Dan Fredman PR

Cantina Roccafiore Luncheon at Terroni

How better to celebrate the first day of summer than at a Cantina Roccafiore luncheon at Terroni in Los Angeles? The Roccafiore organic wines are produced at a winery/hotel/spa located in Todi, Umbria, about 25 miles outside of Perugia. Luca Baccarelli (the winery's Direttore Commerciale) was in town with sales manager Valentina Davide and Terravino's Guiseppe Cossu was a most gracious host for the afternoon. I was honored to join a group of some of the finest sommeliers and wine directors in Southern California to taste the current Cantina Roccafiore lineup and enjoy the remarkable Southern Italian cuisine of Terroni. 

We began with the 2010 Roccafiore Bianco Fiordaliso, an unoaked blend of Grechetto di Todi and Trebbiano Spoletino. The winery's focus is on indigenous grape varieties made in a style intended to be crisp and refreshing, with or without food. This wine showed a bit more Trebbiano influence in it, but had a very succulent sapiness to it yet remained light on the palate. This was followed by the 2009 Fiorfiore Bianco Vigna d'Autore, a wine made from 100% Grechetto di Todi dei Colli Martani. The grapes are harvested and fermented in stainless steel before being aged in large Slovenian oak vessels. This adds some breadth to the wine without adding any untoward wood flavors. It was silky in the mouth but had good acidity, and really seemed as if it would improve with a little time in the cellar. Both wines worked well with Terroni's Zuppa di Cicerchie. Cicerchie are beans that have been found in Umbrian dishes for centuries. The broth was complex and the dish was topped off with a crouton and what appeared to be a piece of lardo. It was a beautiful accompaniment to both wines. 
We moved on to the reds in the next flight, beginning with the 2009 Rosso Melograno, a Sangiovese, Merlot, and Montepulciano combo. This wine was supple, with aromatics  refreshing acidity and a long, dry finish. Each variety is produced separately in stainless steel before blending and bottling. The 2007 Rosso Roccafiore is a step up from this in complexity and texture. It's made of 100% Sangiovese that's been fermented in stainless and then aged for a year in two year-old French barriques. This gives some aeration without overt woodiness to the wine. Finally, there was the 2007 Prova d'Autore, a blend of Sangiovese, Sagrantino, and Montepulciano. These varieties are fermented separately in stainless steel (stop me if you've heard this one before) but the wines are then aged for two years in new French barriques (thus the source of the oak used for the Roccofiore. Both wines receive additional time to evolve in the bottle before release. I think this added bottle time gives these wines a great advantage for restaurant use - although they would benefit from another couple of years in the cellar (particularly the Prova d'Autore), they have an inherent complexity and refinement that makes them good choices for "gonna drink it tonight" situations. 

We first drank the red wines with the Tonnarelli all Norcina con Tartufo nero Estivo. Tonnarelli are sort of a squarish spagetti that's popular in Rome and points further south. There was a sweetness to the sausage that nicely balanced out the acidity of the wines, and of course, what dish doesn't taste better when it's been enhanced with shaved truffles? There was a consistency shown throughout the red wines that struck me as being fresher and maybe a little more alive than most of the Tuscan wines I've tasted lately; they were refreshing and went well with the food.

 

The Tonnarelli was followed by a grilled lamb t-bone with a bit of rosemary, roasted potatoes and a small bit of olive oil. The dish was extraordinarily simple, and was intriguing because it worked as well with the wines as did the much more complex pasta served as a middle course. The food went perfectly with the wine (or maybe it was the other way around) and it made for a great afternoon. Afterwards, we got onto our Vespas to head home (well, Scott from Pace got on his, the rest of us drove home in cars). The service was as exceptional as the food and it was quite a memorable lunch.

There are some days where opening a schnitzel drive-in doesn't seem like a bad career move. Then again, it might not be as popular in Malibu as it is in Krems....(but doesn't that kind of look like a surfboard on top of the van?)

Vineyard Tasting with Jurtschitsch, Grillmaier, Rabl, and Höllerer

After tasting through the lineups of Kamptal Riesling and Grüner Veltliners, we broke up into groups to spend the evening with several local winemakers. Our group jumped into vans and headed up to the Heiligenstein Vineyard overlooking Langenlois where we were officially introduced to our hosts. Alwin Jurtschitsch, Josef Grillmaier, Rudi Rabl, and Alois Höllerer (Steininger was planning to attend but a family event got in the way - we drank his sekt anyway).

The view from the vineyard was amazing, but it wasn't as if the wines needed the atmosphere to show well.

Each winemaker poured one of their wines, talking about their vineyards (Heiligenstein and Spiegel, primarlily) and giving us a general feel for the history and geology of the area. I thought that the 2010 Jurtschitsch Riesling Zöbinger Heiligenstein Kamptal DAC Reserve Erste Lage particularly stood out, as did Alois Höllerer's 2010 Grüner Veltliner Alte Reben that was grown a couple of towns over.
The cover crop in the Heilegenstein Vineyard was about as colorful as I can recall seeing in any vineyard: 

After tasting throught the first round of wines, we climbed back into the vans and headed off for the Käferberg Vineyard across the valley. Willi Brundlmayer is probably the best known producer from this vineyard, but Jurtschitsch, Grillmaier, Loimer, Rabl and others source fruit from this beautiful site.
We tasted another flight of wines (Grillmaier's 2010 Weissburgunder Käferberg tasted especially good, possibly because we were drinking it a few meters away from where it was grown)(but that's why you go to visit vineyards). As the sun started to set we headed back down to the Loisium for dinner.
While a beer might have been called for, we went directly to the table, whereupon they plied us with five courses of food, accompanied by five different wines with each course. While the intentions were good, it may have been just a little bit too much of a good thing, particularly as it was a Sunday night, the restaurant was a little understaffed, and we'd tasted quite a bit of wine already that day. The food was on the creative side, with more than a touch of molecular cuisine appearing at the table. The dinner's pace was slow, to the point where we opted to do away with the cheese course entirely and we took the final flight of wines to the bar where we were joined by other members of the group who were returning from their winemaker dinners.
By the end of the night, we'd added 35 more wines to the tasting talley, bringing the day's total to "way too many". The winemakers were good sports about it and guided us through their favorites in the last two flights. As it turned out,the 100+ wines we tasted that day served as a good warm up for Monday's schedule. It would have been easier if the wines hadn't been so consistently good. It wasn't a matter of quality analysis, simply one of deciding what you liked at that moment a little more than another wine. Not exactly a bad situation to be in.

The Loisium in Langenlois (or: Bacchus goes to the Bellagio?)

After the schnitzel lessons and luncheon at Schloss Mühlbach, we departed to the town of Langenlois in the Kamptal DAC.Our accommodations were at the justly-famous Hotel Loisium, a combination hotel/restaurant/spa and wine museum designed by US architect Steven Holl.

Set among vineyards on the outskirts of town, our room had a great view of the vineyards that surround Langenlois. Some of the rooms are named after local wineries (we were in one of the Schloss Gobelsburg rooms). After getting checked in and dropping off our stuff, the group headed past the pool and through the vineyard to the adjacent Loisium Museum. The entrance is tough to miss, with heiroglyphics telling the story of wine, food and the way they come together in life (or at least that's how I interpreted them).
Upon entering the museum, we descended via elevator to a room containing a huge vat of bubbling liquid (wine? water?) whereupon a show worthy of the Bellagio Hotel burbled to life.
Fountains spewed liquid in all directions, lights flashed and changed colors and there was enough misty spray to please anyone who's ever enjoyed the splashy water rides in amusement parks.
The show concluded with a glowing amber bust of Bacchus rising from the depths of the tank like something out of a Conan the Barberian novel and spitting a stream of wine at the open mouth of the ghostly, mysterious figure undulating on the wall above our heads.
It was a little bit Wagnerian, a little bit Las Vegas, and overall as entertaining as it was mystifying. We left this wine-creation pageant through a side door and entered some ancient wine aging caves that led us to a slightly (well, entirely) more normal museum experience. I enjoyed seeing the recreated kitchen with its bread rising trough, along with the cooperage display, the cobbler's room, and the general sense of what it was like to be living in Langenlois 100+ years ago.
After wandering around through the last century, we found our way up to taste through some 50+ Grüner Veltliners and Rieslings from the Kamptal DAC. We were welcomed by Fred Loimer, one of the highest-profile winemakers in the region.

In addition to Fred's 2009 Steinmassl Reserve Riesling, I was also impressed with the Jurtschitsch Dechant Alte Reben GV, Hiedler Kittmannsberg November Reserve GV, the 2009 Hirsch Gaisberg Reserve Riesling and the 2010 Schloss Gobelsburg Kammerner Gaisberg Riesling. In general, all of the wines showed beautifully, and palate fatigue hadn't yet reared its ugly head. But we'd only tasted about 80 wines thus far (including the morning's Weinviertel DAC bottles) thus far and the day was yet young...

Schnitzel cookery lesson at Schloss Mühlback, Wienviertel, Austria

I like schnitzel. No, make that "I LOVE schnitzel". On my recent trip to Austria, I quite likely would have dined on it at every meal, but I was unable to find it at any of the breakfast buffets at the hotels in which we stayed.

My favorite schnitzel of the trip was the one pictured above, from Chef Martin Weiler of Gasthaus Weiler in Laa an der Thaya, about an hour outside of Vienna. His recommendation ("secret"?) was to fry the meat in lard. Real lard, not the namby pamby vegetably oil or butter or anything, just real old-fashioned lard. Oh, and use veal, not chicken, pork, or whatever else sort of meat you might want to use to save a few bucks. It makes a difference in the end result.

Pictured here are the OEWM's Susanne Staggl and Barbara Arbeithuber explaining the technique as Chef Weiler seemingly sweats out the details. Note that it's pound the paillards with the bottom of a frying pan, then you dip the veal into the flower, then the eggs, followed by breadcrumbs and ultimately into the frying pan containing the hot lard. Fry until nicely browned and serve immediately to the delight of anyone who happens to be in the area (and hungry). Here are the ingredients:

4 Veal cutlets

60g wheat flour

2 eggs

80g breadcrumbs

200g lard

salt

 

Place three bowls near each other, filling the first with flour, the second with the two eggs (beaten), and the third with fine bread crumbs. Japanese panko might work okay too if you want to be a little different (even more appropriate if you're not using veal).

Serve immediately after cooking, accompanied by potato salad, cucumbers, and maybe some tomato if in season.

Schnitzel is one of the easiest dishes to find a wine to match. The obvious call is Grüner Veltliner or Riesling, but Zweigelt or St Laurent work perfectly too.