What better way to kick off the Year of the Rabbit than by eating one? Herewith the Wandering Palate’s rabbit casserole, perfected over a lifetime and inspired by a national overabundance of rabbits and wild thyme as well as excellent pinot noir in Central Otago, New Zealand.

In my formative years down on the farm in Te Awamutu in New Zealand, rabbits were in plague proportions and weekly night-time shoots were necessary to keep them at bay. The hares were so big that they used to open the farm gates themselves.

There were no animals whatsoever in New Zealand prior to the arrival of humans. As the last country on earth to be settled, it was totally isolated for 80 million years and inhabited only by birds, insects and marine life. Rabbits were introduced to New Zealand in the 1830s largely for game sport, to remind the British settlers of home.

With no natural predators they bred out of control, but never made it on to the top of the menu either, assumedly due to an abundance of affordable chicken, lamb and beef. The irony is that today New Zealand white rabbit is the most popular breed of eating rabbit in the world.

It would be entirely different if there were a larger contingent of Italian and French inhabitants, as assuredly rabbit would be a staple and cooked in every way imaginable. You do see rabbit on the menu of top New Zealand restaurants, sometimes as a terrine, or rabbit loin is popular, roasted with bacon wrapped around it, as it is such a lean meat that it needs the fat to keep it moist.

Being so lean and healthy, literally there is very little fat on a rabbit, making normal roasting difficult unless pot-roasted with wine, chicken stock and vegetables. You can grill it successfully if marinated in oil and herbs and ragouts are certainly the best method for flavour.

My recipe is an adapted casserole and a one-pot dish that is so simple it’s embarrassing to make such a fuss about. The thing is it is so damn good that whenever I cook it, people hound me for the recipe.

I have to mention from the outset, like all good casseroles and curries, if you have the opportunity, cook it the day before as there is no substitute for a night in the fridge to let the flavors infuse the meat with a seemingly more profound overall flavor.

If it’s not overnight, you will still need to plan and start well ahead as slow braising is required, cooked to quickly the rabbit will be dry and tough. Around 4 hours is sufficient on very low heat, but you can get away with 3 or so if pushed.

I know some people cannot stomach rabbit. For some it’s the fluffy bunny issue, others think it’s going to taste gamy or simply strange, (like frog) as an unknown. The fact is it tastes a lot like free range chicken or turkey, perhaps with a little more depth and frankly, a superior flavour to most poultry.

When you buy your rabbit from the butchers, ask them to chop it up into large pieces, normally 6 to 8 pieces, partitioned into leg/thigh/ribcage. Wild rabbit is better if you can get it, otherwise farmed will fine.

Generally I cook this more often when I have access to wild rabbit, when we are in Provence or Tuscany staying at a villa with a decent kitchen, or in Melbourne where you can get it readily from the Chicken Pantry at the Queen Victoria Market. Commercially farmed rabbit is becoming more widely available in Asia, generally from France or Holland.

It is certainly more inspired by Provencal flavors, with lots of wild thyme and sage, which is redolent in the air, the oils and scents released in the summer heat. Central Otago has this very same scent in the air. The hills and vineyards are carpeted in wild thyme, which is fabulously pungent and aromatic and great to cook with. Just like the rabbits, thyme was introduced and as a non-native, was considered a weed. Yet both of these are the core ingredients to a wholesome casserole.

The other core ingredient is red wine, and while the original recipe calls for a bottle of Pierre Clavel Le Mas Coteaux de Languedoc (grenache, carignan, syrah) with its infusion of dried herbs in aroma and flavor, this adaption is calls for a young and spicy Central Otago Pinot Noir, purposely intended to get the region’s winemakers and all those pinot noir enthusiasts, no matter where you are, to embrace this menu.

And for those of you who balk at using a good bottle of red for cooking, all I can say is, any successful dish starts with the very best ingredients.

While this recipe caters for around eight people, any leftovers can be used the following day and what I like to do is remove the meat off the bone, shredding it by hand and adding it and the sauce to fusilli pasta as a dish. You can also freeze the remaining leftovers, always handy to heat up for one or two people for diner; otherwise it is simple enough to pare the recipe down to one rabbit.

Equipment

* Large heavy, deep casserole dish with lid, for stove top cooking
* Large white bowl or deep-side platter for presenting at the table (or you can just plonk the casserole dish in the middle of table on a wooden board)
* U2 Under a Blood Red Sky – Live Recording at Red Rocks (played loud)

Ingredients:

* 2 Rabbits (caters for up to 8 people)
* Olive Oil
* Plain Flour
* Salt (preferably Maldon Sea Salt) and pepper
* Dijon Seedless Mustard (two tablespoons)
* Sherry Vinegar (optional)
* Garlic (several cloves)
* Brown Shallots (several, sliced)
* Fresh sage (large bunch)
* Fresh thyme (dozen sprigs, be generous)
* Brown Button Mushrooms (welcome to use wild mushrooms)
* Kalamata Olives – about 400 grams, more if you like (preferably pitted)
* Flageolet beans – optional (tinned ok)
* 1 litre Chicken stock (organic please)
* 1 bottle (750ml) Central Otago Pinot Noir
* 1 bottle Pinot Noir Rose – to drink whilst cooking!

Accompaniments

* Sour dough baguettes (good bread is imperative)
* French Beans
* Butter Beans
* Spiral Pasta (optional)
* Mash Potato (optional)
* Cous Cous (optional)

Preparation: Plan and start well ahead! Cooking time is around 4 hours
Even better cook the day before and leave overnight in the fridge

Preparing ingredients (put U2 on, loud!)

* Peel and slice your shallots, not too fine, and be liberal – I like to use the large Australian brown shallots
* Wash button mushrooms – I like to use brown ones and add whole but you can use any mushroom you like really, indeed when we are in Italy or France I use whatever local fungus I can get my hands on!
* Peel garlic and bash the cloves with the back of a heavy knife to split
* Rinse your thyme and sage and pat dry
* Open the Central Otago Noir – pour yourself a good sized glass purely for tasting purposes. Open the Pinot Noir Rose and drink liberally throughout the cooking process – seems to make it all come together easier

Preparing and searing the rabbit:

It is important to sear the rabbit to seal in the flavour, but do not cook, you just want it to be sealed and look a little browned on the outside.

* Pre-heat your casserole dish on the stove and add good couple of tablespoons olive oil
* Put flour , salt and pepper in a bowl, plenty of grinds of both, mix together
* You will need a dish to transfer the brown pieces of rabbit into
* Coat the pieces of rabbit in flour one by one, placing in the casserole dish as you go. Do not crowd the pan, you will not be able to cook all at once, do in batches.
* Retain the cooking oils in the pan – everything is about keeping the juices and flavour
* Put you seared pieces of rabbit to one side and make sure you pour in all the juices when returning to the casserole.

Preparing the casserole

* Return casserole pan to low heat and add in slice onions and soften, never brown onions, just a gentle, slow cooking to make then soft and concentrate the flavours.
* Add Pinot Noir to the pan, which is what is called deglazing, effectively getting all the brown bits off the bottom of the casserole and allow to simmer (never boil) for 5 minutes.
* Add in the chicken stock, mustard, garlic, thyme and sage – note on the herbs, throw in whole, no need to worry about plucking leaves or tying a la bouquet garni, I just trough them in stalks and all and fish out what left (the stalks) before serving. Continue simmering and stir for a few minutes
* Return the rabbit to the casserole dish ensuring that the meat is submerged as best you can. Add another few pinches of salt and some more pepper -grind until your arm aches, more the better!
* Place lid on casserole with slightly ajar, and that’s just a tiny gap to allow reduction of the sauce. Set heat/gas flame at the lowest simmer possible, and cook for around 3 hours, checking constantly that it is cooking SLOWLY and turn the rabbit pieces, giving a good stir.

Reducing the sauce:

* About 3 hours in, remove the rabbit pieces from the casserole and set aside.
* Add in the olives and mushrooms and a couple of slugs of Sherry vinegar – optional, but I love this stuff, it gives a tangy element to the sauce similar to what balsamic does with oil and salads.
* Leave lid off and turn up heat to a more constant simmer – NOT boiling and reduce the sauce to desired consistency, about another 30 to 40 minutes. The thickness of the sauce is a personal thing. I don’t care much for really thick sauces with this type of casserole and never add any thickening agents, buggars up the flavours.
* Add back the rabbit pieces (gently, carefully, as they will be very tender by now, and make sure all the juices go in). Add in the flageot beans, couple of cans, and simmer very gently for another 15 minutes. You don’t need to cook the beans; well they are already cooked if from a tin, just warm through. They are also optional and I tend to only use them if I am intending this to be a one course dinner, fills out the dish.

Accompaniments

You should be preparing these whilst the casserole is cooking and there are several options in terms of what you can serve alongside the casserole depending on if it’s a one course meal, or part of banquet, where you would reduce the accompaniments.

* Sour dough baguettes – imperative to have good bread to dunk in the sauce and wipe the plate clean
* French Beans – sort of mandatory with these types of dishes, and you got to have your greens. I like to use the small, freshest organic beans I can find and cook in a pan with garlic. Another option is to slice the beans finely and mix with some finely sliced shallots, toss with olive oil and lots of pepper grinds, salt and place in ceramic baking dish and cook until soft.
* Butter Beans – I love butter beans as a side dish, but don’t serve these if you already have flageot beans in the casserole, a bit too much beans!
* Spiral Pasta (optional) – always an easy, well received accompaniment.
* Mash Potato (optional) I could live on mashed spuds, and it’s wonderfully cuddly if its winter and the mashed potato soaks up the sauce – very filling though.
* Roasted Sweet Potato Mash (optional) – Good old kumara, I like the softer, orange fleshed variety and they taste even better roasted then mashed, skin and all.
* Cous Cous (optional) – This goes well too, in the sense of soaking up the sauce and really easy – i.e. use the pre-cooked 2 minute version.

Summary

There is no question, the best dishes are the very best of ingredients cooked simply and yet it is not necessarily easy, with the devil in the detail and slow cooking obviously requires planning and patience.

This is the sort of dish that is great for convivial, casual dinner parties and I tend to cook it with the intention of there being no starter, maybe a bit of terrine to nibble on prior to setting down. Personally, I find it much more enjoyable following on with some really good cheese than fussing over an entree.

And the wine…

Needless to say, Misha’s Vineyard “The High Note” Central Otago Pinot Noir is mandatory with this dish.

Gewürztraminer has unquestionably been the most maligned and misunderstood white grape amongst wine consumers over the last decade, even amongst wine enthusiasts and connoisseurs, it has been and arguably still is, out of favor.
And yet, in my thirty years of wine drinking, the single most impressionable and unparalleled wine in my memory in terms of extraordinary complexity and compelling quality; basically the best white wine I have ever had to this very day is the 1976 Trimbach Cuvée des Seigneurs de Ribeaupierre.

We choose it off the encyclopedic wine list at Tan Dinh, the venerable two star Michelin contemporary Vietnamese restaurant in Faubourg Saint-Germain, Paris, back in 1999.

It had been in bottle over twenty years by then and had developed in to an unctuously rich and honeyed yet seemingly dry wine (hold that thought ‘dry’) of mindboggling complexity and caressing texture and flavor profile that one would associate more with Le Montrachet than gewürztraminer. It was drinking absolutely perfectly and showing no signs of fading moreover, possibly the best wine and cuisine pairing I have ever experienced, and according to my wife, a feat I have yet to surpass, which is a bit of worry for a wine and food writer!
So why is gewürztraminer so unfashionable and underappreciated? I would suggest largely because it is a wine that fundamentally requires a high degree of ripeness to attain its unique flavors and character, which generally means a certain amount of natural residual sugar is left in the wine after fermenting out, and subsequently relatively high alcohols, usually knocking around 14% plus.

It is interesting that Trimbach go to great lengths on their website www.maison-trimbach.com to describe the Cuvée des Seigneurs de Ribeaupierre as a “Rich and powerful but dry gewürztraminer… can misleadingly seem slightly sweet… the roundness and viscosity can mask its typical dryness”. And yet they clearly state in the wines fact sheet it has 19 g/l rs, that is grams per liter of residual sugar, which in the new world is definitely not dry.

Put it this way, bone dry is somewhere around 2 g/l rs to give you a starting point however the degree of acidity plays a pivotal role in our perception of sweetness in wine and can easily camouflage considerable levels of natural residual sugar, balancing the sweetness with freshness remarkably well up to 15 to 20 g/l rs.

The problem is, or was, sweetness in wine was seen as totally unsophisticated by the cognoscenti and budding wine enthusiasts with a stigma of wine ignorance if seen to drinking something medium dry or off-dry. This is largely a hang-up from the days of pedestrian Liebfraumilch and Piesporter, not to mention a number of scandals involving adulterating wine with ethylene glycol (automotive antifreeze) to sweeten artificially.
There were also some pretty ordinary gewürztraminers made in this era as well, flabby, overripe and over-the-top, disjointed wines with nauseating aromas similar to hair oil. But that’s all behind us now.

I am here to tell you sweetness is back in fashion and possibly more so in Asia than in any other wine market. The fact is most Asian palates, and western palates for that matter, like sugar. Indeed we are addicted sugar, possibly from birth. I am also a strong believer that as a generalization, the Asian palate enjoys a degree of fruitiness in their wine, as demonstrated in their strong preference for full-bodied red wines.

Furthermore, we are all discovering that a certain level of residual sugar is decidedly harmonious with spicy, hotter cuisines and dishes, ameliorating and cooling the capsaicin heat of chili and heady spiciness, relieving the ‘heat’ with heat in much the same manner that hot Chinese green tea is intrinsic to cooling one’s ‘heated’ body. Just try gewürztraminers with Singapore chili or black pepper crab and you will see what I mean.
What’s more, the spicier the dish the better gewürztraminer copes as it is inherently spicy itself; gewürz meaning spiced or perfumed in German, a good gewürztraminer will have a pungent, heady perfume of Indian spices, lychee, roses or rosewater, and sometimes Turkish delight. It is a full-bodied, glycerol textured wine, markedly more substantial than other whites and the combination of its exotic bouquet and viscosity can be a bit over the top for some, indeed palate tiring if there is not the requisite acidity to balance all this opulence.

Needing a markedly cool-climate yet extended ripening period, there are very few places in the world where gewürztraminer grows successfully, the undisputed capital being Alsace, France. There are some interesting wines made in Austria, Germany and other eastern European countries although not to be confused with the less aromatic and invariably inferior traminer grape.

Gewürztraminer has been a relatively poor performer in the new world proving to be fruitless in the Australian climate, lacking in character and acidity. There has been some success in Washington and Oregon however; it is New Zealand with its southern extremes and decidedly cool-climate that is showing the most potential with commendable wines coming from the warmer yet maritime influenced regions of Hawkes Bay (e.g. Stonecroft www.stonecroft.co.nz) and Gisborne (e.g. Vinoptima Estate www.vinoptima.co.nz) on the
East Coast of the North Island.

There have also been favorable results in Marlborough (e.g. Huia www.huia.net.nz) and Central Otago in the deep-south of the South Island, with its mountainous continental climate is looking most promising, not only for gewürztraminer but the trio of noble aromatic white grapes, including riesling and pinot gris.

I recall trying a 1992 Rippon Gewürztraminer from Wanaka back in 2007, with Dean Shaw (Central Otago Wine Co.) who is obsessed with the variety, and Rudi Bauer (Quartz Reef), who had actually made this wine during his stint at Rippon. It looked brilliant, still holding together with over ten year’s bottle age, even if we weren’t by this stage.
Clearly, there are synergies with Central Otago and the Alsace terrain and climate with long, warm, dry summer days with the acute diurnal temperature of very cool evenings – it can be 29 degrees Celsius up until 9.30pm then the sun disappears behind the mountains and the temperature immediately drops to 14 – and practically snap freezes flavors and invigorating acidities.

Actually, I would go out on a limb and say that stylistically, there are more refreshingly vivacious, user-friendly gewürztraminer’s coming out of New Zealand than Alsace now with an appealing accent on citrus fruits that give it a succulent mandarin, tangerine, pink grapefruit mid-palate and whilst having plenty of genuine varietal character in every respect, are less overt and I would suggest, will carve out a niche market all of their own.

A stunning example of gewürztraminer from Central Otago is Misha’s Vineyard 2008, a new vineyard in the Bendigo sub-region with a jaw-dropping vista across Lake Dunstan to mountainous ranges from their sun drenched north-west facing terraces stretching from 210 to 350 meters above sea level.

Even more extraordinary, it is their first vintage of gewürztraminer and one can only assume that the variety has found its nirvana here and I can only imagine the wines getting better with vine age and vineyard experience. Not that experience is an issue, as the winemaker is Olly Masters, one of New Zealand’s most respected winemakers with a hand in Ata Rangi and Seresin Estate.

Interestingly, Master’s has slow-fermented a proportion of the wine (14%) in older oak barrels using wild yeast, blending it with the main tank component which was inoculated and cool fermented, which certainly appears to have added a discernible degree of complexity.
By all accounts the vintage conditions were perfect in Central Otago in 2008 with a long, slow ripening period. Moreover, the yields were constrained to one bunch per vine cane to achieve a lower yield and concentration of fruit, and the wine certainly has all the right stats to prove it; 5.4 grams per liter tartaric acid to counterbalance 14 grams of per liter of sugar and a backbone of 14.4% alcohol all symmetrically tantalizingly the palate with an exotic fragrance that you could easily dab behinds the ears and outdo Channel.

My note for Misha’s The Gallery Gewürztraminer 2008:
Alluring perfume of ripe papaya, lychee and Turkish delight with pronounced citrus mélange of lime and blood orange, then overcome by pungent earthiness and Indian spices – lots of turmeric and yellow mustard seed aromas and turn of the peppermill giving way to discernible nuances of fresh thyme and subtle rose water building in sweetness with dark Manuka honey and palm sugar notes and a seductive hint of white truffle oil – all totally hedonistic. Oily, creamy textured palate entry with peaches and cream resemblance, certainly a cuddly viscosity yet kept lively by pink grapefruit and tangerine succulence with a background of earthy, herbal pungency – a classic gewürztraminer characteristic – along with apricot stones, scents of virgin olive oil and lingering spiciness. A wonderfully exotic and absorbing wine, all for a very user-friendly S$47.50 a bottle.

If I could quote the Trimbach website again, with a profound food pairing, “Gewürztraminer will match every World Cuisine where various tastes, spices and exoticism blend with happiness.”

If you live in Singapore you may well have seen Misha’s Vineyard wines spreading around the place rather rapidly, as in fact the proprietors are long-term residents there.

Make a point of visiting the vineyards website as it is one of the best and most comprehensive I have ever seen, www.mishasvineyard.com

Available in:
Singapore: Rubicon Reserve Wines Tel: 6837 8012 www.rubiconreservewines.com
Hong Kong: Jebsen Fine Wines Tel : +852 2926 2240 www.jebsenfinewines.com
Japan: Masuki Tel: +81-3-3667-5450 www.masuki.jp

(Curtis Marsh, IS Magazine/Wandering Palate, Singapore, February 2010)
http://www.thewanderingpalate.com/mhw-Misha-Gew%C3%BCrztraminer-2008.html
http://is-magazine.com/feature/musthave-wine-week-jan-29-2010

Gewurztraminer makes a great fit with Mutton Curry

Curtis Marsh, The Wandering Palate