On Bliss, Rankings, Awesomeness and the Allure of Perks

The framers of the American Declaration of Independence were onto something quite remarkable when they codified not only happiness, but its pursuit, in their document, even if they did refer to it as The Purfuit of Happineff, the sly jokesters.

Achieving happiness remains an elusive goal, though, and countries like Finland, New Zealand and Canada regularly trounce the U.S. in measures of overall societal bliss. Pundits jump to point out that one of the reasons that Americans are well down the list is all the time they spend at work. 

The website health.com recently came out with this list of ten careers that are particularly apt to make people unhappy. Of 21 major job categories surveyed, here are the ones in which full-time workers are most likely to report an episode of major depression in a given year:

1. Nursing home/child care workers
2. Food service staff
3. Social workers
4. Health care workers
5. Artists, writers and entertainers
6. Teachers
7. Administrative support staff
8. Maintenance and grounds workers
9. Financial advisors and accountants
10. Salespeople

Okay, so all kinds of questions arise from a list like this. For example, do writing and entertaining tend to attract people with an inherently gloomy disposition? Perhaps, but let’s leave aside this layer of complexity and assume that there is, in fact, something about those jobs themselves that induces what we used to call ‘melancholia’. Good enough for me. Tricia, Kelby and I regularly muse that spending all day trying to convince people to buy stuff (#10) would turn us into emotional basket cases by about week two.

I don’t know how long the list of job categories would have to be before you came to ‘Winemakers’, but given that there a lot more, say, donut makers in America than winemakers, it would have to be pretty long. This is why one’s not likely to be able to find some official gauge of the satisfaction level of people who ‘vint’ for a living. So perhaps we will never know how happy a group we are by any standard metric.

A different approach might be to find out if winemakers make it onto a list of jobs with astronomical job satisfaction. A Google search on that subject yields a single, very nonscientific, article that is at least kind of fun to read. The author names some AWESOME!!! jobs that people can also putatively make a good living at:

1. Ferrari driving instructor
2. Astronaut
3. Winemaker
4. Chocolatier
5. Pilot
6. Magician
7. Park Ranger
8. Video game designer
9. Florist
10. Standup comedian

I wrote “AWESOME!!!” because I was tipped off to the highly subjective, jokey nature of this list as soon as I saw ‘video game designer’ (#8), something I believe every teenage boy entertains serious ambitions of being as soon as he gets to the bottom of that last jar of Clearasil (“You get to play video games all day and get paid for it? So long, mother and father!”).

All this notwithstanding, readers of this blog will have picked up by now that we are a pretty jolly lot up here at the winery. Tricia “I am Deliriously Happy” Renshaw has been especially prolific on that subject. If we were the types who are disposed to smugness, we could really run with this, especially since true happiness in one’s job is thought be pretty rare. Jobs equal drudgery, right? They’re what we do to make the money to buy the things we need to bring happiness!

But now comes evidence that people who complain about their jobs might just need to recalibrate their view of the value of work. Toronto journalist John Allemang* suggests that work ought, in fact, to be considered essential to a balanced, happy life:

What a bunch of whiners we’ve become. Work is destroying our life, cry the proponents of greater equilibrium, and stress has become the 24/7 routine. Woe is us, responds the oppressed labor force between frantic Facebook postings – we demand in-house corporate pedicures to alleviate our unparalleled suffering. 

But maybe it’s not as bad as all that. Maybe it’s our endless negativity about the work-life balancing act – based on a refusal to see our behavior as an enlightened personal choice rather than a forced sacrifice of self – that’s put [our] fragile psyche so pathetically out of whack. 

“Don’t denigrate work,” advises Thomas Hurka, a University of Toronto philosopher and author of the forthcoming book The Best Things in Life: A Guide to What Really Matters. 

Work matters, Prof. Hurka says, much more than its life-loving critics care to acknowledge. “If you ask what are the things that make life worthwhile, one of them is pleasure, satisfaction, feeling good. But another one is achievement. If you have work that is challenging and calls on your abilities, and then you succeed at it, that’s worthwhile in itself. So it’s a mistake to talk about work versus your life – work is a valuable element in your life.” 

The dichotomy is false to begin with: Take away too much work and you almost certainly won’t be left with enough of a life. By recognizing the pleasure and sense of accomplishment work can provide, we might already feel less conflicted.

Do winemakers understand intuitively that this should be the case, and approach their task accordingly? Are we one step ahead of the general population, having made that leap at a nascent stage in our careers? Nice ideas, but I think not. More likely, we are just lucky enough to have found something remunerative that is also enormously challenging and seriously fun.

“Wine is the only thing that makes us happy as adults for no reason,” wrote The New Yorker cartoonist and all-round smart guy Saul Steinberg. He was writing about the drinking of it. How AWESOME!!! it is that making the stuff is so good at bringing us happiness, too.

But I am intrigued by the likelihood that in-house pedicures would ramp things up even higher...

By: Peter Bell, Winemaker

What Makes Us Happy (Smuckers Product Placement)

Alcohol is off limits for winery dog Max, so he gets the canine 

equivalent of a Shirley Temple Cocktail.

*Allemang can write pretty cleverly about wine, too. In the course of a recent email exchange, he coined the term airoir to describe the flavors that wines get from the winds that pass over the grapevines (“The gentle, limestone-infused summer breezes on our estate give this delightful Pinot Grigio a distinctive sense of airoir…”). You heard it here first.

Music of the Day:

• Split Enz - History Never Repeats; "One Step Ahead":

Support Artists, buy the music you like!

What Is A "Holiday Wine"?

It was only a few weeks ago that anyone and everyone connected to Fox Run started getting bombarded with questions regarding what wines pair well with Thanksgiving Dinner.  As you could see in my post on the subject, the broad answer with a meal that diverse and with a main entree so versatile was to drink any wine that wouldn't tire you out (due to too much alcohol, tannin, etc.) and especially to make sure it was a wine you enjoyed (because that is what really matters).  Now as we approach and immerse ourselves in other major celebrations of the season, each of which marries gaiety with some form of excess, the questions of "what wine" are no less important.

To me, the most interesting part of wine pairing questions during the holidays is the larger premise behind the question: that a distinct set of wines exist that are appropriate for the holidays.  Even if we cannot place our finger on what exactly makes a wine a "Holiday Wine," we all seem to have some understanding that it deserves special attention (and capital letters).  Frankly, I'm most interested in what all of you and consumers in general think of when they approach a holiday wine selection - and hope to see some ideas in the comments below.  In the meantime, here are a few attributes that I tend to weigh and juggle for these special wines:

• Pairing Food:  The most obvious factor that might go into designating a wine as a Holiday Wine is that it pairs well with traditional foods of the season.  Thanksgiving brings to mind zinfandels for many who read American wine writers anytime after the 1980s, because it seemed appropriate at one time to serve an American wine with an American holiday and now is rooted like tradition (regardless of suitability to the meal).  For those who have a standing rib roast for Christmas or New Year's, a classic claret-style red might beg for Holiday Wine consideration.
• Pairing Mood:  No less important when it comes to wine pairing, is how the wine seems to pair with the mood of the season.  Excepting its most ardent proponents, most wine drinkers would not readily think of a crisp, dry rosé during the depths of a cold and snowy January.  On the flip side, dark and sticky port wines feel perfect by the fireplace and a sparkling wine is as de rigueur at a New Year's Eve party as the midnight kiss.  Fortunately, sparkling wines are excellent partners for the hors d'oeuvres present at most such gatherings - but regardless of that the mood fits the wine so perfectly that food pairing might be cast aside (see: Zinfandel, Thanksgiving).
• Price:  There is no way around the fact that all consumers, including everyone in the wine industry when they are out shopping, use the price of a bottle as an indicator of the quality within the bottle.  These assumptions may be entirely off base, perhaps the wine just has better marketing or an artificially low supply, but nevertheless they are still made.  And when it comes to the holidays, similar to how everything else is treated from food to spending, excess (high price) is often rewarded as being correct for a Holiday Wine.  This isn't to say that the fun gatherings this time of year do not deserve expensive bottles of wine, but neither does it mean that just because a wine is expensive it should be considered a Holiday Wine.
• Tradition:  Relatively straight forward, I suppose.  If you always have a nice Chianti Classico on Christmas Eve with a big Italian-American feast, that style of wine is always going to be a Holiday Wine for you and yours.  It may even come down to a specific producer or bottle if it has really entrenched itself.  For better or worse, when it comes to this signifier of Holiday Wines I am still in my early 20s and struck hard by wanderlust, so I'm far more prone to experimentation even within the context of tradition.
• Sensory Analysis:  This comes surprisingly far down my list, but I don't think that is inappropriate given how important the first three are in most of our decisions on wine during the holidays.  To some extent, there are simply wines that can call to mind images of the holidays simply by their aromas and flavors.  Whether these be aromas of cloves, cinnamon, red fruit, or anything else that we associate with the holidays, a wine can certainly vault itself into being a Holiday Wine if it suddenly serves as a Proustian portal to holidays (real, imagined, or idealized) gone by.
• Connection:  This word may be as nebulous as terroir is, in that giving a precise definition is as frustratingly difficult.  Instead, by way of example, here is what caused me to think of this entire topic.  While I was in New Zealand I purchased about a case-worth of wine, bottle by bottle, from small producers I was impressed by and wouldn't find elsewhere.  Now when I look at these bottles and contemplate opening them for a meal, I am drawn back to beautiful landscapes and my remarkable experiences traveling through that nation in the spring.  This may not have a direct connection to anything relating to the holidays, but to the extent that it brings me back to these special memories it feels right for the joy and reflection of this season.

So there you have it, a partial listing of categories that help make a wine become a Holiday Wine.  As I said at the beginning, I am more interested in what other people think of when they pick out wines for the holidays.  Every such bottle tends to have as fascinating a story behind it as the person who selects it.

By: Kelby Russell, Winemaking Team

Music of the Day:

• Lower Dens - Twin-Hand Movement; "I Get Nervous":

Support Artists, buy the music you like!

The Torturous Path

Hi there, blog fans. 

I’m back from the fantasy world that we like to call the monthly Bulk Inventory Report, and I have to confess that I am thrilled to have the paperwork part of my job done for a few weeks.  While it’s important to regularly keep an eye on volumes and the whereabouts of our wines, what this exercise really does is inspire a nearly rabid desire to get my hands dirty.  

In truth, the extraordinary variability of this job is one great aspect of making wine for a living.    

When I’m asked how I found winemaking as a career, I’m forced to sheepishly admit that I was that kid –the one who had no clear direction in life.  Most of my friends knew by mid-way through high school that they wanted to be doctors or lawyers or teachers, but I was never sure.  I liked elements of every job, but could never pick one path without fearing that I would feel trapped or that I would miss out on an integral part of who I should be.  I kept thinking that surely by the time I was a senior, I would know what I wanted to do.  I was wrong.  

After high school, I spent a year in Belgium as an exchange student—plenty of time to figure out my future.  Unfortunately, aside from realizing that the world is both bigger and smaller than I had ever imagined, and that I love to experience other cultures, cuisines, and languages, I had not come to any useful conclusions.  

Enter college.  Freshman year, I was a math/computer science major.  I poured myself into AP Calculus, Pascal (it was a long time ago), and Number Theory.  Sophomore year, I became an art major.  Pause a second, and imagine that conversation.  “Hi, Mom and Dad!  Guess what?  I dropped math, and I’m taking art.”  Junior year, I transferred to a local college (no need to drive to Indiana to take art classes, dearie).  By the second semester, I’d had enough art, and took off to France for a semester abroad (OK, so maybe they had a point).  Senior year, panic set in.   Still no reason to believe that I was meant to do anything in particular, yet I had a strong hunch that I was, and I couldn’t guess what that might be.  

I didn’t think I had the patience and tenacity to teach (I was right—teaching is a gift, and I don’t have it).  I couldn’t imagine crunching numbers inside an office for more than three consecutive days.  Art was too fleeting—what if I lost my muse?  Or worse—what if an art director wanted to change something in my work?  I considered science, because I enjoyed that so much, but doing what?  Biology and chemistry were fun, but I didn’t believe I’d find myself in a lab coat.  I was fascinated by astronomy, but everyone, and I do mean everyone I told, said “No way—you can’t make a living watching stars, even if it is interesting.”   Astronaut was out—I’m afraid of heights, and I’m claustrophobic. 

Actually, I wasn’t claustrophobic until I went to Belgium.  My class (teacher and all) took a senior trip via bus to Czechoslovakia.  On our way home, we stopped in Germany to walk through a concentration camp.  It was a holding camp rather than a death camp, and we were treated to the agonizing experience of being closed inside a holding cell.   There were approximately 70 people crushed inside the cell, and I was toward the back of the crowd.  Our guide explained that there was typically twice that number of people interred in these cells when the camp was in use.  He looked in at us from outside the doorway and said, “There was no way to sit down, or lie down.  People relieved themselves in place.”  He gave us a moment to think about that, then concluded, “Many died and were held upright by the sheer number of bodies.”  He swung the heavy door shut and locked it.  The reality of 70 people in that cell was terrible.  140 people in that cell would be unimaginable.  I clawed my way to the front of the crowd and pushed furiously and fruitlessly against the door.  That moment will never leave me.  

That experience made me a more considerate person.  I’m careful to treat people well, because even on a small scale, it matters.  

It also left me a high-functioning claustrophobe.  I hadn’t fully ruled out astronaut until I returned from my year abroad, but it was definitely off the list.

So, there I found myself, well past the age when I was sure I would know what I wanted to do with my life, and I had still not found my way.  With graduation looming in the all-too-near future, I had to force a decision. A perusal of my résumé and a visit to my advisor indicated that my major had to be French to graduate on time.  

I finished up my Lit classes (17^th, 18^th, 19^th, and 20^th Century French Literature—loved every minute of it, not kidding), and was loosed upon the world.  

By the time I had graduated from college I had collected a long list of things I didn’t want to be.  I soothed myself by repeating over and over, “It’s OK.  Finding out what you don’t want to do is nearly as good as figuring out what you do want to do.”  Nearly being the key word, of course.  

I knew I could make a living, because I liked so many things well enough, and I was lucky enough to be good at most of it.  I ended up working in a bank—I really liked the idea of money, and my math, language and culture skills were sought-after by the international banking department.  

Life unfolded, and my career, such as it was, gave way to motherhood.  What a gift my girls are.   What a gift staying home to raise them was.  

In the course of things, I discovered wine, and eventually winemaking as a career possibility.  It’s funny, I wasn’t even looking, and I found exactly what I was meant to do:  raise these two girls, and make wine in the Finger Lakes.  

August 2, 2005, Peter interviewed me for my first winemaking position (on the bottling line).  He said “You can’t be claustrophobic, or afraid of heights.”  I am not making this up.  I told myself, “Well, I’m both, but for this job, I won’t be either.”  And it hasn’t been a problem.  

He also said, “You won’t make a fortune making wine, at least not in this part of the world. But,” he went on, “for those people who are truly passionate about making wine, job satisfaction is off the chart.”  

Was he ever right!

I went from that kid, the one who couldn’t imagine doing anything for a lifetime, to that woman, that winemaker, who can’t imagine doing anything else.  

Every day, I use math, and science, and art, and my creativity.  I work alone some of the time, and in collaboration most of the time.  The work can be physical and demanding or slow and even tedious at times (yes, bulk inventory, I’m invoking you).   I pour my passion into the wines we make, as do Peter and Kelby.  

I do a job I love, with people I admire wholeheartedly, for a company we are all so proud to say we belong to.  

Sure, I took the long route, but it was the road that led me home.

Smiles From Above

The Chesire Cat has nothing on Tricia.

By: Tricia Renshaw, Assistant Winemaker

Music of the Day:

• Tom Waits - Orphans; "Long Way Home":

Support Artists, buy the music you like!

Have A Heart: Chill Your Reds Between Uses

In my last post I mentioned, tangentially, a situation that is common among wine lovers: the half-finished bottle. This subject came up in the context of a food-and-wine discussion -- you may recall that I had taken advantage of having an open bottle of Merlot, and one of Riesling, to see which paired better with the food I had made. (They both tasted fine.)

A quick poll of the winemaking staff here at Fox Run (they both live far enough away so that I couldn’t go and take a sneak peek myself) confirmed my suspicions that what holds for me, holds for them: at any given time, chances are high that there will be a partially-consumed bottle of wine or two in the fridge.

Notice that I didn’t say anything about an open bottle of wine sitting on their countertop.
You see, when I interview candidates here at the winery, I always make it a habit to toss some direct questions at them: “Are you, or have you ever been, the type of person who would…?” Tricia and Kelby were able to answer honestly in the negative to my red-baiting, and they both got a job offer.

Coincidentally, I came across an article over the weekend that does a fine job of answering some common questions that consumers have about wine. Number two on the list was “How long does wine last once opened?”

The smart-aleck response would have been “Just drink it up, dummy, and you won’t have to worry about that.” I have to admit that I’m occasionally tempted to give that answer, especially when someone asks me about a bottle they’ve had open for several months: “Is it still good?” (Typically, the query will finish with, “Or do you think it’s turned to vinegar?” More on that subject below.)

If the author, Gregory Dal Piaz, had been in the room at the time I read his piece, I would have given him a big, congratulatory bear hug, because he said something that I have been harping on for going on a quarter century:

“Refrigerate the wine. Wines go ‘off’ once they have been open because they are interacting with oxygen while warm. Cool the wine and you slow down the rate of those reactions.”

Notice that he didn’t say, “Refrigerate white wine”. That seems to be the reflexive practice of most wine drinkers, and its dangerous corollary is that open bottles of red wine are fine on the countertop.  They are not. Dal Paz nails it when he avers that oxygen is the enemy of wine, as long as it’s clear that we mean bottled wine here. Measurable oxidation reactions happen within a few hours of a wine being exposed to air, and though in some cases a quick hit of air can make a wine taste much better, that doesn’t mean the wine will improve, or even continue to taste good, with a day or so of oxygen exposure. (Remember that standard-issue air is about 21% oxygen, most of the remainder being made up of harmless nitrogen.)

Most people like sunny kitchens. Are you one of them? Yes? Then you have just fallen into my trap. Let’s say, completely hypothetically, that you are also a person who likes to keep a half-finished bottle of red wine on the counter. You get up the next day, go to work, then come home and proceed to ‘enjoy’ the remaining wine from the night before.

But while you toiled at the shoelace factory or insurance agency or wherever, what has happened?  The cat has wandered all over your food prep surfaces, certainly, but more importantly the sun has risen fully and tracked through your kitchen before going on its merry way. That open bottle of red wine? It became, for an hour or so, a mini greenhouse as the sun bestowed all its shining glory on your counter.

Or, since few of us have greenhouses, let’s instead say that while you were away your bottle became a mini automobile sitting in the sun with its windows closed. That’s a more familiar image. For a time, then, those fearful oxidation reactions were ramped up by the Los-Angeles-like temperatures that developed inside your little Buick Regal.

What’s an oxidized wine taste like? Let’s start with what it smells like, how about. It helps to have a memory of what the wine smelled like when it was freshly opened. Typically both red and white wines display some identifiable fruit aromas: pear and apple in the case of Chardonnay, raspberry and cherry with Pinot, and so on. Moreover, there should be no “off” aromas in a newly opened bottle – cardboard, apple peelings, nail polish remover, what have you.

By contrast, a wine that has suffered through some owner-induced oxidation will show a sharply diminished fruit aroma intensity, and in place of those nice, evocative scents you’ll smell things that clearly should not be in the wine. Red wines that have sat out for a day or so often develop unsavory aromas like shoe polish, beef bouillon, bruised apples, rancid cocoa, and Worcestershire sauce. Mmm.

What you won’t find, though, is that your red wine has started to smell like vinegar. The conversion of ethanol to acetic acid is actually a pretty hard trick to accomplish at home. It certainly does not happen to sealed bottles of wine, despite what everyone thinks, and an open bottle will show other off-aromas long before it becomes acetic.

So please keep your open bottles of all wines in the fridge between degustations. If your fridge doesn’t have a shelf tall enough to accommodate a bottle standing up, do something about it.

But you’re supposed to drink reds at room temperature! I hear you say. Easy – take the bottle out of the fridge as you start cooking to let it warm up a bit; or if you’re really in a hurry, place the bottle in a bath of lukewarm water for a minute or two.

Don't Let This Happen To You

Moments before sitting for his portrait, this otherwise
cheerful individual learned that he had been drinking oxidized
red wine every other night for most of his adult life.

- by Peter Bell, winemaker


Music of the Day:

• Dionne Warwick - The Dionne Warwick Collection; "Anyone Who Had a Heart":

Support Artists, buy the music you like!

Roll Out (Wash?) The Barrel

As I sit at home this evening looking at the beautiful snow falling outside, I can't help but be reminded of barrel washing.  This feeling, strange as it seems, is even harder to avoid after having spent four hours wandering around the wilds of northern Wayne County searching for a Christmas Tree in the wind and snow earlier today.  (Christmas Tree searching is a process which never ceases to amaze me for how long and complicated it manages to become for every additional person involved: there may be more platonic ideals for a "Christmas Tree" than there are for "wine.")

Why should associate cold and blowing snow with barrel washing and, other than the obvious, what exactly is the whole "barrel washing" thing about?  Given the weather outside today, fortunately it has absolutely nothing to do with what is currently happening in the winery at Fox Run or this year... hopefully (*hint* *hint* Peter).  Last year, however, when I first started working at Fox Run we were faced with a vintage and set of winemaking challenges quite distinct from 2010.

Rather than warmth and extraordinarily early ripening, and thus the early harvest we had this year, the 2009 harvest lasted much longer into the autumn.  Where we had started to catch our breath this year around the beginning of November, to the extent that our red wines were already near or through fermentation, in 2009 we had just received the last blocks of red grapes around the beginning of November and didn't reach a relaxing moment until nearly Thanksgiving.  With the 2009 red fermentations just completing around Thanksgiving, it meant that some of them were not ready to go into barrels until the beginning of December.

This is all well and good, but to get red wines into barrel at Fox Run - and most other wineries - means transferring (technically, racking) the red wines from the previous year that are in barrels to tanks.  This frees up the barrel space, along with some new barrels every year, but the old barrels that have been emptied need to be thoroughly rinsed and cleaned before we put in the new wine.  This basic step in sanitation is absolutely crucial, as there are spoilage organisms that can survive on the inside of a barrel and live on into the next filling.  While there are some people who are proponents of the aromas these spoilage organisms create as "complexing," I'll leave that subject for Peter or Tricia to tee-off on another day.  Suffice to say, we want our barrels clean.

To accomplish this, we have a rack that can be hauled outside to our crush-pad and setup so two barrels may be fork-lifted onto a cradle that suspends them off the ground and also allows them to be spun around so the bung hole can face downwards for draining.  After the lees in the barrel have drained away to some extent, we insert an attachment into the barrel that connects to our pressure washer and excoriates the inside of the barrel with a powerful, rotating, spray of 170 degree water.  Following a few minutes of this to (hopefully) sanitize the inside of the barrel, we turn off the burner and allow cold water to cool off and rinse the barrel before moving on and filling them again.  All of this must be accomplished in relatively quick succession, from the emptying to the cleaning to the filling (certainly within a day) due to the sanitation concerns and, when two people are really on their game, we can empty/clean/fill around 30 barrels in a day.

The hitch comes with the cleaning portion, however; not only does it take the longest of any step in the process, it also has to be done outside.  Last December, if those in the Finger Lakes and snow belt remember, was absolutely miserable.  Exceedingly cold and snowy for this region, there was a period where the Rochester airport measured snowfall for 120 hours in a row.  This would be bad enough on its own, but - as much as we love him - Peter seems to have a sixth sense for knowing when to plan on having someone else do something outside on the absolute worst weather day within seven days.  It certainly isn't intentional, and is a strange phenomenon that the rest of us joke about, but last December it was as uncanny as it was brutal.  Following a few days of nice weather we would have to do barrel work again, due to the late vintage, and this would inevitably be a day with driving wind, a sub-zero windchill, and pelting snow.

So as I look at my window at the foot of snow that has accumulated in under 2.5 hours (thin lake effect snow-band that setup over Newark), I am certainly moved by how beautiful it is.  But I am also very glad to be inside and with our 2010 barrel work a month-old memory.

Winter pruning is a different story, but we'll make sure to have a guest blogger address that when it is appropriate!

By: Kelby Russell, Winemaking Team


Music of the Day:

• Robyn - Body Talk; "Dancing On My Own" (Pop Song of the year from one of the most infectious and intelligent musicians out there.  The fact she isn't famous or getting radio play with music like this, when Katy Perry or Lady Gaga are, is a musical crime.):

Support Artists, buy the music you like!

Ruminating on Food and Wine

In the absence of Tricia today (she's been swamped with obligations at home and the winery this week; end-of-month bulk-inventory reports are surprisingly complicated), a wanted to add to some of the ideas that Peter brought up on Wednesday.  Bringing up food, wine, and especially the pairing thereof is always a way to get us talking and brainstorming.  With that in mind, here are a few interesting guidelines to wine and food pairings we've discovered at a Fox Run Tasting or on our own:

• Port with Savory Foods.  Unless I am mistaken, we haven't taken the opportunity to really write about our port program here at Fox Run and the deep pride and enjoyment we take in crafting this fortified wine.  For better and for worse, many people instantly associate port with chocolate, desserts, blue cheese, and cigars.  With the exception of the last item in that list, I can certainly vouch that port has a unique place in pairing with each of those items.  Yet whether you're drinking the more jam-like Ruby Port style (younger and bottle aged) or the brown sugar and caramel Tawny Port style (aged in neutral oak for many years), don't overlook these wines when it comes to non-sweet foods!  Never will you want a big heaping glass of a wine this intense, but it can pair beautifully with hearty, earthy, or rich meats and stews.
• Riesling with Pork.  Riesling is one of the best wines to pair with food out there; it's like the Mickey Mantle of the wine world.  To wit, we've been very excited to read about the ever-increasing number of restaurants in New York City and elsewhere catching onto this fact and propelling riesling forward.  You can pair it with non-cream based seafood preparations and watch the wine and food build each other up, or with roast poultry and enjoy its refreshing aspects.  As a foolproof pairing, however, I can think of few pork dishes that would not be fantastic with Riesling.  Maybe I am just a sucker for the historical linkage of riesling and hearty pork dishes with Germany; but everything from pork roast to grilled pork chops to pulled pork and BBQ (seriously!) seems to only get better when Riesling is matched with it.  The only question you need to settle is whether you want a dry, semi-dry, or semi-sweet style to meld or contrast the natural richness of the pork.
• Barrel Aged (Reserve) Chardonnay with Seafood.  Especially if the preparation of the seafood involves cream or butter.  Peter pointed out one instance where this pairing did not work out for us, but the fact it was worth singling out also underscores what a spectacular (and easy) pairing this normally is.  One of the most memorable wine pairings I've ever had at home involved making up some lobster ravioli (from Rochester's fantastic Ravioli Shop) in a simple butter sauce and then opening up our Reserve Chardonnay.  It was only supposed to be an easy, yet festive, meal on Christmas Eve as we were rushing around - but the pairing with that wine turned simple into transcendent.  Butter richness, lemon curd, vanilla, and a whole host of other wonderful aromas and flavors came out to complement the food and vice-versa.

This is a huge subject to tackle, and hopefully we will return to it  again if anyone is interested in more general guidelines for Finger Lakes Wines.  Just remember that there is always an element of surprise to having food and wine together; the point is to have fun.  And if you are pairing your food with a wine from the Finger Lakes, you can be assured that you have a great chance of it pairing nicely.  The style of red and white wine we make around these Lakes is some of the most food-friendly and refreshing that exists, and it is right in your backyard!

By: Kelby Russell, Winemaking Staff

Music of the Day:

• Paul Simon; "Getting Ready For Christmas Day" (new single from an upcoming album):

Support Artists, buy the music you like!

Does Food and Wine Pairing Have to be Intimidating?

In which the author definitively says yes, and no


By Peter Bell, Winemaker

During the year or so that we were having regular tapas evenings here at Fox Run, it was the task of the winemaking crew to taste each tiny dish a day ahead of the event and deliver a verdict on which single wine would best pair with it. The cuisine was madly eclectic, invoking a fusion-on-steroids ethos that generally left us mute with baffled enthusiasm.

Among the many things we learned from this exercise was that when it comes to making food and wine taste good together, one is often in territory uncharted in the existing oeuvre on the subject. With the startlingly creative food our chef came up with, reaching a decision on wine pairings thus had to be 100% empirically based.

With that in mind, we learned to systematically taste small portions of a given tapa, try to break it down into its key flavors and textures, and then taste it again with a succession of wines, all the while furrowing our brows in an attempt to look erudite and contemplative and rakish.

Our favorite combos seemed to effortlessly achieve the synergy trick that is the hallmark of a successful food and wine match: the wine emboldened the food’s flavors, and the food returned the favor, simple as that. Some memorable ones:

• Mole chicken wonton drizzled with salted caramel goat cheese sauce, served with Merlot
• House made beef and watermelon carpaccio with mint, lime and chili oil, served with Gewürztraminer

Other times we achieved a sort of lukewarm success, sort of like the vibe you’d get asking a girl to play with her younger boy cousin for the weekend. In these cases, it was just a matter of tasting a few more wines before we found something much more compatible.

And then there were the abject failures. Here’s where the value of a pre-event screening was really apparent. To wit:

• Crab cakes with fresh corn paired with Chardonnay should have been, well, a cakewalk. We’d had great success pouring our Reserve Chardonnay with corn chowder in the past, and thought that shredded crab would only heighten the pleasure. But -- and to this day we don’t know why-- the crab cake managed to magnify the delicate, deep-background oak flavors in the wine to the point where there were no fruit flavors at all, just an almost comical planky taste. Final wine choice: Reserve Riesling.
• Tasted by itself, a Thai jumbo shrimp with chilies, mint, basil, ginger, melon-tomato chutney and finished with a tiny drizzle of truffle oil was dazzling. We loved the earthy complexity of this little bite, along with its soft-plus-crunchy textures. We took tiny tastes and started through a lineup of wines that we thought might be a good match. The first candidate was our Gewurztraminer, normally a cinch to put with most finger foods, especially those with a hit of fresh ginger.  Let me be forthright: this delicious wine very nearly elicited the gag reflex when it met the truffle oil. Final wine choice: Riesling.

Paying this kind of exquisite attention is all very well in a setting where people come and pay money to be wowed. That said, I tend to spend very little time at home trying to divine which wine is the right wine to pour with whatever I’ve prepared. Absent the pressure to achieve an exalted food/wine apotheosis, and one is free to tap straight into the easy pleasure-giving qualities that are inherent in good food and good wine.

(It might be a good idea  to expand on what I mean here: to me good food is that made from the best ingredients, whether fresh or not, local or not; and prepared in a way that allows for all their scrumptiousness to be expressed. Good wine is wine that has sufficient acidity to refresh the palate, and no excess of alcohol: cool climate wine.)

With these simple precepts in mind, I put together a quick-from-scratch weeknight meal a few nights ago that was so good I felt compelled to do it all over again a day later, then summon up the vanity to write about it here. The ingredients:

• A bag of mixed late-season greens from Italy Hill Produce called Misticanza, chopped, blanched and then sautéed in olive oil with garlic and red pepper flakes. 
• German-style rye bread from Dimpflmeier Bakery, toasted and buttered. 
• Range fed eggs, fried sunny side up with very runny yolks. 
• Gruyere cheese, grated. 
• Sudsy’s Fearless hot sauce. 

Winter Greens Sautéing

They had previously been par-cooked in boiling salted water, then well drained.

Greens On Rye

The slightly bitter, al dente greens make a terrific landing
for the eggs that are frying in the cleaned-out skillet.

Fried Eggs

Dark yolks tend to mean rich flavor.

Plated

A pair of stately pleasure-domes that took a few seconds to
decree, about 15 minutes to construct, and 20 minutes to demolish.

The question as I finished plating this meal up was not a burning one. Which wine?


Well, I happened to have a bottle of our Drink New York Merlot on the go, and also some of our 2007 Dry Riesling. Conventional wisdom, meaning the stuff we were all taught in the 1970s when wine was really a new thing, maintains that eggs and wine are simply a bad idea. Red wines especially. Or is it white wines especially? (I’ll have to dig out my old books from that era and find out; and while I’m at it, I’ll bone up on the vitally important practice of letting wine ‘breathe’ by pulling the cork a few hours before pouring it.)

There were so many components to even a simple dish such as this – protein, fat, bitter elements, sweet grains, nutty cheese – that I found that both wines made a delicious accompaniment. Some element in the wine found some element in the food to make it taste good. No villains; just heroes. Thus liberated from having to parse the whole thing any further, I could proceed straight to the ‘gusto’ part of the meal.'


Music of the Day: 

• The Beach Boys - Smiley Smile; "Heroes and Villains":

Support Artists, buy the music you love!