Traveling Feast

Does one of these new wine cubbys at the Rocket Market on Spokane’s South Hill have your name on it?

Wine guru Carl Carlsteen says they are just about ready to launch their wine-of-the-month club, and soon these cubbies will be home to specially selected wines each month.  Details are still being finalized, but if your tastes in wine match Carlsteen’s passion and palate you might want to consider joining the club and score a cubby.

Last year a friend who calls herself a “chef and food wrangler” invited me to spend four days working in the campus kitchen for Linfield College alongside some of the best chefs from around the Northwest.  “We don’t pay you, but we give you room and board.  The wine is not bad, and you’ll get to meet some amazing chefs.”

I went.  The event is called the International Pinot Noir Festival and for the better part of the week each summer the IPNC folks take over the college in the heart of Oregon’s Williamette Valley.  The wine is excellent and the food is as well.

Today I’m headed back for more 10 hour days in a hot kitchen for no pay and I’m looking forward to it.  My friend describes it as “summer camp for chefs” and most of the other volunteers in the kitchen (who actually are chefs in their own right) agree.  They keep coming back because it is fun.

Last year I kept a running record in pictures of the bottle bin in the back.  I might do so again.  Over the course of the long weekend it goes from empty to overflowing.

For an article I’m writing entitled “A Beginner’s Guide to Wine” I spent time this past week talking to the wine guru at the Rocket Market, Carl Carlsteen.  Near the end of the conversation he mentioned a Chilean producer that has impressed him with a number of their wines.  The name, I’m sure somewhat tongue-in-cheek, is Cono Sur.

Carlsteen pointed out one Cono Sur bottle on the shelf featuring a grape I’d literally never heard of: Carmenere.  Yet on the strength of his recommendation I snagged a bottle for $9.99.

My bankable wine knowledge is still quite limited and I love tasting wine with others to see what they pick up that I may or may not have noticed in my sniffing and sipping.  Yet I’m going to make an exception with the 2007 Cono Sur Carmenere.  BUY THIS BOTTLE.  I loved it.

I’m still weak on describing what I taste in a given wine, but this Carmenere tasted spicy/smoky in one moment, sweet in another, and has a depth missing from a lot of big American reds.

The grape, it turns out, is a kissing cousin in the Cabernet family and was originally planted in France’s Bourdeux region.  Yet it fell out of favor.

Across Europe the Carmenere vines were torn out and replaced with other varieties.  Thankfully though, this took place only after Carmenere vines had been introduced to South American vineyards in the mid 1800s.  Almost all of the current Carmenere comes from Chile, but I would put money on a comeback elsewhere.

In the meantime, buy this bottle.

This week the Feast is in McMinnville, Oregon, for the annual International Pinot Noir Celebration.  The IPNC is three days in Oregon wine country–an event based at Linfield College that regularly sells out of the 1200 tickets available.  People come from around the world to try hundreds of wines and eat meals pared with the wine from top regional and national chefs.

I’m working in the kitchen, trying to keep the knife wounds and burns to a minimum.

A friend, Anne Nisbet, who is a chef and food event organizer from Seattle invited me to be a culinary grunt for the weekend and I agreed.  Today this meant dicing and slicing hundreds of potatoes, plating smoked salmon for 400 in a frigid walk-in, roasting massive trays of hazelnuts and then rubbing them for an hour and a half to get the skins off, slicing zuccini, garlic and 25 lbs of onions.

Already I’ve met 30+ chefs, line cooks, culinary students, and locals who love food and volunteer year after year at IPNC.  One of the chefs, Adam Bernstein from Eugene, Oregon, suggested that an intriguing series of pictures would be shots of the Mixed Glass recycle dumpster behind the main campus kitchen.

Here is a picture of the dumpster today before the first Pinot bottles arrive.