Baptiste Cousin "Marie Rose" 2015

Even on a root day drinking Baptiste Cousin’s wines makes me feel like it’s my birthday. They’re d i s c o wines: fun, foot  l o o s e and fancy free, skip the Kool-Aid and Acid Test these juice b.o.m.b.s best drunk out of cups bikinied or, better: not actually in a bikini because let’s face it; push comes to shove and most people feel better not worrying about what’s wiggling but in XXL shirts and their geography teacher's hiking socks. But you get the vibe I’m going for.

Baptiste works in the Loire and makes this wine with the native Grolleau which is great news as far as someone who pretty much only drinks neon strawberry wines cold from the fridge is concerned. Other good news is he works without sulphites, works with horses like his outlaw dad from whom he bought his vines, has dreads / is handsome and makes a SUPER FUN Grolleau Gris pét nat called "Puppet Nat" that I can personally attest to being perfect to celebrate the first time you’ve skated on natural ice slash ever really skated. And so you see, bikini not always necessary.

Tasting notes: 

Pale rose petal rosé pink in your glass on your eyes but there's also something rosy in the mouth zone too. Like the herby, woody bowls of potpourri mom puts on the window sills to collect dust, or how those raw liquorice bars with pandas on them that look better for you but are still liquorice bars smell. But in a good way. Anyway, by now you’re on your third, fourth sip n' golly gone and changed your mind sir, because why no, sir, this isn’t as ABC a wine as you first thought, sir. It’s light, sure, juicy, sure, but there's nuance and layering and texture and gravity and it coats your tongue like velcro or at any rate a Bourgogne. In a good way. **

** and this was on a root day.

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Baptiste Cousin
"Marie Rose" 2015

Grolleau Gris

Martigné-Briand, Loire

Julien Meyer "Les Pierres Chaudes" 2015

We were drunk and still drinking and talking about name dropping and I said, ‘Meyer, why do people talk about Julien Meyer?’ What happened next is we knocked back his 'Les Pierres Chaudes' Pinot Noir in about 3.8 minutes and now that I’m thinking about how to describe it I keep coming back to heavy velvet wizard cloaks and Patagonia night skies. To gravity and potential and mushroom-seeking boars’ hair caught on bramble bushes fallen to the mossy forest floor. To the electricity running ‘tsk’ through those electric tennis rackets of death used to zap flies, to shadow play and the

M   i  l  k  y     W  a  y.

Tasting notes:

Small wild berries growing with midnight plums in the tangly bramble undergrowth that's taken over a magical mystical garden somewhere elsewhere and shot through with comet-bright acidity and all that in your glass because this is wine even if it doesn’t sound like it and I know it doesn’t, I get it, I let it not, but who cares ‘cus seriously HOW GREAT DOES WINE SOUND WHEN YOU'RE NOT OBVIOUSLY TALKING ABOUT WINE?? Les Pierres Chaudes is intense, pure, balanced and water on your face fresh and I think I know why people talk about Meyer.

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Domaine Julien Meyer 2015
"Les Pierres Chaudes"

Pinot Noir

Nothalten, Alsace

Brett: the taste spectrum of farm

I guess I was around 13 when I got my first taste of farm. We were in Austria walking and we had apples and cheese and dried sausage for lunch and it was the first time I drank Apfelmost and it went !*p f c h %$ when you opened it and it was golden like low winter sun ‘round 3, maybe 4, o’clock-golden and with that sparkly-sparky taste of something alive and rotting and in a rush>>> A borderline case flit-flirting between sour, sweet, yeast and your brain’s yes OK and no: definitely throw away. Smell of fresh wet hay and grass-damp horse blanket. Of apple skeletons and toast.

We drank it on a bench and it was delicious and I think my aunt was there too and the cows were soft and chestnut and 15 years later I know now that the word to describe that particular smell slash taste-state of life and death, boot room, sweaty saddle and organic mass that makes me think of Most is, when it comes to wine*, called ‘brett' and, officially, Dekkera bruxellensis or Brettanomyces by those who know what they're talking about, and 'FUNK' and 'barn' by them too plus by all the others, and the Internet is full of discussion on whether or not this naturally occurring strain of yeast is, when it comes to wine, a fault that compromises terroir or is, in fact, itself terroir — course there is — and you can care or not care but the smell still reminds me of the first time I drank Most which is why I’m telling the story and as it happens I happen to like it.

*beer too.

'Album' 2012, Jean-Baptiste Menigoz

I’ve mentioned baskets of bruised apple before but Jean-Baptiste Menigoz's "Album" 2012 gives you quince. Fuzzy quince browning in wooden fruit bowls of walnuts and almonds and baked apples in warm sugar dusted dough. Lush with ripe pears dipped in Manuka honey, some lemon pith and tastes somehow heavy.

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"Album" 2012

Domaine les Bottes Rouges, Jean-Baptiste Menigoz

Savagnin

Jura

Milan Nestarec's "Podfuck" 2014 means party

‘Party in a glass’ is how I'd described Milan Nestarec's 2014 "Podfuck" if you asked. But equally I could say ‘A five-a-day fruit forward punch in the face of anyone who takes their wine too seriously’ or, ‘Californian sunshine, captured’ or, if short of time, ‘Fun! Capital F’.

Furthermore the colour is peach fuzz slash bleached out Venetian paint pink orange and it comes from the Czech Republic and is made by Milan Nestarec and the first time I drank it I swore off food.

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"Podfuck" 2014
Milan Nestarec
Pinot Gris

Moravský Žižkov

Imported by Wilde Wijnen 

'Les P'tites Vignes' 2015, La Lunotte

Smells milky like salted caramel ice cream melting in a cone. Drinks soft with a plummy finish, like an over-blended blueberry-banana milkshake that’s spoon stand-up thick and air-soft. Bluberry blue but tastes milk chocolate brown and reminds me of flannel sheets: soft and powdery because your mom uses too much laundry softener.

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"Les P'tites Vignes" 2015
La Lunotte, Christophe Foucher
Gamay
Loire

Beijing Bao, Rotterdam

If I said what I wanted to say, namely that what I ate at Beijing Bao didn’t taste like Chinese food, then you’d probably take me for an idiot. You’d say China is big, China is far away, and as the only Chinese food you’ve probably eaten was eaten in Chinese restaurants, the restaurants not being in China, then you don’t know what Chinese food tastes like.

That would be fair enough.

So perhaps it would be better for me to say that the food at Beijing Bao is not what one would expect to eat at a Chinese restaurant. I mean, not unless you expect cumin in your food and thickets of fresh coriander strewn on top. Not unless it’s no big deal to you that the beef you just put in your mouth has melted before you had time to close it, let alone chew; and not unless you’re the kind of person that would find someone’s asking you to pass the soy sauce some sort of joke. Everyone knows you don’t get soy sauce when you’re eating Beijing Bao’s Chinese.

And you don’t; at least, it doesn’t come standard at the table. Standard there is a small pot of vinegar, Korean style, and a sauce with a chilli-kick. Standard there are green beans barely cooked and heaped in fried, minced pork that will make you think twice about the virtues of eating pop corn because heck, popcorn is greasier than this and this is much more satisfying anyway. Those sauces (you know the ones) that render every dish essentially the same but for their different hues of red? That goopy, black, they-call-it-fish-sauce, I-call-it-MSG stuff that, no matter how hard you try not to, reminds you of the effects of an oil spill? Instead of that stuff, you get vegetables that are still identifiable as, and have the original texture of, vegetables; and if you order right they’ll come with nothing more than chunks of fried garlic that you’ll be able to chopstick-out blindfolded for their size.

No, this kitchen is not afraid of garlic and nor should you be. Not even when you order the beef ribs in garlic which, when we did, turned out to be (or at least seemed to be) pork ribs in a dry-as-dust pancake-batter crust that had been infused with garlic. ‘Dry as dust’ in the case of batter is a compliment, unless you like the not-enough-napkins greasy kind, in which case this is not your sort of Chinese. 

You’ll probably want to order second plate of the Chinese cabbage with pork (kimchi with really tasty, not at all dry pork), but don’t let this put you off ordering another, different cabbage dish. The Chinese cabbage with soy and vinegar was bright and tangy and imparted a joy akin to that you might feel in taking a bite of a well-placed pickle in your sandwich for balance, i.e.: much joy. Order it. Order it and put a little on your plate with a little of everything else (the dishes are large and to be shared), but especially the melt in your mouth beef with cumin (I’m still surprised), shredded onion, coriander and… garlic. With the beef shaven, succulent but dry and spiced with cumin, I suppose this is what Greek gyros would taste like if it were excellent. And this was excellent.

When the ‘Beijing pizza’ arrives (for the restaurant operates strict serve-yourself drinks and it-comes-when-it-comes policies), essentially a larger, absolutely not greasy, dumpling rolled over well-spiced minced lamb and braised leeks, it’s likely you’ll also want to comment on how Middle Eastern the tastes are. Ditto with the steamed eggs - theirs is the same creamy, nuttiness that you’ll find in the 10-hour boiled eggs that perch atop hummus bowls in Israel. From these last two dishes and the beef, it would seem that the two kitchens share similar recipes for soul food. 

And it’s the food that carries the place. With no real decor to speak of, a TV screen in the back loudly slide-showing the dishes, no alcohol licence and staff that aren’t really interested in talking to you, Beijing Bao is the type of place you probably only dared to enter because of the number of Chinese sitting inside, or because a local friend you trust enough to take you to a Chinese restaurant in Rotterdam even though you don’t like ‘Chinese’ and you have to travel from Amsterdam, takes you. However you got there, go there. After dinner you’ll probably want to go again for breakfast.

Photographs by Sophia van den Hoek. Also published on Unfolded.

A garden in pictures

When I say my mom’s a gardener what I mean is that we eat late in the summer months. It means there's a good chance my hand luggage has a plant or two stuffed down the side wrapped in damp newspaper and that I get seed heads sent to me in the mail. It means I don't cut flowers probably because my mom doesn't cut flowers, and that I like making sticks into infrastructure most certainly because mom makes stick infrastructure.

When I planted my first garden I was a little nervous and spaced everything out like the mysterious runes and diagrams on the seed packets said to. Mom’s advice: ‘Everything just wants to live’.

When I say ‘my first garden’ what I mean is that time, three years ago, when I grew mainly greens and 3.5 sunflowers in a 1x1 box in a field that, for the longest time, was looked over by city planners and left to a group of alcoholics that would (mostly) leave you alone as well as a modern day mystic and follower of the ayahuasca church (possibly — no, probably — also an alcoholic) who once accused me of stealing his watering can (I didn’t). This field is now a construction site like it’s been for the last two years, destined for a new try at life as a carpark. 

My next garden isn't so much mine as it's ours and this isn't just because it's squatted, which it is. These pictures are of her garden, not of ours.

Sunflowers, incidentally, seem to do very well in Amsterdam.

Movia Wines + Restaurant De Jong + Lux = magic * natural wine

It started at 6 so we figured we’d probably be out early. And anyway, or so I thought, it was a wine tasting (small sips, spit spit) and it would all be natural (wine that has been farmed according to organic or biodynamic principles plus minimum intervention thereafter… including, according to some diehards, no sulphite at bottling; a practice that has the effect of stabilising the otherwise very much still alive wine by stunning microbial reproduction, fermentation and all-round interaction as well as sanitising bottling equipment: sulphite’s antioxidant properties shield the wine from oxygen.) — so we’d be fine

— or at least, more fine than how we might feel after drinking, sorry tasting, the equivalent amount of conventional wine; wine that will almost invariably have had chemicals and sulphites added, noxious nasties that would have to be processed by our livers the next day as well as the alcohol. The lack of crap* in natural wine should make it, both theoretically and in many of my own experiences though certainly not all, less likely to leave you feeling bad the next day, precisely because there’s less crap to have to filter out. Obviously alcohol percentage, sugars, dehydration, levels of histamine (high in red wine), how much and how fast you drink are also influencing factors; and there are a lot of offhand soundbites being thrown around about the evils of sulphites as the major causer of hangovers, but for now, that’s what they are: unscientific soundbites. 

And that’s where we’ll leave them. Hangover prevention is a bad reason to start drinking natural wine and if it’s yours, please don’t. Better reasons are: caring about the environment, supporting the farmers that care, additives in your food and if you think you’d be interested in trying something that’s alive, tastes it, and is therefore unlike anything else, certainly anything we label ‘wine’. 

But the night itself? 

A collection of observations on mostly mould

I grew up scraping mould off stuff. Not actively or anything: it’s not like I was handed a pot of something fuzzy and told to go play; but if, for instance, we wanted jam, we’d probably have to scrape off the mould first. That’s just how it was (is, actually) and we were fine with it. What made it funny was when guests wanted jam. What made it funniest was this one time we were playing a board game called Association or something where you have to give your teammates prompts via association, and an old friend of the family prompted ‘mould’ to her son (and teammate) who answered ‘PANTRY’.

See? Funny.

*

Where the US customs office would consider me a young-verging-on-old offender, I’d probably just call myself a mostly short-haired girl with a devil-may-care nonchalance when it comes to ticking the ‘nothing to declare’ box and a healthy disrespect for the FDA’s health concerns. Big men with big guns are not enough to stop us from rolling by with our bags full of whatever we’d emptied from the fridge packed in newspapers, and you can bet your $3,000 fine there’ll always be numerous newspapers wrapped around numerous cheeses (you can only import raw milk cheese into the U.S. if it’s been aged for more than 60 days. This makes the presence of a Mont d’Or or Tomme de Savoie in your suitcase both illegal and, more importantly, perfectly room temperature).

*

Another cheese memory is the time we ate a cheese my parents had been given when I was born. I was born in ’88 and we probably ate it four years ago. It was the best cheese I’ve ever eaten. I eat a lot of cheese. 

*

It was my mom that introduced me to the idea of eating raw egg with raw meat at a pretty young age. Now I’m of age, if I’m also hungover, I want Japanese. Always sukiyaki, a dish where you dip raw slices of wagyu beef into a broth and then raw egg yolk. The otherwise stern waitress smiles approvingly when we ask to have it with egg. Japanese customers get it standard.   

*

Raw milk is another ‘issue’ as I understand it, but not if the animals are healthy and allowed to roam and graze. It will also leave you spoiled for taste and unsatisfied when all you have to  wash down your cardboard cereal is pasteurised milk. I recently made yoghurt from milk that we tapped raw from a tank and have the best intentions not to ever buy yoghurt again. However we all know that this is the same material they used to pave the way to hell and at the very least I will be introducing my water kefir babies to their milk cousins. Read: probably replacing (even if only until its summer sun cocktail time) because at one point one gets worried about the amount of sugar one is drinking when one is drinking water kefir. 

*

The other day I got into an argument with someone because they were looking at the due date on a bag of carrots. This is not the way to live your life. 

Chardonnay-schmardonnay: "La Bulle à Zéro", Gilles et Catherine Vergé

"La Bulle à Zéro" by Gilles and Catherine Vergé is a chardonnay raised by wolves are not my words but I wish they were because they’re true and better than mine. What I had: running barefoot, dancing leaves and flying kites by which I mean to say, a joy.

Tasting notes:

Breezy salt air licked off a rock-salinity, beer yeasts and earth bound walnuts with a whiff of whiskey apple cider air. Owl-eyes oxidised open a la Jura but we’re in Burgundy (Viré) plus:

B U B B L E S

!!!!!!

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Gilles and Catherine Vergé
"La Bulle à Zero"

Chardonnay

Viré, Burgundy

Fraud, food and natural wine

The article coincided with the week I happened to spend 100% more time on a farm than I usually do so it got me thinking. The reason I was on farms was to source (sounds better, really just buying) ingredients for our latest sit-down supper, the menu for which we’d promised would be entirely noord-centred and — (that word again) — sourced. No small feat during the dregs of winter but we did it and it was great. What exactly we did/made I’ll save for another story; but for now, it was all about kraut.

When I read it, the first thing I thought about was how impatient I’d been when required to wait 40 minutes while a lady on one of these farms counted out and calculated the cost of as many cheeses. She was operating at the speed of slow that makes you appreciate that little-spoken alternative use of the countryside: the pace of city life is just not for everyone (and mind you, we’re talking Amsterdam here). I don’t feel ashamed saying it: I had better things to do in that time, but the article made me laugh at the thought. Turns out this was a small price to pay for the (incidentally, excellent) cheeses we bought. At least they were what we thought they were.

Not so, it turns out, for many many more things than I thought (if I’ve ever really thought), says the article. So much not so, that in early 2015 the UK set up the National Food Crime Unit to fight food fraud; one, policy makers hope, that will one day be as good as the Dutch equivalent. 

Via a process that uses rapid evaporative ionisation mass spectrometry, scientists can test if what the food in front of them says it is, it really is. Be it a piece of cod or flakes of dried oregano (last year a UK institute found that 25 per cent of the samples supplied from supermarkets and online retailers contained substances other than oregano), the bottom line is that where there’s money, there’s crime, and where there’s big money, there’s big crime. Financial consulting firm PwC estimates that global trade in food fraud is worth around $40 billion a year.

But more on the things the authorities are finding another time. For now, what I’d like to write about is what we’re putting in wine. 

Fraud you say? Well, ish even though, technically, no. What wine makers put in to wine is legal. Not listing what they’ve put in on the label is also legal. And yet, people would probably be shocked to see the ingredients in a bottle of wine. Wine growers know that they would be shocked. Does’t this smack a teeny weeny bit, even if not exactly then something quite like, fraud?