Damn, This Was Good! #19: Steelhead Red Wine 2010, North Coast

Food and wine pairing ? and was there ever a culture more concerned and nervous about that issue than ours? ? doesn?t have to be about temples of cuisine and fine old wines. The perfect wine with a cheeseburger qualifies as a great match. Today?s entry in the ?Damn, This Was Good!? series is a sterling example of the ?It Doesn?t Have to Be Complicated? principle. The dish was a simple bowl of spaghetti with an intense tomato sauce; the wine was the Steelhead Red Wine 2010, North Coast, an inexpensive blend of 65 percent zinfandel, 15 percent each cabernet sauvignon and cabernet franc and five percent syrah, aged for 12 months in a combination of new and used French oak barrels. (And we won?t get into the issue here about ?North Coast? being an appellation so ludicrously huge as to be meaningless as a ?place.?)

Billed as ?$4 Spaghetti That?s Almost as Good as $24 Spaghetti,? the dish is chef Roy Choi?s take on a pasta from Scott Conant?s restaurant Scarpetta in New York. Choi runs the Kogi group of food trucks in Los Angeles; Conant was chef and owner at L?Impero in Manhattan?s Tutor City what now seems an eon ago. I hope they?re friends. I?ll append a link to the recipe online at the end of this post, but a brief description will give My Readers an idea of how the sauce gets its powerful flavor. The recipe calls for simmering sliced white mushrooms in water for an hour, reducing the liquid to make a mushroom broth. Simultaneously, you?re simmering about a truck-load of peeled garlic cloves in olive oil, until the garlic gets toasty golden brown and platonically tender. Then you empty two large cans of tomatoes into a Dutch oven or something of similar size and shape, add the olive oil and garlic, bring to a boil, add the mushroom broth, turn the heat off (v. important), stick an immersion blender down in there and blast that stuff into a smooth puree. (You could use a potato masher, but the sauce won?t be as smooth.) Turn the heat back on and let the sauce simmer for about an hour until it thickens a bit. Yowsir, it?s fine stuff, intensely garlicky and deeply flavorful. Here?s a link to Cho?si recipe: here.

And here?s an F.K. Kitchen Hint, from the School of ?Experience Is a Dear Teacher But Fools Will Learn No Other Way? (as my seventh grade teacher Mrs. Simpson told our class every fucking day!): When that immersion blender is running, don?t lift it out of the tomato sauce. Took me about an hour to clean the stove and the counter and the stainless steel backsplash and the tea kettle and the Vent-a-Hood and the floor, though the dogs cheerfully volunteered for the latter duty.

Anyway, the Steelhead Red Wine 2010, North Coast, embraces the lighter, brighter, immediately attractive side of the zinfandel grape, while allowing the other varieties in the final cut to add some darkness and oomph to a very tasty, blithely vibrant package. The color is deep ruby purple; this is clean and fresh, with black and red currants and blueberries galore ? ?Your Galleria of Berriness?! ? hints of smoky graphite, lavender and potpourri and high notes of spiced cherry. Deftly balanced tannins, well-honed and slightly grainy, support black and blue fruit flavors that take on an edge of briers and brambles and touches of macerated plums, with a nimble pass-off to a dry, slightly sanded finish. Beside the fact that the wine was delicious, what cemented its sacred kinship with this assertive spaghetti sauce and made LL and I look at each other and say, ?Yep, this is it,? was acidity of authoritative dimension and lively degree, a quality that clasped the acidity of the sauce with the fervor of a soul-mate and cut through the richness like a flame-thrower through a stack of telephone books. It made you want to laugh with happiness. 14.2 percent alcohol. Drink now through 2014. Consulting winemaker was Hugh Chappelle. Very Good+. About $15, a Notable Value.

A sample for review. A portion of the proceeds from sales of Steelhead wines funds Trout Unlimited and other conservation projects.

Source: http://biggerthanyourhead.net/2012/07/27/damn-this-was-good-19-steelhead-red-wine-2010-north-coast/

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