Pairing Wine with Beer

*This was originally a guest post on www.israeli-wine.org blog*

Dalton wines, waiting for the perfect time to be uncorked...

Every time my wife and I make our bi-annual trip back home to Israel, we especially look forward to visiting our relatives in the north for the usual great conversations, delicious dinners and amazing wine in the cool Golan breeze.

Our last such dinner included several Hatzilim (eggplant) dishes, various spicy spreads, a Greek salad and fried red mullet fillets accompanied by Dalton 2008 Cabernet Sauvignon Rose and 2007 Sauvignon Blanc… and of course enlightening conversation about the very wine we were drinking.

“Wine making takes a lot of patience, there is a huge amount of waiting,” started Binyamin “Beni” Sorkin, the famous viticulturalist (partly of Yarden, Galil Mountain brands fame) and Israeli wine industry consultant, our host and my uncle in-law. “It takes at least a case of beer to make a bottle of good wine,” he continued swirling the newly minted Dalton Rose… A wine coincidentally made by Naama Mualem, Beni’s oldest daughter.

Beni Sorkin in his wine cellar with the Dalton 2008 Cabernet Sauvignon Rose and 2007 Sauvignon Blanc

I’m not sure people outside the industry have ever measured good wine in the amount of beer it takes to create it… Sure, some folks are aware of the role of water in the manufacturing of wine (if taking glass and other industrial manufacturing processes into account), but the beer insight is new and more delicious.

Figuring this would be a perfect theme to explore for this gracious guest blog post from Avi, my wife and I jumped in our rented car and headed to Dalton Winery to discuss it further with those entrenched in the process. Without question, the phrase seems to resonate with industry professionals but needs to be put in perspective. I asked Naama and Beni what exactly they are waiting for… in a world of automated harvest machinery and bottling process, hasn’t the process been sped up and not slowed down?

“As the winemaker, I wait for everybody and for everything, including myself. From the perfect time to harvest, to the actual time that harvest gets in the gates to the winery from the vineyard, mashing and filtering, the bottling process, and of course the barrel aging” Naama notes. And because the harvest times are different for each varietal, each one of them goes through the process alone and you usually can’t combine bottling of a Sauvignon Blanc while mashing of Merlot is going on. “So the beer comes into play between stages of winemaking and every time the process has started.” She summed up, confirming her father’s assertion.

Just like wine is often paired with a good cheese, a cold beer is always matched well with a game of Shesh besh (or backgammon). Naama made a point to mention that there is a lot of Shesh besh playing in between work. “In fact this year we launched a Shesh besh tournament. We are the first ever wine business in Israel to open such a league,” she boasts. While the league is currently open to Dalton employees only, Naama dreams of a country wide competition between wineries.

Naama Mualem, Chief Wine Maker at Dalton and backgammon enthusiast

Gaining this insight, we proceeded to the tasting, which as usual I can only describe as hedonistic given our familial leverage, tasting all thirteen 2008 bottles and with regional artesian cheeses, breads and spreads. This brings me back to the Dalton 2008 Cabernet Sauvignon Rose we had on our first night in the Golan… it was very refreshing, served somewhat cool but not cold. It embraced the spices in the spreads and home made olive oil, and yet the delicacy of the red mullet; it was the right wine at the right place and definitely at the right time. I recommend it immensely.

Waiting can also be savoring, taking the time to enjoy something; it can also be looked at as anticipation… and here is where US consumers can relate. Because of Shmita rules (biblical agriculture laws mandating a break from harvest on the 7^th year), Dalton will not be exporting the 2008 wines, so you may be sipping beer between now and when the 2009 vintages make it stateside. Good things come to those who wait, and the waiting time can be easily passed by drinking Goldstar or Guinness while playing a fierce game of Shesh besh.

http://www.israeli-wine.org/2009/10/02/on-wine-and-waiting%E2%80%A6/

Negatweeting, it is our right, nay duty…

Photo credit to: http://redstaplerchronicles.com/

Editor’s note: forgive me reader for I have not blogged in nearly three weeks… it’s planning season, sorry folks

First, some background on why –

However snobbish or passé (perhaps even condescending) the term Foodie may seem to some, I consider myself one; I’m a foodie with my restaurants, my menu picks, my ingredients, my home cooking, my books, my TV choices… I just am, and not that there is anything wrong with that. Even though I babble about food and restaurants all the time, the one thing I refrain from doing is talk negatively about the service of a restaurant.

To me the food and the chefs are the stars, so why bias people about décor or service if the meal is great… that is until recently when my mom, brother, wife and I were at Fig and Olive (Fifth Avenue location, the ‘new’ one; bottom line: I recommend the uptown location, food is the same) and had one of the worst services. So I decided to enact the age-old marketing perspective: negative experience = 10 people told vs. good experience = 3 people… I went to town, and told all who’d listen about it in addition to those I usually babble about food with.

The next day my frustration was met with an interesting read from the Chicago Sun-Times about a Horizon Group Management LLC lawsuit against a tenant’s ‘slanderous tweets’… then as if on cue, I started catching up on the Sam Sethi/TechCrunch libel suit over published ‘slanderous articles’ (see more TC coverage: here, here and here) this week… hm, I thought “the power of words you say?”

So, a new Tword is born–

The other day I came up with (per search results) a cute term… Negatweeting, seemed to just roll off the tongue, quite self explanatory given the recent occurrences around me.

Now that I work a lot with corporate reputations and though I’m young, I can seriously say (with a straight face) that I remember when people only had to worry about reputations in print and on TV. All of us, my current clients included, aren’t so lucky… we have to counter and encounter the public head on; the virtual soapbox of social networking and social media mandates us. If we don’t engage and define ourselves, someone else will or already is. Oh, if I had a dollar for every time I heard that phrase recently (again, planning season)…

I take the side of Amanda Bonnen (obviously) as well as that of Michael Arrington in these cases, and frankly everyone else that took a stand. It is the power of free speech, if not consumer power through preference and opinion, which is the foundation of American society… hence Michael Arrington wanting his case tried here and not in the UK, as it is now. And that perhaps is the problem with such outrage as my own at the legal system hamstringing free speech online… the internet, though democratization at it’s finest, is not a democracy.

Recent Exhibits: a)      Google’s power to ban sites b)      Marines banning social networking c – e) Iran, China, Russia

And so on... internet is not a democracy, it is a powerful populous tool that is used to spread information and opinion, but there will always be those who control the switch... and yes, there is a switch. Again, do I even need to link to yesterday’s Twitter/Facebook hacker slowdown/deny of service attacks? Seems quite reasonable of an argument to me.

Thus, I decree: onward with your negatweeting my masses, go forth with your opinions and free speech consumerism. Use social networking and social media to bunch up and grow your numbers. Have your cake and eat it too, until they take away the fork.

So go on, exercise the right to express dissatisfaction with things and make yourself heard through tools available… because if we don’t engage and define ourselves, someone else will or already is.