Let me make a case for Riesling as the perfect Holiday Food wine. Allow me to take an economist approach to the holiday which would be something like “how can one reach the highest level of pleasure during the Holiday at the least cost”. The classic problem that arises with Holiday food is the richness and abondance of the food available coupled with the desire to celebrate with the family. Think about the traditional Thanksgiving dinner (Sweet cranberries, rich potatoes, pumkin pie, poultry…) or about a Christmas meal (at my house generally crab cakes, lox, a huge chocolate sponge cake with lots of Xmas decoration on it). All those meals are about large amount of food, something sweet and something salty, lots of time at the table, talk with family and hopefully a good card/board game to prolong the evening. I have done too many holiday parties were the richness of the wines clashes with the food and most likely send you to a lethargic state well before the end of the party. By now you should know that my antidote to all your problems in life is Riesling and that indeed it will provide you with the greatest pleasures at the most reasonnable price. First Riesling has high acid cutting through the fat and handling sweeter or spicy dishes very well, it will go perfect with most food and is a true chameleon adapting to the food you match with it. Second, Riesling has gentle alcohols and sometimes low alcohol by wine standard (you should be able to find Rieslings between 9 and 12% alcohol) helping you to enjoy a glass while not falling into the arms of morpheus in minutes. Thirdly, Riesling is elegant and not oaked which makes it an enabler wine, a bit like salt or pepper, Riesling does not take the center stage, it helps the food to take the center stage. As far as which Riesling works best, I would recommend trying a Dry Riesling or choose a slightly off Dry (up to 4% Residual sugar) if you have to choose a silver bullet wine - one size fits all. For Riesling explorers (neophytes or fanatics), the Holiday meal is the perfect occasion to do a full Riesling dinner - where do I sign? should be the natural reaction to this revelation. Here is a sequence of pleasure that you should consider: Sparkling Riesling for the aperitif, a Dry Riesling for the main course and a salad if you have one, a 2-4% residual Riesling (like our Riesling made from Organic Grapes) for a cheese plate, you can finish dinner with it or open a sweeter style for dessert such as our Vin De Glaciere. For those 4 Rieslings (Sparkling, Dry Riesling, Riesling made from Organic and Vin De Glaciere) you would spend $50 on wine and you would have a 100% chance that the selection will go with the food. As an incredible bonus you would be having a complete Riesling exploration with the family; full pleasure at a great price.

Just came across a good Tuna recipe on the web (click here for the recipe) where the writer (Mark) used our Dry Riesling for food pairing. Thank you for the recommendation Mark! Looking forward to try the dish!

Just to clarify the “hybrid” status of our Dry Riesling, we have always blended 15% + of Mosel Riesling in our Washington Riesling to give it a bit more zesty acidity and reduce the final alcohol ofthe wine. The label on Mark’s blog in the 2006 vintage (20% German). The Mosel wine always comes from our dear friend Johannes Selbach in Zeltingen (Johannes owns the Selbach Oster estate and also a negociant business).

Summer is definitely here in the great Pacific Northwest and I find myself gravitating towards lighter, fresher and sweeter wines. I like the low alcohol/high acid/carbonation combo on a hot sunny day. My favorite Riesling for this time of the year are the Sweet Riesling (8.5% Alcohol - definitely sweet), the Organic Riesling (10.5% Alcohol - medium sweet) and I must say that I found two great friends in the Sparkling Riesling (10.5% Alcohol - almost dry) and our Single Vineyard Daunhauer (8.5% Alcohol - sweet). That’s four wines for a hot summer and with our great free shipping on 6 bottles it is easy to try them all!

Thanks to Mr Asimov of the New York Times (read the article here) I was reminded how succulent is a fresh Riesling for Spring. Riesling is everything I look for this time of the year, the floral notes, the crisp acid, the sweetness of Spring. My favorites for this time of the year are the lighter sweeter Riesling like our Sweet Riesling or German kabinett. So don’t forget to open several Riesling to celebrate Spring!

Here is a good recipe for our Dry Riesling tried last week. Half of the wine is for the dish and half for your soul.

Ingredients:

• 1 Lb clams
• 1/2 bottle of Sweet Riesling
• Parsley - 1/4 cup chopped
• one large shallot
• 1 stick of butter

Rinse the clams. Chop finely the shallot and in a large pot saute the shallot with 1/4 stick of butter. When shallots are soft add 1/2 bottle of the dry Riesling. Pour yourself a glass to enjoy. Heat up the sauce and when boiling add the clams. cover the pot for 5 minutes then remove the clams into a bowl. Reduce the sauce to about 3 cups. Add the remaining butter and melt it in. Add the parsley and pour the sauce over the clams in the bowl. By now you should be out of Dry Riesling. Open another bottle and enjoy it with your bucket of clams!

If you happen to be looking for a great gastronomique stop in London, I invite you to go to the Ambassade de l’Ile in Kensington. The restaurant is the sister of l’Auberge de l’Ile in Lyon (hence the connection with me since this is where I was born). The place is very nice and the food was top notch for the price. Count on spending some money still (may be 100 pounds/person) but really the food is worth every penny of it.

Link to the web site of L’Ambassade de l’ile: http://www.aubergedelile.com/

Paul Grieco’s wine bar in New York City is wrapping up its Summer of Riesling program presenting a 100% Riesling wine list for the summer! Paul, thank you for the great support for our favorite grape varietal. I hope that more restaurants and wine bars accross the country will follow your steps as we need to keep the Riesling revolution alive and moving. About a 100% Riesling month from a great retailer.

To go to Paul’s site: http://www.wineisterroir.com/

Stir Crazy is a pretty cool restaurant chain in the North East mainly. Their food is great and very Riesling friendly. They have a cool video about asian food and wine pairing at http://www.stircrazy.com/company/news.aspx

I could not copy the video but it is the third video down “how to pair with Asian Food”.

Most often when I go to a small ethnic restaurant (I favor Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, North African and Mexican), I enjoy a bit of spice and sometimes brutal heat. It is always puzzling to find a good drink (with alcohol please) to go along with a good curry, a spicy couscous and other Pad Thais. Often the choice is between the house wine (no thank you, I do not want your white zin…), the beer (not another Kirin or Tsingtao please) or an uninspiring cocktail (likely with Tequila or Vodka that do not taste much of anything). I often retreat to water or, I must admit, a beer (light lagers or pilsners are a favorite if available).

I have found out that most of the smaller ethnic restaurants are likely run by foreign born staff with little wine knowledge. They usually see the wine list as important as the fortune cookies (I would not be surprised if they pay more attention to the cookies at times). The wine is usually provided by the beer salesman of very large wine and beer distributors (they are the only one that really have the time and incentive to visit those smaller accounts). The beer salesman is usually incentivized on beer and his wine book is often dismal. The combination of an uneducated buyer and a sales person that want to push beer is unfortunately an uninspiring wine selection in 99% of small ethnic food restaurant.

If anyone as a solution on how to change this sad state of affair, please leave a post!

PS: Did I say that Riesling (in many forms), can aikido most, if not all, of those ethnic foods…

This week I was visiting a great restaurant in San Francisco called Sens (http://www.sens-sf.com/) with our local sales person (Jo M.). Jo and I were chatting about the cocktail trends in San Francisco and to demonstrate how good wine cocktail can be he asked the bartender to create a Chenin Blanc based cocktail. I am not sure if it has a name yet but it tasted just perfect with the food and the hot weather. Here is the recipe: 1 part Eldelflower liquor (Use St Germain liquor: http://www.stgermain.fr/), one part Pacific Rim Chenin Blanc and one part club soda - all of it in a tall glass on ice with a lemon twist on the rim. This might be the best wine cocktail I ever had.

One trend that I have been following lately is the use of wine in cocktails. I made a few discoveries during my last trip in San Francisco.

Luna Park’s (http://lunaparksf.com/) “Icebreaker” is one of the best Vin De Glaciere cocktail I have tried. It is one part Riesling Vin De Glaciere and one part chilled ciroq vodka with two frozen grapes in a martini glass. Very dangerous and delicious cocktail. Highly recommended.

Thank you Luna park for this inspirational use of our Vin De Glaciere!!

Thank you to Sharon Kapnick of the New Yourk Times (among others) for her great article about Riesling’s versatility with food: http://www.seniorwomen.com/hs/articles/kapnick/articlesKapnickRiesling.html

It is a very toughtful article with many references to the Riesling world. Riesling is really the greatest food wine.

I was just reading a post on Dr Vino’s blog (http://www.drvino.com/2008/07/10/alcohol-can-it-be-too-low/) about low alcohol wines. Why people love 15% overextracted wines puzzles me! When we (at Pacific RIm) make wines above 13% ethanol I get very uncomfortable as a prefer 11.5% and below. The Sweet Riesling and the Vin de Glaciere at 8-9% are great choice for low alcohol wines in our Riesling world if you want to test lower alcohol content wines. Why can’t folks make 12% light reds in this country is a mystery.

Superb dinner at Boka last Wednesday. Highly, highly recommended. The chef, Giuseppe Tentori (A Charlie Trotter’s alumni), is quite a genius. The fusion food type worked very well with Riesling as one might expect. Check this menu: Stuffed squid on a bed of tapioca in the squid’s ink, golden beet salad on a red beet coulis with yuzu and hickory bacon, veal cheek with homemade grainy mustard, and on and on… Every plate was delicious and beautiful. You have to stop at Boka if you are in Chicago, believe me, you will remember what awesome fusion food is.

Two places to add to this list of great restaurant. The first one is the famous Frontera Grill. I went there yesterday for a Margarita and some topes. The ambiance is great and the topes/margarita combo was awesome. This is one great restaurant for sure.

The other restaurant that is definitely worth mentioning is Vong’s Thai Kitchen. I had a very delicious dinner there. This is not a very hard core Thai, many European influences in the cooking. This type of fusion food works very well with our wines, so it was a memorable event. The dinner was organized in conjunction with Sam’s, the famous Chicago wine retailer.

Dinner last night was excellent. Mike and I had dinner on the Moshulu, a four masts ship anchored on the Delaware River in Philadelphia. There is no doubt in my mind that this could be a temple for Riesling. I’ve enjoyed greatly the story of the boat; a freight vessel was originally German then captured by the US during WWI, then captured back by the German during WWII to be finally purchased by the US in 1970. How can a French guy not love that story?

The food is perfect for Riesling: modern, lots of seafood and accent of asian influences throughout the food. Mike and I tried the duck spring rolls, the spicy tuna tacos and the surf and turf (braised short ribs with seared scallops). We had three wines to enjoy with the food, a French sparkling, our dry Riesling, and a Mosel kabinett. Seriously, our Riesling was the best. The Kabinett was a tid bit too sweet for the food and had a strong banana aroma (not usual in my experience) and the sparkling was a bit simple. I was please to see the dry Riesling pairing well with everything from the wasabi sauce of the tacos to the rich umami taste of the short rib - scallop combo. If you stop by Philadelphia, I recommend the Moshulu for the evening. Thank you Bill Bergan for running a great establishment like the Moshulu.

I had lunch last week at “Taste”, the restaurant in the Seattle Art Museum (SAM). I was meeting with Shannon Borg from the Seattle Magazine and we’ve decided to try Pacific Rim wines with a sample of the menu. The food was freshly delicious and a perfect match for our wines. My favorite combos were the spring pea and sorrel soup with the Chenin Blanc 2006, the hot italian sausage and herb pizza with the dry Riesling and the mini organic burgers (with yummy french fries) with, well actually the sweet Riesling…

Taste is a great place for a quick lunch downtown Seattle and the food is very fresh and organic. Danielle Custer, the general manager, is really running a great restaurant there. Highly recommended.