Rosewood Wines Meet Uptown 21 Food

Over the course of the summer, Nick and Nat’s Uptown 21, the popular Waterloo restaurant, have been offering tasting menus featuring many great Ontario wines and beers.

The popularity and growth of these events–tables filled and patrons having a wonderful and relaxed evening–are simple testaments to the quality of the food and drink served and the dining collegiality of the events themselves.

These nights have grown to be fun and informative occasions and represent the best of food and drink that Waterloo Region offers. Previous events included a dinner with Beau’s All Natural Brewing Company. Two dinners remain in August and September.

Rosewood Estates Winery: guest wines and winemaker at Uptown 21.

On any given night during a taste-pairing such as this, you can bump into friends and acquaintances who are fans of Benninger’s cooking and the restaurant’s ambiance–and you more often than not make new friends and acquaintances. Is that not what is truly great about dining out with other food lovers? But, of course, being introduced to new flavour and texture combinations is paramount.

An amuse-bouche that set us up for the night's tastes and textures.

With Rosewood Estates Winery winemaker Natalie Spytkowsky attending the dinner and overseeing the evening’s tasting notes for the Beamsville-based winery, Benninger spoons out a bite-sized amusegueles, a salsa-like anticipation of the night’s contrasting flavours and textures.

That is followed by a first-course raw scallop, a truly first-rate delicate and beautiful dish that was a melange of flavours, and which offered a unique texture delivery (one which I thoroughly enjoyed) via sea buckthorn berries with added crisp from a green olive tempura and a honeycomb vinaigrette.

The berry–a local berry, I might add, from Everspring Farms of Seaforth, Ontario–added an astringency and acidity that worked well with the elegant crunch of the tempura green bean. The orangey-yellow berry is from a deciduous shrub that was native to China but that grows fairly extensively.

It’s not hard to detect the sweetness of the scallop against the honeycomb. And how many times do you get honeycomb on your plate. This was a truly remarkable dish.

A 2009 Semillon, a medium dry and full-bodied single varietal wine draws on fruit from the Renaceau Vineyard in the Beamsville Bench and one for which Spytkowsky points out lemony, citrusy and pear notes with a bit of minerality.

How often is honeycomb set before you, except maybe your Post breakfast cereal?

In several meals (no wait: make that several dozen meals) enjoyed at Uptown 21, it has been pleasing to see Benninger’s cooking style continue to evolve and develop. I see in his dishes a beautifully controlled and refined rusticity which is complex and yet welcoming and accessible; and yet, he pulls an uncharacteristic but very entertaining and tasty composed salad out of his toque (or ball cap). A selection of veg are accompanied by slightly warmed Quebec artisanal cheeses and served with a home-made mustard vinaigrette and some “bread crumbs.”  The components are discrete and yet they offer integrated flavour. It’s a thoughtful dish.

Salad and wine usually don’t work well together, but these two do–that is where the cheese and bread crumbs have role to play to my thinking. They blend nicely with a 2009 Natalie’s Sussreserve Riesling (not Uptown 21 Natalie but rather Natalie Spytkowsky). It’s her favourite grape, and the sussreserve is her signature wine.

A composed salad with artisanal cheese: a beautifully conceptualized and realized dish.

Spytkowsky says it works like this (and that only two wineries in Canada make Riesling like this): some of the Riesling juice is reserved and does not undergo fermentation. After the bulk of the wine has fermented, the reserved and sweet unfermented juice is added to the wine. Sussreserve, the winemaker says, is German for “sweet reserve.” She adds that the process adds acidity, sweetness and more complexity to the wine. The Riesling tastes very good and has a lemony-orangey citrus note.

The kitchen at Uptown 21 loves bacon and they love duck: the two come together, in a way, in Benninger’s next course of duck bacon with a Pinot Noir and honey-stewed rhubarb (I can see ducks happily waddling through a patch of rhubarb before they end up happily together on the plate, can’t you?), braised navy beans and a barley grass jus.

Duck ... duck ... bacon. 'Nuff said (except for some lovely braised white beans).

The Rosewood 2009 Pinot Noir has the right balance of berry fruitiness and spice and a gently muscular body to go well with the duck and its accompanying ingredients. A medium barrel toasting gives a hint of smokiness, cocoa and mocha.

The true main course, a beef ragu with cavatelli dumplings, is in my view as true a manifestation of Benninger’s cooking talents as any–and it is delicious. Tender beef is scattered with sweet peas, some fried shallots and pickled green onions served with wonderful little cavatelli dumplings.

What is I see as one of the true strengths of Benninger's cooking: earthy-rich beef with cavatelli dumplings in a hearty rustic flavour-variety.

The dish was served with what I call a glass from the “The China Wall”–Rosewood’s 2009 Johnny Bower Merlot, named for Maple Leafs’ legendary goalie. With hand-harvested fruit from the Renaceau vineyard, the grapes undergo a couple of week’s worth of fermentation on-stem and after more than a year in oak what results is a tannic, and nicely dry and full-bodied wine with cherry and plumy fruit, as Spytkowsky describes.

"The Benninger Beignet" makes a return to partner with Rosewood's Mead Royale.

A final course saw the appearance of a sort of signature of Benninger’s, the beignet: a rosemary sugar-dusted doughnut with fresh and stewed strawberries and a honey goat-milk ice cream. This was served with Rosewood’s unique creation, Mead Royale–fermented wildflower honey and water.

A truly tasty substitute to the sometimes overly sweet ice wine, the mead, I could tell by the looks on some folks’ faces was a challenge. But I think that we should be challenged because it makes us more discriminating and discerning diners. The mead had ginger, orange and mint notes that balanced sweet and acid quite well and I thought paired up well with the strawberries and the earthier, cake elements of the doughnut.

Aromas, tastes, textures: Rosewood and Uptown 21, wine and food, work very well together indeed.