The Icewine Cometh
The idea started innocently enough. I was taking a friend, out to dinner, and I asked him if he liked ice wine. We had just acquired a nice bottle, and I wanted to share it with someone who would appreciate it. And Josh and his wife Lisa were the most obvious candidates.
Not only did Josh like ice wine, he had gotten some for his wedding (technically, he had gotten eiswein, which is the same thing from Germany). In short order, he suggested an "ice wine summit." We'd provide dinner and our ice wine, and he and Lisa would bring their eiswein.
Ice wine is among the s†rangest of the dessert wines. Many dessert wines are made with grapes that are harvested late, but for an ice wine, the grapes are harvested after the first frost. Usually at dawn after the first frost, as many countries have laws about what the temperature has to be when the grapes are harvested (-8 C for Germany, for instance). Some producers, such as Bonny Doon, harvest the grapes, and then just freeze the juice for what they say is the same effect. The debate continues about that.
So here's our dinner menu, as usual with my notes:
(Note: I don't usually make wine tasting notes at dinner, because I don't feel right about scribbling
away in a notebook while trying to entertain guests, so there's not much in the way of descriptions
on the wine.)
The bread and oil is straightforward enough, but the mousse in crisps comes from The French Laundry Cookbook and worked out quite well. I figured out an assumption in the recipe that wasn't explicitly stated. Keller suggests using an egg carton to shape the crisps, but what he means is an egg carton that holds at least 18 eggs; the crisps want to be shaped in the wells between four of the spikes in an egg carton, and a 12-egg holder doesn't have any wells with all four corners being spikes. This I realized after I tried shaping them, so they didn't look exactly like the picture in the book, but they were still yummy. I piped the mousse with a small star tip, so it got a nice swirly, ribbed look.
This pairing was an experiment. The Italian model of wine is that it is an ingredient of the meal, and they'll often use it to complete, rather than complement, the food on the plate. That was the goal here. The Moscato d'Asti is a lightly sweet wine with a little fizz, the gravlax (salt-cured salmon) is of course salty, and the arugula is bitter. So we had sweet, acid, salt, and bitter when everything was combined. But it was merely a fine pairing, not a really interesting one. Still, Moscato d'Asti is always a treat, even though serving it first violates the "increase in sweetness" rule of wine progression.
I knew I wanted to serve this Pinot Noir, which was quite a nice wine, but I struggled with what to serve it with. A little later in the year, I might have opted for coq au vin, the classic dish of Burgundy, figuring that even if the wine wasn't from Burgundy, it was still made with Pinot Noir, and Oregon's Pinot Noirs from the Willammette Valley can often hold their own against Burgundies. Instead I went for root vegetables in different preparations. The pairing worked nicely.
Within days of this dinner's conception, I had figured out how to serve my ice wine. Unusually, it had gotten botrytized while on the vine. Botrytis is the "noble rot" which makes Sauternes so distinctive. So I decided to treat my ice wine just like a Sauternes, and served it with a mild blue (not knowing how strong it was, I didn't want to overpower the wine with very flavorful cheese). The Montagnolo is, as it happens, a German cheese. Pain de Mie is a dense, fairly buttery bread which is great for toast or sandwiches. You actually cook it in a special pan which has a tight lid. As the dough rises, it hits the lid, but has nowhere to go, which makes the crumb very tight. And the pan is perfectly square, so you end up with a beautiful loaf for presenting slices.
The ice wine was delicious. On the nose, it was like sticking your face into a vat of honey, the botrytis making itself known loud and clear. The wine walked away with gold medals from the Washington State Fair when it was released, and it's easy to see why.
The eiswein was everything you want a good dessert wine to be. It was sweet, of course, but noticeably crisper than the Claar (which makes sense in retrospect; Baden may be a warmer part of Germany, but Germany is still cold enough that the fruit doesn't ripen very much). A really nice balance.
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