On the road in the Pacific North West: Day 4

What happened to days 2 and 3 you may be asking and indeed that’s what I’m asking myself. We swept through Eastern Washington as fast as a tornado, barely pausing to sleep, never mind write.

The area has changed so much since I last visited some 11-12 years ago with about 10 times the number of vineyards. There are some amazing wines now - of every conceivable kind which is both Washington’s strength and its weakness. There the Cabs and Merlots I remember but also Mourvdre, Counoise and - would you believe? - Gruner Veltliner.

Great food too especially eating with winemakers at their homes. (An epic never-to-be-forgotten lunch with the legendary Charles Smith, the Alice Cooper of the wine world, whose (awesome) flagship wine is called The Creator. More of that in due course - suffice it to say it involved a black Rolls Royce . . . )

Yesterday we finally arrived at McMinnville for the International Pinot Noir Celebration, an event I’ve wanted to come to for years. If you want to understand why Oregon Pinot is as great as it is we were basking in 30°C heat in the afternoon and wrapping up warm to eat under the stars a few hours later.

Our dinner - there are several - was a fundraising benefit for Salud a great Oregon initiative which negotiates the tortuous US health service on behalf of the immigrant vineyard workers who do most of the picking in the state and provides regular screenings. A model for every other wine producing country and region

Wines were provided by Dominique Lafon, Evening Land Vineyards where Lafon also consults and the Westrey Wine Company whose proprietor Amy Wesselman is a former director of IPNC. They were matched with food by Naomi Pomeroy of Beast in Portland and introduced by the irrepressible Evan Goldstein, author of Daring Pairings, who has the best shtick on food and wine matching I’ve come across.

Standout pairings were Westrey Wine Company’s 2004 Chardonnay Reserve with scallop and foie gras wrapped in puff pastry (all the Chardonnays were good tho’), 1994 Westrey Willamette Valley Pinot Noir with quail with summer chanterelles (but the 2001 Comtes Lafon Meursault ‘Desirée’ was fantastic too) and Evening Land Vineyards La Source 2008 (my favourite wine of the evening which eclipsed even a Lafon Volnay) with mesquite grilled lamb chop.

Today we’re off to blend wines at a mystery winery and there’s the Grand Dinner tonight, with, I’m sure, the odd glass of Pinot.

Incidentally I’ve only just discovered that IPNC has a great blog which you can follow and that there was a dinner last night called Counter Culture pairing Pinot and other wines with street cart food at Anne Amie Vineyards. Shame to have missed that but you can't be everywhere . . .

Image © David Gn - Fotolia.com

On the road in the Pacific North West: Day 1

For the next 10 days I’m going to be visiting the vineyards of Oregon and Washington State so the site will turn into more of a blog. Our first day yesterday included lunch at Chateau Ste Michelle, by far Washington’s largest wine producer.

I didn’t realise however that it was also now the largest Riesling producer in the US, its flagship wine being the fine Eroica which is produced in conjunction with Germany’s Ernie Loosen. Last week they hosted an international Riesling get together called Riesling Rendezvous which I was sorry to have missed although we have got the International Pinot Noir Convention to look forward to later this week.

Our lunch with their Australian white wine maker Wendy Stuckey, which was devised by the winery’s executive chef Janet Hedstrom, included some well-crafted pairings:

Spiced halibut with heirloom tomato and arugula salad and sautéed Yukon Gold potatoes with Wendy’s 2009 Waussie Riesling (an Aussie style Riesling made from Columbia Valley fruit). Surprisingly this went better with the dish than the Horse Heaven Hills Sauvignon Blanc, the wine I’d have been inclined to pair with those ingredients. It had more attack and picked up beautifully on the Cajun-style crust and accompanying arugula pure.

Grilled lamb chop with Syrah demi-glace, pancetta and butternut squash risotto and fresh green beans with Chteau St Michelle’s 2006 Ethos Syrah. The wine needed the sauce to offset its firm tannins but it slightly overwhelmed the meat and was a little heavy for a summer lunch dish. I think it would have worked just as well with a chargrilled chop.

Orange-infused olive oil cake with fresh Washington fruit and raspberry coulis with the Chteau Ste Michelle 2005 Ethos Late Harvest Riesling
A stunning combination. A lovely, exotic late harvest wine, which picked up beautifully on the orange peel in the cake and the fresh fruit which included peaches, blueberries and raspberries.

Today we’re off to Eastern Washington to visit the producers over there. I’m not sure how easy it will be to get online but let you know what we've been eating and drinking when I do.

Image © David Gn - Fotolia.com

What makes Korean food distinctive

The first thing everyone asked me when I got back from Korea was what does the food taste like? Unless you live in London, or New Malden in Surrey, which, rather randomly, boasts the UK’s biggest concentration of Korean restaurants, then you probably won’t be familiar with Korean food.

It borrows elements from China and Japan, sure, but Korea has its own distinct cuisine, which has developed over several thousand years, from humble meals served in Buddhist temples to intricate feasts served in ancient palaces.

Lesson one: every meal must be balanced. It’s the ying and yang approach - or as your average Korean puts it, a meal has to have five natural elements of the positive and negative. Think sweet and sour, salty and bitter – and a riot of colour.

And they love to share – dishes arrive all at once, often more than ten, whether you are dining alone, or in a group. Though gluttons can relax – you order your own main dish, from bap (cooked rice) to juk (porridge), to tteokguk (sliced rice pasta soup) to sujebi and mandu (dumplings).

And before you start baulking at the sheer volume of food, Korean food is healthy stuff. This is the home of kimchi, a fermented vegetable dish that no Korean meal would be without. Heralded as one of the world’s healthiest foods, there are more than 200 types, loaded with A, B and C vitamins, and bursting with healthy bacteria called lactobacilli.

Row upon row of brown earthenware pots crowd out gardens and back yards stuffed with different types of kimchi - from the most commonly scoffed cabbage kimchi (tongbaechu), to oisobagi (cucumber kimchi).

Why are they kept outside? Kimchi stinks. It gets into your clothes, your hair - every pore. The Koreans even have a special fridge to store it. But don’t let that put you off - the flavours are exciting and you’ll be hooked from the start.

In addition to your main course, there are many different side dishes, from raw and cooked vegetables singing with garlic, ginger, chillies and sesame, to various soups (guk), stews (jjigae), hot pots (jeongol), stuffed vegetables (seon), pickled vegetables (jangajji), salt-fermented seafood (jeotggai) and raw meat and fish (hoe), seasoned with vinegar, soy sauce, red pepper paste or mustard.

Other key ingredients? Rice rules, from the sweet, sticky, brightly coloured rice cakes (tteok) we ate washed down with flower teas, to the baked risotto-style bibimbap, where you scoop up unctuous crunchy rice from the bottom of hot stone bowls.

Other essentials include beans (mostly red and mung), potatoes (including sweet), mushrooms (a lot of wild), seafood, seaweed, meat (beef, pork and chicken), eggs and fruit - particularly persimmons, jujubes and Korean pear.

Flavours are big, thanks to a range of punchy seasonings from soy sauce and soybean paste (doenjang) used to give a kick to stews and added to wheat flour pancakes (jangtteok), to mustard, cinnamon, ginger, garlic, sesame salt, and vinegar. Not forgetting green onions (spring onions), which we ate in abundance with pretty much everything.

To drink? Tea, mostly. Barley rules, along with roasted rice tea. And if you’re in the mood for alcohol, then soju is the nation’s favourite alcoholic drink. Clear, like vodka, and made from distilling a fermented mash of rice or sweet potatoes, it packs a punch at well over 20% abv. I preferred the lower alcohol makgeolli (the peasant’s drink of choice) - milk-coloured, with a sweet and sour taste, and my perfect match for Korean food.

Surrounded by the sea on three sides, 70% of Korea is mountainous, the tree-covered hills breaking up endless fields of poly-tunnelled produce. But the mountains serve another purpose, too, dividing each region, giving each one a particular microclimate - and style of food.

There are ten distinctive regional cuisines in Korea. The capital Seoul, for example, was at the heart of the Joseon dynasty, which gave birth to a complex, elegant style of royal cooking, with presentation a key element.

Further south (about four hours drive from Seoul) is the Jeolla-do region. Known as Korea’s food capital, the food is saltier, spicier and more pungent than the rest, drawing ingredients from the surrounding rich farmland dotted with paddy fields, and from the sea which borders the region on its west and south coasts.

The Koreans aren’t as uptight as the Japanese when it comes to table manners. Far from it – they get stuck in, each dipping their chopsticks into the shared dishes, and eating at breakneck speeds. A full Korean meal is over within the hour - there’s no lingering over mouthfuls here.

I cooked a Korean meal as soon as I got home, choosing my favourite dish of the trip, japchae. A colourful sweet potato starch cellophane noodle dish packed with stir-fried vegetables, bolstered by thinly sliced beef, and boosted by an intense sesame, spring onion and chilli marinade.

Each vegetable is painstakingly sliced matchstick thin, cucumbers and carrots are salted to rid them of excess water, and each vegetable is pan-fried separately (they do a lot of that), before combining the ingredients and garnishing with paper thin slices of omelette. It’s all in the prep, they’ll tell you – but so worth the effort.

Fiona Sims is a food, wine and travel writer and regular contributor to the Times.

Photo © Elena Eryomenko at shutterstock.com

New York dining adventures

It’s pretty likely, I’d have thought, that anyone logging onto this site enjoys spending the odd evening at a restaurant. Those of us who live in London – or even visit London on an occasional basis – are well aware that we Brits have privileged access to one of the most diverse and high-powered dining scenes in the world. Arguably, the only city that can match it – possibly even exceed it – in terms of its restaurant culture is New York.

A recent visit to Manhattan – my first in 18 years and my husband’s first ever – was a heaven-sent opportunity to get to grips with its restaurant world. I’d booked tables at a selection of places, from the super-trendy to long-serving old faithfuls. My aim was not to pit one city against another, but rather to get a taste of just what it was that makes New York such a great restaurant city.

One of my first dinners was at the much-lauded Corton, a new venture from top restaurateur Drew Nieporent. As the name suggests, the wine list’s strength lies in its Burgundian offering, but more of that later… The restaurant itself is a somewhat hushed temple to gastronomy, the kind of place where you’re afraid to laugh too loudly in case you get angry looks from diners at neighbouring tables. Nevertheless, the menu ($85 for three courses or $140 for a seven-course tasting menu) devised by British chef-patron Paul Liebrandt has immense appeal. Choosing just three dishes from the short menu (a choice of six dishes for each course) was tough, but only because we wanted to try everything.

In the end, I settled for a beautifully presented starter of hamachi (yellowtail), which came with an avocado and violet mustard garnish, while my husband Mark opted for the silky, opulent foie gras with sour cherries, Chioggia beets and Catalua spices. Mains were a richly spiced dish of lamb with eggplant chutney, ricotta, espellette peppers and anise hyssop and a tender, subtle composition of rabbit with scallops accompanied by artichokes, sweet potatoes and a painterly smear of black garlic. Although there were a lot of ingredients packed onto each plate, Liebrandt’s cooking proved a masterful assemblage of intense flavours.

Our only issue with Corton, sadly, came with the wine service. As the restaurant’s name suggests, Burgundy is pretty much where it’s at, and given our choice of food the ideal would have been to have had a glass of white each with our starters and to have shared a bottle of perfumed Pinot with our main course. Sadly, with a list of over 60 red Burgundies, only three came in at under $100 – and then only just. Prices rose vertiginously thereafter to hit a height of nearly $3,000 (although, admittedly, this was for a bottle of DRC Richebourg, never a cheap option). Bottles averaged somewhere north of the $200 mark. As I scanned the list for a cheaper alternative – an Alsace Pinot, a Cabernet Franc from the Loire or a cru Beaujolais, perhaps – I found little choice, and most of the alternatives seemed too heavy and rich for Corton’s delicate dishes. We ended up with a slightly tired bottle of Barbet’s Moulin Vent Vielles Vignes 2006 ($60), which didn’t really do the food justice – it fared best with the gently gamey flavours of the rabbit, but didn’t have the power to stand up to the spices in the lamb dish.

But the worst disappointment of all was the attitude of the business-suited sommelier, which changed from friendly to disdainful when he realised that we weren’t about to take out a second mortgage as a down payment on our wine.
The evening was saved by our waitress, who blended consummate professionalism with a friendly personality – and by the superlative quality of the food. Nevertheless, the evening was tainted by the tussle over the wine list.

As a result, our favourite fine dining experience came at the weirdly named WD-50, a play on the name of the chef-patron, Wylie Dufresne, and the lubricant, WD-40. I’d been looking forward to dinner at WD-50, if only because a friend of mine referred to Dufresne’s food as being ‘like a cross between American and Martian cuisine’.

The restaurant suited its funky Lower East Side location: a long, thin, richly coloured space with mellow lighting and an open kitchen at the far side of the room, where the chefs worked smoothly, silently, and with a precise economy of movement. Once again, the service was nicely gauged, blending efficiency with warmth – a hallmark of pretty much all our dining experiences in a city once famed for surly service.

The wine list ranges far and wide, featuring sakes, beers and a particularly strong list of sherries, as well as reds, whites and ross from Greece, Southern Italy, the Jura and Croatia in addition to the better-known regions of France, Australia and California. While some restaurants fob you off with the predictable choices when it comes to the by-the-glass selection, WD-50’s offering is more eclectic.

The restaurant manager suggested a glass of Nama Ginjo sake, Masumi Arahashiri First Run, to match an explosively flavoured starter of aerated foie gras with a tamarillo-molasses sauce and pickled beet. It was a revelatory experience: rather than being weighed down by the rich sweetness of the classic Sauternes-style match, the sake not only coped admirably with the food’s weight but cleansed the palate between bites as well. A dish of smoked eel with spiced bread and a bitter twist of Campari in the sauce was paired with a glass of Weingut Robert Weil’s Weissherbst Sptburgunder 2007, whose slight smokiness echoed that of the dish, while its twist of candied lemons provided a perfect counterpoint to the Campari and spice.

An earthy, full-flavoured main of duck with parsley root, mustard greens and spaetzle spiked with Worcestershire sauce was paired with a glass of Tir Na N’Og’s Old Vines Grenache 2006, a wine that perfectly matched its savoury intensity. Another dish of pork loin with charred leeks and coconut-mustard mash was paired less successfully with Leon Barral’s Faugres 2006, which threatened to overwhelm the delicate meat and sweet veg.

The meal concluded with a shared dessert of soft chocolate, peppermint ice cream, black cardamom and toffee, for which the suggested match was a glass of darkly bitter amaretto liqueur that provided the ideal foil for the bitter-sweetness of the dish.

In terms of world-class dining experiences, both Corton and WD-50 come near the top of the Manhattan list (although, as I’ve pointed out, unless you’re planning to blow the budget, WD-50 is the more approachable option). Other restaurants that weren’t quite in the same league, but nevertheless have much to recommend included Scarpetta, a bustling Italian place where sophisticated versions of Mama’s home cooking can be washed down with a wide variety of wines from the Old Country.

Particularly noteworthy were the silky home-made papardelle sauced with rabbit, herbs and parsnip dice and the Sicilian spiced duck breast, which came with a zesty accompaniment of preserved oranges – a contemporary take on an old favourite. A bottle of Gattinara’s Antoniolo Nebbiolo 2004 was, perhaps, a better match for the duck breast than the delicately flavoured pasta, but it wasn’t a totally inappropriate match for either dish.

Aldea is very much flavour of the month in midtown Manhattan. Chef George Mendes served his apprenticeship under some of the best chefs in France, Spain and the US before opening Aldea earlier this year. The restaurant’s menu nods politely in the direction of Portugal, Mendes’ parents’ homeland, although the dishes are prepared with a lighter touch than the Iberian originals. His duck rice, a mound of buttery rice studded with duck confit, slices of chorizo and black olives harmonised beautifully with a bottle of Joan d’Anguera’s deeply flavoured Syrah, Grenache and Cabernet Sauvignon blend, Montsant 2006. The wine was also a more than adequate match for a savoury dish of lamb loin and belly, the loin cooked rare and the belly cooked long and slow.

By the end of our stay, we’d had enough of fine dining, so we enjoyed an enjoyably informal last meal at Greenwich Village’s Pearl Oyster Bar. Like many of New York’s hipper eating joints, you can’t book a table at Pearl – you’ll have to join the queue (and there’s always a queue). No wonder – the place serves the best oysters and steamed clams in town, not to mention a top-notch lobster roll with shoestring fries. We sat at the bar and necked our seafood, washing it down with a couple of locally brewed beers from the ever-changing list on the blackboard. It wasn’t premier cru Burgundy, but it was a great match for a thoroughly enjoyable meal nevertheless.

Natasha Hughes is a freelance food and drink writer whose work appears in Decanter, Imbibe, Square Meal, Traveller and Australian Gourmet Traveller Wine, as well as the wine website www.wine-pages.com. She is currently studying for her Master of Wine