We’ve been drinking better than usual coffee lately, as is always the case when my mother is in town (visiting from my hometown…New Orleans).  Scott makes the coffee in our household, and has for the 14 years of our marriage (although he’s only begun drinking it himself in the last year or so).  He watched my mother’s coffee-making protocol carefully, asked questions and came up with a few important tips, mainly that when making drip coffee, and pouring the boiling water over the grounds, the water should be added in tiny increments – just 4 tablespoons or so at a time.  Also, she uses more grounds than we do (CDM brand is her favorite and you can mail order it here).  The result is concentrated and fabulous and one of those tastes and smells that I’ll be able to summon in my mind for the rest of my life.

My Mom is the original culinary tourist, and I learned at her hip.  When I was growing up, she always enjoyed discovering an ingredient or food product while traveling.  When we were little, I didn’t appreciate so much the visit to farm stands and markets.  Now I understand that it’s a fun game, and I torture Pirrie and Scott with requests for U-turns and detours and field trips.  The fun is in the hunt and in the discovery.  One of the discoveries during her recent visit was the mild but addictive puffed crisps, made from corn flour, sold at the Mexican food stand at the Wooden Shoe Tulip Festival in Woodburn.  We made bad Wooden Shoe puns the remainder of the day.

So what made an impression on a foodie from New Orleans??  My mom relished an order of biscuits and sausage gravy from Pine State Biscuits at the Portland Farmer’s Market.  Also, a Croque Madame at St. Honoré Boulangerie was the most authentic version she had ever had (she also told the baker that New Orleans French bread is much better for bread pudding and promised him the Commander’s Palace recipe).  Because my mother doesn’t cook any more, or rarely, I made one of her own recipes, something she used to make for us when we were growing up – the broccoli/ham casserole that I’ve written about before.  Maybe the best was our dinner last night – the easiest meal of all.  After seeing the suggestion in the Oregonian’s Food Day, I topped pieces of fresh Alaskan Halibut with a jarred salsa (I tried papaya), and wrapped each 6 ounce piece in parchment and baked the packages on a baking sheet in a 425 degree oven.  I served it over rice with some fresh mango, and a side of asparagus that had simmered briefly in lightly salted water.  The asparagus from the Yakima River area was absolutely delicious, better than any I’ve had including when I grew my own in Napa Valley.  It required no adornment.  So the best meal of all was the simplest…great ingredients wrapped in paper and baked.  Wooden Shoe Know it?

With the new shipment just in of the first releases from Burgundy star Benjamin Leroux, and our purchases from the Hospices de Beaune auction in 2007, we now have our first 2007 red burgs in hand. I tasted over 500 07 reds in the cellars on the Côte last summer and fall, and was very happy with the very pretty fruit and supple textures. Much like the 06s, these will be wines for early drinking, in fact I think most will show better sooner than their 06 counterparts. They have very appealing fruit, are generally excellent and transparent examples of their terroir. Many have compard them to the 2000s, but with better structure, or the 2001s but more approachable. Either way you slice it these are a yummy group of wines – you can taste these first arrivals this Saturday at our tasting room in Carlton from 1-5. The rest of the 07 reds will start arriving in the fall…

Speaking of Ben Leroux, in addition to the tasting Ben will be doing at Portland’s Cork wine shop on NW Lovejoy on May 13th – later that night we’ll be doing a small winemakers dinner at the red-hot Urban Farmer restaurant in the Nines hotel downtown. Watch this space and your email for details soon…

I’m semi-bummed about Arsenal’s 1-0 loss in the first leg of the Champions League semi-finals today. The 2nd leg back in London on Tuesday should be smashing, as will the 2nd leg of the Chelsea-Barca clash. Everything is wide-open at this point, and by next Wednesday afternoon we’ll know who’s in the final on May 27th – which you can come watch with us at The Agency in Portland – call Kelly Karr at 503-852-7300 for reservations (there are still seats available.)

And here’s Chelsea’s Petr Cech making a flying save at Barca yesterday…

… I’ll be older. At least it seems that way. I’ve never been good with handling delayed or cancelled flights. The passengers are here. The plane is here. Our pilot is not here, however. He’s coming in from somewhere else on a flight that is, of course, delayed. Oh well…

In the meantime, it was a great first trip through Phoenix – we just started distributing our wines here a few months ago, and it was a pleasure to come in and meet with the sales team and a lot of top sommeliers and retailers throughout the area. I was continually amazed by the amount of money people have put into their restaurants here – every place we went seemed like a page out of some food-porn magazine. Literally millions of dollars have gone into decor and design into lots of these places, not to mention a sizeable commitment to maintaining large, deep wine programs. Which reminds me to remind you to please go out and eat and support your local restaurateurs if you can. Share small plates, order wine by the glass, skip dessert – you don’t have to break the bank to dine out – and most operators these days are offering some great deals or $20 three course meals.

Like small wineries, these are mostly small, locally-owned family businesses, and we need them to survive the tough times. We need a strong, local, food & wine culture going forward.

On another subject entirely -we’ve just announced our special event coming up on May 27th for the Champions League final – we’re joining our friends at Portland’s Storyteller Wines for a private event at The Agency on W. Burnside in Portland from 11-2. Reservations a re required, as we’re limited to 30 people in our private room – it’s $35 a head, which covers food, beer & some good grape juice, and what could be the most exciting game of the year (Arsenal-United and Chelsea-Barcelona are the semi-final match-ups – big action to come!)

They’re finally boarding my flight – I’m off to NoCal…

The wait is over! The 2007 Audrey Pinot Noir (a whopping 30 cases available) is finally released. 

Please come enjoy a sip of Audrey, along with an array of Burgundies.  We’re thinking something with salmon might be in order too…

If you purchased futures of Audrey in the fall, we’ll have them here ready for you to pick-up.

We’ve had a steady stream of customers in our tasting room recently who’ve been remarking on the negative press the 2007 vintage in Oregon has been getting. To summarize and paraphrase our customers’ comments “What are they talking about – these wines are beautiful!”

I’ll be the first to tell you that ’07 was a difficult year. Cold when it should have been warm, hot when we needed cool, and wet when we wanted dry.  And It rained on and off during harvest. That, apparently, is enough for many folks to write off the vintage. And that’s a shame, because it’s in the difficult vintages where you find out who the good producers are. In the superior vintages, virtually everybody makes excellent wine (2002 Oregon, 2005 Burgundy, for examples)- it’s not that challenging when you have superb raw material gifted to you by mother nature.

On the other hand, when the going gets tough, then we see who’s got what it takes to produce excellent wines under adverse conditions. There’s an old adage that rings very true – the good producers make good wine EVERY year. In looking at Burgundy, one could argue that the top tier of superstar producers have earned that status specifically because of their ability to make excellent wine year-in, year-out. Take your pick – DRC, Roumier, Rousseau, LeRoy, deVogüé, Lafon, Leflaive, Coche-Dury, Mugnier, and many others – they consistently produce delicious stuff despite the vagaries of nature from year to year. One might even argue that DRC actually excels in the “off years”.

People of course tend to like things tied up into neat, tidy packages, but wine unfortunately doesn’t often willingly conform. It is fair to say that certain vintages are indeed difficult and challenging, but to dismiss them out of hand is simply using too broad of a brush.

The other old adage that is also true is that one does not drink a vintage, one drinks a bottle of wine or a portion thereof!) You certainly need to be more selective in the challenging years, because all the wines are not uniformly excellent. Some of my favorite all-time wine experiences have been with “off year” wines, however, and I urge you to TASTE, TASTE, TASTE – you’ll find a lot of wines you like from the vintages that many would like to write off.

A lot of excellent 2007s are just hitting the market now, and I bet you’ll be surprised by how many wines you’ll really like from this too-quickly discarded vintage. It certainly favored the producers who work at the elegance-and-finesse end of the spectrum rather than the big-fruit-and-power style, but if you prefer the former, there’s a lot to like.

OK, he’s just saying this because he’s got 2007s to sell, right? To be honest, our 2007 Cuvée Martha Pirrie is nearly sold-out, and the 2007 Audrey we’re “releasing” tomorrow essentially sold-out as a Futures offering last fall. We will have a lot of 2007 La Paulée to sell, but that won’t be out until much later in the year, as we still have a good amount of the 2006 in stock (at 2,000 cases it’s the largest production bottling we’ve ever done, which of course precisely coincided with the largest fine-wine market slowdown in memory!)

To further defend myself from charges of being a shill for that which I have to sell, I will say that I’ve always been fairly vocal about not being a big fan of the 2006s – which I find too big and fruity in general, and for our style in particular, though they’ve proven very popular (maybe because the press said it was a “great” vintage!) That said, I think we did a nice job with the 06s and ours are fairly restrained for the vintage, but I simply prefer the 07s (and the 05s, for that matter.) Or maybe I’m just a contrarian, who knows!

At any rate, here’s the best advice I can give -  let your palate be your guide.

And here’s my favorite vineyard on the planet, always a source of inspiration through “good” vintages and “bad”…

Lots of action to come here in the world of Scott Paul. First off, don’t miss our 2007 Audrey release party on saturday – 12-5 in our tasting room – with perhaps your last chance to get a hold of this elegant ’07 beauty for your cellar. We’re down to about 20 cases or so remaining as of today – come on out and taste…

I will announce for the first time right here on the blog that we are excited to make a new addition to our Burgundy portfolio. Winemaking superstar Benjamin Leroux – since 1999 the head of Pommard’s legendary Domaine Comte Armand – has launched his own new label, and we’re thrilled to be bringing his wines in to the market. I’ve known Ben for a number of years, and he has roots here in Oregon, having worked the harvests at DDO in 1996 & 1997. He continues at the helm of Comte Armand, while launching Maison Benjamin Leroux with a line-up of lovely 2007s. We’re planning a winemaker dinner with Ben here in Portland when he comes in to visit in mid-May – watch this space and your email for all the details.

Ben’s been getting mega-press already, before his wines even hit the U.S. (we’re expecting our shipment by early next week.) Here are some early notes from Wine Spectator’s Bruce Sanderson. We’re also planning an introductory tasting of Ben’s first releases – save the date for Saturday May 2nd at the tasting room, when we’ll also unveil our 2007 botling from the Hospices de Beaune.  I bought a barrel of the ’07 Beaune 1er Cru Cuvée Maurice Drouhin (the same cuvée we bought in 2005 & 2006) – and we have a scant 12 cases to offer for sale – so please plan to join us for a great event.

Here’s Ben, in the kitchen of his restored stone farmhouse in Merceuil (a little hamlet just below Meursault)…

For those of you that follow my soccer obsessions/ramblings here, you probably have figured out I’m over the moon with Arsenal’s win today and move into the semi-finals of the Champions League. If you happen to share my soccer enthusiasm, or perhaps just have a desire to watch me go rabid and scream “YESSS!” when we score a goal – we’re planning a party for the Champions League Finals on May 27th. We’re taking a private room at The Agency Ultra Sports Lounge in Portland for the day, and will be pouring some nice wines to go with the Agency’s killer array of Sliders and decadent pub-grub. We’re going to do it in conjunction with our friend Michael Alberty of Portland retailer Storyteller Wines. Michael, in spite of being a Chelsea fan, is a pretty decent human being. As of this writing it is possible that Arsenal and Chelsea could meet in the final – so all kinds of fireworks may ensue! Again, watch this space and your email for upcoming details…

And here’s Theo Walcott – artfully slipping in what proved to be the winning goal today…

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter – scottpaulpn – or visit the Scott Paul Wines page on Facebook.

There’s a great tradition in the Oregon wine industry that I was introduced to when we first moved here many years ago. Every Easter there is a huge open house party/barbecue/pot-luck/easter-egg hunt on the grounds of John Davidson’s nursery outside of McMinnville. John is one of the owners of Walnut City Wineworks, and began this celebration way back as a staff and family party for the crew of Tina’s Restaurant in Dundee, of which he was part-owner at the time. It has grown over the years, and now is packed with winemakers, restaurateurs, vineyard crews, tons and tons of kids, and more food than even this large crowd could consume.

Everybody brings something – a salad, a side-dish, a dessert, or several bottles of wine, and then massive amounts of sausage, flank steak, ribs, foot-longs, and oysters hit the grill. Even when the weather isn’t terribly cooperative, as in yesterday, it’s a massively fun and festive day that we look forward to every year.

Huge thanks to John and everyone for their immense contributions of time, work, money and meat – we are deeply appreciative of the opportunity to be a part of this community and great event year after year.

And here’s Fred Carlos (the sausage guy at all the Portland farmer’s markets) busy at the grill with several pounds of sizzling goodness…

When I worked years ago for Chefs Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger, they shared with me their belief that you could tell a lot more about a chef by his or her salads than by the entrées.  Lots of chefs can perfectly sear a scallop or make meat seem to melt, but, they contended, a really good chef can make a salad sing.  And right now, I can’t get out of my mind the salad I ate last night at Le Pigeon – a head of romaine lightly charred on the grill with grilled onions and pine nuts and salt cod.  I didn’t even see the salt cod so maybe it was melted into the dressing the way you do with anchovies in some dishes?  Scott had brought a bottle of Philippe Chavy 2005 Meursault-Blagny 1er Cru that was fantastic with the salad.  My entrée was sliced duck breast with a creamy spinach, golden raisins, walnuts and garlicky croutons.  I would never have thought of walnuts alongside the duck but it was all terrific.  All in all, the best meal I’ve had in a while…one of those where you don’t want dessert and can barely stand to brush your teeth when you get home because your mouth is so content as it is.

Easter in Oregon Wine Country means one thing…the Davidson’s Easter Open House!  Not sundresses, sunshine and sandals, the way it was where I grew up and hunted eggs, but drizzles, fleece and blunnies (aussie work boots), and barbequed oysters (we’ll bring the Chablis – it gives us an in with those tending the oysters on the grill).  There is a mile long pot luck buffet brought together by people who love food and wine.  The kids are distracted — led on a nature hike around the property — while the Easter bunny hops in to hide treats.

Here’s a pic of what Pirrie prepared for the bunny.  As you can see from her post, she is a fan of a good Pain Bagnat.  I’ll make one for her this week with some awesome Oregon tuna, good olive oil, black olives with provençal herbs, and hard-boiled eggs (so what if they’re pink or purple tinged?).

I have just had a great pain bagnat at our local bakery Saint Honoré .  But not as good as the first pain bagnat I ever had it was in Merseille,France when I was almost 3 years old .  Nothing will top that one.  Still it was amazingly good .

By Pirrie Wright