaking duties to his daughter and my friend, Tahmiene.
Albeit she is under 30 years old, she is a veteran to the wine industry having helped make wines for places as popular as New Zealand’s Kim Crawford and being no slouch, has already turned in monster ratings from Wine Spectator, Wine Advocate and Wine & Spirits with her latest release of wines. She is now the next in line of this strong family business with her sister Naseem overseeing sales and her parents Moe and Flora with oversight duties.
This family came from very humble roots with Moe and Flora having fled from Iran when the Shah was deposed and Khomeini came into power, eventually making it to the United States where they lived throughout from Atlanta to now McMinnville.
Now that you know a little of their background, you might have an idea of their willingness to succeed. To start off, they grow some of the most sought after grapes in the valley. Winemakers from St Innocent, Kelley Fox, Dobbes and Willamette Valley Vineyards just to name a few, constantly check on the fruit that the Momtazi Vineyards produce and more often than not, they purchase this fruit to make wines under their labels.
For those of you that don’t know, buying grapes from different vineyards is common practice in winemaking, not only to demonstrate different styles of wine, but to show off the winemaker’s abilities.
The fruit that the Momtazis keep goes into their own label, ranging from their estate Pinot Noir to their high end private select Pinot Noir (“Asha”), and they are highly rated. But before we get into the actual winemaking, I want to talk about a wine that is produced there: Three Degrees. It is a 91 Point wine (Wine & Spirits) that is priced under $20. Now, truth be told, this is a favorite wine of mine. I sell through about 10 cases every two months. Large Oregon wineries can sell Pinot Noir under $20 such as A to Z, Erath and Willamette Valley Vineyards and they produce quality juice. But for a small winery to produce a Pinot Noir for under $20? It isn’t impossible, but to have such quality is improbable.
Now, all of this having been said, here is why I think that every wine produced should be at least $80/bottle (thank God it isn’t). Here are some of the basics from my week of winemaking:
Cleaning

I know for a fact that everyone in the restaurant industry can relate to having to clean… every day and many times within that day. In a winery, it is no different. Having worked as a waiter, busboy, and general employee in restaurants, I knew there were times where pretty much everything had to be bleached and scrubbed down. Well, the Maysara winery is listed as Demeter certified 100% biodynamic. What that translates to is that there are no harsh chemicals used (only organic compounds) and that the winery is self-sustaining. What does this mean? I will explain this in further detail later.
There were so many pieces of equipment to clean. There are all the fermentation tanks that hold anywhere from 2000 to almost 5000 gallons of grape juice that will be converted into wine. Those tanks are all power washed with steaming hot water. But before the grapes make it there, they have to go into the crusher.
The crusher is a large tank (imagine a gas truck tank, but about half the size) with a bladder inside of it. When grapes are put inside of the tank, the bladder is inflated with air, thus pressing the grapes and squeezing all of the juice out into a holding tray. The inside of this tank must be scoured with a few basic ingredients: Proxy Carb (Sodium Percarbonate—a natural “wash” that when mixed with water, produces hydrogen peroxide and sodium carbonate) to clean, Citric Method to rinse and elbow grease…me. Let’s just say that there is a lot of scrubbing involved in a large tank, but when it is complete, the tank is hospital grade clean.
There are many other components to the process that need to be cleaned as well such as the sorting line, de-stemmer, and the bins that will hold the freshly picked grapes, but I’m running out of writing room for this week.
Next time, I’ll talk about more processes that I participated in and why my hands turned completely purple.
--Cheers!