Working as a prep cook in a hotel, I used to clean a lot of strawberries. Strawberries for the breakfast buffet, strawberries for the cold line’s fruit plates and salads, strawberries for the pastry shop. (This is a Pinot Noir review–I’m getting to it, I promise. But first I want to tell you about my job prepping strawberries.)
It’s a tedious task, one that usually went to new hires. I was 19 or 20 years old and just out of culinary school, so this one fruity duty could account for half of my shift or more.
Strawberries come in one-pound boxes, eight per cardboard flat. You can stack about 50 or 60 pounds on a pushcart before they teeter dangerously high and you have to make another trip to the storeroom in the back.
Fill a large sink and float the berries in it, picking out any obviously spoiled ones. Wash them, drain them, air dry them. The good berries get handled one-by-one, quickly inspected as they pass from the bucket at the left hand to the knife in the right hand. Bruised, over- or under-ripe fruit is dropped into a smaller bucket, destined for the pastry kitchen for coulis and compotes.
Slice off the green tops without cutting too shallow or too deep. Turn them on end, cut them into quarters or sixths, depending on the size. (Some cooks use a paring knife for this, but I think a sharp French-style chef’s knife is faster and cleaner.)
Make the breakfast trays for tomorrow, and a few gallons of loose sliced berries for the morning crew to have in reserve. Don’t let any pieces of green leaf escape your notice, or Chef might see them and flip out. I did this almost every day for a while–months–and the motion became mechanically fast.
Sometimes, when you handle one food item for a long time, you sort of forget that it’s food. It becomes separated in your mind from its ultimate purpose of being eaten and evokes no appetite. Food becomes abstract, just more material to be processed, more work to be completed.
But I never once forgot that strawberries are food, because a good strawberry is about as divine as food can get. And somewhere in each cart full of fresh berries was a single specimen that was better than all the rest. The Best Strawberry. Every day, I made a little game of finding it.
The perfect strawberry is intensely red and fragrant. There is no trace of whiteness at its shoulders. Its middle section yields to the gentle press of a finger, but is not yet soft. Its ripe seeds are small and recede into the flesh. Its leaves and stem are unobtrusive.
Shape and size are less important than color and texture–and fragrance, which is the most important of all. But shape and size do have their implications. Generally speaking, the best berries are on the small side. Giant strawberries are just for show–to cover in chocolate and such–and they taste like crunchy grass.
The ideal strawberry is big enough to be a mouthful, but not pithy or overgrown. Its shape is a gradual one that ripens evenly from crown to tip. It has no hard ridges or awkward crannies where seeds collect to form a gritty bite.
I searched for the best strawberry passively, as each fruit passed through my rubber-gloved hands. I tried to work as quickly as possible so I could move on to the melons and the pineapples. When you’re parsing a few thousand strawberries a day, it gets easier. My sense of smell and my sense of touch were becoming honed. Pretty soon, I could tell whether a berry was a top candidate or not without touching it or even fully setting eyes on it.
When I found the best berry, I set it on the edge of the cutting board. There it would stay until all the berries were cut and sorted, or unless it was displaced by a challenger.
Eventually, the fruit prep was finished. The soggy cardboard trays and plastic clamshells were piled to one side of the table, the expertly sorted and sliced produce to another. That final strawberry was mine. One perfect (or near-perfect) berry.
With a few swipes of my knife I would de-stem it, core it–though a primo strawberry rarely has much of a hollow core–and cut it into wedges. (Cut strawberries always taste better than whole.) Then I would palm the pieces, pop into the walk-in fridge and eat them–a little reward for churning through a stack of berries that weighed as much as a Golden Retriever.
Sometimes, the best strawberry of the bunch would be merely tasty. We served strawberries year-round. Every big hotel does–it’s simply expected. But an out-of-season strawberry never achieves full deliciousness. Its texture is too spongy or too firm. Its flavors are simple and green.
A sublime strawberry, on the other hand, will taste better than you remember a strawberry can taste.
There were times when I didn’t eat the best strawberry. Maybe I had just brushed my teeth (and therefore wasn’t worthy of that strawberry’s glory). Or a boss or trainee was watching. Or else, somebody was crying or texting or toking in the walk-in, rendering my hiding place temporarily off-limits.
Even so, I would identify that singular strawberry and slice it. Instead of sneaking the morsels, I’d silently bless it as I placed it on a breakfast tray with all the others. Bye bye, perfect strawberry. To whoever gets this bite, I hope you damn well appreciate it.
Why am I thinking about the Best Strawberry game, these years later? It’s because of Pinot Noir. Specifically, a certain style of concentrated, berry-licious Santa Barbara Pinot Noir that I have only lately been made aware of.
Today’s wine is the Sea Floored Pinot Noir from El Pino Club. El Pino Club is a group of winemakers who have found common cause in their love of Pinot Noir. I got this bottle at The Wine Authority, where a wine rep friend turned me on to it.
Now I feel most fortunate, like the person who happened to grab my perfect berry off the buffet. Because this wine is very good.
Sea Floored is a wine from the Foley family, from 100% Pinot Noir. It’s named for the marine soils in its two vineyards in the Santa Rita Hills AVA. The 2021 vintage was aged for 18 months in French oak barrels, 60% new. (There’s also some information about clonal selection, which is all just letters and numbers to me. I am not that much of a Pinot-head. Yet.)
It’s medium ruby with a light watermelon-hued rim. The dominant aroma, as you might have guessed, is strawberry. Full, ripe and juicy strawberry–just a day or two away from being relegated to the pastry shop. It’s a transcendentally tasty fruitiness, but the oak-derived aromas are also something divine.
Literally. Sacred woods are on the nose: Dry, spicy sandalwood or palo santo. Geranium, and the maple-spiciness of fenugreek seed. There’s something camphorous that I think might be mint or cedar, but on second thought it turns out to be alcohol heat. The herbs are freshly dried ones–green sage, especially. And I’m sure I’m not just imagining a faint trace of cannabis hovering near the fruit. (Which also reminds me of the walk-in at the hotel…for some reason.)
On the palate, it’s more buckets of ripe red berries, red-skinned apple, and cranberry. There’s a demure but persistent smokiness–a toasty, oily-fragrant note, like a just-extinguished incense stick.
Structurally, it’s marvelous too. Medium tannins, medium body, nothing stepping out of turn. The acidity is ideal–again, like a perfectly ripened piece of fruit–enough to make you salivate but not pucker. The alcohol is surprisingly high (14.4%) and prominent. But in a wine with this much character I don’t mind it, because it makes you slow down and savor every little sip.
In short, this wine is a kindred spirit to my hard-earned, furtive strawberry snacks, except in bottle form. I’ll probably rate it even higher because of that particular association.
The thing is, though, I don’t think you need to have a strawberry-specific sensory memory to recognize that this is a very delicious wine. In the same way, toddlers don’t really know what a strawberry is but will practically bankrupt you with the amount of the precious fruit they can shove down their gullets. (This is what my friends with kids tell me, anyway.) Good food and good wine taste good. It’s not that complicated.
Although…actually it is. There are so many ways that wine can go wrong–Pinot Noir especially–and the fact that this fussy fruit has been shepherded from vine to glass with so many delicate parts intact is mind-boggling.
I’m not sure what sorcerous art can make grapes mimic the rarest and best tastes on Earth. It’s wacky.
I thought this wine was probably too good to drink with food, but it was dinnertime and I was hungry. Pairing-wise, I’m finding that I like Pinot with pork, Pinot with herbs, and Pinot with mustard. I paired it with bratwurst and a smashed-potato hash.
Bottle: El Pino Club Sea Floored Pinot Noir (2021)
Variety: Pinot Noir (100%)
ABV: 14.4%
Suggested retail: $52.99
My rating: 9.1 (out of 10)
Review disclosure: I was not compensated or provided any free products for this review. Opinions expressed on The Wine Fairy blog are entirely my own.
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