Each week, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

Sticking with the bread theme from yesterday, why not start the week right with some Sun-blushed Tomato & Goat’s Cheese Rolls?

Sun-blushed tomatoes and goat’s cheese make another great match for the the 2005 Remole Frescobaldi (12.5%), £7.49 from Oddbins, made from a blend of 85% Sangiovese/15% Cabernet Sauvignon. The tomatoes and cheese provide a slightly savoury balance to the tannins of the Remole (especially if opened the previous day with InterWined’s Olive & Parma Bread).

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Each Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

This week, ‘Blow the Bank’ brings you two of InterWined’s favourite pizzas.

Pizza with Parma Ham, Basil, and Red Onion

Feta & Butternut Squash Pizza with Ricotta and Pine Nuts

The 2006 ‘Taste the Difference’ Primitivo del Salento, from Italy and available exclusively to Sainsbury’s for approximately £5, is made by Cantina Due Palme, an Italian co-operative from Apulia known for their award- winning Primitivo. So, it doesn’t disappoint. In fact, it slightly astounds. For £5, this is one of the best wines that I’ve had in months; it’s also great for pairing with all manner of foods.

This wine is rich and flavourful, with a complexion that’s something of a cross between black cherries and dried blood. Thankfully, you can only taste the cherries. But even if wine could taste like blood, this wine would pull it off brilliantly. There’s such a good balance to it.

It’s also the perfect mix of spicy and sweet to match both pizzas. The sweetness really marries well with the squash and adds a little bit of a zip to the mellower flavour of the baked feta. Likewise, the sweetness helps counter any saltiness from the Parma ham, while the fresh basil, red onions, and ample cranks of cracked pepper help compliment the spice. A perfect threesome: 9.1.

InterWined’s Own Recipes in Full

Pizza with Parma Ham, Basil, and Red Onion & Feta & Butternut Squash Pizza with Ricotta and Pine Nuts

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Ever ordered a dish off a menu at a restaurant or café and found yourself thinking, “I could make that”?

Well, InterWined did last weekend, while sitting outside Carluccio’s, the popular Italian café chain, and trying to make the most of the sporadic sunshine that fell along Market Square near London’s Oxford Street. The dish was a simple Emilia-Romagna-inspired serving of parmesan cheese with balsamic vinegar.

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Each Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

This week, ‘Blow the Bank’ brings you savoury dinner that doubles as a nice mid-afternoon snack or late-night dessert courtesy of InterWined’s Own Ricotta & Sun-dried Tomato Samosas.

InterWined could bore you with stories of the history of the samosa and it’s journey from the middle-east to India or somesuch, but that would be boring. See, you’re already yawning. It would also be misleading, because these samosas are samosas in name only and inspired by a bit of late night food television viewing and a recipe for what was by all accounts an apple turnover that the chef chose to rename an apple samosa. I might have been tired, and it might have been late, and I might not remember the name of the programme, but the simple samosa recipe stuck in my head.

And now, I’m sticking it in yours.

Making your own dough can be daunting; it certainly is for InterWined. In fact, I’ve yet to follow a recipe for making dough and get the appropriate results, from the stated measures of ingredients. I’m forever having to adjust the flour or the water or the milk or whatever to make the mixture wetter or dryer and easier to knead into dough. And, even though, I vow each never to make my own dough again…I always do and almost always get the same mixed results.

Not this time. This time, I followed a simple formula of 2 parts flour to just less than 1 part water. And it worked.

Now what about those samosas?

Citrus fruit and ricotta are classic pairing partners and regularly feature in numerous Italian recipes, such as those for cannoli. While InterWined recipe for Ricotta & Sun-dried Tomato Samosas doesn’t include citrus and isn’t Italian, the same classic thinking prevails with pairing them with a wine.

The 2005 Château Saransot Dupré Blanc Sec (12.5%) Sauvignon Blanc/Semillon (60/40 blend from Bordeaux, currently available from Cadman Fine Wines for £8.99, brings with it a zippy acidity that pairs well with the peppery ricotta of the somosa, the Sauvignon Blanc helping the wine to find balance with the creamy flavour of the ricotta cheese.

It’s the salt, found of the sun-dried tomato, that proves the most challenging aspect in this pairing and, as mentioned in previous ‘Blow the Bank’ posts, countless others. However, the creaminess of the ricotta mixed with pepper and the Semillon in the wine do a nice job of taming it and preventing the wine’s overall acidity from clashing with the saltiness of the sun-dried tomatoes and leaving a pucker on the lips and a grimace on the face.

On the nose, the Château Saransot Dupré gives a good mix of mild honey and hay that translates as pretty well to the mouth where the honey clearly dominates before finishing with a slightly sharp zip of lemon and acid.

Personally, hay is one of those strange terms that sometimes appears in tasting notes that, while entirely accurate, is kind of meaningless to anyone who didn’t grow up near horses, under a thatched roof, or chewing it while pretending to be Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, a gunslinger from a 1950s’ Western. It’s like gooseberry…only people that have had the occasion to eat enough gooseberry so as to create a sense of it in their minds, noses, and palates should ever be allowed to use that tasting note — especially when describing Sauvignon Blanc. Why would such a common wine smell of such an uncommon fruit? No one ever says the reverse, “This gooseberry smells exactly like a 2004 Sancerre from Château Pretentious Tasting Note”. Do they?

Well, I am not one of those gooseberry gobblers. But, I do know what hay tastes like, since I did grow up doing one of those things (any guesses?) and, thus, feel pretty OK using it to describe the wine. It’s a bit…hay.

And, for those worried about their salt intake, the current unpopularity of sun-dried tomatoes, hay-tasting, or the availability of the Château Saransot Dupré Blanc Sec, a great alternative would be to replace the sun-dried tomatoes with freshly chopped pomordorinos, as fresh tomatoes tend to be fairly acidic, and pair the dish with the equally well-suited Ronco del Gnemiz Sauvignon twice reviewed by InterWined in recent weeks. (They make quite a bit of ricotta in Friuli, don’t you know.)

InterWined’s Own Recipe in Full

Ricotta & Sun-dried Tomato Samosas

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Each Friday Most Fridays and some others given the circumstances, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

This week it’s InterWined’s Own Chunky Tomato Soup — just the sort of dish to enjoy with loads of freshly baked bread and good bottle of wine on a late autumn evening when you and the sun in the sky have decided to call it a day by four in the afternoon.

For many people, wine is in an ingredient and never an accompaniment to well-prepared soup. After all, what’s the point of pairing a liquid with a liquid? But it needn’t be so galling.

In fact, it’s quite traditional to serve a sherry or fortified wine with a consommé or bisque. The flavours of the two balancing each other to great affect. What’s perhaps slightly less traditional is serving a fuller white or red wine with soup. But, given the features of InterWined’s Own Chunky Tomato Soup a fuller wine should work wonders, and does do in the form of a 2006 Txomin Etxaniz Getariako Txakolina, just outside of San Sebastian in the Basque Country of northern Spain, and bought from Planet of the Grapes for around £11.

In the wine world, there are few better partners to the tomato that the simple green wines of the Iberian Peninsula. And while, most wine lovers are well-versed in the Portuguese Vihno Verde, fewer are familiar with its Basque cousin, Txakoli, made from the grapes Hondarribi Zuri and Hondarrabi Beltza, or its most famous representative the humble Txomin Etxaniz.

For those not blessed with a knack for the Basque tongue, Euskara, Txomin Etxaniz looks virtually unpronounceable. And, as a wine, one assumes is more often ordered with an index finger placed on a menu than a tongue pressed against the soft palate of the mouth. In actual fact, it’s quite an easy name to say: It’s Shomin Eshaniz or Shomin Eshanith. But, for simplicity’s sake, we’ll call him Dominic or Domy for short.

And the 2006 Domy is a perfect partner for Chunky Tomato Soup. At 11% alcohol, it’s both light and nimble. Its green-y acidity and fresh zip give a nice kick to the tomatoes and make the entire experience utterly morish: 9.6. This is another superb example of a simple, low yield, table wine that beats the big boys in terms of sheer drinking pleasure again and again.

InterWined’s Own Recipe In Full

Chunky Tomato Soup

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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

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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 courtesy of Haalo at Cook (Almost) Anything At Least Once and a rich and flavourful Eggplant (Aubergine) Involtini with Ricotta, Mozzarella and Tomato.

Vegetarian food is regularly overlooked by head chefs and, in turn, often ignored by most diners. As a result, it is usually underserved by sommeliers who limit their pairings to a few simple dictums: mushrooms are like meat and deserve a full-bodied red wine such as Chateauneuf du Pape; Chardonnay goes well with quiche (it is chicken, after all – see Pear & Sage-stuffed Chicken with Hazelnut Crust for more); and, when in doubt, serve Sauvignon Blanc.

All three are reasonable, as, indeed, Sauvignon Blanc pairs excellently well with many vegetable dishes including asparagus, but each belies the complexity and nuance one finds in vegetarian cuisine.

As with the mushroom, one could class the aubergine or eggplant as a meaty vegetable. Equally one could place the aubergine alongside the courgette or zucchini in terms of its cucumber-like texture. (Perhaps strange, the aubergine is actually from the same genus as the tomato and potato.) While Chateauneuf du Pape can easily compliment the meatiness of mushroom, it would likely overpower the softer courgette (zucchini).

So what wine grapes pairs well with aubergine? Something red, to be sure; but, where others would possibly recommend a Merlot or Cabernet Sauvignon, InterWined would suggest finding a red with softer tannins such as those found in the Gamay Noir à Jus Blanc.

Served chilled as an aperitif or opened only when plating, the 2006 Te Mata Woodthorpe Gamay Noir from New Zealand, £11 from Planet of the Grapes is an excellent partner to Haalo’s Eggplant Involtini with Ricotta, Mozzarella and Tomato. It easily compliments the softness of the grilled aubergine while proving a perfect partner to enhance the kick found in Haalo’s secret ingredient, wine vinegar-soaked currants.

The Te Mata Gamay Noir is black currant juice drink or even black cherry in colour. Fragrant, refreshing, and smooth on the palette; it bears all the signature features of an outstanding Beaujolais. In fact, since the Te Mata Woodthrope Gamay Noir seems unavailable outside of the UK and New Zealand, InterWined recommends another Beaujolais wine, the Fleurie; or, better still, try one of North America’s Gamay Noirs, such as the ones made by Andrew Lane in Napa, California.

Haalo’s Recipe in Full

Eggplant Involtini with Ricotta, Mozzarella and Tomato

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