Plenty of great wines – and beers; and sakes; and ciders – are available here in Michigan. But every now and then, we encounter something seldom seen here that is so outstanding we feel obligated to seek it out for the menu. Here are a few such recent additions:

Dassai Otterfest 23 Sake

Last summer, we added Dassai Otterfest 50 to our menu after a staff tasting that spawned an infatuation with sake. Our guests who enjoy the classic Japanese rice “wine” will know that the 50 in the name refers to seimaibuai – the percentage of a rice grain left after it’s been polished to prepare it for the brewing process. Previously unfamiliar with Dassai, we learned that they offer both a 39 and a 23, the latter being a figure that is truly astounding: Consider that 77% of a single grain of rice is essentially thrown away to get only that eminently fermentable center.

Sake lovers (and really, anyone who loves delicious things) will be excited to hear that the Dassai Otterfest 23 is now on our reserve list. Our pals at Great Lakes Wine & Spirits helped bring it in for us, and we couldn’t be happier: It’s an astonishingly delicate, elegant beverage. No, not beverage: Ambrosia. Nectar. Of the gods.

In terms of food, think of it as a superior rose and pair it with seafood or root vegetables. Or just drink it with a grin.

This sake is listed in many east coast retail shops for around $100. To encourage Detroit’s sake lovers and curious beverage aficionados to give this treasure a try, we’re selling it for just about the same price — $110/bottle.

2013 Ferrando Erbaluce di Caluso

All too rare here in the Mitten, the wines of Luigi Ferrando are universally charming and delicious. This winter, we’re excited to be pouring their Erbaluce by the glass ($10). A white grape indigenous to the mountainous northwestern part of Piedmont, Erbaluce is known for producing high acid, mineral-driven, dry wines – a perfectly versatile white to accompany a wide-ranging restaurant menu.

The Ferrando family has been making wine in this part of Italy since about 1900. Their “white label” Carema – a miniscule appellation known exclusively for its elegant, high-elevation nebbiolo – has achieved genuine cult status in the United States. Further down the mountain is the appellation of Canavese where they make a delightful rosso that we poured by the glass when the restaurant first opened. Within Canavese is the town of Caluso, about 45 minutes north of Torino, which is where their Erbaluce is grown, eventually fermented and aged in stainless steel.

Ferrando’s expression has an unusually rich body, densely packed with luscious fruit and herbal notes before a long, refreshing finish. Complex enough to be intriguing to wine lovers and quaffable enough for anyone with access to a patio to enjoy, it’s rapidly become a house favorite. We brought enough in from New York to last us well into the spring.

2014 Thierry Germain Franc de Pied

Despite some recent good press, France’s Loire river valley is still an underappreciated source for wine. Our friends at Elie Wine Company in Birmingham turned us on to Thierry Germain, an up-and-coming producer whose winery, Domaine des Roches Neuves, is drawing some comparisons to the legendary Clos Rougeard. Indeed, they were recently awarded 3-stars by the Revue du Vin de France, an honor reserved for only those two estates in the Loire.

A transplant from Bordeaux, Germain has been making his wines since the early 90s, but in 2000 he converted everything to biodynamic farming and has refined his approach, keeping alcohol levels low and finding structure from using whole clusters of grapes.

Franc de Pied is French winemaking shorthand that references a vine’s own rootstock. Many wine lovers are familiar with phyloxera, the louse that decimated Europe’s grape vines in the 1800s. After the scourge, winemakers took to grafting their vines onto American rootstock which was resistant to infection. Germain’s Franc de Pied, true to its name, is thus ungrafted. Whether that adds extra depth or not is beyond our palates, but it’s hard to argue with the results: The wine is tremendous.

Like many of his reds, Franc de Pied could enjoy a brief sojourn to a decanter (or a few years in the cellar), but among his offerings, this is among the most generous, with a nose of flowers and raspberries, notes of black currant and herbs, good structure, and a surprisingly mineral-driven finish. Light in body but rich in color and flavor, this is truly a Burgundian cab franc.

Less than 80 cases of this wine are made in a given year. We’ve got a few of them stashed away, and they’re on offer for $65/bottle until they run out.

Remember when words like “artisanal” and “handmade” carried genuine gravitas? It was only a few years ago, before even a shelf of 99-cent emery boards could be “curated;” before “craft” applied to anything not made in a sweatshop, before every can of soup confidently staked claim to being “all natural.”

It was around then that farm-to-table was emerging as a common exhortation for any restaurant that bought a head of broccoli from an actual farmer.

Like so many things, it’s a matter of degrees. And there are places to which farm-to-table truly applies – Dan Barber’s Blue Hill in New York, for example, which is under the auspices as a farm of the same name. By comparison, Selden Standard looks to others for ingredients, working with a couple of dozen farms from Detroit and southeast Michigan. Does that baptize us as farm-to-table? Not really.

The terms farm-to-table, local, seasonal, and half a dozen others have almost become a transposable type of short hand. But there are worthwhile distinctions to be made. And while we’re not a farm-to-table restaurant by our own measures, we think of ourselves as seasonal and probably local as well.

Of course, that still begs a reasonable question: Why should anyone give a shit?

A Matter of Taste

Shortly after we first opened Selden Standard, a customer was disheartened to learn we didn’t have any fresh tomatoes to add to his flatbread. Naturally, he asked, “Why?” Being January, we had a fun conversation about seasonality. But truthfully, we could have answered in a single word.

Flavor.

Anyone shopping a farmers’ market knows the difference between a tomato picked at peak ripeness, served that same day, and one that traveled cross-country on a trailer. The former is generally delicious, the latter is often a pulpy red water balloon.

 

Beyond what’s served at the table, food has so many facets to it – environment, scalability, security, perishability, affordability, health, and so on. We choose to be concerned with many of those. But first and foremost, given our livelihood, we must be concerned about flavor.

And how do we find that? By shopping in season, generally from a local farmer.

Not every item we buy is local – Michigan doesn’t do so well growing lemons, for starters – but just about every fresh ingredient is seasonal. That is to say, when a particular fish is in season via sustainable fishermen, we’ll buy it. When California is in the midst of citrus season and the blood oranges are fantastic, we’ll buy them. And of course, when the farmers in Detroit can grow tomatoes, we’ll buy those too.

For outside observers, a surprising facet to Detroit’s current restaurant boom is that very network of urban farmers helping to supply produce. The idea of an acre of potatoes around the corner from a Boston-Edison mansion is shocking to many.

But it does not get more flavorful than the ideally ripened tomato, picked in the morning, driven two miles, and dropped at a restaurant for use that night. And when we can’t acquire that tomato, there’s just not much reason to have any tomato.

Relationships

Lengthy supply chains are like a game of telephone: Imagine a pallid head of lettuce that arrives via a distributor who got it from regional affiliate who got it from a wholesaler in California who got it not from an individual farmer but from Trevor, the underpaid account representative for a large-scale farming conglomerate.

That’s a lot of steps. A lot of people we’ll never see. A lot of opportunities for information to get lost. A lot of questions about provenance.

Knowing farmers (or coffee roasters, grain millers, chocolate makers) is the best way to understand the source itself. A handful of exceptions notwithstanding, building those relationships is just easier to do locally.

When we buy from a one- or two-person operation, we see those people every few days. We know the product. We see the farming practices. We get their t-shirts and wear them with pride. Buying locally means buying into a partnership. But it’s not just a romantic ideal: It’s quite practical when acquisition of the best ingredients is a necessary condition.

A Safer Choice

Sometime in the future, it’s likely that we’ll have an international food system that is sustainable: growing flavorful produce, minimizing pollution and waste, and maximizing nutrition and efficiency. But in today’s United States, the food system is seemingly dominated by factory farms prone to cross-contamination; inclined to leech pollutants into our rivers; and suffusing our food with sugar, chemicals, and antibiotics.

Wise application of new science has led to and will continue to lead to numerous ways of producing and transporting food sustainably. But factory farms rarely practice those, as has been well-documented again and again.

By contrast, our local farmers are treating their land and their produce in a way that respects not just their customers but the community itself. While economics and technology may nudge agriculture in another direction someday, local farmers are certainly our safest outlet today.

Some of Selden’s ownership and staff keep gardens, have worked on farms, shop for home from farmers, and otherwise search for products that are humanely and sustainably raised. At the restaurant itself, if we’re being honest, that’s rarely our first concern – but it’s far from our last.

* * * * *

Thus we are compelled to serve local food.

It doesn’t make us farm-to-table, so to speak. It doesn’t turn our business into some admirable cause. And it doesn’t mean we don’t eat cheap burgers (probably with that same pallid lettuce) after work. Because we do, and we love it.

But the choice to serve what we serve is not made lightly, and we’re quite grateful to have the opportunity to present those ingredients to people. Despite the supersaturation of the assorted terms describing the mindful approaches of chefs, bartenders, and winemakers, those words are worth saving from the interests who would continue to appropriate them.

Words like natural, handmade, and seasonal. And words like local.

Bon appétit, friends.

Swiss-based Mirus magazine visited Midtown last year, pointing their cameras at the businesses, artists, and leaders that make up the community. Selden Standard was lucky enough to be a part of their thorough examination of our neighborhood. The magazine’s staff assembled 100 pages of beautiful photography and compelling stories about many of the people and places here.

Mirus Magazine, Issue 04 – Midtown, Detroit

If you care to visit the earlier issues, there are some pretty interesting pieces on other cities as well. Definitely worth a read.

Surrounded on three sides by the Alps in the northwestern corner of Italy, Piedmont doesn’t feature a climate that readily conforms to the American, tomato-soaked stereotype of Italian food and drink. Rather, this is beef territory, where cardoons, garlic, and truffles are among the prized produce, and where the biggest, age-worthy reds of the area – Barolo and Barbaresco – have earned a large following around the world.

While those two famous expressions of southern Piedmont’s Nebbiolo grape are justifiably coveted, the area’s rich food and drink culture offers plentiful variety for the thirsty and curious. Last year, when we opened, we featured the Canavese Rosso from Luigi Ferrando, and as we head into this fall and winter, we’re leaning even more heavily on Piedmont across the menu.

 

2013 San Fereolo Valdiba

Dolcetto is a grape that seems poised for a resurgence with American wine drinkers. It’s affordable, easy to get, and when done well, a perfectly gulpable and food-friendly table wine. In the southern reaches of Piedmont, the area called Dogliani prides itself not on the prestigious Nebbiolo but on Dolcetto. That pride often manifests itself in the form of over-concentrated wines designed to compete for broader attention, but not so with the wines of San Fereolo. Winemaker Nicoletta Bocca makes a range of expressions of Dolcetto, and while her affordable entry-level wine is perfect to accompany a range of foods – like one might eat at a shared plate restaurant.

The farming and winemaking are everything we generally look for as clues to quality: biodynamic farming (albeit uncertified) of limestone-dominated vineyards, hand harvesting of grapes, relatively low yields, and fermentation with indigenous yeasts. The resulting wine is full of fresh mixed berry fruit balanced nicely with modest tannin and fresh acidity that are hallmarks of Valdiba, a notable sub-region of Dogliani. We fell in love with this last spring and brought it into Michigan for the first time to serve by the glass throughout the fall and into the winter.

2011 Aldo Conterno Langhe

Known for Barolo sourced from his vineyards near the famous town of Bussia, Aldo Conterno also makes an entry-level wine that we actually prefer and which we recently added to our reserve list.

Italian wine authorities give a lot of latitude to winemakers in this part of Piedmont via the Langhe DOC, a named region where the rules surrounding what grapes go into the wine are looser than most, leaving a great deal to the winemaker’s discretion.

In Conterno’s case, his Langhe Rosso is 80% Freisa and 10% each Cab and Merlot. Freisa has a long history in the region, arguably the most significant and prestigious grape in Piedmont prior to the post-WWII rush toward Nebbiolo. And indeed, Freisa is a genetic parent of Nebbiolo, so they share some characteristics. Surprisingly, Freisa can be even more tannic and acidic than its offspring, but that isn’t the case here, perhaps owing in part to the age of the wine. Rather, it features nuanced aromatics, darker fruits, and nice acid with just a bit of tannin on the finish.

2000 Conti Boca

Traveling north-by-northeast from Barolo, there’s a cluster of wine regions – Ghemme, Gattinara, Boca, and others – leading up toward the massive peak of Monte Rosa. Even the robust Nebbiolo here thins out and becomes lighter in color, lower in tannin, and higher in overall acid.

Boca, established as a DOC in the late 60s, requires that the wines must be 70-90% Nebbiolo and 10-30% Vespolino and Uva Rara, grapes that add a spiciness and color respectively.  Wines are barrel aged for a minimum of 18 months, and a total aging time of 34 months.  Riserva wines must be aged for 46 months, 24 months in barrel, and almost 4 years total.

Among the two dozen or so producers still working in Boca, Conti is the oldest. Begun in 1963, the winery has been passed to the three daughters of original winemaker Ermanno Conti. Their wines spend three years in barrel, and they have a very extensive library of older vintages. We were fortunate enough to be able to get a case of their 2000 vintage, which is drinking really well. Fresh and spicy with plenty of floral, cherry, and mineral notes, the herbal, moderately tannic finish makes this a bigger wine than one might assume at first glance.

2011 Ferrando Carema “White Label”

We’ve been serving the Boca mentioned above for a few months and are down to our last several bottles. As the wine gets drained off the reserve list, the replacement coming in behind it is a cult classic. North of Canavese and west of Boca, Luigi Ferrando makes some spectacular wines. While these were imported directly into Michigan back in the 70s and 80s, it’s been a long while since it’s been available regularly. Some of the better restaurants and wine shops in Michigan have periodically gotten their hands on some – notably, Trattoria Stella in Traverse City and Elie Wine Company in Birmingham – but sadly, it has otherwise been largely absent from the state. So we leapt at a chance to buy some this year.

In the hills leading up to Mont Blanc, Ferrando holds about 15-16% of all the vineyards in Carema where he grows Nebbiolo with full southern exposure. Here, acidity is not a problem – rather, it’s getting full sunshine and ripeness. So in addition to his choice vineyards, he trains the vines onto a pergola to maximize said sun exposure. The wines are eventually aged in barrel for about three years, give or take a few months, depending on the vintage and then aged in bottle for another year (Carema must be aged four years before release).

This is a very elegant, often floral and spicy expression of Nebbiolo with hints of cinnamon, mineral, smoke, and just enough tannin. The acidity is lively and fresh. We have access to a couple of bottles from the 60s and 70s, which we hear should still be youthful and nuanced, but we have yet to crack them open to see for ourselves. Despite the reported durability of these wines, we know from first-hand experience that this 2011 bottling is drinking quite well right now. We’ll look forward to adding this to the wine list after we sell out of the Conti Boca.

The following map, which we found floating around the internet without any attribution we could see, outlines a number of the regions discussed above:

 

We’ve had the good fortune to be a part of a recent spate of national articles highlighting, among other things, the Detroit food scene. If you’re interested, give them a read:

• The New York Times came to town to eat and explore with Detroit-born chefs and restaurateurs Eli and Max Sussman.
• Bill Addison, restaurant editor for Eater National, came to metro Detroit and dined at a number of the newer spots in town.
• The Boston Globe penned a travel piece about the city, praising some restaurants, a creative culture, and the people the author met.

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