King Cab

You can’t beat a good California cabernet

By Bob Johnson

CABERNET Sauvignon grapes have been planted in the Bordeaux region of France for nearly a century longer than in California. So it’s easy to understand why California winemaking pioneers looked to the French for direction and guidance with this most noble of grapes.

In the early 1980s, however, the pendulum started to swing the other way. California cabernets, for a variety of reasons, began to gain in richness and ripeness, and French vintners took note. In a number of blind tastings–wine evaluation sessions during which the identities of the wines are revealed only after they’ve been rated–French winemakers actually gave higher marks to California cabernets than to their own Bordeaux bottlings. It was embarrassing for the French–much more so than the whole Jerry Lewis-idol worship thing–and eye-opening for the wine-drinking world.

Today, winemakers and wine writers who taste a great many California cabernets and French Bordeaux wines each year generally agree that the advantage enjoyed by the French for so many years has all but disappeared. The French may still possess an edge in history and lore, but when it comes to what’s in the bottle, crafters of California cabernet take a back seat to nobody.

According to journalist James Laube, who literally wrote the book on California cabernets, what sets the Golden State’s wines apart from many other fine wines of the world is their “incredible complexity of aroma and flavor, and amazing longevity.” Many cabernets of the 1990s have earned acclaim for their versatility; they not only can age gracefully, but are delicious and satisfying upon release.

In other words, one need not wait a decade before opening a bottle of California cabernet.

THE CABERNET sauvignon grape is hearty and durable, grows vigorously in many climates, and is relatively easy to harvest. Viticulturists have found that employing techniques to limit their vigor can yield wines of great depth, richness, intensity, concentration, and structure. While some grapes are one-dimensional or otherwise fairly “simple,” cabernet sauvignon grapes–when planted in the right place, maintained properly, and smiled upon by Mother Nature–produce wines with layer upon layer of aromas and flavors.

This is why California cabernets today are so sought-after, and why some bottlings are sold as “futures,” never making it to the mass market.

Perhaps the most symbolic event in the evolution of California cabernet came just two decades ago when Baron Philippe de Rothschild, owner of Mouton-Rothschild, teamed up with California wine pioneer Robert Mondavi to create Opus One–a marriage of both French and California winemaking technologies applied to California cabernet sauvignon grapes. The partnership generated a surge of foreign investment in the California wine industry, and the bubble of French superiority was burst forever.

While the Napa Valley produces a vast majority of California’s “high-end” cabernet sauvignon, Sonoma County vintners slowly but surely are gaining on their neighbors to the east.

For instance, take Chateau St. Jean’s Cinq Cepages, a cabernet-based blend that also includes the four other classic Bordeaux blending varietals: cabernet franc, merlot, malbec, and petit verdot. Representing the bounty of the county, its grapes were sourced from no less than three appellations within county lines–Alexander Valley, Knights Valley, and Sonoma Valley–and the resulting wine satiates the senses.

The Cinq Cepages, which earns four corks on our four-cork scale, is every bit as rich and complex as Napa Valley cabs that command $100 or more. This means the $33 suggested retail price is well worth the investment.

Other local four-cork cabernets that could be considered underpriced in today’s inflation-infected wine market include Benziger’s 1996 Sonoma Mountain Reserve and B.R. Cohn’s 1996 Olive Hill Estate, each priced at $35.

If that’s still too stiff a tariff, be informed that a handful of local cabs–each boasting “Sonoma County” on the label and earning a 3.5-cork rating–can be had for $15 or less. These include the 1996 Sebastiani ($15), the 1997 Sonoma Creek ($12), and the 1996 Gallo of Sonoma ($10).

Two popular bumper stickers of our time urge us to “think globally and act locally,” and to “kiss French, but drink Californian.” When it comes to cabernet sauvignon, an admittedly twisted morphing of these sentiments would be apropos: Drink locally, and kiss off the French.

Do the Math

WINE SPECTATOR magazine recently rated California cabernets currently in release, and Chateau St. Jean’s 1996 Cinq Cepages was outranked by only five wines.

Those five bottlings have three things in common: all are from the 1996 vintage; all hail from the Napa Valley: all have three-figure price tags.

The magazine’s ratings: Bryant Family, $120, 99 points; Dalla Valle (Maya), $100, 98 points; Harlan Estate, $125, 97; Opus One, $125, 96 points; and Screaming Eagle, $125, 96 points.

Of this quintet, only the Opus One is readily available in the marketplace; the others are highly allocated and often difficult to find.

Which brings up the question: Why bother?

The Chateau St. Jean Cinq Cepages retails for around $33, and there’s plenty of it to go around; more than 11,000 cases were made.

From the December 2-8, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Get a Grip

The very best kitchen utensils–and, hey, they’re free

By Marina Wolf

I RECENTLY discovered the most amazing kitchen tools. They never need sharpening. They’re perfectly weighted, easy to clean, and completely rust-resistant. They’re instantly adjustable to almost any kitchen task. And, best of all, I never have to worry about leaving them behind at a potluck.

Are you poring over the cooks’ catalogs yet? Well, you won’t find them there, but don’t worry. You probably already have a set: your hands.

Hands are the original kitchen implement. Heck, opposable thumbs–the very evolutionary development that enables us to hold steering wheels and cell phones–originally came about so we could get a better grip on our food. Why not use those puppies for good, not evil? Williams-Sonoma can only dream of coming up with something so ingenious. They can squeeze lemons, fold enchiladas, fish a pickle out of the jar. Hands let you sprinkle just the right amount of sugar, test a strand of spaghetti, throw raisins in the cookie batter; heck, you could even mix the cookie batter with your hands, if you felt like it. With your hands, you can pick bits of shell off an egg, press crumbs back onto the side of the cheesecake–or just whisk them away into your mouth. The question is not what can you do with your hands, it’s what can’t you do with them.

In cookbooks or cooking classes, or in the Saturday morning cooking shows, we’re not really taught to explore these options. There’s something about handling food too much, with the hands, that just makes modern-day Americans a little uncomfortable. The discomfort goes beyond perfectly valid, if slightly paranoid, concerns about hygiene into the area of taboo.

Every year there are more and more ways to handle food without touching it: bread mixers, food processors, salad spinners, 10 kinds of tongs. They say these innovations are to speed things up, to keep things neat, but I think it’s a convenient cover for not having to soil the hands with anything so mundane, so earthy.

BUT IT’S ONLY the home cooks who are so apprehensive. Chefs, for the most part, don’t have any compunctions about putting their hands all over your dinner plate. They know the truth: in order for food to be cooked and arranged properly, touching it is essential.

But all too often, home cooks pick up their food as though they’re picking up a dead mouse: with their fingertips, pinkies extended. A few of my acquaintances have commented on my speed in prepping ingredients, but that’s just a side effect of using my whole hand to get firm with the food, to hold it down and scoop it up, glop and all.

I’m beginning to appreciate some other reasons for getting back to the hands-on approach. Ripping lettuce by hand, for example, gives the fingers a chance to find those soft broken spots that, under the uncaring knife, might end up in the salad bowl. Warming tortillas or chapatis over an open flame is too tricky for a slow pair of tongs; the fingers, on the other hand, move much more deftly, and immediately sense when the bread has reached the correct flexibility (and temperature–ouch, hot, hot!). Working bread dough by hand possesses its own subset of particular pleasures: the cool, soft flour; the soft give of the unbaked loaves as you gently place them on the baking stone; even the flour crust around the fingernails, perhaps giving you an earthy thrill.

Best of all is that sweet spot, after about eight sweaty minutes of kneading, when the dough transforms from sloppy to satiny smooth. That’s a beautiful thing.

It’s funny that I’m only now discovering the culinary potential of my hands. When I was younger, I knew these things instinctively. My favorite hands-on task, beyond pounding the occasional bowl of bread dough, was the annual turkey massage. Though my mother was no kind of culinary genius, she taught us (unwittingly à la Julia Child) to rub the Thanksgiving turkey with butter, inside and out, before putting it in the roasting bag. Now I understand the science behind the procedure, that a sheen of butter browns the skin and crisps it up nicely, while the gravy gets an added richness.

But back then I figured it was just a weird little family tradition.

It was a simple ritual, but it felt huge: the fate of the feast rested heavily on our youthful shoulders. First we lugged the thawed turkey from the cold garage and unwrapped it in half of the double sink. Pretending to be surgeons, we pulled the neck and the mysterious bags of giblets out, then ran water through the carcass and toweled it off carefully, patting the bird dry under the “armpits.” We had to stand on a step stool to get leverage, but with a mighty collective effort, we could pick it up and make it dance along the sink rim, flapping its featherless wings. After getting over the giggles that performance inevitably inspired, we laid the turkey down in the pan and began the massage, rubbing cold chunks of butter over the pale, goose-pimpled flesh, until the butter softened and spread in slick golden patches.

CONSIDERING THE STATE of our magnificently greasy hands, that we never actually dropped the turkey on the floor was some kind of minor miracle. But the list of our health-code violations was plenty long even without that. We stuck our unwashed fingers in the cooling cranberry sauce. In between, we petted the cat, pulled each other’s hair, and played Monopoly (you know what they say about money and germs).

We dribbled raw turkey juice over the countertops and onto the floor, where our youngest siblings were crawling happily.

Those were the blissful days before anybody really paid attention to salmonella (which was not rampant then) and other digestive disorders; everyone was oblivious, most of all a pack of enthusiastic kids wrestling with a 25-pound bird. But no one ever got sick.

And everyone always loved the turkey.

From the December 2-8, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Eating alla Ebraica

Author Joyce Goldstein explores the culinary heritage of Italian Jews

By Marina Wolf

POLENTA, pomodori, pepperoni . . . these are some of the products that Italy is known for. Many sharp-eyed gourmets know that these ingredients–corn meal, tomatoes, peppers–were brought back from the New World. But, as Joyce Goldstein outlines in her excellent introduction to Cucina Ebraica: Flavors of the Italian Jewish Kitchen (Chronicle Books, 1998; $29.95), these ingredients were most likely introduced to the country by the Jewish population that was always small–never more than a few hundred thousand–but remarkably significant in terms of the evolution of Italian food as we know it today.

In retrospect, this influence was one of the few silver linings to the cloud of anti-Semitic oppression that cloaked medieval and Renaissance Spain and Italy, according to Goldstein and her sources. Some Jews had lived in Italy from 200 B.C., and their persecution has been documented for nearly that long.

“The Jews were allowed to do only certain professions, and import and trade was one of them,” says Goldstein.

Because of this segregation, the Sephardic Jews in Spain were uniquely positioned to be among the first to see the new vegetables brought in on Columbus’ ships. Driven away by the Spanish Inquisition, the Spanish Jews brought the new crops to Italy, where the Jews in trade there would have been the first to try them out and introduce the vegetables to the rest of the Jewish population.

In spite of these important contributions to Italian cuisine, Jewish Italian food has gotten very little attention in the United States. The reason is simple: most Jewish immigrants to the United States have been Ashkenazi, from Central and Eastern Europe. This population brought in food that can be delicious, but all too often home-cooked Ashkenazi food is interpreted as bland and overdone, says Goldstein. “Sephardim are in the minority here, but they got better food,” she says with a wry laugh.

Goldstein has sought out that “better food” for most of her professional life. Square One, her acclaimed restaurant in San Francisco, was a showcase for Mediterranean specialties. And her next book explores even more far-flung regions of Jewish culinary influence: Greece, Turkey, North Africa, the Arab countries.

Over the centuries the diaspora of Sephardim from Spain spread across the Mediterranean and Middle East, even to India and China, leaving ever-shifting communities of Jews to adapt new foodstuffs to the age-old demands of kosher law.

Kosher law regulates the serving of certain seafood (no shellfish or fish without scales) and animals (only cud-chewers with cloven hooves, slaughtered in a kosher fashion). Most important, kosher law requires that meat and dairy be kept separate at all times: no Parmesan over a meat sauce, no cream-based desserts at the end of a meal with meat. Non-Jewish cooks may be perplexed at these restrictions, and of course do not need to observe them, but they will find a wealth of possibilities within these ancient dictates.

Finding the traditions in the first place was an act of both faith and scholarship for Goldstein.

“I am a food historian, in addition to being a good cook.” What she found in her research were fragments, recipes presented in Italian cookbooks as regional specialties, without any indication of their Jewish-influenced history. Or they were oral traditions jotted down by friends of friends, with all the spotty directions that usually entails: “add a handful of flour” or “roast until done.” Even if the recipe appeared in one of the few Italian Jewish cookbooks, Goldstein still had to do some research. “Often people print the recipe, but they never bother to show you the roots of the tradition,” she says.

FOR CLUES, she most often turned to such simple things as ingredients. Take eggplant and fennel, for example. Now thoroughly integrated into Italian cookery, these vegetables once were as segregated in the greengrocer’s window as the Jews were themselves in larger society. The Jewish Italians picked up on them first, which meant that other Italians avoided the vegetables well into the 19th century. Dishes were also named alla ebraica or alla giudia (pronounced “judea”), or perhaps included a biblical figure in the name: crema di carciofi Ester (artichoke soup, symbolizing the bitterness in life) or pollo Ezechiele.

Such weighty biblical connotations could be lost on most cooks. But even a “cultural Jew” such as Goldstein says her work at the crossroads of culture and cuisine has changed her life in subtle but important ways.

“It has made me aware of my Judaism in a very different way,” Goldstein says thoughtfully.

“I am not necessarily going to become kosher or an Orthodox Jew, but I have developed a huge admiration for the ability of a culture to stay joyfully alive.”

Joyce Goldstein will be demonstrating a dairy-free holiday menu from Cucina Ebraica at Ramekins Sonoma Valley Culinary School on Wednesday, Dec. 1, from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. Registration fee is $55. For details or to register, call 933-0450.

From the November 24-December 1, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.