Wednesday, April 18, 2012.
Eat Club At French Quarter Wine Festival, Le Meritage.
I think the wine dinner concept may be due for renovation. It may otherwise go the way of beef Wellington--first outmoded, then forgotten, finally extinct. There is no question that the interest in them is less fervent than it once was.
The problems may be wine prices. Despite a worldwide glut of wine--modern winemaking techniques are turning poor wine-growing areas into good ones--the cost of interesting wines continues to rise faster than the cost of food. Our most popular Eat Club dinners are more about food than wine, probably for that reason.
It was tough to fill the room for the dinner at Le Meritage tonight. There was no question about the quality of the venue, food, or wines. The price--about $125--was certainly an issue. But some other dinners in the restaurant's sixteen-event, two-month French Quarter Wine Festival sold well at much higher prices. Maybe it was lack of name recognition for Elk Cove Vineyards, a small Oregon specialist in Pinot Noir. Wine buffs know it, but not the typical white-tablecloth restaurant customer.
I see my role in this business as lighting a fire under people with only lukewarm or beginning interest in better food and wine. That's why the intense wine and food buffs tend to leave my audience and our Eat Club dinners after awhile. It would be like taking 101-level classes over and over if they stayed. Instead, they move up, as well they should.
But trends are what drive everything, and the trend now is casual, uncomplicated, even more casual, cheaper, and still more casual. The hottest restaurants in New Orleans right now are specializing in barbecue, hamburgers, mac 'n' cheese, and pizza. What wine dinner can be had in weather like that?
About thirty-five people showed up for the Elk Cove dinner, of which I suspect about a third were there on the house. The wines were very interesting, and owner-winemaker Adam Campbell was there to talk about them. Adam is only the second second-generation winemaker in Oregon. The Oregon wine scene exploded (with more noise than brilliance, I'd say) in the 1980s, when the word circulated that it was the perfect place to grow Pinot Noir. Pinot Noir is one of the great wine grapes of the world (it's the stuff of red Burgundy), but on the West Coast it was largely misunderstood both by makers and drinkers.
The high moment tonight was a three-wine mini-tasting with the second course. All three were Pinot Noirs from the 2010 vintage, made by the same winemaker in the same way. But each came from a different vineyard. An exercise like this is always fun, because although the differences are very subtle, if you pay attention they emerge. That's true even for people who claim they don't have a developed wine palate.
Everybody at my table found something worth talking about. I thought the Five Mountain Vineyard wine was the most interesting. It was the lightest of the wines, yet it had the longest finish--a combination of traits I I've found in a lot of great Pinot Noirs over the years.
We had that with slices of raw tuna atop seaweed. This was tasty, but I ran out of patience with the Pinot Noir-with-fish vogue a long time ago, and I thought the tuna added less than nothing to the wine. I would have preferred bread or crackers or a slice of ham, or no food at all.
The dinner started out with a better match. What Chef Michael Farrell called a "crabtini" was more like a deviled crab, baked in a ramekin with a nice touch of herbs and pepper. This was just right with the two white Pinots on the table. The Pinot Gris (a.k.a. Pinot Grigio) was sharp and citrusy, well-liked with the crab thing. But I found the Pinot Blanc a more interesting wine. We don't see Pinot Blanc enough. This one was just the mellow wine I like from that varietal, with a vanilla-like middle. (That was unexpected, since the wine had never touched oak.)
After the three-way Pinot course, we were sent a Kurabuta pork chop. The vaunted brand could not make up for the fact that the chop was substantially overcooked, dry, and lacking the necessary gravity to hold the dinner together. But the wine was a treat. It was the 1998 Elk Cove Pinot Noir from the Roosevelt Vineyard. This was a much bigger wine than the three 2010s. Adam said that the weather was the entire story behind that. Small yields = high intensities.
This wine was poured from a nine-liter bottle (the one above). Even with a dozen wine people in the room, nobody could remember the name of that size bottle. We had to look it up online: salamanazar. It holds the same amount of wine as a full case of standard bottles. A bottle that big makes for retarded aging, and that was obvious here: the wine was still loaded with fruit, and showed little browning around the edges.
The dessert was rich with a gooey chocolate torte, and was served with a sweet wine made not from late-harvest grapes, but from artificially frozen grapes of several varieties, dominated by Riesling. It was much better than I am making this sound.
Thomas Reed--formerly the King of the Eat Club, coming every week for years until he had to start traveling for his work--sat with me. He liked everything but thought $125 was less than a great value. But he's not as intensely interested in wine as he is in food.
Le Meritage. French Quarter: 1001 Toulouse. 504-522-8800.
