Going Back in Time Takes a While

Posted on August 16, 2010

Finally, after four years of planning and work, I have mowed a row of grapes. Illahe’s friend and teamster Mark Sougstad, who is driving in the picture above, handed me the lines and walked in front of me with his hat held above Doc’s head so I could aim his ears down the middle of the row. The bar of the mower clacks loudly but Doc doesn’t make a sound and the mower bumps around, much more than the tractor. Whereas some of the parts on Marvin Brisk’s mower are made in modern factories, the mower was assembled by hand and could have been done with different parts from the 19^th century. I would guess that no other winery is approaching pure sustainability in this way.

As you’ll note from the other picture, Doc and Bea are pulling a wagon in between bales of food. We did have a tractor bale those things, so we still put some diesel into the project, but with only a few acres of hay and about four acres of pasture, a sack of oats and the occasional apple, our team should be able to mow the bottom 30 acres of vineyard next year.

That’s a big ‘should’ since so far we’ve only mowed an acre. I hope to get up to three acres mowed this year and at least the reserve grapes pulled up to the winery by horse.

Mark plans to take Doc and Bea down to California to do some horse logging next month and have them back before harvest. They’ll have more practice and be healthier when next year rolls around. If we can mow 30 acres a few times we may save a few gallons of diesel. I’ll work on the math when quantity matters.

Now, only quality matters. We have never been closer to bringing true Oregon terroir into your bottle. Let us know when you want to come thank winemakers Doc and Bea.

A Short History

Posted on July 29, 2010

The Romans sometimes finished their wines in a smoke-filled fumentarium and grew grapes up the side of trees, the Greeks plugged up their amphorae with pitch, and the Egyptians pressed wine in large canvas sheets that they twisted like they were wringing out a towel.

The French developed a taste for wine stored in a barrel and knew that burning sulfur in the barrels helped clean them. Despite the fact that wine was significant in most ancient religions and important in both the Old and New Testament, attempts to restrict and regulate its consumption have been consistent ever since Medieval monks tried to sober up their members.

Wine is now produced seriously in most of the world’s temperate regions and global consumption has continued to grow despite phylloxera, prohibition, and war, to its greatest amount in history.

This is an even more concise history of wine than the one I finished reading recently, Rod Phillips’s A Short History of Wine. The book itself was good. It was easy to read and covered most of the big events in wine history. A lot of the sections were anecdotal, which is what one might expect in a book not called The Entire History of Wine. He connects it together but it’s obvious that he’s leaving a few things out.

The book does better covering the olden days before good records. No one knows what wine tasted like back then, and there was no real discussion of quality beyond good, bad, sweet, dry, old, or young. In modern times wine is subjected much more harshly to recorded criticism. The Greeks and Romans didn’t sit down and write descriptors or scores and they had no scientific measures to speak of, so they probably just enjoyed it more. Viticultural recommendations were simpler—don’t crop it too high, plant it toward the sun, and pick it at the right time—these were the main words of advice of the theorists.

Now we’ve entered an enlightenment in which sophistication thrives well. To understand the transition from monasteries to sommeliers one would have to reach for a different tome. But at IPNC I was asking Thibaud Mandet and Steve Doerner about vine spacing, and Steve said that it used to be the width of a monk’s ass, then changed to the width of a horse’s ass, then changed to the width of a tractor, and each measure works fairly well to make great wine. I have to thank Steve for making sure we don’t get too sophisticated.

Did someone say tacos, mango salsa, and Pinot Gris?

Posted on July 6, 2010

Illahe fans everywhere are beginning to write in with their recipes to match
our wines. This recipe for fish tacos comes from Santa Barbara, California
from our esteemed graphic designer, Merry Young, who believes that it was a
perfect match with our pinot gris.

Remember, it takes a lot of beer to pair with great wine.

You’ll probably want to make the salsa and stick it in the fridge before you
start in on the tacos.

*Beer Battered Mahi Mahi *

Canola or olive oil

1/2 cup all-purpose flour (or whole wheat, or a combo)

1/4 cup extra flour for dredging

2/3 cup beer (PBR works well)

1/4 tsp cumin

1/4 tsp paprika

pinch of cayenne

1 egg, lightly beaten

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1 pound or so of Mahi Mahi (tilapia, flounder, etc.)

In one dish, whisk together 1/2 cup of the flour, beer, egg, baking powder,
salt, pepper and spices. In a separate shallow dish, place remaining 1/4 cup
flour.

Heat enough oil to shallow-fry the fish in a large non-stick skillet over medium-high
heat. There should be enough oil to cover the bottom of the pan, plus a
little more.

Pat dry and season both sides of the fish fillets with salt and black
pepper. First, dredge fish in flour dish, turning to lightly coat both
sides, then shake off excess flour. Second, dunk fish in beer mixture and
turn to coat both sides, let excess drip off.

Add the fish to the hot oil and cook 2 to 3 minutes per side, until cooked
through and opaque. Remove the fish from the oil. Place on a paper towel
lined plate. Cover and let rest a few minutes.

*Mango Salsa*

1 ripe mango, diced or 1 1/2 cups (I use Trader Joe’s frozen mango chunks)

1/4 cup finely chopped red onion

1/2 medium red bell pepper

2 tablespoons fresh lime juice

2 tablespoons rice vinegar

1 tablespoon or so chopped fresh cilantro

Combine all ingredients in a medium bowl. Let chill a half or so and stir
before serving.

Corn tortillas are the best, and can be fried quickly in the oil or wrapped
in paper and microwaved, or even steamed if you have such a contraption.

Brad Ford thanks to Merry Young

Notes on the Grands Jours, Days 3, 4, and 5

Posted on June 4, 2010

Days three, four, and five were just as action-packed as the first two days.

Day three was the Beaune tasting, and it included cremant, haute-côte, and Macon producers along with the lesser-known villages north of Beaune. The wines were thoroughly enjoyable, and this was the spot for finding affordable wines. I’ve heard that Beaune’s Aloxe wines (which didn’t include the Corton wines here) are good deals for pinot noir, but the pinots of Savigny, Ladoix, and Chorey are pretty good, too. Of course the producers vary, and I’d have to look through notes to remember which ones I liked the best, but there are wines with great complexity and seriousness. Claude Rateau’s spring to mind.

There was a twenty-foot-long table of Macon wines set up for attendees to serve themselves, and I went through tasting Pouilly-fuisses. I’m not an aficionado of Macon chardonnays, but I did find it interesting that Pouilly-vinzelles, which was also there, was of equal quality to some of the Fuisses, and I had never heard of it before.

The exhibition hall in Beaune was a sea of wine. If I were an importer, this is where I would start. The wine was fine and affordable and not laden with fame.

Day four brought us down to Mercurey to the barrel factory of Mercurey to taste the Côte Chalonnaise. Buxy, Mercurey, and Montagny are the big names but God help me if I could make out any vast differences between them. One of the big names here is De Villaine, who makes a famous aligoté in Bouzeron.

In the Côte C, they grow white and red, and the difference in producers, like in Macon and Beaune, seemed to make a bigger difference in wine quality than the magic of terroir. That’s probably the big lesson of the Wednesday and Thursday sessions of the Grands Jours.

The truly fun thing on Thursday was the lunch—a huge buffet with salads, meats, cheese and desserts of all kinds to pair with the wines. I saw a guy eating a huge plate of runny white cheese for dessert. The after dinner coffee was good, the sun came out, and our tasting team including Peter Julian and Stephane Kat (former salesman at Camile Giroud) cracked up about the French nasal laugh, which made me feel like I was at summer camp.

On the last day we made it to Meursault, Pernand, Chassagne, and Pommard. At least I think we did. I know we were in Pommard and up on a hill near Corton, and that we tasted some Bâtard-Montrachets. The fatigue almost made me sick of wine tasting, but with the famous names and the incredible scenery of the hills and the Chateau de Pommard, I was able to make it to the finish line this year. The big disappointment of the day was that some of the Corton-Charlemagne producers did not do too well with their ‘07s or ‘08s, but that is a general statement when some were wonderful. Volnay seems to produce a wine with more oomph and interest, and Pommard with less. One producer in Pommard was great—I think it was Moissenet-Bonnard. He gave me his tarif (price list) since I showed an interest, and they were all pretty expensive. I guess I’ll have to keep working.

The overall lessons for Illahe after all this tasting were:

A) Burgundy is a different animal from Oregon wine. Oregon wine, even when made in Illahe’s completely natural style, is less tannic and more palatable than most of Burgundy’s at the expense of complexity. The more modern-style wines were similar to what I’m used to tasting here. There’s no reason to want to make Burgundy, but we would like to make wines that are palatable *and* complex, so we’ll work in that direction.

B) There’s little reason to grow Chardonnay here thanks to France and California (which I think most wineries here have figured out), and

C) we have excellent prices.

Brad Ford

Notes on the Grands Jours, Day 2

Posted on May 5, 2010

During day two of the GJ, we did the Côte d’Or. Unlike my first Grands Jours day two, we went from south to north. We started in Nuits-Saint-Georges, had a snack in the Château de Clos de Vougeot, skipped through Chambolle, whose tasting is in an old barn, and finished in Marsannay.

The first time I made this trip, I was overwhelmed by the grands crus. I wanted to be able to say I’d tried Chambertin and Bonnes Mares and all that stuff. Since that was over, I tried to get around the lines at grand cru barrels and search more for the character of the places. I still got around to trying a couple St. Vivants and the Clos de Tart, just to make sure they were keeping up.

The wines are all wonderful. I’m a wimpy wine reviewer, but I was really happy with the heart of Burgundy, even though most of it was from an off-vintage. The quality creates the legends that abound in this place. Myths abound, too. The storytelling is fun, though, because this is where wine lovers all congregate, and it’s the people who really care that perpetuate and inflate all these stories. My head was filled with the stories.

I think I came out with two points that seemed real, anyway, and were reflected in the aromas and palates of these wines.

The first was that the tannin character of the wines tends to be high at the ends, and low in the center, like a suspension bridge. Nuits and Fixin have plenty of tannin, and it smooths out as you get closer to Chambolle. A writer named John Gilman (http://www.viewfromthecellar.com/index.html) pointed this out to me, and I found him to be right. Is it that the terroir naturally makes the wines this way?

Probably to a certain extent. But another thing I heard when my friend Stephane was talking with another winemaker was the word  “Americanization.” It was in French, so I didn’t understand the whole conversation. I asked him about it later and he said that it was the word that described modern winemaking, and it seems to be characterized by more fruit flavor, less tannin, less acid—in a word, less of everything that helps a wine age, but helps a wine taste better initially. In a way, this could also mean that the wine is more controlled to produce these attributes and therefore has fewer flaws and more factory corrections.

The defenders of the faith demand that if a wine is made this way it’sflawed. This isn’t a wine flaw we covered in class. As the culture influences me, I’m beginning to lean toward enjoying the wines of Nuits and Fixin. They are more tannic, rustic, and real. We tried lots of ten-year-olds made in this style, and they’re fascinating. And they’re a lot cheaper.

Brad Ford

Notes on the Grands Jours, Day 1

Posted on April 13, 2010

Chablis is the first stop on the Grand Jours tour. There, they also pour Auxerre, Tonnerre, Vézelay, Irancy, and Saint Bris. Saint Bris is notable since it’s made from sauvignon blanc. It tended to be aromatic and balanced just under a percent of sugar. I would say the Saint Bris seems to be a world away from white Bordeaux or New Zealand, and definitely a fun change from a thousand Chablis.

They do make reds, especially in Irancy and Vézelay. The majority are thinner than in the south—no big surprise—but also have nice noses and are not oaky. The reds were acidic and so were the whites. We tasted mostly 2007, a cold year.

When it comes to Chablis wines, I found that a person could make a nice Cartesian graph to explain them. On one axis, let’s say the X, we have growth designations from Bourgogne to village to premier to grand cru. On the Y we have oak. As you move along the X axis, the wines tend to go up in oakiness.

Anyone can probably guess that as you move up and away, the Chablis also get more and more expensive. The surprise of the day was that what was interesting to me didn’t line up directly with the price. The lines of people at the tables lined up directly with the price. Not that the expensive stuff isn’t good. It is. That isn’t a surprise.

There was a really nice, balanced premier cru, Vosgros, that I loved, and some of the Fourchaume and Montmains were great. My faves had a little oak. A really smart importer could find some wonderful wine in this region cheaper than grand cru. Then that person could import it to Oregon and we’d all be happier.

Also, I might try to find a premier cru Chablis made in Oregon. Let us know if you have found one.

Brad Ford

Notes on the Grands Jours

Posted on April 7, 2010

Bethany and I knew our bags were pretty heavy with seven bottles of Burgundy and a cremant and a vin de paille from Jura, so we were going to switch the load between our bags to even it out. But the one I thought was heavier was already gone when our clerk told us that the second was too heavy. Bethany heroically suggested pulling out the books we’d saved from the Grands Jours de Bourgogne week of tastings, around 20 of them, and our bag was all right to go.

During our trip, including a few dinners and an extra tasting at the Hospice de Nuits, we tasted more than 1000 wines each. It gave me a lot of fodder for blog entries. We started the Grands Jours tastings in Chablis, then tasted the main areas of Burgundy over the next four days from Marsannay down to Pouilly, and I think there’s even another little town south of there, but I don’t have the book. Before that, we were farther north, in Paris, and we had a wonderful night at the restaurant of wine guru Tim Johnston of Juvenile’s wine bar.

Tim came to our table after we’d had a bottle of South African riesling and started chatting. He poured us some Beaujolais and we drank a bit of his birthday-barrel single malt. He found out we were going to Burgundy. After seeing the disgust on his face, I noted that he had no Burgundies among his glass pours. He said something like, “I only have good wine.”

There’s no good wine in Burgundy? Nope. And little good in Bordeaux, either. So if you want to follow the example of a successful restaurateur in your own cellar, you would only purchase Rhône, Bandol, Loire, east-of-France (Germany, Austria) and new world stuff. Now, he did say that he probably wouldn’t like the bottle of Illahe we gave him, either, but I’m blaming it more on the fact that our bottle was made from Burgundy’s king of grapes than it was grown and made in Oregon.

It was a great night. It’s always fun to hear different opinions. (Oh, he also mentioned that he kicked the director of the movie Mondovino out of his bar!) In the following week I tasted some spectacular wines from all over Burgundy. Whether they are priced fairly is another subject altogether.

Brad Ford

In Search of an Illahe Yeast

Posted on March 16, 2010

To date, Illahe has done a handful of native fermentations but it hasn’t been a main part of the program. We’ve used a special yeast from Evesham Wood and we’ve used about 10 different commercial yeast. Most of the commercial yeast have given us wonderful results, so we have been happy. Yet from what Michael and I learned at the Oregon Wine Symposium, there may be a good reason to start looking at native ferments more closely.

Dr. Mat Goddard of Auckland University presented his research at the symposium that he had found yeast in fermentations that were genetic matches to yeast found in the vineyard. Not just yeast, but Saccharomyces—the wine yeast. This contradicts the research we learned in school. For example, Charles Edwards says in his book, Wine Microbiology on page 7, “Kloeckera…as well as others present in grape musts such as Candida [et al.] are also called ‘native,’ ‘natural,’ or ‘wild’ yeasts because they originate in the vineyard or the winery.” They are also called spoilage yeast, and they don’t include Saccharomyces. Moreover, in his section on native fermentations, he talks mostly about how spoilage yeasts affect wine.

Neither Dr. Goddard nor anyone else denies that these yeast do exist and do come from the vineyard. The important point is that Saccharomyces, if he is right, does come from the vineyard. But not only this, a vast array of different and interesting yeast with different genes come from the vineyard.

Isn’t this obvious? How was wine made historically if not from Saccharomyces? The explanations I had heard before were that yeast came from the winery walls and equipment and had floated there from oak trees, where they had been found before. Oddly, Dr. Goddard could not find Saccharomyces in the winery, though at some times of year it definitely exists and in great quantities.

The other fascinating thing about his discussion was that none of the yeasts he found were commercial strains, indicating that a wine can be made from its own terroir. Nonetheless, one of the components is bound to be the spoilage yeast of the terroir, so a native ferment will have to be managed closely.

In following Cristom and Eieio (whose excellent vin de terroir I had not too long ago) and many others, Illahe will begin a serious native yeast program this year. In the handful of native fermentations we’ve had, I had assumed they started from other innoculated fermentors. I still think it might have happened that way: a punchdown tool or even a hand moving from one fermentor to another to clean it could have innoculated the must. They were successful and acted like innoculated fermentors, but this research suggests that these wines may have been native Illahe yeasts. Finding a local, strong fermenting yeast would be something that we would love for complexity and uniqueness.

Brad Ford

Tonkatsu with Illahe Viognier

Posted on March 16, 2010

For me to post a recipe is pretty ridiculous since I’m an average cook and there must be twelve better recipes for tonkatsu. But this is the only one with Illahe viognier in it, so I’m going to serve it to you anyway. Tonkatsu was one of the best things my beautiful friend Yone would make for me when I was a bartender in Tokyo.

And this is a beautiful viognier! I just read some thing on the internet dissing it, and all I can add is that if you think everything with the word ‘viognier’ on it must be Condrieu, I would say this is Willamette Valley viognier, and it stands on its own. A perfect balance of pleasing aroma moving between tropical fruit, apricots, pears, apples, to sweet spring flowers, backed up by a lawn being mowed a block away.

Oh, where was I? The recipe. It’s like most tonkatsu recipes I’ve read (whence it derives). Salt and pepper the pork chops and let them rest a bit. That’s a good time to shred up some cabbage, cut a lemon into wedges, and heat up oil in a sauce pan to medium-hot. I used olive oil and it worked just fine, but I had run out of vegetable oil. After the salt has worked its way into the chops, fill a plate with flour, a wide bowl with egg for every two chops, and a plate with panko. I’ve tried it with regular white bread crumbs and it’s okay, but the big panko pieces are nice.

Into the egg bowl, whisk in two or three tablespoons of Illahe viognier per egg along with a tablespoon of Dijon. C’est tout. Dip the chops in the flour, the egg mix, and the panko, and then fry it. Do the first side for about five minutes, golden brown, then flip. I used a meat thermometer since I had thick chops, up to 145F. If you don’t have a thermometer, I would say about 10 minutes for an inch. Put them on a bed of cabbage with the lemon, squeeze on some lemon, and drizzle with soy or teryaki or some nice salty brown sauce. You might even want to look up a tonkatsu sauce if you have ambition.

Make rice if you like, but make sure you have wine left for dinner.

Brad Ford

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Illahe Vineyards and Winery 3275 Ballard Road Dallas, OR 97338 phone : 503.831.1248 fax : 503.831.1237