Wine PhD

Over a two week period the students (and staff) in the Dept. of Viticulture and Enology will be tasting 23 Zinfandels produced between the 1960s and the 2000s.

The first tasting happened last Thursday, July, 22.

The wines from the first week:

1967 Souverain Mountain Zinfandel, Napa Valley

1968 Mirrassou Zinfandel "Third Harvest", Monterey County (Tasting note from Fredric Koeppel here, created almost exactly 25 years to the day before we tasted these wines.)

1968 Louis M. Martini Mountain Zinfandel, California

1970 Souverain Mountain Zinfandel, Napa Valley

1979 Fetzer Zinfandel "Scharffenberger Vineyard", Mendocino

1980 Milano Lane Late Harvest Zinfandel "Scharffenberger Vineyard", Mendocino

1986 Kendall-Jackson Zinfandel "Zeni Vineyard", Mendocino

1991 Rosenblum Cellars Zinfandel "George Hendry Vineyard", Napa Valley

1991 Oak Ridge Vineyards Zinfandel, California

1998 Robert Mondavi Old VIne Zinfandel, Napa County

2001 Steele Old Vine Zinfandel "DuPratt Vineyard", Mendocino

Not surprisingly, the progression in age was the most notable aspect of the tasting. The old wines had the dried leaf, tobacco, musty, neutral flavor while the young wines had a fruity, jammy, oaky flavor.

Less pronounced by just as obvious was the shift in oak usage over time. The older wines (before 1990) had little or no apparent oak influence. As the wines got younger, oak began to play a much more pronounced role. My favorite wine, the Rosenblum, has just enough oak to let you know it was there, but not so much as to be considered a major flavor characteristic. The youngest two wines were almost completely oak dominated.

Another interesting note is the change in acidity over time; the old wines were very tart. We speculated that it may be because the grapes were picked less ripe. Other explanations involved the concept of field blending: When the Zinfandel grapes were harvest, other varieties interplanted in the vineyard were harvested and mixed in with the Zin. A high-acid grape like Barbera may be contributing to the acid structure. We also found a little bit of Brettanomyces going back to the vintages of the 1970's. Though none of the wines were medicinal or fecal, there was some barnyard-leather going on in a few of the wines.

The first week was an informative tasting. None of the wines were so dead that they were unenjoyable to taste. This week we will have 10 or 11 more to try. I will update with another post after that tasting.

A few days ago this is what I made for lunch

What is it, you ask?

1. A monterey jack quesadilla with salsa verde on the inside of the quesadilla;

2. Onions and mushrooms, sauteed with paprika and cumin;

3. Two poached eggs;

4. Topped with more salsa verde.

I'm still thinking about this.

From the time my mom started dating Ira, her now-husband, I have had an immersive introduction to Persian cuisine. For me the take away message of Persian food is two-fold: 1) Flavor, flavor, flavor without spice; and 2) rice.

I was first introduced to tahdig at a Persian restaurant in Irvine, CA. We ordered tahdig with a few stews to go on top. Actually, I think we ordered stews with tahdig to go underneath, but I soon learned that the true star of the dish was the rice.

So what is tahdig? Tahdig is crunchy rice created cooking rice hard over heat, resulting in a sort of burned, crunchy bottom layer. Easy right? Add the water to the rice and cook on high the whole time instead of simmering. Wrong. That won't work. Even with the simple instructions on the production of tahdig it took me half a dozen attempts to get it right.

A prerequisite for crunchy rice is... rice. To cook the rice properly, I've found that the bulk water method ("pasta method") is best - bring a whole pot of water to a boil and cook the rice, then drain. This is better than the usual rice instruction, which I call the "risotto method" in which a perfect amount of water is combined with the rice and it is cooked until the water is just absorbed. The bulk method is much more predictable.

The rice is cooked using the bulk method for about six minutes until the rice is cooked but not cooked through - one could call it al dente, perhaps. After that, the rice is drained and put aside. Now, the hard part. How to burn rice in a controlled manner.

At my mom's house in in Los Angeles, she has a gas burner. It is much easier to make tahdig on a gas burner as the temperature control is much better. I have a glass cooktop with a halogen lamp at my house in Davis. So after the hard boil on the rice, I need to cool down the burner. I do this by wiping the cooktop carefully with a wet paper towel. Nothing like using the high heat capacity of water to my advantage, right? After the burner has cooled slightly, I wash out the pot that the rice was cooked in and mix some turmeric (poor man's saffron) with vegetable oil and heat that up on the bottom of the pot over medium high heat. Once the turmeric starts to sizzle, I carefully spoon back in the rice. Now the burning begins. As the rice sits in the oil, it basically undergoes a shallow frying. The pot is covered with the lid lined with a dishtowel to absorb the moisture.

The most important thing is to now make sure the rice doesn't burn and carbonize. I use my nose and the rate of steam escape from the lid to judge. I think it is one of those things that takes practice to know what it is supposed to look like. If I had to describe it, I'd say that the steam comes out at a slow leak and smells fragrant. If the steam starts to smell burned, it's too hot. If there is no audible sizzle, it's too cool. I tend to pull the pot off and back on the heat during the 10-15 minutes of medium-high heat. After these first critical minutes of high heat, the pot is turned down to low and cooked for another 30-45 minutes.

After this is done, if you are lucky, you will find this at the bottom of the pot.

Topped with a lentil stew, a perfect dinner.

Here are some of the leeks at the Robert Mondavi Institute Garden at UC Davis. They have flowered - are they still edible in this state?

You can see why I consider myself lucky.

Two of my favorite people beings on the planet.

I want to share my favorite label design. I think Roy Lichtenstein would approve.

Budbreak has occurred in my backyard in Davis, CA. I look on with mixed feelings. This will be my baby Viognier's 4th leaf and I'm not sure I will be there with her when she fruits. We are possibly going to move this year and I don't think I will be able to transplant her successfully.

A look back at year 2: That was a lot of growth for April!

In the spirit of "Eat for Eight Bucks" on Serious Eats, I am going to start a new series here called "Cheap and Tasty". I'm going to take my freest of free days (Sunday) and cook for the week. Using affordable, healthy, and fresh ingredients, I will figure out how much a serving costs and use that as a basis for (maybe) discussing food culture.

Today I am cooking:

Stuffed Cabbage (Holishkes), Celery Soup, and Kreplach. I guess Eastern Europe came through strong this week. Recipes and photos coming up soon...

Here are most of the labels from the Sherry tasting. It took most of a day to remove them from the bottles. The bottles are another story - they are beautiful. The colors of glass used in the bottles are unlike the colors used today. That will be for a later post.

I really like the tax stamp that was on the Diezmo bottle. The last two or three labels were beyond salvage. I will try to get a label from those in the future. Each label will link back to a full resolution version at flickr.