Summer vacation

John on Wine: Summer vacation

Originally published in the Ukiah Daily Journal newspaper on Thursday, August 13, 2015

The metal band Gundriver visited the McFadden Farm Stand & Tasting Room and liked it. Photo by John Cesano

Few would choose Yuma, Arizona as a place to vacation in the summer but, as you read this, that is where I am. For those unfamiliar with Yuma in summer, pull out an illustrated Bible and flip to a picture of Hell. Same thing.

My son Charlie leaves for U.S. Army Infantry training at Ft. Benning, GA in two weeks, on Aug. 24, and we made plans to visit my step-father Lyle before Charlie leaves.

Joining the Army, and choosing to be an Infantryman, would not be my first choices for my son, but he follows in a long line of Cesano males who make questionable choices in youth.

I was a U.S. Army Infantry Sergeant. My brother showed up at the Army enlistment office. My father and step-father were both Army. The Cesano clan isn’t necessarily bright, but we serve.

While in Yuma, in an air conditioned house, we will enjoy tastes of Crispin Cain’s Rye Whiskey from Redwood Valley, and Zinfandel from throughout the county to go with meat cooked outside at night after temperatures drop to 90 or so.
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Charlie and I will also be visiting my brother Thomas just before Charlie leaves. Thomas is out with Kelly Clarkson, and we’ll see him in Mountain View on the off day preceding Kelly’s concert at Shoreline Amphitheatre. On a previous tour, earlier this year, my brother was out with the Michael Schenker (Scorpions, UFO) Group, and band members ordered wine to go on their tour bus when we caught their shows at Yoshi’s in Oakland.

Afterward, the opening band Gundriver came to Hopland, parked their bus in front of the tasting room, and ended up doing a wine tasting. It was great fun to see and pour for R Ev Jones, Tomes, Tom, Alex, and the whole Gundriver crew. Quite a bit of wine ended up going on that bus too.

Kelly’s production manager is a “wine head” and we’ll take the McFadden tasting room show on the road, with the help of the tour’s caterers, and do a tasting for the crew when we visit.

It is gratifying to spread the message about the quality of Mendocino County’s wines through unconventional outlets, and tastings for popular musicians is just one more way to do it.
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While Charlie and I are visiting my brother Thomas, on Saturday Aug. 22, the Yorkville Highlands Growers and Vintners Association will host the Yorkville Highlands Wine Festival at Meyer Family Cellars, 19750 Highway 128, Mile Marker 34.2 between Yorkville and Boonville. The event starts at 1 p.m.

This year’s festival will celebrate 13 years of wines from the Yorkville Highlands. Highlights will include tasting award-winning wines made and grown within the Highlands around Anderson Valley. Tickets are $60, and $30 for designated drivers; the price includes a delicious farm-fresh lunch and dessert, a silent auction, and a grape stomp. Head to Meyer Family Cellars for this year’s celebration of Yorkville Highlands wines.

Yorkville Highlands member wineries include: Bink Wines, Halcon Vineyards, Judson Hale Winery, Le Vin Estate Winery, Lone Oak Ranch Vineyards, Maple Creek Winery, Mariietta Cellars, Meyer Family Cellars, Route 128 Winery, Theopolis Vineyards, and Yorkville Cellars.

Visit http://www.yorkvillehighlands.org to purchase your tickets.
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Attend the Pure Mendocino Organic Dinner & Farm Tour on Saturday, Aug. 29, if you can, for a summer evening enjoying the perfect blend of Mendocino County’s bountiful harvest, generously offered by local farmers and producers. This unique celebration honors Mendocino County’s leadership in organics and community health, and is the major fund raising event for the Cancer Resource Centers.

Held at Paul Dolan’s Dark Horse Vineyard at 5341 Old River Road, Ukiah, attendees will enjoy a wine tasting and appetizers reception beginning at 5 p.m. with the farm-to-table dinner at 6 p.m., and, after dinner, dancing under the stars to live music from Mendocino’s talented selection of artists. A silent auction will run from 5 to 8:30 p.m..

Chef Olan Cox and friends will showcase the community’s finest organically grown food and wine. Participating wineries include Barra Vineyards, Bink Wines, Bonterra Vineyards, Frey Vineyards, Golden Cellars, Handley Cellars, Jeriko Estate, Masút Vineyards, McFadden Vineyards, Oster Wine Cellars, and Yorkville Cellars.

Tickets are $135, online at http://www.puremendocino.org.

Pure Mendocino is a memorable celebration of the uniqueness of this community, its people and our bounty. Nationally recognized, Cancer Research Center Mendocino County is the only direct-service organization of its kind in Mendocino County, and 100 percent of all donations stay in the county to provide information, support and advocacy services free of charge to those facing cancer.

CRCMC’s vision is that no one in Mendocino County faces cancer alone, and the funds raised at this dinner will help provide support services to over 300 people.

Please join Pure Mendocino in a commitment to the sustainability and care of our community. The feeling you will get helping fight cancer, making someone’s fight a little easier, will make you feel pride for having helped in your way. Again, please attend if you can.

 

A month of wine weekends

John On Wine: a month of wine weekends

Originally published in the Ukiah Daily Journal newspaper on Thursday, February 26, 2015

One of the genuine perquisites of writing a wine column is receiving invitations to organized wine tasting events. Today, I’m going to recap my last four weekends of wine tastings.

Barrel Tasting 101 in Hopland coincided with the last weekend of the Mendocino County Crab, Wine & Beer Fest and featured winery tasting rooms along Highway 101 from Hopland to Calpella and Ukiah to Redwood Valley pouring barrel samples of wines not yet bottled, providing an opportunity to taste the future, and purchase futures of these wines, while offering up delicious food pairing treats created around Dungeness crab.

Barrel Tasting 101, BARRA of Mendocino (Photo by John Cesano)

This was a joyful weekend for me, as I was able to visit all of my neighbors, and taste many delicious crab treats, as well as get a glimpse of what is coming wine-wise in the future.

Best food spread goes to the team at Testa, with terrific tastes at Barra, Simaine, Seebass, Milano, Cesar Toxqui, and Terra Savia, as well.

This was the second annual Barrel Tasting 101, a great addition to the two Passport events put on by Destination Hopland each year, and saw attendance triple over the previous inaugural event. There will certainly be a third annual Barrel Tasting 101 event in January next year.

Zinfandel Advocates & Producers, ZAP, made San Francisco the epicenter of Zinfandel love, with their multi-day Zinfandel Experience. On Wednesday, I attended Epicuria, a food and wine pairing tasting, featuring over 30 top Zinfandel producers, each sharing a table with chefs from bay area kitchens.

On Thursday, I attended Flights, a seated tasting of three flights of five wines each, moderated by Joel Peterson, featuring winemakers from three distinctly different growing areas in California, Contra Costa County, Amador County, and the Dry Creek Valley of Sonoma County.

On Saturday, I attended The Tasting, with over 100 producers pouring their Zinfandel, and the folks from the SOMM Journal leading panel workshops exploring lesser known Zinfandel growing areas of California. These workshops included a look at Lake and Mendocino County by Sommelier Chris Sawyer and featuring Lake County’s Jelly Jar Wine Zinfandel and Mendocino County’s Rich Parducci pouring two McNab Ridge Winery Zinfandels. I wrote a piece, running over 4,400 words, with pictures, that you can find archived on johnonwine.com about my three days in Zin-bliss.

Zinfandel Experience, Rich Parducci and Chris Sawyer (Photo by John Cesano)

The 10th annual International Alsace Varietals Festival in Mendocino County’s Anderson Valley was held right in the middle of the deluge that saw 3-11” of rain fall, depending on where you were in the county, in just a week. Bacchus, the God of wine, smiled and provided a window of warm weather and sun for the festival.

The main grape varieties of Alsace include Riesling, Pinot Blanc, Gewurztraminer, and Pinot Gris, with (unoaked) Pinot Noir, Sylvaner, and Muscat also represented.

At 8:30 a.m., the Alsace Fest kicked off with educational sessions, with Glenn McGourty moderating the sessions, including panel tastings of white wines featuring different periods of skin contact and examples of winemaking protocols at Campovida by winemaker Sebastian Donoso; an exploration of single vineyard Pinot Blanc by sommelier Chris Sawyer (this guy is everywhere!) with Randy Schock of Handley Cellars, Jason McConnell of Rivino, and James Wasson of Rein each pouring wine made from Shrader Ranch Pinot Blanc grapes; Christie Dufault leading a food and wine pairing featuring food prepared by her Culinary Institute of America at Greystone team and four very different, but delicious Gewurztraminer from Brooks, Navarro Vineyards, Pierre Sparr, and Husch; Thomas Schlumberger’s tasting of eight Grand Cru wines from his Domaines Schlumberger estate in Alsace, France; and a steelhead trout on cauliflower puree cooking demonstration by Francois de Melogue.

After the educational sessions came the big public tasting, with Alsace variety wines from around the world, but concentrated heavily on the Anderson Valley and Alsace, France.

Thomas Schlumberger poured three additional Grand Cru wines from his Alsace estate, originally planted in 1810; the 11 wines Schlumberger poured that day were the best 11 wines I tasted that day, were revelatory for me, and set a new high bar for tasting of Alsace varietal wines that I will measure all other tastes against.

Another huge treat for me was talking with Master Sommelier Ian Cauble, who I recognized from the movie SOMM — find it on Netflix and watch it — who was pouring at the Wines of Alsace USA table.

I did taste our local Alsace variety wines too, and enjoyed offerings from Handley, Graziano, Navarro, and Lichen very much.

Too many associate these Alsace variety wines with sickly, cloyingly sweet, wines; but the wines I tasted on this Saturday were uniformly drier and more concentrated in depth and character, multi-noted, layered wines, that I will reach for again and again this summer.

Lastly, on Valentine’s Day Saturday, I attended the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition’s public tasting of Gold, Double Gold, and Best of Show awarded wines from January’s competition.

Rather than treat the day, and the tasting, like a press opportunity, I decided to just relax and have fun. Juanita Plaza works with me at McFadden’s tasting room in Hopland, and neither of us had a Valentine, so we decided to go together for a San Francisco getaway, built around the wine tasting and an Italian dinner in North Beach.

The weather was unbeatable, blue sky and warm sun, and the tasting was a treat. We tasted several terrific wines, and even a beer and a cidre (really, that’s how they spell it) from Stella Artois. It was nice to see our friends from Campovida, Rivino, Handley, and Simaine pouring.

Dinner didn’t work out. My brother Tom, by fortuitous coincidence, pulled into town across the bay and arranged great tickets and working passes for the Enrique Iglesias and Pitbull concert that evening at Oracle Arena in Oakland, and we had a blast, up and dancing for most of the show. Thanks Tom, we really appreciated you hooking us up, sorry you were working and we didn’t get to see you. Thanks Juanita for joining me for a fun weekend getaway.

That’s it, four weekends of wine tastings. I have to give thanks to Destination Hopland, Zinfandel Advocates & Producers, Anderson Valley Winegrowers Association, and the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition for comp tickets. I write about events, encourage you to get out there and attend some, and I’ll continue to do so. I attend as many events as I can, because I consider it continuing education, it helps to taste broadly and refine or renew perceptions about wines and wineries, and sometimes it can just be a great getaway.

I hope to see you at future wine events…like the Celebration of Mendocino County Sparkling Wines at Terra Savia in Hopland on April 11, the Passport to Dry Creek Valley on April 25 and 26, or Hopland Passport on May 2 and 3.

 

Wine Steamed Chicken, Rice, and Chardonnay. Yum.

I tried to recreate a meal I used to cook often about 25 years ago; steamed chicken thighs, stuffed with ham, swiss cheese, and green onions – a healthy version of Chicken Cordon blue. I wasn’t able to extricate the thigh bone from the center of the thighs, so I rolled the deboned thighs and used cooking twine to tie them around the other ingredients completely.

Instead of steaming in water, I used an entire bottle of $1.99 2007 FoxBrook Sauvignon Blanc California. I tried to drink a glass of this wine, but poured it out, choosing to cook with it instead. Where another Sauvignon Blanc might have a note of cat pee in the nose, this wine tasted of piss. Not a wine I will ever buy again.

I served the Cordon Blue-esque Chicken up with a creamy chicken rice, to which I added a ton of butter and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.

I paired dinner with a 2008 Fetzer Vineyards Valley Oaks Chardonney California. Clear pale gold  in color, this 13% alc wine has a ton of notes and flavors for an under $9 wine at Lucky supermarket. Crisp apple and citrus nose gives way to tropical fruit, grapefruit, and apple, balanced by oak and sweet cream, in the mouth. A nice medium bodied Chardonnay with a long light finish characterized by apple and acidity. I liked it lots, and saved the rest of the bottle with a Wine Preserva flavor saver disc.

Overall, a pretty tasty and moderately showy meal.

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Speaking of showy meals, I’ll be auditioning for Gordon Ramsey’s Masterchef on FOX in 11 days. If you live in Atlanta, Denver, Kansas City, Miami, New Orleans, Chicago, San Francisco, or Los Angeles, open casting calls are coming up; for more information, here’s a link: http://www.3ballproductions.com/masterchef.html

Jennifer Pitchke, a reader of my blog left this comment about the audition process:

Just wanted to let you know I went to the New York auditions and it was nothing like I expected so I wanted to give you heads up. I thought it would be like a one on one. Nope–you will be asked to stand with up to 8 others at one time to plate and they go down the line and you have maybe two minutes with them so back those two minutes good because I sure didn’t. My food rocked but felt I could have handled the Q&A better. Good Luck.

If you have read about the real audition process for American Idol auditioners, not the select few put through to see Simon Cowell and the gang, then Jennifer’s description is familiar. I don’t have cancer, a dead wife, or a very ill or disabled family member to exploit through the audition process, FOX loves the sob backstory in casting their reality shows, but I can cook and have personality; hopefully that will be enough. I will happily keep my healthy family and miss out on being cast if it really comes to that.

I had planned to serve involtini, polenta, and red sauce with a solid red wine. I’m adding a pesto sauce to the mix, so I can “paint” my white presentation plate with the red (homemade Italian red sauce), white (polenta), and green (pesto) of the Italian flag, and lay my sliced pinwheels of involtini across the flag in a line.

The presentation is better, the flavors still work great, and the food allows me to tell my story of growing up watching my Italian American father Charlie Cesano cooking, and how it has inspired my brother Thomas , myself, and my 12 year old son Charlie to be the primary cooks in our kitchens.