Sunday Dinner – 4/26

In the business I’m in it often happens that Sunday is my Saturday which means I’m up for a more ambitious evening than the usual Sunday night rote routine of cold sandwiches and Law & Order re-runs.  Even when Sunday dinner is preceded by several hours at JazzFest I’m still up for rolling up my sleeves and stepping beyond the normal Sunday night afterthought.  Of course Sunday dinner always includes some good wine (its is “Saturday” night after all) – add a camera, figure out a slant on the wine and – et voila – you’ve got a weekly blog post.*  Read on . . .

Date: April 26 (the 1st weekend of JazzFest).

Location: The Casa

The Menu: Grilled Black Drum with Crawfish Courtbouillon and Quickie “Crawfish Boil” Taylor Happy Oak’s Farms New Potatoes

The Wine: 2007 Marco Felluga Pinot Grigio Mongris, Collio

This was an easy dinner to whip up and most of it, the fish and potatoes anyway, came from our Farmer’s Market. The crawfish were from a boil the week before and had been frozen and thawed.  Not needing to explain how to grill fish, and you can Google the preparations of a Courtbouillon sauce (lemon juice, white wine, diced tomatoes, herbs, etc – I did use a roux) the only “cutesy twist” was the fair to midland attempt at recreating Crawfish Boil potatoes on the stovetop.  All in all it was a pretty damn good dinner, considering I was sunburned and JazzFested out when I undertook preparations.

So, being a wine blog and all, perhaps I should pay some attention to the fact why I – a jaded and anti-establishment wine guy – chose to drink Pinot Grigio with my Sunday night dinner.  Doesn’t that seem a little boring you might think, what with all the other unique and exciting wines at my fingertips?  Pinot Grigios are a dime a dozen, right, in particlar Italian Pinot Grigio, is the question I often get.  Well, there certainly is a great deal of truth to the fact that Pinot Grigio has become a highly overcropped grape – particularly in Italy – and as a result has developed an identity of a more “boring” and mundane everyday wine that is meant to be guzzled more than dissected.  Pinot Grigio can be, however, a grape that can produce a wine that is age worthy, rich and lively and, most important, a very good companion to food.

Just one genetic tick off from Pinot Noir, Pinot Grigio (or Pinot Gris – same thing) actually has a slight purplish hue to it and when the winemaker allows those grape skins to hang out in the fermentation vat it adds a character to the wine that has the potential to make a richer, rounder wine than a mass produced Pinot Grigio.  Also, climate helps a great deal with the grape and, like its oenological cousin, thrives in cooler climates.

That’s where Collio comes in (no, not Coolio).  Collio is a hilly region in North Eastern Italy hemmed in between the Alps and the sea.  Its soils were once actually part of the ocean floor which gives the grapes a really unique minerality.  Fortunately for the grapes, the sea is now about a doezn miles away.  Those sea breezes which keeps things nice and cool, the proximity to mountains along with the mineral laden soils creates an ideal situation for producing some really damn good Pinot Grigio.   Add to it the EXPERT wine making of one of Northern Italys most unique wine makers and what you get is a deep, rich, dense and complex white wine with enough acidity to stand up to a courtbouillon, the fruit to battle the spice and the body to match with that big, white flaky drum.

All in all a fantastic dinner and a really great example that wine and wine varietals shouldn’t be over generalized.  A really nice experience can be had, if you just know where to look, collio?

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