food and wine matching: the class

To say I have been busy recently would be a huge understatement – I’ve been so busy I haven’t posted here in months!

I’m currently on a hiatus from wine school classes. My most recent course, Food and Wine Matching, had its last class on Tuesday night. I’m also sad to report that I had to miss the last class – I blame it on the automotive industry – but apparently our project went over well. The culminating activity for this short class is to choose a dish, cook it and pair it with a wine. Then, on the last night, the food and wine will be judged and a paper will be handed in.

The marking of the project is apparently based on the paper – not on the cooking, or on the wine – and the paper has to include comments on the wine’s structure, flavour profiles, etc and how it pairs up with the food that was served.

We cooked a chicken crepe with cream sauce and chicken & mushroom risotto. My group’s plan was to include one riesling, for the sake of completeness – as riesling is always a great match with food – but to try as many wines as possible with the goal of picking another wine to pair.

Unfortunately, the riesling was the best match. I don’t even know why we tried to find something else. We should have just gone with the riesling and avoided the hangover that came from trying seven different wines in one night. Oops.

Zuccardi

It’s Valentine’s Day. I’m kind of ignoring it, and the rest of the world, by sitting and hanging out in my apartment today. I’m also watching a rather ridiculous amount of 30 Rock… but I guess you win some and you lose some.

I finally opened my last bottle of Zuccardi Q Malbec. It’s from the 2005 vintage, and it’s from Mendoza. I first discovered this wine while out a fantastic restaurant in Bogota called “Ochenta Sillas” – they had some deliciously crazy ceviche combinations. After struggling to get the cork out of this wine, I discovered that it still has all of those delicious fruit characteristics, that great purple colour and a totally refreshing mouthfeel. I really love this wine. I also hate that I can’t buy it in Ontario. I bought the last two bottles from a NSLC store in Bayers Lake this summer. I couldn’t even find this wine in Alberta!

Anyway. I realized I was saving this special wine for a special occasion. But, as Miles in Sideways, maybe I don’t need a special occasion to drink my delicious malbec. Maybe I should drink all of those wines I’ve been holding onto for a special occasion.

As an aside, I opened another bottle of Fuzion. I’m over that wine. It’s a great wine for $7.50 – but I think I’d rather spend another $5 and get something I really like.

wine school updates

I’m overjoyed to have the Internet working today. For some reason the darn Internet hasn’t worked for me all week!

Wine School has been keeping me busy. In Vinification, we received our first test back. The highest mark in the class was 47/50 – which sounds high, but seeing as how the class average for the midterm in wine tasting was something like 95%, it’s pretty different. I find that our instructor, Aaron, is a surprisingly hard marker. I was above the class average but I still lost more marks than I would have liked.

I didn’t love today’s class as much as I normally do. We started off with sparkling wines and Champagnes. We later moved onto dessert wines that were the result of Botrytis or, as the wine industry likes to spin it, the result of “noble rot.” Sauternes dessert wines are one of these, with Chateau d’Yquem the most famous. The afternoon was spent learning about sherry and valpolicellas.

Sherry. I never thought I would find a wine I didn’t like. Aaron kept telling us how cheap it was – and when he asked the class who loved wine, only one person put up their hand. I think it must be an acquired taste – because I really couldn’t concentrate on or find any of the positive aromas or flavours that must have existed somewhere in the wine. The process of making sherry, but using the solteras, was pretty interesting to learn about – although I think that working in a sherry winery would drive me nuts. All those careful pours and division of sherry from each barrel down must be incredibly repetitive.

Anyway. Enough of that.

The drive out to Grape Varieties on Wednesday was miserable. Ottawa received a dump of something like 15cm of snow which meant my normal 15 minute drive took closer to an hour and a half. I crawled along the streets, avoiding the highway, and was surprised that by the end of the class pretty much everyone had shown up. Natale, our instructor, even brought us in a red pepper and goat cheese dip to snack on throughout the class. The focus for the week was pinot noir, baco noir and gamay. The pinot noirs he chose were pretty interesting, however he pulled out the same example of a “don’t” pinot noir as Aaron had done in Vinification the week before. The “don’t” pinot is from a winery here in Ontario, that I refuse to name. I actually want to visit this winery to see if they have anything that I like to drink… I’ve only tried their red wines and haven’t been impressed. Maybe they have a great white wine!

I like pinot noir, but saying that is almost trendy because of the movie Sideways. A girl I used to work with out west hated pinot noir – which I struggle to understand. Winemakers can do so much with the grape and pinot noir is grown all over the world, which makes it such an interesting varietal. A pinot noir from New Zealand can be completely different from a California pinot noir which is different from the great wines of Burgundy.

Oh – in excellent news, Natalie totally understood the importance of the California wine fair and offered to let us write the exam a week early. He’s going to discuss it with everyone else next week!

I’m starting to hate how people ask me what I want to do with this Sommelier program. After this semester I will have three classes left. Should I rush through them and finish them off quickly? Or should I do one at a time? I’m currently leaning towards the latter – almost to give myself more time to make a decision about what I want to do.

Growing up is so much effort. I’m almost done my year of the quarterlife crisis – as I’m calling the period from when I decided to quit the Chartered Accountant path to now – and I still don’t feel like I’ve really progressed. I have a junky apartment, my car lease is going to be up in November… the only really good thing is that I’m in a new city and I now (fortunately) have a permanent job which means I won’t be given the bum’s rush anytime soon.

wine terroirs

I’m completely obsessed with a blog. It’s called Wine Terroirs and it’s by a man named Bertrand Celce who is a French photographer and writer. I can browse through it for hours.

He basically shares his travels around the French wine world. Tastings, wine bars, vineyards, wineries… you name it, he includes it. The photos are enough to make me want to pack up and move to France to pursue a life of wine. The stories and the descriptions are enough that I can actually visualize myself living in France, pursuing a life of wine!

My absolute favourite posts are the wine bars. I love wine bars – I love the idea of wine bars, at least well done ones. I should actually start visiting the wine bars in Ottawa on a frequent basis – the only wine oriented establishment I have really visited is Divino’s. And it wasn’t really how I had imagined a wine bar to be. I desperately want to go to Paris and wander around wine bars, getting lost in tiny cobblestoned streets and alleys. I’ve never been to Paris, so I’m sure my desires are overly romanticized, but sometimes it takes everything I have to keep me from racking up a few thousand on my credit card and flying over there.

I still don’t know what I want to do with my wine education. I love my vinification class – that much I’ve decided – but I’m not sure if I want to pursue a career as a winemaker. It seems like a lot of responsibility and pressure, yet it also seems as though it could be immensely rewarding. The only problem would be the sheer amount of education required and the type of wines I would want to make. The winemaking programs here in Ontario are all cool climate oriented and I wouldn’t want to stay in Ontario to make wines. I would rather move to the Okanagan, if I were to stay in Canada, or head further south. Although I love pinot noir, I would like to make Bordeaux varietals and those just don’t work in the Ontario climate.

Anyway. That’s just more musings. I’m glad to report that Wednesday’s Grape Varieties class was a better. I’m looking forward to the Riedel tasting, done by Diane Paradis of the CA Paradis store here in Ottawa. There will be different grape varieties tasted in normal glasses and then the specific Riedel glasses. If we bring our chequebooks we can buy the glasses at a discounted price, too… which is tempting, because Riedel glasses are pretty.

None of us have had the guts (yet) to ask our Grape Varieties instructor about the timing of the final exam and the conflict with the California Wine Fair. I discovered, however, that a number of my classmates are equally concerned about the conflict. I’m glad I’m not alone!!!

the tragedy of Wednesday

My absolute favourite wine event (ever) is coming up. It’s the California Wine Fair.

I discovered this event in the Calgary Round-up Centre (on the Stampede Grounds, for the uninitiated). It was a giant room full of delicious wines. I went with a big group of people from my old job and we basically hit the ground running as soon as we walked in the door. It was a fundraiser for the Calgary Opera.

What do I remember about this event? A room full of California wines, of course. We paid around $50 or $60 to get in with unlimited sampling. And sample we did. It was my first serious wine event. I remember talking to a lot of the importers, distributors and marketing representatives, wishing I had a job that was so cool. I also learned that by actually talking to the individuals working the table, as opposed to going around with a glass out to be filled, you could try some extremely special wines. I actually think this is the first time I ever tried a bottle worth over $150, retail.

Why am I discussing the California Wine Fair? I was crushed to discover that the fair this year, here in Ottawa, runs on a Wednesday. Coincidentally it’s the same Wednesday as my Grape Varieties final exam. How can one of the best wine events of the year be held on the same day as my final? I’ve already discussed this with Morgan, wine school friend, and we are going to casually bring it up to our new instructor. Just so that he’s informed. In case he wants to make the final exam some other time.

I mean, really. We only have class on that Wednesday because it’s the final exam. It would be so much easier if we could just fit our final into the last actual teaching class. Right? Right?!?!?!

I’m also missing the Ontario Winter Wine Night Out, which is being held on a Wednesday during Winterlude (February). I’m not happy with these Wednesday wine events!

wine school starts again…

So, wine school has started up again. Wednesday evening was “Grape Varieties” while today, Saturday, was a full day of “Vinification”. It should be noted that when I say full day I mean it – class started at 8:30am and went until 4:30pm. Our first wine was poured before 10am!

Grape Varieties
The point of this class is to learn the characteristics, viniculture and viticulture of different grape varieties. The instructor is supposed to be Natale, who works for the LCBO and is a colleague of my old instructor (Paul). We were a bit confused to walk in the door of the classroom and find a short, thin woman named Denise.

It was a different atmosphere than my class last semester. To be completely honest, I started to wonder what I was doing there. I wasn’t having nearly as much fun as I did in my other classes and I found it to be almost oppressive. Plus there’s an entirely new class of people and an entirely different dynamic… but I was pretty excited to see some of my favourites from last class!

Instead of doing a lecture and then doing a big tasting at the end, this class would do a bit of a lecture and then taste a few wines. The total was still only about six, but it made things a bit more structured. We were also given ten minutes to taste each wine and then the instructor asked for volunteers to share their tasting notes. Her goal seemed to be to break down the wines in a strictly academic sense – one person said “this wine tastes really balanced, I found that I really liked it” as her ending statement after giving her tasting note and the instructor quickly told her not to include her personal assessment of the wine. I missed the informality of Paul’s class where we could throw out descriptive words. I also missed how engaging he was… this was an entirely different wine school ballgame.

Vinification
This class was way too early in the morning for my liking. Especially because I really like sleeping in on Saturday’s and it was -24 this morning (according to my car’s temperature gauge).

For the first time we were in the CA Paradis Wine Lab. This is set up with three rows of seating and a sink at each spot. We ended up at the end of the first row, which would normally be an excellent seat except for this smell I noticed early in the morning and throughout the rest of the day. We finally determined that it was from the sink to my right, after Morgan (my wine school friend) correctly identified that the smell had a faint vinegar characteristic. Seeing as how wine can turn to vinegar… well, we took a sniff in the sink and our problem was solved.

So for future students: avoid the last sink in the first row. My sink (the second last one) didn’t smell at all.

The class itself was great. Our instructor, Aaron, really knows what he’s talking about and is incredibly engaging. There is a lot of material, however, since the class is compressed into four days. Next week we have a test worth 25% on today’s material, the week after that we have another test worth 25% on the previous week’s material and then our final exam is worth 50% and is on the afternoon of the last day.

We tasted so many wines… I haven’t even looked back at my notes yet because I want to do some more research on the wines and on the wine making methods. I was glad to walk out of this class wanting to know more about what we covered. I think that’s what I’ll spend a lazy Sunday doing (aka tomorrow)… especially because it’s so darn cold in Ottawa.

I look forward to Wednesday’s Grape Varieties because we’ll have our normal instructor. I’m hoping I end up with a better impression.