A month or so ago, me and the wifey were out and about with the keen palated duo of Jeremy from Do Bianchi and his lovely fiancée (now wife!) Tracy P. We were passing a quite fine evening at Vino Vino and I was downshifting into coast mode when out of nowhere Jeremy popped up and announced that it was time for a seriously badass wine.
Huh? I thought we might be running out the clock, but apparently we’d just been warning up. He returned grinning impishly, cradling a bottle of mystery juice frenetically labeled in blue and white.
“You guys like orange wine?”
Well heck Jeremy, I just don’t know.
A few minutes later though, as I swirled my freshly poured glass of titian colored goodness, I had a strong suspicion that the ‘07 Santa Chiara and I would be getting along just fine.
This odd little wine, crafted as a white but then left to ferment with the skins for an extra couple of weeks or so, really appealed to me. It had a playful nose that wavered between spicy star anise and earthy tea, all with a bit of citrus in the background.
Drinking it blindfolded you might mistake it for a red. Light stone fruits, a little caramel and lemon rind shift around a rich minerality. Overall though, it’s just fun. As you drink it you get the sense that the winemaker's having a bit of an inside joke with you. If you’re ever feeling a little burned out or stuck in a rut, this is a great wine to re-peak your interest.
Flash forward a month.
I haven’t quite been able to put the Santa Chiara out of my head. It’s also Valentine’s Day and I’m feeling lobstery. Stereotypical maybe, but I sense an opportunity and an excuse. Nothing says I love you quite like “here’s a bunch of stuff I want.”
My plan: shell out for the Santa Chiara (splurging is totally justified by fabricated holidays), buy a giant crustacean (and keep it away from the cats), toil away at some homemade German pasta and then bring it all together with panache.
The result: Lobster with spaetzle in a saffron ginger cream sauce, one really great wine, one messy kitchen (complete with pissy cats), and an extremely happy wife totally convinced I did it all for her. And as long as she can’t read or work the internet I’ll get away with it too.
To lighten things up a tad, I also threw together a salad of Belgian endive, pecans, and the tiniest little clementines you’ve ever seen. The French style mustard and champagne vinegar dressing kept things appropriately festive and confusingly multi-cultural. At least it all stuck to a Western Europe theme.
So what’s the moral of the story? Well, if pressed I guess I’d say-, don’t use egg whites in your spaetzle, don’t feed your cats bonito flakes out of a misplaced sense of guilt and definitely, without a doubt, drink more orange wine.
Paolo Bea’s Santa Chiara Bianco 2007
Available online or at:
4119 Guadalupe StAustin, TX 78751(512) 465-9282
You can find recipes for the salad dressing and the ginger-saffron cream sauce by clicking on the pictures. I’d include a spaetzle recipe but I hadn’t made spaetzle since a cross-dressing German showed me how in culinary school. This effort was largely trial and error. I would recommend using a recipe that is very light (or non-existant) on the egg whites as this makes the pasta very fluffy and soft- good for some applications but not this one.
The lobster I just boiled for about 7 minutes. I reserved the shell and other bits for use later.
I garnished with fried ginger threads and sliced scallions.
Happy eating!
-Logan
