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Hi, everyone.

We're working this week to finalize the menu for our "Mighty Mourvedre"
wine dinners on April 6 and 7th.

We chose the Mourvedre grape as the focus for the dinner partly because Cheryl is a big fan of meaty, smoky, gamy wines and partly because the foods that go well with Mourvedre-based wines will taste particularly good this time of year. We plan to serve an exciting Bandol red, a Provencal rosé, a Corbieres from the Languedoc-Roussillon, a Spanish Jumilla dinner wine and a dessert wine called Olivares Dulce Monastrell. We have asked one of our importers to lay his hands on some very special wines in these categories and he'll be reporting back on his degree of success later today.

The dinners start at 6:30 p.m. each of the two nights (Wednesday and
Thursday) and are limited to 20 people around a single table. Tickets are $80 per person, plus tax and tip.

For the food, Paul wants to make a raw tuna nicoise to go with the rosé, and confit of duck for the Corbieres. The Spanish mataro will be served with buckwheat pasta with tapenade, and the Bandol with braised lamb shanks. The Dulce Monastrell we'll save for a special chocolate dessert.

Cheryl has been working on the tasting notes for the dinners (we don't lecture, but we do provide a lot of material that you can look at or ignore depending on your level of interest) and we thought we'd share a little of it with our newsletter readers.

Wines made from Mourvedre tend to be intensely colored, rich and velvety with aromas of leather, game and truffles. They tend to be high in alcohol and tannin when young and they age well. The barnyardy, animal-like flavors can be so strong in badly made Mourvedre wines that uninitiates can easily mistake the gaminess for bacteria. In well-made mourvedre wines, the animal-like flavors resolve into garrigue-like smells of forest floor and leather.

Mourvedre is usually blended with Grenache for warmth and fruitiness and with Syrah for structure, spice and tannin.

Mourvedre is native to Spain, where it is known as Monastrell. In Spain, it is second only in importance to Grenache as a wine grape. In southern France, it is blended with other grapes to add richness, meatiness and a sense of smokiness. In Châteauneuf-du-Pape, where 13 varieties of grapes are allowed to be used to make wines under the prestigious appellation, some vineyards devote more than a third of their acreage to Mourvedre.

Still, the grape is only just beginning to be recognized in its own right in California, Australia and other parts of the world warm enough to support it. Mourvedre ripens late in the season, and won’t survive in places where winter comes early.

Mourvedre spread from Spain to sunny Provence in the late Middle Ages.
Cuttings were transplanted from the Spanish town of Murviedro, near Valencia, and by the end of the 19th century, it was the dominant grape varietal in southern France. In the mid 1800s, the vines (called Mataro after a town near Barcelona) were transplanted to Contra Costa County in California and to the Barossa Valley in Australia.

Then the phylloxeria epidemic hit France in 1860. The flying louse was particularly devastating to Mourvedre vines. Vineyard managers found it difficult to graft disease-resistant rootstocks with Mourvedre and chose easier grapes varietals, such as grenache. For decades, about the only place in France you could find Mourvedre was in Provence, where the sandy soil along the Mediterranean coast had held phylloxera at bay.
http://www.indianspringsvnyrds.com/newsltr/news6.htm

Only after World War II did Jacques Perrin of Château de Beaucastel develop compatible mourvedre rootstocks and begin making the Mourvedre grape the primary one in his legendary Châteauneauf-du-Pape. His grapes are small and sweet, with thick, intensely flavored skins.

Recently, Californian and Australian producers started using the French word, Mourvedre, rather than Mataro, and have begun releasing Mourvedre-only wines.
One of the California producers, Tablas Creek, cloned mourvedre vines from Chateau de Beaucastel because the winemaker felt that the existing California mourvedre stock was less intense in color and flavor than the French rootstock.

(Single-grape wines sell better on the world market, partly because of an incorrect perception that winemakers blend to hide flaws in the quality of their grapes. A Southern Frenchman will tell you that making a wine with one grape is like painting with only the color blue. It can be interesting once or twice, but it’s not something you’d want to make a career of. At the same time, let us note that France’s prestigious Burgundies are single grape wines by law.)

Still, it’s risky business to base your entire wine production for a year on Mourvedre. An entire harvest or a great portion thereof, can be ruined if the winter cold comes too early or the summer is too mild.
It’s why with many French wines, the percentage of each grape varietal will vary widely from year to year (which made it interesting to pick the wines for our wine dinner. Cheryl ordered one mourvedre-based wine she’d loved in the past, and it was as delicious as she remembered.
Then she discovered that the vintage currrently available was only 10 percent mourvedre because an early frost had decimated mourvedre vines in that year.)

For all of its sensitivity to cold, mourvedre is still a moderately vigorous varietal that requires little tending. The wines tend to grow vertically which makes it an ideal candidate for the Chateauneuf-du-Pape traditional method of head pruning. They can be forced to trellis, but when allowed to grow verticially, the weight of the fruit pulls the vines down like the spokes of an umbrella, giving each bunch of grapes maximum exposure to the sun.

Speaking of grapes, the kitchen guys froze a bunch of the muscat grapes we got last week to use as a garnish for sorbet and other desserts.
Their glassine skins turned pale and opaque and they began to look like delicious little crab apples. Nicholas discovered frozen grapes in January, when two of our customers invited us to their home for dinner and served frozen grapes in Champagne. Figuring that the skins weren't too porous, Cheryl shared one with her toddler. He was so over the moon for the taste and texture that we were very lucky our hostesses had a whole tray in reserve in their freezer.

Kristina Krawchuk from Channel 9 news spent the afternoon at Chez Sophie Thursday to film a segment that will end a series she has been airing on diners. Paul cooked a pheasant in port for her and popped a couple of bottles of nice wine for her to try with it. The segment is scheduled to air April 1 and be repeated throughout the day during the news broadcast hours.
To view other diners featured in her series see http://www.capitalnews9.com/content/living/dine_on_9/

We're getting a domed wheel of Chimay cheese from Belgium, an aged cow's milk cheese from the Abbey of Chimay. It is a semi-firm textured cheese with mild, medium-aged gouda-style flavor. The coloring of the interior is a nice rosy-orange that provides good color and shape to our cheeseboard. The Cistercian Trappist Monks of the Abbey of Notre-Dame de Scourmont began making beer and cheese in 1862 in an effort to create employment in their own regions and preserve food products for their own members.

The tragedy is that the two big beer distributors in our area have completely dropped the line of Abbey of Chimay beers from their offerings, along with many of the other Belgian, Canadian and French beers we have previously offered. We keep contacting smaller distributors based outside the immediate Capital Region, but they seem incapable of filling orders for a small restaurant on the scale that we need to keep our beer fresh. Unless someone steps forward soon, willing to take our money, we will have to reduce our beer list to about a dozen offerings.

Because there was so much demand for the cooking class Paul will be holding on April 3, Cheryl is considering scheduling one more in May before the summer season makes it impossible. If anyone would be interested, please let us know and we'll try to schedule a Sunday class on a weekend that will work for those who are interested.

The last Saratoga 4x4 event this year will be April 13 at Sargo's at the Saratoga National Golf Course. Chef Larry Schepici sent us a draft of the menu yesterday. Chef Mark Graham of the Wine Bar will start the meal with lobster strudel with a monkfish flan and vanilla-scented carrot emulsion (paired with Chateau St. Jean Sauvignon Blanc 2002.) Springwater Bistro Chef David Britton will serve up shellfish ceviche yellow fennel gazpacho (paired with Trimbach Riesling 2002). Larry will serve the main course, a spring lamb tasting with shepherd's pie braised lamb shanks and truffled mashed potatoes, double rib lamb chops with Nettle Meadow herb chèvre, onion mint chipotle marmalade, black plum lamb jus, lamb flank braciola with Serrano ham, piquillo peppers, Manchego cheese, arugula and arrocino bean ragout (paired with Marques de Caceres Gran Reserva 1994). Chez Sophie Chef Paul Parker will finish the meal with what Larry dubbed a "not so New York" cheesecake made with Vermont Butter & Cheese Co. Quark and with a fresh cherry napoleon (paired with Beringer's Nightingale Special Reserve 2000.)

The cost of this meal is $75 per person, including four courses, four wines, tax and tip. Call 583-4653 for reservations.

The four chefs will be on the radio Sunday after next (April 3) to talk about the 4x4 (it's prerecorded, so Paul can listen to it, rather bizarrely, while he's preparing for his cooking class that day. They will be aired on Sunday, April 3, at 7 a.m. on WHRL (FM 103.1), WOFX (AM 980), WPYX (FM 106.5), WRVE (FM 99.5), and WTRY (FM 98.3). It will be aired at 11:30 on Sunday, April 3 on WGY (AM 810), and WKKF (FM 102.3).

One of our customers requested that we serve blanquette de veau for the Pink Plate Special this week, and so we shall. Blanquette de veau is a comforting, warming veal stew that dates back to the 18th century. It has a velvety white sauce, thickened with stock and cream and flavored with hints of lemon, herb and even vanilla. Half the recipes we've found for this dish refer to it as a middle-class, bourgeois dish, and the rest refer to it as an exemplar of the best techniques of grande cuisine.

The Pink Plate is a weekly prix fixe special we offer on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday (except during the summer season). For $28 per person, you get your choice of soup or salad, the featured entree, two selections from our cheese board or one of a couple of featured desserts and coffee, tea or espresso. If you have a favorite Pink Plate you'd like to see us do week after next or later, let us know.

We'll be serving at The Taste of Ballston Spa on Monday, March 28, at Ballston Spa High School to benefit the Ballston Spa Educational Fund, as well as the Taste of Saratoga at the Canfield Casino on Thursday, March 31, to benefit the Shelters of Saratoga. The Saratoga event is the larger and more glamorous of the two, but we have enjoyed the heck out of doing the smaller Ballston Spa event for the past three years.

Notes on Nico:
Nicholas' fascination with heavy equipment continues unabated. The two-year-old can now distinguish between tow trucks, heavy tow trucks, snowplows, pick-up trucks, freight trucks, steam rollers, tractors, tankers, cranes, concrete mixers, car carriers, and mere vans, as well as naming each passenger car by color (next year: make and model.) His interest is not limited to ground transportation. In addition to his beloved hair panes (which we will stand up in his crib at 4 in the morning to announce when he hears them passing overhead), he has now discovered helicopters, which he calls, with great expression, "Hello, Copter!"

We suspect the Easter bunny will be bringing some vehicular joy to our toddler Sunday.

Click here for the Pink Plate Special

Hope To See You Soon!
Paul, Cheryl & Joseph
at chez sophie bistro
518-583-3538

Chez Sophie was founded in 1969 by sculptor Joseph Parker and his French-born wife, the late Sophie. The business moved to a vintage stainless steel diner in Malta Ridge, New York, in 1995, and is open year-round for dinner. It is owned today by Sophie and Joseph's son, Paul Parker, and his wife, Cheryl Clark.

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