New Belgium Follow-Up

Our friendly neighborhood Bay Area Beer Ranger stumbled across my post about "2° Below Winter Ale" - the seasonal beer that New Belgium will distribute in bars and restaurants beginning this week. If you haven't already, be sure to check out his comments on that post for the scoop.

He was also kind enough to drop by an entirely custom and thoroughly limited edition 6-pack of 2° Below for the misses and I. As the beer will only be available on tap, between now and January, thought I'd share the branding with you:

Tomatoes: Purple Plum: Wild Boar

The Wild Boar Farm folks, from Suisun Valley, refer to these as Evan's Purple Plum tomatoes. They also describe their tomatoes as,"Soon to be world famous." I've eaten a lot of tomatoes this year and this was the first time I felt I had to photograph and come up with words.

The flavor is appropriately sweet and tart, and manages to be meaty without the starchy density of some varieties. In smaller tomatoes of this type, the seed and juice to flesh ratio is probably more akin to a cherry tomato than a traditional plum.

What got me was the incredibly deep hue of the tomatoes --an intensely dusty purple and red-- and the blemishes on the fruit. Even the heirlooms I pick up at Berkeley Bowl or from other vendors at the Grand Lake Farmers' Market adhere to a more traditional notion of aesthetic appeal.


Some of this may be self-inflicted; if I'm dropping 4.00 to 6.00 a pound on produce, I do expect it to be pretty. Something about these Purple Plums though redefines the terms of that expectation.

Rather than some idealized notion of a tomato, they are a tomato that appears to have come from a specific place at a specific time - a kind of vegetable terroir that is only heightened by their being in the last week of the season.

Fruit: Figs

I'd be remiss if I let a whole season of figs go by without a photo. I've mentioned figs here a few times now. Should note that the season appears to be pretty much over. Stores are likely to have them for a while, but the Farmer's Market was running on fumes this morning.

Price hanging steady at 5.00 a basket, the stall where I tracked them down presented them in such a way as to imply scarcity. Two baskets occupying a wide open stretch of table top, three more baskets hidden behind a sign advertising persimmons.

My online research turned up at least one other person (click at your own risk) who feels as strongly as I do about figs:

The Supreme Court of the United States has proven that the law is a barren garden where nothing grows -- except for fig trees. It is Satan's orchard. Justices David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg are the tree surgeons in the abominable nursery of evil.

Of course.

Wine: Zinfandel: Haywood Estates: 1997 Los Chamizal Vineyard

It's unlikely that a quick glance at this blog would convey just how much I'm into wine. This has something to do with how difficult it can be to photograph wine. Generally I drink my wine in the evening, and what with glass being a reflective surface it can be hard to capture the glass and not also your own reflection.

That said, folks who know me will likely be surprised that the first bottle to drive me to post was this conglomerate-owned Zin. While the bottle relates the story of Peter Haywood planting vines on the steep terraces of a sonoma hill back in 1976, Haywood Estates belonged to Allied Domecq until Allied Domecq was acquired by "Pernod Ricard in partnership with Fortune Brands."



Have a history with this bottle though. Shortly after being dot-commed back in 1999, we tasted this wine at the Buena Vista (another Allied Domecq brand) tasting room in Sonoma. After stopping at Ravenswood, and being told by the room staff to not bother buying any of there wine there because Cost Plus carried most of it for much less, Buena Vista seemed stuffy. The 5.00 charge for the premium tasting seemed positively Napa-like.

The Haywood Estates zin made it all worth while though. Bone-dry nose that smelled like dust, dark fruit with pronounced acidity, more elegant than you'd expect for a '97 coming in at 14.5% alcohol. We splurged 40.00-worth on a single bottle. A year and a half later, with me laid off and considering everything from moving to Portland to taking up teaching, we drank it. It wasn't everything we remembered, but we'd been on a tear through our cellar.

Flash forward a few years. Stopped at Buckingham Wine and Spirits this past Friday, on a whim after a meeting with our real estate agent. Seems like they almost always have one bottle on the shelves that has no business being in a small liquor store on at Buckingham Wind and Spirits on Lakeshore avenue. This time around it was the 1997 Haywood Estates Los Chamizal Zin.

The cork on this bottle had seeped a bit, but the nose was just as I remembered.