South Africa, part II: Rust en Vrede

Friday night, I was supposed to cook dinner for Stevie for her belated birthday present, but my partner-in-crime/sous chef came down with the stomach flu. Instead of canceling dinner plans altogether, we decided instead to cook together at her place. She and Josiah would provide the sustenance, I would bring dessert and birthday wine. I won’t go into detail about how deliciously perfect the steak with bone marrow butter was, since Stevie has already done so. I also won’t talk about the dessert, since I’ve already described it before. What I want to talk about instead is the wine.

For Christmas a few years ago, my mother gave me a wine club membership, where 3 unspecified bottles showed up on my hypothetical doorstep each month. Each wine came with a distinct recipe to pair with the wine, which still proves at times to be an interesting exercise in flavor combinations that had never before occurred to me. Some of these were easy drinking, less expensive wines, while others were a bit nicer and meant for laying aside.

One of the latter was a 2004 Rust en Vrede Estate Blend. I’d earmarked this wine months ago as one I wanted to try with Stevie, and her birthday/the delicious steak dinner that she had planned/the confluence of my upcoming trip seemed the perfect occasion to pop it. And boy was I right. The wine was a luxuriant, velvety, thick, balanced blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Shiraz, and Merlot. It was big, bold, and fruity, with subtle tannins from the bottle age that rounded it out.

Josiah, who is a sommelier, said that it was the first South African wine he’d been truly impressed with – mostly, he thought, the wines tasted like an ash tray to him. And to be fair, there was an element of ashiness to this wine, which must be representative of the terroir, but it was so beautifully counterbalanced by the depth of the Cab, the fruit of the Merlot, and snazzy spice of the Shiraz that the wine just tasted…smooth.

Rust en Vrede is a 315 year old vineyard that was founded by in 1694 by the then Governor of the Cape, Willem Adrian van der Stel. The winery specializes exclusively in red wine production, producing full-bodied reds aged in new oak. The wines coming from this estate seem to defend the notion that Stellenbosch may be the premier region for red wine production in South Africa. The 2004 Estate Blend was pure deliciousness. Even the experts approved. Happy birthday Stevie!

Celebrations: Vegetarian Birthday Dinner at Dirt Candy

Yesterday was my friend Noa’s birthday, so I decided I wanted to take her to dinner. In the four years we’ve known each other, I have set a precedent of thinking way too hard about how to feed her, either at restaurants or at home. Noa keeps kosher, so she tends to eat like a vegetarian in the restaurants that us laymen frequent. Although she is perfectly capable of taking care of her own food intake, I like to mother-hen her (perhaps a bit too much) by always making sure there’s something on the menu that she can eat.

Enter Dirt Candy. This vegetarian restaurant opened in the East Village in 2008, and I’d been wanting to try it for awhile – then repeatedly forgetting about it. While racking my brain for fun places to take Noa, the memory lightbulb went off. Take her to Dirt Candy! She can eat everything on the menu! 

The premise of the tiny 12-seater on 9th street is simple: vegetables are delicious nuggets that come from the earth. They are “dirt candy.” Chef and owner Amanda Cohen is right there to greet you when you walk in; she seated us herself when we arrived. And apparently we were lucky – they don’t usually have room for walk-ins.


The menu is small and quirky. There was one “snack,” four starters, and four entrees to choose from. All seasonal produce, and every item was named for its key ingredient.

Noa and I ordered the Jalapeno Hush Puppies to start – the soft, fried cornmeal was served with maple butter, which melted right off and onto our fingers. My only complaint is that there were five of them for two of us. Then we decided to split two entrees. Noa wanted the Corn and the Eggplant, so that’s what we ordered. And we were delighted with her choices.

There is a definite southern flair to the menu. The Corn dish was essentially gussied up grits (not that I am complaining, I adore grits,especially with cheese). These were stone ground and tasted like they’d been cooking up all day. They were speckled with full corn kernels from the corn cream, microgreens, pickled shiitakes, and huitlacoche, which is a fungus that grows on corn also known as the “corn truffle.” Served on top was a tempura poached egg, cooked to perfection. 

As delicious as these dishes were, I preferred the Eggplant. The presentation is not as beautiful as that of the Corn – there is no vibrant yellow and green to perk the eye. However, if there were to be a single dish to embody the notion of “dirt candy,” I think this would be it. Eggplant – sliced, pickled, breaded, and fried – was served a top black olive fettuccine, tossed with fresh ricotta, and served within a pool of basil broth. Eggplant jam was used as a garnish. 

If this sounds like a dark, monochromatic plate of food, it’s because it was. The dirt-colored food was even further underscored by the indigo plate it was served upon. But oh my, what amazing flavor combinations. I loved that the eggplant was pickled before it was fried, because it added an element of depth and saltiness that fried eggplant tends to lack. And the basil broth mixed with the eggplant jam was to die for. 

Though stuffed, it was Noa’s birthday after all, so we visited the dessert menu. We immediately nixed the popcorn pudding since we’d just consumed several heads of corn. Instead, we concentrated on the sweet potato puffs – served with sweet potato sorbet, brown sugar ice cream, and sour cream ice cream – and the ice cream nanaimo bar – sweet pea and mint ice cream and cream served between layers of chocolate. We mentioned both to the waitress and her reaction was immediate. The Nanaimo Bar. Hands down.

She brought it out with a candle on top – she’d caught onto the fact that this was a birthday date. I snapped this shot, the only one of the night, before we dug in (unfortunately, she’d already blown out the candle before I got to it).

The sweet pea and mint ice cream was delicate and refreshing, but I wish there had been more of it. The cream was reminiscent of the kind put in ice cream cakes from Baskin Robbins (not that this stopped me from eating my share), and the chocolate cookie at the bottom was a bit mealy. We cleared the plate, however, and ended the night with a bang – sweeping hand gestures left a bit of wine on the floor, and on me. Mazel Tov!

South Africa: Wine & History

I am gearing up for a trip to South Africa at the beginning of April to celebrate my birthday – I bought the ticket months ago and have slowly been setting up my itinerary. Everyone keeps asking me if I am planning to go on a safari and visit the lions. The answer is no. This is a wine trip.

Thus far, I am planning to spend a few days in Cape Town, hoping to wander the town, stumble upon good food, hike Table Mountain, and potentially drive down to the Cape of Good Hope to see penguins. Then, I am driving to Paarl to spend a few days visiting Backsberg, Glen Carlou, and a few others.

Paarl
Then, on my birthday, I leave the solo life behind and fly to Durban to visit a good friend of mine from college, Cheryl, who moved back this past year. That part of the trip-planning I’ve left up to her :)
 see left. ignore my outfit.

I have been brushing up on my South African history, particularly as related to the wine industry, and I thought I’d share a few interesting nugglets of information here. If you are a history buff, keep reading.

1652 – the Dutch arrive at the Cape of Good Hope and set up an outpost on the Europe-India trade route

1659 – the first grapes on record are pressed

1679 – Simon van der Stel arrives and imposes the first wine-making regulations

1685 – van der Stel acquires Constantia, South Africa’s first internationally renowned winery, producing wines that were highly favored in the courts of Europe (Vin de Costance was Napoleon’s favorite wine)

 

1688-90 – After fleeing Europe, 200 French Huguenots establish Franschoek (the French corner, in Dutch), another wine-growing area in the Western Cape

throughout much of the 18th and early 19th c – SA establishes itself as a leading exporter of port- and sherry-style fortified wines, especially benefitting from Napoleon’s Continental System, which blockaded the British

post-Napoleon – sale crisis due to the low quality of wine, whose high yields and overproduction could not compete with the leading wines of Europe

late 19th c – phylloxera and mildew epidemics reach SA and ravage vineyards

the phylloxera louse

start of the 20th c – export trade market dries up, further decreasing production

1918 – Koöperatieve Wijnbouwers Vereniging, a winemakers’ cooperative, was founded to begin establishing wine controls

1924 – KWV given legal authority to fix the price of wine used to make brandy

1925 – the Pinotage grape was created by crossing Pinot Noir and Cinsault (known as Hermitage in SA) by viticulturalist Abraham Izak Perold

1940 – SA government fully transferred the supervision of the wine sector to the KWV, allowing it to determine wine prices, permissable yields, varieties, planting rights, and production methods, as well as to control the surpluses

1948 – apartheid established in SA

1959 – first call to boycott South African goods, including wine exports, as a response to apartheid

1980s – boycott fully established internationally

1992 – KWV quota system abandoned, granting winemakers greater creativity and flexibility to create quality wines of various depth and complexities

1994 – apartheid officially ends with the multi-racial democratic elections won by the African National Congress under Nelson Mandela

Mandela wins!

1994-now – huge increase in international demand for SA wines, as an affordable, quality commodity; this is reflected in the increased plantings of international varietals throughout the winegrowing regions of the Western Cape

More South Africa-oriented info hopefully to come over the next few weeks. Test on Tuesday.

Sources: Andre Domine’s WINE; wikipedia; and various (see links)