Expert Tips: Choucroute Cooking & French Wine | Slice

Keith samples some of France’s best wines including Riesling and Gewurztraminer and cooks choucroute.
Click here to subscribe
https://www.youtube.com/c/slicefood

Follow us on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/SliceFood-1437001789923228/

as well or should I say good lovin this week we’re in Alsace a region famous for splendid beers it’s also famous for some excellent wines so if you’ve got yours ready to taste we’re gonna have a lot of fun this evening Cheers [Music] so this is the fifth program in our wine series and I hope like me Umesh learn something about this winemaking business we’re gonna be doing some hill climbing tasting to delicious wines and finding out some of the problems that live and exist in the vineyard no I’m not referring to our illustrious master wine JP Alsace is the area between the Rhine in the east and the Vosges mountains in the West region benefits from an ideal climate for white wine being both cool and dry the wines produced here are good but perhaps it’s the names of the wines like reasoning or Sylvan a that confused many people into thinking they’re from Germany far from it despite their Germanic names and the outward appearance of the area this is a fiercely French region Alsace has been fought over and occupied many times since the Middle Ages as you can see by the ruined castles and the fortress turns yet mixes with a large dose of Hansel and grettel and you get a stunningly picturesque region we’re interested in the two main wines have put alphys on the map divert stamina and reasoning and to help us through the tasting I need to find my good friend the mad professor of wine John so Jonathan what we’re gonna try now I thought we kick off with a bit of a bit of reasoning reasoning isn’t that a sweet German wine yes I’m afraid it has this rather sort of grim Nath image doesn’t it a sweeter wine and rather sort of old-fashioned and it’s a great tragedy because of course reasoning is one of the world’s great aristocratic grapes and in fact the Germans make beautiful reasoning and so did so do the Alsatians but what is the what is the the real difference then roughly speaking the German versions tend to be a bit sweeter perhaps medium or or fully sweet whereas of course here in Alsace it’s almost all dry but both Germany and alles us make fantastic versions of the grape it’s more just a tweak you know so but we’ll see the dryness I think that’s look at it that’s a drink some I hope you’ve got some at home as well have you if not why not you can see as I’m opening it the varietal on the label Riesling actually means the grade from identified easily you know this is the one grape that goes into this excellent wine from Alsace yes it’s much more like the new world where we get the name of the grape you know clearly shown on the label the new world he means is of course places like New Zealand South Africa United States of America California in particular and indeed Australia just to refresh your memory while you refresh my palate please dear boy thank you he’s a bit slow good as they say encouraging to be here it’s my usual procedure you know the old site smell and taste you don’t need to do this at home if you don’t want on the appearance if we have a look first of all the thing to look here obviously lovely bright colour with reasoning you tend to get I suppose a paler shade of color and this one you can see is quite a sort of straw I I disagree to me that’s very lemony you’re more on the on the lemon side the one thing people might sort of be interested in is that with Riesling you sometimes do get a sort of greenish tinge in the color is that anything to do with the fact they come out of wooden barrels no no no I mean it’s more to do with the the reasoning grape itself which tends to be on the greener side and some of that color seems to come through into the finished wine if we go into the smell you can see the nose this is of course very little of that wood character comes through that what you get on Alsace reasoning is this beautiful pure fruit with reason you tend to get these very sharp green smells you know I guess almost of a citrusy sort of cooking apple type character I mean this is fruity and it’s dry yes because if you’re going to do the taste I mean the thing that comes through very strong is this is virtually dry very different from the German style where you expect some sweetness but also very very acid very fresh acidity moderate alcohol the great thing about raising particular threes is the elegance of the wine but you shouldn’t confuse sweetness with fruitiness should use I mean this is dry and fruity this is not dry and sweet I know it sounds a bit silly but it is dry and fruit you know in many ways that’s the as the essence of owls us wines that combination of superb fruit it’s all about sort of lightness elegance finesse it’s not trying to sort of blow your head off in fact I think it’s a very delicious wine but you hear people talking about reasoning do they talk about chardonnays and ryoga’s and things like that but it is a pity because I suppose most people think that it’s either too dubious of origin too sweet or too cheap you know it’s it’s a real tragedy because it is such a great great any here in Alsace you know they’ve got one of the great places for growing the reasoning what is the reason for that why why is it so good I think it’s back to our usual business about the climate we’re obviously it’s still right up in the north of France here with a cool climate so that gives us the lovely freshness and the crispness but of course the Vosges mountains shelter Alsace cut out a lot of the rain coming in from the West so you’ve got this magic combination of a cool and dry climate to be honest you know if you wanted to design a perfect climate for making white wine you’d have something like the climate analysis and then of course with the mountains it also gives you the chance to have some vineyards on quite steep slopes so you get this superb aspect really aspect yes what is this what is this aspect he’s talking about well we’ve talked about some of the factors like soil so now when you think about the aspect or the slope of a vineyard good thing is a bad thing if you’re wearing clothes for the vines it’s generally a good thing because the slope as you can see here will catch as much Sun as possible and will be good for other reasons like drainage as well because that goes we’ll for red wines as with his wives absolutely in a cool region like Alsace you need all the help you can get and of course this sort of slope it’ll catch the Sun what Sun but it’s also good for drainage if this lot descends on us so it’s good news really but it must make harvesting much more difficult absolutely I mean you could see here you’re gonna have to pick everything by hand spray by hand you know it’s very labor intensive this sort of thing here so this is gonna make the price of the wine much more expensive absolutely I mean this will be obviously a premium wine inexpensive wine the great wines of the world are generally made in small quantities that they prune the vines very hard you know they’ll remove bunches during the summer to get the vine to focus its energy on what’s left so you’ve got a small quantity of production and then of course as we saw in Bordeaux last week you know where you’re maturing the wine for a long time in wood that adds to the cost and then of course you’ve got other factors like the cost of duty and things which again will drive up the price yeah Jonathan that was brilliantly succinct thank you feel glad we’ve got the techniques out of the way anyway now while you sit back and continue to enjoy all reason besides reasoning I’m off to explore this beautiful area [Music] I’m staying in coma in southern Alsace and despite the various Wars and occupations its beautiful architecture remains unscathed as you see here in Little Venice and what better way to explore then by punt before drinking and eating the local fare for me Alsace is one of the premier gastronomic regions of France the food here is sensational and one of the classic dishes is shukru pickled cabbage so with smoked and fresh pork but let’s look at the ingredients first of all potatoes carrots garlic onions and crispy Alsace cabbage over here we have salt bacon smoked bacon smoked loin of pork fresh knuckle and two kinds of Strasbourg sausages but the star of our show is choucroute pickled cabbage now this is very simply done back to me Mike you take one of these fresh cabbages slice it very very finely mix it with bay leaves peppercorns and juniper berries lots of sea salt put it into an earthenware container put a weight on it but muslin over it leave it for two or three weeks it pickles and it’s fabulous the other things we have juniper berries garlic bay leaves I’m using pork fat today you could very happily well use goose fat or duck fat no I just get my pan up to there the other thing about this recipe it is a to bottle recipe why is the to bottle recipe one bottle of reasoning here another bottle of reasoning here the reason for that is one bottle of reasoning is for me and Cheers and the other bottle of reasoning is for the dish so the first thing we do stick some fat into here and melt that down a little bit and pop in some garlic that will take a second or two to warm through let the garlic get nicely browned to gives out all the flavors into the goose flat and then we start stirring in our soup let’s try that in the garlic and the pork fat you could use goose that as I said goose or for satisfying I know you’re going don’t worry about me I’ll just carry on cooking [Music] sorry about that but good food waits for no one a little bit of parsley and there we are but it’s only that that Alsace is famous for its famous for its wonderfully sweet delicately made brioches almond flavored cinnamon flavored all kinds of wonderful flavors it’s often said back to me please Mike just for a second they say that any pet easier any cake maker can become a cook but not any cook can become a cake maker anyway they’re also famous for their wonderful Myrtle tarts their plum tarts they’re superb quiche Lorenz and their onion parts wonderful lovingly baked breads but for me the real star is the shoot Gaffney Alsace eeeh although shoe code and our next wine give birth Remini sound ugly they both taste good anyway JP JP this converts tréminis sounds very very German it does sound very I’m noting it I think obviously the name is of German extraction but in fact it’s I suppose the great one associates most with Alsace but yeah as you say it’s it’s originally from the other side of the Rhine you know the converts bit is the grape well yeah rightly the the converts part of the name actually means spicy in German so you and I can check out whether it actually has anything like a spicy taste or no and what just tremendae mean I think ramen is the village Japan II where it came from so it’s literally that sort of spicy grape from the village of Traum in but anyway let’s get it open if you wouldn’t mind I’m a bit thirsty this morning or tonight whatever time of day this is meant to be so was very confusing on these shoots you know that we cheat a lot well I don’t cheat that the director does anyway you should be opening yours at home now as well by the way I hope you are quite dear heart now make this a bit snap it would you because I’m you know what’s that usual routine on the appearance the thing to watch out for on converts traveler wines they do tend to have a fairly deep color right the grapes are quite a dark color on the vine and that to some extent comes through in the appearance for the wine that’s the appearance now on the nose this is where we can look and see whether we’ve got this spiciness now I’m never quite sure that you actually get a true spice character but any spicy spice in there known and I I never actually get the spice character but what what you do notice is that incredibly intense smell you know of all the white grapes Gewurztraminer is probably the one that gives you the most pungent smell that you know very rich very heavy now you can have a heavier smell and it sounds a bit funny but it’s that’s what I see it as yeah and it smells sweet or you can’t actually smell sweetness it’s one of these extraordinary things with you and I can’t smell sweetness but where we smell something so ripe and with so much fruit it gives us an illusion of sweetness the one fruit you often hear referred to for the verts drummers like cheese you’re almost at sort of them a very tropical fruit smell and also almost a floral scented perfume bit like sort of roses or higher things something like that – but did you get the line cheese side let me get the lighter side yeah I agree with you there certainly unmistakable smell Gewurztraminer and then on the taste as we’ve seen with the reason these houses wines tend be on the drier side you know it may not be absolutely bone-dry but it’s certainly pretty dry and much drier than you’d expect from a equivalent German wine choice on the taste not so acid as the reasoning either but quite full in flavor quite rich quite oily so heavy and really very concentrated are you getting two things I find I know what you find I first will enjoy the first taste then I find it very pleasant going down the throat yeah really good going down this with extra fruit comes up yeah you know it’s not a thin wine at all is it it almost has that sort of oily texture doesn’t it very very weighty rich style of wine very fully and of course this will mean that it will work very very well often with food you know if you want a rich white wine talking your food I mean this can you can drink raela with pudding with white meat I think not fish I don’t think what do you think what are you doing this with I don’t know the other thing you hear people talking about with Gewurztraminer is the fact that it will work very often well with Asian foods I disagree totally I think there’s no wine in my view goes with Asian food at all I mean take curries for example I think it’s beers fruit juices passionfruit juice and yogurt based drinks stuff like that with Vietnamese Thai Chinese and stuff sake scented tea those canned again fruit juices again I don’t know what do you think would you what you think at home you’re all Caritas are all Tigers and stuff like that no that’s all very interesting but why have you brought these we gonna take some more this morning well I’m sorry I’ll beat it was more just to show you that as we’ve seen the Alsace wines tend to come in these tall green flute bottles and I’m sure they’re in a lot of markets this is part of what’s holding back the sales of these wines that you and I absolutely love them but I’m sure when a lot of people see a bottle like that they think it must be Germanic or it must be sweet and it’s throws people I think whereas when you think of friends we tend to think of a bottle like this a classic Bordeaux bottle here with the tall shoulders or at the other end of the line we’ve got the burgundy bottle with its sloping shoulder or you know down in Provence the Rochas rooms that’s right all roses the roan bottle that more sort of dumpy type of bottle in some markets this flute bottle in Alsace just and creates a bit of confusion and I think it’s one of the things that may have held them back a bit you know hasn’t held me back I adore it whereas JP’s dissertation on the shapes and sizes of bottles was terribly interesting what’s really important is that they’re full anyone who finds bottom lines thrilling has to have a personality defect but for those of you who do like this sort of thing like Trainspotting these things can fill up 9000 bottles now it’s spotlessly clean and makes it one person one for you one for me one for you one for me one for me again and down on that it what’s so special about cork well I’m not quite sure who first had the brilliant idea to strip some bark off a tree and use it to close a bottle but we’ve been using it for several hundred years and it’s fantastic it will keep a wine fresh for donkey’s years you know in 3040 years of life out of a red wine maturing with a cork like this you know so why are we going over to plastic all right well there is an ecclesiastical or in fact to a glaze here like most of us first of all it’s very expensive nowadays second thing is you’re probably way you can get sometimes a bit of a taint coming from a natural call and you get what’s called a cork wine it’s got that horrible moldy fungal smell so people have experimented with alternatives your plastic cork and then obviously the screw-top bottle as well doesn’t take this some of the romance out of our wine drinking it does it does but I think the feeling is that the screw-top bottle is perfectly fine for everyday drinking the plastic cork seems to be the one that over the last few years they’ve put a lot of effort into and I think there’s a pretty key place like Australia some quite posh wines are now going into plastic corks so we don’t need to be put off by a plastic no no no I don’t think so I think so I think we’re gonna see a lot more of them over the next few years I think you won’t catch on Jonathan just there mentioned this business about corked wine now what really does that mean because most people think and many have asked me they have phoned in all sorts of things they think it’s when there are little bits of cork floating around the bottle from a badly withdrawn corkscrew but that’s not the case is it that it’s not a quart wine no it’s one of the great misconceptions that sometimes the actual cork itself has a moldy taint and that could be transferred to the wine so that when you and I pull the cork will pull the wine out it’s actually picked up that sort of thing so be fair to say there’s a plastic one is to eliminate exactly exact or ever brilliant I’ll drink to that now the wine has been made bottled and called splendid but another really good thing about alf s apart from the food and the architecture is their sense of tradition and the wine is still fermented in wonderful wooden barrels Oh [Music] if your fine bottle of perverts remedy was produced by a company called Whoville it might have come from this fine old barrel the Austin world built in 1715 and containing 14 thousand bottles that would last a week or two children of this first five weeks but any of us thoroughly enjoyed myself I’ve also learned a bit and I’m actually quite interested in becoming a wine grower myself sounds very appealing doesn’t it but I’m afraid there we’ve really looked at the good side there are all sorts of terrible things that can go badly wrong like what well for instance I mean early in the growing season when the buds are newly opened they’re actually very very sensitive to frost damage and there are things you can do about that for instance in Alsace you know they train the vines high off the ground and that means the cool air sinks away from the vines and you get some natural protection that way elsewhere in France you’ll see things like eaters fans even things like giant windmills which keep the air circulating they even have a bizarre places of spraying water on the vines which freezes as ice and actually gives you some natural protection that way I’m sorry I understand how can something frozen the sea views and sounds crazy doesn’t it but the water freezes as ice but actually that it’ll shoot inside is perfectly protected so that’s early in the spring in the summer one of the principal risks is hail you can get sort of terrible hailstorm sweeping through a vineyard essentially smashing up the vine and really devastating things you know well should get insurance where you can you can but you thought sort of spraying water on the vines is strange what they actually do for hail is they fire rockets into the clouds and Rockets yep Rockets the rocket explodes in the cloud and causes the moisture to drop as rain rather than as hail later on listen since this is meant to be a partly educational program and a partly a fun program as far as i’m so it should be a fun program let’s have a rocket in Phylon off the viewers would love it I’d quite enjoy it as well because some bits this period bit darling a few bangs from here and there they want to see a rocket sounds good fun doesn’t it but I’m afraid the locals here in Al’s us don’t really use the rocket system and in any case it’s beautiful sunshine fire a rocket and there must be a rocket somewhere I mean this is television after all and if you talk about so you’re gonna show them what it looks like otherwise the punters are disappointed anyway after your spasm over the Hale Rockets you’ll be horrified to know that various other things can go wrong and during the summer they can often run into quite severe disease problems in fact this is a very old fashioned but in the past very effective early warning sign that vines like a lot of plants are very sensitive to mildew and you know we the rain in the summer and humid conditions it can be a problem so it’s a bit like the old Canaries down the pits that this is a sign if the road starts getting milled you that there’s a big disease risk why would these rows get us ahead of the vine when it’s pushed so closely together I think the story goes that the Rose is slightly more sensitive so you know if it comes down then the grower knows he’s got to work quickly get some spray on the vine right exactly exactly so that’s I think we just make it look pretty well to be honest I think nowadays that’s my mainly what it’s for but I think you can see that you know when you add all these factors together what can go wrong it makes the grape growing not an easy business in fact I’ve been considering my original enthusiasm and I thought about it deeply wrongly and hardly for now nearly you know this is my third visit to this area and I still enjoy the place not to mention the fine wines all in all it’s been a great day except jp’s tantrum over the Rockets of course I’m not remotely concerned about JP wine snobs or anybody else I’m gonna launch this thing anyway [Music] and my German actually you