Sort of Sicilian

Reading Giorgio Locatelli's book Made in Sicily this morning got me thinking about Sicilian flavours. This recipe is not his, or traditional Sicilian, but works with Sicilian reds or grenache. Try using a pasta like strozzapretti or casarecce with this sauce, or bigoli if you want something longer.

Get a pot on for the pasta. Soak some sultanas in a cup with half hot water and half marsala. Heat a frypan and then take a handful of pine nuts to light gold, before tipping them out to cool. Then gentle heat into the frypan and start melting butter (about 45g per serve). Toss anchovy fillets, sage leaves, garlic & a fresh red chilli (chopped) into the butter. Cook slowly while the pasta water is coming up and then the cup or so of strozzapretti (per serve) or similar is cooking. Gentle heat will break down the anchovy, cook out the sage and colour the milk solids, without getting too much bitter and colour with the garlic.

When the pasta is just short of cooked, add the soaked sultanas to the frypan and mix some pasta water into the soaking cup. Use this to thin the sauce out, shaking the pan to emulsify. Don't worry you are losing the crispness on the sage. All part of the plan. Drain the pasta and tip into the pan with the sauce. Add more of the pasta water/soaking liquid mixture if it needs it. Cook out for a minute or two to let the pasta take the sauce. Add the pine nuts and a little black pepper. The sauce should be salty from the anchovies, savoury from the herbs and garlic and a little sweet from the sultanas and marsala, with the nut brown butter pulling it together.

Serve with a good Sicilian red wine, or some McLaren Vale grenache. No cheese. Maybe a little breadcrumbs if you use bigoli. Resist the temptation to use lemon juice in the sauce - you want the wine to bring the acid to the table.

Ochota Barrels Surfer Rosa Sangiovese Grenache 2012

The 2011 vintage release of sangiovese from Ochota Barrels was outstanding. Lithe, nervy acidy, persistent flavour, sinewy tannins - a whole new face for South Australian sangiovese. The 2012 is sangiovese with makeup on. It really, really, wants to go to a party and have people say nice things about how it looks.

Taras Ochota has made wine from Puglia and  Sicily and there is perhaps a hint of Sardinian Cannonau going on here (though Sicily also grows grenache). The Adelaide Hills are the source of the sangiovese fruit in both the 2011 and 2012 releases. It is good fruit. The big difference here is the presence of grenache from the Onkaparinga Hills. The 2012 is still a red-fruited wine, about cherries and raspberries. The grenache adds a candied cherry and sweet-fruited raspberry to the crisp line of the sangiovese, as well as backing off the tannins and acid. Low in alcohol (12.2%) but ripe, nothing green, this is fruit-forward, acid second, tannins in the rear.

The result is more crowd-pleasing, easier to drink, than the challenging 2011. But take it to a party. Leave the 2011 for serious romance & a picnic rug.

Screwcap, gift, about $25, 12.2% alcohol, website here.

Learning

Two new discoveries for me:
- Using my pancetta and artichokes preserved in oil as a pizza topping (just a bit of cheese and tomato sauce underneath). A great combination of salt, oil and sharp from the artichoke brining, plus the giving texture of the artichoke against the chewy resistance of pancetta cut into batons. Went well with a Rockfords Moppa Springs grenache mataro shiraz blend. A sangiovese or barbera would have been a good match too.
- Hazelnuts in pesto instead of pinenuts. Dictated by the necessity of having run out of pine nuts and needing to make pesto to go with a pane di casa loaf I'd just baked. Usually, I have little time for pesto variants (especially commercial pre-mades that substitute many of the key elements that make fresh, traditional pesto so good). But this time, using good hazels with the skins on, the pesto turned out lighter and crunchier than usual. The skins gave the pesto a length of flavour (and tannin grip) that made it an excellent accompaniment to the fresh bread. Surprisingly good with a sparkling pinot noir from Adelaide Hills fruit (done as a white bubbles with the barest touch of bronze), but would have also been good with a prosecco or pinot grigio.

Australian wine, Italian food

A couple of worthwhile matches of Italian food and Australian wine from the past week:

1. Spaghetti with a sauce of speck, braised onion, rosemary, a little fresh tomato, and just-picked harvest of home-grown broad beans and peas. A 2009 Kay Brothers McLaren Vale grenache had an inky character that went well with the speck, onion and rosemary in the braise, and allowed the sweetness of the vegetables to come through.

2. 2005 Williams Crossing pinot noir (the Curly Flat second label) with double-peeled broad beans smashed up with olive oil, mint, salt and parmesan. Spread on grilled sourdough bread you have wiped over with a cut clove of fresh garlic. The sweet and salty in the food brought out the clean, refreshing acid of the wine, with the developed, just-mushroom characters doing well with the char on the bread.

Simple stuff, but reinforced to me the fit between honest Italian food and the diversity of Australian wine.

Planting grenache and cinsault

At Quarry Hill, we are part of the way through removing a struggling block of pinot noir and converting it to a planting of mixed varieties that will produce a red Rhone blend.

The photograph shows the use of an about-to-fail planting spear from our grenache planting session last Saturday. Four rows of BVRC38 clone grenache sourced from Elite Nursery in the Barossa went in, with four more to go next weekend. We have also planted two rows of cinsault (old vine selections), and prepared a row for grafting to roussanne. This is on top of the initial grenache planting at the top of the hill we put in in 2009.

When completed, the block will supply grenache, shiraz (Great Western clone), cinsault and roussanne. With a planting of mataro/mourvedre going in below the 2006 plantings of tempranillo, we should have the makings of a decent volume of a hopefully good red Rhone blend.

Peter Lehmann turns 80, so I drink Barossa - 2005 Rockford Moppa Springs GMS

I found out last night that yesterday was Peter Lehmann's 80th birthday. The only Barossa reds stored at home were Rockfords and Spinifex, as all my Lehmann gear is out in the cool store at the vineyard. But a 2005 Rockford Moppa Springs grenache mataro shiraz seemed like a good option.

This was under cork, and I got a good one. The barest of soaking and staining. The wine started out a little muted, with mainly inky, verging on tarry characters on the nose and palate, so was left alone in a decanter for two hours while I watched snatches of ABC coverage of the Brisbane 'town hall' meeting and pottered through getting dinner sorted.

After the decant, the fruit really powered through. Rich cherry and ripe bramble fruit, with a good balance of soft and strict in flavours and tannins. The grenache dominates, but the mataro gives interest and a bit of wildness. The last glass was the best by some margin, and I think this wine will flesh out nicely over the next couple of years.

A good match to barbecued organic lamb cutlets marinated in Herbie's bay spice, cabbage panfried in ghee with caraway and mustard seeds, and a couscous with mint and parsley. And maybe a good match to a milestone birthday for an important figure in Australia wine.