fall harvest is about to be underway any day now. I did a morning (oops) tasting of six vodka’s made right here in the Charleston area at Firefly. Notably lemonade (my favorite of the tasting-fresh made daily) and sweet tea. Strangely I kept thinking of Snapple but it wasn’t really like that. It is out of town about a half hour passing tiny little roads named after their plantation and tiny little churches on roads that sweep under trees that drip with spanish moss and cover the sky.
Category: booze
G – gin
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gin & tonic. Kind of tastes like Christmas, or pine.
Coolest Husband Ever
You know you have the coolest husband ever when he buys in to your hobbies whole heartedly. Over the weekend Z actually took it upon himself to roast guajillo peppers until they were cracklingly dry and load them in to our spice (coffee) grinder. Voila. Homemade chile powder. It is totally mild but then he combined it with ancho and chile de arbol for heat, tossed it with lime juice and then dry roasted peanuts. While the peanuts roasted he popped some pepitas in a dry skilled and tossed the whole thing together with salt ground in our mortar. Perfect cocktail snack.
the days of wine and flip-flops
How far would you go to have a glass of wine? Would you stomp and smush grapes with your feet in order to produce juice? Would you have second thoughts with every drop that passed your lips? I have heard what can be cultured from flip flops and my first thought is, ‘heck no!’
We went to the LakeRidge Winery grape stomp and harvest festival yesterday. It wasn’t really anything to write home about. In fact I enjoyed the trip I took through the winery back in July when my girlfriends came for a visit and we did the wine tasting tour quite a bit more. The stomp is just a gimmick to get people out in greater spending exuberant numbers. They give you a few tastes among the vats and herd you through the tour in a sort of half masted way. We wandered for about five minutes through the ‘festival’ where crowds bumped and spilled wine on my flip flops for a glimpse of a few people with their pants rolled up and feet in piles of grapes before we decided to go home and have lunch.
It is a free tour and tasting worth taking most days but a regular old weekday or a Saturday would be just fine, even I might add, more enjoyable. You might even find you like the muscadine, native and locally grown grapes. They have a peculiar musky smell and a taste I find reminiscent of grape Kool-aid.
I love alliteration, and as a matter of fact, wine
I was blessed to be sent to Napa Valley California on a trip for work. The visitor’s center where I work is part of a group called the Guest Relations Association, or GRA for short. This trip was all about taking public tours and evaluating what was well done and what could be improved, in order to make our own facility better.
We visited about 10 different venues, each with their own charm and interest encompassing everything from Giants Stadium (a great tour) to the Jelly Belly Factory as well as several breweries and wineries. We also had the pleasure of taking Wine Tasting 101 at Copia, the American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts. Here are some useful wine tasting notes I learned in this useful class.
Swirl – This adds oxygen and rounds out the flavors. Try a careful taste both doing this and not, it makes a huge difference. This is also where you see the legs which are streams of wine down the sides of the glass. These are largely sugars and alcohol. Good legs really isn’t that meaningful.
Sniff – Interestingly enough, you smell based on your own life experiences. Tastes can be as bizarre as leather, cut grass, mold, dirt and as wonderful as sun warmed raspeberries or juniper berries.
Sip – Take a good sized taste, roll it around in your mouth and really taste it. Sipping on wine might sound romantic but won’t help you figure out if you like a bottle/
Savor – Really think about it, feel it. Take time to make it worth while.
Spit/Swallow – Pretty much what it implies.
Now for the V’s. Take notes on
Vintage – the year can make all the difference
Varietal – the grape – what you liked about it
Vinyard – the producer
Then you can remember what you liked the next time. I have been pleasantly surprised at the enjoyment I have gotten from each glass after taking this class. It becomes more academic than just swill, and that’s another S. Cheers!
My Urban Pantry 