Join us for the annual summer kick-off event – the Memorial Day Weekend Open House celebration. Hundreds of wineries all across the valley will be open throughout the weekend, and here in Carlton we’ll be ready to rock with a stellar lineup of handcrafted Pinots and Burgundies, and handcrafted jewelry too! Tasting fee is $10, which is refundable with any three-bottle purchase.

Joining us for the weekend will be jeweler extraordinaire Siri Healy, who crafts exquisite rings, necklaces, bracelets and pins from recycled gold and silver – with a selection on display and for sale all weekend. We’ll be open Saturday & Sunday from 11-5 for all the festivities, and closed on Monday to spend the holiday with our families.

We’ll be joining many other Oregon wineries in donating a portion of tasting fees and proceeds from the weekend to the EcoTrust Farm-to-School program, supporting healthier food programs in our schools. We look forward to seeing you here!

…the more they remain the same. The old adage rings true time and time again. For relaxation and pleasure, I read a lot of old history books about the vineyards and wine business in 18th & 19th century Burgundy (yes, I’m a geek, I know.) I’m currently in the middle of a book recounting the history of Clos Vougeot, during the time it was a monopole of the Ouvrard family (up until the late 1800s.) It is fascinating to see business and economic cycles repeating themselves, and to see how similar things really are to what has been happening in modern history.

Monsieur Ouvrard père seems to have been a bit of a shady financier, part-time arms dealer, and private equity banker – who apparently put together his deal to buy the 125-acre Clos Vougeot (Burgundy’s most famous vineyard at the time, along with Romanée-Conti) with a byzantine assembly of loans, promissory notes, bonds, and other “creative” financial instruments. There’s no evidence that he actually put any cash into it at all. Sound familiar?

Burgundy went through about 40 years of hard times from the 1870s thru the 1930s – wars, horrible vintages, economic collapse, you name it. The equivalent of our modern day mortgage-backed securities wheelers and dealers went through their version of the wringer back then too. Vineyard owners saw their expenses outstrip their incomes in the lean times, and only the deep-pocket players were able to stay in the game. Wineries had vintages stacked up in their cellars that they couldn’t sell at any price. Then the speculators came in and bought properties at pennies on the dollar, and sold them off in smaller parcels at huge profits at the first signs of an upturn. Sound familiar?

La plus ça change, la plus c’est la même chose indeed.

On another subject entirely – I’m looking forward to seeing you here this weekend for our Memorial Day Wknd. Open House, 11-5 Saturday and Sunday – with a nice line-up of Pinots and Burgs to pour, and a killer artisan jewelry show & sale too. Stop by if you can!

I’ve been experiencing food euphoria.  The Farmer’s Markets opened.  I’ve got beautiful kale, chard and lettuce producing.  The carrot seeds…they came up!  Even though we’ve had a tease of a spring (actually typical in Oregon – some false spring weather gets us in our cropped pants and sandals and digging around in the garden and then bone-chilling relentless rains send us scurrying for the coffeehouses again), I can’t feel down, because I’ve already tasted spring and it is delicious!

A Farmer’s Market is such an inspiration and automatically turns my mind to simpler, flavor-packed preparations.  I wasn’t sure how I would use the rhubarb that I bought on the Market’s opening day, but I couldn’t resist its gorgeous hue.  Try this recipe for jam (see small-batch strawberry jam) — it’s perfect for those of us who don’t want to “put up” and just want enough to eat some now and maybe share a jar.  No equipment, no technique, just a skillet.  You can do it if I can.  Really, you “can.”  It only takes a few minutes, but the domestic goddess glow will stay with you for days.

rhubarb and strawberries from the farmer's market prepped for preserves. It's only the second time I've ever used rhubarb. It has a nice bright tart flavor like a green apple. I just subbed in some rhubarb for some of the strawberries in the recipe.

sauteed in the skillet with lemon juice and sugar - less sugar than many recipes call for...

spread on homemade bread (see recipe in previous post)...

Other memorable recent meals have been inspired by the Market too.  Tastebud Farm serves pizza straight from the wood-burning brick oven with toppings from neighboring vendors such as sauteed collards, spring onions and pecorino romano.

...oh, I forgot about the lardons. That really was delicious.

At home, I’ve been improvising my own versions, this one with mushrooms, duck salami, roasted asparagus and a buffalo-milk cheese.  (I prefer very thin crust, and no tomato sauce.  Pizza is never round in our house.  Sometimes the shape of Africa, but never round).  Here’s the pizza dough recipe that we love.

Before I get in a rut or a rush and pick up a prepared dinner that is overly salty and sweet from Trader Joe’s (as I did recently), I have to remember this dish — maybe the best nosh of recent memory — a simple dinner of roasted asparagus, gruyere, salami (Mario Batali’s dad’s brand), on fresh bread.  Here I made the bread, but Pearl Bakery or Grand Central would be great.  Yum!

It’s actually pouring rain as I wrap this up.  But I’ll be back in my little garden as soon as I can.

Martha & I celebrated our 15th anniversary with a quick 2-night trip to Seattle, conveniently tied-in with our participation in the Ray’s Boathouse annual Oregon Pinot & Copper River Salmon Extravaganza last Thursday night. The event was excellent – the season’s first CR Salmon on the grill (along with great slow-cooked brisket and about 275 killer side dishes and desserts), 10 of Oregon’s top producers pouring a line-up of sumptuous Pinots, and four Washington craft-brewers drawing pints of really nice micro-brews, and a gorgeous view of the sunset on Elliot Bay – all for $65 a head. How bad can it be? I definitely look forward to doing it again next year…

Ray's chef Peter Birk at the grill with fresh Copper River Salmon

A plate-load at Ray's

On the way up we stopped in the small town of Centralia, on a tip from our distributor about a little Mexican restaurant that has been drawing raves from all the foodies in the blogosphere. La Tarasca is the name of the place, a non-descript roadside joint that you would pass by a million times without ever giving it a second thought. That would be a huge mistake. This was truly one of the best Mexican experiences we’ve had anywhere. The family is from Michoacan, and their cooking stays true to their regional roots. The Pork adobado taco was a true standout – maybe the best ever. I’d drive the 90 minutes just for that taco. It was truly that good. Check it out on your next slog up or down I-5…

Carnitas at La Tarasca

We had two really memorable meals in Seattle. Our lunch at Matt’s in the Market overlooking the Pike Place Market was a delight. I had the brisket sandwich – basically the world’s greatest pot roast on a great brioche roll with horseradish aioli and arugula – god that was good. Not to mention their home-made salt & pepper potato chips, hot out of the fryer and ridiculously delicious. The highly-touted Catfish sandwich was also a big hit. It was apparent that people who really LOVE food are behind this place – it shows in every bite.

Brisket sandwich at Matt's - heaven on a plate

Dinner that night was at Lark up on Capitol Hill, a place that has been drawing raves since the day they opened a few short years ago. Chef Jonathan Sundstrom is really at the top of his game. The purity of the flavors in each dish, the quality of every locally-sourced ingredient – truly about as good as it gets. The Foie Gras terrine with addictive brioche toasts was downright amazing, and I’ve never had better, sweeter tasting asparagus in my life. (The lightly-truffled butter was a nice touch!) You may recall That Jonathan cooked our pre-IPNC dinner at the winery back in 2007, along with Portland’s “flavor-beast” Tommy Habetz (then of Meriwether’s, and now of Bunk fame.)

A shout-out for Seattle’s Hotel 1000 – we loved it. Great tubs, showers, service, bedding, free wifi, free phone calls, great tech hook-ups – overall a top notch experience. “We could live here” was uttered more than once!

Great to be back in Oregon now, but not so thrilled with the weather. We’ve got the wettest and coolest May of all-time on or hands, it looks like. We’ve gone from being a few weeks ahead of schedule to a couple of weeks behind. If we don’t get some warmth and sun soon (and it does not appear to be forthcoming), the vines won’t be flowering until July. So, we shall see…

Your's truly at Matt's

Join us in Carlton this weekend for our annual “Weekend Before Memorial Day Weekend” tasting festivities. Beat the traffic & crowds and check out some great bubbly to go with our stellar line-up of pure and elegant Oregon Pinot Noirs.

For your summer bubbles, we’re pouring two great sparklers this weekend, both great hand-crafted & estate-grown examples of what we like to call “Farmer Fizz”. First up is the rich and vibrant Crémant de Bourgogne from Domaine Huber-Verdereau in Volnay (one of the world’s great sparkling values at $22) – and then the crisp and bright Brut Sélection from Champagne Marc Chauvet, a top producer of Grower Champagne since 1529.

Then it’s on to three of our Scott Paul Pinots – the 2007 La Paulée, and two tiny-production single-vineyard wines – the 2008 D122 (from Ribbon Ridge Vyd.) and the 2008 Audrey (95 Pts – Wine Enthusiast) – one of the few times this year we’ll have the Audrey open for sampling.

We’re open 1-5 this Friday, Saturday & Sunday. Tasting fee is $10, which is refundable with any three-bottle purchase.

We’re stoked to be joining a stellar lineup of our friends and neighbors at this year’s Spring Pinot-Fest Extravaganza at the venerable Ray’s Boathouse in Seattle on May 20th. $65 gets you in for the food and drink, with Copper River Salmon on the grill and Pinots from a dozen of Oregon’s finest – all on the waterfront at Ray’s. We look forward to seeing you there!

… the season is about to begin! Of course here in Oregon that means we still have 3-4 more weeks of going back and forth between gorgeous spring-summer days and cold, rainy ones. Once we turn the corner in mid to late June – we’re off and rockin’ for one of the greatest summers on the planet. I truly would not trade summer in Oregon for anything.

First, I’ll be heading up to Seattle tomorrow (Thursday May 20) for the annual Ray’s Boathouse Pinot & Copper-River Salmon extravaganza. We’re pouring La Paulée and D122, along with ten other top Oregon producers and some great micro-brews as well. I look forward to seeing you there (and to that salmon on the grill!)

Memorial Day weekend is the traditional summer kick-off around the country, but here in the valley the weekend before the holiday weekend has become the big insider’s secret for wine tasting. The wineries are pouring better wines, the traffic and the crowds are much easier to navigate, and you can actually relax and enjoy yourself – what a concept! Join us for great bubbly (Crémant de Bourgogne from Huber-Verdereau and the awesome Brut Sélection from Champagne Marc Chauvet) and three of our Scott Paul Pinots, including one of the few times a year we open the Audrey for tasting. We’re here 1-5 all weekend, so stop on by…

Then on Memorial Day Weekend itself, we’ll be open 11-5 SATURDAY & SUNDAY only, taking Monday off to enjoy the holiday with our families. That weekend we’ll be pouring our favorite best-value white & red Burgs for summer sipping, and the full line-up of our Pinots too. Our good friend Siri Healy will be here both days, with a show and sale of her great jewelry handcrafted from recycled gold and silver as well. It should be a great weekend in wine country for you and a few thousand of your closest friends!

Join us for a special flight of red Burgundy from the Côte de Beaune, as Scott leads you through the villages, producers and individual vineyards. Located right next door to each other, the villages of Beaune, Pommard and Volnay produce wines that are very different, making this flight an excellent study in the concept of terroir. We’ll feature the following wines:

Huber-Verdereau 2007 Volnay 
Huber-Verdereau 2006 Volnay, Fremiets 1er
Hospices de Beaune, 2007 Beaune 1er
Aleth Girardin 2006 Beaune, Clos des Mouches 1er
Violot-Guillemard 2006 Pommard, Pezerolles 1er
Aleth-Girardin 2006 Pommard, Epenots 1er

25% off Featured Wines through Sunday May 16th.  Case purchase not required.

$20 covers the special  Burgundy flight and our regular flight and is refundable with a 6 bottle purchase. $10 for regular flight only and refundable with a 3 bottle purchase.

Kelley & I tasted through all the lots of our 2009s yesterday. They’ve been gorgeous during their élévage, and have now settled in to a very nice place. Globally, I would say the 2009s are first and foremost ripe and rich, but not to the level of 2006, thankfully. They don’t have the perfect balance of the 2008s, but they”re damn close. A pretty streak of raspberry and cherry fruit runs through all the lots, and they seem to have excellent length. The fruit quality is similar to the 09s in Burgundy that I spoke about below – very much the “cream of the fruit”. As a group they should be very appealing when young, and they have enough balancing acidity to mature nicely for 5-10 years.

Our old-vines at Maresh

After sorting them all out, we arrived at the preliminary blends. There will be six barrels of Audrey from a single block of Maresh, a succulent La Paulée from several different parcels, and one four-barrel cuvée that has yet to be named. We will fine tune these by going through barrel-by-barrel in the next several weeks, and the plan is to bottle on August 25th…

View from the deck at Azana

I spent this morning up at our Azana vineyard, where we’re building a nice party deck overlooking the vines, and a barn for the tractor and vineyard implements, etc. We’ve also decided to plant a small block of ultra-high-density Chardonnay this spring – we’ll be doing the no-trellis, no-wire old-school Burgundian plantings like I described a few posts ago. At maturity we should have enough to make a barrel or two of Chard, and we’ll see how it goes. If it’s great we might sell it, and if it’s just really good, we’ll probably drink it all!

The barn in progress at Azana

Thanks to Paul Gregutt of Wine Enthusiast for including us in his excellent new article on the best of Oregon Pinot touring and tasting – and for making our ’08 Audrey his top-scoring wine this year! Read all about it here.

I’m getting fired-up for our Côte de Beaune Reds Tasting Saturday here in Carlton. It’s a great chance to check out a bunch of killer 1er Crus from Beaune, Pommard & Volnay – and get 25% off the featured wines for the weekend. (I’m also doing a seminar on these wines that night – there may still be a seat or two open by the time you see this – email Kelly Karr to book yours if you’re interested in joining us.)

Some final thoughts on my latest Burgundian adventure… Having tasted a couple hundred 2009s and maybe four-five hundred 2008s to his point, here’s my take on the vintages. When you think of the ’09s, think raspberry cream. When you think of the 2008s, think of a pure, clear, cold running mountain stream. Both are very delicious, but in very different ways. There’s a purity and brightness to the 2008s that I adore, and the sexy fruit of the 2009s is undeniable…

The Huber-Verdereau wines in Volnay have hit new heights in both ’08 and ’09. They’ve always been really well made and well received, but Thiébault seems to have taken them to a new level. I told him that he had now found the elegance within his terroirs, and he agreed. Watch for the next two vintages from this young biodynamic rockstar, they will be a revelation.

Thiébault Huber - a man outstanding in his field!

One of the best meals I had on this last trip was not at a “restaurant”. The Cook’s Atelier is a private cooking class/market-tour/supper-club that is housed in the way cool 17th-century Beaune apartment of American ex-pat Marjorie Taylor (whose daughter Kendall interned for us and Domaine Huber-Verdereau a couple of years ago and now works fulltime in the wine business in Beaune.) Marjorie was a restaurateur in Arizona and trained under Anne Willan in France at La Varenne, and is now living the dream in Burgundy.

The prep table in the Cook's Atelier

At the end of the long zinc-topped dining table is a large piece of blackboard slate emblazoned with the great Julia Child quote – “If you’re afraid of butter, use cream”! Marjorie’s cuisine is beautiful in its simplicity – whatever is fresh and delicious at the market, simply prepared to show off the natural flavors inherent in the ingredients. The night I went she made a ridiculously good Boeuf Bourguignon (which she said was based on the classic Julia Child recipe, with a bit of Thomas Keller’s twist, and her own to boot.) Wherever it came from, it worked. Meltingly tender chunks of beef in a deep, rich sauce, perfect baby carrots halved-lengthwise, the onions… The Cook’s Atelier is a bit of an insider’s secret for now, but I suspect it won’t be long before the word is out. I highly recommend it for your next visit to Beaune…

The stove of my dreams at the Cook's Atelier

Back into the cellars (for that’s where I do my best work!) – one of my favorite tastings every visit is with François Millet, the esteemed winemaker at Domaine Comte Georges de Vogüé in Chambolle-Musigny. (We do not import the de Vogüé wines, but I’ve been fortunate to have befriended François and GM Jean-Luc Pepin over the years.) Widely considered to be one of the elite estates in Burgundy, the reputation is clearly deserved. Along with the Mugnier wines, these are some of the most pure, precise, and thrilling wines on the planet year after year. I find the de Vogüé wines texturally denser and sometimes more concentrated than their counterparts at Mugnier, yet they are both stunningly elegant and graceful. I believe I could drink nothing but Mugnier and de Vogüé for the rest of my days and be quite happy, if I had to!

In the cellar with François Millet at de Vogüé

We tasted the 2009s in barrel, as none of them had started malo yet, and the 2008s had just been bottled and were not ready for their close-ups. I have never tasted such a richness of fruit in young pinot pre-malo. François called it the “cream of the fruit”, a perfect descriptor for the lush yet refined richness of of the fruit. Only a hint of the green-apple acid showed up on the back end of some of the wines, and that of course will be gone after malo. Could these wines be even lusher and richer then? It will be very interesting to check in on them again in the fall.

Even through the creamy fruit, the minerality of Chambolle was showing – to a lesser extent in the Chambolle villages, and more prominently in the Chambolle 1er Cru (the declassified young-vine Musigny.) The Amoureuses was very precise and expressive, all minerals and cream, while the Musigny was, as always, a class apart, with a lovely magenta-ruby color and the texture and taste of honeyed raspberries. The Bonnes Mares (which comes from “different blood” as Millet pointed out) is also showing the ’09 cream of fruit – but in this case it is cream of black and blue fruits – mostly blackberries and very rich blueberries on the day. In all, a superb range at the very top of what Burgundy can produce. I cannot wait to drink these in their prime.

There is never enough time nor enough words to fully express what one goes through during a tasting at Lucien Le Moine in Beaune. They make about 50 different wines, for starters. And they are all from Burgundy’s best Grand Cru and Premier Cru vineyards (no lowly villages wine in this house!) Mounir Saouma and his wife Rotem are the husband and wife team who do everything at this micro-negoce, and they are each among Burgundy’s top true characters. Outspoken, never shy with their opinions, and with a very clear vision of what they’re trying to do, they have quickly risen to the ranks of the elite.

I found their ’08s fascinating – and so did they. They found that the 08s went through four very distinct phases of evolution – starting with what they thought were fresh and fruity wines to drink young, which then added toughness and acidity, only to get deeper and more serious, to finally arrive at what they think are true “Vins de Garde” – wines to age for a good long time. There is a bright acidity and structure to the wines, but a lot of fruit sweetness as well. The best wines will clearly need 10 years or more, but they are indeed wonderful.

Lucien Le Moine himself - Mounir Saouma

Among the whites, it’s always fascinating to taste the three top Meursault 1er Crus – Charmes, Genevrières, and Perrières – side by side. If one had any doubts about “terroir”, they’d be gone after these examples. Flowers and richness in Charmes, succulent minerality in the Genevrières. and an intense minerality to the 10th power in the Perrières. Fascinating stuff. It’s also very educational to taste their Corton Blanc (from the east facing slope) and the Corton-Charlemagne (from the west-facing slope) one after the other. A crème-brulèe richness and open-knit texture to the former and a loud mineral intensity to the latter – another great illustration of the concept of terroir.

On the red side, I tasted two different cuvées of Bonnes Mares – one from the northern end of the vineyard near the Morey side and the other from the southern section in Chambolle. It wasn’t hard to pick them out blind – the southern version had a very elegant entry, flowing into powerful but very refined tannins. The northern version was all black fruits and heavier, denser tannins. I thought all of the Chambolle and Vosne-based wines were showing excellently on the day, with the Richebourg in a class of its own in richness, roundness, length and complexity -a truly astounding wine. In the recent issue of Burghound, Allen Meadows’s listed the top 33 highest-scoring wines of the vintage, and fully 10 of those 33 are from Lucien Le Moine. I would say they had a successful 2008!

More soon with my final thoughts on another great visit up and down the Côte…