Duck breast with black raspberry sauce

My blogging associate, Vinogirl, likes duck. After a comment about duck that she made on her blog, I promised a duck recipe.

This one is duck breast with black raspberry sauce, for two.

Ingredients:

Two duck breasts
Flour
1 Shallot chopped
2 Cloves Garlic minced
Cup of Black Raspberries
Cup of Ruby Port
Crushed black pepper
Olive Oil
Two large potatoes cut into small cubes
1 Onion sliced
½ cup Chicken Stock
Paprika

Pound the duck breast, sprinkle one side with pepper and then flour; do the same for the other side.

I keep some black raspberries from my garden frozen whole through the winter. When I want some, I remove as much as I want, let them warm up and then run them through a sieve to remove as much of the little seeds as possible.

In a skillet with a little olive oil, brown the duck at high heat on both sides and remove.

Deglaze the skillet with ½ cup Port until it cooks down to half; then, bring heat to low, add the shallot, half of the garlic, raspberries, and the rest of the port and let simmer, but don’t let it dry out. If that is about to happen, add wine.

In a pan, add tablespoon oil, onion and cook on medium for a minute; then, the rest of the garlic and cook for another minute; then, add the potatoes, sprinkle as much paprika as you want on them, add stock, mix things up, cover and simmer on low flame until the potatoes are soft—it should take about twenty or so minutes.

Gauge your stovetop and calculate how much time you need to allow the potatoes to cook so that the potatoes and the duck are ready at the same time, based on how rare—or not—you like your duck.

In another pan add a teaspoon olive oil over low heat; then, add the duck breast and let cook for about three minutes, turn over and let cook for three minutes; then, cover for two minutes. Check the duck breast to see if it is as rare as you like it, or not too rare. If you need to cook more, keep watch over the breast so that it doesn’t overcook (I like mine pink to juicy). Always remember that meat cooks a little more after you turn off the flame.

When done, the potatoes should be soft and moist. If they are done slightly before the duck, just turn off the flame and let them sit covered.

When it is done, plate the duck, either pour the sauce over it or beside it, whether you like to cut and dip or sauce and cut.

Before serving the potatoes, sprinkle some pepper over them (salt too if you use it, I never do).

Add your greens of choice or salad.

Which wine would you pair with this meal?

Vinogirl Blog

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
November 2010. All rights reserved.

Lifting a blog entry without the author's permission (and without recompense) is a copyright infringement--period.

Which wine with pork chop?

Wine writers, reviewers, critics, and bloggers are in the business of telling readers what to drink. Let me try something new and have readers tell me what to drink.

I’ll write out a meal, with recipes, and you pair it with wine. Tell me which wine you’d have with the meal and most of all, tell me why that wine.

First meal: thick cut pork chop in Madeira sauce, with roasted potatoes and sweetly infused Brussels sprouts.

The potatoes:

If you can find small new potatoes use them; if not, use the larger ones. The difference will be in how you cut them for the roasting. I like to thinly slice off the top and bottom of a small potato so that it stands flat and it has a plateau surface on which to add the ingredients. If the potatoes are large, I cut each in half and then slice the rounded edges to create the same flattened bottom and plateau on top, but to make the large potatoes small enough for quicker roasting.

While a small toaster oven (or similar unit) heats to 350 degrees F, dribble olive oil over each cut potato then sprinkle winter sage leaves and crushed white pepper over the potatoes so that they stick to the oil. Place in the oven and set for 50 minutes.

After 20 minutes into the potatoes roasting, turn main oven to 350 (I use a convection) and then drop a tablespoon olive oil into a cast iron pan and turn heat to high.

Place pork chop(s) on a meat-cutting surface, sprinkle crushed black pepper on one side and then lightly flour it; turn the chop over and do the same. Then, roll the chop in the rest of the flour that has fallen to the surface.

In the hot iron pan, brown the chop on each side and around its edges and then remove from heat. Immediately deglaze the pan with a ½ cup sweet Madeira and then reduce flame to low.

Place chops into the oven and turn timer to 20 minutes.

Add chopped shallot and garlic clove to the Madeira, plus ½ cup more Madeira and a few dashes of soy sauce. Separately, mix an ounce of Madeira with two teaspoons of flour until it is a thick gooey substance and add to the pan, turn flame to simmer and stir constantly.

Rinse and then cut a cross hatch into each Brussels sprout. Slice a garlic clove and thin carrots. In a sauté pan, over very low heat, add a teaspoon of olive oil, the sprouts, garlic and carrots, plus ¼ cup Madeira and cover to steam.

When the potatoes and chops are done, turn flame up under the Madeira/shallot sauce and stir vigorously until it is less liquid-like and more solid-like.

Check to see that the sprouts and carrots are firm but cooked.

Plate everything and pour the sauce over the chops—garnish with parsley.

Eat with the wine you prefer, but do tell me which one you have chosen.


Copyright Thomas Pellechia
November 2010. All rights reserved.

Lifting a blog entry without the author's permission (and without recompense) is a copyright infringement--period.

Ten Best--no, not again!

Each year, columnists, bloggers and sundry writers complain about the commercial aspect tied to Christmas and how much they hate it that earlier and earlier store windows are decorated, we are subjected to insipid “holiday” music loops, and magazines (and now Web sites) bombard us with “sales.”

Another of the holiday traditions is the end-of-year best of this and that lists, something I railed about here last year. When it comes to what to say as another year bites the dust, bloggers prove as uncreative as regular old print writers—instead of saying anything, they make a list!

The only good thing about those lists is that the assault is held off until late December or early January, after the insipid music stops—until this year.

In what appears like an attempt to get the jump on the annual listing crowd, two of my favorite wine bloggers have hit us with lists in early November.

Luckily, neither Tom Wark nor Jeff Lefevere chose to attach to their lists the undercurrent of some insipid music (the number of times that I mention the music indicates how much I despise having to be subjected to holiday music wherever I go).

Tom did a simple list of ten.

On the other hand, Jeff is not the kind of guy who will say something in five words when he knows that he has at least 50 words sitting around somewhere—his list came in four parts, in four separate blog entries.

Me, I don’t do end of year lists. But I’m also a realist. I know that the list crowd isn’t going to stop on my request. So, in the spirit of the early season, and since I am not as much of a curmudgeon as I want everyone to believe, I will join the fray, the early list fray.

Here are the Best Ten Excuses of 2010 to which this writer has been subjected:

1. I get so much email I must have missed yours.

All fifteen of them?

2. I didn’t see that invoice.

It was copied in all fifteen of those emails.

3. I was traveling.

By now, doesn't everyone know what a laptop and wireless are.

4. We are a start up online magazine so we can’t pay you for your work, but we can offer you exposure.

Exposure can cause cancer.

5. We aren’t publishing any books this year.

…and why do you call yourself a publisher?

6. I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner, but…

No, I can’t stop everything to write 500 words in fifteen minutes.

7. I’m too busy right now to meet with you.

Yet, each time I call to try for a meeting you spend 50 minutes on the telephone with me complaining about the publishing business.

8. He’s at a meeting.

How come he takes phone calls when he's meeting with me?

9. That wasn’t my fault.

It never is.

10. Oh, I forgot.

Your honesty will come back to haunt you.

Tom Wark

Jeff LeFevere

If you are reading this entry anywhere other than on the vinofictions blog, be aware that it has been lifted without my permission (and without recompense), and that’s a copyright infringement, no matter that the copyright information appears with it.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
November 2010. All rights reserved.

Book Review

When I operated my winery tasting room one of my wines provided me with a valuable lesson about pricing.

The wine was named Proprietor’s Blend. Essentially, it was concocted from the leftover lots of Chardonnay, Riesling, Gewurztraminer, Seyval, and Vignoles that I produced as single variety wines.

This was the late 1980s and so wine prices were quite different than today—I sold Riesling for $10 a bottle and Gewurztraminer for $12. The price of the Proprietor’s Blend was $5.

After a number of weeks, I noticed that many tasters who said that they liked the Proprietor’s Blend didn’t buy it. They bought other wines, everyone of which cost more per bottle than the blend. As I wondered over this situation, thinking maybe I should put the wine on sale, get rid of it and never produce it again, my wife made a suggestion.

She had been watching the tasting room people too. Her sense was that they didn’t buy the wine because it was too cheap. Instead of running a sale, my wife said that I should raise the price of the wine to $8.

I did what she suggested. The wine sold out every year thereafter, even when the price rose to $9.

This is why I agree almost completely with the thesis behind the Fearless Critic Media (FCM) concept that fuels that organization's book The Wine Trials 2011.

This is not FCM’s first book—last year the organization published The Wine Trials 2010, an event that saw me dining with Robin Goldstein and Alexis Herschkowitsch, the two major forces behind FCM. I wasn’t dining with them exclusively, that would be against their agenda. I was just one member of a group of invites in the wine industry to taste some of the wines that had come out on top in their first Wine Trials blind tasting—wines that they claim prove that most people prefer wines at lower prices than the wines that generally receive high critic ratings.

I agree with most of the reasoning that FCM uses to support the claim. I fully support the quality of many of the 175 wines under $15 that made the top preference list in the latest “Trials.”

The fact that FCM uses Champagne to prove that price does not automatically signal either better quality or equal acceptance is critical; next to Bordeaux futures, Champagne is the most ludicrous end of the wine market. The big names that FCM exposes don’t even produce Champagne in the true method. How could they? Moet alone produces about 25% of the whole region’s wines; the company can’t engage in the painstaking, labor-intensive step-by-step method that used to be the excuse for high prices.

There’s no doubt in my mind, and never has been, that the general wine consuming public has bought into a variety of hucksterisms, not the least of which is that the ratings of critics have meaning. As FCM points out by citing many studies, consumers are receiving messages that lead them to buy wines that they probably don’t even prefer. That’s because marketers know all about aspiration.

FCM rails against the rating and award system as if it was designed to sell wine. It wasn’t—not at first.

Awarding wines once was akin to the big and beautiful pig contest at the county fair. The awards that were handed out to wineries at agricultural fairs were to recognize their achievement, not to recommend their wines to us. It wasn’t until the 100-point rating system gained traction in the 1980s when the focus of awards and ratings was turned away from the winemakers and toward us.

Mr. Robert Parker named his newsletter The Wine Advocate because he viewed himself as a Ralph Nader-like crusader to protect the consumer from bad wine. It was a self-anointment as the arbiter of taste, and those who followed him followed his system both of self-anointment and of rating wines.

The result these many years later is that ratings not only inflate the value of wine, they inflate the value of the critics. Even the best wine palates have a tendency toward inconsistency. If critics were to taste wines blind, and as FCM points out, most do not, many would have a hard time picking out a duplicate sample of one wine among a flight of six wines tasted; most of us would have a hard time doing it and that means that critics would be just like most of us; to protect themselves, they don't taste wines blind.

On the subject of blind tasting, I register one small disagreement with FCM.

The FCM claim that a blind tasting is the only way to remove bias and to discover your real wine preferences is spot on, but there’s blind and then there’s blind. In my opinion, bottles should never be in the same room as the tasting; wrapped in brown bags or not, the astute could find ways to gain clues from the bottles. A truly blind tasting includes glasses filled with wine in another room and then delivered to the tasters to make their evaluations. The only information available is the color of the wine (even that could be masked with black glasses, but that would be overkill). The wines should be selected so that they don't jar the tasters palates; in other words, similar wines within each flight.

This is a small disagreement, but I do have a bigger concern with The Wine Trials.

FCM waxes well regarding its thesis, sometimes so well that it betrays a bias against a certain style of wine referred to as New World or international. Not that I disagree with the assessment—I am not a fan of bombastic wines that some critics believe to be Nirvana—but isn’t that a preference matter?

Gratuitous shots at oak chips or extended aging or other so-called interventions are neither graceful nor necessary. Present the science, present the results of your experiments, and let others make up their own minds, which is what FCM claims that it wants consumers to do.

Also, except a vague reference to wine that is “created by nature,” the book offers no scientific proof that there’s anything qualitatively wrong with “interventions” of the sort that are excoriated.  Since its discovery, wine has not  been created by nature but by humans. To follow FCM’s seemingly intended logic would mean that wine should be allowed to ferment in a hole in the ground and it should be stored in the earth as well plus, it should receive pounds of additives like salt and sugar to try to preserve it but it should be consumed right away anyway, because most early non-interventionist wine turned to vinegar quickly. But, admittedly, this is a nit pick.

Finally, even though the title The Wine Trials at first led me to think of a Mr. Koch and the wines he bought at auction that turned out to be fraudulent, I really do agree with the thesis behind FCM.

In fact, I rate the book 98 out of 100.

If you are reading this entry anywhere other than on the vinofictions blog, be aware that it has been lifted without my permission (and without recompense), and that’s a copyright infringement, no matter that the copyright information appears with it.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
October 2010. All rights reserved.

One Romance (30)

“Wake up,” Nick told himself, “you are going to meet the queen.”

Even back then, in the late 80s, everyone in the Finger Lakes wine business knew who the queen was. Too bad it took so long for the rest of the world to catch up; if it had found out sooner, Nick might have been able to hold out a little longer and make a great success of his little winery.

Of course, on that first morning of his first juice run for his first Riesling, Nick was still full of hope and optimism. There was no other description for what he felt. He had serpentined the alcohol rules and regulations, he had been schooled in the conservative ways of banking that proved only the stingy stay wealthy, he had been awakened to the cruelty of large wineries and the cruelty of the weather, he had been subjected to the interrogations of clueless tourists, he had been tried by financial deprivation, and he had been made to change plans through no fault of his own. This morning he was going to meet the reason for it all.

The grapes came in at approximate total acidity of .9 %, pH at 3.1-3.2, and sugar between 21-22 Brix (generally the % by volume). The juice he picked up was the most tasty of all the juices thus far—the only one that had less of a grape juice quality to it and more of the profile of what the wine might be like: austere, yet giving; aromatic, yet subtle; full, yet delicate; and filled with the promise of a future.

Waiting in the winery was a batch of Steinberger yeast (DGI 228). Known for its ability to ferment under cool conditions, slowly, to draw out the aromatics and fruit, as well as for its ability to tolerate at least 13% alcohol, sulfur dioxide, plus low pH. He used the yeast on Gewurztraminer for similar reasons, but the yeast seems to have been developed specifically for all that Riesling has to offer.

Nick picked up the juice without incident: no lost tank, no state policeman on the road to look unfavorably at his low tire pressure, no spills, no mistaken ripening stats, no dead pump in the winery, no problems with the yeast, no problems with getting fermentation started, a perfectly cool yet clear autumn weather pattern so that he didn’t have to cool the fermentation by watering the tank, and a perfectly quiet few weekdays in the tasting room, giving him time to do the necessary fermentation work on the Riesling and racking work on other wines in the cellar.

Riesling was the promise and now that promise was in Nick’s hands to mold, certainly not to mess up.

When Theresa called that night she could hear in his “hello” that something good happened that day, and she became so excited that she could feel the promise, too, even though she was beginning to wonder whether or not Nick had what he needed to get this winery off the ground. She believed in him—no problem there—but she also saw how much of an uphill trek he had before him. She wanted to be there to help, but financially could not drop the commute and the income that it provided, the income that Nick quickly made to evaporate into the promise of a future.

The future was Riesling, for the region and for Nick. For now, the future was slowly bubbling away, almost foamless, which is another benefit of DGI 228.

His ideal was to craft a finished Riesling between 11-12% alcohol, a 3.2-3.3 pH and .75-.80 total acidity, and no more than .75 residual sugar. He could then decide if it needed some of that Gewurztraminer to give it a push or if it could stand on its own. He rambled on about all the stats while Theresa listened, happy to hear in his voice, well, happiness for a change.


NOTE: there may be longer lag time between posts of Nick’s story. I have a project on which a great deal of time must be spent. Hope all four of my readers will bear with me.

If you are reading this entry anywhere other than on the vinofictions blog, be aware that it has been lifted without my permission (and without recompense), and that’s a copyright infringement, no matter that the copyright information appears with it.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
October 2010. All rights reserved.

One Romance (29)

The Vignoles was truly interesting. The juice was so acidic it almost tasted as if there was no sugar, but the hydrometer reading showed about 23 Brix (23% sugar by weight).

Each morning, Nick drank a large glass of grapefruit juice. The smell of Vignoles reminded him of his breakfast drink.

Vignoles is an extremely fruity variety with aromatics that take your nose in many directions, from funk to fruit salad. He was advised to use a slow-fermenting yeast, one that could be stopped easily enough before completion. This was because Vignoles is not a candidate for dry table wine—it’s ok as a sparkling wine, but even then, a dry sparkler can mask as much as 2% residual sugar.

Nick selected the Epernay II yeast. His only worry was that daytime temperatures might not cooperate, and for a few days after he got fermentation started, they didn’t. He spent a great deal of time cooling the tanks with water—a great deal of time. Every evening for about four straight days, he ended the day almost entirely soaked with water, despite the protective high rubber boots and rain jacket that he wore.

It took a few weeks for the fermentation to get the Vignoles down to 2% residual sugar, which was where he wanted to stop it. That gave the wine about 11.5% alcohol, and with all that fruit, plus acidity in the finished wine well above .8% by volume, with a finished pH of 3.2, this was indeed like grapefruit, or pineapple juice with a kick!

To stop the fermentation Nick opened the doors and let the cold air in which luckily by mid October had settled into the region. Then, he racked the wine and dosed it with sulfur dioxide. The cold air didn’t hurt the other wines, as they had long ago finished fermenting and were resting.

He was pleased with himself that night at home, sitting with a glass of wine, a chunk of cheese and some bread for a late dinner after work, and then the phone rang at about 9:30—Riesling tomorrow!

This is what he was waiting for. The locals knew as far back as the 1980s that Riesling was the future for the Finger Lakes wine industry. Nick certainly knew it. He couldn’t wait to get into his first production of Riesling. He had decided to produce a version that would be drier than most in the region. In fact, he had decided to do a few trial blends with small amounts of Gewurztraminer in Riesling to add a touch of the Old World Alsatian taste to the Finger Lakes product.

Nick slept restlessly that night.


If you are reading this entry anywhere other than on the vinofictions blog, be aware that it has been lifted without my permission (and without recompense), and that’s a copyright infringement, no matter that the copyright information appears with it.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
September 2010. All rights reserved.

One Romance (28)

Seyve-Villard hybrid number 5276 is known as Seyval Blanc or Seyval, for short. The grape’s development is attributed to the Villard family of grape hybridizers.

Suitable in cool climates, Seyval is grown widely in New York and in England as well. In the past, it had been grown in France, but these days European Union rules forbid inter-specific species hybrids for wine, which makes British wine industry people bristle.

Nick hadn’t heard of the grape until his first visit to the Finger Lakes. He liked the Seyval wines that he had tasted, as everyday quaffers. They were medium-bodied whites with clean, citric-like qualities to them, except when they weren’t. A few Finger Lakes winemakers got the notion that Seyval would make a fine replacement for Chardonnay, so they began to give it oak treatment and allow it to undergo the secondary malolactic fermentation that softens mouth feel by converting malic in the wine to lactic acid. The result was spotty, but when it worked, it seemed to work well enough.

Nick had no intention of producing Seyval wine. He wanted mainly to keep the line of wines short: Riesling, Gewurztraminer, Chardonnay, Vignoles, and possibly a house blend. Yet, even though things worked out and he got a replacement for his Chardonnay juice, he decided to try his hand at Seyval, opting for the clean, citric-like style. It turned out to be a good decision.

Seyval juice was quick to ferment, easy to work with, and half the price of Chardonnay. It gave him a wine to offer to customers at $8 a bottle, exactly where he wanted to price his house blend. The wine he produced was nearly bone dry, aromatic and almost overly citric. It reminded him of a few whites he had consumed in the past that had been produced in France’s Loire Valley.

At the same time that he produced Seyval, Nick was wrapped up with Chardonnay. The latter would be produced in a clean style, too, with no malolactic fermentation but with just a touch of oak, for which he bought a few Yugoslavian barrels for the cellar.

When not subjected to malolactic fermentation, Finger Lakes Chardonnay can remind of Maconnais wines, with hints of crisp apple on the palate. The aroma of clean local Chardonnay often reminds Nick of malt in a beer-like situation, but not many people agree with him.


Not having a means to control temperature within the fermenting tanks, Nick relied on outside temperature and luck. But because of his lack of control he also decided on yeasts that worked well at cool temperatures, which in the Finger Lakes arrive almost without fail the day after Labor Day, as if someone flipped a switch. As he carefully watched his fermentations, he saw how they slowed after a cool night and then as they warmed during the beautiful early autumn days a tendency to speed up—that’s when he cooled the tanks down with sprays of cold water.

It was lucky for him that he used well water, and that his wells did not run dry. But he was forced by the Ag and Markets inspector to chlorinate his water, especially for use in the tasting room, and that caused both money and aggravation as the chlorinator was not exactly a perfect machine. Also luckily, Nick’s winemaking facility was low on porous wood products, a fact that helped him avoid TCA taint with all that chlorine around. It took a few years into his winemaking before the nasty taint got to one of his wines, but that was no worry just yet.

When the fermentations each ended, Nick had a total of three new wines with two more to go—Riesling and Vignoles. The Vignoles came right on the heels of the Seyval, so within a couple of days he was back in the truck and on his way to pick up juice. On the way, he couldn’t help think that his friend Fred would likely escape having to get his hands dirty, as there was just one more juice run to go and Fred still hadn’t said exactly which weekend he would visit. But then, after taking in the Vignoles he would have three wines fermenting simultaneously with a fourth in the offing. He was bound to find some dirty work for Fred--and then that evening...

“Hello Nick.”

It was Fred calling.

“Hey Fred. You comin’ up this weekend?”

“Oh man, I’m sorry to have to tell you this but I have an emergency at work. I’ll be tied up with a project for another two or three weeks…”

Nick cut him off.

“You lazy bastard. You are making this up.”

“Yeah, sure, Nick. Like I don’t want to get away from here. Anyway, are you trying to see me work hard? Is that all you care about?”

The two friends could slip easily into chiding and kidding without hurting because they know each other so long and so well. But this time, there was a tinge of disappointment in Nick’s chide. He didn’t think deeply about it, but when confronted with this situation it became clear to him that he missed his friends greatly. It wasn’t that he was sorry to be where he is. It was that he wasn’t too crazy about what it cost to follow his dream.

In his large Federal style home that was built in 1827, Nick was comfortable and content. In his small winery and tasting room, he was proud. In his relationships with the people he deals with daily he was competent. But he had no close friends nearby and that made him feel lonely at times, especially since Theresa was there only on weekends. Perhaps, if he hadn’t been working almost every waking minute, he might have chucked the idea by this time. But he has been busy and he hadn’t been brooding or dwelling on the loneliness—until Fred hit him with the news.

 “Ah, Fred. It’s not that. Don’t worry about it. I understand.”

“Nick. We miss you, too.”

Special message for vinofictions readers.

I am guest blogging on a new site named wines.com. Take a look at my first entry winecrush.

It will be like the old vinofictions, but with a much softer feeling…after all, I’m working for someone else!

If you are reading this entry anywhere other than on the vinofictions blog, be aware that it has been lifted without my permission (and without recompense), and that’s a copyright infringement, no matter that the copyright information appears with it.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
September 2010. All rights reserved.