I love to eat simply, and simple to me means two or three main ingredients prepared in a way that brings out the greatest depth of flavor. For a tomato sauce, it is important to choose high-quality tomatoes to achieve the ideal balance of sweetness and tanginess. A good tomato also gives you a beautiful, pulpy, and silky sauce. Add a dash of good olive oil, complimentary aromatic spices, and some garlic, and you have created a simple sauce with great depth of flavor. A long cooking time is essential to marry the flavors, bring out the sweetness of the tomatoes, and provide the perfect sauce consistency. A few good ingredients for handmade pasta are also key.
Chefs and home cooks love to modify their pasta dough recipes. Different kinds of flour, as well as egg, water, and olive oil ratios, all affect the consistency and taste of the finished dough. Playing around with a basic dough recipe provides a great variety of flavors and textures… It is also good fun!
In the recipe that follows, I simply substituted some freshly milled whole wheat flour to give the pasta an earthy, nutty base note as well as provide some weight and texture from the bran in the flour. The little bit of roughness from the bran also helps to grab the sauce. The flavor of the whole wheat marries well with POV.
POV can definitely relate to simplicity, depth of flavor, and texture. We start with good ingredients, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, and Cabernet Sauvignon, organically and biodynamically grown on our estate vineyards. We harvest and bring them to the cellar door where after destemming and crushing, we let native yeasts, in all their glory, take over the fermentation and work with the fermenting grapes to provide a deep depth of flavor supported by maturing in about 30% new French oak barrels that provide structure and texture for a silky fruit overlay.
As a chef, I continually see the connection between cooking and winemaking. Success in both stems from working with the best ingredients possible and then stewarding those ingredients through a process, whether cooking or fermenting, to bring out the greatest depth of the flavors from the ingredients.
That’s why I’m never going to stop growing or seeking out the best ingredients for my meals, and we won’t stop growing the best ingredients for our wines.
Until the Next Wine…
Maria
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