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 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’.

There are few things nicer than a warm slice of bread and a good glass of wine. So, this week, ‘Blow the Bank’ brings you both with its very own Olive & Parma Bread.

I’ve made this bread several times and in many different ways, as a bâtard, as a baguette, and as a kind of stromboli. This recipe makes the stromboli-style.

Accompanying the stromboli is a simple glass of Italian wine in the form of the 2005 Remole Frescobaldi (12.5%), £7.49 from Oddbins, made from a blend of 85% Sangiovese/15% Cabernet Sauvignon. Oddbins describes the wine as a mini-Super Tuscan and it’s hard to disagree. The flavour is earthy and tannic with a nose that smells of cherries and summer fruits. Together, the two work well and find balance — the bread with its strong olive, salt, and cheese flavours smoothing the tannins found in the wine.

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InterWined set itself a challenge: go into the wine section of a market and grab the first bottle that grabs you. Did so at a North London market named Woody’s…and thought we nabbed a red wine from Italy. In fact, we swore the wine was red right up to the point we poured it into […]

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Each Friday and sometimes Saturday, 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’ introduces InterWined’s All American, a month-long celebration of some of American cuisine’s greatest dishes from classic comfort foods to the unsung greats of American soulfood.

First up is All American Meatloaf with Crème Fraîche Mashed Potatoes.

Whether its origins rest, as some varyingly contend, with the mogul invaders of China, Italian meatball-makers, German Hamburgers, British shepherd’s pie-bakers, or the recipe books of eager home-meat-grinder salesmen, there can be little doubt that the humble meatloaf is 100% American and 100% classic.

Just as its histories are numerous, its variations and varieties are both countless and unpredictable. So, while some recipes call for the inclusion of pineapples or scotch eggs — ingredients that would be anathema in others, still others quibble over the significance of using barbeque sauce or ketchup or Bolognese in the name of authenticity and correctness. In the end, like so much confort food, it all comes down to what you like and what you think is right.

Indeed, there is little doubt that many chefs (and many of their mothers) will find InterWined’s All American Meatloaf far from correct. For one, it includes a couple of rather unorthodox ingredients, such as cubed pancetta and stale sourdough bread. For another, it’s topped with streaks of bacon.

And, because one classic deserves another, paired with InterWined’s All American Meatloaf is the 2005 Château Amarande (13.5%) Grand Vin de Bordeaux. A mix of Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon, the 2005 Amarande has the familiar nose of a classic claret — a bit of eart, spice, and forest. On the tongue, it’s surprisingly soft, rich in fruit, and mildly tannic with a touch of pepper that marries brilliantly with the both the crusty edges of the meatloaf and its slightly fatty, chewy middle (thanks in no small part to the cubes of pancetta). At 13.5%, the wine is a tad too high in alcohol and, therefore, attention-seeking to be a perfect wine to serve with food; but it high-alcohol wines are all the rage these days and this one proves a superb match for the meaty ground beef, fatty pancetta, and crispy bacon all the same: 9.4.

InterWined’s Own Recipe in Full

All American Meatloaf with Crème Fraîche Mashed Potatoes

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Welcome to Health News Tuesday, where InterWined.com brings you the latest in health tips for everyday living. Today we have…nothing.
But that’s not to say we don’t have anything… It’s just against ethics to release the information today. And if I tell you, then the people who told me are going to be, like, “We told […]

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The run up to the 2008 Olympics is Beijing is marred by protests. The issues surrounding the news images have a particularly deep impact on me, as a one-time student of the language, history and follower of the religions of the region.
The central authority of China is often described by scholars as an iron fist […]

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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 is a busy one for the world religions, from Baha’i to Zoroastrianism and nearly every other alphabetically in between.

So, today, ‘Blow the Bank’ brings the world a little closer together with InterWined’s Own Rosemary Rack of Lamb with Dolcelatta Polenta.

Not only does Easter, Purim, and Mawlid an-nabi fall within the third week of March this year, but so too does the Vernal Equinox and a host of New Years and religious Spring festivals. And while there is no single food that could satisfy the observers of all of these holidays, there’s certainly one that comes pretty close — at least close enough to bring together Christianity, Judaism, and Islam — which on the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq is surely no bad thing.

What is this miracle foodstuff, you ask? Well, thank Abraham; it’s the humble little lamb, of course, that delectable little animal so prevalent in Judeo-Christian symbolism and essential to Islam’s Eid Al-Adha celebration.

And interfaith reconciliation aside, it’s also arguably the perfect companion to the totally haraam and non-kosher Pinor Noir. The 2005 Hautes-Côtes de Beaune Clos Bortier (12.5%) from Caroline Lestime and Domaine Jean-Noël Gagnard, currently available in store only from Oddbins, makes for simply a great match to InterWined’s Own Rosemary Rack of Lamb with Dolcelatta Polenta — if only for the goyim.

There’s a great deal of subtly the 2005 Clos Bortier, with a touch of cherry on the nose and tannin in the aftertaste. The tannin in the wine marries very well with lamb, while its limited potency prevents it from clashing with the creaminess of the dolcelatta.

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Today is the first taste of the wine tour of Italy, undertaken by InterWined in order to try to get a better handle on why Italian things make book authors cry.
So it seems only fitting to start with the popular, and often mass produced wines made from the Barbera grape. Wines made from Barbera strike […]

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For most of us, getting our hands on the best of the 2005 vintage in Bordeaux is unlikely; the price of this exceptional vintage is well out of reach in the higher echelons of wine production.
For InterWined.com’s standard, that is only rating wines worth drinking, usually in the £5 to £10 range, 2005 Bordeaux would […]

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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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