It may be good for persons to step away from the places where they were born, but it isn't always for foods or wines.
A lot of what we eat and drink is a poor second or third generation of its better and more distant parent.
Wisconsin cheddar is no English farmhouse cheddar, to be sure, nor is California Central Valley chablis anything at all like Chablis. Those examples are as obvious as a second nose.
But food and drink in imitation of primal flavor is everywhere: 'Italian-style' pasta sauce, Argentine 'parmigiano,' even the lowly French onion soup.
This thought came to me—as many do—by way of a taste. I was in Portugal, at the Graham's porto lodge in Vila Nova de Gaia, dining with Penny Symington and her husband, James, members of the large Symington family that owns Graham's, among other porto houses.
The meal was winding down and we were eating some Serra cheese, a semi-runny ewe's milk cheese and one of Portugal's most celebrated. Serra is often served with a thick quince paste that the Portuguese call marmelada (a similar confection in Spain is called membrillo).
This marmelada was a simple affair, but it was terrific: as orange as the setting sun, rather tangy, and with a grainy texture that itself helped scrub clean the fatty cheese from the mouth. And it had buckets of flavor for something made of mere fruit, like a combined concentrate of tart-sweet apples and d'Anjou pears.
I've had other quince pastes—from California, from Canada—but they were shadows of this marmelada. Why? Perhaps because, simply, they were not marmelada. They were copies, well-meaning attempts to capture a primal taste but, in the end, copies.
The Portuguese did not invent marmelada or other marmalades of various fruits. As for quince preserves, they began in ancient Rome, then to medieval Arabia and onto France. But in the present day, the Portuguese do quince paste best.
And so it is, for a lot else that we eat and drink, with other originals and their copies.
It's an open question whether the winemakers of California and Oregon yet seek the Holy Grail of making their pinot noir 'like Burgundy.' (Or their sparkling wine 'like Champagne' and their meritage 'like Bordeaux.')
Even to this day, many a winery's press packet trumpets that it 'uses Burgundian techniques.' Or, this or that p.r. agency will hold a blind tasting for wine writers that smuggles in an Oregon pinot noir among a raft of wines from the Cote d'Or.
Nonetheless, the bright fruit, higher acidity, earthiness and funk of Burgundian pinot noir elude winemakers who work apart from there.
To their credit, more and more winemakers have ceased the charade and now state 'I do not make Burgundy,' accepting what the West Coast climates give them: by and large, wines with deep, dark fruit and a lot less funk than Burgundy's.
It's a grown-up though humbling attitude, to acknowledge that site and soil will tell you how to make a wine. It also makes for a more interesting palette of wines around the world (despite an unfortunate, countervailing international homogenization in style of especially red wines).
Perhaps the American wine people have learned from the American cheese people who some time ago realized that copying cheeses wasn't as tasty as coming up with your own.
Our supermarkets are still replete with 'camembert' or 'gouda' from some Midwestern state, but the contemporary success story of American cheese is told from the small goat, ewe and cow herds that give up their milk to artisans who fashion small-batch, sometimes rustic cheeses.
There are now dozens and dozens of examples, all pure-bred American. To cite merely two: the delightful, creamy-crumbly, cows' milk Poudre Puffs from Bingham Hill Cheese Company in Fort Collins, Colo.; or this year's Best in Show at the American Cheese Society, Cowgirl Creamery's Red Hawk, from Point Reyes Station, Calif., a washed rind triple-créme, runny in texture, with a deep, earthy flavor.
All of these (now) hundreds of artisan cheeses are reflections of the places from which they come. Because each herd's food and silage comes from specific pastures and farms, and because each dairy or cheese cave is replete with its own microflora and microbes, these artisan cheese makers cannot help but fashion cheeses different one from the other.
Moreover, they differ from any 'mother cheese' such as Brie or Gorgonzola that, to bring the argument full circle to its source, is specific to its own site.
In all, mine is an argument to travel to the places where primal foods and wines come from, to cook with ingredients that do not have frequent-flyer miles—to eat asparagus only in the spring, say—to buy from and make prosper local food artisans, and to learn to taste and prefer in wines and foods not only their pure flavor, but more, the place from which they come.
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