“Food without wine is a corpse; wine without food is a ghost; united and well matched they are body and soul, living partners.” — André Simon (this is a continuation from the most recent wine post, Contemptible Scoundrels March 2012 C).
Amy taking the wine/corpse dichotomy to extremes
Using up some leftover roast chicken I opted for a stir fry, but decided to make homemade black bean sauce using fresh grated ginger, some dill pickle juice, a spoonful of garam masala (out of Chinese 5 Spice), enough cayenne to disperse an unruly mob, a can of rinsed black beans, and a half glass of dry white wine all heated at a low simmer while the veg and meat was prepped. The more you cook the more you would think nothing could surprise you by being better than packaged but I’ve had my belly-to-the-bench in the kitchen for roughly 40 years and I continue to amaze myself; this was really fantastic and the cheap bordeaux I picked up on the way home was perfect for it:
We drank the tailings of some bottles all weekend then had builders in replacing the bathroom through the middle of the week. We couldn’t decide what wine went best with feeling grubby (or, rather, we weren’t going to drink that stuff while we had perfectly good mouthwash and paint thinner in the house) so we had iced tea for a few days. On Thursday we had cleansing facilities again and I celebrated with burgers packed with bleu cheese (runny and stinky as I had been Tuesday and Wednesday), spring onions and mushrooms along with a side of corn-on-the-cob from Morocco. I bought a mixed box of 6 wines on the way home (slowly restocking the wine cellar) and tried one that was deeply discounted and that I had never heard of before ( a Côtes du Roussillon) which was fantastic. It may have just been the cheese or the high quality beef but every sip was a delight and a slightly different experience than the preceding one; on second thought, it could have just been rapidly oxidising but whatever the cause it was quite a treat:
The weather has been spectacular and Friday’s dictated a cookout. The venison was succulent and the sides lovely and the wine was complex and divine but so full of sulphites we both had severe allergic reactions and swore of it ever again (that’s too bad as it is one of Tesco’s cellar and thus is quite a bit cheaper than a similar Gigondas with a vineyard name):
What wine goes with a radical socialist newsletter? Red, of course, and the Piccini Memoro was also fantastic with a small roasted Gressingham duck.
The WFF line continues to impress on its own and with the sort of grubby food we fall back on when we have no imagination in the kitchen, this time beef burritos (filling cooked in beer with black beans) and a Cobieres:
Wines for 19 – 25 March were:
Prestige de Calvet Bordeaux
Palais des Anciens Cotes du Roussillon Villages
Gigondas from Tesco
Piccini Memoro
Wines from France Cobieres
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