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31.10.11

embracing austin autumn


I miss Fall. I hail from the Northeastern half of the country, a Yankee if you will. I never knew a life without the changing of the seasons. September meant leaves changing color, December meant White Christmases, and April meant the emergence of flower buds. When I moved to New York, my new favorite season became Fall. Fall in New York meant going back to school, getting back to my job at the tea house, pots of my autumnal favorites like Apricot Cinnamon Tisane or Lapsang Souchong, and a closet of heavy sweaters, scarves, and knee-high boots.

I have come down with a heavy case of homesickness in the month of October dreaming of these blustery New York days in said boots and sweaters with hot to-go cups of said teas. Then I take a walk with friends through Central Park, red and orange leaves on the trees, ending up on the cobblestone sidewalks of Museum Mile, paying a measly dollar donation in order to browse the 19th century section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Now being in Texas, I have to acclimate to new seasons and new fall fantasies. Luckily, for me, Texas has cooled down and New York is blanketed in snow for Halloween and I get to enjoy sweater weather and knee-high boots at the perfect time of year. Unfortunately, my current job at Fino cannot provide me with huge pots of smokey tea leaves but it does offer some new concoctions from our lovely bartender, Josh Loving, with a bit more burn, bite, and spice. So I have revised a set of new fall fantasies that include some lapsang souchong-infused mezcal and apricot liqueurs- just so not to move too far away from my comfort zone.

Pim-Pim Pot-still

+  pimm’s no. 1
+  smith & cross pot-still rum
+  allspice dram
+  allspice syrup
+  chinese five-spice bitters

Maple Leaf

+  maker’s mark bourbon
+  maple syrup
+  lemon
+  cinnamon

Ghosts of the Pine

+  nux alpina walnut liqueur
+  rittenhouse rye whiskey
+  zirbenz stone pine liqueur
+  del maguey chichicapa mezcal
+  lapsang souchong
+  orange bitters

Millionaire Cocktail

+  smith & cross pot-still rum
+  plymouth sloe gin
+  orchard apricot
+  lime

Autumn Toddy

+  blume-marillen apricot eau-de-vie
+  laird’s apple brandy
+  honey
+  angostura bitters
+ orange
+ clove








 
After a Saturday afternoon tasting all of these, you end up in a nice Autumn haze to forget all about your homesickness.

22.10.11

fall fino food photography

I was commissioned or commissioned myself should I say to photograph the new fall food menu items at Fino. Here is my experimenting with rad iPhone applications:

harissa braised lamb

beet and avocado fattoush

pork ribs

fall vegetable & farro salad

grilled octopus

cojonuda

white gazpacho

goat cheese and olive tapenade flatbread

vegetable cazuela

butternut squash manti


16.10.11

Blind Dating


I’ve never been on a blind date. This is probably because physical attraction is important to me. I’d hate to come off shallow but I’ve always been a big believer that physical chemistry is an important aspect of any relationship- one lasting for years and one just beginning. This doesn’t at all mean that relationships should be based on looks alone. Sometimes attraction comes along over a few months of dates, sometimes it just takes a look across a wine bar. What I learned at a blind wine tasting is that first sight is not something to be ignored.



 Appearance: garnet, purple, bloody red, shallow, pink-silver rim, nice legs.

Shallow you say? You can describe a wine’s appearance in depth by tilting it back to have a center line of vision. Does the wine change color the farther back you look? If it does, it has depth. If not, it’s “shallow”.

Pink-silver rim? This is obviously a red wine and more of a brown or orange color at the rim can be a sign of oxidization or age. Pink-silver? We’ve still got something young on our hands.

After you swirl your wine around, there is a ring of liquid near the top of the glass and droplets which fall back into the wine. These are called “legs” or “tears”. It occurs because of the differences in surface tension and evaporation rates of water versus alcohol but to get to the point, visible legs mean a higher alcohol content. We all show a little more leg with a higher alcohol content.

Nose: alcohol (I know but some burn more than others), cherry, jammy, oak, baking spice.

Mm, baking spice. Did you know that the baking spice in an Old World wine means it’s been in aged in oak for an amount of time. Another sign that this wine is young but yet older than probably two years.

Taste: quartz, chalk, rock, high alcohol, savory, herbaceous, green pepper, fruit and wood tannin, medium acidity, concord grape, salty, dusty, salami, white pepper.

So depth, age, and the sight of visible legs and a higher alcohol content can all be told before the wine is even tasted or your date even seen. As our date was revealed, it happened to be this:


Neipoort is a producer in the Douro region of Portugal run by Dirk Neipoort and has been family-owned since 1842. The Douro region of Portugal is known for its schist "soil", a metamorphic rock known to “split” and flake because of its mineral consistency- this includes quartz and graphite, two things that you can taste in the wine. The Douro is mainly known for its Port-making abilities but because of economic tax breaks in the early 1900’s, table wine began to make much more sense. The Douro is also known for its tough terroir and high temperatures which make winemaking here extremely difficult and its resulting wine that much more appreciated.

The Vertente is a blend of Touriga Nacional, Tinta Roriz (aka Tempranillo), Touriga Franca, Tinta Amarela. All of these grapes are red grapes that are used in making Port. The grapes come from 20-year old vines, are then fermented in stainless steel tanks, and aged in French oak for 18 months.

So we deduced a somewhat higher alcohol content of 13%, aging in oak, a rocky terroir, and a young age but yet older than two years (2007) all without knowing what we were drinking. The only reason why I say you should maybe give your blind date a second chance is because I thought this was a French Syrah and Grenache blend. Portuguese? Really? 

So I guess what I’m saying is that it’s okay to make some physical judgments but keep an open mind until your wine or date really let you know they’re one-note and don't last that long.  

10.10.11

Terroir Tastings


If you read my lovely About Me section, you’d learn that I worked at a tea house before I came out to Austin. One love I had working at a tea shop was well, tea. It was my first experience with the art of the beverage. It was my first experience in understanding that location, climate, and topography can affect the taste of your drink (India or Sri Lanka, China or Japan?) or that the production processes affect its weight and color (black, green, or white tea, anyone?).

It was my first time understanding that depending on where that tea came from and how it was processed, cooked, stored, or added to (genmaicha or lapsang souchong?) could affect the experience that you have in your cute, little vintage teacup.

Leaving New York and conquering every tea on the Alice’s Tea Cup tea list, I was ready for the next thing. I didn’t realize it at the time but landing my job at Fino led me to the next great step: wine.  Conquering wine has been one daunting task. It went right over my head. Was Arbois a vineyard, appellation, or an importer? Or none of the above? How does one ever learn the weather of every European country in every year since 1960 and what does that even mean for a grape? Those pencil shavings and forest floor aromas? Nope, don’t smell it. Dried apricot and gasoline flavor? Nope, tastes like alcohol.  Windows on the World? No, it’s all French names. Wine Bible? Nope, it’s still French.

I bring my troubles up to my lovely wine director and was recommended Alice’s Feiring’s The Battle For Wine and Love. With this book, my mind was officially blown and not with overly academic articles but with passionate memoirs about the state of the wine world. It was a realization that the wine world was not as big of a beast as I was making it out to be. My biggest epiphany of all was that not all wine is worth knowing about.

Even this prestigious world of wine can be tainted with over-processing and questionable farming practices. I narrowed down my scope and wanted to bring it back to the idea that where your wine is from, its climate and topography, storing and processing has a direct effect on what ends up in your wine glass.

Terroir- “This French word means the total impact of any given site-soil, slope, orientation to the sun, and elevation, plus every nuance of climate including rainfall, wind velocity, frequency of fog, cumulative hours of sunshine, average high temperature, average low temperature, and so forth. There is no single word in English that means quite the same thing.”- Wine Bible

Along with terroir, the processes of fermentation, storing, filtering, and etc. all affect what ends up in your wine glass. If all that means so much, I want a pure and untainted connection to the place where my drink is from or else wine is nothing but grape juice.

From this comes a new appreciation for the Fino wine list and its dedication to small producers, organic practices, and a true representation of Old World terroir. Why not begin my wine conquering here?  It’s also easy when you get paid to taste them on Wednesdays:



This Wednesday starts with D. Ventura. This producer is located in the Ribeira Sacra region in Galicia in Northwest Spain. Run by Ramon Losada and his family, two of the three vineyards lay on the banks of the Sil River. These happen to be the two that we carry at Fino- the ’09 Vina Caneiro and the ’09 Pena do Lobo. The Caneiro is strictly slate, the Pena do Lobo is a mix of slate and granite. Both have steep terraces that run along the bank of the river which cool the vines from this specific soil. It’s not called the “Sacred Shores” for nothing.

These regions of Spain only carry the Mencia grape. This varietal only coming into the limelight quite recently known for its currant red and pomegranate flavors. It’s very Pinot Noir-esque but the more exotic and lesser known version. The producers at D. Ventura take an organic approach to their 80+ year vines by fermenting with only indigenous yeast and storing in stainless steel barrels allowing very little of its terroir to be tampered with.

The ’09 Vina Caneiro is a little meatier, gamier with dark fruit and tannins. The ’09 Pena do Lobo holds a more musty quality but also more delicate with fresher fruit tastes of raspberry and strawberry.

See, it’s not so bad and scary after all. Conquering the huge world of wine might just be starting small.