D

Chalk Talk: The Dallas Wine Trail. Full Report and Extensive Tasting Notes

Welcome to our first edition of Chalk Talk featuring Andrew Chalk. Andrew is a food and wine loving SideDish reader who has taken time out of his busy schedule to send in extensive reports of his experiences around Dallas. Last weekend, he hit the Dallas Wine Trail. Below are his recollections of the day-long event followed by his totally geeky, but insightful, tasting notes. And now, here’s Andrew:

Want to visit the wine country but out of NetJets units? Or don’t want to bear the cost of getting the G50 out of mothballs in the Arizona desert? Easy. Tour the wine country in Dallas where there are now four commercial wineries that have banded together in a joint promotion called the Dallas Wine Trail. The idea is that you travel from one winery to the other, taste three wines at each, talk to the winemakers, and tour the winemaking facilities. For $39 you get the tasting, light food at each location, a souvenir glass and a bottle of one of the wineries wines to take home.

First stop was throbbing downtown Lakewood to visit Times Ten Cellars. This winery sells almost entirely California wine. However, a new development is the coming on stream of their own Texas vineyard “Cathedral Mountain Vineyard” in Alpine Texas (that is so far away it’s closer to Chihuahua than Dallas). It is planted to what appears to be a risk-aversion strategy: Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc reflect Bordeaux. Syrah and Grenache reflect the Rhone region of France and Tempranillo reflects Spain. We tasted the first vintage from Central Mountain Vineyard which includes all of these grapes (see tasting notes below the jump). The food consisted of sandwich rolls filled with either tuna salad or ham. Pretty tasty.

Next stop was at Calais Winery in the neutron bomb test zone known as Deep Ellum. This is the newest of the four wineries on the tour having been formed by Frenchman Benjamin Calais, with exquisite timing, just prior to the economic crash of 2008. To date, all of their wines have been made with California fruit shipped under dry ice for fermentation and aged at their winery in Dallas. However, change is afoot. On the day of the tour, he and his wife had got back barely 24 hours earlier from Newsom Vineyards in Plains, West Texas having spent 48 hours, virtually without sleep, hand picking and crushing fruit left on the vines after mechanical harvesting was completed. Newsom Vineyards is the source of most of the top-ranked Tempranillo wines from the state and Calais and his wife had to go through this hand-picking ordeal because there is a queue of some 50 wineries ahead of him for the fruit. He told me how he had planned to make a Rosé like the Tempranillo Rosados from Spain but gave up when he saw the color of Texas fruit immediately after crushing. The pigmentation was so dark he realized he would be making an inky red monster whatever his best-laid plans. The food match was Scardello’s cheeses although I had to leave before any serious sampling so I just grabbed a slice of the Empire Bakery bread.

The third stop was FUQUA Winery. This winery is focused mainly on California fruit and all three wines we tasted were majority California wine. The food here was the most varied of anywhere on the tour. Rex’s Fresh Seafood provided shrimp paste on crackers that tasted truly shrimpy but unfortunately had some chili’s in that made them incompatible with the wine. Kathleen’s Sky Diner (neé Kathleen’s Art Café) provided half a dozen toppings for bruschetta, an organic meat producer from Oklahoma provided succulent mouth-sized portions of various cuts of beef and Paula Lambert, representing her own firm, Mozzarella Company, served six cheeses including three very worthy chevres.

The final stop was Inwood Estate Vineyards. Here the emphasis is certainly not on ambience. Inwood Estate Vineyards produces wine exclusively from Texas fruit. The winery has a separate label, xxx, for its non-Texas wines. For the tour, they pulled out all the stops, serving their latest flagship offerings of Tempranillo-Cabernet blends, Tempranillo and the limited release ‘Magellan’, a blend of the five Bordeaux varieties and Tempranillo.

Perhaps it was a cult following, perhaps just because it was later in the day, but Inwood Estates was packed. The food had suffered. Maybe it had started as a hors d’oeuvres plate but by now it resembled a grainy movie of 1945 Dresden, with red specks. I passed.
The next Dallas Wine Trail will be publicized here on SideDish. I highly recommend it if you can take part.

Until then, jump for my geeky tasting notes. (more…)

What To Do Wednesday, September 9: An Evening of Wine Tastings & Pleasure

La Duni NorthPark and Cibus are hosting a special evening of wine tastings (from more than 16 wineries), Scardello cheese samples, and live music tomorrow, September 9. Check in at 6 for the festivities that begin at 6:30 pm. Cost is $15 in advance or $20 at the door; call 214-987-2260 to reserve a spot. Should you choose to stay for dinner, it’s $30 per person, and you can get a bottle of one of the featured wines for just $19 a bottle.

Adelmo’s Celebrates 20 Years

Adelmo’s, the little gem of a restaurant on Cole Avenue owned by Adelmo Banchetti, is celebrating 20 years on Saturday, September 12. Should you be so lucky to dine that evening, you’ll get a complimentary glass of prosecco. Cheers to that.

New Sweet Release from Kessler Cookie Company

We’ve been big fans of the sweet boys over at Kessler Cookie Company and their Oak Cliff baked goodness for quite some time. We even named their oatmeal cranberry walnut cookie the city’s best cookie back in 2004. Just found out that KCC is producing an exclusive cookie for Dream Cafe: the Dream Ranger cookie is a blend of oatmeal, chocolate, and coconut. You can find it at both Dream Cafe locations (Uptown and Addison).

Is there a Decent Gai in Dallas?

Nancy is away and so like a fat little gnome, I’m seizing her keyboard, making stupid puns and trying to quench my own food cravings.

About a year ago, I started to read the book, the United States of Arugula, the first sentence of which included a reference to author David Kamp having a “rapturous food memory” of some “Cantonese lobster dish unveiled from beneath a dome in some dimly lit place with a name like Jade Pagoda.”

I never made it all the way through the book, but the sentence stays with me to this day. It has conjured a craving that I can’t seem to quence in Dallas. Mainly it is this: I want to revisit the ’70s and relive a “rapturous food memory,” by having a waiter in some dimly lit place with a name like Won Ton, Lotus Garden or Lai Lai (actual names of Chinese restaurants from my youth in Atlanta and Fort Lauderdale) unveil a plate of Wor Su Gai.

Or, as you may know it: Almond Fried Chicken.

(more…)

Quick Review: The Dog Stop in Dallas

I stopped into the Dog Stop, a drive-through hot dog stand on Arapaho just west of Hillcrest. The menu for this tiny place is amazing: the husband and wife team that owns the spot offers a variety of styles including Chicago, Philly, German, Polish, and Texas.

Texas dog.

I picked up a Texas Dog, a soft poppy seed bun with a Vienna Beef dog topped with yellow mustard, neon green relish, sliced jalapenos, and celery salt. Can’t say that I cared too much for the relish and jalapenos together especially since they were both refrigerator cold and caused the whole sandwich to cool down too fast.

Maxwell Street Polish Special.

The Maxwell Street Dog was terrific. A Polish dog cooked on the griddle, nestled in a yellow mustard covered poppy seed bun, and covered with crunchy grilled onions and a long slice of dill pickle. Next time I’ll substitute sport peppers. This place is a bargain: $5.07 for two dogs and one drink.

7-Eleven Introduces Frutti, the Next Frozen Beverage

Move over SLURPEE®, here comes FRUTTI®, a new smoothie making machine. The invention was developed by Global Smoothie Supply, a Dallas-based company run by David Tiller, husband of local PR gal Martha Tiller. The first self-serve GSS unit was installed at the 7-Eleven store on Northwest Highway at Hillcrest. Tillers, I think you can plan your retirement party now. Just pick a flavor, add a little rum, and send out the invitations.