Liquid Love Letter: From Stars to Home Bars

Cathy

This week Matthew is attending World's 50 Best awards week in Las Vegas, and I am shortening the distance between “star” wineries and chefs, and those of us who want to experience those stars in our home bars and kitchens.

Let’s start with the ease of bringing “star” wines home. There are so many ways to gauge what “star” means for you personally. Maybe it’s your all-time favorite wine that’s your go-to for special occasions. Maybe it’s a wine your best friend is raving about. Maybe it’s a wine or two that you enjoyed on your last family vacation. Maybe it’s a wine that’s been rated highly by a critic you follow, or on an app on your phone. Maybe it’s a recommendation by your favorite staff person at your local wine shop. Whatever your criteria, there are many roads to finding a “star” wine to orient your evening around at home.

This week, the star wine squarely at the center of my “star to home bar” experience is Cantina Tramin’s 2021 “Nussbaumer” Gewürztraminer.

A few weeks ago I joined a virtual tasting hosted by Cantina Tramin , the exceptional producer of mostly white wines in the mountainous Alto Adige region of Italy. Full disclosure: I’ve visited this producer at their estate and I am a fan of both the profile of these wines as well as their business model that involves some 160 local families in a cooperative arrangement.

I was so taken by the “Nussbaumer” Gewürztraminer during that virtual tasting that I immediately started wondering how and where I could enjoy the wine again. Which led to asking Tramin’s winemaker (Willi Stürz) and Sales Director (Wolfgang Klotz) about food pairings for the wine. Which led to the other “stars” of the evening, namely Chef Massimiliano Alajmo and Sommelier Angelo Sabbadin of the three-Michelin-star restaurant Le Calandre near Padova, Italy.

Alajmo and Sabbadin had created a recipe specifically to pair with the “Nussbaumer” Gewürztraminer: Risotto with Saffron and Licorice Powder.

If I was going to tread from “stars” to “home bars,” this recipe was the bridge. Fortunately, it meant sourcing another bottle of the Nussbaumer (which was not a difficult or onerous task), and it meant stirring up a saffron risotto, which was a fairly familiar dish.

The licorice powder, though?

I had never heard of it. But Amazon did, and within a few days I had collected all of the stars-to-home-bar ingredients.

The licorice powder was the differentiator that elevated that home-bar experience to something stellar. I was expecting to taste anise fruit, just like with Gewürztraminer I expect to taste spicy notes like ginger and star anise. In this recipe, though, I tasted sweetness from the licorice powder (I learned later that “sweet root” is the alternate name of licorice root, and is about 50 times sweet than sugar), and in the wine I once again tasted things I would not expect to taste in Gewürztraminer: not just “regular” fruits like banana and mango, though certainly they were there, but also stone fruits and lemongrass and tangerine.

Do we need licorice powder in our lives? No, not necessarily. Do we need this Nussbaumer Gewürztraminer in our lives? Also no, not necessarily. But they both elevate the experience of food and wine and their synergy, right at home and all the way from the stars.