Food with a Sense of Place

Those revelations became the foundation of Orsini’s philosophy about good food: that it’s intimately tied to a sense of time and place. Now executive chef at a renowned winery, Orsini has been given a large garden and encouraged to keep pioneering new ways to connect his meals to the winery and the Napa Valley region. “Food is about context,” he says. “And so my inspiration mainly comes from what’s available from the gardens. What’s in season? What’s the weather like outside? Is it a warm day or is it a cold and chilly day?”

Orsini looks for innovative ways to connect his meals to that context with almost childlike enthusiasm and energy. For inspiration, he walks his gardens to see which herbs, fruits, and vegetables are primed for harvesting. He grows a specific type of corn to create his polenta and mills his own flour. He burns vine cuttings to smoke meats and repurposes cover crops to grow basil for his pesto. Leftover barrel staves fuel his wood-burning oven, and pinot noir and Cabernet leaves get used to braise meats. His is a passion that has, at times, led him almost to mad-scientist extremes.

Not long after he came to the winery, Orsini learned that one of the Cabernet vineyards was going to be removed and replanted. He thought long and hard about how he might honor and preserve the essence of these decades-old plants, and, just before the last harvest, walked out into the rows and snipped a couple of bunches of grapes. He then put them into a mixture of flour and water, where the wild yeast on the grape skins started to feed off the sugars. Over time, he coaxed the mixture into a levain, a French term for a bread starter, that he still uses to bake bread and pizza dough.

Orsini likes the idea that the levain is a living thing that, if cared for, could be used to make bread indefinitely. He even jokingly named the starter Justin, in honor of the winery’s founding winemaker. “He’s a living entity in our kitchen,” Orsini observes. “On a regular basis, you’ll hear people say, ‘Don’t forget to put Justin in the walk-in before you go home. Don’t forget to feed Justin today.’ It’s something that we love and care for.”

In another experiment, Orsini took some of the extra wine used to top off barrels and created a vinegar. He also harvested table grapes on the property in order to begin the long process of creating a balsamic. “A true balsamic, they say, takes twenty-five years,” he explains. “It is something you are making for your grandchildren.”

Orsini has a name for the experience of finding the perfect combination of food, wine, and place: making the angels sing.