Lets Butcher Something and Eat It: A saignée Essay of Sorts

One of my sparetime activities is learning how to butcher my own meat.

White wine from Gascony is cheap and good for hot days, you should drink more of it. The advantages of butchering your own chicken are clear, you get to cut things with a knife, plus you get stock scraps.

I drank two Spanish wines from the mencia grape on back to back days. One from Abad Dom Bueno in Bierzo and one from Enologia Temera “Themera.” The dom Bueno used no sulfites, but enough oak and alcohol to murder the grape anyway. The Themera had sulfites, but little oak and a lightness (12.5%) that showed perfectly. Good wine making and terroir win anyday. real fried chicken is a labor of love.

I drank my first Cour-Cheverny from Pascal Bellier. Cour-Cheverny is grown from Romorantin, an old almost completely unknown grape from the Loire. It is a constant source of amazement and joy that people are still dedicated to things like Romorantin that most world seems to have past by. the wine was excellent. My wife says it isn’t cooking if i don’t hurt myself. i spilled oil on my arm, and picked up a hot pan, so it was definitely cooking.

i drank a 2006 red Burgundy from Olivier Guyot last night. The label had Bourgogne misspelled as Bougogne. I have a fondness for misspelled or handwritten labels. It makes me rmember that stuff is still made by hand. The wine was still tight and young. My grandmother’s family used to fry chicken in the same cast iron tub they washed the children in.

i drank some wine from Binner in Alsace, a gewurtraminer and a co-fermented riesling, gewurtz, pinot blanc, and sylvaner. These guys are making some of the most interesting wine i have tasted in a long time. Uncontained raw naturalality (i’m making that word up right now). My friend is in town and he working on fabricating neural receptors that one day far in the future might be able to bypass broken nerve connections and let people in wheelchairs walk again. i had no idea. Buttermilk biscuits are hard to make from scratch.

i argued with someone over biodynamics the other day. They wondered why it is we don’t demand the same level of scientific inquiry in regards to biodynamic wine that we do with medicine. If you’re conflating wine with medicine you’ve lost the plot. Wine is not medicine, nor is it car brakes. I’ve always been surprised at the level of animosity that biodynamics can stir in people. Sure i’m suspect of several, but I also get to drink Huet and Lopez de Heredia. Scientific inquiry has brought us scientific wines, and scientific medicine. i’ll take one and leave and leave the other, even if it means surrendering some logic. The chicken was good, my Carolina forebears would be proud.

They re-released Company Flow’s album Funcrusher Plus. It is an aural version of Dr. Who’s sonic screwdriver. Drinking wine as opposed to simply tasting it is something that has been on my mind. I went to a party a few weeks ago that can only be described as “wine-geek.” Disparate people came and brought wines from their cellars (including VLM) to taste, to show off, to compare. People bought all manner of wines, from Italian orange wines to Zinfandel made when Zinfandel was made gently (’77 to be exact, stunning by the way). The wine was good as was the company. i got to drink old alsatian tokay and older alsatian gewurtztraminer, and a glassblower was wearing a wig. This is a strange way to drink wines, trying to maximize the wines tasted at the expense of really knowing one wine. It’s not a bad approach, just strange, like a museum of wine put togther to showcase everything the world of wine has in it. Just a thought, not sure where i’m going with that. Grab something you like and really get to know it. We drank something sparkling with the chicken, can’t remember what, didn’t get to know it i guess. i’ll leave you with Bowie:

~ by Cory Cartwright on May 17, 2009.