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8

Dec

Basques & Bisques: Chunky Tomato Soup

Sean Sellers  in White Wines, Blow the Bank, Vegetarian, Txakoli , , , ,

InterWined Food
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.

Chunky Tomato SoupChunky Tomato Soup

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

Click on the post to view and download the recipe

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