Casually Enjoying Wine AKA A Brief Tale of Me and an Unlikely Wine: a Super Tuscan?!
(also a trip down memory lane)
Hello! If you are just picking up the Grape to Table newsletter, thanks so much for joining to learn more about wine, food, and life. There’s lots to read – from my origin story (click here to read) to fun content focused on meaningful time at the table with delicious wine and food. For now, my newsletter is free and you can find all the content by clicking here – basically a little Grape to Table website created by the great folks at Substack. I did realize recently that you only see the various categories of past newsletters if you open this link in a browser (rather than the Substack app). It’s a shame because the categories make it easy to find content you might be interested in…so here are some more embedded links! Click here for Wine Tips. Click here for Recipes. Click here for Q & As. As always I really appreciate when you hit the like button as it helps get the content in front of more people :) and spread the joy of wine and food! Here are some recent musings…also read or scroll to the bottom to learn more about an awesome Girl Power Wine Night I am hosting at Edmund’s Oast Restaurant here in Charleston, SC.
Lately I am all about a more casual approach to wine. This does not mean drinking more (I am such a lightweight now, lol!). Rather, this means not overthinking the whole situation. Of course, I love a good wine and food pairing or I would not be writing this newsletter, but I am very likely to overthink the actual wine and get stuck in ruts! As I’ve matured (i.e. grown older, haha), I have definitely come to prefer lighter reds, and so basically I could happily drink Pinot Noir or Gamay from various regions for the rest of my drinking years (with a few esoteric lighter varieties sprinkled throughout).
Because of this I have quite the stash (not really – but maybe a case) of bigger reds in my wine fridge that I bought when I was just getting into wine and wanting to try everything and also back when I was not such a lightweight imbiber. I have held onto these wines because they will only improve with time, and also because as mentioned above I can overthink every situation and always talk myself into another bottle of light red (or white or sparkling for that matter!) — thus neglecting said “bigger reds”. Most of this stash consists of wines from two iconic California wineries that I was lucky enough to visit earlier in my wine journey. Cheers to you Ridge and Corison!
But back to the present day – as in this past weekend – when I was rummaging through the wine fridge and per usual berating myself for the chaos…I spied a bottle in the back with a distinctive blue foil. Oh my, I had assumed that this bottle disappeared during pandemic drinking, but no, here it was – a wine that I bought from a friend’s shop here in Charleston that first took me down the wine rabbit hole (shoutout to Avondale Wine & Cheese and Manoli Davani who was one of the original badass wine ladies in this town). And the wine? A 2006 Tenuta San Guido Guidalberto!
Some of you wine nerds will be nodding your heads at the mention of Tenuta San Guido as it is an iconic winery on the Tuscan coast where history was made when Marquis Mario Rocchetta released the 1968 Sassicaia, a Cabernet blend aged in French oak. Due to the constraints of Italian law at the time, Rocchetta was forced to release Sassicaia as a vino de tavola aka table wine because of his usage of international (non-native) grape varieties. But Rocchetta was onto something, and other winemakers soon followed in his path – blending mostly Bordeaux varieties – sometimes with Sangiovese – sometimes just on their own. Italian wine laws were eventually changed to allow for this since these rebel wines had garnered all sorts of fame and status, and today they command very high prices.
But back to me and my wine, which was not Sassicaia, but rather a side project (aka second wine) they created in 2000. It was meant to be more affordable and easier to drink without extensive aging. While Sassicaia is a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc, Guidalberto is a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. But both are definitely aged in some new oak and would certainly fall into the “bigger” wine category that I seemingly once loved and now mostly dance around. So what better time to open this bottle that I’ve toted from house to house and successfully hidden from myself for over 10 years than a regular old (but unseasonably warm) Saturday in March. I will admit that I had also acted somewhat out of present day character and bought a rack of lamb as I just felt like doing something different (and I have nostalgia for rack of lamb going back to my short culinary school stint and also to my grandmother who loved serving it with mint jelly of course!). So this also motivated me to consider breaking outside my wine comfort zone. And in all honesty, I was also motivated to be more diligent in not allowing any older wines to die in my limited storage as I had recently opened an older bottle of Pinot Noir that had slipped through the cracks and not withstood the test of time.
So I spied the Guidalberto and did not hesitate. I opened it a few hours in advance to assure that I was not met with the same sad state of that Pinot, and I was quite surprised…even at first sniff and sip…this wine spoke to me. All that lavish oak had mellowed with time, and the muscular blend had also softened. I let the wine sit in a tabletop wine cooler to keep some of its chill for the next few hours (cork removed, allowing some oxygen to work its magic).
When we sat down to eat a few hours later, it had opened up. To be fair it had some of that mature wine funk on the nose, but that made it all the more engaging to me and also made it work quite well with the strong flavor of the lamb. My brief notes: prune and a bit of barnyard on the nose and then dried red and black fruit on the palette with just a hint of that vanilla and spice from faded oak but mostly wet earth/garden soil/autumn leaf pile.
All in all it was a complex wine that stood up to the test of time, and it was also a wonderful reminder of me at another time and place as well. This is one of the many reasons I love wine – what else could do this?
I encourage you to hide at least a few bottles of wine from yourself (in proper storage) and open them on just a regular day sometime down the road for a trip back in time.
P.S. Some other shoutouts: I served the lamb not with grandma’s mint jelly but with my curried lentils (Rancho Gordo of course), which I added to the recipe collection a few weeks ago but you might have missed … click here for that recipe! I also seasoned the lamb with Steak Masala from Diaspora Co. – I highly recommend all their spices and spice blends!
Now about my upcoming event!
Join us on Monday, March 31, from 5 to 9 p.m. for another Girl Power Wine Night at Edmund’s Oast Restaurant celebrating Women's History Month and our amazing EO lady team members!! We will be featuring a special by-the-glass menu of women-led wine projects from around the world. Reservations can me be made on Resy or by calling 843-727-1145.
Some featured wines:
Pertois Moriset L’Assemblage”, Champagne, France
Tiberio Pecorino, Abruzzo, Italy
Anne Sophie Dubois “Les Cocottes”, Beaujolais, France
Shiba Wichern Nuestro Sueno Pinot Noir, Willamette Valley, Oregon