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Zoes and a Zeta Blend, Beverly Farms

Posted 03/26/2008 at 06:28 AM by Cathy

Every wine, every single wine, on the list at the brand-new Zoës tapas + bar in Beverly Farms is available by the bottle and by the glass.

Can anyone say… Hallelujah?

Zoës is the latest (and fifth) venue of Jeff Cala’s, who only last December opened Latitude 43 in Gloucester. My gripe with Latitude 43 was that so few of its wines were available by the glass. Not so at Zoës.

Neither my server nor the bar staff knew which of the wines were made by a woman winemaker; with just a few days left of my month-long series on women winemakers, I’d seen this before. I did tonight what I did then: I took a chance and ordered what looked interesting. Tonight’s choice was a Chardonnay/Sauvignon Blanc blend from Zeta winery in Spain.

On the nose the Chardonnay portion of the blend won out with characteristic smells of oak and butter. In the mouth, though, the wine was dry and crisp, like a Sauvignon Blanc but not too much so. The real test came when the food arrived. How would a wine with the distinct features of two different grapes spread itself over two plates of Spanish tapas?

I’d ordered, first, the handpicked spinach with garlic, ginger, golden raisins and aged goat cheese. The most pronounced flavor of the dish was ginger (in a good way), which seemed like a direct challenge to the Sauvignon Blanc side of the wine.

I took a bite of the spinach, then took a sip of the wine.

The wine responded. The part that needed to respond to the ginger responded to the ginger. The part, later, that needed to respond to the mango chili ketchup (served with the yucca fries) responded to the mango chili ketchup.

Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, ginger, and mango chili ketchup are not tastes that I normally associate with each other but tonight, they not only associated. They harmonized. They were the next-door neighbors who are discreet but friendly all at the same time.

Was the Zeta Chardonnay/Sauvignon Blanc made by a woman winemaker? I still don’t know. But would I order it again? That, I know for sure I will.

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About the Author

Cathy Huyghe
Cathy Huyghe

Cathy Huyghe writes about drinking wine every day in the Boston area. She finds the quirky characters, the after-hours events, and the surprising stories that make up Boston's vibrant local wine scene. But no matter where she is, what she's doing, or who she's with, she mostly just wants to drink the stuff.

Her first restaurant gig was at Chez Panisse, when she knocked on the kitchen's back door and asked if she could work there. She's also worked for Jean-Pierre Vigato in Paris and Thomas Keller in Las Vegas. She went to graduate school at Harvard (twice), and her writing has run in Boston magazine, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Edible Boston, and on Nevada Public Radio and Grist.org.

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