December Wine: Domaine Bernard Baudry Chinon, Cabernet Franc 2009

Dino Gazzola, Grouse Mountain’s The Observatory | BCBusiness
Mountain Man: Dino Gazzola serves fine fare at 1,100 metres above sea level.

Forget your diet for now. ’Tis the season to indulge.

Ask an Oenophile

The Expert: Dino L. Gazzola, executive chef at Grouse Mountain’s The Observatory
The Dish: Polderside Farms roasted duck breast and crispy leg, $39
The Pairing: Domaine Bernard Baudry Chinon, Cabernet Franc, 2009, Loire, France, $55

We do what we can to utilize what is organic and local. As such, the menu changes five or six times a year – with the seasons and in conjunction with the products coming in. This month, Polderside Farms duck is a featured entree.

There are a few flavour combinations happening with this dish: duck leg confit served with a celeriac purée; duck breast on a bed of Swiss chard; and roasted endive tatin with a brandy au jus and heirloom vegetables. Overall, the thinking here is French country food – that rich, really technique-driven cuisine.

A traditional-style Loire wine, the Bernard Baudry Chinon pairs beautifully with this dish. It’s very elegant, very approachable and has nicely balanced tannins with just a bit of acidity, but it doesn’t strip your teeth.

I find duck to have rich, very earthy flavours and the minerality in this wine really works with that. It’s a blend of Chinon’s two major terroirs, mixing 75 per cent fruit from gravel soils and 25 per cent grown on limestone slopes.

However, what I like most about this pairing is that you get a few raisins in the endive tatin and a hint of raisin on the nose of the wine, so it’s very complementary. The rich flavour of the duck with the sweetness of the tatin and this wine is just, well, awesome.
– as told to Alexandra Barrow

Bottoms Up: It’s Business Time

Downtown office workers can still get down to business outside the boardroom thanks to Yew Restaurant + Bar’s lead bartender, Justin Taylor. When we asked the master mixologist to create a BCBusiness-exclusive cocktail for the month of December, he really delivered. According to Taylor, his tasty tipple “It’s Business Time” has all the elements of Christmas in a glass, with the added flavour punch of an exotic escape. Try it at Yew, where the cocktail will be part of the bar’s We Make It, Yew Shake It program until 2013. Or whip it up at home: mix 2 oz barrel-aged, chai-infused Mezcal, ½ oz crème de cacao and ½ oz vanilla syrup with 1 oz fresh-pressed lemon juice and .75 oz pasteurized egg white. ($14, yewrestaurant.com)

Berry Indispensable

We tend to focus on the tart-tasting cranberry during the holidays, since a slice of roast turkey without a side of cranberry sauce is practically blasphemy – and certainly goes against tradition. But this hardy, bog-growing fruit has long been important to B.C.’s economy year-round. The Sto:lo Nation used the cranberry as currency, and in the 1850s the Hudson’s Bay Co. began exporting the crop from Fort Langley to the U.S. for a pretty penny. Today, the province is the largest producer of cranberries in Canada, with approximately 80 growers producing up to 84 million pounds (840,000 barrels) of fruit annually, and a brand new, $26-million, 25,600-square-foot Ocean Spray receiving facility in Richmond. As a result, B.C. constitutes about 12 per cent of North America’s total cranberry production, proving that beyond their antioxidant properties and the way they light up turkey dinner, these little berries mean big business.