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Wine and Food

Alexander van Dülmen

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Hof Zuort, Weiler and Restaurant, Engadin, Switzerland

Hof Zuort, Hotel and Gasthaus, Zuort close to Ramosch, Eastern Engadin, Switzerland

IMG_1190Without a previous recommendation, you would not easily find this magical and fabulous place, deep in the Eastern alps of Switzerland. Or you find yourself on a tracking or climbing tour and would like to stop over somewhere different from the typical alpine hut. This historic and untouched hamlet is surrounded by big mountains, wood and meadows – and is almost unreachable by car.  http://www.zuort.ch/

At this place, time stands still. The only noise here comes from the surrounding nature, or from the creak of IMG_1183old wooden floors and walls.

The place offer unique and historic rooms (a very limited number !) in original style. You better reserve many days in advance if you’re traveling there during summertime.

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RivaBella, Restaurant, Los Angeles, USA

RivaBella, Italian Restaurant, Los Angeles, USA

0,5 points

What a dreary and uninspired restaurant. I guess all the food here tastes the same, having no particular or distinguishing flavors, but is in an American way “rich” which in the most of the cases means that it is just heavy. Although the waiter was “so” nice, I could have selected any dish it would have been an excellent choice, if not the best of the night. Don’t be foolish enough to ask him about anything as he – honestly a really nice guy – would probably never have had a chance to taste any of the dishes he’s serving.

The place isn’t inviting and just shamefully expensive considering your experience. Any pasta dish is not below $20.00! Main courses are all at least $40.00!

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Cháteau Beau Séjours, 1998

Cháteau Beau Séjours, 1998, Bordeaux, St. Emelion Gran Cru, Red wine from France

5,5 points

I stumbled upon this bottle in my mother’s cellar. Not knowing anything particular about this wine, we just decided to open and decant it.

Simply speaking: very delicious but somehow stronger tannins than I am used to. The whole tasting experience was a graceful one, although it lacked some depth. There were a lot of flavors like dry fruits as plums and some real country flavors. Nevertheless, this wine wasn’t really filigree. Perhaps it would have been better to give the wine more than an hour air before you sip the first glass.

My drinking experiences is older than this blog. We tasted the wine more than one year ago. Hopefully it wasn’t too early.

It is probably not possible to get this wine (and vintage) at any store. Here is the website of the winemaker: http://www.beausejour-becot.com/

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Merengö, St. Andrea, 2006

Merengö Egri Bikavér superior 2006, St. Andrea, Red wine from Hungary

6,5 points

My favorite Hungarian wine maker is St. Andrea (http://www.standrea.hu/). So far I haven’t had a chance to visit them, although this is a producer I would really like to get to know. They produce a variety of wines: white and red, from typical grapes of the Eger wine region in Hungary, but also Pinot Noir. Most of the wines of St. Andrea are cuvées.

While I’m a big fan of their Pinot Noir, the most prestigious and certainly also their top wine is called Merengö. It is a cuvée made from ca. 50% Kékfrankos, then Syrah, Merlot and Cabernet Franc.

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Weinbar Rutz, Berlin

Restaurant and Winebar in Berlin

7 points

As many of my friends know, my favorite restaurant in Berlin is WEINBAR RUTZ . There are hundreds of trendy places, a remarkable number of Michelin star restaurants in the city and probably some location with a lot of good wine as well. But there isn’t any other place comparable to this one.

It is an easy but unique concept as at the lower level you have rather a food-bar or tavern with slightly more basic but fantastic dishes along the motto “Save the German Food Culture”. You get blood sausages or some liverwurst or rutabaga stew or – at least at the moment “crispy haddock, chestnust, red cabbage and baked kale – but also just a solid “home” aged steak. All this usually is not served with a typical German beer but with the best mostly German (white) wines. You would only very seldom get such high quality wine by the glass anywhere else. This place offers you even sometime a Großes Gewächs (which is similar to a Grand Cru) by the glass and if you become a “friend” of the house, they might open a bottle just for you without letting you buy the entire bottle if you didn’t drink it. If you go for first floor, please ask for the table in front of the kitchen because then you can watch my friend Marco Müller preparing the plates with his amazing and always surprising culinary art and extraordinary taste experience. Here you encounter Chinese or other Asian flavors combined with regional ingredients and condiments. Marco is always spunky enough to present unusual and sometimes, I would say, experimental combinations of taste.

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Terra Soprana, Cucée MORE

Terra Soprana, 2012, Red wine from Portugal

bad
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This worthless cuvée is made of Portugese grapes: according to the back side label is Touriga Nacional, Castelâo and Trincadeira.

It tastes artificial, uninspired and just flat. Nothing really happens even if you wait some hours after opening it.

This wine isn’t some stuff from any winery in particular but probably shuffled together by some wine importeurs. If you’d like to read something about these types of wines, you can find some stuff at (http://www.cmweine.de/sortiment).

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Jos. Christoffel Jr, Erdener Treppchen, Riesling Spätlese, 1996

Jos. Christoffel Jr, Erdener Treppchen, Riesling Spätlese, 1996, White wine from Germany

7 points

Yes you can keep white wine for decades: Many Mosel Rieslinge can be stored for years. Many of them get better.

This wine is such a classic that many people would think: “oh god, this looks like stuff my grandparents would have in their pantry: sweet German white wine which gives you a headache.

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Grignano, Chianti Rufina, 2010

Grignano, Chianti Rufina, 2010, Tuscany, 2010, Red wine from Italy

3,5 points

Even though this wine is already four to five years old, surprisingly you don’t really taste the aging. There isn’t maturity or richness and dry fruitiness you usually experience when you open a “red” from Toscana. It is rather fresh, still very young, somehow a bit sour but pretty full of its own character. You may like it or you may not, but this wine doesn’t deliver any kind of Mediterranean flair like sun, heat, dry earth or straw. With my limits of tasting I guess – in the case I would have to taste the wine blindly – I would even tend toward some flavors I associate with nebbiolo. Nebbiolo is a grape of Piedmont. If you translate Nebbiolio into German something like “nebelig” would be a reasonable translation. “Nebelig” means foggy or misty.

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Poggia delle Faine, 2006

Poggia delle Faine, 2006, Red wine from Italy

2 point

This wine is a remarkable example of good marketing! It was ca. € 9 per bottle, although I don’t think you can still get it. The wine ranked on many wine testing charts within Top 5 and 1. Many magazines, wine testers and of course websites presented this wine as something very special. Based on this assumption I also bought some bottles.

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Restaurant U Kucharzy w Arsenale, Warsaw, Poland

Restaurant U Kucharzy w Arsenale, Warsaw, Poland

5 points

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If you were in Poland during the nineties and the first years of our century, you needed good Polish friends to find restaurants and inns which served edible food. Perhaps my Polish friends would protest, but at that time there wasn’t any culture for good food and even any interest in wine. Of course some homemade basics – a pickled herring with potatoes with some fresh dill – could have been delicious, but in general you got only heavy on meat (99% pork) and flavors which were the clear opposite of piquant.  As in every other country in Eastern Europe, you would have expected that after the wall came down there would be a huge “hunger” for new flavors, for foreign influences in cooking and some new tasting experience aside from vodka, beer and salty water. For whatever reasons it wasn’t like this for many years: one of my first foreign food experiences in Warsaw was bad Mexican cuisine (another problem is that I am not a big fan of Mexican food in general). It was frightening to see how my friend from Warsaw enjoyed this bad fast food and some cheap red wine from Chile.WP_20140617_010

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Arco Antico, Pizzaria, San Marco di Locorotondo

Arco Antico, Pizzaria, San Marco di Locorotondo, Pulia, Italy

1497581_302969813223190_7948449430752086154_nToday my son Balthasar shares his memories of his “best pizza of the world”:

We were on holidays in Apulia, Italy when we normally ate dinner. The food of our sensational hotel “Il Palmento” was decent. But there was even a better place to have dinner. Only 5 minutes walking from our hotel, there was a restaurant – called Arco Antio – with what I think is the best pizza in the world. I remember dark small streets towards a small light, the restaurant. I remember cars from the parking place on a flint ground. The light wasn’t bright at all. But still you could see my dad with his red-sunburned head. ^^

Behind the kitchen inside of the trulli building, there were the eating tables inside of the not very bright but relaxing light. Even when it is your first time there, the waiters and the cooks treat you like you are there every day. I remember, when my sister and I always asked our parents for 50 cents for a bouncing ball. I also remember watching the pizza maker making pizzas. Continue reading “Arco Antico, Pizzaria, San Marco di Locorotondo” →

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Riserva Mazon, 2008, Pinot Nero, Blauburgunder, J. Hofstätter

Riserva Mazon, 2008, Pinot Nero, Blauburgunder, J. Hofstätter, red wine from Alto Adige, Italy

5 points

In 2005, fortunately, we had a business meeting in Venice: an enchanting place for business, but even captivating for good food and wine. As long as you don’t have to pay for it ……

For dinner we went to a rather medium place because we didn’t want to spend too much money (Venice is really overly expensive). We found a very nice location. The wine menu was full of wines from area around Venice, Piedmont, Friuli and of course Toscana. One of the “cheapest” wines – today we would say “affordable” – was a Pinot Nero of the Südtirol winemaker Josef Hofstätter. I ordered it – and much to my surprise, the waiter really appreciated this choice. Obviously, not many costumers would have had the idea to order a wine of the “German” part of Italy – and I would love to know how this marvelous wine ended up on this menu. 2005 was about the time that I started to have both more money and more interest in wine – and for me this Pinot Nero was an amazing discovery. You can buy it directly from them via Internet or phone, But the best you can do is to drive there to enjoy this beautiful piece of earth among huge alpine mountains, apple tree groves and rows and rows of grape vines: Tramin.

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