Wine PhD

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.

Two eggs, poached
Truffled mustard vinaigrette
parsley

What does it mean to be unique, in the context of wine tastings? I'm proposing the following definition:

"A wine tasting is unique if it cannot be replicated under any circumstances other than using wine from the 'wine unit' as the original tasting"

By wine unit, I mean the same case, the same shipment, the same allocation, etc.

I admit that this definition is somewhat contrived in that it was designed to highlight exactly how unique the tasting I am about to describe really was.

Under this definition, very few tastings are truly unique. A 25 year vertical of all 5 First Growth Red Bordeaux wines? Special and rare, indeed... but not unique. The same tasting could be constructed from cellars over and over and over again. What about a Screaming Eagle tasting including every year of Screaming Eagle produced? Quite repeatable under this definition.

Last night VITIS, the wine tasting group of the Department of Viticulture and Enology at UC Davis, under the direction of Darrell Corti, the proprietor of Corti Bros. Market in Sacramento. For those of you who have not met Mr. Corti, I can say with quite a bit of confidence there there is not an individual anywhere who knows as much about so many subjects relating to food and wine. We are fortunate to have him so near to Davis and lucky that he is able to spend time with us.

So why is this tasting truly unique under my definition above? We tasted 21 sherries made sometime around 1940. Most of these sherries are Fino Sherry, which was not created to be kept in bottle for 60 years. As such, there is a high likelihood that today these wines do not even exist in the cellars of the producers. Furthermore, many of these producers do not exist any longer, making this tasting not only unique but also a slice of history.

In the early 1980's the sherry collection that now lives in the UC Davis Enology cellar was donated by a merchant who bought the contents of a closed-down bar in Burgos, Spain. It has sat in the back of the cellar untouched since. Last week, Mr. Corti came to the cellar to pick through the wines and put together what he believed would be an "interesting" tasting. "Interesting" turned out to be apropos.

A part of my job for the tasting was decanting all of the wines. When a wine stands upright for 25 years, there is a fine, clay-like deposit that forms on the bottom of the bottle. In order to keep the wine clear, I decanted by siphoning in order to keep the clay-like sediment in the bottom of the bottles.

Below is a list of the wines we tasted. Sherry, by nature of going through the solera system, is a non vintage product, so no vintage is listed. Based upon the history of the collection and the presence of some extinct brands, the wines are dated to just after World War II.

Wines
Flight 1 - Fino Sherry
Gonzales Byass - San Lucar - Manzanilla
Herederos de Argueso S. A. - Manzanilla Pasada "San Leon" - San Lucar de Barrameda
Sancho - Jerez Fino Delicado - Puerto de Santa Maria
M. Misa - Fino Marques - Jerez
Bodegas Castillo - Fino Catillo - Jerez de la Frontera
Pedro Domecq - Fino Lamero - Jerez de la Frontera

Flight 2 - Fino/Amontillado Sherry
Bodegas Delago - Moriles La Cadena Fino - Puente-Gentil (Cordoba)
M. Misa - Solera Fina Carrascal - Jerez
Bodegas del Diezmo Nuevo - Melquiedes Saenz Amontillado Fino - Moguer

Flight 3 - Amontillado Sherry
Jose Pemartin - Macharnudo - Jerez
Pedro Domecq - Jandilla - Amontillado Macharnudo (375 mL) - Jerez de la Frontera
Pedro Domecq - Jandilla - Amontillado Macharnudo (750 mL) - Jerez de la Frontera
Juan de Burgos Luque - Lagar de Benavides - Aguilar de la Frontera

Flight 3 - Dry to Sweet
Marques de Misa - Abolengo - Jerez de la Frontera
Osborne - Solera India - Puerto de Santa Maria
Agustin Blazques - Jerez Seco No 2
Sanchez Romate - Jerez Especial - Jerez
Alverez & Mayol - Finisimo - Vino para Damas - Jerez de la Frontera
Sancho - M. Oscuro Dulce Superior - Puerto de Santa Maria

Flight 4 - Flight of Fancy
Perdo Diaz Lopez - Especial para Enfermos - Jerez
Ricardo de Valderrama - Salus - Real Aperitivo Tonic Sherry Wine - Jerez
Osborne - Jerez Quina - Vino Tonico Aperitivo Digestivo - Puerto de Santa Maria
J. Luis Mondina - Vino Tostado Gallego - Vigo (Galicia, Spain)

Flight 5 - Licor
Valvanera - Licor from Rioja, Spain

So there it is. A crazy tasting of forgotten sherries.

For me the highlights of the night were some of the non-traditional sherries. I really liked the J. Luis Mondina Vino Tostado Gallego. It possessed so much life - aromatics, deep, slightly caramelized flavors as well as still being a relative of fino sherry. I also liked the Valvanera liqueur. It was some sort of wonderful cross between an anise liqueur like pastis and Jagermeister and something even more herbaceous than either of those. It was very sweet and viscous. I hope to find it again somewhere. From what I can tell, it is still made to the tune of 15,000 bottles per year

Here is a link to a slideshow with pictures from the tasting. I will be adding pictures over the next couple of days, so check back often.

Next week Vitis, our student tasting group, is putting on a tasting of some old sherries. We went and selected wines for the tasting this morning with Darrell Corti, the founder of Corti Bros Market in Sacramento, CA.

Here is one of the wines that we will try. After the tasting I will post my impressions.

Northern California (and the rest of CA, too) is in the midst of a significant rain event. I thought things were wet in Davis. Oakville, in the heart of Napa Vally, has received 3-4 times as much rain, so far.

The somewhat circuitous split/do.call/rbind was necessary to get around an issue with the groups argument to lattice, which would not do what I wanted. Good explanation of my problem, no?

#R code
library(cimis)
library(lattice)
#northern ca weather

w <- mcimishourly(c("006", "077"), "name")

xyplot(do.call("c", lapply(split(w, w$station),
	function(x)cumsum(x$precip))) ~ w$datetime,
	groups = w$station, type = "l",
	auto.key=T, xlab = "Time",
	ylab = "Cumulative Precipitation, in")

I find that I use my cimis package almost every day to check the weather trends in Davis. It's pretty easy to do:

library(cimis)
xyplot(air_temp ~ datetime, data = w <- cimishourly('006'), type = 'l')

Things get more complicated when I want to compare multiple stations or multiple years (with cimisannual). This was a the major feedback I got from the one person I know who uses this package (thanks Kim!).

In the updated version, I have added two new functions: mcimishourly and mcimisannual, which take multiple stations and years as function parameters.

Below is a graph comparing 9 years worth of air temperature data for 4 weather stations. Granted, it's not very useful, but it does give a good overview of the trends and differences between the sites.

Below is the code to create the graph. Most of the code is for graphing the data. The stations and years could be written inline as one line of code.

#code for new cimis 0.1-3 updates
library(lattice)
library(cimis)

places <-c('006', '077', '075', '052')
years = 2000:2008

w <- mcimisannual(places, years, label = "name")

xyplot(avg_air ~ julian_day | as.factor(year),
		groups = station, type  = 'l', data = w,
		layout = c(1,9), strip.left=T, strip=F,
		auto.key=list(columns=2), xlab = "Julian Day",
		ylab = "Average air temp, F")

I also fixed the leading white spaces in the stnlist, which isn't so important except to make the legend labels align properly.

As always, any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
I'm uploading the new version tonight, hopefully it will be on CRAN in the next few days. Until then,
you can get a copy here: cimis_0.1-3.tar.gz. Now available on CRAN at http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/cimis/index.html or use

install.packages("cimis")

Making this soup is easy - it's basically an exercise in assembly. I decided to make it a bit harder on myself, although harder is not really the right word. It wasn't hard, it was time consuming.

I made both the chicken broth and tofu by hand.

The soup tasted so light and flavorful - it was both simple and complete.

So here is the recipe, in the style of the glossies:

Mushroom Tofu Soup

6 button mushrooms, chopped

1 recipe chicken broth (see below)

1 recipe tofu (see below)

1 tbsp green onion, sliced.

1 clove garlic, sliced in half.

Heat up broth. Add tofu, mushroom, onions, and garlic. Simmer to soften mushrooms. Add salt if desired. Do not serve garlic clove.

So short. So simple. Read on.

Chicken Broth

1 recipe of chicken stock (see below)

2 egg whites per 4 cups

Bring chicken stock to a simmer. Beat egg whites to a foam. Add egg whites to the stock. Stir for a few minutes, then leave to simmer for 20 minutes. When the egg whites are pushed aside and the stock is clear, it's done. Strain through a cheesecloth to remove egg whites.

Chicken Stock

1 carcass of a roasted chicken

1 onion, quartered

2 carrots, roughly chopped

10-20 peppercorns

a few springs of parsley

salt

water

All of the ingredients in a stock pot. Add the water to cover. Simmer for 4-8 hours. Add more salt until it tastes right. Strain, cool, then refrigerate overnight.

Skim off as much fat as possible. Use or freeze.

Tofu

adapted from wikiHow and Just Hungry

1 lb (450-500 g) dried soy beans

cheesecloth

water

a coagulant (I used magnesium sulfate a.k.a. Epsom Salt, but I think calcium sulfate, or gypsum, is recommended)

Soak soy beans in water overnight as if cooking dried beans. Drain beans, rinse. Add 16 cups of water to a large stockpot and set to simmer. In batches, process in a food processor until they form a whitish paste (See photos in the Just Hungry recipe). If necessary, add some water to thin out beans so they can form the creamy paste. Add paste to the stockpot. Cook the paste at ~ 190-200ºF (just sub-boiling) for about 20 minutes. Using cheesecloth, strain out the fibrous solids from the white liquid into a bowl.

You have now made soy milk.

Put the soy milk back on the stove in the stockpot, which is newly cleaned. Bring to ~145-155ºF and hold. Add 4 teaspoons of your coagulant to a cup of water and mix to dissolve. Slowly, in about 5 parts, add the coagulant solution to the soy milk, stirring. Once it starts to coagulate, let it just sit at temperature for about 15 minutes to complete coagulation.

Now that the curds have separated, its time to press them. I did it the (very) hard way: I punched too small holes in tuperware container and used that as a form. I would next time just line a colander with cheesecloth and press it in the colander. In any event, line a holey vessel with cheesecloth. Ladle in the curds. Fold the cheesecloth over the top, and press. I pressed, but I think you can probably let gravity to 80% of the work before doing the manual pressing.

Now you have tofu!

Assemble the soup as above.

Quick and easy, right?

During winter in Davis, the morning fog sits thick until about 9:30 am and best exemplified over large, continuous patches of grass. I have started walking Tilden in the morning - both him and I enjoy walking through a field where the border between the gray sky and the silver, ice-covered grass is indeterminate. Our footsteps leave visible footsteps, like green dance instructions of a platinum page. I enjoy the trees most of all. The deciduous trees stand as ghosts of their verdant pasts and the evergreens sit, like stoic black cones, waiting for the sun to return.

While the cold elicits frowns and complaints and shivers, but it also provides some of the most striking natural scenery of the year.