Magnificent Meal with McLeish Estate Wines

Posted on July 11, 2013 by Steve Shipley

We are spending two weeks in the Hunter Valley and really enjoying it. We have taken the opportunity to cook every meal so far and have plans to cook most of our meals while here. However, we are excited to participate in two McLeish Estate wine tastings. The first one was this evening at Two Naughty Chooks Restaurant and Wine Bar at 130 John Street, Singleton, NSW and the other will be tomorrow evening at Paymasters Cafe in Newcastle. Both are hosted by McLeish Estate wines.

Brook and Wayne Dermody are the husband and wife team and co-chefs at Two Naughty Chooks Restaurant and Wine Bar. The food truly caught us by surprise – it was magnificent! And working together with Jessica McLeish of McLeish Wines, we had a perfect pairing of food and wine. We also bought some real truffles and other truffle-related products. (Tomorrow morning for breakfast we will be having scrambled eggs with truffles – yum!)

Bob and Maryanne McLeish have been working the vineyard since 1985, and all grapes are sourced from their own vineyards. They have a premium parcel of land between Broke Road and De Beyers Road and the quality of their grapes shows in the quality of their wines. Their daughter, Jessica, is part of the wine making team along with Andrew Thomas, one of Australia’s best known winemakers. The McLeish family and Andrew Thomas make a formidable team and I am certainly interested in trying more of their wines year-in and year-out.

We started the evening drinking a Sparkling Chardonnay and a Sparkling Shiraz with an assortment of great canapes. Then we sat down for a four-course degustation with perfectly matching wines. The first course was a Jerusalem artichoke soup with scallop, bacon, Hazelnuts and crispy artichoke. We drank a 2013 McLeish Estate Semillon (bottled only four weeks prior) and the 2009 McLeish Estate Semillon. Both wines went extremely well with the soup. The 2013 Semillon was fresh and very alive on the palate, with citrus and pineapple flavors, while the 2009 Semillon possessed a smoother mouth feel and was more integrated and balanced due to its maturity.

Jessica describing the Semillons

We then had the Confit chicken with mushroom and truffle. Among so many other great foods during the evening, it is impossible to pick out a standout dish, but if one had to chose, this would be it. And the matching wine was the 2009 McLeish Estate Reserve Chardonnay. This was also the stand-out wine of the evening and we are swinging by McLeish Estate in the next several days to get a dozen or so bottles. The 2009 McLeish Estate Reserve Chardonnay drank like a Montrachet. It had a mineral, wet stone taste representative of Chassagne Montrachet and lemon flavors. It also still had a good amount of acid and should cellar and improve with age over the next decade or so.

The main course was beef cheeks with celeriac, broad beans, pickled cabbage and Enoki mushrooms with a matching 2010 McLeish Estate Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon. The bouquet was amazing. This wine was drinkable now, with big fruity, jammy flavors, tasting of blackberries. It was alive on the palate. This drink was surprisingly good for a Hunter Valley Cabernet Sauvignon.

We also had the 2010 McLeish Estate Shiraz and the 2009 McLeish Estate Jessica Botytis Semillon with an assortment of desserts. The Shiraz was big and both fruity and spicy, typical of a Hunter Valley Shiraz. It possessed boysenberry and plum flavors.

While both red wines were very drinkable today, the Cabernet Sauvignon and the Shiraz had decent tannins and I am certain each wine will improve significantly over time. You should buy some now to sit down in the cellar for a few years! And the 2009 Jessica was luscious, with a creamy, yet refined mouth feel. It had both melon and honey flavors and was a bit sweet, but not too sweet.

The evening overall was magical with a great crowd, great chefs, food and service and of course, great wines. Jessica McLeish is typical of someone in the Australian wine industry in that she is extremely knowledgeable and passionate about her wine, yet is one of the friendliest people around and willing to share her knowledge with anyone else who is interested (like me!).

And to think we get to repeat the experience (with a different line-up of McLeish Estate wines) tomorrow again at Paymasters Cafe. Looking forward to it! Then back to cooking on our own!

Steve Shipley, author Wine Sense, out early 2014. Published by InkIT Publishing
© 2013. Steve Shipley
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Gustatory Travel Experiences!

Posted on June 23, 2013 by Steve Shipley

I am about 90% complete in writing the initial draft of my wine book entitled Wine Sense(s), and am excited to start sharing some extracts with you. Today I am featuring how to indulge in culinary excursions to further your wine education. One reason for featuring this topic is that it provides a fun way to learn more about food and wine. Another is that the proprietor, On the Road Culinary Adventures, is offering an upcoming 10-day Mediterranean culinary cruise which looks fantastic, so if you are looking to get away for a few weeks this September, you should check this out.

This section is extracted from Chapter 20: Further Wine Education, under the section Guided Gustatory Tours. (Please note that this is draft material and may contain grammatical and other errors.)

Guided Gustatory Tours

Continued reading and research using the resources described above provides an ongoing improvement in our cognitive wine knowledge which is critical to improving wine drinking enjoyment and appreciation. But that on its own is not pleasurable unless you actually do some wine drinking along the way!

Earlier in the book, we discussed a number of different methods to gain wine drinking experience as part of our everyday existence. But there exist some other avenues for concentrated and intensive wine education which comprises eating and drinking great wines in great locations. More and more food and wine tours are being organized to provide ‘extreme’ gustatory experiences embodied as vacations. These can be in duration from several days to several weeks or longer. They usually involve traveling to a place relevant to the food and wine that will be discussed and consumed. Many occur in exotic places such as Tuscany or Provence or take place on cruise ships featuring ‘intensive’ cooking or wine tasting courses that are great fun and great education.

While you can select your own destinations and visit different wineries and partake in different tasting experiences, having an expert aware of the region, its food and wine styles, and with access to the best venues and instructors can be a real help; both in terms of what you learn and how enjoyable it is. You can query online or visit a travel agent find out more about these types of wine educational tours and vacations to start to search for and plan available options.

I am not going to provide links or names as I am more familiar with the growth of this concept for ‘extreme gustatory vacations’ than I am knowledgeable with the increasing number of providers in this space. You can easily find out more by looking online or talking with a travel agent. However, I will use one provider I am familiar with and can recommend to illustrate the services and options available. On the Road Culinary Adventures (www.ontheroadculinaryadventures.com/) combines a love of food and wine with a love of travel to provide culinary travel adventures. These include several-day events hosted in the US and longer overseas trips, including cruises.

On the Road Culinary Adventures combine a relaxing vacation experience which focuses on teaching you more about food and wine through providing a tremendous culinary experience complimented by increasing your cognitive knowledge through lectures, instruction by guest chefs, and a hands-on teaching experience where you are preparing the food and the meals under the tutelage of culinary experts. I know the owners from having worked together with them in the corporate world, and know they have exquisite taste and knowledge when it comes to food and wine and a passion to share that with others.

Gustatory vacations can provide intense and in-depth experiences in a relaxing environment. You should come back from this type of experience with deeper knowledge and increased abilities to recreate similar events at home and share with friends. A gustatory vacation also increases your visibility of what is possible and heightens your expectations of how to be involved and even host similar events in the future.

Visit the fish market with the Executive Chef of the Quest in Kusadasi, Turkey followed by a cooking demo with lunch

The jury is in on Shiraz with pork!

Posted on June 13, 2013 by Steve Shipley

Many of you are aware of my recent experiment of having an elegant Shiraz with a pork fillet, mash, gravy and vegetables the other evening. The meal on its own was magnificent and so was the wine. The combination of the two together was adequate, but not perfect. The 15-year-old Shiraz was made in a less heavy style than many other Shiraz’ and had soften quite a bit with time. Yet, it was still too powerful and overwhelming for the pork. I love to co-mingle perfectly matched food and wine, but the Shiraz over-powered the food in this case. I needed to take several minutes of palate resting between bites of food and sips of wine to really enjoy both on their own.

So in the case of a good pork fillet in the future, it will be back to Pinot Noir for the most part. However, I was reminded by RAP (a blog viewer and commenter), that another beautifully styled wine to match up with pork is a GSM blend. GSM is common wine terminology for Grenache, Shiraz, and Mouvredre (often called Mataro also). This blend works beautifully with pork, and I have even written about this as a possibility previously. This was a superb suggestion RAP! The GSM blend is softer and more of an old world style that works well with a pork fillet. There is a lot going on in this blend and it is quite complex in terms of the primary and secondary flavors coming through. Yet, it does not overpower pork.

Another mate suggested that if a meal does not match well with the 1998 Tyrrell’s Vat 9 Shiraz, well then just throw out the meal! This may be a bit extreme, but he does have something in the Vat 9 being a meal on its own!

After the meal, I did indulge in a couple of pieces of Lindt Chili Chocolate which does match perfectly with Shiraz. The chili infusion in the chocolate provides some power to match the power of a good Shiraz. So it was a very good evening of food eating and wine drinking, but in the future, it will be even better by drinking a Pinot Noir or GSM when serving pork.

Vavasour Pinot Gris with Zucchini Soup

Posted on May 12, 2013 by Steve Shipley

As we move into the winter months Down Under (yes, mate, Australia is where I am writing this from!), my wife, DAZ in the Kitchen, and I enjoy making more soups for dinner. We try a variety of soup recipes and have had some spectacular soups from Sibel Hodge’s A Gluten Free Soup Opera which provides gluten-free soup recipes which are easy to make, flavorful and healthy. Sibel’s soup recipes are powerful and flavorful with chick peas, lentils and a lot of different spices.

We also like to make creamy vegetable soups such as pumpkin, broccoli, cauliflower and others. Recently, we were the benefactors of a 2.5 Kg zucchini and had to figure out what to do with it! We made a lot of zucchini bread muffins (see recipe in last DAZ in the Kitchen post) and a lot of zucchini soup (recipe has not yet, but will be, published soon in DAZ in the Kitchen). In fact, we had so much zucchini soup, we ended up freezing several servings. And tonight we are taking two servings out of the freezer for dinner.

I have tried Riesling with creamy vegetable soups and I have also tried Verdelho. Both work. However, many Verdelhos are too soft and tepid and many Rieslings are too acidic. I have found for my taste, I like a Pinot Gris with a creamy vegetable soup (other than tomato). A young Pinot Gris still has a bit of acid and slight metallic diesel and mild citrus edge to match up well with the vegetables, but also a soft mouth feel to go with the creaminess. The 2010 Vavasour Pinot Gris is such a wine.

This is a great wine for the money. We paid $15 per bottle for this. It is a New Zealand Pinot Gris from the Marlborough region. It has pear, apple and grapefruit flavors. The wine is surprisingly well balanced and integrated for such a young wine. I love the mouth feel and tannins that provide a puckering on the inside of my cheeks. I would call it off-dry or juicy dry.

This wine is great value for the money and it goes beautifully with creamy vegetables soups. It has consistently been rate 93/100 or 94/100. This wine will not cellar for more than a couple of years. It is drinkable immediately and drinking very well now. The 2011 is also rated very high and much more available than the 2010.

Some of the Italian Pinot Gris I have tried are a bit more elegant, but also much more expensive. They go well with a variety of food choices. But if you are making a simple creamy vegetable soup and possibly having a bread roll to go with it, a New Zealand Pinot Gris like the 2010 Vavasour will do the trick nicely.

Puligny Montrachet versus NSW Chardonnay – too close to call

Posted on March 17, 2013 by Steve Shipley

We enjoyed one of our favorite Montrachets yesterday with lunch, that being the 2009 Bouchard Peres & Fils Puligny Montrachet. This is a beautiful rich, creamy Montrachet yet balanced with ample citrus flavors. It cost us $75 per bottle in Australia. Thinking it sinful to use 100 ml of this fine wine for the mushroom and wild rice soup (see my post on wine math!) we are making this evening, and since there was only enough for one glass left over since yesterday, we opened a 2008 Tamburlaine Reserve Chardonnay made with grapes from Orange, NSW. This fine wine is $30 per bottle and was made organically. I bought a dozen of this wine several years ago, and it is one of the best organic wines I have ever had.

While the Bouchard lost a very small touch of flavor since yesterday, it was still drinking well. The smell of the Bouchard was more evident than for the Tamburlaine, but the color identical. I had my wife do a blind tasting of each and she could not tell the difference, and with a bit of hesitation, pointed to the Tamburlaine and said it was the Bouchard. While I had the knowledge of knowing which wine was which, I also had a tough time deciding which wine I liked better. Except for the more aromatic nose of the Bouchard, I have to say, I enjoyed both of them equally! And for the money, the 2008 Tamburlaine Reserve Chardonnay from Orange wins hands down with regard to value.

The Tamburlaine tastes of orange (how coincidental being the grapes came from Orange!), mandarin and lemon. It starts strong, but does not have quite the finish that the 2009 Bouchard Peres & Fils Puligny Montrachet has. But it still packs a mouthful of flavor! I would highly recommend this wine and all the organic wines from Tamburlaine. They make good use of their Hunter vineyards and their Orange cold-weather vineyards to produce some outstanding wines, and if you are looking for organic, this is my wine maker of choice. I have sampled a lot of organic wines and frankly, have not been impressed. However, I am open to trying more and also giving a number of the organic wine makers another chance. But Tamburlaine is the only organic wine maker from which I have purchased any wine!

While the Hunter Valley is known for Shiraz and Semillon, they are also the fine producer of some great Chardonnays, and so are the colder climates in NSW of Orange and Mudgee. I am becoming a big fan of NSW Chardonnays, whereas previously, I was only drinking Australian Chardonnays from Margaret River. Now I am seeking out and enjoying NSW Chardonnays at a fraction of the cost of the better Margaret River Chardonnays.

It was spur of the moment that I decided to compare side-by-side these two Chardonnays as I thought there was no comparison, but I was wrong and glad for the comparative tasting I did. Both are worth drinking, but for those of us in Australia, being able to buy Tamburlaine organic Chardonnays at a fraction of the cost of a good Montrachet is the way to go!

Steve Shipley, author Wine Sense, out early 2014. Published by InkIT Publishing
© 2014. Steve Shipley
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deVine is divine for food and wine!

Posted on February 22, 2013 by Steve Shipley

I have only referred to a few restaurants in SAZ in the Cellar. While I am willing and even excited to try new places, I feel most comfortable going to where I know I will get great food, great wine and great service. In that regard, I go to Fish on the Rocks (29 Kent Street, Millers Point) quite a bit because they have great food and I can ensure I am having great wine because they are a BYO (Bring Your Own wine). They are also licensed for wine and beer, but there is nothing more satisfying and fool-proof than taking wine from your own cellar!

And The Cut Bar and Grill (16 Argyle Street in The Rocks) is my favorite steakhouse and meets all the criteria. They have a great and good-valued wine list along with great food and service and while they are not a BYO, if I asked ahead (and because I bring a lot of food business to them), they will let me do a BYO for special occasions. I don’t take advantage of this, but really appreciate that they provide me the option when I want to do a truly special dinner with special wines.

I hate and avoid restaurants which have over a 300% (and sometimes far north of 500%!) mark-up on wine over what I can buy it for retail or from the cellar door. As nice as the food and view is from Cafe Sydney on top of Customs House and overlooking Circular Quay, I only go there at the insistence of foreign friends who marvel at the view. A number of their wines cost two to three times what the same wine at Lord Nelson Restaurant in Millers Point does. And I was at The Malaya at Kings Wharf a few weeks ago and they were charging $50 for a bottle of wine I paid $8 for retail!

I simply will not go to restaurants that screw you on the wine and those restaurants have lost all of my business over the last decade. I don’t care if it is for business or personally, I want good value and refuse to do business with businesses that do not provide good ongoing value. Restaurants I will frequent include Fish on the Rocks, The Cut Bar and Grill, Hux’s Dining, and Lord Nelson for four of my favorite outings around Sydney.

A typical guideline is that a restauranter should charge about 220% of what they paid for the wine to cover the cost, labor of serving and cleaning glasses, breakage, the ‘insurance’ risk of have a corked bottle, etc. And I am comfortable with that. I am glad to pay up to 250% of the price I could have bought the wine for at retail. But I simply will not frequent or pay for wine that is over a 300% mark-up.

One of my very favorite restaurants is deVine at 30 Market Street (corner of Market Street and Clarence Street) in Sydney. This is a magnificent restaurant, with the lowest mark-up I have ever found on wine. I rarely pay 50% more for a bottle at deVine than I do retail. And the service is magnificent, being both friendly and attentive. There is always one, if not both owners, Terence and Andre, on the premises to take care of you.

Their wine knowledge is superb. (I also value sommeliers like Terence and Andre at deVine and Gustavo at The Cut Bar and Grill who know far more about wine than I do. Surprisingly, the ‘wine person at most restaurants does not.) And they have a wide range of domestic and foreign wines to choose from. In addition to a great and often changing wine list, the owners at deVine have a collection of private wines from their own cellar and for the right occasion, they may recommend trying one of those. I have never been disappointed (in fact – quite the opposite – I have been greatly pleased) with each and every time this has occurred, and I don’t remember ever paying more than $100 for a rare and truly great find! Again, I am not sure they would do this for anyone, but once they quickly understood my interest and appreciation of good wine, it just became part of their superb service proposition!

The location, ambiance, service, quality, value and just about everything else is divine at deVine. Make sure to try them out if you have not already.

When choosing a restaurant, I look for the following things:

great food
diverse wine list
average wine mark-up no larger than 250%
great service
ability (if I prove to be a good customer) to do BYO and pay corkage (usually about $10 – $25 per bottle is reasonable at a good restaurant and for a very good bottle of wine this is a steal!)
occasional food or wine choice ‘not on the menu’
ownership or senior operational management is on the premises
location helps if it is spur of the moment or I am pressed for time

The restaurants I have featured here meet those criteria. Make sure to frequent them, and avoid the ones that are more interested in their profit than your experience and pleasure, regardless of how iconic they may be!

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