What is it?
There will be 30 producers with cheese, sausage, wine, bread, meat and drink at the Restaurant “G27″.
Music by: White Brani
The only cheese market in zurich
Sunday, 5 September 2010
From 11:00 to 16:00
Where is it?
Restaurant G27
Grubenstr. 27
8045
Zurich Binz
Monday 7th June 2010 17:39
Alberto Gandolfi is the new president of the Farmers Association
Mantua. Alberto Gandolfi is the new president of the Farmers Association of Mantua. He was elected unanimously this morning during the first Executive Council of the three-year period 2010-2012. Alberto Gandolfi takes the place of Alberto Zilocchi, who was leader of the Farmers Association of Mantua for ten years. He is 42 years old, he lives and works in Pegognaga in the farm «Gandolfi Mario & c.» that is led by his father Giovanni, his uncles Mario, Giacomo and Luigi, his cousins Stefano, Alessandro and Gabriele and by himself. He raises dairy cows and bovines for their meat for a total of about 450 heads (the milking animals are about 170). He was president of Promalat in 1997 and he is currently the president of the “Consortium Export 3-P”, born in 2000 with the aim to enhance (also and especially abroad) the agrifood production of the territory of Mantua. He is a president that skillfully manages Blackberry, Mac and e-mails. Alberto Gandolfi in his speech wished to underline an innovative aspect of the current Executive Council: “We are a motivated and united team, which did not forget to take on some young farmers, an important resource to make it grow in the Farmers Association of Mantua. We want to continue to be close to our associates and favour a generational exchange in order to have the young protagonists in their companies and in the institutions that represent them”.
We will introduce you some members of the Consortium:
Az. Agr. Senga
Casa Madaio
Cas. Soc. S. Rita
Grana D’Oro
And others partner companies:
La Via Lattea
Latteria Perenzin
These days in Verona the Vinitaly of substance opened compared to a recent past where it seemed it was sufficient a magic formula and a small cask to make a great wine. Today “the great wine” seems to be the biodynamic one, that indeed strikes because after the inebriation of so much baroque (euphemism used to talk about the nauseating wood sensation), someone felt the perfumes of the territory, so as to indicate them as the “real wines”. What is the “real wine”? It is the wine that we drink. Like La Fortana, that is a wine-not wine, for his moderate alcohol content, that is drunk with intense pleasure in the Po Valley where the Culatello was born.
Massimo Spigaroli, the consultant-pork butcher of Charles the Prince of Wales, in its Corte Pallavicina in Polesine Parmense fulfilled a dream: to do the same job as his parents, the hosts that practiced the philosophy of food miles before anyone else. He cooks everything that he breeds and grows, and his 37-month Black Pig “culatello” match the wines he produces perfectly. In Vinitaly he will cook at the “pranzo d’Autore”, like if he was in that court in the flood bed of the river Po, the court that belonged to Giuseppe Verdi, where you can feel the fragrance of the Fortanella, a forgotten wine that his grandfather Carlo had obtained from very sweet grapes.
Six years ago Luciano and Massimo resumed the cultivation of this grapes with four hectares in the locality of Motta, and from this rare grapes you have three sparkling and cool wines: the Fortanella, the Tamburen, which is a rosé produced by the “Charmat method” and a fantastic brut produced by the Classical method with Fortanella grapes vinified as white wine, the Strologo, which I liked the most. It has a light pink colour, but it is also rich in spices. In the future they will propose “La Rosa Gran riserva di Corte”, a fortana classical method that- they declare on the label – is made with an “ancestral fermentation”. The Guinea fowl covered in culatello cooked in the clay of the river Po matches with the Rosso del Motto, a blend of lambrusco, fortana and fortanella grapes, for good and enjoyable drinks like only in the Po Valley can do!
ANTICA CORTE PALLAVICINA AZ. AGR. SPIGAROLI
POLESINE PARMENSE (PR)
VIA MOTTA NUOVA, 6
TEL. +39052496136
A BOTTLE OF FORTANELLA 2009: EURO 8
http://www3.lastampa.it/cucina/sezioni/in-cantina/articolo/lstp/181982/
The French change their cheese consumption. The classic Camembert is paying dearly the consequences; the French cheese is losing out (-2.6%) to Mozzarella and Feta (+10%). The Cniel (National Interbranch center of the dairy economy) informs on that, underlining through its speaker, Laurent Damiens, that «the trend had been evident for years» and that the data now recorded are a confirmation of a hardly disputable trend.
However, the French keep the second place in Europe for cheese consumption, with 24 kg per-capita, after the Greek.
We are living in times of absolute certainties and little doubts. Times in which there is no room for anxieties, melancholies, feelings more subtly human that are at the basis of so much literature which has trained us and brought us up. Information, denunciation, consumption and controversy have replaced culture. Nothing settle, everything runs. And so I have found myself thinking over the meaning and the origin of the word «culture». Etymologically, at the basis of the word, there is the Indo-European root kwel, whose meaning is producing a circular movement. In Latin, it became colere, to cultivate. Cultivate, precisely. This year, for the first time, I did not cultivate the fields at home because, by now, even for those who are farmers, farming the land has become a completely disastrous undertaking. The Christmas period was marked by the first snow and ice, then by torrential rains that washed away the land, cutting furrows almost as big as trenches on the sloping lands. Had I sowed, I thought with relief, the fragile stems would have been dragged to the valley, leaving, at the time of growth, the desolate landscape with vast barren areas. However, this relief was short, because, in fact, seeing uncultivated fields arouses in me hardly erasable pain and sadness. It is an increasingly growing phenomenon, unfortunately, it is sufficient to look carefully to realise the changes of the landscape: especially on hill and mountain areas, where once vast barley and wheat fields stretched out, now there are only the dark profiles of brambles or barren pastures disseminated with sheep. The fruit being left to rot on the trees provokes in me an even greater grief. Nature offers us its gifts and we turn our head on the other side.
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Eat a little for lunch and even less for dinner, that the health of the whole body is built in the laboratory of the stomach (Miguel de Cervantes). For some years I became a vegetarian, at least once a month. What I put into my mouth does not involve just my mouth and what is on the point of the fork, it deals with the rest f the world.
by Jonathan Safran Foer
Easy Things
Mark Twain has been credited with saying that quitting smoking is among the easiest things one can do. He, himself, did it all the time. I might add vegetarianism to the list of easy things. During the course of certain years, I have become a vegetarian at least once a month. Recently my culinary habits have fluctuated so quickly (and seemingly randomly) that when perusing a menu I’ll often have to pause and ask myself, “So what am I eating these days?”
The Nine Year Old Life of Me
I first became a vegetarian when I was nine years old, and the rationale was entirely straightforward: I didn’t want to eat anything that had to be killed for me to eat it.
It seemed like one of those self-evident moral truths: you shouldn’t end life unless it’s absolutely necessary, and it isn’t necessary to eat meat. I couldn’t, for the nine-year-old life of me, understand how anyone could possibly disagree. I felt that way about most of my opinions.
Then again…
I did eat plants. Albeit reluctantly, and usually while holding my nose. And I ate meatballs, my favorite food, which technically didn’t have to be killed for me to eat them,
as a meatball is not, technically, an animal. And the chicken stock in my grandmother’s soup was grandfather-claused to maintain the peace. (She had a hard enough time getting her head around the idea that smoked salmon was “meat.”) I wore leather, but I didn’t eat it. But I did chew on it.
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The Provolone Valpadana PDO changes its specifications, leaving out, at last, the formaldehyde, E239 from its production. This is what the Official Journal of the European Union shows. On 16th December 2009 the Official Journal published the “Proposed modification of the production specifications of Provolone Valpadana protected designation of origin.”
Prices were still low in 2009, but they have increased in the last three months. On the foreign markets +7%
(Bologna, 28th January 2010) Next months will tell if it is a stable recovery, but there has been a steady improvement in quotations of Parmigiano-Reggiano, this is what has said the president of the Consortium of Parmigiano-Reggiano, Giuseppe Dalai – but if we consider that the good balance at the end of 2009 has been reinforced again in January 2010, at last, the possibility to overcome the dramatic crisis of the last five years can be glimpsed”.
The figures that Mr Alai with the director Leo Bertozzi and the vice-presidents Adolfo Filippini and Alberto Boscoli provide do not mince words.
The production in 2009 confirmed the productive fall that has been under way for years, marking a drop by 2.23% after the -3.1% of 2008 and the -0.40% of the 2007, falling for the first time below 3 million wheels (2,947.292); the stock in trade diminished by 11.3%, family consumptions have increased by 0.7% and exports have gone up by 7% in the first ten months of the year, bringing to the 27% the quota of exported Parmigiano Reggiano addressed to foreign markets, with a +9.1% in the EU area together with a recovery of the Asian markets which marked the most dramatic growth in sales of Parmigiano-Reggiano in Japan, with a +5%.
The president Claudio Poggioli says that they have exported 60% of the 4,800 wheels produced during the year thanks to the participation in international fairs.
The Caseificio Santa Rita has been exporting in 11 countries and is capable of offering products such as the 80 month-old Parmigiano Reggiano. Since 1990, Social Dairy Santa Rita, a cooperative which has its headquarters in Pompeano di Serramazzoni, more than 700 metres high on the Appennino, have decided to go for organic Parmigiano Reggiano. They were able to create a business specialised in organic Parmigiano Reggiano. The Santa Rita Dairy dates back to 1964 when just one cooperative of milk producers existed. Currently, the companies members of the dairy are 9 and are giving organic milk to the dairy twice a day with about 900 cows of which 400 producing milk. They are producing around 4,800 wheels every year, with a turnover of €2.9 million.
Thanks to the participation in the most important international fairs of the sector- says Claudio Poggioli, president of the Social Dairy Santa Rita – we were able to conquer significant market outlets abroad especially in European countries, USA and Japan. To enter those two markets the dairy had to obtain the Nop certification for the USA and the Jas certification for Japan.