Much to see, do and learn at Food & Wine Classic

Beer lovers rejoice, make it personal

What’s a beer drinker to do at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen? Why, drink beer, of course.

I’m not much of a wine drinker so I was delighted to attend the inaugural beer and cheese pairing session Friday, titled, “All Aboard for Cheese and Beers: Take a Trip Through Europe’s Greatest Craft Beers and Artisanal Cheeses.”

My grandpa ran small creameries for 50-plus years, so he taught my family appreciation of good cheeses. The beer drinking came naturally. But our beer and cheese pairings were nothing quite like Friday’s tasting.

Laura Werlin, aka Cheezelady, based out of San Francisco, and Anne Becerra, a certified cicerone from New York City, somehow managed a cross-country mix and match of their favorite brews and cheeses in preparation for the event. Despite being the beer version of a sommelier, Becerra made it clear that she had no pretension.

“When tasting, try to make it personal,” Becerra said. “There’s a lot of things that I could tell you but it’s not about memorizing. There’s no right or wrong answer. If you taste something that reminds you of your mom’s garden, great, don’t think you need to learn technical terms or have a whole new vocabulary. I certainly don’t. I use crazy terms like, ‘It tastes like Fruit Loops’ all the time."

Whew! That put me at ease. Over the next hour, Becerra and Werlin were the conductors of what they likened to a train tour across Europe. The first stop hinted at a delightful trip. It featured a bubbly Orval Trappist Ale from Belgium with a cheese called Il Canet, a blend of cow and goat’s milk made since 1880 by the same family in Northern Italy.

“This cheese, if you smell it, is a little bit funky but it doesn’t taste as funky as it smells, as most cheeses that smell funky are the same. They don’t usually taste as strong as they smell,” Werlin said. The creamy cheese, she added, “likes bubbles of any kind.”

Our imaginary train trip introduced us to beers ranging from a light, refreshing Bavarian hefeweizen to a La Trappe Dubbel that I found a bit overwhelming but it impressed the red wine lovers in the crowd. Fortunately, the beer was bailed out (for me) by its pairing with my favorite cheese of the session, a sheeps’ milk Gouda named Rispens after the family of farmers in northern Holland who started making it a few years ago.

Becerra wrapped the session up with good advice and a helpful tip. Her advice for fans of India Pale Ales, like me, was to experiment with a flight of the beers and a variety of cheese to see which pairings trip your trigger. Rely on your taste, not necessarily what someone recommends, she advised. The emphatic tip was to free your beer from a bottle or can and drink out of a tulip or wine glass. Not even a standard pint glass will do a brew justice, she said.

—Scott Condon

Variety of Indian breads to round out any meal

Chef Maneet Chauhan invented a new flavor of paratha on Saturday with the help of the audience at her cooking demonstration at the St. Regis on Saturday — the Aspen paratha.

Parathas are a flaky, layered flatbread and one of many types of breads that can be served with Indian meals. For her demonstration, Chauhan prepared two different fillings for the parathas: a pea and a carrot filling, both of which are common, but when she asked the audience which one she should use first, half the room wanted peas and the other half wanted carrots. To make everybody happy, Chauhan used both. It was a whole new thing.

“That’s cooking,” Chauhan said with a smile on her face. “There are no rules. You can make your own rule.”

In addition to the Aspen parathas, Chauhan made three other types of typical Indian breads: a fluffy puri, a stuffed kulcha with potatoes and paneer and of course, a signature naan.

Bread is the center of any meal, Chauhan said, and while naan is the star of many Indian restaurants, there are no limits to how to make Indian bread. The amazing thing about Indian breads is that depending on the season, you can use almost any filling you want and you can make a delicious meal. Above all, Chauhan recommended lots of butter and toasted spices.

“Butter does make the world better,” she said. “Cooking is all about taking something you’ve learned and putting your own spin on it. That’s what takes something from being delicious to memorable.”

—Megan Webber

Incredible stories from ‘Winemaking is Freedom’

Every wine has a story. And being a great winemaker shouldn’t be about your gender, your skin color, who you love or if you live in Bordeaux. It’s about making great wine.

This is the messaging of Go There Wines, a new social enterprise company bringing to market trailblazing wines made by women and other underrepresented winemakers from lesser-known regions around the world.

Co-founded last year by celebrated restaurateur Rose Previte and her husband David Greene, an award-winning journalist and the former national host of NPR’s Morning Edition, Go There Wines was created with the aim of disrupting the global wine industry and championing a new era of winemakers by shedding light on their stories.

I had the opportunity to immerse in some of these incredible stories on Thursday, the eve of the Food & Wine, at the “Winemaking is Freedom” event. It was the first event that I attended heading into a packed F&W weekend, and it was perhaps the most authentic endeavor that I got to partake in.

Presented by Go There Wines and Aspen Public Radio, the event celebrated the marriage of winemaking and storytelling. And, serving as a fundraiser in support of APR, it also celebrated the importance of local journalism.

Attendees gathered at a white tent set up on the lawn of a home in the West End. Wandering around to the different stations — which featured a diverse selection of seven wines and also food pairings by Washington, D.C.-based Chef Eritrea Mehary — I could tell that Go There Wines is different from any other wine program I’ve encountered thus far.

Even the labeling of the bottles — each of which displays quotes from the winemakers and QR codes linked to their stories — told me that Greene and Previte’s mission is one worth knowing and sharing.

Previte and Greene were there, pouring us tastes of their Go There Wines. They each spoke a few words and showed a powerful video that told the stories of the winemakers behind the bottles on display at the Aspen event.

And from hearing from woman winemaker Maria Frangieh who defies gender stereotypes in the Bekka Valley of Lebanon to Tara Gomez — who is the first recognized Native American winemaker in the United States — and her wife, Mireia Taribó, pursuing their natural wines in California’s Zotovich Vineyard, I felt the significance of the wines I’d tasted that evening and the impact of storytelling.

I left the "Winemaking is Freedom" event feeling grateful for storytellers, like Greene and Previte, who pursue it to help liberate others.

—Jacqueline Reynolds

Whiskeys: Starting F&W right with some liquid gold

On Friday morning, with a roomful of my new friends, I started Food & Wine the right way, with a proper Irish breakfast at the “Whiskeys Around the World” panel at Limelight Hotel.

Our seven-course meal contained grain and fruits from across the globe, fermented in classic and new-age casks and leaving the next few hours a little fuzzy. All that was missing was some eggs and bacon.

A panel of four whiskey distillers — two locals David Coors (from that Coors) and Justin Aden from Stranahan’s plus Conor O’Driscoll of Kentucky’s Heaven Hill and Jared Himstedt from Texas’ Balcones — joined moderator Nate Ganapathi, a “spirits influencer” with six-figure Instagram followers for a 10 a.m. tasting of seven whiskeys — and whiskys, in respect to the Canadian and two Scotch beverages in the lineup — of unique tastings and availability, some going as high as $200 a bottle.

“I want you guys to taste the best of the best and things that aren’t out yet or just hitting the market or are extremely rare,” Ganapathi said. “You’ve got seven gems in front of you.”

Now’s as good a time as any to share that, despite whiskeys and bourbon playing their roles in my college years, my palate for the drink is mostly limited to the Bulleit Bourbons and Maker’s Marks of the world. This was a whole new world I didn’t understand and while I certainly didn’t walk away much more sophisticated in my understanding, I did have some new curiosities to explore.

As a proud Colorado boy, I was a bit embarrassed to not realize our native Coors had forayed into the whiskey landscape. Its Barmen 1873 — named for Coors Brewing Company’s first year — runs about $40 and felt fairly akin to what I was used to.

The second in the lineup, a Canadian single-malt whisky from Shelter Point on Vancouver Island, was my first notice that there was more to this world than I was familiar with. I picked up on the fruitiness and I feel comfortable using the word “crisp” with my limited intellectuality on the subject, while Ganapathi noted the red apples and strawberry jam of it.

Stranahan’s 10-year Mountain Angel came third, another single malt, before the Scotch Benromach from a polish oak barrel that gave me a nice geography lesson about sourcing materials for casks to accompany the early onsets of a buzz. It was also the start of four closers all sitting at around 60% alcohol by volume, hitting the back of my throat with some surprise.

The back three — a Bernheim barrel proof Kentucky wheat whiskey, Balcones’ Pilgrimage single-malt, after-peat and a grand finale of a 1995 Gordon and MacPhail single-malt scotch from Highland Park, Scotland from the oldest independent bottler in the world — educated me further on the process of distilling and how global not necessarily the end product may be, but the sourcing of casks and the history.

Feeling a greater appreciation of the craft, and a healthy buzz, was a fantastic tablesetter for the rest of what the weekend had to offer.

—Rich Allen

The bounty of Oregon’s Willamette Valley Pinot Noir

Oregon’s Willamette River runs 187 miles through the northwestern part of the state, carving a valley between the Oregon Coast Range and the Cascade Range from Portland to Eugene. The wet, cloudy climate, distinguishable by its volcanic and red clay soils, was not known throughout history as a wine-productive environment, but today it is famous for some of the best Pinot Noirs in the country.

On Saturday morning, acclaimed winemaker André Hueston Mack and sommelier Erik Segelbaum led a tasting of six Pinot Noirs from across the region, delving into why the climate makes the grapes so flavorful and the variety of tastes that come from Oregon’s rainiest valley.

“I like to think as a sommelier, we’re kind of like a tour guide,” Mack said. “I hope you walk away knowing more about the diversity of Pinot Noir and the Willamette Valley.”

The six wines that Mack and Segelbaum presented were all made in 2021 and ranged from the Hyland estates — where the grapes produce warmer, more full-bodied wines — to the Chehalem Mountains, where the wines are cooler. Segelbaum said that the geology of each region affects the way the grapes are grown and the flavor of the wine because of the soil that the vines come from. The Willamette Valley also produces wines that are high in acid and tannins — which make the wine drier — due to the warm days and cold nights the region experiences.

In recent years, Oregon has seen the full impacts of climate change. In 2020, much of the state was impacted by wildfires in Oregon and California, which affected the wine production. Mack said that although not all wineries were affected, it was enough of a change to create an imbalance between bottles that were made in 2020, which is why he and Segelbaum decided to show 2021 bottles on Saturday.

Still, Segelbaum said that the Willamette Valley is not only diverse in flavor, it also blends everything that wine-drinkers love from both Europe and the Americas — the region has the soil, the climate and the grapes to produce great glasses.

“The Willamette Valley is the perfect blend of old world earthiness and new world ripeness,” he said. “It’s your perfect gateway.”

As the skies above Aspen poured rain on Saturday, it also made for the perfect weather to sample Oregon wines. The six bottles that Mack and Segelbaum showed can be found for anywhere between $45-$60 per bottle, and come from the Chehalem Mountains, Hyland Estates, Yamhill-Carlton Estate, Ribbon Ridge, Eola-Amity Hills and Dundee Hills.

—Megan Webber

‘Splendid Table’ tapes live episode at Wheeler

Fans of public radio’s “Splendid Table” show caught a live taping of an episode on Friday morning at the Wheeler Opera House. The conversation, hosted by the show’s own Francis Lam, centered around current eating-out trends, a deep dive into Southern food and whether rosé is underappreciated. The event was one of two seminars hosted at the Wheeler that were free and open to the public.

Lam was joined onstage first by Chandra Ram and Khushbu Shah, Food & Wine food and restaurant editors, and later by Chef Tiffany Derry and wine writer Wanda Mann. Ram and Shah shared stories of their visits to restaurants across the country in recent years since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and trends that have emerged in the modern dining-out world. Shah spoke about how chefs are becoming more unapologetic — opening and closing their doors when they want to, educating customers about how to arrive early if they want the best baked goods in the mornings, and not feeling beholden to keep certain popular items on the menu, like butter chicken at an Indian restaurant.

Derry, who owns the Roots Southern Table restaurant in Farmers Branch, Texas, shared her journey of growing up eating Southern food and all it encompassed — from classic comfort foods like fried chicken and mac n’ cheese to fresh and region-inspired produce. In culinary school, she said that Southern food was seen as less-than, not comparable to French dining or other cuisines, and so she shifted away from it.

“Southern food wasn’t as special, so I didn’t feel comfortable cooking Southern food until finally I just wanted my roots to be shown,” she said.

She also spoke about the diversity of Southern cooking — regions across the south have unique populations and ingredients that make for some special styles of dishes, and while everyone loves a good plate of comfort food, Southern meals don’t have to be unhealthy.

“It’s all about the region,” Derry said. “At Southern Table, I don’t have to cook one way because there is no one way.”

Mann spoke about the challenges of creating a good low-alcohol or alcohol-free wine, noting that there is a technique to it and the trend is picking up. She also insisted that rosé is a misunderstood wine, because although it is thought of as an easy, girly drink, it’s a classic craft that is tricky to make and like any other kind of wine, comes in a range of qualities and types.

The episode will air on July 7 on radio stations across the country as well as SiriusXM Satellite Radio. More information can be found at splendidtable.org.

—Megan Webber

Melo talks wine with two fellow NBA stars

It was, as far as I could tell, Carmelo Anthony’s first public appearance since not only announcing his retirement from the NBA, but since the Denver Nuggets won their first championship in franchise history.

But Melo wasn’t at the Wheeler Opera House on Friday to talk about round objects in baskets — unless they were grapes to be smashed. Anthony, joined by fellow NBA stars Channing Frye (winner of the 2016 NBA Finals with Cleveland) and current New Orleans Pelican C.J. McCollum, along with respective business partners Asani Swann, Ashley Combs and Tiquette Bramlett to discuss the three players’ ventures into the wine space.

“I wanted to challenge my path because I knew where my path was at,” Anthony said. “It was the big boys of the wines… I really felt like I was ready to challenge them when it comes to understanding the industry, understanding what it takes to make this wine.”

Antony launched VII(N) The Seventh Estate last year with Swann. Bramlett joined Frye’s Chosen Family Wines just about a month before Food and Wine, a company started after his retirement in 2020. McCollum, then a Portland Trail Blazer with close access to Oregon’s wine region, also started his own brand that year.

The six panelists talked about their exposures to wine, Anthony’s and McCollum’s experiences hosting “wine tastings” in their rooms in the NBA bubble during the COVID-19 season.

The business partners were asked by McCollum about being Black women in a field historically dominated by white men. Swann focused on community.

“There is a decision that we all get to make to be allies and not be threatened by the position that we all have,” Swann said. “We’re not threatened by each other. We’re making wine and supporting one another.”

The panel went for about an hour, including mentions of some of the other notable wine palates in The League like LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Kevin Love.

Discussion of basketball was kept to a minimum, with McCollum joking about tampering.

—Rich Allen