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Liquid Refreshment
GALLIVARE, Sweden (AP) — He may look young for his age, but 77-year-old Swedish retiree Per-Eric Henricsson was not flattered when his local supermarket asked him to show ID to prove that he was old enough to buy a case of beer.
Now, Henricsson has asked the National Association of Senior Citizens for help in pressing […]
Learn something new every day. Here, we thought the Scotch Bonnet was the hottest chilli pepper, after the Habanero… but, as it turns out, neither are even in the top two.
This development comes after researchers at New Mexico State University recently discovered the world’s hottest chilli pepper. Bhut Jolokia, a variety of chilli pepper originating […]
A recent lunch at One Blossom Street presented InterWined.com a unique opportunity: to try a very, very expensive wine, compared to a not-so pricey wine.
Owner Roberto, and wine merchant Antonello, were there for the private tasting. Roberto broke out his 2003 Barrua Isola Dei Nuraghi , made by the same folks who produce the super tuscan Sassicaia, which he said will be the next great wine to come out of Italy. He’s going to sell it for around £85 a bottle ($175).
Antonello brought his 2004 Piantate Lunghe, Conero Rossini, which would sell on a store shelf for a much more forgiving £12 ($25).
So which taste better?
Roberto isn’t a huge fan of his Barrua. He believes it is produced to appeal to more “international” tastes, and isn’t distinctly Italian enough. And he’s right to an extent, as it is a blend using French varieties: Carignano, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. The wine is incredibly well-balanced. Flawless, even. Violets, plum and a strong helping of liquorice. The tannins are weak for an Italian wine, but this just makes the Barrua incredibly mellow. The loamy clay soil can also be tasted, at least that’s InterWined’s guess on what kind of earth the grapes grow in. The wineceller, Enotria, says that the wine pairs well with spicy food. They’re lying. Spicy food kills this wine. Ruins it. We tried the wine with a spicy tomato pasta with olives and hated it. 9.3 points. Drink by itself or with cheese.
Antonello’s Piantate was fuming with alcohol on the nose, but for some reason, it cut right trough the spice. His wine is a blend of Montepulciano and Sangiovese — very Italian. Medium body with surprisingly soft tannins. It had nice grip, sure, but still a year too young. InterWined noted a chalky flavor, which Antonello confirmed: the vines grow in chalky soil.
How about that? 8.9 points.
What’s so special about the health news post today then? Well, it’s a day late! But, it’s a good one. We had a study about pot-smokers acting stupid, but decided to publish some health news that is a little less obvious.
So, it may seem like a no-brainer that men have certain tastes in women that […]
Sometimes technology is great; sometimes less so.
Today it’s less so.
But rest assured that InterWined’s Health News will return for a special Wednesday Edition tomorrow.
Every Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results, along with the recipe!
It used to be that InterWined prepared its dish following the instructions of one of the Internet’s best food blogs. But, for the last several weeks, it’s blazed its own trail and almost forgotten that the idea was to pair a wine that exceeded the normal £10 ($20) threshold Jacob set for InterWined when he started the site about 200 years ago…
So this week, ‘Blow the Bank’ comes in the form of a good old-fashioned recipe — not from a blog, but from a book (an actual cookbook) — in the form of Slow Cooked Sweet & Sour Lamb from Greg and Lucy Malouf’s excellently exotic ode to Lebanese and Syrian cooking Saha.
As readers will know, the vast majority of ‘Blow the Bank’ dishes come courtesy of chefs and bloggers from other Web sites who give ‘Blow the Bank’ scribe Sean permission to publish their recipes. So what should he do with a recipe from a cookbook that retails for £19.50?
Well, here’s the answer…write the author a letter and wait for a reply.
A copy of the letter follows, along with pictures of the cooked dish and a review of the wine. (Note: Sean replaced the pearl onions listed in the recipe with 8 shallots and the lamb chops with lamb rump steaks.)
Dear Mr. Malouf,
My name is Sean Sellers and about a year ago, my wife Steph gave me a copy of your excellent cookbook as a gift. I thoroughly enjoyed and particularly like your lamb recipes. (Lamb is Steph’s favourite meat and the first thing I ever cooked for her.)
I’m not a chef, but I do like to cook. And each week, I pair a wine and a meal for a Web site called InterWined.com, written by a well-known international wine journalist and sometime actor. In the past several months, I’ve cooked recipes from Internet chefs around the world alongside a few of my own.
Before posting the pairing on the site, I seek the chef’s permission to publish the recipe with photos of the finished dished and a review of the wine with which it was paired. This week, I prepared your fantastic Slow-Cooked Sweet & Sour Lamb (it’s a firm favourite) with a few minor alterations. Namely, I replaced your pearl onions with shallots. But, since the recipe came from your cookbook and I didn’t have your permission, I thought it unwise and inappropriate to publish your recipe without seeking your permission first.
So, instead, I’ve published the post with pictures of the dish and this letter.
The 2006 Georges Duboeuf Brouilly from Beaujolais is as rich, grapey, and full of vibrant red fruit flavour as it was last year and probably the year before that, if not the year before that…after all, M. Duboeuf was fined €30000 in 2005 for blending grapes to make up for a poor 2004. Yet the wine’s consistency in flavour is probably down to a combination of cultivation practices and M. Duboeuf’s 55 years making Beaujolais more than anything else. And there’s something nice about knowing exactly what one is going to get from a bottle of Georges Duboeuf. (Remember; this is the man that invented the annual Beaujolais Nouveau craze. He knows what he’s doing.
The 2006 Bruilly is a superb match for the thick tomato sauce of Greg Malouf’s sweet & sour lamb, the fruitiness of the wine balancing nicely the tinge of sweet and sour flavour of the vinegar and, in the case of InterWined’s version, the sweetness of the shallots. 8.5: predicable, yet perfectly on the money — all €30000 of it.
Hey, did you know Parducci winery in Mendocino, California is the only carbon neutral winery in the United States?
That’s OK, neither do the guys at the wine shop in London that sells it. Apparently saving the environment means little, yet there is an entire section of the shop dedicated to the vineyards that save […]
A new study helps confirm what many of us probably already knew: jerks are good at getting the girls, but not so great at sticking around… at least with birds. We all knew that some birds were jerks, right? The truly funny thing the researchers found, though, was that whether or not birds stuck […]
Every Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine that exceeds its normal £10 ($20) threshold with one great meal, prepared following the instructions of some the Internet’s best food blogs.
This week’s ‘Blow the Bank’ comes in the form of Sunday lunch and its own recipe for Haloumi on Aduki Bean & Spinach Bed.
In recent weeks, it seems that every supermarket has unveiled its own version this week’s ‘Blow the Bank’, call it serendipity or coincidence. Just don’t call it a controversy. Leave that to the wine.
The 2006 Red Heart Cabernet Sauvignon Petit Verdot from South Australia, £5 from Sainsbury’s, is shrouded in controversy. Bottled in Northamptonshire for Buckingham Vintners, yet allegedly produced in South Australia’s Riverland. But, as Kim Wheatley and Paul Kent of Adelaide Now reported in December 2006, “Sainsbury’s says the wine comes from Kingston on Murray in the Riverland, but declined to elaborate on the vineyard that produces it. The Sunday Mail has contacted the main growers in the region, including Kingston Estate, Banrock Station and Salena Estate. All said they knew nothing of Red Heart.”
All very mysterious…
But wait; there’s more. Red Heart advertises itself as the Britain’s healthiest wine, containing 32% more antioxidants than average. Indeed the back of the bottle reads more like a press release for the health page of woman’s magazine than it does the traditional tasting notes and “excellent with cheese” malarkey more commonly found on the back of wine bottles these days.
According to Wheatley and Kent’s report, the wine’s health allegations put it in breach of wine export regulations. The two quote Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation corporate affairs manager Eric Wisgard as saying, “It’s almost promoting wine as a health drink and that’s something that’s not permitted. Because of these reciprocal agreements between all the wine trading nations, it effectively would be an international breach.”
Regardless of the controversy, InterWined’s ‘Blow the Bank’ is first and foremost interested in pairing foods and wine and the Red Heart makes an interesting and satisfying match to the haloumi salad.
A red wine most often paired with grilled meats and grassy steaks, the Cabernet Sauvignon Petit Verdot blend here nicely compliments the grilled and chewy texture of the haloumi cheese, helping to give it a meatier quality and smooth its often salty flavour. The Red Heart’s juicy, blackcurrant taste and pepper/chocolate nose also support the subtle flavours of the peppered aduki bean and spinach bed. And, while the controversy surrounding the wine might not matter much to the average drinker, it matters to InterWined: 7.9. A good match, soured by controversy.
InterWined’s Own Recipe In Full
Haloumi on Aduki Bean and Spinach Bed
Click on the post to view and download the recipe
Been thinking about Puglia in the south of Italy. Was invited to attend a new luxury hotel opening there soon.
Declined.
Thinking that wines from Puglia are too hot, and this make the wines less approachable to the average consumer. Not international enough. The Nero di Troia grape lends an essence of foxiness to the wines. Some […]
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