Sunday, March 28, 2010

Lucie Snodgrass Dishes Up Maryland

One of the restaurants featured in Lucie Snodgrass' comprensive Dishing Up Maryland (Storey Publishing, 2010, paper, $19.95) is the Fair Hill Inn in Cecil County in northest Maryland, so it's fitting that she have one of her first book signings there on a chilly evening in late March. While we nibble hors d'oeuvres rushed out of the kitchen by co-chefs Brian Shaw and Phil Pyle and sip a variety of wines, Lucie stands behind the sturdy bar and wields a pen.

She explains that, although she was born in England of Swiss parents and has roamed the world a bit, she has lived for many years on the west side of the Susquehanna near the Pennsylvania border with her horticulturalist husband, Edmund, a fifth generation farmer and a scholar who pioneered green roof plantings - itself a story for another day. So there are a lot of plant experts from the region in the old stone inn this evening, sipping wine and discussing their specialties and their lecturing circuits.

Snodgrass has written an excellent cookbook with 150 recipes from all corners of Maryland's diverse landscape, but she also has written a cultural guidebook with stories about the people who grow the food, as well as those who cook it, such as the Ways of Rumbleway Farm just down the road near the Susquehanna or the Hayden Brothers, watermen down the Chesapeake Bay, or the Bruscos of South Mountain Creamery in the hills of Frederick County.

And like a delicious entree that also is beautifully plated, Lucie Snodgrass' book has dozens of colorful photos by Edwin Remsberg printed on glossy stock. Well worth ordering through your local bookseller.

Until next time...

Roger Morris

Friday, March 26, 2010

The Friday Lineup™

A weekly commentary on selected wines tasted. All wines are sampled pristine and with food.

Wine of the Week:


2007 Pfendler Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir ($45). Last weekend, Jancis Robinson wrote in her Financial Times column that it might be a good idea to have food present even at serious wine tastings in spite of all those potentially distracting smells and tastes. After all, isn’t that how we consume most wine? Besides, the stomach often demands it. And when I first tasted this Pinot, my stomach said very firmly, “Roger, go immediately to the refrigerator and arrange a culinary marriage of convenience.” This wine is part of an evolving line of very good to excellent Pinots from the Sonoma Coast (that gerrymandered app) with a good concentration of ripe Bing cherries and dark plums laced with plenty of acidity, minerality and refreshing tonic-water bitters around the edges. This is not one of those complex wines that goes wandering across the terrain of the palate but instead sinuously flows across the mouth, drops down the chute and lingers long after the lips are closed.

Wines of Interest:

2007 Chaddsford Portfolio Collection “Miller Estate” Chambourcin ($26). If Chambourcin were an indigenous grape growing in Italy or Spain, the Trendy Wines Brigade (TWB) would be all over it. As is, it’s ignored because it grows best on the East Coast (oh, there…) where it is almost indigenous. It's one of those French-American hybrids that lost the battle of replacing phylloxera-devastated vineyards many harvests ago to vinifera vines grafted on American rootstock. It is still a finicky grape to make better-than-average wine out of, but winemaker Eric Miller has mastered it. And this is not a wimpy East Coast red, but a complex, full-bodied food wine that opens to aromas and flavors of dark fruits, bacon fat, tobacco leaf and a little cola. Very well-balanced. Even if Miller knows how to make Chambourcin, he is still befuddled (as am I) as to which Chambourcins will age well and which will not. He sensibly recommends, “Drink it now.”

2006 Hidden Ridge Cabernet Sauvignon ($40). This is a Spring Mountain wine that can’t call itself that because it's on a mountain dimple between the two main ridges of the Mayacamas range and is thus legally in Sonoma County. I tasted it while interviewing winery co-owner Casidy Ward in the lobby of the Helmsley in New York one morning recently, so my notes are less that laboratoryesque. But I did enjoy the plumpness of the Cab fruit and the sinewy finish and noted it is a very good wine, especially at the price. Yes, I was looking around for food.

2008 Monthaven Central Coast Chardonnay ($24 for 3 liters). This is a very good affordable party wine, the kind that won’t ruin your reputation even though it does come from a box. Or something to have in the fridge if your spouse is out of town and you need liquid to help you make it through the week without pulling corks and restoppering. Nice clean fruit with hints of tartness, moderately lean like a Macon.



Until next time...



Roger Morris

Friday, March 19, 2010

The Friday Lineup™

A weekly commentary on selected wines tasted. All wines are sampled pristine and with food.

Wine of the Week:


2007 Craggy Range “Te Kahu” Gimblett Gravels ($22). How many times do I have to say it – Steve Smith really knows how to make wines, whatever the grape. OK, so this may not be the best wine I’ve ever tasted, but it is a delicious Bordeaux blend – complex fruit with mulberries, minty creams, dark cherry, buttery oak and a lean finish. As a winemaker friend who tasted this with me said, “It has New World fruit, but is very smooth and drinkable.” Blend is Merlot (54%), Cab Sauv, Cab Franc and Petit Verdot.

Wines of Interest:


2008 Liebfraustift-Kirchenstuck Riesling Trocken (SRP not set). This is a good wine for Riesling lovers who can’t make up their whether they prefer plumpness or austerity, as it has a little of both. The first taste is of succulent oranges and peaches smoothly transition into a slatey, minerally finish. Not a great wine, but a very pleasant one. (Estate formerly known as P.J. Valckenberg.)

2008 Gabriel Meffre “Laurus” Gigondas ($24). Dark, concentrated cassis and raspberry flavors with nice tonic bitters around the edges. Tasted it with a cassoulet, and it was a great pairing.

2009 Craggy Range “Te Muna” Road Martinborough Sauvignon Blanc ($22). This is a big and firm wine, seeming almost a different variety that the boxwoody, lean Sauvignons of Marlborough across the straits at the tip of New Zealand’s South Island. It is an excellent food wine, well-balanced, with more tropical fruit flavors than grassy tastes. Apples and pears.

2007 Blackstone Winemaker’s Select Merlot ($12). A bargain. I like this wine for its dark fruits concentration – especially black raspberry - yet it never becomes too fruit-forward or tiring on the palate. In some ways, it is more reminiscent of a good, earthy Grenache from the southern Rhone or Languedoc than of a Bordeaux varietal.

Until next time...



Roger Morris

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Farm to Fork - An Historic Tale



We learned to eat with our fingers first.

The Church liked us that way and for a long time preached that some eating utensils were an affront to God. The English once considered the fork to be a foppish Italian affectation. And “farm to fork” local food sourcing had another meaning – essentially, the instruments we eat with are merely scaled-down farming tools.

All these thoughts came to me recently when we were having dinner with friends, and I referred to a table knife as a “case knife.” The hostess had never heard of the term, but it was such a common one when I was growing up – “reach me a case knife” – that I never thought about its origins. Interestingly, another couple at the table, both from Tennessee, had also used the term.

When I was growing up in rural West Virginia, we always had names for our various types of knives – case knife, butcher knife, paring knife, pocket knife, switchblade, hunting knife. We didn’t use bread knives, as we seldom baked yeast bread in loaves, or boning knives, not being a fishing people.

So I promised to Google “case knife” and get back to my hostess. The first reference I found was to a company that makes mainly pocket and hunting knives – W.R. Case – but that turned out to be the simple answer but wrong one. Rather, the term dates back to travel in the American South, where 19th Century inns did not provide eating utensils for their guests. The fork was still a rarity at the time, so travelers ate with their fingers and used their knives, which all men carried at the time as a necessary tool and/or weapon, to cut meat at the table or spear errant bits of food.

As the fork was gradually introduced into American society as an eating instrument, really classy men (few women traveled) began traveling with their own eating utensils – a fork, a knife, and maybe a spoon – packed together in their own cases. As forks were new to cutlery, they did not need a distinguishing name, but knives carried for use only at the table only became known as “case knives.”

Early English travelers to Italy made references to the use of table forks there in the early 1600s, but it was well over a hundred years later before they became common in England and later still the U.S. During this period of culinary abstinence, one Catholic cleric wrote, “God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks – his fingers. Therefore it is an insult to Him to substitute artificial metallic forks when eating.” This also seemed to have been the philosophy of my Uncle Amos, who, in the late 1940s, still licked his plate – holding it up to his face – when he was through eating. While it might not have affronted the deitic Him, it did gross out the rest of Us at the table.

Of course, it’s easy to speculate that all table instruments, used more for delicacy and cleanliness than for a real need – what you can’t eat with your fingers can be drunk from a bowl – came from the miniaturization of farm instruments which were invented centuries earlier as labor-saving devices.

It went like this:

The table knife was a smaller adaptation of a hand saw, and many knives had, and still have, serrations to separate joints of meat or to “saw off” a piece of particularly tough meat.

The spoon had its origins with the shovel, although it was used at table more for liquids than solids.

The fork came from the pitch fork (furca in Latin), used to collect and carry straw, hay and weeds, and at the table was used to collect items on the plate that were in pieces and for which knives and spoons were useless. One could speculate (rightly or wrongly) that the fork first evolved in Italy from a farm instrument to a table instrument as the result of that country’s invention and wide use of spaghetti and other forms of pasta, the quintessential food for forks.

Hewing or striking instruments on the farm – such as axes, hoes and hammers – had little use at the table in their miniature forms, although they are used in the kitchen – meat cleavers (axes) and tenderizers (hammers). The garden hoe or mattock? Simply another form of an axe with the blade on the horizontal.

I’m sure some scholar has determined why early Asians didn’t widely use forks and spoons at the table, but instead devised chop sticks, which are simply an unhinged pair of tongs that utilize the digits of the hand – the thumb especially – as a fulcrum.

In practice, of course, food still falls off my fork, causing a splatter, which invariably gets grease, sauce, or oil on my necktie – but then it’s only serving its probable historic purpose, most likely having evolved from the bib or napkin.

Until next time...

Roger Morris

Friday, March 12, 2010

The Friday Lineup™

A weekly commentary on selected wines tasted.

2008 Corzano e Paterno “Il Corzanello” Tuscany Rosso IGT ($15). Warm, lush cherry fruit with a lean finísh. Delicious. Buy

2006 Corzano e Paterno “Tre Borri” Chianti Riserva ($44). My favorite of the three tasted here – great smooth tannins with vanilla and tart cherry flavors. Buy

2006 Corzano e Paterno “Il Corzano” Tuscany Rosso ($44). Great food wine with good finishing acidity, but not as rich or complex as the Tre Borri. Consider

2006 Clos la Chance “Hummingbird Series” Monterey County Chardonnay ($15). The oak isn’t well integrated, so the wine comes across as too aggressive on the palate. Pass

2005 Marcari North Fork of Long Island Merlot Reserve ($36). Very nice. Dark cherries with a touch of spice. Try.

2007 Estancia “Keyes Canyon” Central Canyon Merlot ($12). Estancia has been through so many owners and iterations through its history that it’s nice to pull a cork and find that the wine is still quite enjoyable – creamy and juicy cherry fruit, a deep purple coloring, but not too extracted or overly fruit forward. Buy.

2005 Chaddsford Pennsylvania "Merican" ($40). A Bordeaux blend mainly of Cab Sauv (60%) with portions of Merlot, Cab Franc and Petit Verdot. It has welcoming aromas and flavors of warm, slightly caramelized oak mingled in with firm fruit and a nice, lean finish. Consider.

Until next time...

Roger Morris



Friday, March 5, 2010

The Friday Lineup

A weekly commentary on selected wines tasted.

2007 Mouton Cadet Bordeaux Rouge (about $10). Sometimes a flaw can be charming, as in a dinner companion’s crooked grin or a touch of green stemmy-ness in a red Bordeaux. The vins gendarmes don’t like any vegetable notes in their red wines, due to early harvesting, but some of us grew up with a hint of greenbriers in our reds and still enjoy it. This Mouton also has good fruit from the 65% Merlot, 20 Cab Sauv and 15 Cab Franc blend. Buy.

2007 Clos de La Chance “Hummingbird Series” Central Coast Cabernet Sauvignon ($18). This falls into that nice-for-the-price category – good fruit, minerally, touch of leather, mild tannins. Not complex. Consider.

NV Fantinel Prosecco Vino Spumante Extra Dry ($15). Usually the extra dry category is littered with saccharine wines, but this is not one of them. It is as complex, fruity and clean on the palate as most bruts. Buy.

2008 Patone Cellars Brandywine Valley “La Fleur Blanc” (22). This is a promising new winery from Pennsylvania’s Chester County that uses purchased fruit, and with this wine the fruit is a blend of apples and oranges. At least in the flavors – orange notes from the Viognier, and apples from its Chardonnay companion. A very chalky wine, with a crisp and refreshing finish. Try.

2007 Patino Cellars Brandywine Valley Malbec ($30). Lots of cassis and spicy peppermint, yet this isn’t a fruit-forward wine, but more of a savory one. Well-made and interesting. Consider.

Until next time....

Roger Morris