We saw a lot of beautiful views during our Italian road trip, but none were more spectacular than those we got to take in at Brancaia’s Poppi estate in Radda in Chianti property. We made our way up steep, narrow, rocky roads to reach the winery, but once we got there, the payoff was well worth it!
Brancaia was born in 1981, when a Swiss couple, Brigitte and Bruno Widmer, fell in love with an abandoned estate in Castellina in Chianti, about 20 minutes from where we were. The story we were told on our visit is that the couple fell in love with the area and were initially interested in just buying a vacation home. In turn, they found and fell in love with the house on the Castellina property, but there was no way to purchase just the house, so they bought the whole thing. What a dream!
Within just a couple of years, they’d won first place award from a major Chianti Classico tasting. They quickly gained international recognition after this and began expanding, first buying the Poppi estate in 1989, which is now the family estate, followed by another property in Maremma called Grosseto in 1998. They’ve now long since established themselves in the top tier of Tuscan producers.
The family is now in its second generation of winemaking, although Brigitte and Bruno’s daughter Barbara, was reluctant to take on winemaking as she initially wanted to be an architect. Wine eventually won her over though, and she went on to study enology and viticulture. She has been in charge of winemaking and the vineyards at all three properties since 1998. That’s certainly a huge task, so in addition to the help of a team of about 40 people, she also relies on advice from enologist Carlo Ferrini, one of Italy’s most famous winery consultants.
Our visit coincided with the 2018 harvest, and it’s always exciting to see wineries during harvest as everything is in full action mode! As we moved through the tour we could basically follow the winemaking process as it was happening. Follow the process via these highlights:
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| Grapes still on the vines. |
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| Grapes coming in and being hand sorted. |
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| Juice being piped via gravity-flow into stainless steel fermentation tanks. |
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| Fermented wine aging in the barrel room. |
Note: Our visit was comped as a member of the wine industry. No other compensation was received, and as always, all opinions are my own.
All three of the properties are farmed sustainably, all following the guidelines of integrated production, which offers principles for sustainable practices in the vineyard, winery, and even in packaging. They’ve also been restricting the use of fertilizers and chemical pesticides in their vineyards since 1996, and do not use any conventional insecticides. Instead, useful insects are allowed to multiply. The limit irrigation and all harvests are done by hand. The vineyards have also been converting to organic practices and are certified since the 2019 vintage.
SUPER TUSCANS
Brancaia makes a full range of wines, in addition to grappa and olive oil. In addition to a Chianti Classico and a Chianti Classico Reserva, they also have several Super Tuscans. Personally, I know them better for this class of wine.
What are Super Tuscans you ask? This is the unofficial name for wines from Tuscany that play with blends outside those prescribed for their appellations, particularly those that include non-indigenous, international varieties like Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Syrah, Cabernet Franc, etc. Interestingly, at one point this also included wines that were made from 100% Sangiovese, because at the time Chianti Classico, as one example, required that at least 10% of the blend be made of up other grapes that are generally considered to be of lesser quality. The rules have changed over time, but some wineries making 100% Sangio still prefer to stay IGT.
The origins story of how the Super Tuscans came to be is among my favorite bits of wine lore. In the 1970s, winemakers in Tuscany began to increasingly experiment with their blends. These were high-quality wines, however, because the fell outside the DOC regulations, they were classified as Vino de Tavola (VdT), or table wines. Producers decided to release these wines anyways. Sassicaia from Tenuta San Guido was the first to be released commercially, and it was soon followed up by Tignanello from Antinori, and others quickly followed. These wines very quickly gained international recognition and began commanding BIG bucks. Because they were still labeled as table wines, they basically made a mockery of Italy’s quality pyramid.
Whether intentional or not, their existence was a big FU to the regulatory system and the system was forced to accommodate them. The Indicazione Geografica Tipica (IGT, nowadays you'll also IGP) classification was essentially created in 1992 to accommodate them. Nowadays, you’ll find Super Tuscans in all tiers of the quality pyramid, and there are various appellations now dedicated to them. The underdogs are underdogs no more.
I should reiterate that the term "Super Tuscan" is completely unofficial. It was created by the media and now is used as shorthand for this rather large, broad class of wines, and it caught on with consumers. A lot of wineries would not use it themselves to describe their wines.
TASTING
After our tour we had a chance to taste through the range of wines. We tasted mostly at the bar inside, but I’d recommend taking a glass to the patio outside where you can take in the beautiful views!
Here are quick notes on all the wines we tasted on our visit.
Blend: 100% Merlot | 12.5% Alc
Nose: Pretty pink floral note, pink grapefruit, tangerine, bright cherry.
Palate: Floral perfume continues on the palate, grapefruit skin, peach, cherries, hints of stone on the finish.
Winery’s Recommended Pairings: Aperitif, salads, crustaceans, seafood, and poultry.
Blend: 80% Sangiovese, 10% Merlot, 10% Cabernet Sauvignon | 13.5% Alc | Avg Price $19
This wine gets it name from the fact that it blends three different grape varieties coming from all three of their vineyards.
Nose: Rich black cherry, deep red plum, spices, cloves.
Palate: Savory herbs and tomato paste join the other notes on the palate. Good QPR.
Winery’s Recommended Pairings: Various pasta dishes, roasted and sautéed white meat, white poultry, fried and grilled fish.
Blend: 100% Sangiovese | 13.5% Alc | Avg Price: $42
Nose: A bouquet of pink and red flowers, herbs, and bramble, followed by sour cherry and red plum.
Palate: Deeper on the palate with pepper and light tobacco notes, red plum. There’s an elegant smoothness to the finish.
Winery’s Recommended Pairings: Salami, cheese, pasta, poultry and grilled meat.
Blend: 80% Sangiovese, 20% Merlot | 13.5% Alc | Avg Price: $43
Chianti Classico Riserva was the first wine the winery produced.
Nose: Cherries that have fallen onto a forest floor, tomato leaf, a little cedar.
Palate: Plums, red licorice, fennel, tomato leaf, and a hint of lavender join the mix. One of my faves from the tasting.
Winery’s Recommended Pairings: Grilled meats, beef and veal roasts, stews, grilled fish and pasta dishes with strong sauces.
Blend: 100% Cabernet Sauvignon | 14% Alc
Nose: Pine, salt, cassis, and plums.
Palate: A mix of red and black fruits including strawberry sauce, black cherry, raspberry, and dark plums, with pine, and light spice on the finish.
Winery’s Recommended Pairings: Salami and aromatic cheese but for a more formal meal the ideal pairing is almost any red meat, especially served rare if grilled or slow-braised.
Blend: 40% Cabernet Sauvignon, 40% Petit Verdot, 20% Cabernet Franc | 14% Alc | Avg Price: $56
Nose: Olive tapenade, cedar, forest floor, meaty undertones. Opens up considerably in the glass.
Palate: Red and black plums, cassis, star anise and other mixed spices. Velvety.
Winery’s Recommended Pairings: Food with balanced, intense flavours, meat and game dishes – fried or stewed – for poultry such as pigeon or pheasant.
Blend: 70% Merlot, 25% Sangiovese, 5% Cabernet Sauvignon | 14.5% Alc | Avg Price: $77
Nose: Violets, black plums, black cherry, hint of mint.
Palate: Beautiful, bright dark fruits, a hint of chocolate, and black pepper. Long, lovely finish.
This is their top-end cuvée and was indeed my favorite.
Winery’s Recommended Pairings: Dishes with strong flavors, dark meat such as beef or lamb.
Game – fried or stewed – dark wild fowl.
Blend: Pomace of Sangiovese, Merlot and a small proportion of Cabernet Sauvignon | 43% ABV
Nose: Vanilla, hay, light hints of flowers
Palate: Similar notes on the palate, along with grapeseed oil. Very smooth and brandy-like.
BRINGING BRANCAIA HOME WITH A PIZZA NIGHT
We recently decided to open a bottle of the Brancaia Tre Toscana IGT 2016 for a quaranteam pizza night. (Wine purchased from Wine.com for $19.99.) The blend for this wine is exactly the same, but this vintage was considerably meatier than my notes from the 2015 vintage. On the nose it showed notes of tomato paste, smoked meat, and mushrooms. It was likewise quite earthy on the palate, with black fruit, red fruits singed by the sun, stones, and black pepper on the finish. It was full-bodied, and had medium + to high acid and tannins. (14% alc.)
I would highly recommend decanting this wine as it started out quite tight when we first poured it. We also had a glass the next night, and it was MUCH better. It was richer, smoother, more polished, and less gamey, showing notes of licorice, violets, pomegranates, and even a little blood orange joining the party that had not been there the first night.
For our pizza night though, I made the dough based on this recipe from Breadtopia.com for Grilled Sourdough Pizza. I rolled out the dough quite thin for two pizzas, then Greg and Drew teamed up on decorating the pizzas with toppings and cooking them on the grill. It took some creative maneuvering to get them on the grill, but they came out nice a crispy with a little char.
The guys took our pizzas in two different directions. One was what you might call a meat-lovers style pizza with steak, peppers, and onions, with more classically Italian flavors. The second had Asian-inspired flavors mixed in with spicy pork belly, jalapeños, corn, and onions. Drew liked the wine with the spicy pork pizza, but most of us preferred it with the steak pizza, as it resonated with the earthy meaty notes. We also had a couple of California reds open, and I definitely preferred the spicy pork with these more fruit-driven wines.
I’d recommend having a pizza night of your own with a couple of different wines and mix and match for yourself!
Photo credits in this post are split between Greg and I, although as usual he took all the food pics, as well as the majority of the beautiful shots of scenery.
*****
The rest of the Italian Food, Wine, Travel blogging group is also exploring Super Tuscans this month. Check out Jill Barth's invitation post here. If you see this post early enough, feel free to join our Twitter chat on Saturday, June 27th at 8 am PT time. All are welcome, just hit up the hashtag #ItalianFWT.
Be sure to check out the rest of the group's posts.
*****
Also check out these other posts related to our Italian road trip.
And to brush up on Italian Wine check out my Italian Wine 101 Cheat Sheet
Additional sources used for this post:
Christine Havens : Brancaia: The Best of Both Worlds
Superiore.de : Brancaia
Decanter: Top Super Tuscans
Wine Enthusiast: What’s a Super Tuscan and is the Term Still Relevant?
WineFolly.com: Unofficial Star of Italy: Super Tuscan Wine - A good overview, but note that there is an error -- they mention Tignanello as the first Super Tuscan, but Sassicaia preceeded it by a couple of years.
This post contains affiliate links, including the following Amazon Associate links, from which I might receive a commission at no cost to you.
Do you know that feeling when you read a book or watch a movie and you don’t know exactly how you feel about it right away? Maybe you’re not sure if it’s good interesting or bad interesting. Maybe there’s something a little different about it or it challenges you in some way, but it sticks with you and you wrestle with it for a while, and you come out liking it all the more for it. I had that reaction to Champagne a while back. This wine has rattled around in mind for over a year. What’s more, a funny set of coincidences have arisen that have endeared it all the more to me.
This month’s Winophiles topic is “Unexpected Pleasures in Champagne” led by Gwendolyn Alley of Wine Predator. I was really excited by this topic and considered lots of different wines and angels. There are a bunch of Champers I’d love to cover at some point made from lesser-known permitted grapes in the region, or people using unusual techniques, and then there are the still wines in the region. So many wines, so little time!
It dawned on me that I have a friend, Alex, who started an import company with her husband and they’re bringing in beautiful, interesting, organic Champagnes by Charles Dufour. In particular, I had his Bistrøtage and Bistrøtage Rosé in mind. I reached out to her about teaming up in some way for this post, but the timing wasn’t working out and we left it for a future date.
Now running out of time and having difficulties finding specific bottles during COVID, I ultimately decided to find out more about a grower Champagne that had been stuck in my brain for the last year and a half. When I dug up my photos and notes of on the wine, lo and behold, I discovered that the winemaker is Charles Dufour.
The discovery was definitely an unexpected pleasure!
THE WINE
The wine had fruit notes of gold apples, peaches, and preserved lemon. There was a mix of sweet and savory notes, kind of like candy cap mushroom, along with yellow flowers. There was a slightly oxidative note on the palate that gave it toastiness. What threw me off about the wine at first was that it also reminded me a bit of a Pét-Nat in that it had this kind of raw, young, wild streak, although it was more vinous than a Pét-Nat. I wasn’t really expecting that in a Champagne and had to wrestle with it for a while, but ultimately decided I liked it, and like I said, it stuck around in my mind for all of this time. I'd love to revisit it at some point.
It’s a distinctive wine on the palate and it turns out that there is a lot that’s distinctive about how it’s made. He farms organically (certified by ECOCERT) and uses native yeast for his fermentations. He maintains a perpetual blend, which is a good way for smaller winemakers to maintain a house style without taking up all the room that is normally required for a reserve wine system the way larger houses do. In this system, winemakers add young wines to a designated tank or barrel each vintage, and then draw out as needed for their nonvintage blends. The system is often compared to the solera system used for making sherry.
Each year, Dufour makes a new “Bulles de Comptoir” cuvée combining the base wine from the perpetual blend with wine from the current vintage. Each one gets a new name and new label by a different artist. For this particular vintage, the label was created by a Bay Area artist named Joanie Hudson. In addition to the usual players of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, Dufour also uses a bit of Pinot Blanc in the cuvée, which is far less common. It tends to lend floral and honey notes to a blend and adds richness, all of which we can see here. It’s historically been allowed in the blends of the region, but very little is grown nowadays.
Apparently, “La Benjamine” means the youngest child born in a family. Charles is the ‘benjamine’ of his family, but reading that, the name also seemed to me reminiscent of that youthful, wild streak in the wine.
Dufour comes from a winemaking family and I get the sense the whole family tends to do things their own way. His father, Yves, decided to retire in 2010 and divvied up the vineyard lands in Vallée de l’Ours in the Aube Department between Charles and his sister, Julie, so that they got 6 hectares each. At that point, the vineyards were already undergoing conversion to organic farming. Apparently the family had begun the process of applying for biodynamic certification as well, but Charles ultimately decided to pull the plug, preferring to preserve some optionality for himself in farming practices. He does, however, continue to use quite a few biodynamic practices.
At the time Charles’ father decided to retire, his mother, Françoise Martinot, decided that she was not ready for retirement. She wanted to hang onto the Pinot Noir vines she has in the Vallée de l’Arce, located one valley over. Charles and Françoise ultimately decided to collaborate on the Bistrøtage wines that I hope we’ll get to explore another day.
THE PAIRING
We enjoyed these bubbles as part of a rather decadent brunch. We made these Salmon-Caviar Croque-Monsieurs based on a recipe from Le Bernardin. We used this version of the recipe, which is behind a pay wall, but it also available here. Basically they’re grilled cheese sandwiches with smoked salmon in place of ham, plus caviar. YUM!
“Bulles de Comptoir” means “bubbles of the counter” or bar. That to me suggests a certain casualness for this wine. It makes me think of bistros and the food they serve, making me think that it’s also intended to be paired with food. If I had remaining doubts about the wine, they completely went away when I tried it with these tasty sandwiches. They made for a VERY happy pair!
Now before you judge me too harshly for being bougey AF for talking about delighting in the pleasures of caviar and Champagne during such lean times as we’re living in, let me remind you that this was in the “Before Times” –– indulge me in reminiscing just a bit.
Let me also offer a few adaptations. First, if you are using caviar, spoon a little on top of the sandwiches instead of layering the caviar on the inside as is called for in the recipe. I find this allows the caviar to shine a bit more, and a little bit goes a lot further. You could also easily substitute salmon roe in for the caviar, or leave it off completely and top it with a béchamel sauce as in a classic croque-monsieur. I will say though that I have seen some very good deals on caviar during these lean times, which could make it a much more reasonable proposition.
As to the Champagne, well, I don't think that needs an excuse. As many great figures have noted before me, Champagne is always in order, in good times and in bad. We all need indulgences from time to time, even if it’s just via memories. Plus, topping what amounts to grilled cheese sandwiches with caviar makes for such a fun high-low combo!
GEEKY DETAILS
Taken from tech sheets here and here.
APPELATION: Aube, Champagne
COMPOSITION: 60% Pinot Noir, 30% Chardonnay, 10% PinotBlanc. The 2015 vintage makes up the base of the blend, with reserve wine from perpetual blend going back to 2010.
VINIFICATION: The perpetual blend is aged in barrels while the harvest ferments naturally in barrels and then aged for 11 months on the lees before racking followed by a rest of 2 months in vats, without fining, and without filtration. The bottles are disgorged in successive batches from January 2018. Extra raw dosage (<4g / l) without added sulfur.
TIRAGE: October 2016
DISGORGEMENT: January 2018
SOIL: Clay/Limestone
ABV:12%
AVERAGE PRICE: $64
*****
As I mentioned above, the rest of French Winophiles are exploring "Unexpected Pleasures in Champagne." Please join our twitter chat on Saturday 6/20/20 by following the hashtag #Winophiles. We’ll be live at 8am Pacific time!
And be sure to check out the rest of their posts:
Also be sure to check out these additional posts related to Champagne:
Additional sources used for this post and extra reading
This post contains affiliate links, including these Amazon links, from which I might earn a commission at no cost to you.
David Chang's Bo Ssäm is a delicious and surprisingly easy way to feed a group! We used the occasion to have comparative Riesling tasting with versions from the Finger Lakes in New York, Alsace in France, and the Nahe region of Germany.
One of our very favorite restaurants when we lived in NY, was David Chang’s Momofuku Ssäm Bar. The first time we went was in 2011 for a friend’s birthday not too long after we’d moved to the city. We’d pre-ordered their Bo Ssäm for the event and what a feast it was! It continues to be one of my very favorite food memories.
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| Photos from our first Bo Ssåm at Momofuku Ssäm Bar, plus a much younger Greg with our friends Glenn, Rob, and Adam. We were there celebrating Glenn's birthday. |
The Bo Ssäm is one of several large-format meals the restaurant offers that are available for pre-order. (Well, when one can go to restaurants again I assume it’ll be available again.) It showcases a big hunk of pork with all kinds of fixings. Here’s the website description:
The Bo Ssäm features a pork shoulder that we cure overnight, then slow roast for 6–8 hours before glazing with brown sugar and roasting juices. It comes with a dozen oysters, white rice, Bibb lettuce, Korean-style barbecue sauce, kimchi, and ginger scallion sauce. In the spirit of “ssäm,” which is Korean for “enclosed” or “wrapped,” we encourage guests to make wraps with the pork and condiments, or eat as they please. (Available for parties of 6–10 guests)
I loved the amazing mix of flavors and playing around with the different sauces. The oysters were also a surprise. They seemed like they shouldn't have worked in the mix, but their brininess cut the fatty richness of the pork in a beautiful way. The whole spread was unbelievably good. What I’ve now discovered is that it’s also unbelievably easy to make!
After over two months of being quite strict about social distancing due to Coronavirus, Greg and I decided it was time to start figuring out our “quaranteam” or social bubble, whatever you want to call it. Our friends Lucy and Drew were the first additions, given we’d all been similarly strict and we all love preparing a good feast together. (Regular readers will recognize them from our many trips to the Culinary Cabin, and you’ll be seeing more of them since they’re part of the team now.)
A Bo Ssäm feast seemed like an excellent group project to celebrate reducing isolation! We used the version of the recipe up at NYT Cooking. That’s behind a paywall, but luckily the recipe is up at various different sites including Epicurious and Taste. The recipe is also in the Momofuku cookbook, which I definitely recommend. I prepped and babysat the pork while it cooked, Drew shucked and prepped the oysters (I love oysters, but I hate shucking them!), the guys and I divvied up the sides and fixings, and Lucy made dessert.
The pork preparation could not be simpler. The curing and cooking were both super easy, it just all requires time, although it doesn’t require a lot of your attention through most of the process. We stuck to the recipe pretty faithfully, although we cut the quantity in half – I’d say even that made more than 6 servings. Shucking oysters aside, this has to be one of the easiest, most showstopping ways to feed a crowd and it packs a flavor punch.
I realize we’ve been on a slow-cooked pork kick around here, as two piggy posts have landed next to each other. But hey, it’s so freak’n good!!!
Riesling Party
An added bonus of a dinner with friends is that you get to open multiple bottles of wine, and I love to mix and match to see what works best. The mix of spicy, sweet, fatty, and salty flavors here screamed out for Riesling to me. Since several bottles would inevitably be required, I figured, why not have a comparative riesling party?!
I’ve mentioned that Riesling is my favorite white grape, and a big part of that is its ability to make such a wide range of wine styles –– sparkling, bone dry, and every level of sweetness to full-on dessert wines. Moreover, the incredible range of flavors it’s able to produce makes it easy to pair with a wide range of cuisines. It also tends to be high in acidity, which is another plus when it comes to pairing it with food. This is also a very aromatic grape, that will often jump out of the glass with a whole kaleidoscope of aromas and flavors that can include everything from citrus, stone fruits, apples, pineapple, stones, honeysuckle, jasmine, ginger, and of course the petrol notes that it’s often known for.
I decided to open bottles from the Finger Lakes in New York (the subject of this month’s Wine Pairing Weekend discussion), Alsace in France, and the Nahe region of Germany. All three wines are from standard-bearers in their respective regions, and all were in a similar price range. In a way, this line-up also reflects the progression of my relationship with this grape.
All wines today were purchased via Wine.com.
Dr. Konstantin Frank Semi-Dry Riesling 2016
My appreciation of Riesling started with a trip to the Finger Lakes in New York. Funny enough, this trip was just a few months after that Bo Ssäm at Ssäm Bar. We headed up to Seneca Lake for a party celebrating the wedding of two friends (the bride is from the area). We tacked on a couple of days to explore the wine region – I actually wrote about the experience here. (Wow! I'm realizing that trip was exactly 9 years and one day ago! Where does the time ago?)
We were delighted with the QPR of the wines of the region in general and we learned a ton. The trip really opened my eyes to the grape’s possibilities. The region makes its Rieslings in a full range of styles from dry to sweet, which quickly undid me of the notion that Riesling equals sweet. (This was before I’d started studying wine.) I also found that often a little a bit of sweetness was not a bad thing, as a touch of residual sugar often helps balance out the grapes searing acidity on the palate.
One winery I always wished we’d been able to visit is Dr. Konstantin Frank on Keuka Lake, as it’s a key benchmark winery of the region. There has been a wine industry in the Finger Lakes since the 1800s, however, native species like Concord grapes were the norm for the majority of that time. It gets REALLY cold in the Finger Lakes and their growing season is very short. It’s at the upper latitudes of where it’s possible to grow wine grapes and has a climate very similar to many of Germany’s wine regions. The lakes themselves help moderate temperatures and without them, grape growing would be impossible. Nonetheless, it proved quite tricky to coax Vitis vinifera, the species to which all of our beloved wine grapes belong, to grow here.
That all changed thanks to Dr. Frank. A professor of plant sciences who held a Ph.D. in viticulture, Dr. Frank arrived in the US in 1951 and soon took a position at Cornell University. He had experience working with cold climate grapes and became convinced that the real problem was that they weren’t working with the proper rootstocks for the conditions of the region. He eventually found a collaborator in Charles Fournier, a French Champagne maker and president of nearby Gold Seal Vineyards. Their work made a difference and now the region is well-known for its fine wines. Dr. Frank founded his own winery in 1962, just over a decade after his arrival in the US, and it continues to be one of the benchmark wineries of the region.
We opened the Dr. Konstantin Frank Semi-Dry Riesling 2016 for our Bo Ssäm. I chose the semi-dry version because I thought a little residual sugar would help match the sweet and spicy components in our meal. It worked out great! It actually proved the pairing winner. Even Lucy, who is not a fan of off-dry wines in general, had to give it to this wine as the best match.
For me, this wine stylistically fell between the other two examples. It had a little more residual sugar and was fruitier than our wine from Alsace, which was key for the reason mentioned above, but it also had a more robust structure than the version Germany, which helped it stand up to the robust textures and flavors of the food. Admittedly, it was less complex than the other two wines, but it made the best pairing.
Tasting Notes: Pear, peaches, tangerine skin, ginger, and honeysuckle. It finished with lots of minerality, and showed the most petrol character of the three wines. Fresh acidity helps to keep the sweetness balanced.
Geeky Details
(From the tech sheet.)
Winemaking: The fruit was picked in the early morning to retain freshness and fermented at low temperatures in stainless steel tanks. The fermentation was stopped before dryness to preserve the fruity character of this wine.
Additional paring suggestions: Orange chicken, paella, gumbo, turkey with cranberry sauce.
Alcohol: 11.5%,
Acidity: 0.73 g/100mL
pH: 3.10
Sugar: 2.5%
Price: $19
Trimbach Riesling Alsace 2017
This is one of the wines that really cinched my love for Riesling. I’m not certain, but I’m guessing I first tried Alsace’s take on this grape during my CMS Somm course. I started buying this bottle of Trimbach regularly because I always found it to be excellent at the price point. I’ve continued buying it ever since.
Alsace is generally known for a dry style of Riesling, although wines at all sweetness levels exist. Trimbach’s wine are known for being particularly steely. I went into depth on Alsace and it’s wines here, so I’ll invite you to check out that post for background on the region. It also happens to include a previous vintage of this wine with additional details.
The Trimbach Riesling Alsace 2017 was the crowd favorite when sipped on its own, but it did not work with the food. It wasn’t bad with the oysters, but it clashed with the pork. It was just way too dry for the sweeter components in the meal.
Tasting Notes: Stony minerals galore. Grapefruit, white peach, green apples, and white flowers. Super steely with lots of acidity. It was definitely the driest wine of the group and had the most minerality.
Geeky Details
(From the tech sheet.)
Winemaking: The grapes are normally harvested in late October and fermented in temperature-controlled stainless steel and concrete vats. There is no secondary malolactic fermentation in order to maintain as much natural acidity as possible.
Alcohol: 12.5%
Residual Sugar: 2.7 g/L
Price: $20 on sale. (I usually see this for around $24-$25.)
The Trimbach might not have worked with the Bo Ssäm, but here's another recent pairing where it did work.
Dönnhoff Estate Riesling Nahe 2018
It took me a little longer to understand and appreciate German Rieslings. While the are variations by region, the German style of Riesling tends to more ethereal, and they indeed escaped me for a while, like I couldn’t quite pin them down. It’s also hard to get a handle on all of the classifications. (And we are not going to get into them today!) Now I love them, drink them regularly, and I’ve come to appreciate the precision of their system.
Nahe is a smaller region in Germany, and not as well known, perhaps because it’s flanked by the two more famous regions of Mosel and Rheingau. The Dönnhoff family has been in the area for over 200 years. They slowly grew from a modest farm to a full wine estate over time, and are now in their 4th generation.
The Dönnhoff Estate Riesling Nahe 2018 is labeled as dry, but I got a little bit of residual sugar, which rounded it out and helped it work well with the food. We all agreed that it was a close second in terms of pairings. Drew actually preferred this wine with the oysters.
Tasting Notes: Flowers blossoms with white peach, pears, and light hints of spice. It was the most delicate of the three wines with the lightest body, but it still had lots of refreshing acidity.
Geeky Details
(From the tech sheet here and here.)
Soil:The vines grow in stony, weathered volcanic soils of porphyry and melaphyr in particular, with certain amounts of slate and quartzite.
Winemaking: Fermentations occur in a combination of stainless & used large oak
Age of vines:15 - 30 years
Alcohol: 11.5%
Price: $24
This was such a fun feast! And I love any excuse to pop open a bunch of Rieslings. Plus, now that I know how easy it is to make a Bo Ssäm, I will definitely be doing it again!
*****
The rest of the Wine Pairing Weekend (#WinePW) blogging group is also exploring wines from the Finger Lakes. Be sure to check out their posts:
Wendy at A Day in the Life on the Farm is “Exploring the Wines of New York’s Finger Lakes Region.”
Camilla at Culinary Adventures with Camilla is pairing “Bibimbap with Garden Banchan + Forge Cellars Classique Riesling 2017.”
Lori at Dracaena Wines is “Delving Into the History of the Finger Lakes with John Wagner.”
David at Cooking Chat is exploring “Finger Lakes Wine Paired with Everyday Favorites.”
Cindy at Grape Experiences shares “An Impressive New York Treasure: the Finger Lakes Wine Region.”
Teri at Our Good Life pairs “Zero Degree Riesling with Pan Seared Scallops over Cheesy Grits.”
Jeff at Food Wine Click! suggests “New York Finger Lakes – I Hope You Like Riesling!”
Jill at L’OCCASION offers “New York Finger Lakes: Wine For Summer Pairings.”
Pinny at Chinese Food and Wine Pairings shares “New York Finger Lakes Wines – Lonesome Stony Rose and Fox Run Rieslings Paired with Quick-Prepped Seafood.”
Jane at Always Ravenous offers “Picnic Fare Paired with Finger Lake Wines.”
Rupal at Syrah Queen discusses “The Charm Of New York Finger Lakes Rieslings.”
Robin at Crushed Grape Chronicles is pairing “Finger Lake Riesling and Alsatian Salmon.”
Gwendolyn at Wine Predator offers two posts: “Two Riesling from the Finger Lakes Paired with a Potluck” and “#RoseAllDay for #RoseDay: 3 from New York’s Finger Lakes.”
Susannah at Avvinare shares “Delightful wines from the Finger Lakes.”
Jennifer at Vino Travels takes a look at “Wines from Around Upstate New York’s Finger Lakes Wine Region.”
Finally, Linda at My Full Wine Glass is sharing two posts: “Three Takes on Finger Lakes NY Cabernet Franc Rosé” and “Two Pairs of NY Finger Lakes Riesling – a Winning Hand.”
Additional sources used for this post:
Vinous.com: Finger Lakes Rising
Wine-Searcher.com
Winefolly.com: The Taster’s Guide to Riesling Wine
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