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Please The Palate Pick of the Week – Maude’s Greatest Hits – October 2017

Having made it a personal mission to go to Maude almost every month since they opened in 2014, when October brings a "Greatest Hits" from the past four years, it should not come as a surprise that the Maude October 2017 menu is the Please The Palate pick of the week. This dinner marked my thirty-seventh meal at Maude (out of a total of forty-six seasonal menus in total). Maude's October 2017 menu offered a fourteen-course tasting of some of their Greatest Hits! With almost 500 dishes to chose from, they whittled it down to the top twelve. Although I am sure that there are many more dishes that could qualify, some dishes could not be included because the featured ingredient is not currently in season. The diverse menu played homage to four years of creative, diverse and distinct menus and it was yet another great meal shared with friends and good wine.

07 October, 2017

Greenbar Distillery – Born out of love and built on passion

This story originally appeared in the Napa Valley Register.

Greenbar Distillery, Los Angeles’ original distillery, is a story of love. It was born out of the love of two people and today is a love letter to the city it was born in, Los Angeles.

Melkon Khosrovian and Litty Mathew met in journalism school at the University of Southern California. Litty, who is Southern Indian, was born in Ethiopia to missionary parents, raised in Jamaica and moved to the United States at age 11. Trained as a chef in Paris, Litty had a wine palate but did not like spirits. Melkon, on the other hand, is Armenian, and in his culture, Litty explained, it is the “land of toasts and it is impolite to not raise a glass.” Wanting Litty to fit into his family, Melkon created a vodka infusion that she would like so that she could participate in the toasts. His infusions, which were made out of his love for Litty, became popular in the entire family. Litty and Melkon married in 2002. At the time, Melkon owned a software company. He sold his company, and in 2004 they started Greenbar Distillery, originally under the name Modern Spirits and then under the name Greenbar Collective. Their goal was to create the best flavors and work with fresh ingredients.

05 October, 2017

The rieslings of the Mosel

This story originally appeared in the Napa Valley Register.

Last week, I wrote about the dry riesling found in Nahe, Germany and the fact that 90 percent of German wine is dry. But fruity, sweet wines do still exist in Germany, specifically produced in the Mosel, Nahe and Rhinegau regions.

When we talk about “sweet” wine in Germany, we are not talking about overly sweet, cloying wines. We are talking about wines of finesse. These are wines with fragrance, fruity acidity and a mineral undertone. We are talking about riesling, considered the king of wine grapes in Germany. Of all the white wine grapes, riesling grapes produce the most intense and flavorful wines.

Unlike the dry riesling which is categorized under the VDP (“Verband deutscher Prädikatsweingüter”) system, the sweeter wines are classified under the traditional Pradikatswein. The levels of sweetness will vary and are dependent on when the grapes are picked. There is trocken (dry), kabinett (off-dry), spatlese (late harvest), auslese (select harvest), beerenauslese (berry select harvest) and trockenbeerenauslese (“dry berry select harvest”).

To differentiate between these different styles, it was best described to me by a winemaker who likened these styles to bananas. Kabinett is described as the perfectly yellow banana whereas spatlese is a banana with brown spots. Auslese is the banana that is almost entirely brown and trockenbeerenauslese is a dehydrated, concentrated banana.

04 October, 2017