For description, menu, wine list, and raison d'être of this event, see the official webpage. Also check out the photo gallery.
It was, of course, the coolest, dampest day for two weeks either direction. A couple of hours before opening, when we were mostly set up, it started to rain. We scrambled to get everything hidden away, chairs turned upside down, audio-video gear covered up, and we watched the sky. If the rain didn't let up, well, we really didn't have any options. (Plan for rain? In Oregon? The Cordial is very much a damn-the-torpedoes affair.)
The rain let up. Clearly the gods were in a Cordial mood.
Weeks earlier, I had woken up in the middle of the night with an idea. The real centerpiece of the Swiss National Holiday for me as a kid growing up in Switzerland was, frankly, the candlelit red-and-white Swiss-flag paper lanterns we kids would carry around. Getting such lanterns for the Cordial would have been difficult, expensive, and impractical at best, so we needed another solution. It came in the middle of the night, when I awoke with the image a milk carton, sides cut out and replaced with Swiss flags of crepe paper. Anna loved the dairy connection, and we started saving cartons. Then she and our dear friend Yvonne (Dutch, but deputized Swiss for the occasion) cut and pasted and bricolaged them into being, and Ashley strung them onto a length of xmas lights.
Thankfully, we hadn't strung the milklanterns, above, when the rain hit. All nine were safe and dry to illuminate the evening in charming DIY style, below.
When, after tablecloths and chairs had dried out, our Cordialistas arrived, they were relieved to discover that they were entering neutral territory:
They were met by Customs Official Anna, who stamped their Chocolate Visas (below) and gave them personalized wine tags entitling them to a soirée of amazing, obscure pours.
This Cordial, celebrating 717 years of Swissitude, took place at an urban farm within Portland city limits: City Garden Farms. A hearty thank-you to CGF co-founder Martin Barrett who entrusted his urban farm — and its produce — to our Cordiality, and to Dan & Jenny, also of CGF. The good vibes are mutual, as Martin's unsolicited testimonial shows.
It was an evening of great, celebratory nostalgia for me, having been a kid in Switzerland. Particularly fascinating to me is how obscure this little country remains for Americans. I'm often asked if I speak Swedish! Finding Swiss things (foods, wines, media and cultural items) proved a big challenge, to which we rose by a variety of tactics.
Below is a detail of a Swiss food & wine map we made for the event, so that people could follow the geography of the evening. The complete document is here.
Swiss wines are close to impossible to buy here. The problem is multi-part: the Swiss consume most of their own wines; their viticulture is steep and work-intensive, making the wines expensive (Swiss wealth contributes too); and few even know they exist, let alone what they're like. All of which adds up to pretty much no incentive for distributors and retailers to carry Swiss wines. Similar dynamics are at play with Swiss cheeses, chocolates, and other comestibles.
Well, we love a challenge. My dad was able to smuggle a trio of unusual, highly local Swiss wines out from Lausanne, and our man Ewald Moseler pledged a few bottles of outrageous Swiss wines from his own stash by cult winemakers Martha und Daniel Gantenbein. Of these wines, one reviewer writes:
Gantenbein makes small batch handcrafted smoky Pinot Noir of incredible quality. The simple, thin, sky blue label affixed to a heavy burgundy bottle can be found at Switzerland's finest hotels and restaurants, but only around 180 bottles makes it into the U.S. Consider yourself an insider to even hear about this wine and 'lottery winning lucky' to get your hands on a bottle.
What can we say? Everybody at The Swiss Cordial can consider themselves "lottery-winning lucky." Danke schön, Ewald!
Above: The elegantly understated bottle in the middle is the remarkable Martha und Daniel Gantenbein Pinot Noir from Fläsch, Bündner Herrschaft, Graubünden, Switzerland. Ewald brought both 2000 and 2001 vintages. Over a glass of this good stuff, he told me more about the illustrious Gantenbeins and their wines. Unfortunately, my German is rusty enough, and I'd had enough wine, that all I recall is something about the son of the reigning prince of neighboring Liechtenstein being an avid collector of these wines. I'll have to look into that. Or just let it develop as a myth...
The rest of the wines, my dad brought back from Lutry, on the advice of our consulting sommelier in the Lausanne office, Heidi Diggelmann (merci, vous deux!). The leftmost bottle was actually an empty (of a wine from a vineyard held by the city of Lausanne) which we used as a water carafe for the night. The second — La Viticole de Lutry Plan-Joyeux Rouge 2005 comes from the small town just east of Lausanne where I went to preschool. (I didn't know the wines back then.) The other two — Cave Duboux Villette 2006 and Domaine Bovy Saint-Saphorin 2005, both the quintessential Swiss white varietal, Chasselas — come from a few minutes east of Lutry, also on Lac Léman.
Swiss food was almost as challenging as the wines. We found some extraordinary Swiss cheeses at Steve's Cheese, and Steve went so far as to loan us his bona fide raclette grill. We also brought a recipe for Vaudois-style saucissons to Viande, who made them to order for The Cordial. They were a great success.
And Chef Cyndy brought my mom's recipe for the quichelike gâteau au fromage to life (below, with sous-chef Jessica). I was quite overcome when I tasted it (all the Swiss wines may have been a factor) and ran into the kitchen to accost Cyndy with un gros bisou.
Every Cordial, it seems, has its quietly revelatory little pairing moment. This time it was during the primo course, in which Anna's sautéed CGF frisée, beet greens and onions, topped with an astounding Krummenschwiler cheese, quite sang with the lightly chilled Jura red from Domaine Tissot, the Montigny-Les-Arsures 2005 Arbois “Sans Souffre” (Poulsard). This wine, coming from the French Jura just over the Swiss border, is available in the States. In Portland it's distributed by Triage, the distributor for all the non-Swiss wines we served this time. A big merci to Dana of Triage for recommending the "Sans-Souffre". The Krummenschwiler is more obscure. Ask Steve. (See what else we served on the event menu.)
Then, there's the question of Swiss media. I spent many an hour over several weeks researching, listening, and generally becoming something of an amateur of yodeling, alpenhorn and other, more obscure, Swiss sounds. What had begun a bit tongue in cheek turned into a compelling exploration. And of course, we had a good complement of Montreux jazz, including Les McCann and Eddie Harris's compelling 1969 record, Swiss Movement. In the end, we had enough music of Swiss persuasion to fill a week of Cordials. Need some?
Swiss film/video was less forthcoming. I did a montage of stunning alpen travel footage with some '20s silent film. Switzerland, as you know, was the birthplace of Dada. Searches for footage from the actual Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich turned up short, so we went to France for René Clair's seminal Entr'acte, 1924, starring the likes of Duchamp, Satie, Man Ray, Milhaud, and Picabia. With that, we mixed in La glace à trois faces, 1927, by French director Jean Epstein who, it turns out, was also a kid in Switzerland. Good enough for us! (And the film is merveilleux.)
Of course, we couldn't resist throwing in some scenes from Shirley Temple's 1937 Heidi. Quite charming, actually, though Duchamp, Man Ray and Picabia are nowhere in evidence.
Finally, we did find a bona fide Swiss moving picture in the form of Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss's remarkable "Der Lauf der Dinge":
The look of the video is very funky and gritty, but under the hood, what makes it all tick but good old Swiss precision!
For the evening's madness overall, we hewed to the recipe of too many interesting, ingredient-driven courses, far too many unusual, astounding wines, and several sleeves full of surprises such as the CGF raffle in which we raffled off a box of our host City Garden Farms' produce, CSA-style. In the end it was Martin Overstreet who claimed the prize from farmer Martin Barrett, and there were some allegations of inter-Martin rigging. However, absent conclusive evidence, we just remained neutral and let Martin O. keep the greens.
Of course, the real secret to The Cordial's success is that we bring together so many interesting, friendly people from completely different milieux. It's a refrain we hear time and again from our guests, that they've never met so many varied, fascinating people from worlds they don't otherwise have contact with, and that they're all such fun. We love that.
Come to think of it, The Cordial is a bit like Switzerland. Bunch of people hanging out in this fertile crossroads of cultures, taking note of the fact that they all speak different languages — Schweizerdeutsch, français, italiano, rumantsch (or art, science, wine, law, business, farming, what-have-you) — and by all rights have no business forming a confederation. One day (August 1, 1291, apparently), they say to each other, Hey, let's put aside our differences and grill up some raclette.
We'll drink (Chasselas) to that.
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