Pizza Wine
Several years in Italy is guaranteed to destroy your appreciation of American-style pizza. Like so may American wines, pizza here features too much of almost everything. The vast pile of cheese and other ingredients turns the crust into a soggy mess. Delivered pizza is even worse. As easy as it is to make pizza at home and as bad as most American pizza is, why would anyone bother with delivery?
Pizza, like all Italian cooking is based on one thing: get great ingredients and don't screw them up. The most important part of any pizza is the crust, and good pizza crust is one of the easiest thing to make - especially if you have a food processor or KitchenAid. Here you go...
- 2 packages quick-rise yeast
- 1 cup very warm (not hot) water
- half-teaspoon sugar
- 3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
- 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
- 1/4 teaspoon sea salt
In the bowl of the food processor with the kneading blade in place, put the warm water, yeast and sugar. After a quick spin to mix, let stand for about 15 minutes until there is a thick foam on the top. Then add the flower, salt and olive oil and turn on the machine for a minute or so until the dough is kneaded. It should easily form into a smooth ball that is just a bit sticky. If not forming into a ball, you will have to add either a bit of flower or water depending on your climate. Put dough into a bowl rubbed with olive oil, cover and put in a warm place to rise for 3 or 4 hours. After tripled in volume, roll out and top with your preferred toppings. Please - not too much cheese: simple pizza is beautiful pizza.
Nothing can replace the searing, smoky heat of a wood burning oven, but you can still get good results at home. Be sure to pre-heat the oven to its highest temperature – you want fast hot cooking. A pizza stone is best, but if you don't have one get a pizza pan with holes in the bottom so your crust doesn't steam and get soggy while cooking. You are looking for a crisp crust.
In Italy, the preferred beverage with pizza is beer, but in the USA many of us think of wine. Deeply fruity, high acid wines go perfectly with pizza, but oaky, tannic or alcoholic wines taste jarring and overwhelming. An excellent example of the perfect pizza wine for someone serious about their wines is the 2004 Rosso dei Dardi by Alessandrio e Gian Natale in Monforte d'Alba in Piemonte. A blend of barbera, nebbiolo and friesa from the famous Dardi area, this delicious wine would be just as adept with grilled steaks as it would with pizza. My all time favorite pizza wine would be the Poderi Colla Friesa, whose light effervescence is a great compliment to any pizza. It's too bad this style very lightly sparking dry red wine, so popular in Italy, is almost impossible to sell in the USA.
Rosso dei Dardi, Alessandro e Gian Natale, Piemonte Rosso, 2004
A blend of barbera, nebbiolo and friesa, this wine is everything that the Paolo Scavino Rosso 2004 should be: or could have been. Brilliant fruity without overdoing it, with a brilliant streak of acid that brings it alive. A real charmer for meals that that need something really bright, charming and alive. Served with my homemade pizza, it was perfect.
Paolo Scavino, Rosso, VdT, 2004
A blend of barbera and dolcetto. Dark ruby, big fruit, lots of lots of lots... Nice enough with pizza, but the big black fruit extract is a bit tiring without a little more zip. Lightened up it would be a delight.
Val Cerasa, Etna Rosso, Az. Ag. Bonaccorsi, 2002
Always a very nice wine, Val Cerasa is a good introduction to the considerable pleasures of nerello mascalese, Sicily's finest red variety. Grown on the volcanic soils of Etna, this is more than a simple charming wine, as it has very nice underlying mineral earthiness. A great wine for grilled steaks and chops and an excellent bargain. Why is anyone buying all those boring, industrial New World wines when wine like this are around?
Vosne Romanee, Vieilles Vignes, Alex Gambal, 2002
Brilliant medium ruby. Bright, fresh nose full of black cherry and cranberry with a touch of red licorice. All simple fruit at this stage, wait 4 or 5 more years before drinking. At $60 its a bit pricy for just charm. We can only hope for more.
Cairanne, Cotes du Rhone Villages, Domaine Cros de Romet, Alain Boisson, 2004
Brilliant ruby, with an explosion of fruit on the nose. Not that kind of fake, contrived extraction you see so often these days, but a clean, brilliant ripe fruit with an underlying zest of acidity. Just plain delicious. Drink over the next couple of years.
Pinot Noir, Twin Vineyards, Daniel Schuster, Canterbury, New Zealand, 2004
A real charmer. Bright, quite light ruby/garnet. Very clean, fresh bright fruit. A real bargain in every day pinot noir: something very, very hard to find. Something to buy by the case.
Lessons Learned from The National Enquirer
The wild claim I made in my last post, "The Best Wine I Ever Tasted" worked perfectly. Without the hyperbole, I could never have gotten anyone to read a tasting note about a lowly Muscadet. Sensationalism works!
While not the best wine I ever tasted, that Muscadet was a great wine, but wines like this just aren't on the radar today. Press reviews only focus on current releases and the public show little inclination to go beyond the wines and varietal of the moment.
Wines like this, great as it may be, are the orphans of the wine media of today.
Barbera, La Strega, La Gazza e Il Pioppo, 1998, Oltrepo Pavese, Az. Ag. Martilde.
A stunning bottle of wine that offers almost none of the attributes that knock down the big points today. Wonderfully warm and earthy with just the right touch of inelegant abandon on the nose, this wine hits the palate with a bitterness and acid zing that evolves into a wine of such length and complexity that it indeed took my breath away.
Muscadet, Cuvee Vieilles Vignes, Chateau de l’Aiguillette, 1995, eleve sur lie
Only a faint hint of older gold shines in the brilliant fresh straw yellow color. On the nose it is expansive yet firm, showing dense mineral highlights over fresh honeysuckle and red apples with cinnamon. Rich, yet zesty and alive on the palate with a finish that evolves into layer after layer of complexity for those paying attention.
The Best Wine I Ever Tasted...1995 Muscadet
I could not resist the bottle. A 1995 Muscadet for sale today. It was one of the best wine choices I have ever made as this bottle is one of the finest white wines I have ever tasted - and it cost $15.99.
- 1995 Muscadet, Cuvee Vieilles Vignes, Chateau de l’Aiguillette, eleve sur lie
A wine name that deserves a line to itself to contemplate the incredible achievement of producers Patrice and Vincent Gregorie. This is an extraordinary bottle that will be intensely ignored by the wine media because it does not cut the profile they are looking for, but this wine is everything I look for in a white wine. Unbelievably fresh for an eleven-year-old wine, this is a wine at the peak of perfection. It is worth noting that most of the white wines getting big points today will fall apart by their fifth birthday.
Only a faint hint of older gold shines in the brilliant fresh straw yellow color. On the nose it is expansive yet firm, showing dense mineral highlights over fresh honeysuckle and red apples with cinnamon. Rich, yet zesty and alive on the palate with a finish that evolves into layer after layer of complexity for those paying attention.
No, its not the best wine I ever tasted, but it is almost perfect and is certainly the best dry white wine I have tasted in the last several years. Congratulations to Portland Oregon’s Casa Bruno for having the courage to import such a gem.
Pinot impossible in Burgundy
At least that is what Decanter Magazine is reporting. It still remains unclear what's the main cause of the increasing girth of wines around the world. The culprit of the moment seems to be Robert Parker, but perhaps Mother Nature is more to blame. It would seem even she has more impact on vineyards than Mr. Parker. A quick look at the string of warm vintages in places like Piemonte and Oregon has to send up a few warning signals to even the skeptical. Pinot impossible in Burgundy over next 50 years - decanter.com - the route to all good wine.
Drinking the Best at Their Worst
Never have the great wines of the world been more clearly identified. Same for great vintages. Magazines, newsletters, web sites and blogs provide us with up-to-the-second reports on great bottles not to be missed. Big scores create feeding frenzies that clear store shelves nationwide. Now that we know who the best-of-the-best are, what do we do with them? We drink them as fast as we can.
More and more we are drinking the best at their worst. Consuming them at the very moment they are overwhelmed by full-blown young fruit power. What all this means is that consumers are learning that a great young wine, it all its majestic simplicity, is what great wine tastes like. This is truly a waste of some potentially great wine.
Robert Parker comments on drinking wines too young in the current New York Times article by Eric Asimov, “It's like walking into a maternity ward and looking at all the newborn kids, and other than the different colors, they all look alike."
Very, very true. With modern vineyard and cellar techniques, wines are more intensely fruity than they used to be when first released. This fruitiness, while charming, is simple stuff to what many of these wines will offer with a little bottle age. Perhaps everyone should stop blaming Mr. Parker for big, simple fruity wines and blame their own impatience and unwillingness to cellar a wine in the rush to taste whatever is hot and new in the press.
Recently I purchased two wines with a few years of bottle age on them from The Wine Expo in Santa Monica. The depth of complexity these wines offered from just a few years of bottle age was stunning. No amount of breathing or magnets can replace this time in the bottle. If you are going to seriously collect great wines, access to proper storage conditions are essential to enjoying these expensive and rare bottles at their finest.
Wine Sediments - Feds acknowledge myth of underage drinking in direct-shipping debate
Wine Sediments - Feds acknowledge myth of under-age drinking in direct-shipping debate.
Wine Journalist Mark Fisher (and I really mean journalist) reports on minors buying wine over the Internet. I always thought the concept of teenagers, motivated by instant gratification, would have the patience to try to illegally buy wine over the Internet was ridiculous. Now here is some research to back that up.
Wow
The more you drink, the harder it is to find a wine that takes your breath away, that makes you step back for a second and say: Wow!
I had that experience tonight with a bottle of 1998 Barbera, La Strega, La Gazza e Il Pioppo, Oltrepo Pavese from the exciting Az. Ag. Martilde. A stunning bottle of wine that offers almost none of the attributes that knock down the big points today. Wonderfully warm and earthy with just the right touch of inelegant abandon on the nose, this wine hits the palate with a bitterness and acid zing that evolves into a wine of such length and complexity that it indeed took my breath away. It was wines like this that got me into wine in the first place and wines like that are damn hard to find these days.