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Wine & Food Fest: Where Terroir Meets Tradition lunch
Like the South by Southwest festivals, the daytime programming for the Hill Country Wine and Food Festival isn’t so much about bells and whistles as it is examining the nuts and bolts of the industry. On Friday afternoon, Texas terroir — the combination of soil, climate and the less tangible “sense of place” — that so profoundly affects the wine produced in the state was the focus of a lunch at the AT&T Conference Center & Hotel, moderated by Jane Nickels, an engaging instructor from the Texas Culinary Academy.
Chefs Octavio Benavides (Maria Maria), Paul Petersen (soon-to-be-formerly of the Gage Hotel in Marathon) and Josh Watkins (former Driskill Hotel executive chef who now watches over four restaurants at the AT&T conference center) paired courses with six Texas wines.
Benavides served a taco with chipotle and orange marinated shrimp with a side of mango habanero sauce and melted blackberry pasilla sorbet to go with a melange from Llano Estacado Winery and the Angel Riesling from Messina Hof Winery. Nickels explained that sweet, salt and heat, all present in Benavides’ dish, are the “psycho wine killers of the food world,” but the catch is that a sweet wine takes away some of the heat of the dish and sweetness in the food can take away from the sweetness of the wine (which in the riesling was close to overbearing, likely a far cry from the Angel Riesling that Wine Spectator gave 90 points to in 1990).
Watkins’ tomato fennel soup, he admitted, was his first attempt to pair wine with soup at such a pairing, but the acidic nature of tomatoes did a great job cutting down the acidity of the sangiovese from McPherson Cellars and the Prairie Rôtie from Becker Vineyards.
Petersen, applauded at each festival event when he confirms he’s coming back to Austin from three years at the helm of Cafe Cenizo in Marathon, served another version of the quail he presented at the Culinary Masters Dinner Thursday night at the Four Seasons. Everything on the plate was from Texas, he told the crowd of about 25, and the dish paired well with the near-legendary Meritus wine from Fall Creek Vineyards and the Norton from Stone House Vineyard.
“We can grow, within our borders, almost every grape variety — almost,” said Ed Auler, whose winery in Tow was one of the pioneering ventures in Texas winemaking. It’s a matter of learning what grows best in the kind of soil you’re working with and embracing the unlimited possibilities you have with blending, he said. Sangiovese, viongnier, for example thrive in the Texas heat; cabernet does well in the high plains. Expect to see more tempranillo in the future. Plant to the land, said John Bratcher of McPherson.
Echoing a familiar saying of winemaker Greg Bruni of Llano Estacado, Auler said, as much to his fellow winemakers as to the crowd: “The best wines in Texas have yet to be made.”
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