Friday, April 26, 2013

I got a text from my friend Dan Tuesday night, just as wine tasting at Bistrot L was running down, and I was even let go early by my friend Jay.  Changing out of my work clothes, I see 'do you want to help us out Friday night Supper Club?'  I think about it a moment, being lazy, jealously guarding my time off to do the usual grocery shop/cook/clean/study Buddhism/yoga/exercise/walks in nature/meditations/maybe even reading, and text him back.  "sure."  which can be read on any level of enthusiasm.  Dan and I, we go way back.  Supper Club is a cool idea.  I need to check it out.

Anna sends me an email early Thursday, probably not long after I've gone to bed, as the work week pushes my sleep back further and further into the late night, and I take a look when I get up around one in the afternoon.  Canapes, Salad, Venison...  Menu looks good.  Very professional.  What wines to pick out?  Where to find them?  How to get them there?  Am I in charge?  How much wine?  Well, fortunately there is First Vine (firstvine.com), and I like the wine selections, French, some Spanish.  Dan has poured me a Gaillac white before.  Really, just the sort of unimposing wines that work well with food, a reflection of the earth they come from, just as food is.  They make life easy--they deliver, and Dan has used them before for tastings at GoodWood--and the simple choice is logical, a white, a rosé, a red.  White to cover the lobster with herb pistou, foie gras with fig compote, smoked caponade with basil trio of canapés.  Rosé to go with the salad with asparagus, duck egg, morel mushroom, pickled ramps.  A red would battle with the vinegar.  ("The French don't cook in the summertime," my great sources tell me, meaning that they marinate everything, and eat when they are hungry.  "They drink rosé.")  A rosé gives you enough oomph, enough to sink your teeth into, and the wine will still taste good.  And finally, a good serviceable red to go with roasted saddle of venison with sauce poivrade.  Simple.  As it should be.  Cover the bases to make everyone happy.  (Chacun, son gout.  To each, his taste.)  And in a way, you could get away drinking any of the three the way it works out, credited to the innate wisdom of French wines as they have emerged naturally from the countryside and Gallic practicality.

So, lets go to the Rhone Valley.  A Cotes du Rhone White, that will do quite nicely.  Grenache, Bourbolenc, Marsanne/Roussane, Clairette.  As you would expect.  Good acidity, freshness, and also, a reflection of terroir, the wine reflecting the sorts of herbs that grow here in villages in the Vaucluse.  Fruit trees.  Herbs.  That dry scrubland with pine trees.  The Mistral winds blowing to keep the grapes healthy.  Think of those paintings we know from Van Gogh, the olive trees, the fruit trees and the like, the glass of licorice/fennel absenthe.  This will work with seafood, this white, it will work with pesto, it will work with basil and all those other marvelous anti-inflammatory herbs, rosemary, thyme.  Minerally wine, good to excite the palate.  Foie gras, maybe more ideal to have gone with an Alsatian white, which could have also gone with seafood, but, I think the CDR will work, given that if apricots grow there, maybe figs do too.  Recommended reading:  A Village in the Vaucluse, a fine ethnographic study from the post WWII era, depicting the poverty of the 50s.

And then the rosé, to go with the interesting salad of fiddlehead ferns.  (Chefs are fancy these days.)  The latest City Paper has a sneering reference to the latest trendiness of ramps, but it wasn't long ago that I read about them in the NY Times, probably over the winter.  That's about right, for things to come down to DC.  The wine is from Ventoux, a blend of Grenache and Cinsault.  It will be stone dry. Think of those rocks over in Chateauneuf du Pape.

The red, I can't resist going with a Gaillac, over there below Toulouse, where they've made wine and amphora for it since Roman times.  The Romans at one point encouraged the locals to grow wheat rather than the fruit of the vine, I was told once.  Two thousand years later, the Empire is long gone, and they are still making wine in this part of France.  Syrah, blended with local varietals no one has ever heard of, Duras, and Broucal.  The wine will have pepper and maybe the right hint of chocolate, to go along with Mr. Venison.

Well, time to hop in the shower.  Then we'll see how it all goes.  I'm taking a relaxed approach to the evening, not to get alarmed.  Unlike a shift at the old bistrot, the energy expenditure probably won't kill me and my legs.  Hmm, this may be something to get into.

I am a bit nervous, as I have been since the invite, as I get ready to leave the hermitage.  (A hermit nursed poor old Lancelot back to health when he'd lost his mind, forgot who he was, had taken to be a wild man off in the woods and brambles, subsisting on nuts and berries and insects--the whole Guinevere thing.)  I tell myself I've been doing wine tasting every night of my professional life for the last eight years really, and in the perfect setting for it.  And you have to look at it, as not work, but something you do out of good will, wanting to share, really.  "Who am I, to know what wines to bring and serve and what to say," I ask, but then, it's the entertainment business.  So, go for it.


And things go well.  The chef does an excellent job.  (The chef, going places, is a whole 'nother story, a rising star.)  I help out.  The party goes smoothly.  The setting is brilliant.  The wines are good but for the Cotes du Rhone white wine.  They deliver the 2008 vintage;   some bottles have oxidized, and some are about to when left open for thirty minutes.  The golden color is a little suspicious, and the wine has lost its fruit.  The two other wines worked perfectly.  And then we all hung around too late.  The next day, I've absorbed too much Spring tree pollen to do anything.


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