Cooking with Crosby Roamann: Sourdough boule with Cranberries and Walnuts

 

To change things up this week Juliana suggested we add dried cranberries and walnuts to our weekly sourdough. We added a half cup of dried cranberries and a half-cup of chopped walnuts  and folded them into the dough as we performed our first three stretchings of the dough. We then let it rest overnight to rise. In the morning, we transferred the risen dough to a clean bowl, chilled it for an hour in the fridge (while the over heated up) and then baked it using our standard recipe from FeastAtHome.com for 15 minutes at 500F covered, and another 15 minutes at 450F uncovered. I found that I preferred this bread slightly toasted and slathered with butter, but then again, I always do!

Cooking with Crosby Roamann: Spring Quiche with Cauliflower, Ham & Gruyere

 

Quiche starts to make an appearance in our house around this time of year, maybe because it makes such a wonderful Sunday Brunch. We like to include things from our winter garden -- chives, scallions, green onions, dill, and cauliflower -- and pair it with a well-chilled bottle of our Sauvignon Blanc -- as we like to serve it with winter lettuces fresh from the garden.

Our basic pie dough crust comes from Smitten Kitchen (you can find it here). We follow the instructions as closely as we can and always love the results -- a slightly sweet pie dough that matches well with anything from a savory quiche to a Maple Cream Pie.

For our spring quiche filling we use 5 eggs, 1 cup of cream, and 2 cups of grated gruyere cheese, plus two shallots, two cups of cauliflower florets, and one and a half cups of cubed ham steak, sauteed in three tablespoons of butter until gently browned all over.

 

 

Ingredients

• Smitten Kitchen Basic Pie Dough
• 5 eggs
• 1 cup of cream
• 2 cups of grated gruyere cheese
• 2 shallots, sliced very thinly
• 2 cups of cauliflower florets, about 1" each
• 1.5 cups of cubed ham steak, about 1/2" cubes
• 3 tablespoons of butter
• 3 tablespoons of olive oil
• Salt and pepper to taste
• 1 tablespoon fresh dill, minced
• 1 tablespoon diced chives, optional

Directions

• Prepare the pie dough and par-bake it, set it aside to cool.
• Reduce the over temperature to 300F
• In a large sauce pan, sautee the shallots, cauliflower, and ham steak in the butter and olive oil, until they are lightly browned, about 10 minutes, stirring along the way. Then set these aside to cool.
• Meanwhile, combine the eggs and cream in a medium bowl and whisk to combine. Add the cheese.
• When the cauliflower mix has cooled slightly, add this to the bowl of eggs and cream. Add the fresh dill, and stir to combine. Add the chives if desired.
• Set the pie shell in a rimmed baking sheet (for ease of transport).
• Fill the pie shell to the edge with your quiche filling, and transfer it to the middle shelf in the oven.
• Bake for 50 minutes at 300F, or until a knife inserted in the middle comes out clean.

Enjoy with a nicely chilled glass of our Sauvignon Blanc.

 

Cooking with Crosby Roamann: Lamb Stew with White Beans paired with Estate Red wine

 

INGREDIENTS

• 4 clove garlic, sliced very thinly
• 2 carrots, chopped into ½” pieces
• 1 celery, chopped into ¼” pieces
• 1 onion, chopped ¼” pieces
• 1” peeled fresh ginger, chopped (optional) diced
• 1 box chicken stock
• 1 can diced tomatoes
• 2 dashes Tobasco
• 1 cup dry white wine
• 2 lb. boneless lamb shoulder
• 1 lb. mild Italian sausage links
• 1 lb. dry Northern white beans, soaked overnight
• Kosher salt and pepper
• Chopped flat-leaf parsley or basil and crusty French bread, for serving

 

DIRECTIONS

1. Hydrate beans overnight, rinse and clean
2. Preheat the oven to 350F.
3. In a large saute pan, sauté carrots, celery, onion, garlic, and ginger, just lightly ~ 5 minutes
4. Add the wine and reduce to simmer to burn-off alcohol ~ 5 minutes
5. Combine the sautéed garlic, carrots, celery, onion, and ginger with the white beans in a  5- to 6-qt Dutch oven, and cover with chicken stock (top with water if necessary).
6. Return the saute pan to the heat and add another 2 tablespoon of olive oil. Season the lamb with salt and pepper, and working in batches, slowly brown the meat before adding it to the dutch oven.
7. When you have added all the lamb to the dutch oven, and tucked the meat in nicely with the beans, cover the Dutch oven and put it in the oven to cook on 350F for the first hour.
8. Have a glass of wine!
9. While the lamb is cooking for the first hour, sauté the sausage links briefly next, then let them cool. Slice them into 1 inch pieces on a bias, and at the end of the first hour of cooking lamb, then add the sausage pieces to the dutch oven.
10. Add the tomatoes and gently mix everything together.
11. Cook 1-2 more hours on low to combine. The lamb should be soft and easy to pull apart with a fork.
12. Sprinkle with the parsley or julienned basil, and serve with our sourdough boule.

 

Spring/Summer 2025 Membership Release

 

We are tremendously excited to share our new releases with you. The recommended package of new releases from Napa Valley will include our 2023 Sauvignon Blanc, 2022 Reserve Chardonnay, and 2022 Estate Bottled Red Wine, but as always, you can customize your shipment simply by responding to this email or reaching out to Sean or Juliana directly. Shipments will begin the third week of March, weather permitting.

With love from Napa Valley,

Sean & Juliana

 

 

2023 Sauvignon Blanc Napa Valley

We gently whole-cluster press the fruit and ferment the juice in concrete on native yeast for five weeks. The wine then ages seven months in new oak barrels and stainless steel drums. Mellow aromas of acacia and peach juice. White rose, lemon-lime, and vanilla bean, with a soft and lingering finish reminiscent of apricots and white plums. Delightful now, the wine will gain complexity and depth over the next five years.

2022 Reserve Chardonnay Napa Valley

We pick our Chardonnay by hand, at dawn. The grapes are whole-cluster pressed and the juice fermented in one-half new French oak barrels for eightteen months. Full bodied, with bright, fully tropical notes -- pineapple, apple juice -- and vanilla on the nose, and a softly-integrated almost anise-seed like note on a juicy finish.

2022 Napa Valley Estate Bottled Red Wine

Our estate vineyard is planted to a proprietary blend of Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, and Petit Verdot, in a sand-based Haire clay loam soil on a slight eastern-facing slope. We harvest at the pinnacle of phenolic ripeness to ensure a lush, concentrated, and structured red wine that will age for over a decade. We manually sort the fruit for quality, and ferment in stainless steel tanks for an extended period. The young wine then ages twenty-two months in all new French oak barrels. Delicately sweet blackberry flavors with notes of soft leather and tobacco, coccoa and dark roast coffee that lingers on the finish.

 

 

Harvest Updates: The end of harvest -- Cabernet Sauvignon (Part 2)

Part 2: It's been such an incredible vintage I don't even know where to begin with extolling 2024's virtues. Extremely high sugars and low pHs with lots of acidity on the midpalate that is balanced (at least in the wines that are just finishing fermentation now -- our Merlot blocks, Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot, and our Block 1 Cabernet Sauvignon) by a wonderfully rich and sweet midpalate, and a finish that goes on for days. These will be some of the biggest wines we have produced since 2018, with the classic vintages of 2019, 2021, and 2022 taking a bit of a backstage place, and just (I think and hope and believe) edging out 2023 as the finest vintage since 2016.

On the 2024 Vintage

Dear friends,

Harvest is slowly coming to a close here in Napa Valley, and so far, I have to admit, it's been exceptional. The late spring and early summer were mostly hot and bright, forecasting strong vegetative growth for next year.  Towards the end of July the temperatures began to cool, and we had a generally mild and temperate August. Despite about a week and a half of particularly hot and arid temperatures in mid-September, the end of the summer has been classic, dry, balanced, and moderate, allowing even ripening in all of our vineyards.

We harvested our estate Sauvignon Blanc on September 4, with great sugar and acidity, and a near perfect pH of 3.2.  Chardonnay was harvested on September 12, and from the beginning we were incredibly excited about the potential in this year's fruit -- juicy, peachy, tropical, everything I was hoping for. We pressed the Chardonnay to mostly new French oak barrels and the wine spontaneously began fermentation within three days. We followed Chardonnay in the Petaluma Gap with Pinot Noir on September 19, from our La Tâche clone in limestone-laden deep Haire loam soils.

Returning to Napa Valley on October 2, we harvested Merlot from Block 3, followed by Block 2 Merlot on October 4, together with our Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot. A portion of Block 2 Merlot, and all of the Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot were co-fermented due to the excessively low yields we received, both as these vines are still quite young and have yet to set a full crop, as well as because we dropped about 30% of the fruit set to support and encourage full development of the remaining crop and thus maximize quality throughout the vineyard.

We started to harvest Cabernet Sauvignon on Saturday, October 5, together with all of our estate olive trees. As our fermentation tanks were then full, and the wonderful, sweet aromas of fermentation greeted us every morning for the past three weeks, we took this moment to let the balance of our Cabernet Sauvignon continue to ripen in the vineyard. Our next harvest came on October 18, with our Clone 337 Cabernet Sauvignon, which in recent years has formed the backbone ("structure") of our Reserve Cabernet program.

While the Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, and Pinot Noir have all finished primary fermentation, both the Chardonnay and the Pinot Noir are continuing through malolactic fermentation now.  As is customary, malo was halted in the Sauvignon Blanc after three weeks. We are continuing to stir all of these barrels weekly. As a side note, it's a great time to visit the winery to taste these "bright young things" from barrel, as they are still so pungent, racy, and yeasty.

The Merlot tanks, as well as the co-fermented Merlot/Cabernet Franc/Petit Verdot tank, are still struggling through the end of fermentation -- these are truly the nail-biting moments for me personally, as we check the sugars every morning to see if they are still "moving." We are keeping the tanks hot, and pumping them over each day briefly, to encourage the wines to finish dry. All I can say is, it's in God's hands now, and I find myself praying a bit more than usual.

As many of you know, our winemaking style has continued to evolve over time. There is an old saying in this industry that winemaking is a journey, not a destination, and it could never have been more true than it has been for us. In the beginning of this adventure, I was interested in making the most balanced wines, led by the wines I had loved when I first started working in wine retail in college -- wines like Ridge Vineyards "Monte Bello" Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay. I was interested in making truly "American" wines, so like they did at Ridge, I played with a lot of American oak, and these are still some of the most interesting wines we have ever made -- and some of our favorites come from this period.

Over the following years, we experimented with a number of different styles. From 2012-2016, our wines became a bit more flamboyant, robust, juicy and full. 2017 was a classic vintage, but 2018 was very much in this style; I think of these as a sort of plateau during that period in style. Contemporaneously, however, the Pinot Noirs we were making became more and more restrained. During this period we saw the creation and release of the "Sean W. McBride" wine label -- something that I think I had to do in order to better understand my goals as a vigneron. 2019, the off-year of 2020, and 2021, were a return to a more balanced, elegant, and leaner-style of winemaking, influenced as I had been in the previous period by the winemakers I had been moonlighting for (I'll leave out any name-dropping, as insightful as that may seem).

And then, with the 2022 vintage, we had the revelation of what direction Crosby Roamann would be going in the future, and this happened to coincide, perhaps not incidentally, with the purchase of our own vineyard in 2020, and the release of our first estate white wine.

The vintages of 2022, 2023, and now 2024, have been marked by what I might refer to as a modest style of winemaking -- I have tried to take my "ego" entirely out of the winemaking process. This isn't about me, after all is said and done, it's about the wines, and I think that's what I learned by developing a brand under my own name. Crosby Roamann isn't about me, it's about great wine, and that's all, and that's what I am committed to, each and every day -- truly great wines.

And with that in mind, some thoughts on what to expect from the 2024 vintage wines: I am already drinking them from barrel, and enjoying them, which is saying a lot, I think. Young wine, you have to understand, usually needs time in barrel to develop, to mature, to soften, to come together -- that's why we spend so much money on barrels and wait so long for the wines to develop in them. And the fact that I’m enjoying them while they’re still so young, is rare.

By way of example, when Chardonnay is young, it is usually tight, reductive, and yeasty, with angular flavors. When I was first starting out, I remember learning from a trade magazine, perhaps even the Wine Advocate, that John Kongsgaard, the veteran and legendary winemaker of his eponymous wine label, said of Chardonnay that you needed to let it die, and then you needed to resurrect it, and in some ways I believe this may be true, that's why you need to stir the barrels and let it age, often for up to 18 months -- but all I can tell you today is that I am drinking this damn thing right out of the barrel at about six weeks of age and it is the most intriguing Chardonnay I have ever tasted so young, and I simply cannot express my excitement about the wine it is going to mature into by 2026!

The Sauvignon Blanc is robust and sumptuous, with our peach-syrup estate flavors but a strong backbone of acidity. The Pinot Noir is balanced and elegant, even as it is finishing malolactic fermentation and developing that warm, buttery flavor that malo always has when it's young.  It's spicy with some concentrated herbal notes that herald a nice complexity.

And it's still too young to truly discuss the estate red wines, but by all measures, they stand to be some of the most complex and voluptuous wines we have ever produced, God willing.

Just a couple more final thoughts: Thanksgiving selections are available online. Please find them here.

Also, the Fall/Winter 2024 Membership is still available for a limited time. Please join the Membership here. Joining as a Member is the best way to support our winery. Receive FREE Shipping, 10% discounts, the annual Member gift, and FREE Tastings when you join the Membership.

I'll end it there. It's been quite the morning, and a bit of a trip down memory lane.

With love from Napa Valley,

Sean W. McBride

PS: You might have noticed that the format of this email is a bit different from those of the past, and perhaps a bit of an explanation is due, if only to give credit where credit is due -- Some friends/members of the winery visited for a tasting recently, as they have been every autumn for the past couple years, and they suggested that we send this simple text email, and make it more personal, such as it is. So we decided to try it this time around. Let us know what you think? Personally, we still kind of enjoy designing the more visually exciting announcements, but they do tend to lend themselves more to a "marketing" style of communication, and I've always personally found I prefer the direct communicative style.

Harvest Updates: The end of harvest -- Cabernet Sauvignon (Part 1)

Part 1: Harvest comes to a close on 2024 today with the last block of our Cabernet Sauvignon, with Orion high in the southwest sky and a full moon overhead. And now that harvest is over, queue the music, this is when I get all melancholy and reminiscent about all the things that could have gone wrong but didn't and happened to go right, or maybe I'm just exhausted today. We started at 4am and pulled in 3.0105 tons of Clone 337, which tends to be our "reserve" grade selection which will ferment in Beta Tank, and 2.019 tons of Clone 169 which will ferment in Alpha Tank and likely will form the backbone (i.e., structure) of our Estate Bottled Red Wine.

 

 

 

Harvest Updates: Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Petit Verdot

 

Happy to report: It's been a delightful harvest so far. We harvested our Merlot, Block 3,  on October 2, followed by Block 2 Merlot on October 4, along with our Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot from Block 1 the same day. We returned Saturday October 5 and harvested the remainder of Block 1 -- all of our Cabernet Sauvignon, along with our olives. Almost all of the Merlot was destemmed to individual tanks, but for two macro bins that were blended with our Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot for a field blend primary fermentation, and the Cabernet Sauvignon is fermenting separately.

The flavors are off the charts, and it's really quite exciting, as the grapes are undergoing a seven-day cold soak prior to primary fermentation.

Cooking with Crosby Roamann: Sourdough

Every year, as our grapes slowly ripen, we take fruit samples from the vineyard. Sampling begins generally in mid-August for our Sauvignon Blanc, and continue through our last harvest of the vintage, typically mid-October. The practice is simple, but time-consuming. A 100 to 200-berry sample is collected in a sandwich bag from each block being tested by gently harvesting one berry per cluster from roughly every-other vine until we've reached our sample collection target. We then crush the berries in the sample and chill them to 68F. Then we check the sugar content (i.e. Brix) in a refractometer. Sometimes, the juice sample is sent out for professional chemistry including acidity and pH, among other things.

If the weather is just right, the grapes will be the right temperate for testing with our refractometer right there in the field, and then often the jucie samples get left in the car ... and forgotten, and a day or two later, they will begin to ferment.

This year, I decided to put some of these spontaneous grape sample fermentations to good use. Following a recipe from Sylvia Fountain at FeastingAtHome.com, I collected the juice from our berry samples and made a sourdough bread starter with it. The results have been incredible.

I followed the traditional sourdough starter recipe -- 1/2 cup wholewheat flour, and 1 cup water -- but to this I added 1/4 cup of fermenting grape juice. I made this addition two or three times over the course of the first week as the starter got going. When we made our first boule, at the end of that first week getting the starter going, I added an additional 1/4 cup of fermenting grape juice.

 

 

Cooking with Crosby Roamann: Sweet "Hungarian" Paprika

 

It was one of those special days of the year when, over the weekend, Juliana and I harvested a grocery bag's worth of bright red Hungarian-bred sweet red peppers and brought them home to process. The process is relatively easy. We wash and dry the peppers, and then cut them lengthwise by hand and remove most of the ribs and seeds. Next we lay them out on a large rimmed baking sheet lined with parchment pepper. Then we dry them in the oven at the lowest temperature we can get, which in our oven is only 200F (a lower temperature of 140 would be ideal, but it would take longer ... much, much, much longer). The drying process at 200F takes about 5-6 hours, after which we let the dried peppers cool over night. In the morning, we crush them by hand, and process them into a fine powder in our spice grinder (from Cuisinart). Lastly, storage! We keep our sweet "Hungarian" paprika in an air-tight container in the fridge, in which condition it will last all year long, and often longer.

Interested in learning more? Let us know! Visit the "Contact us" page and give us a shout.

Next recipe coming up -- Chicken Paprikas.