Provençal Pairings: Wine with Food

The Weight of Wine

Winery: Camins 2 Dreams
Cuvée: Syrah
Appellation: Santa Barbara County, California
Type: Red
Vintage: 2021
Grape Varieties: 100% Syrah
Alcohol: 13.5%
Average Retail Price: U.S. $46.00

For something new and different, Susan and I tasted this month’s wine together online from across the country (check out our tasting video HERE), and then I made a plan for the menu. It was a really fun way to do this and we hope to do it more in the future.

The menu ended up being for a recipe I have been working on for a while, and I think I finally got it right for this pairing. (See more below.) Lamb Steaks with Olive Sauce — beautifully grilled lamb steaks with a deep, rich sauce of green and black olives laced with porcini powder and Dijon mustard. The dish complements the wine beautifully. For the recipe, please visit Cocoa & Lavender.

The wine is 100% Syrah from a vineyard called Camins 2 Dreams — representing “the routes and paths we follow to achieve our dreams.” The winemakers — wife and wife team of Mireia Taribó and Tara Gomez — are incredibly talented; I was familiar with Gomez’s style when she was the winemaker at Kitá Vineyard. I have been a fan of hers for years (I loved her Syrah!), though this is my first tasting of their craft from Camins 2 Dreams. We tasted the 2021 Syrah which was made from grapes from Zotovich Vineyard (Santa Rita Hills) in Santa Barbara County.

It has a deep ruby color, and on the nose we both found it earthy with notes of dark fruits, blackberry, and a touch of tobacco. On the palate we tasted cherry (I tasted tart red cherry, Susan tasted black cherry), dark fruit, in addition to spice and savory herbs. It is a medium-bodied wine with an alluring silky mouthfeel, soft tannins and a long, generous finish with notes of toasted marshmallow and caramel.

We tasted this complex and well-balanced wine over the course of an hour as we chatted on zoom, and sipped it at different points during our discussion to see how it might have changed, thinking we would find Syrah’s signature black pepper when tasting. It wasn’t until we were about to sign off that our final taste brought out the black pepper on the finish. We had expected it all along, but this shows that as a wine breathes many changes can take place, making an already complex wine even more interesting.

The weight of the wine was perfect with the lamb, as were the intense fruit and spice — a truly beautiful pairing. As you can probably surmise, I like this wine quite a lot and look forward to more from Camins 2 Dreams.

Now, as promised, a bit more on the origins of this pairing and the culinary road I traveled to get the sauce right. As mentioned, this is a recipe with history. I liked the idea of an olive sauce and started using the most readily available olives: kalamata (black) and Spanish (green). Both olives proved to be problematic when I tested it was a Crozes Hermitage; they were too acidic (vinegar) and they fought with the wine. I felt that this particular Crozes Hermitage was lighter than I expected and didn’t stand up to the sauce. Most are medium to full-bodied, though there is a wide spectrum of weights when it comes to Crozes Hermitage. Each vintage can be so different based on the weather and terroir, not to mention the winemaker.

To make any sauce work with a wine, you need to select complementary ingredients. In this case, I switched out earthy oil-cured olives for the Kalamatas and buttery Castelvetrano olives from Sicily for the Spanish Green olives.