The Pittsburgh Dish

074 Changing Seasons and Chilean Wine Adventures

• Doug Heilman • Season 2 • Episode 74

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(00:40) The leaves are changing, there's a chill in the air, and our host is embracing the seasonal transition on this deliciously varied episode of The Pittsburgh Dish. Doug shares details from his recent end-of-summer cooking class that perfectly bridges the seasonal gap – featuring a mouthwatering menu of prosciutto-peach salad, basil-infused risotto topped with fresh corn relish, and fruit trifles showcasing summer's final berries and stone fruits.

(02:39) The episode takes a fascinating turn as wine expert Catherine Montest transports listeners to Chilean wine country, where she recently embarked on an extraordinary tasting adventure. Wine enthusiasts will particularly enjoy Catherine's spooky-season-appropriate tale of "Casillero del Diablo" (The Devil's Locker), explaining how one winery founder ingeniously protected his best bottles by spreading rumors of a haunted cellar over a century ago.

(12:51) For those enjoying apple-picking season, Carolyn Beinlich of Triple B Farms shares a treasured family recipe for "Nan's Apple Cake" – a simple yet delicious treat. Whether you're clinging to summer's bounty or embracing fall's flavors, this episode offers something to satisfy every seasonal craving. 

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Doug:

Welcome to The Pittsburgh Dish. I'm your host, Doug Heilman. Are you ready for fall? I cannot believe it's here already, and I hope you all have had a great summer. And I'm so appreciative of all of the folks that have taken some time to be on the podcast, sharing their stories, recipes, recommendations, all of those things. Sincerely, thank you. If you're anything like me, the last few weeks have been especially busy with birthdays and weddings. I cooked a brunch for a bridal party. I've never done that before. And I also recently just wrapped up an end of summer cooking class at Third Space Bakery. Let me tell you about this menu in case you can get your hands on some good produce before the first frost. We did a crispy prosciutto and grilled peach salad over dark greens with a little toasted pecans and crumbly cheese. You could go with feta here, and then dressed it with a lovely lime vinaigrette just to change up the old standard of lemon. So good. And then for the main dish, the class prepared a traditional Parmesan risotto, but stirred in half a cup of finely chopped basil at the very end. It gave it a great color and that fresh herbal taste. And then we lightly sauteed fresh corn off the cob, along with tomatoes and more basil, a little squeeze of lemon, and topped the risotto with that almost like a bit of a relish. Delicious. And finally, we had fresh blackberries and juicy plums that we mashed and macerated in sugar and built some trifles using angel food cake, layered with the fruit, and then mascarpone whipped cream. It was such a hit, and I'll tell you, if I can get my hands on some more corn, tomatoes, and fresh berries, I'll be making that menu one more time before fall weather is truly upon us. And finally, just to re-energize my cooking juices, I did a short trip up to Cleveland to see Samin Nosrat, the author of Salt Fat, Acid Heat, talking about her newest book, Good Things. And I have to say, she has me thinking about how and why I cook for people and the rituals that we build around food. It was a great talk, and I am nose deep into her new book. Bonus for that trip was meeting the moderator of her talk, Lisa Sands, who is the creator of a local Cleveland food podcast, C L E Foodcast. I'll guarantee you that Lisa and I will be talking again really soon. And since we are into fall, I have been meaning to catch up with our resident wine expert, Catherine Montest, who took a fall wine trip recently, but not in our hemisphere. Let's learn about how a casual weekly meetup at a local PA wine and spirits store turned into an epic adventure. Hey everybody, we're joined today with Catherine Montest of Your Fairy Wine Mother.

Catherine:

Hi, Doug.

Doug:

Hi, Catherine. Catherine, as we record, we're just moving into fall. But I know earlier this year you took a trip to Chile in March, which happens to be their fall. You are right. Can you tell us a little bit about that trip and what you experienced?

Catherine:

Oh, I'd be really happy to. Um, a small group of us who do wine tasting together on a pretty regular basis, if you consider every Thursday regular. That's regular. Um, one of the members of the group is from Chile. Oh. And she worked in the wine industry when they live when she lived there. How wonderful. She knew a lot of folks and was very successful in setting up an amazing tour for us. In five days, I think we visited 10 wineries. My group. Had a wine pairing dinner. Wow. We met winemakers from Santiago, from the Maipo Valley, and from Casablanca. And it was wonderful. Every winery was a little bit different. The winemakers all had their own approach and, you know, distinct style and way that they were making wines. But universally, the wines were wonderful. Oh, I see.

Doug:

I have heard of Chilean wines, just like we get Chilean fruit in the winter because it's their summer. But I have really no concept of uh how it compares to like Anapa Valley or uh French Tiro or anything.

Catherine:

Interesting you bring up the terroir because it's really kind of an amazingly laid-out country. It's pretty weird. The soil is really good, and the country itself is on the west coast of South America. Right. So it borders the Pacific Ocean, and it is 2600 miles long. Oh, it is so long on a map. You don't realize. And at its most narrow, it's about 40 miles wide, and it's most wide, only 220 miles wide.

Doug:

That is so interesting topographically, like it's just this little sliver, but a super long sliver of a country.

Catherine:

Exactly. And they've got the mountains that are just a little bit to their east. I'm trying to orient myself in my head. And what's really special about that is during the summer, and being in South America, they get wonderful sunshine. The days are warm. They've got the mountains they can plant on the sides of the hills and giving the grapevines the wonderful exposure that they need to flourish. But because they're along the Pacific Ocean there, at night they get these cooling breezes coming in off of the ocean. Interesting. And that cools things down, and the grapes get real calm and they love that at night. So having the shift from being warm during the day and cool at night, it helps them to really produce really good, really flavorful fruit.

Doug:

Interesting.

Catherine:

And that shift from warm to cold in the cycle of the day is called a diurnal shift. So if you want to get real technical about things.

Doug:

Oh my gosh.

Catherine:

That might be too much.

Doug:

Well, were there some particular maybe not the wineries, but the varietals? I don't know about the different grapes down there. Do they have different names? Do they grow some of the ones we're familiar hearing here at home?

Catherine:

You're going to be very familiar with most of the grapes that are grown there. Okay. Um, specifically from the Reds, we're looking at Pinot Noirs, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Malbec. And their next door neighbor is Argentina. And you've probably drank a lot of Malbec from Argentina. Probably. The Chilean Malbecs really hold up and can really compare to them. And because they're not as well known, you can often get them at a little bit better of a price. The Chilean Malbac. The Chilean Malbecs. Yeah. And Chile is the fifth largest producer of wine on the planet. Oh. And they produce a little over two and a half million pounds of wine grapes every year.

Doug:

That's kind of amazing. And I love these stats, Catherine. It's like you're giving us the book report. The book report. The wine report.

Catherine:

Oh, I like that. Yeah. That most of the wineries that we visited were small family-owned operations, and a lot of them didn't do any exporting. We did go to one large producer. And this is a name that most people who drink wine are familiar with. You've seen it on the shelves, and that's Concha y Toro.

Doug:

Okay. I'm not familiar, but okay, keep going.

Catherine:

Canche Toro is the biggest producer in all of Chile, and they've got a number of different labels that they support. The one I want to tell you about today, and I hope I pronounced this right, is called Casaleiro del Diablo, which means the devil's locker.

Doug:

Well, I got the Diablo part of that. So the Devil's Locker.

Catherine:

The Devil's Locker. So the story goes that Don Melcourt, and this is over a hundred years ago, he was the founder of Conchae Toro. And word got out in the surrounding village that his really good wines, the prized stuff, he kept in his wine cellar behind this kind of iron, wrought iron gate kind of situation. And that was the reserve stuff. That was the good stuff that he was kind of hoarding for himself. And he kind of noticed that his reserves were shrinking, but not at a rate at which he was drinking them.

Doug:

Oh, behind his secret.

Catherine:

Well, it became not so secret. And folks were getting in there and kind of snitching a little because they wanted to taste the really good stuff. So having it in the cellar and you know, behind this wrought iron gate wasn't doing the trick for him. I mean, we're talking over a hundred years ago. So there wasn't a lot of technology to support the thing. So by paying attention to what was going on culturally, he's like, oh, people are afraid of spooky things. So he made up a story about the devil's locker, Castile del Diablo, and that his cellar was haunted. Oh. So if you go down into the cellar, it has normal noises and things. But when someone introduces the idea that there's a spirit there, especially an evil spirit, those sounds become amplified. Yes. And the shadows become more menacing.

Doug:

Everything takes on a new meaning.

Catherine:

Entirely. So he kind of created this legend of the devil's locker. And it kept the locals out of his special reserve. Oh, how interesting. Isn't that fantastic? That is a great story. And so I'm bringing this up because it's spooky season. It is.

Doug:

We're getting uh we're recording just before Halloween.

Catherine:

So for your Halloween, if you want to kind of treat your friends to a fun little story and some pretty good wines, all of the um Conce Toro Casillero del Diablo, easy for my friend to say, not so easy for me. They're available in um Cab Sav, Carmen Air, Malbec, Merlot, and even a red blend. So kind of all across the reds, and it's only about $10 a bottle.

Doug:

And so these are readily available at like a PA State store. Yes, they are. Excellent.

Catherine:

Yep. And they actually are pretty popular because I was looking at them on wine.com this morning and they were all sold out.

Doug:

And I just want to rewind for a second. So you were there like at prime time, because this was like their fall, their harvest time.

Catherine:

Their harvest season, yes. All of the um the wineries were in the process of getting their harvesting equipment out. And when I say that, it's really for how they're de-stemming the grapes and things with those smaller growers. They had teams of people who go out into the vineyard and pick by hand.

Doug:

Yeah.

Catherine:

They're not using big machinery. And when you do things that are a little more, you know, hand-called, hands-on, and um, they tend to be a little bit more expensive because you've got so much more labor involved. Conce y Toro being a huge organization, they're harvesting with some machines and they're able to produce a huge volume at a pretty reasonable price.

Doug:

And keep their prices down. Yeah. So, Catherine, when you were down there and you were experiencing these smaller vineyards, uh, I know we've talked in the past about uh organic wines or folks that want to make sure they really preserve their uh their land with uh sustainable or regenerative practices. Did you encounter any of that?

Catherine:

Doug, that's predominantly what we encountered. Oh, that's great. Yeah. Wineries like Lof and Emiliana, most of the work was done by hand and just very carefully and meticulously and with love. Oh, good. And they really have a lot of respect for the land and the produce that it provides and the lifestyle that it provides. That's a lot of conservation and not just thinking about the land for today, but thinking about the land for future generations. And there's a lot of time and attention that's paid to that. And it's really one of the values that uh most of the uh winemakers that we talked with held.

Doug:

That's such a good news story.

Catherine:

Yeah, it really is. Uh talk to the wine specialist at your store and find out what's special from a small grower that they have in their store from Chile. And you will not be disappointed. They are so passionate about creating really wonderful products that tell the story of their country that you'll be doing yourself a favor to look for some of the small growers from Chile. It was an amazing trip, and I really recommend if anybody is into wine tourism, it's a great place to go.

Doug:

Catherine, I can't wait to go look for Chilean wines. I hope you enjoy them. Thanks, Doug. Thanks so much, Catherine.

Catherine:

Hello, this is Catherine Montest, your fairy wine mother, and you are listening to The Pittsburgh Dish.

Doug:

We are in primetime apple picking season. And if you're looking for more recipes beyond the traditional apple pie, we get one from Carolyn Beinlich of Triple B Farms. Hey everybody, we're joined today with Ron and Carolyn Beinlich of Triple B Farms. Carolyn, last time you were here, it was the summertime and we were talking about all the things that were going on at the farm. But now we're moving into late summer, fall. I think we're in apple season. Is there a recipe that you like to make with the apples from the farm?

Carolyn:

Yes. Um, we called Ron's mother Nan. And uh so I make an apple cake that we call Nan's apple cake, and it's one of our son Bill's favorites, too.

Doug:

So can you tell me a little bit more about the recipe? What goes in it?

Carolyn:

It's very easy. Um you're slicing up the apples thinly, and then they have to sit in a mixture of sugar and vegetable oil for a while. Interesting. And then um, it's just your flour, and uh I always add walnuts to it and stuff like that. So I forget all the little details yet, but that's the main ingredients. But it's just and it's so easy to make. Okay. And you just bake it in a nine-inch square pan and put a little bit of icing on it. It's good.

Doug:

Sounds delicious. Ron, was this a favorite of yours growing up? This is scrumptious. Oh, perfect. You said Nan.

Carolyn:

We called her Nan. Her name was really Norma, but we called her Nan.

Doug:

So this is Nan's apple cake.

Carolyn:

Right.

Doug:

All right. I'm gonna try and get that recipe from you and we'll put it up on our website.

Carolyn:

I can do that.

Doug:

Okay. Carolyn, Ron, thank you both so much for being on The Pittsburgh Dish. Thank you for having us. That recipe sounds so delicious. And since the chill is in the air, I have the urge to do more baking this fall. We have a few episodes left to round out our year before winter break, and we will certainly be touching on more baking-related topics on the podcast. Do you have a recipe? Share it with us. Just visit our website at www.pittsburgdish.com and look for our share a recipe form. If you enjoyed the show, consider buying us a coffee for this episode or supporting the show monthly. You can find links to those options at the bottom of our show description. And if you want to follow my own food adventures, you can find me on social media at Doug Cooking. That's our show for this week. Thanks again to all of our guests and contributors, and to Kevin Solecki of Carnegie Accordion Company for providing the music to our show. We'll be back again next week with another fresh episode. Stay tuned.

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