Sextant
2007
12.8% alc.
Bourgogne
St. Aubin, France

This is an unusual pale-gold Burgundian chardonnay—something of a chameleon.  After opening it, I encountered initial aromas of moss, bark and bay leaves. There were rear-palate flavors of clove, lemon, grapefruit, cinnamon and crisp apple. The wine’s high acidity gave it a long length.  Later, however, the nose deepened, giving off whiffs of lilac. The flavors on the palate moved to the front and were less fruity, while leaving a creamier, sensual mouthfeel.  As if Gigi grew into a fetching courtesan in a matter of hours. Importer: Savio Soares Selecions. $19.00

Andreas Baron Widman
Sudtiroler
Vernatsch
2008
12.5%
Alto Adige, Italy

Schiva. In the UK, it is Black Hamburg.  The Germans call it trollinger. In Northern Italy’s South Tyrol, it is vernatsch.  The vine thrives in the Tyrol with little attention. The grape is hardy, productive.  Maybe that’s why the vine is popular in the flatter lands of the region.  It serves as the base of many tourist wines, often blended with ligroin.  But plant Schiava on the steep hillsides of the Alto Adige, prune the vine, ripen it and carefully vinify it, and a good producer can win some charm from this ordinary table grape.  The 2008 vintage has a pale ruby core accompanied by pleasant aromas of tea, cranberry, orange peel and rose petals.  The broad midpalate flavors of musk, dry leaves and cranberry (and a slight touch barnyard) were immediate with medium length. This medium-bodied, medium-concentrated wine had low firm tannins. Overall, the impression was of a lean, supple wine. You could drink it daily with most meals. In my house, it was a perfect accompaniment to sausages, polenta and stir-fried green beans with basil. Importer: Petit Pois Corp.  $23.00.

Aziendo Agricola Bruna
u Baccan
Pigato
2007
13.5% alc.
Liguria, Italy

Ten years ago, you might find a bottle or two of a pigato from Liguria in New York.  Now pigato is more prevalent here. This one is among the best.  A well-structured tonic, it has a stylized peasant allure that speaks of the steep Ligurian seaside vineyards.  (And who says you can’t have a stylish peasant?) In the glass, this wine sits pale gold with an appealing waxy floral aroma.  The wine had a crispness that gave its medium intense flavors of ginger, pear, pine, herbs and white peaches a long length with a slight pear finish. As the wine opens, more tropical notes are revealed.  Though not quite full-bodied, it had a nice rounded concentration of flavor.  This is not the quaffer pigato your parents may have had at a bus stop in San Remo. And what did I eat with it? Pesto walnut pasta with yellow squash.    Robert Chadderdon Selectons.  $31.00.

3/1/10

A memory from a few, very cold days spent in Alsace. One afternoon we left Strasbourg for a drive through the small vineyard towns to the south. Frigid air, intermittent sun, fields mostly brown and, one might think, shivering beneath a light blanket of old snow. Andrew Wyeth in France.  This vineyard was just outside Ribeauvillé.

Oh, Jura Jura Jura—what will it take for the world to appreciate your wines?  The Jura is a prosaic frontier region nestled in France near the southwest border of Switzerland. It is picturesque with fruit orchards and pastures for animal grazing. You’d never really know the place unless you were a devotee of wine. No other real reason to go there. But it produces some of the most interesting and stylish wines in France, and for the quality at comparatively reasonable prices.  Remarkably, even in New York, people tend to ignore these wines. I sometimes eat late at a popular downtown brasserie with a broad wine list, almost exclusively French, including two to four wines from the Jura. A  waiter told me that, aside from some French tourists and the odd local customer, I was the only one he knew who actually ordered them.

The poulsard (or ploussard) from Dom. de la Tournelle is a wonderful, inexpensive pinot noir-like wine that’s quite versatile at the table. Poulsard is a large, thin-skinned grape and a specialty of the Jura.  It’s grown on about 800 acres of clay and limestone at elevations slightly higher than those of the Côte d’Or.  It is grown nowhere else, except  Bugey, France. It produces typically an aromatic, light-colored, pale red wine.  Dom. de la Tournelle’s Pascal and Evelyn Clairet, who founded the winery in 1991, grow poulsard in an eco-friendly manner on 15 acres of land. They hand-harvest the grapes, macerate them for at least a week, subject the juice to malolactic fermentation, bottle the wine without filtration or sulphur and mature it in large oak barrels for 8 to 18 months. The 2007 poulsard has a pale-salmon color flecked with copper.  There were aromas of leaves, moss, earth, juniper and red fruits.  This is a lean, harmonious wine with bright acidity, mildly gripping tannins, medium body and alcohol. There were lightly concentrated rear-palate flavors of tea, orange and juniper. I had this with unadorned baked bluefish and white carrots roasted in duck fat with Forelle pears. 1/27/10.

Fulton Market, late December 2009

We were in Chicago for the holidays, and like everyone else in the country moved around huddled in a clump as a cold front settled in. The sky was blue only for a few hours in any given day. The rest of the time gray clouds tossed down snow, sleet or rain in sloppy indifference. Naturally we longed for warmth. We burned a synthetic log in the fireplace and admired the neat regularity of its flames. We thought of Miami, which also suffered from a cold snap. Then we went to dinner at two restaurants that welcomed us in with warmth and bustle—places that reminded Aldo of Dickens’ old Mr. Fezziwig, the kind soul who never stinted on hospitality at Christmas.

I don’t know why Aldo gets so worked up about Mr. Fezziwig. Sometimes he cries at Martha Stewart’s holiday shows.

Avec and the Publican are both owned by local celebrity chef Paul Kahan, with Koren Grievesonheading the kitchen at the first and Brian Huston at the second. Avec, which is on the same block as Kahan’s flagship establishment, Blackbird, is a handsome oblong room in blonde wood that, on a winter’s night, looked as if it should be filled with good-looking Swedes eating medallions of reindeer. For all I know that is who was eating there that night. The menu, described asMediterranean wine cuisine, is strong on meat, which is not a problem with us. Aldo’s father, before becoming independently wealthy due to the lottery, was a butcher. And the food is conceived more along the idea of tapas, small plates brought out as soon as they’re ready in the kitchen. We liked everything we ordered: chorizo-stuffed dates, fennel-and-pork sausage and an exceptional salad of prosciutto with roast quince. With it we had a bottle of Luis  Cañas rioja that was perhaps too even a match for so much deep-flavored pork: Wine and food faced off and fenced, blade to blade—which is not the way these things should go.

Our server looked like Sally Hawkins from the movie Happy-Go-Lucky, which was a plus.

There was some frustration about the food arriving “family style.” It’s probably an efficient and economic way to run a kitchen, but the phrase “family style” always makes me shy nervously, like a horse reluctant to be saddled. You can’t really relax and be yourself as you’re forced to tuck into a quick succession of plates, and it’s hard to gauge how much food will make sense for the group’s appetite.

To me “family style” means my grandfather is still at the head of the table, throwing boiled potatoes at anyone who doesn’t listen to his very long list of enemies of the state who should be deprived of cooked meals.

But the experience was strongy good—very positive. We would go to Avec again.

The Publican? Mmm. The emphasis is, again, on meat—the menu doesn’t neglect fish, no, but the enormous portraits of Botero-scaled pigs tend to draw the unconscious to the wonderfully rich lineup derived from four-legged wildlife, especially pork. We ordered pork belly (excellent—pink and moist), beef and oyster pie, pork-and-duck rillette, with sides of brussels sprouts and escarole. Food was, again, served family-style, which means you can wind up glutted on meat if you don’t order carefully. But all that we ate was robust and unstintingly rich—Aldo, frankly, was in heaven, although my own tastes meant that we ruled out tripe and boudin noir.

We drank a tempranillo reserva, El Retiro 2005. It was fruit-forward but, beyond that, not terribly interesting. However, I appreciated the wine stewardess bringing me samples of several wines so that I could taste before ordering a fresh bottle for the table.

Unlike the much more intimate Avec, though, the atmosphere at the Publican didn’t really agree with us: It’s designed as a beer hall, a cavernous space with most diners seated at long communal tables. There are also some booths, which may very well be comfortable, but looked oddly like stalls, and so made the diners in my mind resemble cattle at the trough. I’m not sure this setup would work in Manhattan, where people are almost maniacal about turf—especially in restaurants. I think Midwesterners, in general, are less worried about sharing open space: Chicago itself, after all, feels like a great level plain across which the towering buildings give each other breathing room. In fact, Aldo says the city makes him oddly vertiginous. He says he’s not used to seeing so much sky between such tall buildings.

By the way: Here’s a question someone from the Windy City can answer. What and where is Chicago’s best wine store? We haven’t solved that yet. Thanks.