Congratulations to the 2010 American Cheese Society* Best of Show Winners
1st: Pleasant Ridge Reserve, Uplands Cheese Co.
2nd: Bonne Bouche, Vermont Butter & Cheese Creamery
3rd: Tarentaise, Spring Brook Farm

Marion Street Cheese Market is proud to carry outstanding cheeses recognized by the American Cheese Society in our Market! Stop in and taste these delicious cheeses!
MSCM carries 10 of the 1st place winners:
Bellwether Farms Fromage Blanc
Jasper Hill/Ploughgate Creamery Hartwell
Nettle Meadow Kunik
Meadow Creek Dairy Appalachian
Sartori Bellavitano Gold
Jasper Hill/Cabot Clothbound Cheddar
Roth Kase Gran Queso
Spring Brook Farm Tarentaise
Uplands Cheese co. Pleasant Ridge Reserve
Vermont Butter and Cheese Bonne Bouche

MSCM carries 10 of the 2nd place winners
Cypress Grove Truffle Tremor
Cowgirl Creamery Mt. Tam
Vermont Butter and Cheese Coupole
Tumalo Farms Fenacho
Bleu Mont Dairy Bandaged Cheddar
Carr Valley Billy Blue
Crave Brothers Farmstead Cheese Farmer’s Rope
Capriole O’Banon
Nordic Creamery Goat Butter
Capriole Sofia

MSCM carries 11 of the 3rd place winners
Sweet Grass Dairy Green Hill
Cypress Grove Humboldt Fog
Old Chatham Sheepherding co. Nancy’s Camembert
DCI Cheese co. Liederkrantz
Fiscalini Cheese co. San Joaquin Gold
Haystack Mountain Goat Dairy Queso de Mano
Beecher’s Flagship Reserve
Capriole Piper’s Pyramide
Meadow Creek Dairy Grayson
Everona Dairy Piedmont
Haystack Mountain Goat Dairy Red Cloud

*The American Cheese Society is an active, not for profit trade organization that encourages the understanding, appreciation, and promotion of farmstead and natural specialty cheeses produced in the Americas and Canada. By providing an educational forum for cheesemakers and cheese enthusiasts, the Society fills an important gap in today’s specialty food world.

05 July 2010

Hello, fellow wine fans,

You know, you flatter me. I hear so often, “I want your job” or “It must be great to be you” or “How cool is what you do for a living!” Thank you. And while you can’t have my job (because I love it so much and need it :>), and while it is great to be me and while being a wine buyer is pretty cool, my line of work is – like everything else – more glamorous from the outside than the inside. I love it, live it, breathe eat, eat it and sleep it but it is a lot of work and a lot of misunderstood work.

A trusted friend of mine who is also one of my vendors recently shared some profound insight with me that is very relevant to my current life. He said something like this: to someone not in our business, our lifestyle looks very bizarre and much like a giant wine-infused party. Unless you’re in it or totally understanding of it, the wine biz and consequently living with someone in it can seem like a lot of things it is not.

Case in point: we taste a lot of wine. A LOT of wine. During heavy tasting days, I’ll taste 80-100 wines a week. To you, that me seem like a lot. To me, it is nowhere near enough. Robert Parker tastes about 125 each day to draw a comparison. While I love and don’t like him all at the same time, I would not mind having his job nor his influence and respect within wine circles. Another case in point: we spit out a lot of this wine. Most of it, truth be told. We are not here to do shots. We are here trying to figure out the right words to describe the liquid that we are going to sell to you with every confidence that the savory thyme notes and balanced acidity will work miracles alongside your perfectly roasted lamb. I guess there are some people who write wine descriptors without either tasting the wine or caring much about the words they chose. I’m not one of them and I hate that consumers might be subjected to their “reviews”. I care and because I don’t have a freakishly great palate, tasting and subsequently writing a few, select, hopefully accurate words about each bottle is brain-challenging, sensory-involved work. Fun work that I love but work in every sense of the word.

Today I haven’t tasted anything yet, but I have a bunch of wine at home that needs to be evaluated. To be brutally honest with you, I just want a friend to show up and take me out for a beer and a whiskey tonight. I don’t feel like drinking wine. However, all of the aforementioned bottles awaiting my evaluation are things that you have asked me for and things that will fill holes on shelves which I of course can’t abide. So, I won’t go have a beer and a Bushmill’s. I’ll go grocery shopping, open my mail, call my mom and then get my corckscrew, notebook and sit down to work with my spit bucket (a pint glass) and pen. I will not be suffering my any means. After all, I love wine; I wouldn’t be in this business otherwise. But, I will be working by anybody’s definition.

Come see me and chase away the heat with a refreshing glass of my new Serbian Pinot Blanc!

Cheers, everyone,  Winemonger Candy

…must be one of complete trust. There are many reasons for this. Let’s look at a few important ones.

First off, the second wine goes into a bad or unstable oak barrel, it is too late to save it. It would be a major drag for a winemaker who spent his entire year tending his liquid masterpiece only to have it ruined by a barrel maker who was not every bit as meticulous.

Secondly, coopers’ styles vary as dramatically as French oak varies from American oak. To begin with, French oak must be split; American oak can be sawn. Because French oak has fewer tyloses (structures that block the vertical fibers of the wood), it would become porous and therefore not watertight if it were sawn. So, the cooper splits the tough, dead heartwood until single staves are produced. And of course, the “house style” of making these staves is perhaps the most important factor in the overall equation of how the barrel will affect the wine. Clearly, the winemaker must know his chosen barrel maker’s style intimately and trust his consistency from year to year. Otherwise, his wine risks losing its identity, through no fault of the winemaker!

Next comes seasoning, a delicate but necessary two-three year process that brings the humidity level of the oak into line with the environment where it will be used. The barrel maker must leave the wood out just long enough but not too long; otherwise, astringent and bitter compounds in the wood will linger and impart the same unpleasant odors and tastes to the wine. Conversely, a mistake in seasoning timing will prevent some desired aromatic compounds like eugenol from increasing. Again, if the cooper doesn’t know what he’s doing, an improperly  seasoned barrel spells disaster for the winemaker and his creation.

Toasting is another step in the cooperage process where implicit communication and shared knowledge between winemaker and barrel maker is vital. In order to bend staves into shape and construct a barrel, staves must be heated over fire (“toasting”). The winemaker specifies light, medium or heavy toast and each level imparts dramatically different characteristics to wine. For example, the desirable vanilla nuance comes from light toasting but decreases at high toast levels. The guaiacol family of flavor compounds to which “spicy” and “smoky” nuances are attributed are increased at high toasting levels.

Complicated and this just scratches the surface. Remember, I’m not a scientist so this small amount of chemistry is stretching my limited brain power. I do find it all fascinating and as your winemonger, I’d be remiss if I didn’t have a clue about the cooperage process. I would also be lying if I didn’t admit that I’m glad someone else has to know everything and make the splitting, seasoning and toasting decisions! Let’s toast to those brave and smart people!

Cheers, everyone.   Winemonger Candy

Opening Day Wed., June 16!

Welcome to the Oak Park, Illinois Mid-Week Market web site. More than a farmers’ market, closer to a street festival, the Mid-Week Market features locally grown fruits and vegetables, food vendors offering a wide selection of ready-to-eat items and local retailers selling goods and services – all in the heart of downtown Oak Park on Lake Street, just east of Harlem Avenue. Local microbrews and wine are available for on-site consumption as well, along with food demonstrations and live music. Held each Wednesday from mid-June through mid-September, the Mid-Week Market is open from 4 – 9 p.m. For more information, e-mail midweekmarket@oak-park.us.

Hello fellow wine fans,
A lot of you have been asking some very great questions about oak barrels and their role in winemaking. The topic comes up frequently so I thought I would share what little knowledge I have with you.

Oak trees falls into the genus of quercus. This genus can be split into hundreds of species. Fortunately for us, we have only four species with which to concern ourselves if we are looking at oak specifically as it relates to wine. Three, q. robur, q.sessiflora, and q.alba are used to make barrels. The fourth, q.suber, is used to make corks. The forests of Limousin, Burgundy, and southern France are home to q.robur while q.sessiflora is found in the central and Vosges region of the country. Q.alba, or white oak, grows in America.

Of all the trees in the world, what makes the oak so fated to end up as a storage vessel for fermenting grape juice? For starters, it’s strong but pretty easy to work with. More importantly, oak engages in and facilitates certain chemical interactions with wine that can positively affect its structure and flavor. Perhaps most significant but seldom talked about is the beneficial effect of micro-oxygenation that occurs while wine is ageing in barrel. An average barrel holds 225 litres of wine. Wine in this barrel will typically get 20-40 milligrams of dissolved oxygen per year. This doesn’t sound like a lot but it is enough to cause some very important things to happen: for example, colour intensifies due to the interaction between tannins and anthocyanins (compounds that give red wine its colour) and tannins are softened by polymerization and eventually precipitate out of the wine.

As for flavor compounds found in oak and the flavours they impart to barrel-aged wine, here’s a brief list:
Lactones = coconut, herbal, earthy
Vanillin = Somewhat ironically, wines aged in barrels smell less oaky than wines fermented in tank because yeast metabolism in barrel reduces vanillin concentration by turning it into odourless vanillic alcohol. Who knew?!
Guaiacol = charred, smoky
Eugenol = cloves
Furfural, 5-methylfurfural = caramel, almond, butterscotch
Ellagitannins = astringent taste but change the wine’s structure and increase colour concentration
Coumarins = bitter, acidic

That’s enough big, unpronounceable, scientific words for me. Next time we’ll touch on the cooperage process and why a huge amount of trust must exist between the winemaker and his barrel maker.

Thanks for reading, everyone. Hope to see you soon ‘round my wine barrel!
Cheers,
Winemonger Candy

Did you hear us on WBEZ 91.5 FM on Monday, February 22nd?
Follow the link to hear Marion Street Cheese Market’s take on unpasteurized cheese on Worldview.
http://wbez.org/content.aspx?audioID=40189

Mmm Mmmm TASTING: Aspire Coffee and Chef Joe’s Cookies
 You can’t go wrong with cookies and coffee in our opinion. So, we’re pairing the delicious blends of AspireCoffeeWorks – Great Coffee Doing Good – and Chef Joe’s preservative-free cookies made with fresh, natural ingredients on Saturday March 6th, from 10am-1pm in the Market.

Chef Joe’s Cookies are made from a 25 year old proprietary recipe created by Chef Joe Duffy.
Your purchase of AspireCoffeeWorks is funding life-changing programs and creating new job possibilities for people with disabilities. Both companies are local and we think they’re pretty special.

Please come in and taste for yourself, and support two local businesses!
Start Time: 10:00am
Date: Saturday March 6, 2010
End Time: 1:00pm