Bersano Wine Dinner A Hit At The Dusit Bangkok

The Dusit Thani Bangkok hosted yet another great wine dinner on April 30th in the hotel’s Italian restaurant, Il Cielo. This dinner matched the great food of the restaurant with some of the high-quality Italian wines from the Bersano winery, the Piedmont region’s largest privately owned winery which was established over 200 years ago by Giuseppe Bersano. Piedmont is in the far northwest part of Italy and wine production there goes back two thousand years or more.

With 46 different DOC and four DOCG areas, Piedmont is the region that produces the largest number of best known, noble, and world-appreciated prize-winning wines, such as Barbera, Barolo, Barbaresco, Dolcetto, Nebbiolo, Grignolino, Malvasia and Asti Spumante among others. Another distinguished characteristic of Piedmont is that most of its wines are produced on family estates made up of relatively small parcels of land.

The main grape grown here is the distinguished Nebbiolo, which is the base for the famed Barolo, Barbaresco and Gattinara among others. Its name derives from the word nebbia, or fog, because of a velvety, whitish coating over its berries in addition to the fact that it grows in an area where, at ripening time in September, heavy morning fog is a given and the humidity that it provides gives the grapes an ideal habitat. The production of strong reds is predominant in this landlocked, mountainous region and are the perfect complement to the rich and hearty cuisine featuring white truffles, fonduta, which is a variation of the Swiss cheese fondue, rice, meats, pastas and stuffed vegetables.

And the menu for this wine dinner complemented the wines wonderfully as well as being delicious in its own right. Seafood started off the meal with a marinated scallop carpaccio and blue crab timbale paired with a Gavi 2007 white wine whose crispness and acidity provided a great counterbalance to the sweetness of the preserved peach and peppercorn sauce that accompanied the scallop carpaccio and did not overwhelm the delicate flavor of the crab.

A soft potato and spinach gnocchi dish followed, the gnocchi joined by winter truffles and and a sage butter with lamb jus that was matched with a Dolcetta D’Alba, Coldelfoso 2007 that was just strong enough and possessed of enough fruit to stand up to the richness of the truffles and butter. The next dish was equally rich, in the tradition of Piedmont it seems, with rabbit stuffed with pistachios and berries and braised in the wine for this course and accompanied by an artichoke puree with hazelnut oil that may have been my favorite flavor combination of the night. The pureeing of the artichoke concentrated the flavor of this unique vegetable and the hazelnut oil added an extra touch of richness that complemented both the rabbit’s combination of flavors as well as the Barbera D’Asti Superiore Generala 2004 red wine that was this dish’s final ingredient.

The main course of the evening, a juniper dusted roasted venison loin provided a fitting highlight for the meal with an excellent example of classic Piedmont wine paired with it, a Barolo Nirvasco 2004, making this a traditional red meat-complex red wine combination that worked wonderfully. 

This was, as mentioned above, another enjoyable dinner made all the more so by the presence of Erika Abate, the Bersano representative present, who provided information about this great winery’s products. Picking great wineries is half of the recipe for success when it comes to putting together a great wine dinner and the other half was supplied on this evening, again, by the excellent food and beverage department of the Dusit Bangkok, headed up by Mohammed Elsayeh, who delivered the goods in their usual sophisticated and professional manner.