Marzemino/potato pizza

Marzemino
My girlfriend and I were planning on having a nice night together and this included sharing a bottle of Marco Donati's Marzemino. At work I recommend this wine quite frequently, both to open ears an also to those that seem to only hear words like "cabernet" or "chardonnay." Of course, I get mixed results but when somebody gets hooked they always come back, and then I feel like I have made the world a better place. Marzemino is a decidedly modest grape that I have only seen at around $15 in Chicago. It can act like a warm climate varietal, showing a bit of alcohol, some warm fruit aromatics and lower acidity, but it is grown only in Trentino, one of the Northernmost regions in Italy. Marco Donati sources his fruit from Rovereto, not too far South of Trento, the unofficial division between southern Trentino and Northern Alto Adige. Marzemino is a wine that is usually prized for its light body and interesting aromatics- I think about it as the less extreme version of Piedmont's Ruche. The foods of Trentino/Alto Adige often involve sage I see how Marzemino might evolve as the everyday wine of the region because of its affinity for the flavor of the herb. Tonight, though, potato pizza was on the menu and i thought since I thought Marzemino reminded me of warm climate varietals, I would see how it fared with a warm climate food.
Potato Pizza
One of my favorite things to do when i decide i am going to invest some time in making some food i is to make a potato pizza. The recipe comes to me by way of my Regional Italian Cookbook that has pretty much been my bible since I got it last year. The recipe i refer to is Pugliese, using potatoes, flour, and olive oil for the dough, topping it with tomato sauce, cheese, anchovies, capers and olives. I alter the recipe a little by using soy "cheese" and omitting the anchovies because it seems like i am the only one that likes them. I also like to add yellow pepper and zucchini just because i love them both.
The Result
I had been tasting the wine all the while I was making the pizza and I kept thinking about how good it was and how it reminded me of the time i spent in Trentino earlier this year. I used to tell people that the aromatics made me think of baking spice but i don't think so anymore. Now I am having trouble narrowing down the aromas but keep getting images of cool green mountains and fresh cuts herbs. It doesn't have the structure to age, and certainly doesn't strike you with tannin but what it does have is big flavor both for enjoying with food and alone. Potato pizza, I learned not long ago, is ridiculously good with wines from further South like Aglianico del Vulture, Primitivo, and wines made from Negroamaro, and, while i like Marzemino, it is really better suited to something like Canederli in Brodo- an Alto Adige recipe of little bread dumplings in broth. It didn't end up being as bad as say, Mexican food and Nebbiolo, but the strong, sweet flavor of my homemade sauce overwhelmed and muted the softer fruit flavors or the wine. Not good in my book. Next time I make potato pizza, which will hopefully not be too far off, I think I am going to try something from Puglia that I haven't had in a while, Uva di Troia. It has been a while but I remember being enchanted by the unique nose...
Tomorrow is Christmas Eve and i will find myself in the Northern Suburbs of chicago eating lots of good food that will hopefully go with the bottle of Rosso di Montefalco that I scored from one of my distributor friends. We'll see, and maybe I'll write something.
hooray.

Food and wine pairing

Okay so I had this idea to start a blog chronicling my wine and food experiences. I decided to do this for several reasons: 1, to have some sort of reference able record of which foods I had with which wines and how they ended up faring and 2, to make this record public so i could share my experiences. I know that there are plenty of magazines where you could read about Smug Old Man A and Smug Old Man B sitting around a table in Tuscany sharing some crazy wine that you and I could never dream of tasting at a restaurant where neither you nor I could afford to dine, but my purpose here is not to gloat or brag, all I want to do is record my experiences and I feel that if I utilize a public forum, such as a blog, it will force me into really focusing on the mixing of food and wine, enough to forge a complete opinion instead of just jotting down half assed scribbles in a stupor and pretending that counts as tasting notes.
So this is going to be my first entry in the Book of Taste. I won't really start out with any kind of motto or statement, I think I will just jump into it and that is that for an introduction.

Thanksgiving
The days leading up to Thanksgiving were really hectic at work with more people than you can imagine coming up to me asking what they should drink with their holiday meal. I got into the habit of asking people what they were having to eat because after a couple days of assuming that everyone eats what I eat at Thanksgiving, I found out that the only meal component you can count on showing up at was the turkey. What ended up happening to me was in effect a pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving burn out. As the only member of my family that works in wine, and as a result, really knows much about it, it is usually my role to pick out or bring the wine that we will have at any BYO family event. After considering the meal that I know as Thanksgiving, and, after hearing so many variations on that theme I decided that i was done playing sommelier. Instead of focusing on matching every minute quality of every dish with any wine I could imagine I decided that the perfect wine for me to drink on this one night devoted to being thankful was pretty much any wine I felt like drinking. Two or three days of working retail wine sales will do that to you, maybe call it apathy or whatever, all I wanted to do was drink something I knew I would enjoy. i grabbed one of my all time favorites, "La Bastide", a Minervois made by Chateau Coupe Roses. At about $11 this is their base level wine which is a blend of grenache, syrah, and of course, carignan. I picked the wine not based on its appeal of compatibility but rather because I figured it would be just about the right body type and regardless of the food, I knew I would enjoy it. Just as I thought, the wine was spot on: cool ranch dorito aromas and bitter black olive flavors were perfectly typical but really did not create the best combination when drunk with pretty much any of the food. This really wasn't such a shame, however. The food, much of it sweet and loaded with butter, was a far cry from the food of Southern France, so i figured we just had a terrible case of geographical mismatch. Oh well, another year...another Thanksgiving to put behind us.
mark!