Portland bar incorporates “tainted” wine into a smoky cocktail
story and photo by Kelly Magyarics
The spate of wildfires in California and the Pacific Northwest over the past few years has destroyed homes as well as properties and businesses—including wineries like Signorello Vineyard in Napa and Paradise Ridge Winery in Sonoma. Even if fires leave wineries completely (or almost) intact, wafting smoke containing hundreds of chemical compounds can drift to vineyards many miles away which is absorbed through grape skins and vine leaves. During the growth process, these compounds, called phenols, bind with sugar molecules to form phenolic glycosides. If these affected grapes are harvested and used for winemaking, the phenols they release during fermentation can cause what’s referred to as “smoke taint.” Usually seen as a flaw, it can lead to wines that show intensely burned aromas and flavors, and are generally discarded.
But one Oregon restaurant and natural wine bar found a creative way to rescue a few bottles.
OK Omens in Portland uses a smoke-tainted Dolcetto recovered from the 2017 Eagle Creek Fire that occurred in Washington’s and Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge. That fire burned for three months and it destroyed 50,000 acres before being declared completely contained (though the following May it could still be seen smoldering in spots).
OK Omens cocktail, Baby You’re a Firework, shakes smoke-tainted Dolcetto with apple brandy, bourbon, triple sec, crème de cassis, lemon oleo saccharum, and egg white. The wine, crafted from a varietal traditionally found in Piemonte, is the central component to the cocktail and gives it tannic structure, with apple brandy and bourbon fortifying it and adding depth, lemon giving it bright acidity and egg white luscious mouthfeel.
So just how did bar director Alex Blair come to use the wine in the drink? “We were pouring the Dolcetto by the glass and someone at the bar asked for a smoky whiskey drink.” A peaty Scotch would generally be the usual suspect, but he thought it could be interesting to deviate a bit for his version of a New York Sour.
“Most producers don’t release smoke-tainted wine as it has generally been thought of as a bad thing,” admits wine director Brent Braun. “It is pretty common to blend [them] into larger batches of non-tainted wine in order to hide the smoke.” But some smaller producers have decided to embrace the grapes and bottle wines with uncommon characteristics.
The libation has a restrained smokiness to it that may appeal to enophiles in the same manner that brettanomyces—with its pastoral quality—does. “A little smoke taint can be interesting, but if [it] gets too intense then the wines can end up acrid, just like with burnt food.” Blair hasn’t heard of anyone else using these wines in cocktails, and since they are the result of a natural disaster and therefore pretty hard to come by he can’t see it becoming a trend.
Still, the smokiness it imparts is subtler than what would result by using a peaty Scotch or employing other methods like a lit stave or Smoking Gun (the hand-held food smoker) in the glass. “The smoke in this wine feels very close to home and familiar,” Blair says. “Anyone [who] grew up camping in Oregon knows well the smell of sitting in a coniferous forest beside a fire . . . there’s a rich woody quality to it and a slight piney-ness.”
Baby You’re a Firework
Recipe courtesy of OK Omens, Portland, OR
1 oz. smoke-tainted Dolcetto
½ oz. apple brandy
½ oz. bourbon
½ oz. crème de cassis
½ oz. lemon oleo saccharum (see note)
¾ oz. fresh lemon juice
½ oz. egg white
Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker, add ice, and shake until well-chilled. Strain into a rocks glass over fresh ice. Garnish with a lemon wheel.
For the lemon oleo saccharum:
Add lemon peels to sugar, stir to combine and let macerate for a day to release the citrus oils. Remove the lemon peels and store the oleo saccharum in the refrigerator until ready to use.
Kelly Magyarics, DWS, is a wine, spirit, lifestyle, and travel writer in the Washington, D.C. area. She can be reached through her website, www.kellymagyarics.com, or on Twitter and Instagram @kmagyarics.
