FALL PORK RECIPE

1 leg of pork de-boned
4 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons red pepper flakes
1/3-cup Tuscan spice or your favorite rub (hints- cinnamon, cumin, coriander, nutmeg, sugar, all spice)
1/4-cup fennel ground
Salt
Pepper
Olive oil
Bunch of Rosemary, Sage and Marjoram

Butterfly the leg of pork and open it as wide as possible to resemble a book, and then make slices in the flesh in order to get the flavor of the marinade into the meat.

To start marinade pick all the herbs and set into a food processor with a little extra virgin oil and pulse until it is smooth, adding more oil if necessary add garlic and pulse again until the garlic roughly chopped.

Combine the dry ‘rub “ and massage into the meat until it is well covered. This step can be done ahead and left to rest over night if the time is available. Next pour the herb mixture and repeat the massage once again this step can be done the night before and left in the refrigerator.

When it all has been covered with the marinade roll the leg back up like it was before you took the bone out and tie with butcher twine.   Place the leg in a roasting pan appropriate to the size, and place in a preheated 300-degree oven and cook for approximately 3 hours.

Remember to continuously move the leg and baste with the pan juice. When an internal temperature of 150 has been reached remove from the oven and let rest for 15 minutes then slice thin and serve.

March Walker, the sous chef, and I have prepared this recipe for you to enjoy as the summer winds down. Although we love the vast abundance of summer produce, we get equally as excited for fall.

This recipe is our favorite, not only to prepare but also to serve. Fall is time that the pork to start to put on weight at an extraordinary rate, which means more flavor. The pork recipe looks like allot of work but is well worth your efforts especially with a great wine like the Le Cupole that we are featuring this month.

Article: Tenuta di Trinoro

Andrea Franchetti looks like a youthful Yves Saint Laurent, complete with impressive height, heavy specs, mop of tow hair and out-of-focus look. His speech is a cross between a mumble and a Washington state growl through the teeth. He would make a pretty good film star but at the moment is utterly focused on his idiosyncratic wine estate Tenuta di Trinoro that has achieved quite remarkable renown considering it was first planted in 1992.

He comes with a South Carolina textile fortune on his mother's side. His uncle is the artist Cy Twombley. There are roundabout connections with the families who own Cinzano and Montalcino wine producers Argiano and Col d'Orcia which presumably helped draw him to his very particular corner of central Italy, in sheep country which had not been planted with vines for a century.

Tenuta di Trinoro sits in viticultural isolation in a valley just west of the Florence-Rome autostrada near Sarteano where Tuscany meets Umbria and Lazio. Franchetti describes it as “a godforsaken place on the east of the first limestone mountain north of Rome with an ex-volcano between it and the sea”. The 600-meter high Monte Amiata protects Franchetti's vines and the sheep so that summers are hot and there are still leaves on the trees in December. “The weather swirls round us,” according to Franchetti who is glad to leave his grapes long on the vine, building up the extra layers of flavor so beloved by modern wine lovers. He has deliberately concentrated on the often-overlooked Cabernet Franc vine because he likes it, and he thinks the Bordelais make too little of it. He has to admit though that another Bordeaux grape, Petit Verdot, probably does best on his terrain of eight hectares apiece of “Graves” and “Côtes” (he borrows St Emilion nomenclature for soil types), so he has quite a bit of that planted too. Here Cabernet Sauvignon plays a subordinate role and the fashionable Merlot is being made to eat humble pie. Despite getting rave reviews in the US for his Palazzi, a blend of Merlot with Cabernet Franc, and being able to sell every one of the thousand cases he was making several times over, he has abandoned it altogether.

“Palazzi was less complex, so why do it?” is his dismissive explanation. The 1999 is the last vintage of Palazzi (the 1998 won 93 points out of 100 from America's wine guru Robert Parker). He has no plans to pull out Merlot vines but will increase plantings of Petit Verdot (“even the Bordelais admit it's better here than in Bordeaux”) so that they might eventually constitute a quarter of Tenuta di Trinoro.

Since 2000 he has produced just one flagship wine: “Tenuta di Trinoro” (about 600 cases of Cabernet Franc blended with other Bordeaux varieties) and more than 2000 cases of a second wine, Le Cupole di Trinoro. The Cupole blend according to www.tenutaditrinoro.it is a precise 78 per cent Cabernet Franc, 11 per cent Merlot, six per cent Cesanese d'Affile and five per cent Uva di Troia. Tenuta di Trinoro is remarkably direct and appetizing. It is not like red bordeaux but is much more complex than most Italian Bordeaux blends. Like them it qualifies not for any DOC but is sold as an IGT, a wine with an Indicazione Geografica Tipica of Toscana - not that there is anything remotely typical about this wine. It has been treated to every rich winemaker's plaything: tiny yields; the strictest selection (hence the appearance of a second wine); top-quality oak used in abundance to give it longevity; some tricky malolactic fermentation in barrel to soften it; a touch of micro-oxygenation to keep it fresh.