celebration’s râche
celebration’s râche
Tasting notes, sugaring off 2026
1. cosquilla: zesty orange front notes, earthy middles, followed by a depth-bite mellowing at the foothill of the back tongue — deeeep rouge colour
2. comme tu veux: caramel entrance, pine nuts step in sideways, followed by pine-tree mineral hues — mineral sap: as wished!
3. calibrate
4. perishing
5. patch: More on patch to come! …
6. duration: so, before the spoon came to the tongue, the words simpleton had spilled into the sugary shack. this tongue is differing (without begging for this swerve). Not at all. a modest yet irrefutable refined delicacy waits in the curtain, pausing on her modes for entry, sure of potentials and possibilities, and discerning the conditions for coming into themselves. Duration sparked thoughts on how not only do taste sensations change from initial heats to the next day’s cools, but that in those first 12 hours (and thereafter in slower paces, perhaps) a taste is still coming into themselves, still composing. Duration: the thicks of intensities layering, tentative becomings, kindling complexities.
7. belief: buttery buttery beginnings, spritely sugar tones dance the middle hillock, making sure you’re awake! and then, YES! mineral hues lake the whole event, mineral mineral mineral cradle the afterimage – bliss. Belief. Her lights carrying gold.
Days later… butter swaddles with pronunciations perking the middle hillock, she’s chirpy — and songs swells into wiiiiiide scapes.
8. affirmation: Orange! (Colour) immediate butter, lightness, sugar tones across the back tongue, delicate — dances lightly away from the tongue,
Some days later… sooo light! in colour, texture, taste. The colour of tangerine orange wine. The sweetness dances with subtle round caramel.
9. byplace lullabies: sunshine. gentle rounds velvet kiss the tongue.
Red barks with mosses, it’s the next day.
Spices the tongue’s edges with hugs, while she licks cool up the middle brow. Thick thick greetings.
10. for once it was: yellow corners in red flood. she alerts the middle node with a bite, her high cook greeting you, the sweeter lovers lover.
Days later… The bite has mellowed, textures elegant, orange tones are pulling forwards
— lovers with thimble berry tea – Morgan and Sybil’s love in the cup!
râche restaurants: Mushroom, orange, wild thyme, mountain herbs of Greek islands (including mastic? might this then be silver birch inner greens?)
11. vertigo: lighter, more golden — butter, lemon.
Marshmallow! râche: ranging colour-tones and textures, we’re reminded of crustacean frequencies, sonorous roundings.
Râche: magnesium and potassium rich… will we crave less chocolate (thanks Oana!) and sleep better? The soils love it. The futurity restaurants snacks after it 🙂
The Literal: Dreaming of râche restaurants, radicchio râche with lentil dressed in grapefruit juice (wow, this! thanks Sybil!).
note to self, do not never forget Calabrian liquorice root powder again… this surely loves râche, too!
12. eau chaude: “it’s close Curtain,” remembers Mie — number 8, 2025. Sweet note dance so light, also — but sweet for certain, with bitter râche middles. She’s loose, in her liquid, gently rocking away in her ebbing sways down throatwards. Cooked from 2.3 brix.
13. eleven: for Diego’s already-trickster quality spontaneities. Gentle round, earth sweets, with a spikes edging the backs of the … Now we were cooking 2.6 brix – the old-growth forest symphonying 0.3 brix through the arc of the day!
14. money:’s a tongue hugger, soft, deeper red, beginning from 2.45 brix. 5 minutes later and their entrance is russet
15. glass: is stain glass window. Thick butters… oh so much more to say! loop back with time…
intermezzo:
Silver birch’s new shoots: nudges us that we’ll soon drink her sap, uncooked. Splice open to chew on its inner greens, we chewed and wondered through a panoply of taste notes not quite finding what it was, so so familiar, that memory sharp and absolutely reachlessly fuzzy! Mastic? yes! And mountain herb automatics of Greek islands flood back. We returned and chewed again, she’s skirting anise and a root beer.
15. glass, wow. Different level! Texture -texture -texture — syrup glass, she’s still curtaining 🙂 Auburn lifts, carry us over to smokey notes in the mouth’s roof. She fringes, then, to pinch the back of the nasal, inviting the nostrils to tweak. Singularly something else.
16. pinstripes: she’s passing through the conduit differently, tastes deeper red, immediately pulling forwards on the tongue… what’s to come…
liquorice dreams’s râche –or perhaps sooner unfiltered syrup– is undoubtedly the best we’ve met lips with – this delectable scopes from liquorice black moist earth to marshmallow pillows, she spikes with her filtered sister attuning soft lemon notes, with a curl of pine nut, smoke, taffy coffee-bitters highs and afterimages… complexity all the way down.
– each spoon akin to rolling in wet moss!
we saw the first butterflies here today, the sun gleamed through the vet, the proposition with no exaggeration a life-dream in the making, below the view from the kitchen-to-come-window
17. And then liquorice dreams was ready!
She is a dark one, deep amber-black. I saw people congregated around her but I didn’t hear how she tastes so I need help here. But I did see lots of smiles. I unusually left the sugarshack before everyone else because it was sunny and warm (16!) and I just needed to get to the garden…
16th batch. [17th??]
18. Boiling in the snow is a very large batch, deep and dark (almost blue-black). The colour of the syrup does change as the season progresses, so that’s where we are. Wednesday will be our last boil.
19. The first batch, five hours in (with the typical endless infinite 3 degrees – where the thermometer stalls 4 degrees from the desired 7, which is 219 fahrenheit or 7 above boiling), is called celebration. It is dark and thick and full.
20. The second batch, two hours later, is called scarlet runner — for those gorgeous purple beans that were in our dinner (from last year’s garden), and in felt memory of those hot, intense fires that burn my legs every fifteen minutes! It is Brian’s favourite dark batch — a bit more frontal in the palette, sweet and soft, also very dark but with red tones.
