August 2007 Archives

The older this wine gets, the more I like it, but the lower I rate it. I can't explain that, but if you have any of this, I suggest opening a bottle with a good dry-aged steak. You'll like it.

• 2000 Shafer Relentless - USA, California, Napa Valley (8/20/2007)
  Decanted for four hours, the wine exhibited a deep but not completely opaque dark red brick color. Nose is mild, with clean floral and vanilla aromas. Palate initially shows good acidity, a medium body and flavors of berries and bittersweet chocolate. Finish is marked by structural tannins, sweet fruit and balanced oak, and lasts for 30 seconds or more. This will last a long time and probably improve further, but is excellent now with sufficient decanting. A very, very nice wine. (91 pts.)
• 2000 Shafer Relentless - USA, California, Napa Valley (9/27/2005)
  Offline for Alex and Adam at Zuppa (San Francisco, California USA): Rich, fruity, big nose. Palate shows bittersweet chocolate and a medium-full body. Long tannic finish. Quite good wine, but far from ready. (92 pts.)
• 2000 Shafer Relentless - USA, California, Napa Valley (3/13/2005)
  Shafer Hillside Select Dinner (Manresa Restaurant, Los Gatos, California USA): BIG nose of berries with an undercurrent of spice and earth. Better than the '99 in almost every way. Elias Fernandez said this was primarily due to learning about the vineyard and another year of age on the vines. Palate shows ripe fruit, white pepper and spice, superb extract, medium-full body, good acidity and a tremendously long firmly tannic finish. AT LEAST two years till next bottle. This wine is treated exactly the same as the Hillside Select Cabernet with 32 months in 100% new oak (93 pts.)

Sherry is the perfect wine. It is more versatile than any other and pairs well with far more foods than any other wine. Do you believe me? Alas, if you are like most wine drinkers, probably not. Sherry is niche product, consumed by few wine drinkers and beloved by far fewer. So, I will convince you.

My first effort at this was about two years ago when I blogged about Amontillado and Idiazabal which is truly a great match. Today, we take up the next example, a salad of fennel, mushrooms and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese matched with fino sherry.

First, the salad. You will need a medium fennel bulb, 1/2 lb. of mushrooms, salt, pepper, excellent olive oil, a hunk of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, a mandolin, and a vegetable peeler. (Optional is a knit kevlar glove to keep your fingers and other soft tissue out of the mandolin).

Use the mandolin to slice the fennel and mushrooms into slices about 3/32-inch thick. Build the salad in layers in a roomy bowl, first a layer of fennel, season with salt and pepper, and drizzle with olive oil. Next a layer of mushrooms, salt, pepper, and olive oil. Continue until you are out of vegetables. Finish by shaving the Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese on top with the vegetable peeler.

Now the sherry. I matched the salad with a Puerto Fino sherry, which is a pale, delicate, very dry, crisp and tangy wine. Puerto is one of the coolest sherry producing areas, and the resulting wine is higher in acidity than is common for other sherries. Well chilled, the wine goes great with the salad, especially the olive oil, cutting through the fat and highlighting the flavors. This is a lunch that is hard to top. Use a good grade of Spanish olive oil and pretend you are in Spain. If you ignore the Parmigiano-Reggiano, it won't be difficult.

This isn't about wine or food or San Francisco or music, but these pictures are so incredible and eye-popping that I am compelled to blog about them. It's almost like a time machine, transporting you back to Czarist Russia before Lennin's Revolution. My grandfather on my father's side was Russian (or Polish, depending on how you want to look at it) and I'm certain that he grew up looking at scenes exactly like those depicted in these incredible photos.

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944), was photographer to the Czar and spent 10 years between 1905 and 1915 traveling around the Russian empire documenting what he saw. Amazingly, Gorskii took his pictures in color using an ingenious camera that took three exposures through red, blue, and green filters. High resolution digital scanners and Adobe Photoshop didn't exist 100 years ago, Gorskii had to make do with a lantern projector with three colored filters focused on one image. Today, we can use the aforementioned digital media tools to create the most amazing pictures which you can see here, at Alex Gridenko's website.

For more digital realizations of this amazing trove of material, look at the Prokudin-Gorskii exhibit of the Library of Congress. And for details on how these images were created, look at this page.

When I blogged about the tea shops in Chinatown, I said I would go back and check out the Red Blossom Tea Company. Since that was about two years ago I must owe someone an update: so here it is. I've been back to Red Blossom five or six times since my original tea shop tour, and it has become my tea supplier of choice.

Red Blossom is family owned, and has been in Chinatown for over 25 years. The senior Mr. Luong started the business, and it is now run by his children. Red Blossom is an importer of tea and has direct relationships with growers in China and Taiwan. When you buy some Spring 2007 Longjing Supreme (Ming Qian Dragonwell Panan Supreme $380/lb.) you can be sure of the provenance and quality, as Peter (the son) was likely at the tea farm during the harvest. You might buy some Jade Kuan Yin Reserve Grade and be interested in how it was roasted. Peter can tell you, as they import and roast their oolong teas. The teas are arranged on the wall in families (White, Green, Oolong, Black) and by oxidation and roasting within families. You can learn a lot about tea just by studying how the canisters are arranged. You can learn more by talking with the staff, and they love to talk about tea.

If you insist on buying Earl Grey or such things here, you will be able to do so, as they are in business to sell tea and they have what people want. But this is the place to learn about and procure artisan green and oolong teas.

I'll admit it: I'm a tea fanatic. It's great to have a place where I can talk to another fanatic who is as interested in supplying high quality tea, as I am in getting my hands on it.

Red Blossom Tea Company
831 Grant Avenue
San Francisco, California 94108
Phone: (415) 395-0868
Open 9:30am to 6:00pm, Daily