Here’s a fun recipe that a fan posted on our official Mer Soleil Vineyard website.  A colorful and delicious pairing that includes pears, walnuts, and blue cheese – yum!  Our fan paired this appetizer with our Silver Chardonnay which is an unoaked wine produced in cement tanks.   Aging and fermenting this wine in cement tanks accentuates the minerality and brings out the tropical flavors that come from our Santa Lucia Highlands fruit.  We hope you enjoy this food and wine pairing. ~ Charlie Wagner II, winemaker.

Ingredients

* 4 pears, halved, but not peeled or cored
* Extra-virgin olive oil
* 1/4 bunch fresh thyme
* Salt and freshly ground black pepper
* 1/4 cup crumbled good-quality blue cheese
* 1/4 cup walnut pieces

Directions

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.  Pour yourself a chilled glass of Mer Soleil Silver.  Keep the wine chilled at about 40-55 degrees.

Arrange the pears, cut sides up, on a baking sheet. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Strip the leaves from the thyme branches and sprinkle over the pears. Put the baking sheet in the oven and bake 20 minutes. Remove the baking sheet from the oven and spoon a generous teaspoon of crumbled cheese in the center of each pear half, return the pears to the oven and roast until they are tender and the cheese is soft, about 10 more minutes.

Meanwhile, put the walnuts on another baking sheet and toast in the oven until golden brown and fragrant, about 5 minutes. Chop. When the pears are cooked, transfer them to a serving plate and sprinkle the toasted walnuts over the top. Serve hot.

Our aim for this wine is a unique Mer Soleil profile: bold, full-bodied and lush in texture, yet balanced by cool-climate acidity. Coastal, rain-free weather at our vineyards during the long growing season allowed us to select only pristine grape clusters, amber-gold in color and fully ripe, with aromas and flavors reminiscent of tropical fruit, honeysuckle and citrus.  We aged the lots from individual vineyard blocks separately in French oak, then “composed” the wine, including only those lots that showed our desired complexity and richness.  I hope you enjoy the wine.

~ Charlie Wagner II, Winemaker

The time has come to harvest our fruit.  It’s been a longer growing season for us at our Mer Soleil Ranch, due to the cooler weather we had over the summer.  We’re located in the Santa Lucia Highlands of Monterey County, where almost every morning we receive fog from the coast which quickly burns off by noon and is replaced by the hot sun and high winds from the North.  As a matter of fact, you’ll find that some of the trees on the valley floor are permanently bent to the South due to this intense wind – a very iconic image associated with Monterey County.  We harvested 70% of our fruit by machine.

From the time the berries are harvested until they are pressed, there is some serious juice to skin contact time.  At this stage the fruit and juice are in “soup” form which allows for some additional extraction of flavors and aromas.  This ensures that we will be able to build a fuller body wine like our Mer Soleil Chardonnay.

The hand harvested fruit is delivered to the winery in whole cluster form and put into the press where they get the same gentle squeeze as the machine harvested fruit.  Due to our various trellis systems on our ranch we are only able to machine harvest vines planted to a vertical trellis system.  The open Lyre and Trentina (overhead pergola) are all done with hand labor.

~ Winemaker, Charlie Wagner II