Tag Archives: italy

Blogging for Gourmet Underground Detroit has been fairly drink-heavy of late, with Todd, Dave, and I posting mostly cocktail recipes and suggestions for waiting out blizzards using only wit and whiskey.  Not a whiff of food-related comments or links to be found anywhere.

Tonight, that changes.  But only because I want to mention a wine or two.

Worry not, food lovers.  A feature on grass-fed meats is on its way.  But in the meantime, snuggle up to your lover with an adult beverage.  Perhaps one of those that follow.

Unnamed Tea Cocktail

I discovered a bottle of black tea gin in the back of my cabinet, an infusion that I’d made last year in order to make Dave’s Laura Palmer. Inspired by that drink, I tweaked the proportions seeking to emphasize the bitterness in the tea. In essence, I just swapped out limoncello for Aperol:

1.5 oz black tea infused gin
.75 oz Aperol
.75 oz lemon juice
.25 oz 2:1 simple syrup

I shook this with ice, strained it, and served it up. The lemon and the tea are dominant, but the Aperol adds a nice bitter edge to the end. Matches up nicely with the herbal/tannic quality from the tea, but it’s still refreshing.

Some Weekend Wines

Fellow GUDer Todd Abrams came over on Friday night, and over deeply intellectual discussion (read: drunken and aimless arguing) regarding American poets, he, my wife Susannah, and I drank well — a few cocktails and a couple of great bottles of wine.

Todd brought some Domaine de Roally Viré-Clessé Tradition, which manages to never, ever disappoint.  Despite its heritage as a white burgundy (albeit from a lesser known appellation), I always think this has a really pleasant mineral quality to it, no doubt a result of the vines being grown in a limestone-rich area.  Roally always explodes on the palate — lemon, toast, fleshy fruits, stone.  It’s subtle in its complexity, but there’s nothing subtle about how it lingers and continues to dole out flavor.  I’m always happier for having opened a bottle of this.

We also got into a bottle of Paolo Bea’s 2006 San Valentino, brought to us by reliable wine importer Neal Rosenthal.  Located in the central Italian region of Umbria, Bea makes some of the best wine I’ve ever had.  This bottle in particular is something of a treat since it normally would retail for double what I paid.  This particular bottle was rejected by the Italian wine police, who didn’t allow Bea the DOC label because the wine wasn’t deeply enough colored and because it was showing a bit of oxidative brown. He released it as an IGT, and I’ve now plowed through three bottles.  This, like the previous two, was excellent.  Unlike its “big brother” flagship wine from Bea, this bottling is very soft throughout the whole glass without quite as much tannic power as Bea’s bigger wines.  Still, it’s remarkably complex — cherries and red currants, very floral nose, and layers of herbs and spice, something it very much shares in common with the other Bea wines I’ve had.  The predominant grape in this wine is Sangiovese, but italso has Sagrantino and Montepulciano.  This producer makes wines that can hold themselves up and age for a bit, impossibly layered, but that are also every bit as fun to drink as a ripe, acidic natural wine.

And have fun drinking it, we did.