The past week has seen me foray into new culinary territory, some of it much-hyped, some not. In order of ingestion:
1. 2007 Clos Roche Blanche Touraine Cuvée Côt: I recently sampled this small vineyard’s 2008 Cuvée Gamay and really enjoyed it (so much so, in fact, that I am enjoying a glass from a second bottle as I type). I am no expert –– far from it –– but my oenophile friend T, on learning that I was impressed by the Gamay, suggested I try their Cuvée Côt, or Malbec, and so I picked up a bottle at Slope Cellars here in the hood to bring to a dinner last weekend. What an odd, flowery, decidedly funky wine, filled with hints of lavender and herbs and mushrooms and parma violets. I loved it, but I couldn’t imagine pairing it with food.
2. Stumptown Coffee: This coffee has earned many column inches (if one can still talk about such things these days), but the two cups I’d had to date –– at Brooklyn’s Trois Pommes and Baked –– had not left a lasting impression. So when R said he was going to pick up beer supplies at the new Brooklyn Homebrew just round the corner from us, I asked him to pick up a bag of Stumptown so that we could brew and test it for ourselves. He chose their organic Holler Mountain Blend, which was smooth and tasty and all things good, but still left me wondering quite what all the fuss is about. It is more expensive and less expansive that our usual brew (Gorilla’s Poco Fundo). We finished the bag in four days. Now I admit this might say more about our caffeine habit (we have a five-month old! cut us some slack!) than the quality of the beans, but still.
The relationship between items 1. and 2. is as follows: I would rather drink bad wine than bad coffee. In certain situations, I am quite happy to down plonk; I am never content to swill sock juice coffee.
3. Jasper Hill’s Winnimere, a raw cow cheese aged 60 days and washed in lambic. Delicious.
4. SCRATCHbread’s chocolate chip scone. I’ve been eager to sample a SCRATCHbread creation since reading that the baker does all his work overnight, using the oven of a local pizzeria. So when I was at Gorilla this morning with H and saw that they are now carrying the stuff, I let myself forget about the postpartum weight loss (yeah, like the aforementioned wine and cheese didn’t screw that already) and indulged. Perhaps my mistake was to go with my primal chocofiend urges, rather than opting for the more interesting ginger & lemon offering. It may be that I was underwhelmed because I had to juggle scone, coffee, groceries, stroller and icy sidewalks all while performing the puddle ballet required of New Yorkers after a significant snowfall; however, underwhelmed I was. ‘Twas a dry, crumbly and insipid effort –– the kind of thing one might qualify as meh –– even if the darker-than-usual chocolate chips were a pleasant surprise.
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