The wine grape harvest in Sonoma County is obviously a big event, but wine isn't the only thing that you can make with wine grapes. A Southern Italian speciality, although many wine regions in Italy make it for personal consumption. It's not that common here in the States, but many old Italian families have a stash in their freezer and each covet their stash as they would gold.
The Cured Ham has of course participated in the wine grape harvest and has made his own stash of vino cotto for a select group of friends and relatives. I reduced about 1/3 of the large pot into two 375lt bottles that you see in front of the large pot over the course of 4 hours. And yes, the house smells like evaporated grape juice for the better part of 2 days.
So how do you use this stuff? Add a tablespoon or two to rich braised dishes such as short ribs. It has the flavor of plums, figs, grapes, but with a more earthy quality in many cases. However, this earthy quality may be coming from the grapes I used, in this case Cabernet Sauvignon.
A classic Puglian use is to deep fry strands of a modified pizza a dough and drizzle this grape syrup over the top of each fried piece of sweetened dough.
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