All language subtitles for V.is.for.Vino.S01E01.Napa.1080p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DD+2.0.H.264-playWEB

Welcome to the world famous Napa Valley.

It's the wine Mecca of
America, the allure and prestige

of castles and heavy hitter wineries,

household names everywhere you look,

celebrity passion projects,

world renowned restaurants, and land that sells

for up to a $1 million an acre, we're gonna find out why.

Welcome to V is for Vino, let's watch, learn and drink.

This may not be the place
where wine began in America

but the Napa Valley is without question the place

that put America on the wine map.

And while 90% of wine made
in America is made in California,

only 4% of that comes from the Napa Valley

but the small amount of wine they do produce here

has gained international recognition

and made sure America always has a place

at the international wine table.

Napa's located about 55 miles
Northeast of San Francisco

tucked to East of Sonoma
County and South of Lake County.

The Valley itself is framed
by mountains on either side,

which helped moderate the temperature

and protect from wind and rain.

Only 2% of the world has

a dry Mediterranean climate like Napa.

That means not too hot, not
too cold, long growing season

with minimal temperature change in rainfall.

It's not only the perfect place to grow grapes,

but it's also the perfect place to live,

that's why so many people love it here.

Napa's has had its fair share of challenges.

The first Napa winery was
started by Charles Krug in 1861,

but in the start of the 20th century

a devastating root louse called phylloxera

wiped out 80% of the vineyards.

And in 1920 prohibition put almost

every winery out of business.

It's really only in the last 50 years that Napa has

become the icon that we know it as today.

And for that story, we need to take a trip to Paris.

The year was 1976, a man named Steven Spurrier

who was running a wine shop in Paris, invited some

of the most esteemed well
credentialed wine professionals

in all of France to participate in a blind tasting

competition of French versus Californian wines

at the Intercontinental Hotel in downtown Paris.

The judges would taste 10 Chardonnays,

four from Burgundy and six from California,

and then move on to the reds.

All of this was done more of a publicity stunt

than anything else and the competition

might as well have been rigged.

No one, and I mean no one, expected the American wines

to stand a chance, after all these were the French,

the masters of terroir and
the kings of all things refined.

And the Californian winemakers were seen a bunch

of dopes who didn't know how to make wine,

but then the unthinkable happened.

First place of the white round
was at 1973 Chateau Montelena

from Napa Valley and the American wines

took three of the top four spots.

At this point, the judges
were alarmed to say the least.

So when the next red wine
round, they tried even harder

to distinguish the French from American wines

to assure a friend's victory.

But alas, the winner was a
1973 Stag's Leap wine cellars

Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa Valley,

beating four first growth Bordeauxs,

wines that sold for thousands of dollars

and had famed reputations, and one lone reporter

from Time magazine caught the whole thing.

The fallout Was massive.

Time magazine published
an article claiming victory,

but the French press tried to downplay the event

in any way they could, but it didn't matter,

it was too late.

It was a shot heard around the world

and Napa had pulled the trigger.

It proved that Napa wines
can not only stand toe-to-toe

with the best wines in the planet,

but gave California its
opening to enter the world stage.

Today's featured grapes are Cabernet Sauvignon

and Sauvignon Blanc.

These grapes are most famously made

in a place called Bordeaux,

which is in the West side of France.

Bordeaux makes them of
the most highly sought after,

famed and consequently
expensive wines on the planet.

Names like Petrus, Haut-Brion, Margaux, Latour,

may not mean anything to you

but for some wineos, it's all they think about.

And while white Bordeaux wines are great

in their own right, it's the red Bordeaux wines

that everybody loves.

What exactly is a Bordeaux blend?

Well, it's any combination of five grape varietals,

but 90% of the time it's mostly Cabernet Sauvignon,

or Merlot that dominates the blend.

What does all this all have to do

with Napa Cabernet Sauvignon?

Well, the reality is most Napa Cabernet Sauvignons

are actually Bordeaux blends.

See the law says that only 75%

of what's listed on the label has to be in the wine.

So a lot of wine makers make Bordeaux blends

but they label them Cabernet Sauvignon mostly

for a selling point, Americans
are more comfortable buying

Cabernet Sauvignon than something

that has a blend listed on the label.

Sauvignon Blanc, if California Chardonnay

is Mike Tyson, kind of round and heavy footed,

Sauvignon Blanc is sugar Ray, all finesse,

it's taught, lean, herbal and an acidity

that cuts right through the heart of the wine.

It's actually the mother of our other grape,

Cabernet Sauvignon.

See in the 17th century Sauvignon Blanc

and Cabernet Franc crossed
to form Cabernet Sauvignon.

And it kind of makes sense,

they all share a very
similar green characteristic,

Cabernet Franc is stewed bell peppers,

Cabernet Sauvignon, mint,
menthol and fresh bell peppers,

but Sauvignon Blanc
everything green under the sun,

grass primarily, but dill, jalapeno, lime,

green Apple gooseberry, other citrus fruits

and stone fruits are pretty common as well.

It's a perfect pairing for most foods

because it's got a great amount of acidity.

So it's perfect with anything
else green especially,

like your salad course or vegetables.

Cabernet Sauvignon, it's the classic

international grape varietal.

It's grown pretty much everywhere

in the world that grows grapes.

It's kind of like the George Clooney of wine.

It's rugged yet refined, ages well

and loved by pretty much everybody.

It's got a lot of dark fruit flavors,

so black cherry, blue fruits, and then blackberry,

cassis, black currant, also some green notes

like eucalyptus and menthol with Oak aging,

which it usually has.

It can get some spice notes and with age

it gets leather and cigar box, it ages really well.

And that's because it has a
very high skin to juice ratio.

If you look here, you can see how much skin there is

compared to how little juice there is

and that makes a very high
tannin wine, which allows some

of these wines to age for 20, 30, 40 years plus.

It was time to head to the vineyards

where I'd meet Sarah of Elizabeth Spencer wines.

I'm getting you in basically

what is the middle of, of harvest.

Tell me a little bit about

what it's like during harvest time.

Yeah, you're basically on call 24/7.

Well, harvest is really exciting,

you don't get a lot of sleep, but you make up for it

in just the stimulation and it's this kind of,

you remember why you got into it.

The smells and the winery are always

just so incredible this time of year.

We've noticed that.

Yeah, everywhere we go smells great.

It's really infectious.

Can you tell a little bit about Elizabeth Spencer?

Tell me just what you can

about the brands and how it got started.

Elizabeth came from marketing.

She met Spencer who was in fine wine distribution

out in Virginia, and they both had

some background in restaurants.

After a long courtship, they decided

to get together as it were,

and they formed the brand Elizabeth Spencer

and had their first Cabernet release in 1998.

Elizabeth Spencer doesn't
own any of their own vineyards,

we contract with high quality growers to supply us

with the fruit we need to make our wines.

That's a fairly common practice.

It is a common practice.

In the Napa Valley it's probably roughly 50-50,

I don't know how that shakes out in terms of acreage

but there are still estate wineries like this one,

White Rock Vineyards that makes only wine

from their own fruit, but they also make,

they grow more fruit than
they need for their own program,

and they will do what they did for me,

which is sell other wineries their grapes.

What is it like growing and being a wine maker

in the Napa Valley in a place

where you've got these mega producers?

Because the Napa Valley has, you know,

this reputation for good reason

of growing high quality
grapes that always ups the ante.

I know, same way you may have a restaurant town

like San Francisco or New York kind

of pushing everything forward.

Napa's kind of that for the wine industry.

That's a great analogy, yeah.

They tend to be at the
Vanguard of implementing things

that we've discovered in university.

And it also just attracts
very talented winemakers

and very smart people.

I think that the people that
are drawn into this industry

are extremely passionate and it's a really

interesting combination of people

that are artistic, but very scientific.

All right, so tell me a little bit

about what we have here.

We have Sauvignon Blanc,
it's a certified California

organically-farmed sourced from a couple

of different vineyard sites in Mendicino.

We want to see something
that is really pure good acid.

It's bright, it is focused.

Awesome minerality on the
nose in particular, I mean just.

I think we get a little bit of that gooseberry.

There is a little bit of white
flour, pink grapefruit peel.

Yeah, lots and lots of citrus.

And the more I get into this,

the more kind of floral it becomes.

So I always get a little
bit of capsaicin green pepper.

This is such a great food wine.

I always say, you know, anything green is,

is always safe, any kind of green, you know,

salads or vegetables or anything, but you know,

you can, you could get up to this

with a lot of like white fish and white meat dishes.

Sure, crab meat.

Spencer would say crab meat and avocado salad.

So the tasting room is in downtown Rutherford,

it's a really cool spot.

I love, I love kind of the vibe in there.

Well the tasting room

is in the old Rutherford post office.

Okay, cool.

Yeah, it's very cool building.

Purchased the building in 2006,

they had to do a major retrofit
but they wanted to keep some

of the integrity of the old architecture.

It's, it's very small in the actual tasting room

and you definitely feel like
you can engage with somebody

and talk with them about the wines.

Yeah, it's very kind of an intimate tasting

and a place where some of
these grandiose tasting rooms

kind of wash out the wine itself.

Sure, yeah, we don't, we don't have a fountain yet.

No infinity pool quite yet.

No infinity pool.

All right, so now we have our Cabernet.

Well, it really is kind of a flagship wine

for us since Elizabeth and Spencer

have been making Cabernet since 1998.

It's sourced from a number of different vineyards

in the Napa Valley.

So in any given year, we might have some fruit

from Mount Veeder, some
fruit from the Stag's Leap area,

fruit from Coombsville fruit, from Calistoga.

I might have 5% new French Oak in these wines,

I don't want the Oak to sit on top of the wine.

Yeah, and right away you can see it, it's integrated.

I can get a little bit of everything.

I get the fruit coming through.

It feels like kicking a dead horse, but you know,

elegance, you want elegance in your Cabernet.

You want structure, you want grip, you want tannin,

you want all of those things

that make it appropriate to have with food.

But you also want an expression of fruit,

in five years I expect this to have a little more

vetiver and chocolate.

You can also get a little bit of, kind of,

like the sweetness, like a sweet spice.

There's a little bit of tobacco there.

Yeah.

Some Cola.

And it drinks a little darker on the palette

than it does on the nose.

Once you really dig into it,

you see that it's got structure.

I recommend decanting it
especially in the first two,

three, four years of its life.

I think you'll have it a little more open

and offering after a decanting.

Well, thank you so much, this is awesome.

Cheers. - Cheers.

Sarah and I went to the crush facility,

and she told me to wear
shorts, I should have asked why.

We talked a little bit about the process

from taking the red grapes that we sorted today

and putting them into a tank.

So we have Syrah that is just been yeasted.

Oh wow, and that's all the way down with grapes.

Just, oh, that smells so good.

Yeah.

It smells like, it
smells like fresh baked bread.

That is the yeast, yes.

Very cool, yeah, you can feel

that heat coming off of it, that's pretty crazy.

I wanted to do an experiment though.

I've got some of this fruit

which I have put into three small bins,

and I'm going to treat that fruit totally different

than how I treat this fruit.

So this T-Bin is exactly the same as the tank,

but we've inoculated it

with a totally different yeast strain.

In the case of these guys, we're gonna kind

of let them go on their own and see how they do.

And these are the whole cluster.

So these are also whole cluster ferment, same thing.

But we're gonna stomp on this guy.

Welcome to V is for Vino Nerd Lab.

We take complicated wine
topics and make them simple.

Today, we're talking about tannin.

Tannin.

Tannin, it's not something that you do on the beach.

Thank you.

Tannin, it's one of the five
essential elements of wine.

It is a chemical compound or fennel that's found

in the skin, stems and seeds of the grapes.

It's a bitterness or an astringency

and it also contributes a little body character,

it gives wine like a firmness.

It's only found in red wines and this is

because red wines are the only wine

that actually sit with their skin, stem and seeds,

white lines, we just press the juice very quickly

and we let it go.

Consequently, these skins, the thicker they are,

the more tannin is gonna be in the final wine.

So thick-skinned grapes like
Syrah and Cabernet and Merlot,

are gonna have more tannin

than the thin-skin grapes say Pinot Noir,

Gamay, things like that.

Now there's a couple of foods that we have

that actually have tannin in them.

Walnuts and a lot of nuts have tannin,

and tea, black tea specifically.

We're gonna do a little experiment here,

take a black tea bag, put it in some water

and steep it for a really long time.

If you're supposed to steep
it for four or five minutes,

we're gonna leave it go for like 15, 20.

Seriously, get out of here.

Here, watch these clips of
slow motion turtles we shot.

And we're back, how about them turtles?

So we're.

So we've got our overly steeped tea here

and give it a taste.

Now taste that, that
bitterness and that astringency

and especially how it dries
out your mouth, that is tannin.

So how do you fix it?

Well, you could try adding a little acid,

people add lemon to tea,

but it's really just gonna enhance it.

It'll enhance the acid and it'll enhance the bitter.

You could try sugar, it would kind of help.

It would basically make it very sweet

in the front of the tea and still have

that bitterness in the back.

No, the real solution here is cream.

So if you add a little cream
to the tea in the form of fat,

and then now give your tea a try.

Much better.

See what happens is the tannins bond

with the protein in the fat and they softened both.

Now it stands to reason

that if you can fix overly tannic tea with fat,

you can fix tannic wine with fat.

So that's why Cabernet Sauvignons

are often paired with a fatty steak, like a ribeye.

They go together really well

and it helps soften the tannins in the wine.

Tannin also acts as the preservative,

a natural preservative for wine,

it's why some Cabernet Sauvignons

and Barolos can last for 40, 50 years and age,

and tannin helps preserve it.

And this actually helps
both the wine and the tannin,

see with age, tannins become softer

and the wine becomes more complex and exciting.

I hope you enjoyed this Nerd Lab

on tannin, keep geeking out.

After a hard day of wine tasting, the locals,

they're heading the Torc.

It's my restaurant baby,

is what I would like to refer to it as.

Contemporary American
restaurant, located in Napa,

the meaning of contemporary meaning

we're not really pigeonholed to one cuisine.

We can kind of take products

and cook them how they're best prepared.

Everything rooted in a really great French

or Italian technique.

Okay.

With those ingredients brought into the mix.

You know, I grew up in the industry,

I started washing dishes at nine.

My father was a hotelier, a GM at a hotel

and put me on a milk crate,

and had me clean silverware for about five hours.

And that was it.

That was it.

Fast forward 20 years, and here you are.

Yeah, fast forward 35 years, you know, crazy.

And just decided that I really wanted to open,

open a restaurant here in Napa.

It is the quintessential American wine country

in my opinion and just the quality

of produce is unsurpassed.

There's so many other things that,

that I wouldn't wanna do that I could do,

that would probably be easier,

but for me, this is really my life's goal

was to always have my own place

and be able to choose the direction it goes

and what we're gonna do and what the ambiance is like.

Almost a fine dining technique

with kind of the casual
atmosphere that makes it fun.

And meaning like a lot of fine dining restaurants,

you go in there, it's very quiet,

and we try and take that pretentiousness out of it.

If you walk in here, the music's loud,

the dining room's loud.

You know, people are talking and having a good time

and we put a product in front of you

that you would hope to get
at one of those restaurants.

There's two things that I don't like to,

to label this restaurant
and that's like farm to table,

farm to fork, market-driven, but we're market-driven.

You know, we, we go to the farmer's market

at least once a week.

We have farmers that drive
up to our door with produce.

We have some other purveyors
that either raise ducks or,

or game birds, or we have a local fishermen

from about 40 miles away over in Sonoma,

who'll pull up to the back
door two or three days a week

with live King Salmon right now.

We cook based off of what's coming in the door here.

A lot of times the dialogue we have with the cooks

and the sous chefs is, "What are we gonna do with that?"

And I look at them and I say, "I have no idea yet."

Let's figure it out.

But we bought it and it's pretty cool

and let's not waste it.

Well I'd love to go get, get to cooking,

you wanna show us some stuff?

Yeah, definitely.

All right, let's do it. - Love to, cool.

All right chef, this is the Napa Valley,

I'm expecting big things, so what are we doing today?

And we're gonna kinda do a
play on a middle Eastern style

tomato salad with bread and labneh.

You're speaking to a Lebanese guy,

so that's right up my alley.

Whatever varieties we could really get.

And then you just use whatever you can get,

whatever's fresh, whatever they're bringing.

Whatever's good.

Yeah. - Yeah, absolutely.

Totally seasonal, it's the best way for us to be.

So we're just looking to cut the tomato, thick slices

'cause we're gonna marinate it with a little bit

of Sherry vinegar and olive oil.

Okay.

And then salt, really important.

Probably pull some of those moisture right out

and kind of tenderizes them.

Yeah, then we're gonna take some good local fennel,

and I like the contrast that gives the sweetness

to the tomatoes, Greek yogurt,

and then just some fresh lemon zest.

This is some fresh garlic.

Okay.

I think to stay traditional to where this dish

would be from, you need that bite.

Then just a little juice, pinch of salt.

Okay.

Touch of pepper.

And then we're just gonna mix that up with a spoon.

You know, we always have like leftover bread, so we'll,

we'll tear some bread and then we're actually gonna

saute it real quickly just to get some crisp

on it and flavor.

I'm gonna take a garlic clove,

always leave the skin on garlic.

So that way, if we do get a little color on it,

we're not making it bitter.

Oh, interesting, I like that trick.

And it's a good way to judge when,

when your oil is hot too.

Ooh, it's hot, I don't know how you chefs

do it back here all day.

Somebody has to.

And we're just flipping this to make sure

it doesn't take too much color.

Yeah.

And if you see where it's starting to look a touch dry,

you just add a little more oil to it.

And then we're just gonna put this on,

on a paper towel to make sure it's not greasy.

Then you said this dish kinda has

a middle Eastern roots to it.

I think Mediterranean,
Palestine, Israel, Morocco, Italy,

the area, you know, the food is very similar.

And then we're just gonna put a couple of dollops

of the labneh on the plate.

It's nice and thick, you know,

it's something where you
can drag the tomato through it.

And then the bread just,
just sporadically on the plate.

And then a couple other ingredients

that we're gonna add to this,

fennel pollen from here in Napa.

This is a coarse sea salt
'cause everything needs salt.

And this is pimenta Espelette,

so this is a from the Basque region

that bodes Spain and France and it's a,

it's a dried red chili pepper.

It's more smokey than it's spicy.

This is a anise hyssop.

So we have the fennel, which is in anise,

we have the fennel pollen, and then we're just

gonna tear some fresh anise hyssop, flowers and all.

Wow, look at that.

And it's, it's got a really
neat light liquoricey flavor.

Lemon zest.

Wow, you get the purple, the yellow, the red,

the green it's, it's, it's gorgeous.

Thank you.

That's it. - That's it.

I hate to, I even hate to bother it.

It just, you know, you can look at it all day.

Oh yeah.

Oh, you know what?

That spice is great.

You know, and all these
different colored tomatoes too,

they all have variance and flavor, you know,

some are higher in acid, some are sweeter.

This red one here, a lot less firm than say this one

which is cool because you get that play on textures.

The thing I can't get over here is that little bit,

how that little bit of spice
does so much for the dish.

Yeah. - Absolutely gorgeous.

Excellent, thank you. - Awesome.

We paired this with the
Sauvignon Blanc for a few reasons.

The acidity in the tomatoes really needs

a nice high acid wine to match it.

And the floral notes of the wine go really well

with the floral and liquorice
flavors of the anise hyssop,

plus the acidity and the wine cuts right

through the fat that you find in the yogurt.

Looks like we're busting out the big guns.

Ah, gig guns, steak.

Woo, I love it.

Steak, you know, we're in cab country

prime dry-aged New York strip.

Look how thick that cut.

Yeah. - We're this thick.

It's about 20 ounces, it's good for two people.

A good amount of salt on the outside, pepper too.

Give me your three essential steak mistakes.

Number one is they let their father cook it,

which means it's either blood raw or well done.

So you avoid that, that's number one.

Definitely very, very hot pan.

The third thing that's the most important thing is

that it actually rests.

And at this point we're gonna add something

that's integral to the flavor of everything,

and that is butter.

It's gonna impart a nice nutty flavor on it,

but it's all gonna come out.

It's not, it's not something that we're gonna keep in

and we're gonna pour on the plate.

We'll it's like a bath,

you get that nice froth going.

Yeah, definitely.

We have a nice cross on both sides of the meat.

Perfect.

I'm gonna take it out, put it on the cooking sheet.

And I like that too, the rack too.

Yeah, so that way there's air circulation under it.

So we're at 500 degrees here.

And after we've got that sear on the outside,

we're gonna let it cook for about 10 minutes.

I'm just gonna discard that fat,

but leave a little bit of it inside,

a touch more olive oil 'cause
we're actually gonna cook

the potatoes inside with
some of the beef renderings.

Oh wow, so you kind of season that pan.

And these are Magic Myrnas.

So these are hand-dug by a friend of mine

over in Sonoma County.

Hand-dug potatoes.

Hand-dug.

They're almost yellow,

I mean they're like a peach color on the inside.

Yeah, they're crazy.

And the texture is like light and fluffy and creamy.

Once again, garlic with the skin on.

We're gonna take some of our potatoes,

put them in with a hot pan, lots of butter,

and we're gonna get that nice and frothy.

A little bit of salt.

We're actually gonna put this

in the same oven with the steak.

They'll actually cook in the 10 minutes

that it actually takes to cook that steak.

So next we're gonna do some nice summer vegetables,

some beautiful little squash

and they have the flowers
on them, some fresh scallions.

Right.

And we're just gonna cut some little

like one inch batons.

So once again, olive oil, the garlic and the skin,

and we're gonna start with the squash.

So at this point I am gonna
add the onion, a touch a water.

Okay.

And just enough where it's gonna

cause it to lightly steam.

So you know what I look at flavor profile

of the cabs from Napa, big in fruit,

big on the palette, herbaceous.

And so we're gonna find things that,

that assist in that in, in bringing that out.

You know, I get a lot of mints,

and so we're gonna actually use some mint in the dish.

This is what's referred to as a chocolate mint.

It's kind of like mint chocolate ice cream

if you could put it in a plant.

Yeah, we're gonna put it in a steak.

You take a little knife, you take a fork

and you just wanna give it a poke.

So that's, that's ideal, hat's what we're looking for.

Okay.

Some more summer vegetables to those.

So what gonna add are prodrome peppers.

So it's a, it's a Spanish variety, they're more that,

like bell pepper flavor that you do get from cab.

And we're just, we're just gonna get them

a little blistered in, in that frothy butter.

Add some cherry tomatoes to that, take the onions,

and we're gonna make some nice, fine slices.

And then we'll take our nice scallions here,

and we're just gonna finish our potatoes,

the chocolate mint.

This is how you make sure
the, the steak is rested properly.

So now what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna take

the vegetables and we're just gonna put them

on one side of the splatter.

All right, let's see how the steak is.

Oh, look at that.

The ring on the outside, just to sear it in.

And then this pink all the way through.

Nice finishing salt like we put on the tomato salad,

fresh cracked black pepper on top,

last some of the chocolate mint, raw, and back

to that kind of a
Mediterranean-California connection.

Some beautiful taggiasche olives.

I mean, are you kidding me?

And then last, we're gonna
do a little bit of horseradish.

Oh, look at that, fresh horseradish.

Yeah.

You know what I love about this too

is that your hand print is all over it.

Where are you gonna start?

I mean, I pro, I don't know,

I probably gotta start with the meat, is that okay?

Yeah, it's totally acceptable.

All right, oh my God.

So the first thing that hits me is that cut of beef,

the dry aged beef and that little bit of funk.

And then the second thing I get is that beautiful,

that olive, which gives it that a little bit

of briney, kind of salt, which I love.

Oh my gosh, and it melts in your mouth.

I normally just explain what the wine does with it,

you did my job for me, but you took it a step further

and said, we have these comparing flavors.

We can get these menthol

and these mint flavors from the chocolate mint.

We can balance some of that freshness

from the like berry and the fruit flavors

with the freshness of of some of these herbs

and some of these spices.

So I love that you've taken it a step further.

In addition to all the comparing flavors,

the big bold dish needs a big bold wine

and the tannin structure in the wine goes great

with the fat in the steak.

Unreal. - Thank you.

Start to finish, unreal.

Cheers to that. - Thank you.

Thank you so much for having us.

Thanks, thanks for having me.

We ended our day at the Oxbow public market.

Napa's blend of restaurants,
stores and shops that carry,

well a little bit of everything.

Meats and cheeses, wood fire pizza, sushi,

oysters, craft beer, specialty bitters,

and of course, wine.

I hope you enjoy the one and only Napa Valley,

we'll see you next time on V is for Vino.