This is the second in a series where I am joined by Chef Ben, to present authentic French regional dishes and the regional wines that are traditionally paired with them. I’m not going to put emphasis on the wine maker or the vintage, rather, we are concerned about the appellation.
Hello everyone and thanks for joining us myself and Chef Ben for our second and our series on French wine pairings so we are pairing uh well-known French wines not by brand but by appalation which is uh basically a little postage stamp siiz piece of property that that uh creates a particular style of
Wine and uh tonight we are doing a uh combination of shat nift pop which is a very famous French wine along with a dish known as casle which is from the Southern rone Valley area and so to start off I’m going to turn it over to Chef Ben to
Tell you a little bit about the dish so as you can see right here this is a cleet it is a traditional French dish now traditionally this recipe is made with duck or I guess duck coni but the recipe that I followed actually suggested chicken so that’s exactly what
I went with so depending on like what you’re looking for like you can like kind of like cut back on expenses so chicken’s also like a good alternative to this so the recipe also called for calini beans but I used the Great Northern beans and I soaked it for about
8 hours overnight to let it like soften up and a bunch of other stuff also went into this like you got salt pork pork shoulder sausage particularly garlic sausage and you basically just kind of like cook it off in the oven for a long period of time and this actually took
Like a grand total of 4 hours to make well aside from like soaking the beans which took 8 hours so a grand total of 12 hours if you will but 4 hours to actually make the dish itself and because this is a French recipe it basically goes to show just is how
Serious the French people are with making their food where as we Americans most if not all of us are more into like the instant kind of food like your Frozen Foods or just like you know any food that would usually take like at most like 20 to
Like it Miss like 20 minutes to even an hour to make but like the French like use like care and like real quality time to you know make their food so what we going to pair this with is a shout to so it is a a French wine
Typically uh when you’re pairing a red wine with meat um generally you would do a new world wine with a let’s say a steak that is um medium to rare and if it’s medium to well going the other direction generally you would pair that with an old world wine so being that
This is France this is an old world wine so generally you would do this with like a really wellone steak so why would we serve this with something like culle uh this certainly doesn’t look like Well Done meat um and the answer to that is
Is very simple a lot of people tend to want to pair their wine with whatever the entree is whatever the meat is and that uh works a lot of the time but not all of the time so one of the things you have to consider is what else are you
Serving sometimes a side dish is the most flavorful thing in the entire spread and so you need to pair to the side dish more so even than the entree in this case there’s a lot goes into this this has got multiple kinds of meat and beans and and uh lots of of spices
And so this is a really U flavorful dish so you need a big wine to pair with it and if you get culle in the Southern Run Valley you’ll see that more often than not they will serve it with a shat Nifty pop and this is our shat Nifty pop this
Is a Juliet ail which is the the brand name on it one way you can always tell if you’ve got a shot pop is here you’ll see the tiar of the Pope with the crossed keys of of uh St Peter on there uh this is a 2022
Which is or I’m sorry 2020 which is pretty decent uh it’s a big bold wine so you really want to give it some age um you don’t want to like open last year’s vintage it’s going to be a little little strong if you do so first before we get
Started on presenting this let me tell you a little bit about what this wine represents and where such a bizarre name came from so as you may know back during the Renaissance there was uh a kind of a split in the ranks there was uh some politics revolving around Warfare and
What ended up happening is you had a lot of French Cardinals in Rome um and when it came time to elect the pope they were pressured to elect an Italian Pope and finally so the the Vatican U had always been there but the pope himself had
Lived abroad in ayang and the r Valley in France for quite some time and so they said well you know at this point uh I I think we should just go back to Aon and elect a French Pope so it became kind of a political split um during that
Time they are living in a palace in Avon which is down in the Rome Valley it’s a very very steep uh v-shaped Valley very deep and so during the summer months you get what are known as mistal winds that come up off of the the U uh the Sahara
Desert out of North Africa and they sweep up through that Mountain Valley or the the River Valley and the mountains there and uh it it’s almost exasperating it’s just so hot and dry it’s difficult to breathe and as you know a lot of uh Popes are generally very you know
Elderly men it’s very rare that you see a young pop and and so a lot of them had difficulty with that well to the east side of the river way up on a Ledge there’s a ledge up there not all the way to the top but there’s a ledge pretty
Far up uh so there’s a plateau big enough to build a palace there and all of these hillsides are covered with Vineyards and so they built this new Palace of the Pope and that’s what that means shatan the new Palace dap of the Pope and so that’s what this is named
After as he owned all of those Vineyards around that particular area now today that’s not the case those they’ve all been parceled out over the years so there are two different um appalachi in the rone valley as far as uh region so you’ve got the northern rone and the
Southern rone and then in each one of those you’ve got smaller appalachi so shatan is a southern R Appalachian and it is a blend of granach sarra and Morra in that order so ganache is always going to be the dominant grape in the southern R Valley whereas if you’re in the
Northern R Valley then you’re going to uh see that the SRA is going to be the the dominant grape so without further Ado let me give us a little pour here so again um when you’re pouring for your guest make sure the label is facing
Them and you always pour as if you’re WC wel welcoming them rather than than you know pushing them away all right so we’re going to give Chef here some wine you can see it’s it’s nice and dark but not quite opaque and there we go so first thing we
Want to do is we want to take a look at that almost a bake which means you’re getting a lot of uh extraction from the Skins a lot of that red pigmentation and let’s get a nice swirl here and give it a smell getting a lot of lot of cherries off of
That little bit of raspberry this actually smells very new world it’s very uh fruit forward on the nose should not be on the pallet though should be a little more for for lack of a better term kind of antique on on the palette oh it’s so fruity it smells really nice
Let’s do the that beer very nice the ages really helped a lot all of those that variety of flavors from the three different grape varieties have have integrated really well um l l the pepperin is sometimes if you have a really strong one like from my year the the the Vintage was really
Hot they’ll tend to be a little more peppery like it’s got some black pepper in it um in this case again a lot of cherry definitely get some raspberry on there got some like baking spices to it just very slightly and just very mild pepperiness more like like uh white pepper corn than
Black pepper corn on there so let’s give this c a try so we’ got some sausage air and some beans and some pork shoulder and some chicken so we got a little little sausage and some beans here outstanding I actually got pork SED rather than sausage very
Good and would you agree that’s very very flavorful that’s a very rich dish even though it doesn’t look like it would be chicken and beans it doesn’t sound like it’s going to be that rich M that’s very rich and let’s see how well that pairs with the
Wine if it pairs well it should enhance the flavor of the wine oh yeah I’ve really opened it up it really brings out the raspberry a lot more it really opened up the raspberry a lot and now it even has a little hint of pomegranate to really nice so let’s take
One more Sip and then go back to the food and see if this enhances the food again I’m going get a little bit of meat and beans together see how that wine brings out all the FL flavors mhm brings out all of the spices that are soaked into those beans those beans
Just all of a sudden come to life fantastic definitely a good enhancer so works both ways the wine definitely enhances the food the food definitely enhances the wine it’s a nice thing about the European pairings because they’ve been making wine over there for so many hundreds of
Years that over the centuries the two things evolv together the wine evolves with the food the food evolves with the wine so the pairings are always perfect over the centuries different regions have added a particular grape or subtracted a particular grape to make everything parallel with whatever’s customary in
That particular region uh as well as Italy and that’s something we should consider doing as well when we’re finished with France we should move on to Italy very good place to to do the same sort of thing so with that um we’ll call it a day we appreciate you watching thanks
For joining us