a few questions for Atsunori Satake

There were about six months where, if you were at my house, you were drinking wine out of a cup made of clay. I had really just started serving wine at home to guests and the choice of vessel extended the feeling that I wanted them to have, cradled in a hand and soft. I also liked that your mouth was touching where someone's hand had made an impression, the fingerprints in the cup making clear the fingerprints in the wine. Or that was my idea, but in reality the glazed vessel does make the wine soft on your palate carrying more of the qualities of the finish on the cup than the wine itself so the switch to tasting glasses was made. This experiment in what is gained and what is lost in difference of vessel made me keen and always interested in others' experiences and cup preferences. My friend Riley and I have talked about this a lot, he liked to reminisce about drinking wine out of tumblers at Luce in Portland, where he used to live. He says in a tumbler the wine feels immediate and approachable. Every time I drink wine out of a glass like that I drink very fast.

This might be why last summer he asked me if I had heard of Vineria Il Passagio in Tokyo. When I told him I hadn’t he immediately sent me their Instagram full of bottle shots with shells and unglazed clay vessels positioned next to the wine. I couldn’t stop scrolling, trying to imagine drinking familiar wines out of unfamiliar vessels. The collection of pictures reminded me of some thoughts I’ve had but have been afraid to pursue but expressed with a confidence I still can’t summon. I’m working on it for myself, to write to you all about this, but for now I want to make sure you see a little bit about this wine bar.

I DMed the proprietor, Atsunori Satake, and asked if he would have the time to answer a few questions. He graciously offered his time to me and I’m so grateful. Out of respect to him I’ve kept it short and sweet on my end. I hope that his insights and ideas inspire your approach to your next glass of wine and perhaps the other things you touch/that touch you. Google translate provided my translation and Atsunori provided his own, I’ve included both the Japanese and English in our conversation.

How long has Vineria Il Passagio been open? Vineria Il Passagioはどのくらい開いていますか？

Vineria Il Passaggio has been open since 2013 ヴィネリア・イル・パッサッジョは2013にオープンしました。

Who are your mentors or who inspires your work most? あなたのメンターは誰ですか、それともあなたの仕事を最も刺激するのは誰ですか？

I have no mentor.The people who inspire my work are those who face their senses of all genres. For example, athletes, biologists, painters, potters, writers, physicists, philosophers, mathematicians, chemist, etc.

私にメンターはいません。私の仕事を刺激する人は、あらゆるジャンルの自らの感覚に向き合う人たちです。例えば、アスリート、生物学者、画家、陶芸家、作家、物理学者、数学者、化学者、などです。

Where do you find your vessels? 船はどこにありますか？

I'm looking for a vessel in Japan. My favorite potter is Yukiharu Kumagai, a earthenware potter.

器は日本国内から探しています。好きな作家は、土器作家の熊谷幸治です。

Will you explain your philosophy of pairing wine and vessel? ワインと器を組み合わせるというあなたの哲学を説明していただけますか？

e philosophy of combining wine and vessels starts with the idea that “I am in the position of wine."

The traditional method of serving wine has been "how people can enjoy wine". My philosophy is “how wine can enjoy”. 

If there is a correct answer to the taste of wine, I feel that it is there.

ワインと器を組み合わせるという哲学は、「自分がワインの立場になる」ことからスタートしました。

これまで行われてきたワイン提供の方法は、「人々がワインをどのように楽しむことが出来るか」でした。私の考え方は、「ワインがどのように楽しむことができるか」です。もしワインの味わいの正解があるならば、そこにあるような気がしています。

This old post really spoke to me, will you talk about your idea behind it? この古い投稿は本当に私に話しました、あなたはその背後にあるあなたの考えについて話しますか？

My idea behind this post is about the importance of tactile sensation. 

Specifically, the sense of touch also has sight, hearing, smell, and taste. Therefore, I think that when we drink wine, we also taste it tactilely. 

In my experience, drinking wine with vinyl gloves blocking the sense of touch makes it taste bad. The taste goes far.

この投稿の背後にある私の考えは、触覚の重要性についてです。具体的には、触覚には視覚、聴覚、嗅覚、味覚もあるということです。よって、私たちはワインを味わうとき、触覚でも味わっていると、私は考えています。私の経験では、ビニール手袋で触覚を遮断してワインを飲むと、味わいが悪くなります。味わいが遠くに行ってしまいます。

What inspires your drawings and when do you draw? 何があなたの絵に影響を与え、いつ描きますか？

 I draw whenever i want. I've never been inspired by anyone.

I don't mind if it’s not good.I try to draw my own feelings without lying or deception. I think that will lead to my growth.

絵はいつでも好きな時に描きます。誰かに刺激を受けたことはありません。下手でも良いから、嘘や誤魔化しがない自分の感覚を描こうとしています。そのことが自分の成長につながると考えます。

How has your project changed over time? あなたのプロジェクトは時間とともにどのように変化しましたか？

First of all, when I started Vineria Il Passaggio, I was using a regular wine glass.

Two years later, I take various glasses to better serve the wine.

The glasses used at that time were Zalt glass(Austria),Radikon glass(Slovenia ),Gravner glass(Italy),Baccarat glass(France),etc.

A year later, I started to feel something wrong when drinking natural wine in a wine glass.

Just then, I met a pottery cup.

I bought that cup, and put some natural wine in it and drank.

In that taste, something wrong I felt disappeared. And next I tried using a pottery cup without glaze. Its taste made a great impression on me. For wine, I feel that a vessels can be likened to a microscope to see the landscape of its taste.  I felt that the landscape of wine was in focus by ungraded cup.

I started letting go of the wine glass the next day.

the next three years, I found a lot of vessels and studied their compatibility with wine every day.

Now I mainly use earthenware and shells. Studying will continue in the future.

まず、私がヴィネリア・イル・パッサッジョをスタートした時、私は一般的なワイングラスを使っていました。当時使用していたグラスは、ザルトグラス(オーストリア)、ラディコングラス(スロヴェニア)、グラヴネルグラス(イタリア)、バカラグラス(フランス)などです。

それから一年後、ナチュラルワインをワイングラスで飲む時に違和感を感じはじめました。

ちょうどその時に、陶器のカップに出会いました。そのカップを買い、ワインを入れて飲んでみました。その味わいからは、私が感じていた違和感が感じられなくなっていました。そして次に、釉薬のない陶器のカップも使ってみました。

その味わいは私に大きな印象を与えました。ワインにとって器は、その味わいの風景を見るための顕微鏡に例えることができると私は感じます。釉薬なしの器によって、ワインの風景にピントが合ったと感じました。そして私は翌日からワイングラスを手放しはじめました。そしてそれからの3年間で、器をたくさん見つけてワインとの相性を毎日研究しました。今は土器と貝殻を主に使っています。これからも研究は続きます。

There will maybe be some new wines later this week which we're looking forward to. DM or email us to talk about which wines do well out of plastic cups at a picnic or to get ahead of the new stuff. We always enjoy talking to you. Cheers:)

-Emily

for the love of giambotta

 Lately, whenever I call my friend Dario it’s the afternoon, and he is making himself and his family pasta for lunch - yesterday it was carbonara, last week it was bolognese. Actually I think the Bolognese sauce was for serving in Giambotta, his pizzeria, that evening, but the point is, Dario is often cooking for other people and for himself. 

We got to know Dario because of Giambotta, but before Giambotta existed. 

The story goes back to 2018, when Dario bought a bottle of wine from Abruzzo, Italy, made by the winemaker Iole Rabasco. He chose the wine for its unusual look - it was in a clear glass bottle, and it had a handwritten-looking label, both of which reminded him of the wines his uncle’s friends would make in their basements in Bridgeport. He took the bottle home and chilled it. He opened it and thought it smelled terrible. He was upset - he had selected this wine and felt disappointed. Something distracted him for about half an hour, then he tasted the wine again, and thought, this is one of the best wines I’ve ever had. 

I love this story because a lot of people tell me when they first try natural wine they find it unpalatable, but that they find that very quality exciting. They say, it smelled like shit! and seem happy about that. That is a totally reasonable feeling and experience, but it says something about Dario’s sophisticated appreciation of wine that it wasn’t love at first sip. Em says that wines tell you how to drink them when you learn how to speak to them. I think in this story that begins Dario’s relationship with natural wine, that is what unfolds, an exchange between the Rabasco and him, that could only happen if he was open to it, if he gave it another try. This is his spirit and the energy of Giambotta - generosity. 

He wanted to share the Rabasco with other people, and contacted the importer from the back label of bottle, who connected him with Mac, our other friend who is a distributor and who introduced us to Dario. Mac went out to Plainfield, Illinois, a nice town southwest of Chicago where Dario lives, to meet him and taste wines together. They say they had a lot of beautiful wines open. It was then and there that Dario knew he wanted to have a place where he served natural wine, along with pizza and antipasti. Unlike a restaurant looking to top off a predetermined concept with whatever beverage program is of the moment, the inspiration for Giambotta begins with natural wine. 

 a wine from Rabasco & some fritti

Dario is Italian-American. His father, Robert, moved to the US with his family when he was 10 from Calabria, where there’s a town named after Dario’s great-grandfather. Robert worked in the industry for a while and eventually opened his own restaurant in 1985. He now owns Capri Sogno in Plainfield. Giambotta opened in 2018 just down the street. 

There’s a sign above Capri Sogno that reads scuola vecchia, old school. When I first heard about Dario and his Dad, and Capri and Giambotta, I was tempted to think of Giambotta as the nuova vecchia. Father and son, old and new, martini bar and natural wine bar. I thought, here’s this young guy who likes wild and crazy natural wines. 

It’s not really like this. Dario chose to serve a traditional, 48 hour proof, soft dough Napoletana pizza, because he admires its handmade nature, how it is made with care and how it connects to a history of taste. The same ideas run through his love of natural wine - the craft and care involved, and the respect for existing knowledge. Sometimes natural wine seems to have a reputation of resisting systems and authority for its own sake. Natural wine does often resist systems and authority, but only because when those things are applied inequitably, unjustly. In his approach to food and wine, Dario is able to parse out what traditions do and don’t have integrity and relevance. He admires the VPN (Verace Pizzeria Napoletana) for upholding tradition but also for being generous with knowledge and resources with anyone interested. From that organization he started researching intensely about dough make up and says, that’s where the nerd started. 

Dario also had worked for the Chicago Pizza Boss, which was where he met the talented pizzaiolo of Giambotta, Mo. Mo is Roman-Egyptian, and would make a different style of pizza, a thin crust Roman style, for the staff as a snack after the shift. They now have it on the menu - so you can have Romana or Napoletana. 

The food at Giambotta is consistent and wonderful. Dario says he is not a chef, and thus looks to what he knows works, what he likes and identifies with. Under his curation, there is nothing wrong with delicious antipasti, fritti, polpetti, pasta and pizza - indeed it is why I drive an hour to eat and drink there. You should too. 

Dario made some selections of his favorite wines from Rainbow! 

Le Coste Rusticone, Zumito Frizbee & Paterna Olive Oil  available now in our store.

We have some exciting new wines perfect for early summer, a fresh pet nat, iconic orange wine, enigmatic 'white from red grapes' and garden-ready lambrusco. Let us know if you have any questions, concerns, wine dilemmas, joys, crises, we are here for you. Email rainbowwinechi@gmail.com or DM rainbow_wines. Have a beautiful weekend!

-Cub

des pates / the paste, patty piece in pasta : part 2 – semolina dough

As promised here is the part two on Italian noodle dough made using semolina flour. Semolina flour is made of milled durum wheat, a hard variety high in gluten. While not exclusive to Italian cuisine, a large amount of durum wheat is grown in the Alta Murgia at the Western edge of Puglia near Basilicata, Sicily and Basilicata are the next largest growers of the crop. It’s grown in some regions to the North too but the relative abundance of the wheat makes it the most commonly used flour in Southern cuisine. It’s familiar to Americans for two reasons, as Cub mentioned last week it is also the flour most often used for dried pasta as the lack of egg makes it easier to preserve. The second is the influence of Southern Italian immigrants on the way Americans think about Italian food.

It’s also my favorite to work with and I wrote a list of reasons why this is the case:

1. The flour is very coarse, but when mixed with only the right proportion of warm water and kneaded for an extended period of time it turns into a smooth, elastic paste. It feels like the dough is more communicative, the language of semolina dough is a bit easier for me to grasp than egg dough or even cookie dough for that matter. It tells you what it’s up to and what it needs.
2. It can take a cathartic pummeling, both in the kneading of the dough and making the shapes. The coarse flour also helps with some beautiful tearing that typifies many of the shapes of the South that sauce just loves.
3. Many of the shapes rely on transforming from a rope of dough which you can just roll with your hands or a little nugget cut from that rope. The gesture of rolling the coil is very similar to my abandoned ceramics practice, rolling from the palms to spread fingers so as not to flatten your chosen piece. I feel invited to tend to each strand or blob individually, and appreciate the differences in their sameness. This contrasts nicely with the more two dimensional transformations of the sheets of egg dough which bring out a pressure for symmetry in the cuts that I both cannot and am not interested to live up to.
4. Making the dough and shaping the pasta often requires zero additional equipment which is nice because I don’t really have room for extra stuff in my apartment kitchen. The elasticity of the dough encourages it to brush up against whatever objects and it will take on their impression. A common one I recently tried is cavatelli rolled on a cheese grater, the artist Meech Boakye recently used a carved glass bowl for theirs which was particularly beautiful. I love that this tacky ball encourages me to think about the surfaces in my kitchen differently. Like how a skateboarder reimagines the architecture of the city as their board meets the side of a building or public sculpture.
5. Semolina is a bit chewier than its eggy counterparts and is well suited to what I like to call “pasta for dinner”. While any pasta you serve at dinner could be considered pasta for dinner, this really refers to my preferred and untraditional ratio of stuff:noodle. This just means that I usually put more sauce or greens with the pasta than I would if it were being served as a first course. I just imagine everything separated out on a plate classic Midwest dinner style and think about how much of everything I want to feed my household. That is how I know it is the right proportion for me. 
6. Olive oil is the fat of choice in our house, perhaps an accidental legacy of the faddish Mediterranean diet of the 90s. As semolina pasta comes from oil-eating regions every plate feels especially suited to being finished with a generous glug. This also compensates for any deliciousness I personally failed to impart of the dish.

The last thing I would like to add is that I am not one of the people who think fresh made noodles are better than store bought, I just enjoy the task. Sometimes you want to start making dinner at 4:30.

Semolina Dough Recipe for two people

200 g semolina flour*

about 1/2 cup warm water

Put your flour in a bowl and make a well, pour the warm water into it. Slowly mix the walls of your well into the pool to incorporate the flour until it has basically absorbed the water. Knead for like 10 minutes (I treat it like wedging clay) until the dough feels pretty taut and even. I like to let it rest for at least 30 minutes though some recipes say that’s not necessary. 

*I hate Bob’s Red Mill for this purpose, if you can make a trip to an Italian specialty shop like Bari to get Caputo’s brand or something I recommend it. If you’re feeling fancy you can try this Sicilian flour imported by Gustiamo

From here you can make many different pastas, but I will suggest cavatelli to start because it will work even if your dough is a little over hydrated. And since it’s pasta for dinner we’re eating our starch with a vegetable and a meat. Pasta, sausage, broccoli (PSB) was a staple in my house growing up. My mom would pan fry the sausage, steam the broccoli, and boil the noodles separately then combine them in a bowl with lots of olive oil, parmesan, and pine nuts (please note we are not Italian). It’s still a comforting dish for me though I make it a little differently and exclude the pine nuts because they’re expensive. However, like my mom’s dish this is also not really an Italian recipe but is definitely “pasta for dinner”. 

I really like to drink some sparkling red wine of Northern Italy on pasta night even if the food is inspired by the South. It serves as a nice apero while you’re cooking and is hearty enough for dinner. Indocilis in the shop is perfectly suited for this. If you aren’t a red wine liker, the texture and energy of Bianchetto nicely mimics the skateboard feeling, every vintage it feels like part of you is firmly grounded and the other part is hurdling forward.

PSB for two

1 ball semolina dough

1 large or 2 small mild italian sausages

1 bunch broccoli rabe

hunk of pecorino or parmesan

olive oil

black pepper

Cut pieces of the dough and roll into ropes. Then cut again into smaller almost fingernail size pieces. Roll with your thumb against your work surface, grooved board, cheese grater, or whatever else you like. Dust lightly with semolina flour as you go so your pasta does not stick together. Put the water on to boil. 

Chop your broccoli rabe and leave it. 

Break up your sausages and fry them in the pan you intend to finishing your pasta in. Hopefully your water is boiling, salt it and add the broccoli rabe to blanch.

Pull the rabe out with a spider or strainer with a handle and add it to the sausage pan, give it a mix, and let the water come back to a boil. If it looks dry here add a little olive oil.

Add the pasta, when it starts floating to the top fish it out with your chosen tool and add it to the pan.

Grate a generous amount of cheese into the pan and add a little pasta water if you don’t think enough traveled on your pieces of pasta.

Toss vigorously and then plate.

Finish with a fancy olive oil (we use the Paterna in our house), more cheese, and some black pepper.

Cub wrote beautiful tasting notes for all of the wines in the shop save the new selections from Kindeli, Le Coste, and Zumo which are coming soon. If you want some personalized thoughts DM us @rainbow_wines or email rainbowwinechi@gmail.com. See you this weekend:)

-Emily

des pates / the paste, patty piece in pasta : part 1 – egg dough

 
like a lot of people i’m trying to use covid inside time to learn a new language. I chose french. I learned the french word for pasta, which you might think would just be pasta, as it is in italian and english, but the french have certain boundaries when it comes to taking words on loan– so pasta is les pâtes.
 
It’s always plural. The sound of it is flat and makes me think of the word pat which then makes me think of pat the bunny the "touch and feel" children’s book with all the textures that’s hopefully been updated to not just be about a very normative fictional white family.  
 
In french, a pâte is a dough. I was inspired by this to learn how our italian and english ‘pasta’ comes from the  Late Latin pasta (“dough, pastry cake, paste”), from the Ancient Greek πάστα (pásta, “barley porridge”). ‘Pasta’ is a doublet of ‘paste’ and ‘patty’ meaning it shares the same etymological root as these words, but has come to our language through different, modern paths.

There are two major Italian pasta doughs: egg dough, from flour and eggs, and semolina dough, from semolina flour and water. Dried pasta is from semolina dough. Part 2 of this series will be about that type of dough. 

 
I was interested in all of this because in addition to trying to learn a language this quarantine I’ve also pursued making pasta by hand. I have become obsessed with the dough, paste, patty part of pasta. When we think of pasta we don’t often think of those words– we think of the finished product, of words that reflect pasta shapes, like spaghetti, fusilli, rigatoni, penne, etc. At least, this is how I used to think of pasta – represented by the poster hanging in my high school cafeteria that I was thrilled to find online :

Good how the image includes salt, even if it wasn’t meant as a reference to the ancient greek παστός (pastós, “sprinkled with salt”).

 
Last spring I started making egg dough. Egg dough is wonderful for making noodles, it’s the dough of Emilia, the home of Bolognese. It is the dough meant for buttery sauces (think buttered noodles, what is better?)
 
I started out following Evan Funke’s method for egg pasta, which is helpful and nicely outlined in his book, American Sfoglino. The trouble with Funke is his dogmatic and agro ideas about hand rolling pasta (in his restaurant Felix Trattoria, there’s a plaque that says ‘f* # * your pasta machine’) and his bandying about of his mattarello, a long, thin rolling pin, which Em rightly noted had a priapic feel. Personally I do hand roll pasta, and I do have a mattarrello. The thing is I am still terrible at using it, and I have to deal with my partner Dave referring to it as my phallus. While cleaning up the kitchen he might say, for instance, ‘is your phallus water safe, should i clean your phallus in the sink or just dust it off ?’ All this being said, I am only writing about rolling out pasta in the recipe that follows because I haven’t really figured out how to knead and shape using the machine.
 
As the weather got warmer last spring and into summer, I switched from egg based to the semolina dough of southern Italy, thanks to Em. She is a great advocate for this dough. But when it got cold again in the fall, I longed for richer noodles to accompany braises and stewed sauces, so I went back to egg based, this time conferring with Marcella Hazan.
 
Hazan tripped me up. The first time I followed her recipe, it was the best egg dough I’d ever made. The heavens parted and I felt I figured out pasta dough forever. But then…every other time was trouble. The ratio of egg to flour seemed high and hard to manage. * It was often too wet. Every time I made the dough, it was different, because my eggs were of different size. Finally I resorted to weighing my eggs. This felt fussy, but at least I got a consistent result, right ? Wrong. When I tried it out on Monday night (if you’re in Chicago you know it was very humid) the change in the air meant I had to stray even from my egg weighing system.
 
Ultimately I decided it honors Hazan most, works best given the wildly different weather we have in this city, and is the easiest system to just use her original ratio + a little more flour, and know that you are probably always going to have to add more flour, and to not be scared of that.
 
She gives the excellent tip that you know you have the right ratio of flour to egg when you stick your finger in the dough, and if you don’t feel any tacky or sticky resistance, you are good to go. Otherwise, add more flour.
 
 
*Hazan’s ratio is about 4 :3, flour to egg. In his excellent book Ratio: the simple codes behind the craft of everyday cooking, Michael Ruhlman goes for a 3 :2 ratio. Others like Samin Nosrat have a high ratio of eggs to flour (even higher than Hazan) in her basic fresh pasta dough recipe for the New York Times, but she use lots of yolks. I don’t know enough about food science, but imagine the yolks make it easier to handle the dough, with higher fat than a whole egg with the white. Nosrat’s recipe is very solid, but it’s a little eggy for me.
 
 
 
Egg-based dough Recipe – adapted from Marcella Hazan
Makes enough for 2 large entree portions or 4 appetizer portions
 
Ideal tools :
-Large bowl preferably with a wide bottom
-Fork
-Bowl or bench scraper
-Counter or tabletop surface
 
 
Ingredients :
 -About 1 ¼  c of 00 flour, plus another roughly ¼ - ½ c, depending on humidity and egg size
-2 eggs (try not to use very big eggs)
 
La fontana
This is the fontana, or fountain, method, it’s like a fountain because you have a little pool of liquid in the center.
 
Place flour in bowl.
 
Make a well in the center and crack in eggs.
 
Break up the eggs with a fork, while keeping the liquid in the center.
 
Once the eggs are well blended, slowly start to incorporate the flour.
 
Keep going until all the flour and liquid have made contact, but before you have a very shaggy dough.
 
Dump out onto clean countertop.
 
 
Cutting in
Now you do the ‘cutting in’ – like you were making biscuits. This is the only part I remembered to take a picture of but I think it's worth it, this step isn't always included, and I find it a helpful step. 
 
Use the bench scraper to further incorporate the liquid and flour. 

Rest
Once you’ve formed a dough, wrap it tightly in plastic wrap and let it rest at room temp for 10 minutes. You want it more floury than not at this stage.
 
 
Knead
Knead the dough until it feels smooth as silk, when you run your finger along its surface, for about 10 minutes. Do the finger test to check the ratios. Wrap tightly in plastic wrap and let rest  (ideally for 30 minutes or up to 24 hours) before rolling out.
 
To make the noodles, use a little flour on your counter and rolling pin and take your time getting it down to about 1/8 «  or 1/16 » or pretty much as thin as you can.
 
If you’ve double this recipe, make two sheets and stretch one at a time.
 
Sprinkle semolina flour over the sheet. Fold it in half then in half again, and transfer to cutting board. For tagliatelle, cut into 1/8 » strips, using a carving or chef’s knife.
 
Use more semolina flour to keep your noodles from sticking together while waiting to be cooked. I like to toss mine around to make them kind of krimped.

 
 
 
 
Tagliatelle with lamb and onions or ramps
 
In it's essence bolognese is a butter sauce, it is meant to be creamy and coating. I wanted to make something like a lamb bolognese, but we didn’t have celery or tomatoes. This ‘white bolognese’ was really tasty, the sweetness of the carrot came through very well, which was nice with the ramps.
I don’t really like how pungent ramp bulbs are, so cooking them for so long in butter and lamb fat made them very mild. It’s not necessarily the best use of ramp bulbs, but it’s very tasty.

 
 
Ingredients :
2 tablespoons butter
1 onion or half a big onion minced nicely, or about a dozen cleaned ramp bulbs, cut into ½ inch pieces.
Ramp tops (if using ramps)
One carrot, minced nicely
1 lb lamb
3/4 c milk
½ c white wine
Half a clove of garlic, grated
 
A few tablespoons chopped parmesan
 
Heat a heavy bottomed sauce pan. Melt butter. Add your ramps or onion and cook a few minutes. Add minced carrot and cook a few minutes. Add lamb and cook til red is gone. Add milk, cook until reduced by about a quarter. Add white wine, garlic and then simmer for 2 1/2 hours or so, until there’s little liquid left.
 
Bring a big pot of water to a boil, then salt generously.
 
Get a skillet going on medium- high heat. Toss your cleaned ramp tops in the skillet and sear until lightly browned. Remove leaves and give them a rough chop.
 
Cook noodles for 1 minute, then transfer them into your saucepot to cook with the lamb over medium-low heat for another minute or so. Add parmesan. Put in bowls and garnish with ramp tops.
 
This was delicious with the fruit-forward, zingy Primitivo Anfora from Cristiano Guttarolo. I would also recommend Les œillets, the orange wine from Jean Yves Peron – it would surely bring lift and vibrancy to this creamy, delicious dish of pasta.

New wines in the store are landing on Friday – we are so, so excited. Kindeli from New Zealand, Le Coste from Lazio and Zumo from Californie. Can’t wait.
 
Please don’t hesitate to email us at rainbowwinechi@gmail.com or DM rainbow_wines on instragram with comments or questions. 

-Cub