THE latest Food and Drink issue of the New York Times starts with the questions, ‘how can food change my life’ and how can food change the world. The fourth annual Food & Drink issue encompasses the world of food with articles by many journalist
including Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman. Read full article
JOURNALIST Robert Lee Hotz, reports on the discovery by scientists of the world’s oldest winery recently found in a cavern in Armenia. “For this time and period, it is a very surprising discovery of advanced large-scale wine production,The cave was never looted and never disturbed,” said Dr. Areshian. It gives us a wonderful preservation of artifacts and organic remains.” Read more
THE clock-hands read 2:15am. Jet-lag and odd waking hours may be to blame, but night-become-day for the past week has yielded a quest for new books. One has been in the bookcase for six months, untouched: Oxford research fellow Roger Scruton’s latest I drink therefore I am. In a way it has helped – and one paragraph in particular has helped – to sharpen the experience of Terra Madre 2010:
‘Poetry, history, the calendar of saints, the suffering of martyrs – such things are less important to the newly flush generation of winos than they were to us lower middle-class (wine-drinking) pioneers. Today’s pagan drinkers are in search of the uniform, the reliable and the easily remembered. As for where the wine comes from, what does it matter, so long as it tastes OK? Hence the tendency to classify wines in terms of the brand and the grape varietal, either ignoring the soil entirely, or including it under some geological category like chalk, clay, marl or gravel. In short, the new experience of wine is that of drinking the fermented juice of a grape. But that was not my experience on that fatal day in Fontainebleau: with my nose rubbing the nose of (Chateau) Trotanoy I was coming face to face with a vineyard. There in the glass was the soil of the place, and in that soil was a soul.’
Source
I drink therefore I am: a philosopher’s guide to wine
Roger Scruton
Continuum Books ISBN 978-1-84706-508-7
Tuesday 26 October 2010. 6:00pm – WE are driving into the darkling night towards Bra. Domenico says we must see the Langhe wine district and the alps from the hilltop town of La Morra: just a small diversion. We trammel over cobbles and stop in the square at the top of the town and emerge into the fast-chilling air. The last of the day’s light is settling. We walk to a rail at the far end, past an over-life-size, Rodinesque bronze of a vineyard worker atop a great, white, square block of marble. Beyond us, despite the shrinking day, an endless valley appears below, a draughtsboard of intensive cultivation. Here, it seems to me, are the very roots of culture. It has farming at its very soul. Not here is the land and those who work it taken for granted, or relegated. Both are celebrated. Farming is set on a high, white plinth because food, here, is yet the core of life.
A frost settles. Fog appears. On the horizon, to the north-west, the fangs of the alps catch the last wash of the sun. Village lights come on in the valley below. It is time for an aperitivo: prosecco with proscuitto, cheese and bread, a few steps away.
Tuesday 26 October 2010. 4:30pm – DRIVING with Elena and Domenico to Dogliani, in the heart of the wine-grape district known as the Langhe, just south-west of Bra, to visit the high vineyard of Alessandro Barosi and Amalia Battaglia. As the car climbs beyond the village on an avenue bordered by oak, hazel and birch, we pass a farmer and his dog walking through the trees. He smiles and waves and we wave back. Farther on, a large, high, rendered wall appears on our left and we sweep on to a wet gravelled apron. It has rained during the morning and there are puddles in the hard clay. The front of the 
house, arched and gently buttressed, with exposed brick supporting ivy showing in part of the old wall, seems of this earth, this place, inanimate of course, yet breathing of the countryside. Alessandro – tall, smiling, with graying curls – greets us warmly. About his neck hang ochre-red spectacles split at the bridge. Welcome to Cascina Corte. I am very pleased you have come. We turn to look out at the vineyard that falls away below the house and its modern red-brick winery. You catch your breath. The beauty of it in the fading, melting, afternoon light is sumptuous, like a rich brocade drawn with such gentle care over the sleeping landscape. Rows of russet-coloured, emerald green and yellow-orange vines rank away like embroidered stitches in the fabric, set against a field of deeper green. It is cold. A light frost seems to be settling in the field beyond: a hint of silver lies as a sheen on the short grass.
Cascina Corte covers 14 hectares with a little more than five hectares under vine. The vine courses deeply in Alessandro’s family. His grandmother and mother both owned vineyards. He recalls that when he was very young, perhaps five years old, he was wanting always to ride and play on his bike. But he was encouraged, even at that early age, to learn what his mother called ‘grape work’. Alessandro tells us that he bought the property seven or eight years ago for its 300 or 350-year-old derelict house – no-one is quite sure of its exact age – and an old iron bread oven that appears alone in the decaying brick and stone wall of a roofless, detached room at the back. He and Amalia have renovated the house as an agriturismo – a farm-stay bed and breakfast. The house, he says, is their most significant investment. The next is the vineyard – land under vine in Dolgiani is worth about 25,000 euros, or $35,000, for each hectare. Across the hills, in the region’s famed Barolo district, vineyards can be worth 20 times as much.
Cascina Corte is an azienda agricola biologica – an organic farm – and its wine, yet young when compared with the much older vineyards that surround it – commands a premium. Already Alessandro’s and Amalia’s dolcetto, barbero and nebbiolo – ‘the grape that grows in the fog’ – have taken their place on the most select winelists of local osterie. Their winemaking, says Alessandro, makes up the smallest investment in their way of life. The eight or nine serried stainless steel tanks in the winery, for example, each cost about 5000 euros. The dolcetto and barbero have a drinking life of three to 10 years, and nebbiolo, the grape that yields the wine for which the district is renowned, will drink for 20 to 30 years. It is some of this that Domenico wants to buy.
Peter and I return outside to capture the view again. A middle-sized, mushroom-coloured, curly-coated dog runs to us from the corner of the house, followed by a man wearing a blue tractor cap and an old shooting jacket. It is the man and the dog to whom we waved on the road when we drove to the winery. He walks up to us, calling off the dog which is nuzzling the shins of our jeans. We introduce ourselves in broken Italian. He shakes our hands. His name is Piero. The dog’s name is Blas. In the crook of his right arm Piero carries a short-handled tool like an ice-pick. He opens his left hand: in it are three tartufo bianca d’alba – the famed white alba truffles. Blas has just sniffed them out of the earth in the oak and hazel copse by the edge of Alessandro’s drive. It is seemingly immaterial that Piero holds what is worth about 125 euros. This is food with which to garnish pasta, or eggs. At this season, you can buy alba truffles in local osterie at a price of 2.50 euros per gram. Certainly, there are those who hunt truffles to sell, while others hunt truffles to eat. And it is here, first, that the pleasure of eating – and that of wine – seems to us to be at the very heart of Dogliani life.
SLOW Food Perth will be hosted by James and Hilda Talijancich at a special event at the family’s three-generation Swan Valley winery on Saturday 15 May 2010.
The winery was established by Croatian immigrant Jim Talijancich in 1932 and in 1945 Peter became the winery and vineyard manager, completing 50 vintages. James and Hilda and their staff have continued a fine tradition, producing award-winning, slow-matured fortified wines renowned in Australia and across the world. It is one of the few Australian wineries producing the spanish varietal graciano and was the first in Western Australia to achieve biodynamic certification.
Luke Godrich will talk about the history of the winery and the importance of the valley to Western Australian wine production. The event will include a vineyard tour and tasting.
Members and guests are asked to contribute a plate to a shared lunch under the trellised vines.
Event details
Date: Saturday 15 May 2010
Venue: Talijancich Winery, 26 Hyem Road, Herne Hill WA 6056
Fee: $20 Slow Food members, $30 guests
Bookings: download booking form
RSVP: 12 May, by email
ROMAN emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius encouraged people to do good ‘as simply as a horse runs, or a bee makes honey, or a vine bears grapes season after season without thinking of the grapes it has borne’. Slow Food Perth invites you to experience ‘ the good’ and to join us to celebrate the bounty of the vine at Cosham Wines, Carmel – in the run of the Bickley Valley – on Sunday 18 October 2009.
Cosham Wines epitomises ‘small, slow wine’. The two-and-a-half hectare vineyard nestles in an east-west fork of the beautiful Bickley-Carmel valley complex, where the soil comprises typical Darling Range gravelly loam with some clay. The vines yield from a well-drained sloping aspect watered by good rainfall. Chilling winter days are plentiful, followed by clear, warm ripening weather in summer.
Maxinne, Rod and Anto Sclanders tend the vines and pick and vintage the grapes by hand, managing without insecticides, chemical fertilisers or any synthetic pesticides. Cosham’s exceptional sparkling wine is bottle-fermented and made by the traditional methode champenoise using only whole bunch-pressed pinot noir grapes grown in the vineyard. Maxinne, Rod and Anto also produce chardonnay, dry red pinot noir, shiraz and a cabernet merlot blend.
Slow Food Perth’s vineyard bounty picnic menu will include local, seasonal produce prepared for lunch by our committee members. This will be partnered by some heritage wines which the Sclanders are planning to offer from their cellar, together with more recent vintages. We look forward to your company. Fee: $35 members, $45 guests, includes lunch. Wine available for purchase. Children under 12 free. Booking form: Word version or PDF version. Information: email Slow Food Perth.
IMPORTANT note: Cosham estate includes unfenced open water – parents are asked to take direct responsibility for children. Cosham Wines and Slow Food Perth accept no liability.
WESTERN Australian producers and makers offer to the market biodynamic, organic and conventionally-farmed foods. This list of producers and makers is not exclusive. It ranges from those whose foods are produced to Slow Food’s good, clean and fair principles and those selected to participate in Terra Madre: World Meeting of Food Communities in Turin, Italy, in October 2006, 2008 and 2010, to producers farming or harvesting conventionally but in a sustainable way. Slow Food Perth encourages members and consumers to seek out these foods from farmers’ markets and retailers.
If you know of producers and makers who should be listed, please email us. To be considered for inclusion, farmers and makers’ foods must taste good; their production methods must be clean, respecting animals, the environment and people’s health; and all participants producing the food must enjoy fair reward for their work.
Links
