Robert Hijmans puts his money where his mouth is.
I took the train to Berkeley, less than two hours from Davis towards San Francisco. I checked in at the French hotel and dined in the restaurant across the street. We are talking about Alice Waters’ place, Chez Panisse a restaurant well known to the readers of this blog and in-flight magazines.
There is the formal restaurant downstairs (fully booked) and the café upstairs (a late table was available). I had wine made of Zinfandel grapes. ((Quintessential Napa, only recently discovered to be the Croatian variety “Crljenak Kasteljanski” — or so I learned at Harlan II.))
I took the US$29 fixed menu. It had a garden lettuce salad, spaghetti alla Norma with eggplant, tomato, basil, and ricotta salata, and a Concord grape sherbet with roasted Thompson seedless grapes and langues de chat. ((Sic. Why the mix of English, Italian and French?))
These were the variety names on today’s menu: Concord grape, Thompson seedless grapes, and Little Gems lettuce.
And these were the farm names on the menu: Cannard Farm ((As in: “Cannard Farm rocket with shaved zucchini, pine nuts, and pecorino, $9.00”)), Andante Dairy, Soul Food Farm, Marin Sun Farm, Lagier Ranches, and Frog Hollow Farm.
Terroir trumps agrobiodiversity at Alice’s place.
It is a good restaurant. It is very French. The waiter spoke of terroir as if his name were Claude Duchateu. It is very cheap for a famous restaurant. It has a local twist to it. The food is good. But is mainstream now. The menu in the Davis Best Western Palm Court was not that different.
I suppose it is fair what everybody says, that Alice created some sort of revolution. From the wasteland of the American diner to Good Food. Just like her neighbor Alfred Peet transformed mainstream American coffee from diluted sewage to the best coffee anywhere save (perhaps) Italy. But that is ancient history.
But, just for your information, Chez Panisse is passé now. Go look somewhere else. I have heard of an underground restaurant movement in New York.
Chez Panisse is sold out every night, I think. Alice can experiment. But she does not. She chooses the middle of the road. Their produce comes from “farms, ranches, and fisheries guided by principles of sustainability” but the majority of entrees (main dishes) are a fish or meat dish.
Chuck out the meat. Serve different varieties of other veggies than tomatoes (even the Andronico’s supermarket across the street sells heirlooms). Use something locally evolved rather than merely locally grown. The native Californians used hundreds of edible plants. ((Full disclosure: After being captured and given the opportunity, Ishi, the last ‘wild’ Californian Indian, quickly switched to a doughnut diet.)) But no miner’s lettuce or acorns on the menu of the Queen of Slow Food. Come on, Alice, surprise me!
P.S. That pasta was really good though. I will go back tomorrow to further investigate the case.
Nice story, the footnote about Napa vines being a Croatian variety. The discoverer wouldn’t order a Zinfandel wine, though (“not a drop of it”).
Like with the Carolina Gold story, I am very suspicious of these kinds of discoveries. How do we know a variety originates from any place (or is “indigenous”)? I wondered what would happen if we searched more intensively in Southern Europe. Perhaps we find dozens of clones of this same variety. Or the Croatian one is only a remnant of a variety that had a much wider distribution before?
Now that’s the geographer in me speaking. But in terms of terroir, perhaps “kastel(j)anski” doesn’t refer to Kastela (Croatia) but to Castilla?
By the way, the top models told me they are still waiting for a response.
I have not seen Meredith’s paper but I agree that there is likely some more phylo-geographic and historical research that you need to do if your really want to nail this down. Let’s talk about that some day over a glass of Croatian wine (Assuming they are available, I do not think I have ever had or seen one).
Grapes got dragged around Europe a lot, and even where there are wild vines I’m sure they’ve got centuries of intercrossing with cultivated varieties, so I’m not sure there’s any way to say with any certainty where Zinfandel/Crljenak Kasteljanski came from.
However, the abstract of Meredith’s paper ( Maletiæ et al), which is all I can afford of it, says that many alleles in Zinfandel were more common among Croatian vinifera than among vinifera in general. That at least suggests that it or its relatives had been there for a long while.
Oh, and as far as searching more intensively among other Southern European vines–most of southern Europe’s cultivars had already been pretty exhaustively fingerprinted molecularly by the time the Crljenak connection came along. Only the relative obscurity of the eastern cultivars delayed it this long.
The only major synonym of Zinfandel I know of outside of Croatia is Primitivo (also known as Morellone or Uva di Corato), which is an Italian variety. However there doesn’t appear to be any evidence of Primitivo in Italy before 1860.
This paper suggests varieties related to Zinfandel are present in a much broader area. Just as I would guess.
This team was from Italy and Montenegro. I guess an element of “terroir” was important in hypothesis formulation…
Well…depends how you define “much broader area”. Croatia, Hungary, and Austria don’t exactly constitute a gigantic region.
You forget Montenegro, where they also found Zinfandel under the name Kratosija.
From Montenegro to Austria you have an area roughly the size of the entire state of California.
And perhaps even more… The absence of evidence of not the same as the evidence of absence.