Wines for camping

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Two weeks ago my wife and I were wandering the Utah wilderness, car-camping at a pretty, rustic campground in Capitol Reef National Park. For desert rats like us these were wonderful days, hiking up creek beds and into box canyons of Navajo Sandstone, looking for Indian petroglyphs, poking around for troves of jasper and gypsum and petrified wood.

And then there was the food situation.

Peer into the cooler around, say, the third day of 95-degree heat, and it’s easy to be discouraged. The bag of peaches you so carefully selected at the U-Pick look a little like assault victims for all of their bruises and slights; that wedge of waterlogged English cheddar has been slowly liquefying (really, have you ever known a Zip-Loc that does not unzip in a cooler? either that or they’re water-soluble) and then there’s the salami that has been silently outgassing in its own special sealed plastic sheath.

And yet even in the smallest town in Utah you can buy decent local beef, and we had a perfectly usable grill for cooking a steak. I’d brought along garlic, a few shallots, a bag of dried mushrooms, olive oil. The tins of sardines and Wasa rye crackers were intact, along with one very humid avocado -– voila! a first course! -– and there remained about two pounds of Gorp for dessert, or in case dinner was a complete disaster.

The challenge for camping meals is to find a wine that can gather all the pieces. We were more than a little grimy, and despite being generally ravenous after our adventures, our palates were not exactly sharp. But we discovered that the domestic wines best suited for our particular physical condition were Grenache, Zinfandel, and Petite Sirah, big red wines with enough tannin to cleanse our clotted palates.

Grenache is not new to California, but the variety has been revived significantly by the importation of new clones from the southern Rhône Valley, which are firmer and more structured than old selections. The Grenache on hand was made by Santa Ynez Valley producer Steve Beckmen whose Purisima Vineyard bottling has a purity of strawberry red fruit and enough grip to wrap around a steak.

Both California Zinfandel and Petite Sirah are traditional varieties that have been eclipsed somewhat by the popularity of Cabernet and Pinot Noir, but these wines have not only the precise balance of generous abundant dark plummy fruit with plenty of gripping tannin, but they each possess a pleasingly rustic textural feel that seems to capture the camping experience to a ‘T.’

We packed along the well-built 2005 Napa Valley Zin from Storybook Mountain Vineyards, and a stalwart 2005 Mendocino Petite from one of its most dedicated practitioners, Parducci Winery, called, appropriately, “True Grit.” Any one of these heritage varieties are the perfect complement to a rough-hewn, campfire-driven meal.

-- Patrick Comiskey