Today marks the first and, hopefully, last day I eat Hungarian Goulash.
Now, in a completely unrelated matter, two wine reviews for one Spanish producer. Actually the second wine would pair nicely with Goulash, I suspect. But I’ll never know (see first line of entry).
Family-run wine producer Albet i Noya has been around for awhile and […]

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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 InterWined’s Own Monkfish Mexican Rice (Arroz con Rape).

For those whose experience of Mexican rice is limited to Old El Paso and Taco Bell, InterWined’s Own dish might seem more accurately described as Spanish paella. After all, when was the last time that you saw monkfish on the menu at a Mexican restaurant in the United States? Even Wahoo’s Fish Tacos — regardless of its name might suggest ‐ serve relatively little fish.

But, fish is an integral part of much Mexican cuisine — how could it not be with nearly six thousand miles of coastline. And, while that figure might only be half that of the United States, it’s a pretty big number when one considers that the United States is nearly five times the size of Mexico.

What makes this rice dish Mexican rather than Spanish is the same thing that makes a Pinot Noir from Burgundy a Côte de Nuits or Côte de Beaune and not an Italian, New Zealand, or Oregon Pinot Noir. They share the same ingredients but result — sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically ‐ in different things.

The central difference between InterWined’s Own Mexican rice and Spanish paella is that paella is most often made with calasparro rice, rarely found in the UK or US outside of specially shops. (InterWined used a simple long grain.) A further one comes in the use of the main ingredients. Whereas paella begins with the meat, fish, and broth, InterWined’s Own Mexican rice dish begins with the rice and the spice.

Paired with the Monkfish Mexican Rice is the Catalan 2002 Xavier Clua Vindemia (13.5%) from Terra Alta in Spain, currently on sale at Cadman Fine Wines for £13.99 (original price £18.99). Made from Chardonnay (15%), Sauvignon Blanc (10%), and Garnacha Blanca (75%), the Vindemia smells like candied apples and caramel, making it seem like it might be better suited as an aperitif. However, once it reaches the tongue, the wine reveals as an intriguing blend of high-acid and oaky complexity reminiscent of the Sherries found in Jerez. This is a very good wine for food, with both the acid and oak sit well with the monkfish, prawns, squid, and cubed pancetta found in the Monkfish Mexican Rice.

InterWined’s Own Recipe in Full

Monkfish Mexican Rice

Click on the post to view and download the recipe

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Here at InterWined.com, we try to give everyone in the wine industry a fair voice. Our third edition of ‘InterWined In Conversation’ focused on the newly launched French wine for women range, Sublimelle.
The interview gave plenty of attention to the product designs, ideas, and marketing, while reserving any comment or criticism.
The makers of Sublimelle define […]

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Who knows what’s in this white wine blend? But who cares really as The 2005 Finn ‘Off the Leash’ (13%) is a great wine to start the festivities. It’s crisp and somewhat crassy, so there is some Chardonnay lurking (60% — ed.).
Medium-bodied and fresh, it pair well with appetizers. But, as with most table wines, it suffers under the weight of its own basic structure: 8.4 alone and as a mixed case.

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Each Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results, along with the recipe.

Or so that’s the plan.

So, what happened last week?

After all, didn’t ‘Blow the Bank’ just return from a two-week hiatus?

The answer is a special two-for-one: For one week only, ‘Blow the Bank’ is taking over InterWined.com to give you two turkey-free dinners in an effort to guide you through the week that marks the first of America’s turkey-filled, turkey-fueled holidays and the starting bell for the mad dash toward Chrismukah and New Year’s.

The first, published today, is InterWined’s own recipe for Chicken Mole with Tomatillos and Almond Flakes, a dish designed to take you away from pressures of cooking a 16-pound bird for an ever-growing list of 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd, and once-removed cousins and kin.

The second, published Friday, aims to help you forget the inevitable drink-induced fallings-out and crazed, free-for-all, shop-fest fatigue that follows America’s great day of thanks.

In cooking terms, mole ranks as one of the handful of truly great and inspired Mexican contributions to world cuisine, with its unorthodox blend of chocolate, peppers, and spices. So, while some might find the thought of serving chicken, duck, or — yes; even turkey — with chocolate sickly, don’t believe the hype. Its subtle contrast of flavours proves sugar & spice and everything nice goes into more than just little girls.

As mentioned elsewhere, chardonnay is often the de-facto, no-imagination, partner to chicken that’s as ubiquitous, boring, and tiring to see as skinny jeans on every girl and boy that fancy themselves the next waif model or lead singer in a band whose name begins with ‘The’…

But every once in a while, one must swallow his pride and admit that no matter how many people look like David Banner moments before he warns you that ‘you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry’, some people really do look incredibly good in skinny jeans. The problem is that every time you see someone suited to skinny jeans, you realise just how awful everyone else that wears them really looks.

And, believe it or not, the same is true of chicken and chardonnay. Sometimes, the two are made for each other. Sometimes, the flavours of the chardonnay compliment the chicken dish in such a beautiful and unexpected way that you suddenly realise how so many people got the impression that the two went together so well in the first place. If it only it were always thus.

Fortunately, such is the case with the 2005 Glen Carlou Chardonnay Reserve, £13.99 from Oddbins, its wild mix of fruit and cinnamon proving perfectly suited to the Mexican mole. A big wine, the Glen Carlou nevertheless sits alongside the abundance of flavours in the mole without ever attempting to overtake it and comes off all the better for it. This is a chardonnay to make you forget that you don’t like chardonnay: 8.9.

InterWined’s Own Recipe In Full

Chicken Mole with Tomatillos and Almond Flakes

Click on the post to view and download the recipe

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Hate to sound like a broken record…

Hate to sound like a broken record…

Hate to sound like a broken record…

Seriously, an in-depth knowledge of Burgundy is something, it’s fair to say, none of us would even hope to achieve. And why bother, when so many wine writers already tell us what to buy.

InterWined said awhile back that 2004 whites (Chardonnay) in Burgundy and 2005 reds (Pinot Noir) were the way to go… and now that many of the budget wines in this area are on sale now, buy ‘em up. Stick to major producers, Latour, Rodet, Drouhin, etc. even LaRouche.

TIP: When at a dinner party and serving your freshly purchased Burgundy, announce that you have cellared it for six months and when it’s poured take a big smell and then a long, obnoxious slurp and declare, “Now, that’s how the Phoenicians liked it!”

No one will doubt you.

The 2004 Louis Latour Pouilly-Vinzelles ‘En Paradis’ Chardonnay: On sale for just under a tenner, at Nicolas wine shop, this white is exceptionally smooth and tinny, with fresh citrus acidity bursts. Hints of fleshy peach make it tough to pair distinctly with anything but salads and shellfish, but this is best drunk on its own. Decent dry finish balances the sweet hits here and there: 8.9 points.

The 2005 Aegerter Hautes Côtes de Beaune ‘Reserve Personnelle’ (That’s sweet of them, isn’t it?) Pinot Noir. £8.50 at Nicolas. Caramel and Indian spices in the nose, with a soft and fleshy body. Simple and elegant. Good for cooking with and drinking with heavy, blue-veined cheeses. Cinnamon on the finish with also a harmonious ending. Excellent value, and exactly how the Phoenicians like it: 8.9 points.

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InterWined.com loves food almost as much as it loves wine, hence, its new weekly feature ‘Blow the Bank’.

Every Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine that exceeds the normal £10 ($20) threshold with one great meal, prepared following the instructions of some the Internet’s best food blogs, and picked for easy preparation.

This week’s ‘Blow the Bank’ comes courtesy of Johanna at The Passionate Cook.com and a delicious Viennese-inspired Pear & Sage-stuffed Chicken Breast with a Hazelnut Crust.

It’s a cliché of the modern world that the most ubiquitous of domestic birds and Burgundies should pair so well. But cliché or no, chicken and Chardonnay do generally compliment each other better than most. In fact, InterWined finds itself asking what wines other than Chardonnay were paired with chicken before their inexorable rise in popularity beginning in the mid-20th Century. The answer probably rests with Beaujolais (made with the Gamay grape) — an excellent partner for roasted chicken, which one suspects was the most often prepared form of chicken prior to the advent of modern cookers and the mass farming initiatives that gave rise to battery farming, a theory InterWined intends to test in a forthcoming segment of ‘Blow the Bank’.

Johanna’s Pear & Sage-stuffed Chicken is a kind of Austrian cousin to the great American-style fried chicken. But, where a good red wine may serve as an excellent partner for the kind of fried chicken that John T. Edge celebrates in his new book The Southern Belly, most reds would likely overpower the subtly of this more delicate and grease-free recipe.

Thus, bearing in mind that it all comes down to a matter of taste, as outlined in the first ‘Blow the Bank’ last week, InterWined turned its attention to a Chardonnay blend, specifically the blend of Chardonnay and Cortese (the grape found in Gavi) produced in the 2001 Alteserre Montferrato Bianco from Bava, £13.99 from Oddbins/$30 from Winerx.com and Tewksbury Fine Wine in North America.

(A quick glance on the Web proved this wine pretty impossible to source in Australia and New Zealand. As such, antipodeans might consider the Lost Valley Cortese, purportedly the only winery outside of the Piedmont to grow the Cortese grape.)

Straw in colour with a subtle creamy butter flavour, it complimented the pear (a common flavour note with Gavi) and sage very well, without clashing with the fried breadcrumb, hazelnut crust of the chicken. However, as with last week’s Canederli allo Speck, sage is the real essential flavor partner and one that goes well with Chardonnay. And, while somewhat of a predicable choice, it works nonetheless.

Johanna’s Recipe in Full

Pear & sage-stuffed chicken breast with a hazelnut crust, courtesy of The Passionate Cook.com
(serves 4)

Click on the post to view and download the recipe.

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Australian Wine Producer Wolf Blass is switching over to eco-friendly plastic wine bottles in the United Kingdom in the next two weeks. Wolf Blass “Green Label” will be launched in Chardonnay and Cabernet Shiraz throughout Sainsbury’s from mid-August. Priced at £7.49, the brand from Australia will provide Wolf Blass consumers with the same quality of […]

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The 2005 Four Crossing Australian Chardonnay is zippy and full of bursting citrus. The throat burn suggests a price tag around the £5 mark but still very versatile with food. Half a bottle used for a superior turkey stock on the BIG day. Gets extra points for coming from a family that never touches the stuff: 8.5 points.

* New Year’s Eve: 2000 Heidsick Monopole Silver Label Champagne. Nutty, biscotti trim. Fresh orange scent. Small, lovely bubbles. A real value at £20 per bottle at Oddbins: 8.8.

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Wines from Burgundy are made with Chardonnay for whites and Pinot Noir for reds. But, like many French regions, the struggle has been for a consistent wine at a decent price.

All of the whites came from the 2004 harvest, the reds, some still not in bottle for retail, from the 2005. Remember that. The 2004 Burgundy whites are crisp and clean, metallic, citrus and vanilla. Touch of honey in the grapes infected with mild rot.

The 2005 are uplifting and fresh, fruit-forward and funky. Tannic but not tart. Memorable. The ‘estate’ wines can age for at least ten years yet. Both outstanding wines from outstanding vintages.

2004 Burgundy White: 9.0.
2005 Burgundy Red: 9.1

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While trying the Cefalicchio Chardonnay from a Biodynamic consortium in Puglia, declared that the wine smelled like steamed bananas… expected someone to shout, “You’re bananas.” But the only return fire was nodding heads of agreement.

Aufidus 2004 proved to be the star. Not organic, but rustic. Winemaker tried to imitate a Roman-style wine: swords and sandals to pair with rape and pillaging; a robust, rustic wine, like drinking a farm. Smelled of manure, which some people didn’t like for some reason – and wet leaves.

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The Marks and Sparks white Burgundy 2004 and San Tommasi ‘Giani’ Sicilian white; both served at a friend’s finally-off-of-probation celebration. Both were good bargains, excellent and crisp. Both were served cold and felt proper, and tasted too similar, coming not only from different countries, different climates and different soils.

Also, three nights were devoted to three bottles of Bonterra Organic 2004 Shiraz Carignan Sangiovese.

All three bottles were great, with or without food, fresh and clean.

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Started with (and these are all 2004s) a Shiraz Merlot blend… I’m reluctant to name names here; but it’s a big producer (aren’t they all from down under?) Initially it tasted a bit rusty, unpleasant, but after an hour or so, it became decent enough to drink. The bottle was left unfinished.

Then it was a Shiraz-Viognier. Not a typical blend, but still remarkable similar to the previous evening. Again, not finished. It also burned my throat.

I drank a Yalumba. You see, for me, a true wine should give the drinker an ironic feeling: a contradiction where the wine washes away the stress of the day and relaxes, whilst still enabling the drinker to feel invigorated and alive. No, this wine… this wine… just made me feel WEIRD. The next day, my head hurt.

I capped the Australian tour with a Rosemount 100 percent Shiraz.

The label was shouting ‘I’ve been designed to grab your attention, and hold it, so you don’t care if I’m any good on the inside.’ Luckily, by mid-week, I was decanting the wines and letting them sit for an hour before trying. This burned off the alcohol and brought out the tell-tale spiciness of the Shiraz. Spiciness?

I just grabbed a cold bottle of Chilean Sauvignon Blanc from Concha y Toro screw cap (superior to cork when it comes to a ‘drink now’ status). It was lovely, crisp, almost the colour of water.

I went into the store and grabbed another bottle, same shelf, same place… same COLOUR. Only when I got it home did I notice it was the Chardonnay. But the label looks exactly the same! And how can a Chardonnay not retain any of its straw-like hue? It was a decent wine, but c’mon guys.

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