The results of the New York State Fair Commercial Wine Competition are in, and the Hudson Valley took home 30 medals! We are thrilled. Second highest medal count after the wineries from the Finger Lakes. Not bad for a small little region like us. Congratulations to all the winners in the valley!!!
Hudson-Chatham Winery 2010 Baco Noir Casscels Vineyard Double Gold
Whitecliff Vineyard 2011 Traminette Gold
Baldwin Vineyards NV Embers Silver
Brimstone Hill Vineyard 2010 NYS Cabernet Franc Silver
Brimstone Hill Vineyard 2008 Vin Rouge Superior Silver
Brookview Station Winery NV The Porter's Port - Black Cherry Port Silver
Brotherhood Winery NV Brotherhood Cabernet Sauvignon Silver
Brotherhood Winery NV Sweet Lolly White Silver
Brotherhood Winery NV Sweet Lolly Red Silver
Brotherhood Winery NV Blanc de blancs Silver
El Paso Winery Inc. 2012 New York State Dusty Barn Silver
Hudson-Chatham Winery NV Paperbirch Cassis Silver
Hudson-Chatham Winery NV Paperbirch Raspberry Fine Ruby Silver
Palaia Vineyards NV Irene Silver
Tousey Winery 2010 Cabernet Franc Silver
Tousey Winery 2010 Queen of Clormont Silver
Whitecliff Vineyard 2011 Riesling Silver
Whitecliff Vineyard NV Red Trail Silver
Brimstone Hill Vineyard 2010 Hudson River Region Noiret Bronze
Brookview Station Winery NV The Conductor's Cassis - Black Current Bronze
Brookview Station Winery NV Whistle Stop White Semi Dry White Bronze
Brotherhood Winery NV Brotherhood Dry Riesling Bronze
Brotherhood Winery NV Brotherhood Riesling Bronze
Brotherhood Winery NV Brotherhood Pinot Noir Bronze
El Paso Winery Inc. 2011 NYS Merlot Bronze
Hudson-Chatham Winery 2010 Chelois Casscles Vineyard Bronze
Oak Summit Vineyard 2010 Oak Summit Pinot Noir Bronze
Palaia Vineyards 2007 Merlot Bronze
Palaia Vineyards 2008 Cab Franc Bronze
Palaia Vineyards NV Mead Honey Wine Bronze
Tousey Winery 2010 Pinto Noir Bronze
Paradise Hills is located in Hamden, CT. They opened May 1, 2012.
Men's Health November issue features The Thinking Man's Guide to Drinking. We're thrilled Spur Seattle made it onto the list of the 20 Best Bars in America. They write:
The sixth course for this year's White Truffle Dinner was Butter-Poached Maine Lobster with White Truffle Cauliflower Gratin. Prior to my first meal at The French Laundry in 2000, I had come to believe that lobster meat, by its very nature, is always somewhat tough. Like many people, I had spent my life eating lobster that had been cooked through boiling, a relatively violent method of preparation that tends to cause the meat to seize up. Nevertheless, the incredible flavor of this delicacy was always more than enough to compensate for any textural peculiarities. You can imagine my excitement, then, when Thomas Keller and his kitchen demonstrated that evening in 2000 that lobster meat does not have to have a rubbery consistency, that it can instead be tender, buttery and utterly sublime. Although the menu itself announced that the meat had been poached in butter, the precise details would remain unknown to me until a few years later, when I finally acquired a copy of the The French Laundry Cookbook. The secret, I would learn, is to gently cook the lobster in beurre monte -- butter melted in such a way that its component ingredients (fat, milk solids, and water) remain in an emulsified state. As I started the planning for our first White Truffle Dinner in 2003, one of the few things I knew for sure was that butter-poached lobster would have to hold a position of prominence on the menu. I described in an earlier post how much I also loved The French Laundry's white truffle risotto, but I wasn't thrilled with the idea of having that be the last course before dessert -- especially if the consequence was that something more substantial, like the lobster, would have to precede it. On that basis alone, I concluded that butter-poached lobster would serve as the sixth and final savory course on the menu, a distinction that it has held right up to this day.
The loss of the corn made me briefly consider the possibility of replacing the lobster as well. When I came back to my senses, though, I began to wrestle in earnest with the question of what might step in to fill the void. An idea for doing an adult version of macaroni and cheese fizzled out when a recipe that looked promising on paper didn't deliver as hoped, while certain other vegetable options just didn't seem to spark my interest. Around the same time that I was mulling all of this over, I was also finalizing the menu for Thanksgiving dinner with my visiting parents. I settled on a Cauliflower Gratin as one of our side vegetables, based upon a recipe that I had tried once before from, you guessed it, Thomas Keller (only this time from his Bouchon cookbook). The core of the vegetable is cooked in herb-infused cream and then mixed with a pinch of curry powder, before being tossed with the florets and baked under a topping of panko and Comte cheese. The finished dish has a relatively mild yet luxuriously delicious flavor -- perfect, I figured, for featuring white truffle cream or oil. After confirming in my mind that lobster and cauliflower could complement each other well, the details of Course 6 were set.
The seventh course for this year's White Truffle Dinner was Duo of Sorbets: Pineapple Lemon Verbena & Raspberry Rose Geranium. The use of a sorbet as a palate cleanser is quite common in upper-tier restaurants, as is the concept of presenting at least two distinct dessert courses whenever a tasting menu is ordered. Yet, neither one of these ideas occurred to me while I was planning our first White Truffle Dinner in 2003. Perhaps it was because I was too consumed with trying to devise six savory courses and one solid dessert, or maybe it was due to my general anxiety about how we would be able to pull of a seven-course menu at home in the first place. In either case, it wasn't until after that first dinner had passed that the need for a second dessert offering finally came into sharp focus. It occurred to me that there were two choices: I could serve two fully-realized dessert courses, preceded by an intermezzo comprised of an exceedingly simple sorbet (e.g., grapefruit or champagne); alternatively, I could come up with something for the first course that could serve double duty as both palate cleanser and dessert. I chose the latter option in the interest of keeping things simple, and I have followed that path ever since.
My initial inclination to serve a simple lemon verbena sorbet and a plain rose geranium sorbet soon gave way to another notion, namely to pair each of the herbs with a complementary ingredient. But what ingredients? The first idea I had for lemon verbena was pineapple juice, which seemed like a promising candidate when I tried to imagine the two flavors together in my mind. I ran an experiment by infusing some leftover pineapple juice with lemon verbena, and I was thrilled with the result. With regard to rose geranium, I found myself at a comparative disadvantage since I had never tasted the herb directly. I knew from its fragrance, however, that it would have a rose flavor, so I figured that combining it with a berry of some sort -- perhaps strawberries or blackberries -- might be a logical choice. I jumped online to do some research and quickly found a recipe coupling rose geranium with raspberries, a perfectly good idea that I saw no reason not to embrace.
The eighth course for this year's White Truffle Dinner was Pear Cake with Pain D'Epice Crème & Brown Butter Ice Cream. Whenever I order a tasting menu out at a restaurant, I'm always struck by what a difficult challenge the pastry chef faces. Whereas the executive chef has six or more courses through which to impress diners (with each dish hopefully surpassing the one before), the pastry chef is lucky to have two. Moreover, the pastry chef has to continue the upward trajectory set by the savory courses; after all, there's nothing more disappointing than a spectacular meal that fizzles out into a pool of mediocre desserts. Finally, it falls on the pastry chef to make sure that the final note on which the meal closes, the one diners will have most prominently in mind when leaving the restaurant, is an outstanding one. All of these thoughts weigh heavily on my mind whenever I plan a menu, and I always come out of the process with an even deeper respect for what pastry chefs have to do on a regular basis.
I decided to take a step back and approach this from a different direction. One easy component to use would be ice cream, and what better way to pay tribute to Portnoy than to include his brown butter ice cream exactly according to his recipe. One flavor down, and two to go. Gingerbread could not go into the cake if I wanted to avoid a repeat, so that left only one viable option: pear cake. My thought was to puree some Bartlett pears and then add them to a standard batter, perhaps even sauteeing the pears initially in butter and brown sugar to deepen the flavor of the finished cake. I conducted some experiments and was satisfied with the outcome. Once the pear cakes were in place, a gingerbread custard sauce struck me as a nice accompaniment. I pulled out the cake recipe that I used last year, identified the precise ratios among the ingredients that give gingerbread its distinctive flavor, and then calculated the amount of these ingredients to use per unit volume of custard. My first test batch tasted like gingerbread, but the molasses was overwhelming to the point of distraction. In penciling out the numbers for the second batch, I found myself reluctant to reduce the amount of cinnamon, cloves and ginger from their already low levels. But if I reduced only the molasses, would the overall flavor balance be thrown out of whack? I took a leap of faith and tried it, and I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the sauce tasted exactly as I had hoped.
