Alfresco feast

Eating outdoors in the summer is a sensual feast. The swaying grasses catch the eye, the breeze tickles the arm and the sound of a trickling creek relaxes the mind.

And then there are all the delicious aromas — the herbaceous twang of a sauvignon blanc, the refreshing zing of a cucumber, the deep bass note of applewood-smoked meat — that join together to create a harmonious flavor experience.

Capturing the fleeting freshness of seasonal bounty — with food and wine grown within a stone’s throw of the table — is the raison d’etre of Quivira Vineyard’s new Farm-to-Table wine dinners, a series of four seasonal feasts served throughout the year at the Dry Creek Valley winery.

“Because of Quivira’s biodynamic farming practices, they have all this wonderful produce that they just put in the ground last year,” said Donna del Rey of Healdsburg’s Relish Culinary Adventures, who organizes the dinners. “They wanted to create an event that features the terroir, where all the food and wine are coming from the same soil.”

At a recent July repast to celebrate the season’s bounty, the winery opened its garden gates to a group of guests, who sat down at a table under an ancient fig tree and feasted on heirloom tomatoes and beans, beef ribs and zinfandel barbecue sauce.

“Everything is coming from the gardens,” said Quivira Farm Manager Andrew Beedy. “The beans, the potatoes are all grown within 100 yards of the table.”

Created by chef/farmer Doug Nicosia of Sensuous Farms in Sebastopol, the family-style supper celebrated the theme of biodiversity, one of the principle tenets of a biodynamic-certified winery such as Quivira.

“You can’t be biodynamic if you only do wine,” Beedy explained. “It’s about how everything interacts.”

Quivira winemaker Steven Canter defines biodynamics as a holistic approach, encompassing everything within the borders of the farm, and beyond.

“Biodynamics is not a thing ... It’s a means to an end,” he said. “At the center is the soil health and the plant health, from the climate around the plant to the borders of the farm. And it includes the people who work on that farm, and it’s what radiates beyond the farm.”

Not only does Quivira produce a wide range of produce and eggs that it sells to local chefs, but it leases a portion of its raised beds to local restaurants and farmstands. The money for the produce from those beds is donated to the Northern Sonoma Healthcare Foundation, which serves the needs of Hispanic farmworkers.

Guests to the recent farm-to-table dinner were given a tour of the farm, which includes 48 chickens, four roosters, two pigs and a couple of goats. In addition to the 120 raised beds, Beedy has planted 1,200 strawberry plants and a small orchard of peaches, pears, apples and lemons.

Both the berries and fruits are made into a line of low-sugar preserves by Elissa Rubin-Mahon of Artisan Preserves in Forestville, including a delicious Fig Provence Preserve and her latest creation: figs poached in red wine.

To increase the winery’s biodiversity, Beedy planted 70 to 100 varieties of vegetables last April. This year, the garden boasts 12 different kinds of heirloom tomatoes, from Isis Candy to Purple Cherokee, plus all kinds of high-flavor vegetables like Nantes carrots and Turkish Orange Eggplant.

“We only grow open pollinated plants, so you need a male and a female (plant),” Beedy explained. “We bring in the bee hives for pollinization.”

Quivira also makes an extra-virgin olive oil from its olive trees and an estate honey from three stationary beehives, tended by cellar technician and fledgling beekeper Evan Lewandowski.

To support the bees, Beedy plants flowers like Gaillardia and Verbena patagonica throughout the farm. In the future, he plans to add California native plants to maximize the bloom season — and the food supply — for the bees.

The pigs are housed in an apple and pear orchard, as is the custom in England. In this symbiotic arrangement, the pigs in the spring root up the coddling moth larvae, which would otherwise prey on the fruit trees.

During the summer dinner, Nicosia served an amuse bouche of rainbow-hued raw carrots — Dragon, Nantaise, Narome, St. Valery and Yaya varieties — glazed with honey and sea salt. He also sliced up a carpaccio of raw zucchini and summer squash.

The amuse was complemented by two signature Quivira wines: the 2008 Fig Tree Sauvignon Blanc and the 2008 Barrel Complete Sauvignon Blanc. For Canter, the 2008 Fig Tree Sauvignon Blanc serves as a perfect example of his hands-off approach to wine-making.

“It’s virtually a naked wine,” he said. “All the effort has been placed in the vineyard. The grapes are pressed into a tank, and that’s about all.”

As a first course, Nicosia served a simple appetizer of tomato sorbet drizzled with a chile glaze made from Hinklehatz peppers.

“We used two types of tomatoes — the Orange Oxheart and Valencia,” he said. “There was a slow extraction of the tomato flavor with the chili glaze, then we added Quivira olive oil and salt.”

The tomato sorbet was served with a 2008 Mourvedre Viognier Rose. This unusual wine was made from the early harvested “wings” of the mourvedre grape cluster, pressed together with viognier skins.

Nicosia, who gives canning and preserving classes for Relish Culinary Adventures, is a biodynamic practitioner who farms and sharecrops various pieces of land from Sebastopol to Potter Valley.

For the main course, he smoked and braised beef short ribs from the cattle he raises in Potter Valley. The main course was served with Quivira’s 2007 Old Vine Katz Zinfandel and the 2007 Grenache.

The beef ribs were served with an array of fresh vegetables and salads from the garden, including a Summer Bean Picnic Salad, Spinach with Garlic, Smashed Potatoes with Celery Butter and a salad made from Cucumber, Wild Arugula, Preserved Meyer Lemons and Feta.

For dessert, Nicosia served up a tangy Wild Blackberry Gelato with a Semolina and Meyer Lemon Biscotti.

For the Quivira team, including owner Pete Kight, the dinners are a tangible way to explain the winery’s biodynamic practices to the public.

“I hope these dinners wake up a dormant part of people’s minds,” Canter said. “There’s a synergy that starts to happen between the food and the wine.”

For Relish Culinary Adventures, which started out giving cooking classes on local farms and has since opened a home base in Healdsburg, the dinners are a natural fit.

“Any time you’re on a farm eating food that’s been picked that day, there’s a vibrancy and a life force that is there,” del Rey said.

And any time you stage a dinner with Mother Nature as your venue, there’s bound to be a few snags. Before the July dinner, about 30 raised beds at Quivira’s gardens were rooted up by wild pigs, who enjoyed the fresh arugula, zucchini and spinach.

Because of the cooler weather, a plan to make verjus was jettisoned because the green grapes did not have sufficient sugar levels. And while the chef was setting up his kitchen in the field that afternoon, the wind decided to play havoc.

“We had a major wind squall earlier today,” Nicosia said, with a grin on his face. “It knocked all the wine glasses over.”

The following side dish recipes are from from Douglas Nicosia of Sensuous Farms. He prefers to use the Luongo di Firenze red onion, Inchelium red garlic, Suhyo cucumbers, Selvatica arugula and Quivira olive oil in these recipes.

Makes 4 to 6 servings

For dressing:

¼ red onion, peeled and minced

1 clove garlic, peeled and minced

1 preserved Meyer lemon, center discarded, peel cut into ¼-inch dice

1 tablespoon Meyer lemon preserving liquid

¼ cup extra virgin olive oil

For salad

3 cucumbers, peeled and cut into ½ inch dice

2 cups whole arugula, roughly chopped

6 ounces quality goat or sheep’s milk feta, cut into ½ inch dice

Mix all dressing ingredients together in a large salad bowl and let sit for 30 minutes. Mix again. Add salad ingredients, mix well. Let sit for 30 more minutes. Taste for salt. Add more Meyer lemon preserving liquid if more salt is required. Serve.

Nicosai likes to use a Poblano pepper in this recipe. For the green beans, he prefers a combination of Mayflower, Roc d’Or, Blue Lake Mereville Di Piemonte and Scarlette beans.

Makes 4 to 6 servings

For dressing:

1 red onion, peeled and minced

3 cloves garlic, peeled and minced

1 green pepper, cleaned and finely diced

½ cup apple cider vinegar

½ cup sugar

¼ cup extra virgin olive oil

Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

For salad:

3 pounds freshly picked, whole heirloom beans, ends trimmed

For dressing: Place all of the dressing ingredients except vinegar and sugar in a large salad bowl. In a nonreactive saucepan, heat the vinegar and sugar until sugar is dissolved. Do not boil. Pour brine mixture over the rest of the dressing ingredients and mix well. Taste for salt, balance if necessary.

For beans: Blanch beans in salted water, then plunge immedidately into iced water. Drain beans as soon as they are at room temperature and toss into dressing. Let sit covered, at room temperature for at least eight hours, toss several times. The longer the beans sit the better the pickle. Three days is ideal. Make sure to stir a couple times each day.

New Zealand spinach has small, succulent leaves that are dark green and grow 2 to 4 inches long.

Makes 4 to 6 servings

3 pounds New Zealand spinach, cleaned and dry

1 head garlic, peeled and sliced thin

¼ pound organic butter

Sea salt

Make brown butter by cooking butter over low heat until it reaches a light hazelnut color. In a very large skillet, heat brown butter to bubbling on high heat, add garlic and toss well.

Add spinach, keep it constantly moving in the pan. When the color intensifies, add the sea salt. Cook for two more minutes, taste for salt, balance if necessary. Serve immediately.

You can reach Staff Writer Diane Peterson at 521-5287 or diane.peterson@pressdemocrat.com.