That is to say that Tony Maws, proprietor of Craigie on Main, has shared a tasty sounding rack of lamb receipt. And speaking of places I'd rather be having dinner tonight, Mr. Dargis is ignoring the relative abstraction of weather in Southern California, and laying out a hardcore midwinter repast at Lou:
Citrus, avocado, and bacon salad
Pere Ventura Cava Rosé NV
Braised Niman beef short ribs, creamy polenta,
roasted Romanesco cauliflower, red carrots
Flight of stick-to-your-ribs reds
Bobal
Antoine Arena Patrimonio Corsica ‘06
Morgon Chamonard ‘08
Carrot ginger pecan cake,
crème frâiche ice cream, caramel sauce
Fontanel Rivesaltes Ambré
And if that makes you thirsty, they will be serving beverages, and some edumacation:
"Jules Chauvet was a French
microbiologist, life long student of yeast, wineglass designer, and a
vigneron. I never met Chauvet (he died in 1989) and never tasted the
Beaujolais wine he made, and know his work only through the sparse
translations that are available in English. Nevertheless, by tasting
the wines made by a generation of vignerons who have followed Chauvet’s
example, I feel that I know him well.
Chauvet argued that if you (a) farm
responsibly, you (b) create conditions within your vineyard that will
naturally sustain natural yeasts that (c) will create the most
delicious and complex wines. Traditionally, vignerons will use sulfur
to combat “bad” yeasts: Chauvet argued that if you start with clean
fruit, you could dispense with sulfur, at least during the fermentation
process. Without the mask of sulfur, Chauvet felt that a wine could
better speak for itself. This is a somewhat controversial position both
in France and elsewhere, where most winemakers continue to use sulfur,
sometimes a great deal, because that’s the way they’ve been trained to
make wine. No doubt, it is challenging to make a wine with little
sulfur, and such wines are, sometimes, not microbiologically stable,
but when a low sulfur regime works, it works very well.
We often offer Chauvet style wines at
Lou: last year, we poured quite a bit of Jean Foillard’s Morgon, and
the Morgon of his colleague and fellow traveler, Jean-Paul Thevenet. We
are now pouring yet another Chauvet-style Morgon, this one made by
Joseph Chamonard (or more accurately, by Chamonard’s daughter), again a
colleague of Foillard and Thevenet. I find that wild yeast fermented
Morgon like Chamonard’s, made with little or no sulfur, can be a
paradoxical wine. It is a wine that sits very lightly on the tongue—not
quite a gluggy wine, but one that you would nevertheless be glad to
serve cool at a picnic on a warm summer afternoon. It is a wine that is
light to medium bodied, but one with great concentration of flavor.
I am pairing Chamonard’s Morgon with a
big hunk of Niman short ribs, a classic food and wine paring that, if
you are a red meat eater, would have to be dead if you do not like."
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