I’ve lived in Seattle for nearly 10 years and I’m still not used to September as a summer month. Throughout my New England childhood, September meant seeing your breath in the morning air and leaves rapidly turning auburn. Back east, September means corduroy and freshly sharpened pencils; September is apple cider and the return of long pants. September is fall, plain and simple.
In Seattle, September is different. September means tomato season is still in full swing and the lake is still bath-water warm. Though the days grow shorter, twilight still hits after 8 pm, and people linger outside soaking up every ray of sunshine they can. September is absolutely still summer, and I love that this city embraces it fully, squeezing every last ounce out that we can.
With that in mind, we’re leaning hard into the last days of summer for this September wine club. Sparkling rosé, high-acid whites, food-friendly reds—everything in this six pack is made for the last four weeks of swimming, sunscreen, soft serve, summer fridays, and sunshine. Hopefully I haven’t cursed us to an early fall by writing this intro—but if I have, these wines will still be delicious as the wet sets in.
Cheers,
Dylan
NV Franck Besson Granit Rosé: This is a special little bottle of bubbles from Beaujolais that I fell in love with some years ago. It’s 100% Gamay—the grape of Beaujolais, from the cru of Julienas, one of 10 designated best grape-growing regions within Beaujolais—but you won’t find the word Beaujolais anywhere on the label. That’s because there is no legal designation for sparkling wine in Beaujolais. (French wine laws can be rigid and complicated.) But 100% cru Julienas Gamay is exactly what this bottle is, made like Champagne in the Méthode Traditionelle, from 40-year-old organically grown grapes.
This bottle represents one of our favorite things in wine: really delicious, splurgy-feeling bubbles for under $20. There is always a time and place for true Champagne and other high-cost sparklers, but the reality is that there’s a lot of really good juice being made in the same manner for a lot less. It begins with a nose full of ripe roadside berries, rocky minerals, and a touch of violet. The palate carries much of the same, showing up dry and bright with a vein of rippin’ acidity along a persistent fruit-and-spice finish. It’s delicate but intense; effortless yet deadly serious; a contradiction to sip on morning, noon, or night.
Oh, and we can’t forget pairings: french fries with mayo, xiaolongbao, prosciutto and melon, a brick of Parmesan with honey, pan con tomate, sweet or savory brunch, duck banh mi, a bowl full of buttered popcorn—the list goes on.
2021 Hild Trocken Elbing: Dry white wines from Germany feel like one of the great accidental secrets in the wine world. I say accidental because I don’t think anyone is trying to hide away their perfection. In fact, quite the opposite. Dry Riesling lovers tend to scream about its high-acid, bone-dry nature from the rooftops; Weissburgunder (Pinot Blanc) aficionados will praise its age worthiness; Silvaner freaks buy up all the bottles they can find. No matter, it never seems to break through the barrier of mass opinion: German wines = sweet. It can feel ever more muddy because of the language barrier and classifications. We have nowhere near enough room here to dive into the complexities, but I think there’s one very important thing to help you when you’re searching for German wines out in the wild. Trocken means dry.
This particular trocken bottle is Elbing, an ancient grape, which was either indigenous to Germany or brought to the region by the Romans over 2,000 years ago. Genetically, it’s linked to Riesling, Chardonnay, and Furmint, and drinks like an amalgamation of all three with high acid, big fruit, and low alcohol. I’ve seen Elbing called a grape of conviviality—of friendliness—and I love that description. If Riesling is the serious grape of the Mosel, Ebling is the laid-back second-born. It may have one or two more childhood scars, but a total sense of freedom. Bright, easygoing, and crushable; a mineral-and-citrus parade that can easily be consumed on its own or with food. Plus, it clocks in under 12% alcohol, which makes it especially low-stakes and weekday friendly. Here at Little Thing, we’re totally smitten. Elbling!
2022 Birdhorse Contra Costa County Verdelho: It’s easy to get caught up in the Eurocentricity of wine. Our modern wine world is forever entwined with European colonialism, and that spills out everywhere, from the words we use to describe certain flavors to who is given a seat at the table. I see it all the time in Seattle at my favorite hyper-local restaurants that somehow only serve French wines. It doesn’t hurt that many European wines are excellent, and the price points can be much more approachable than domestic and other alternatives. (There are no mortgages on 600-year-old Chateaux, after all.) There’s no easy answer, but at Little Thing we try to feature underrepresented regions, varieties, and people. And that viewpoint has brought some exceptionally delicious wines into our orbit recently, like this electric white from Birdhorse.
Birdhorse is a queer-owned, woman-run winery out of California. By day, the winemaking duo and real-life couple Corrine Rich and Katie Rouse work as winemakers for some of our other favorite California projects, Scribe and Bedrock. By night, they handcraft brilliant wines from some of California’s long-forgotten vineyards and lesser-known grapes, like this buzzy Verdelho from Contra Costa Country. It’s a very California wine: an arty bottle made from a Portuguese variety with almost no plantings in the US, grown in a AVA that almost went belly up during prohibition, that tastes like actual sunshine in a glass. It’s all yellow, from the lemon-acid spine to the pear and pineapple profile. Whole-cluster pressed, raised in a mix of wood and stainless, and aged on the lees for five months; it has some gravitas to it, too. It’s the balance between the brightness and the intensity that makes the whole damn thing so brilliant.
2022 Ercole Piemonte Rosato: Summer isn’t over, but it does feel about time to start savoring all the rosé we can find. There are few things better than taking off work early on a sunny afternoon in late September and sippin’ on a bottle of rosé outside. And it’s even better if that bottle is a liter, rather than a typical 750ml. There’s something so inherently delightful about a bigger-than-normal bottle. It feels downright celebratory, and I’m into finding everyday celebrations wherever I can these days.
This liter bottle is from Ercole—Italian for Hercules—a sustainable cooperative of local growers in Monferrato. Located in the southeast corner of Piedmont, Italy, Monferrato is known for its rolling hills, with south-facing, steeply planted vineyards. It’s also known for its calcareous-clay and sand soils, and as the birthplace of Barbera. It’s absolutely not known for rosato, which makes this bottle all the more special. The blend is two indigenous Italian grapes, Barbera and Dolcetto, harvested sometime in mid-September, and gently pressed with only a few hours of skin contact. On the nose, it shows up as a whole watermelon—the fruit *and* the rind—with blood orange and white flowers. On the palate, it's a lightning bolt on a muggy afternoon, with a streak of acidity running through ripe summer berries. We’d still like it if it was only normal-bottle sized, but boy-oh-boy are we all lucky it's extra large.
2021 Passionate Wines Via Revolucionaria La Criolla Grande: We’ve been downright surprised and delighted lately by a number of terroir-focused projects from the high-elevation plantings that speckle Argentina's interior—specifically Mendoza, and even more specifically the Valle de Uco. Tucked up in the foothills of the Andes, this special little growing region hits over 5,000 feet in elevation. Reading elevation numbers can be kind of abstract, so let me just say: that's really high! That’s taller than the tallest peak in over half of the 50 United States. The Valle de Uco is an extreme place to grow grapes, one that young, experimental winemakers are flocking to in order to break free from the industrial winemaking norms of much of Argentina.
Passionate Wines is a side venture from Matias Michelini, who, with his brother, is leading the charge. He has a series of micro-projects that delve into the unique terroir of Argentina and Chile, all focused on sustainably farmed vineyards and native varieties. This bottle is 100% Criolla Grande, a not-so-distant relative of the Mission/Pais grape, from Campo Vidal, a single vineyard in a northern Uco subregion. Hand harvested, fermented with native yeast, and aged entirely in concrete, this wine is unfined, unfiltered, with no SO2 added. It’s a berry, rose-petal, and mineral red that’s funky but super clean. That is to say: you can drink it with your friend who ~only drinks natural wine~ or open it for your favorite classist wine snob and both will probably love it. Given that September is our last summer month, it feels quite appropriate to have one last chillable red before official red-wine season (aka cold weather) is upon us. Don’t waste it! Before the end of the month, chill this one down for an hour in the fridge and enjoy with tomato toast or roasted eggplant or whichever September produce is your personal favorite.
2017 Castello di Perno Barolo: When I think about food and wine pairing, I think about Italy. No, the Italians did not invent such practices, but their regional delicacies and structure-driven wines seem to expertly illustrate the power that food and wine can have on each other. The Little Thing first rule of wine pairing: you don’t need to do it. Drink what you like, eat what you like. Have fun! The second rule: pairing the right food with the right wine can be a witchy experience. Nebbiolo, specifically from its ancestral home in Piedmont, can be the perfect wine to rip off the bandaid and explore the science of our mouths! (I can’t believe I just wrote the science of our mouths… but here we are!)
Anywho, this bottle is a Barolo, one of the famed trophy wines of Italy. Barolo, and its counterpart Barbaresco, is the most famous Nebbiolo growing region of Piedmont in northern Italy. Young Nebbiolo has the pristine fruit of the finest Pinot Noir and the tannins of a newly dampened tea bag. It’s like a sweet little kiss followed by a slap in the face. With time, it softens, and this bottle has now entered its drinking window nearly six years past vintage. (A window that will last another decade plus, I should mention.) The big question is always, what to eat? I’d grill a ribeye over charcoal and serve it with roasted sungolds. Or take those same roasted sungolds and toss them with fresh pasta and too much parmesan. Or take that cheese and mix it into risotto with eggplant.
It’s such a treat to have this splurge bottle ($50) in the wine club. That’s the fun of wine clubs, non? To try things you might not have bought for yourself. That being said, don’t feel the need to hoard this one because it may be more than you usually spend. As a former boss once told me: drink the good shit now. You deserve it!
We all scream tomato: I’m baffled when I see people eating tomatoes at the first sign of warm weather. Yes, they are a summer food through and through, but tomato season really doesn’t kick off until August around these parts, with the best six weeks of product producing well into September. Annually, September first marks the mad dash to eat as many tomatoes as I can, as fast as I can, before the season is over. That means raw on the best bread I can find with a generous amount of mayo and salt; sandwiched between lettuce and bacon in a BLT; sliced with stone fruit, crumbly cheese, and herbs; cooked with eggplant and tossed with noodles to make pasta alla Norma; roasted slow in the oven (325F for *at least* an hour in a ton of olive oil) and added to just about anything else I am cooking. I love who I am during tomato season and I fully mourn her when she’s gone. Though, I know it’s truly more of a don’t-cry-because-it’s-over-smile-because-it-happened situation. Because without the knowledge of a perfectly ripe end-of-summer tomato, how would we know to stay away from the sad January ones at the grocery store? Life is fleeting! And by life, I do mean tomatoes.
Viet Crab Tomato Toasts: These mind-bendingly good toasts are inspired by our pal David and his folks, who spend the summer on the Puget Sound pulling up crab and cooking it for lucky guests. The Doan family serves steamed crab the Viet way: dipped in lime and black pepper. We turned that idea into tomato treats and there’s no looking back.
Here’s how:
- Cut two big tomatoes into thick slices (lay tomato on its side and cut from the bottom up for picture-perfect pieces). Salt them and let sit while you do everything else.
- Take the meat of one Dungeness crab (roughly ½ lb) and toss it with the juice from one lime, a generous portion of fresh black pepper, and a pinch of salt (remember, crab is already a little salty). Increase salt and pepper as needed to taste.
- Cut up ½ a loaf of crusty bread into thick slices, ½ inch minimum, and toast until golden brown.
- Cut a peeled garlic clove in half. rub each piece of toast with a cut piece of garlic, and spread with a generous portion of mayonnaise.
- Top each piece of toast with a layer of tomato and a mound of lime-pepper crab salad.
- Serve! It’s easy but decadent, impressive as heck, and delicious to boot.