Wine & Spirits - October 2013 - (Page 18)

BOOKS The Origins of California Cuisine Schmidt, The French Laundry’s ﬁrst owner, shook off the formal strictures of French and Italian cuisines. Michael McCarty of Michael’s inaugurated the practice of listing the origin of the produce and meat on his menus. Wolfgang Puck and City Kitchen’s Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger, all inspired by the culinary diversity of Los Angeles, showered their food with Asian and Central American ﬂavors. And though she doesn’t often get credit for it, Alice Waters was one of the ﬁrst to ﬁll her wine list with Napa and Sonoma wines. By tracing its evolution out of nouvelle cuisine—a trend that revolutionized French cooking in the 1960s by shifting the focus from intricate sauces and preparations to a more elemental style—Goldstein credits California’s culinary adventurousness to thousands of cooks with no formal training. Cooks were as likely to come out of Ph.D. programs as they were three-star restaurants. That openness, she says, brought women like Suzanne Goin of Lucques and China Moon’s Barbara Tropp into professional kitchens. Chez Panisse, in particular, led the way in transforming the kitchen hierarchy into a more collaborative team and in introducing new equipment, such as wood-ﬁred ovens, into the kitchen. Wine was integral, too, in shaping California cuisine, Goldstein claims. After the 1976 Judgment of Paris, she writes, California winemakers began thinking about wine in much the same way as the new food artisans were thinking about food: less a commodity than an individual expression. In turn, restaurateurs began pouring local wines and building bridges between winemakers and diners. The author argues that the ripe, bold ﬂavors that have come to deﬁne Napa and Sonoma wines arose out of a desire to work with the bolder ﬂavors of this new style of food. Truth be told, the book is more expository than narrative, and the dozens of sidebars proﬁling major actors in the shaping of California cuisine tend to distract from the larger story. But the breadth of her research, and the way it is informed by her personal experience in the midst of two decades of radical changes, give the book a richness of detail that few historians could match. Inside the California Food Revolution by Joyce Goldstein (with Dore Brown) (University of California Press, 2013; $35) The New California Wine is largely a survey of these newwave producers, people like Steve Matthiasson, a Napa viticulturist who, under his own label, works with Italian varieties like tocai friulano and ribolla gialla. Or Ted Lemon of Littorai, who ran Domaine Guy Roulot in Burgundy before returning to California to make some of the most exciting, structured renditions of pinot noir from the far Sonoma Coast. As Bonné sees it, the glue that binds these winemakers into a coherent movement is “an ardent belief that place matters.” That’s a broad brushstroke—and some may take issue with it: Other winemakers, including those working in more brash, full-bore styles, would argue that they, in their own way, are concerned with terroir. Practically speaking, the book ends up being as much about viticulture and winemaking style as about place itself, as Bonné tracks the ways in which these winemakers pursue wines of moderation in California’s abundant sunshine—entering conversations about yield management, cover cropping, dry farming, heritage vine material and rootstocks. The middle section of the book focuses most closely on place, devoting chapters to critically lauded regions (like the far Sonoma Coast) and to the potential of others (including the Sierra Foothills and Lodi). With the goal of providing a comprehensive survey of the “New California,” Bonné ends up focusing more on how these producers make their wines than about the people themselves. As a result, it feels more encyclopedic than narrative. The book’s clear strength is Bonné’s deep engagement with the forces shaping wine in California—he’s able to discuss everything from the impact of leaf roll virus on older vine material to the effect of California’s Prop. 13 voter initiative on vineyard property taxes. Part polemic and part reference, the book is a timely guide for wine buyers to a set of wineries that, on the whole, are indeed making some of the most exciting California wines right now. The New California Wine, by Jon Bonné (Ten Speed Press, 2013; $35) By Jonathan Kauffman As much as the past decade has seen the rise of modernist cuisine, food blogs and natural winemaking, these trends are mere blips in the gastronomic consciousness, Joyce Goldstein argues in Inside the California Food Revolution, her new history of California cuisine. “Compared to the revolutionary changes in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s,” she writes, “what’s happened in the culinary world over the past 15 years or so has been mostly evolutionary.” California cuisine’s core principle, as Goldstein deﬁnes it—“fresh, seasonal ingredients, preferably raised nearby”—has taken hold in restaurants in every corner of the country. Goldstein, a renowned cookbook author and chef, witnessed the culinary shifts of the 1970s and ’80s from the kitchens of Chez Panisse Café and Square One, her own San Francisco restaurant, and interviewed almost 200 chefs, farmers and winemakers for this book. She argues that many of the culinary tropes we take for granted now came to prominence in California during those decades. Early chefs such as Bruce LaFavour of Rose et LeFavour in St. Helena and Sally The New California By Luke Sykora When Jon Bonné moved to California in 2006 to become the wine critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, he found himself in a curious position: He was suddenly one of the most prominent voices on wine in California, yet he was routinely disappointed by the state’s wines. Too many producers, he felt, were locked in an arms race to produce increasingly ripe, opulent wines. In The New California Wine, Bonné chronicles a wide range of emerging producers who nudged him from skepticism to optimism. As he explored the state’s wines, he writes, he began to notice a small but signiﬁcant number of producers looking to the traditional Old World wines for inspiration. They were farming to maintain natural acidity and picking at moderate ripeness, avoiding manipulations in the cellar and relying less on new oak. Some were doing pioneering work with unusual grape varieties. Often they were seeking cooler, more marginal vineyard sites. 18 WINE & SPIRITS OCTOBER 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Wine & Spirits - October 2013

Wine & Spirits - October 2013
Editor’s Note
Happenings
Contents
Fined & Filtered
Books
Spirits
The Heights of Terroir
Best New Sommeliers 2013
New & Noteworthy Bay Area Restaurants
Finger Lakes Road Trip
Extreme Values
Overview
US Chardonnay
Red Burgundy
Australian Shiraz
Bierzo & Galician Reds
Sherry
US New Releases
Imported New Releases
Somm Gaffs

Wine & Spirits - October 2013