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.

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?

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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this Friday, InterWined brings you ‘Not So Impossible Food & Wine Pairing #1: Chips & Salsa’, a tip of the hat to Dr. Vino and his “Impossible Food Wine Pairings”.

In July 2007 Dr. Vino asked his readers to recommend a wine to serve alongside snack food staple and wine-pairing stumper Chips & Salsa; and at a tasting event yesterday evening, InterWined finally discovered the answer.

A panel of 12 wine experts helped identify each of the characteristics and four grapes (Touriga Nacional, Alfrocheiro, Castelão, and Cabernet Sauvignon) required to produce the 2006 Pink Elephant, Portuguese Rosé (£5 from Tesco and Morrisons).

And, while InterWined doesn’t yet know if it’s the perfect match for spicy foods, it knows that it is the absolute matchless match to Chips & Salsa, and among the only successful examples of wine by committee. Looking quite a bit like Ocean Spray Cran-Raspberry Juice on first pour is a fair description of colour, but an insult to the quality of the wine. This isn’t juice. Sure, there’s raspberry on the nose, but the flavour is more tannic and peppery, with a just of little hint of petrol aftertaste. This is a decent Rosé, make no mistake. But, it’s not until the wine (served extremely chilled) is paired, that it becomes something more substantial and worthy of real praise.

For £5, you would be hard pressed to find a better wine to serve with a bowl of Chips & salsa or Sweet Chilli Kettle Crisps (it’s a very good match for that too), when entertaining guests or slumped on the couch in front of the telly. That probably wasn’t what the Bill Rolfe and Toby Hancock from 10 International, the wine company responsible for Pink Elephant, had in mind when they decided to find a wine to pair with spicy food. (In fact, they were specifically thinking curries.) But, the two of them should be proud, regardless. Finding a matchless match to an impossible pairing is no mean feat. On it’s own: 8.0; with Chips & Salsa: peerless.

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