Our Potrero Hill neighbors @autofuss have movie night once a month and you're missing out!

We've officially moved into our new warehouse at 158 Mississippi Street in San Francisco's Potrero Hill. We hope this new location will make free local pickup more convenient than ever.

The Anchor Brewing Company is just up the street and we recently toured their brewery. Anchor began in 1896 and has operated from Potrero Hill in a former coffee roasting plant since 1979. Their famous Anchor Steam beer is brewed in open vats using a thirty year old strain of lager yeasts. "Steam" seems to have been a nickname for beer brewed on the West Coast though the term today is a trademark of Anchor Brewing Co. The Anchor folks believe the name comes from cooling the wort on the roofs of buildings before the era of refrigeration. Whatever the case may be, Anchor Steam is delicious!

www.anchorbrewing.com
1705 Mariposa Street
San Francisco, CA 94107

Very good to meet importer Savio Soares in San Francisco this week and taste through his range of (mostly) low sulfur wines. Savio is our source for the excellent Jura wines of Annie et Philippe Bornard as well as a few of our top selling traditional estates from the northern Rhône like Bernard Ange in Croze-Hermitage.

I'm not going to open that huge can of worms over sulfur levels and what's natural and what's not. Instead, I'll just say that at this tasting I found myself gravitating towards the producers that Savio deemed “more conventional” like Franck Balthazar in Cornas. 

Entire blogs are dedicated to defining natural wine and how much–or how little–sulfur belongs in them. That sort of ideology has never been a part of our selection process and we reject many of the zero to 10 grams of sulfur wines that come across our palate. 

That said, we have a great deal of enthusiasm for our Beaujolais selections where the producer has decided to work with zero or very little sulfur. A wine of ideas is of little use to us but a wine of terroir will always have our attention.  

 

Many thanks to chef and your two superstar sommeliers Christopher Miller and Maria Gomez. So good!

Homemade stock is a must and I had amassed quite a collection of chicken bones from Olivier's Butchery. Add some pancetta and you have yourself an ideal dish for Pinot Noir. Paired with 2009 Gros Frère et Sœur Vosne-Romanée and the 2008 Kaizen Silacci Vineyard Pinot Noir.

We have a great new French butcher in San Francisco and it is dangerously close to our Potrero Hill warehouse. I say dangerously close because I'm addicted and our meat intake has increased dramatically. Olivier has a cooler full of amazing cuts and he will butcher to order if you call ahead. There's a spectacular looking aged slab of entrecôte which I've yet to get into. So far we've cooked up a delicious côte d'échine de porc, a deboned polet rôti and an aiguilllettte baronne that Olivier butchered for me on the spot.

Get over to the Dogpatch and see Olivier for some excellent meat!
www.oliviersbutchery.com

http://www.sonsanddaughterssf.com/