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15

Aug

Pork Burgers with Summer Salad and Honey-Glazed Parsnip Chips

Sean Sellers  in Rosé Wines, Blow the Bank, Meat & Poultry , , , , , ,

InterWined Food

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’.

This week, ‘Blow the Bank’ brings you the cure for the summertime blues with Pork Burgers with Summer Salad and Honey-Glazed Parsnip Chips.

Pork Burgers with Summer Salad and Honey-Glazed Parsnip Chips

Each summer, people throughout the UK bet on how much or how little sun they’ll see. With the global economy is full slowdown and British politicians espousing the joys of holidaying in the UK as opposed to travelling to the US or the Continent, this year thus far has proven decidedly overcast. So when — and if — the sun shines, why not make the most of it with a good old burger and bottle of wine?

Pork PattiesCarrot SaladParsnip Chips
South African blogger, winemaker, and Web site Stormhoek officially launches launched its new Couture Rosé today a year ago today, August 15th, for sale exclusively at Threshers wine shops in the UK. And, as Peter May of the Pinotage Club, aka Pinotage.org noted it’s pretty risky “launching a wine…in one of the most miserable Julys on record, when sales of other hot weather items have plummeted” — especially one as gimmicky as Couture Rosé with its super stylish bottle and label, complete with cartoon and “freshness indicator”. The thing is, gimmick or no, this wine — if Threshers does its job — is going to sell (by the truckloads)!

Why? For one simple reason (Sublimelle take note!), this is a wine marketed to the most casual and easygoing of wine drinkers. The bottle reveals nothing of interest for the connoisseur. Outside of disclosing the year of production and the alcohol content (12% if you were curious), it says nothing about the grape varieties, percentages, and growing region (hell, you’d have to know that Stormhoek is a South African wine company to even know the country of origin). Instead, the bottle screams the tagline “Best Served on Ice”. Could anything be a surer sign that this wine is probably not produced with the finest grapes available? Yes, it could have no particular smell, like this wine. If nothing else, it must surely account for the wine’s unbelievably sugary flavour, mustn’t it?

Yet, for all of these things and the great many style points that it share with Bill Rolfe’s Pink Elephant, this is a wine designed for sunny days and simple pleasures (if slightly pretentious ones — the kind you’d see on a Channel 4cooking programme’s picnic or beach episode, all soft focus, smiles, and precocious children under 10 prancing about in and out of shot). And, why not? We deserve it, Britain, what with the spectre of negative equity, record foreclosures, global recession, and the veritable threat of another series of Celebrity Big Brother lurking around the corner. So what better way to give in than with a bottle of Stormhoek’s Couture Rosé 2007 (12%) and InterWined’s Own Pork Burgers with Summer Salad and Honey-Glazed Parsnip Chips?

The two are perfect partners: the high sugar, sweet taste of the undefined Rosé pairing brilliantly with the honeyed parsnip chips as well as soft, milder flavour of the pork burger and summer salad. In pairing wines with food, sweet foods prefer sweet wines. Now, this wine isn’t sweet in the sense of desert wine sweetness, it probably wouldn’t brilliantly with a pudding or desert. Instead, it sweetness is sugary — like a pixie stick. Also, because the pork mince used is quite lean and not terribly fatty, it doesn’t struggle or overpower the wine. It doesn’t require anything tannic the way that a beef or lamb burger would do.

Granted, all of the above, sounds pretty insulting — especially the pixie stick remark. However, like pixie sticks, it has its place. It’s fun. It’s throw away. It’s vaguely reminiscent of Kool Aid. It’s also pretty perfect for summer. But too much of it will probably make you sick. 7.7 points in summer with food; much, much less in winter, like 5.

InterWined’s Own Recipe in Full

Pork Burgers with Summer Salad and Honey-Glazed Parsnip Chips

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10

Aug

Fish Pie for Pi Day

Sean Sellers  in Rosé Wines, Blow the Bank, Fish & Seafood , , , ,

InterWined Food
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 Emma at New Zealand’s The Laughing Gastronome and a scrumptious Fish Pie originally served as part of this year’s annual Pie for Pi Day celebrated each…March 14th or 3.14.

Cooking Fish PieFish Pie for Pi Day

Red wine and fish can often mix about as well as red wine and Coca Cola. And unless you’re Basque or from northern parts of Spain, where the people, in fact, do mix red wine with Coca Cola, assume it’s true – at least for most flaky white fish. The tannins in red wine cause white fish to take on a metallic quality that ruins its flavour. It’s not pleasant and will most certainly ruin your evening meal, if not also your evening. However, red wine with red fish (think tuna steak) is an altogether different story, which InterWined will reserve for a different ‘Blow the Bank’.

Where the French have bouillabaisse, the British and their former colonial descendants have Fish Pie, a mixture of white fish in a cream sauce with a crust made of mashed potatoes and cheese instead of pastry.

A French chef working in London once told InterWined that British cuisine would rank alongside French, if only the British had the mind to hold their regional dishes in the same regard as they hold French and cook it with care. Case in point: while the French esteem their fish stew as Provencal cuisine, few English-speaking people rate fish pie as anything other than old-fashioned comfort food.

So to rectify this injustice, InterWined forewent the pairing of Emma’s Fish Pie with a New World white wine and paired it with the 2006 Domaine Lafran-Veyrolle Bandol Rosé, from La Cadiere D’Azur on the southern coast of Provence and £13 from Philglas & Swiggot.

Due to the small size of Domaine Lafran-Veyrolle, this wine might prove difficult for readers to find outside of the UK or New Zealand, where it is available online from Caros wines. In which case, InterWined would recommend other Bandol Rosés. The key is look for a rosé low in tannin and alcohol. (Alternately, a Spanish Albariño or New Zealand Chardonnay would also make very good matches.)

The 2006 Domaine Lafran-Veyrolle is almost apple-juice in colour with a light bouquet and, perhaps unsurprisingly, a flavour reminiscent of currant. A rosé might at first seem a strange and unorthodox choice to pair with a fish pie, given the inclusion of cream in the recipe. (As with salt, wine often struggles with cream.)

Fortunately, the cream sauce included in Emma’s recipe is light, soft, and, due to InterWined’s mistaking a teaspoon for a dessert spoon, wonderfully akin to a cream-based version of the thin and delicate sauce found in bouillabaisse.

Emma’s Recipe in Full

Fish Pie
(makes 2 generous individual portions)

Click on the post to view and download the recipe

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9

Jul

This Wine Goes With Everything

Jacob Gaffney  in Cabernet Sauvignon, Grenache, Rosé Wines, Carignan, Monastrell/Mourvèdre , , ,

Check this: for £8.5, the 2006 Chateau Romanin Rosé from Les Baux-de-Provence tastes unbelievably bland on its own. Except for some strawberry in the beginning (typical) and some tartness in the end, with a bone dry finish (the only saving grace), there isn’t much to the wine. But the blend of 7 (yes, seven) grapes — Syrah, Grenache, Carignan, Cabernet Sauvignon, Mourvedre, Cinsault and one InterWined.com has never heard of Counoise — all work to one completely unpernicious (which, everyone knows, isn’t actually a word) end: it pairs amazingly with just about every type of dish one can make on a grill.

That’s is an unbelievable feat and InterWined is wondering if the more grapes in a blend, the better its chance to pair with more taste complicated dishes, such as grilled lamb chops with a yoghurt, mint and cumin dressing, with a twist of lemon, served with garlic pita, with pumpkin seed and coriander hummous…well you get the point. By itself: 8.2, with the grill, 8.8 easy.

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16

Apr

Rosé Wine Summer Time (2)

Jacob Gaffney  in Red Wines, Cabernet Sauvignon, Rosé Wines , , , , , ,

Went into a wine shop after seeing a bottle of Languedoc rosé with Gerard Bertrand’s name on it. Wanted to buy that wine, but the store was out. So, for the same price — £6 — purchased another Gerard Bertrand, a Roussillon. Huh? Exactly. What?

I think it will still sourced from the South of France, only way south, in the Basque regions, because of the tell-tale red and gold striped flag on the label.

The 2006 Sang & Or is tarty and full-bodied. Hint of watermelon. An unpleasant hotness from inharmonious alcohol levels. Smells crisp and delicious, finishes dry, way dry: 8.3, which is good for a rosé.

Come to think of it, a good red wine to chill would be the 2004 Wolf Blass Cabernet Sauvignon, for around £7. Cedar and dill will flourish with a little chill. The hard-nosed alcohol edge and grapiness will diminish:8.5, much better than the 2003, BTW.

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16

Apr

Rosé Wine Summer Time

Jacob Gaffney  in Rosé Wines

As the days heat up, the sun heralds a rush to the wine shop for ’seasonal’ wines. Rosés, blush wine, chilled whites. Mundo Pinot Grigio.

Well, that will be the first few sentences of every single wine blog out there, people. But not here. White-washed wine writing makes InterWined see red.

Look, you can drink any wine in any weather. Kick around the idea of sloshing a bottle of Brouilly or Pinot Noir in an ice bucket. Or even an Australian Cabernet Sauvignon. Well, actually, that advice is kinda stupid when looked at in reverse: sticking Chardonnay in the oven for Christmas. If that oven isn’t on, and that wine isn’t going in the roasting tin to do whatever it is wine does to the chicken, then it just isn’t right.

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1

Nov

My Blog?

Jacob Gaffney  in Sparkling Wines, White Wines, Riesling, Rosé Wines, InterWined TV, Shiraz, Grüner Veltliner , , , , , ,

I would have recommended a Riesling (grape) from the Mosel (region) in Germany, flinty and fresh, but not dry…or the more exotic Gruner Veltliner (grape) from anywhere in Austria…look for tell-tale hints of white pepper…

On the blush maybe a Tavel (region) Rosé from France…but those tend to be on the dry side… Banrock Station makes a pretty crazy sparkling Shiraz from Australia…

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