Virtual Gourmet
THIS WEEK The
Resort at Pelican Hill:
NEW YORK CORNER
NOTES
FROM THE WINE CELLAR
The World’s Most
Endangered Wine Region:
❖❖❖
The Resort at Pelican Hill By
Carey Sweet
One of the challenges of growing
olives is that they are an alternate bearing fruit,
meaning that one year a tree may produce a plentiful
harvest, but the next year, the branches may be nearly
naked, which can make planning an annual olive
festival a bit tricky, as the organizers of the first
ever Festa Dell’Autunno at The Resort at Pelican Hill
(below) in Newport Beach, CA,
discovered last fall. As the day of the headliner
celebration grew near last October 29, there were few
olives to be had. The 504-acre property’s 750-plus
trees, imported as mature specimens up to 100 years
old when they were planted for the resort’s opening in
2008, hid just handfuls of the tangy orbs amid their
gray-green leaves.
Yet no matter, for what might have been viewed as a
test-run of the salute to fruit was embraced by guests
anyway. Dozens made reservations at the resort to take
in a full day of olive-y celebrations, drawn by
attractions including demonstrations on olive pressing
from a local olive master using southern California
olives, food, wine, and music. Through November,
special olive oil tasting menus were offered at the
resort restaurants, tempting with dishes ranging from
olive oil poached Alaskan king salmon to baked apple
tart with olive oil gelato, while olive oil could also
be applied directly to the skin, in specialized
treatments at the resort spa.
While it’s summer now,
the next olive festival is not far off, and its
popularity means you might think of planning
ahead. Pelican Hill’s olive curator is already
working amid the trees for Festa Dell’Autunno MMXII,
surely whispering sweet nothings to the trees to
encourage the fruit to emerge. Tickets are on sale for
the 2012 party, which will take place November 2
through 4.
Already, the menus have been set by Pelican Hill’s
chefs, who will feature rustic olive oil in special
meals throughout the festival.
Seeing the pressing action at the festival last year
gave oil lovers like me a taste of how demanding the
process can be and how much fruit can be required to
extract the silky stuff. Olive master Thom Curry (left),
owner of Temecula Olive Oil Company, put on a live
pressing, filtering the golden-green liquid from
bushels of green fruit via a complicated machine that
looked like a giant metal wheel in a box stuck with
hoses. We could taste oil right from the press and in
different stages of aging (it’s meant to be consumed
young),
If there is a Goddess of Olive Oil (right), she
was there, though she did not speak, parading silently
through the crowds in head-to-toe royal blue, from her
face paint to her elaborate empire dress with its
train trailing regally behind her, her flowing cape
and towering feather headdress above her gold trimmed
eye mask.
I don’t know if Italians – or olive growers – spend
much time drawing with chalk on sidewalks either (below),
but the Southern California street painting artists
showcasing their works added a distinct festival
charm, working on their creations throughout the
daylong event, until the works appeared in full dusty
splendor: a lovely young peasant woman plucking
olives, another beauty posing proudly with a full
basket of fruit, and more. And for that bit of
extra something, we could sit inside a shiny new
Lamborghini, Maserati, Ferrari and several kicky
little Fiats on display.
For a Festa spa treatment (below), I chose the
grape seed and olive oil scrub, but not until I had
relaxed in the meditation room for a good hour
beforehand, enjoying a spa lunch of crispy flatbread
painted with If
you go: Festa Dell’Autunno Weekend Package 2012:
NEW YORK CORNER
BOOM-BADDA-BOOM The trouble with having music BOOM-BADDA-BOOM in restaurants these days BOOM-BADDA-BOOM
is that you can’t even BOOM-BADDA-BOOM
hear the music if you wanted to BOOM-BADDA-BOOM. Hold on, lemme turn it off. BADDA-BOOM!!!
❖❖❖ NOTES FROM THE WINE CELLAR
The World’s Most Endangered Wine Region: Portugal’s Colares Appellation
by
David Lincoln Ross
Sand
Worshiper: The Ramisco grape
thrives in sandy soils, hence its rapid growth and
popularity across late 19th century Europe, when
the most of the continent’s vineyards were
devastated by the phylloxera pest, but not in
Colares, where the pest cannot abide sand.
It was then that Colares wines were known as the
“Bordeaux of Portugal,” owing to their finesse and
delicacy. HOW
SAND SAVED THE WINES OF COLARES
Hemmed
in by still expanding residential and commercial
developments, Colares’s once expansive rural landscape
of farms, orchards and seaside vineyards has gradually
given way to ultra-modern weekend retreats, luxury
hotels, and plush gated-communities. Adding to
the coastal transformation of these once sleepy
fishing ports and nearby hamlets, vineyard owners of a
certain age in Colares are “cutting back”, pun
intended: That is, these 60- and 70-year-olds are
selling their holdings, which nowadays are more
valuable as ocean-side residential lots than as
cherished backyard vineyards. (Indeed, Colares, and
neighboring Azenhas do Mar, have undergone a startling
evolution much SO
WHAT DOES A COLARES TASTE LIKE? Very Cherry: The Arenae Colares, vintage 2005, from the Adega Regional
do Colares, is a medium-bodied
Francicsco offered the most
remarkable, and enlightening, reply: a Pinot Noir
Burgundy from a Premier Cru Cotes de Nuits, or
a fine Nebbiolo bottling from Barolo in Italy. In
fact, if you poll sommeliers as well as expert
Portuguese and Spanish wine importers, they might well
tell you a Colares wine exhibits the following
characteristics: Ramisco-based wines are
light-to-medium bodied; they feature distinct, some
say relatively high, levels of acidity; and thanks to
the Ramisco’s thick skin, Colares wines also possess
ample levels of tannin; and most would note their
alcohol level rarely exceeds 12% or 12.5%. At their
best, these wines are enormously long-lived,
well-structured, balanced and display great finesse,
all capped by a long, lingering finish of red berry
fruit and black cherry jam. In their youth, they can
be a bit astringent, but with age, they blossom! DOES
THE RAMISCO HAVE BURGUNDIAN ROOTS? – A VINOUS
MYSTERY To
locate and sample the Colares wines in the U.S.,
visit: bit.ly/Re7xWJ David Lincoln Ross is a food, wine and travel writer based in NYC. For more blogposts, please visit: davidlincolnross.wordpress.com ❖❖❖ ![]() THE MUSIC FOR THE SHOW--"ON THE TOWN IN LJUBLJHANA"
“I had one day to see Slovenia. Ten
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had never been to Slovenia, had always wanted to visit
it, and might never get back. And we had to return to
Trieste by 7 p.m., before our ship set sail for the
next port of call.”—Wendy Perrin, “Slovenia,” Conde Nast Traveler
(3/12).
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