Tokaj food camp

Tokaj is a wine region in the North East of Hungary. A couple of years back I rather fell in lover with the place.

The meandering Bodrog river, all early morning mists and darting dragon flies. Winding your way around the Zemplen foot hills, admiring the patchwork of vineyards that adorn the slopes, the multifold shades of green that turn an intoxicating mahogany and gold come harvest time in the autumn.

As a wine region it's just watching the second modern (post Soviet) generation really get their teeth stuck into the perennial questions of terroir. This for me makes it a wonderfully exciting place to explore. On the one hand you have the established large wineries who set about rewriting the quality rules twenty odd years ago. Then on the other you have people like Istvan Szepsy and wine growers of Mád who decided to ask different questions. Disregarding the iconic sweet wines that had defined the region for hundreds of years, they instead focused on single vineyard dry wines, each one offering a different spyglass look into the multifaceted geology of the region (it rivals Alsace for geological complexity). Subsequent visits saw me falling further for the energy of this younger generation. Each time I went back, my new friends would foist bottles with new names on me, their wild eyed enthusiasm testament to the degree to which the Hungarian's are proud of their countries gift to the world of wine.

Back in the UK I managed to fall in with the sort of crowd who thought it'd be a good idea to spend a weekend butchering a whole pig and eating it. While this was not only great fun it pitched me into the orbit of Florian Siepert (the inspiration behind our pig day), Florian fast became a good friend and I ended up going with him on one of his food camps, to Essouaria as it happened, late one night (almost certainly after a lot of beer) I suggested that we should do the same thing but to Tokaj.



So the Tokaj food (and wine) camp was born. With much help from another friend Gergely Szabo (a fellow night of Tokaji) we harangued, pestered and generally annoyed the good folk of Mád (the iconic village of the region) until we came up with what we think is a pretty awesome itinerary.

So without further ado: I give you, hunting trips for wild boar and moufflon (like wild sheep) with the town's mayor (he's president of the hunting club), foraging in the hills, fishing in the hill streams, fishing in old fashioned style wicker traps in the rivers, visits to some of our favourite wineries (of which more later) including the best Sherry style wine you'll ever taste (yes, I rank it as being better than anything from Jerez) from Samuel Tinon, vegetable shopping from the villages market gardens, fresh geese, a mangaliza pig slaughter and traditional butchery/preservation. Basically, everything you've ever wanted to do in an idyllic wine region. With communal dinners every evening where more of our winemaker friends will come to join us.

The main wineries we'll be off to are Szent Tamas (wines made by Istvan Szepsy junior), Orosz Gabor the genial genius from Mád and Samuel Tinon, French born perfectionist who also, in his Szaraz Samorodni, makes the most incredible Sherry style (aged for six years under flor yeast) that you'll taste outside of Jerez (or Vin Jaune).

There'll be lots of Palinka, probably lots of sausages and only the occasional bone shattering land rover trip across steep hillside vineyards.

Incidentally if anyone is particularly interested in wine rather than wine and food. We've got a sort of parallel itinerary arranged that will take in visits to your selection out of:

Szepsy Istvan

Geza Lenkey

Pendits

Disznoko

Demeter

Patricius

Oremus

Tokaji Nobilis
Dobogo

Hetsolu

Balassa

So, if you want to join us in Tokaj for the food/wine camp. Go to OpenTrips and either book, or register to follow any updates we have on what's happening.

n gram action

I noticed recently that google had added a facility to search their full corpus of scanned literature and archived web pages for specific search terms.
Known in computer science as n grams these are essentially a natural language searches, they're a core part of machine translation systems and have many other important uses.
I'm not going to be as useful. What I am going to do is plot the relative mentions of various wines/regions in the literature corpus so that we can finally answer some of the more pressing vinous questions.

Bordeaux or Burgundy?


Which of the First Growths really deserves the accolade of first amongst equals? Obviously taking 1855 as our starting point.

I think it makes for a rather beautiful little graph. Almost certainly of no real use what so ever, still. Here's the link to their n gram search page, let me know if you come up with any good ones. 

£6.99 Anatolian smackdown

Taking as my inspiration the now defunct MTV Celebrity Deathmatch concept but transposing it to relate to the lower end of the available wine market in SE London (i.e. what I’m prepared to purchase with my own coin). I bring you the £6.99 Eastern Anatolian smackdown. Two wines, evenly matched on price, boasting the same blend..

Öküzgözü and Bogazkere: The Eastern Anatolian brothers - The ‘Bulls eye’ and The ‘Burns the throat’ (exactly what the wrestling move that ends up burning the opponents throat is I have no wish to imagine) (actually on second thoughts; it could be like a Chinese burn, but more strangly)

Serious now, Öküzgözü is the softer, juicier and less tannic of the two; Bogazkere bringing the structure, both light in colour with and very often blended. Both varieties are native to Eastern Anatolia and both have a selection of equally difficult to spell siblings and parentage. 

Yakut 2011 - Eastern Anatolia
Kavaklkidere winery

Lightish weight, initially presenting simple bright cherry flavours, light tannins, then a cherry red fruit, dried cherry liquorice finish. Think old school beaujolais.

Buzbag Klasic 2010 - Elazig - Diyarbakir

Kayra winery

Fuller bodied, slight grip to the tannins, dark cherry and some dark fruit, lots of liquorice, like a fuller riper version of the above. Slightly more evolved and complex, though obviously fuller bodied to start with.

The bell: The Yakut makes a pleasant out of the fridge summer wine, but isn't going to be anything else, the Buzbag, by dint of it's fuller body is probably a bit more versatile though it's hardly the subtlest. Having said that, for £6.99 they're both pretty good value.

Both wines available from TFC supermarkets (shops that I highly recommend, excellent veg at good prices and all the Turkish goodies you could wish for)

London International Wine Fair

It's been a couple of years now since I last attended the London International Wine Fair and I'm in two minds. Yesterday was RAWfair, bustling even on the quiet trade Monday, filled with interesting and (without wanting to resort to cliche) unusual wines.

Not really sure what I'm going to find this afternoon at Exel, but I'm hoping it'll not be quite as moribund as people are suggesting.

Wine of the day - Wetzer Spern Steiner 11 - Scintillating Kekfrankos, alive with buzzing acidity and a glorious fresh bitter cherry fruit character.

what should we do with a rubbish cider? (to the tune of the drunker sailer sea shanty)

My girlfriend Helen (@foodstories) gets sent all sorts of stuff on account of her being a much, much better blogger (chef and all round person) than me.
Sometime we don't quite know what to do with said products.
I give you Brothers Cider, all the way from somewhere in Somerset, from a family with cider making traditions dating back to the 1600s (some ancestors possibly spinning in their graves over the crazy fruit flavours) and a nice friendly PR who kindly sent Helen a couple of bottles of their strawberry and wild fruit flavours ciders.
So, we were faced with a dilemma; one not at all disimilar to the one I faced whilst buying a bottle of Appleton's Estate rum from the corner shop at 8.15am (it was for a work function that night I promise) when the proprietor proudly grabbed a large bottle of pink Bacardi Breezer from under the counter and presented it to me whilst informing me that I could have it free with my purchase. How to politely get across the message that it wasn't really the sort of thing we drink?
Then, the idea came like a special sort of heavenly manna lightning cross. What if we made ice lollies from them!?!

Take one bottle of sweet red fruit flavoured cider.
Pour into four disposable plastic wine glasses.
Freeze with a teaspoon inserted at a jaunty angle.

Remove and enjoy!

Needless to say the act of freezing the sweet sickly cider goes a very long way to making it palatable (remind me to write a post about FroRosé some time soon).

On supermarkets and sweet vinotypes

I've been reading the new text by Tim Hanni 'Why we like the wines we like' and while I find the style a little abrasive (it's very chatty and American) there's no doubt in my mind that it's the most interesting and thought provoking wine book I've read in a good while.

The central tenet of his take on wine is that there are essentially four different palette profiles extant in the general populace, of which only two, sensitive and tolerant are really paid much attention in the wider wine world. He spends a lot of time discussing, sweet and hypersensitive palette profiles and how they often find delicate wines such as Pinot Grigios and softer sweeter wines like White Zin more appealing.

I'd been chewing (swilling round my mouth) over what I'd read I found myself looking for something drinkable in my local Morrisons (I'm in Camberwell and sometimes I forget to pre purchase the evenings drinking) it dawned on me that the bulk of the whites would cater very well for the sweet and hypersensitive drinkers. I stopped, mused on some statistics that I'd remembered.

image nicked from Yapp wine's blog, a really good wine merchant http://www.yapp.co.uk/

Sweet vinotypes: 21%:7% Female to male. That's a 3 to 1 ratio of female to male.
Hypersensitive: 36%:38% pretty much even.
Tolerant (the palette type that appreciates big gutsy reds etc, your Parker wines if you will) is 2:1 male:female.

I also remembered that I'd read somewhere that supermarket wine purchasing is some 80% controlled by women.

So ensuring that the wine selection will appeal to the palette preferences most likely to present in the consumers most likely to be spending money in the shop. All of a sudden the predominance of wine styles that were likely to be appreciated by the dominant spenders in the shop didn't seem all that unusual.

I guess the supermarket wine buyers do know what they're doing...

Jamie Goode on the same topic..

RAW preview..

The world of wine is by its very essence cyclical. Vintage follows vintage and wine follows wine in a stately procession that can ether prove fascinating or somewhat somnolent. Whenever I find myself less than thrilled to be reading about the intricacies of the most recent Bordeaux vintage, or exactly how much the emerging Chinese desire for Burgundy is going to hamper my future enjoyment of said region, my thoughts turn to Italy.

Endless complex, gloriously varied, and possessed of a soul that honestly does seem to leap out of the glass, gesticulating wildly whilst fretting over the fortunes of their local team in the scudetta.

As an aside; how do you stop an Italian from talking? Tie their hands behind their back....

Interestingly the Italians have been enthusiastic adopters of the minimal interventionalist movement, I guess that there's something about the devil may care attitude and snubbing of convention that appeals. None the less, there are a huge number of Italian natural wines making their way to our shores, many of the growers (actually lots of them) are going to be at RAW fairin May. 

I had a little sneak preview of some of them with Isabelle earlier this week. 

'If I was Prosecco, I'd be cool and art deco, you could drink me in the penthouse you could drink me in the ghetto' so went the short bit of verse an Oddbins colleague of mine penned many years ago for some competition or other. At that time we saw Prosecco as a frothy, simplistic sort of drink, ideal for folk who didn't really understand why Champagne was better. God we were snobby in our ignorance. Still, I like to think that I've moved on somewhat, now I only look down on the people who unthinkingly drink Prosecco, not the drink itself, an important distinction (I keep telling myself). Any way, the real excitement in Prosecco is all about the words 'Col Fondo' directly translating as 'with the bottom' while actually meaning bottle with the lees. Opaque, enervating, gloriously moreish, this is Prosecco that seems to birth vitality. 

Malibra, Sottoriva (Col Fondo, 2011), coming from a tiny 7ha vineyard this seemed to me like a grown up lemon barley water, delicately sparkling with subtle fruit notes and an invigorating minerality. 

Tuscany, the Chiantishire of so many idyllic new Labour retreats. Sangiovese the blood that runs through the valleys, Malvasia and Trebbiano the Lymphatic to the better known reds. Columbaia Bianco 2011, from just outside of Siena, a blend of the two white varieties. Somewhat spiritually cleansing, tart peach floral notes, just a touch of fatness from its time on lees, the chalky clay soils coming through in the persistant minerally finish. Pacina, Il Secondo 2010, like the Columbaia this was a steel tank job, the inert vessel maintaining a lot of the freshness and aromatics of the Sangiovese, all dark cherries, black tea and primal meatiness. Some very chewy tannins suggest that this was a wine that really wanted to be sidling up to something with a healthy whack of meat fat. Nothing bad with that though.

Not strictly Italian, but given its proximity to the border I'm letting the Vipava valley in Slovenia slip into my Italocentric round up. Mlecnik (if anyone can help me out with the short cut for the little v on top of the c I'd be most grateful) Chardonnay 07. Three weeks on skins puts this wine firmly in the orange category, however it's still recognisably Chardonnay, and a surprisingly youthful one at that, its six years of age merely contributing a nice earthy creaminess, ripe apple and peach contributed the fruit notes while the measured tannin extraction made for a most satisfying body.

Wrapping up our little tour of Italian staples was La Biancara, Recioto Garganega 2007 from the Veneto. Half of the crop dried in a traditional passito fashion, the other half given extended skin contact, this seemed to me to sum up why natural wines can be so much fun. All sorts of naughty volatility on the nose, but I didn't really care, figs, prunes, toffee glazed walnuts, rich, sweet and lovely. The kind of wine that makes me want to just ditch the hassle of making a tart tatin, far too much going on to dick about with a pudding..

Links on the wine names take you to the suppliers.