XMas 2011: Top Secret Santa Wines

5 12 2011

Yep, that time again.

Over the last week I have somehow found myself volunteered to be a part of not one but TWO Secret Santa gift swaps at work.  I’m not really sure how I feel about this.  The office Secret Santa pool is always fraught with dangers because (1) you often don’t know your co-workers well enough to get them anything truly personal that you know they’ll like, and (2) there is usually a spending limit imposed on your shopping (in my case, $15 for one pool and $25 for the other) that prevents you from buying most types of gifts that would be winners with just about anyone.  Since I feel that Secret Santa-ing chocolates is basically an admission of defeat, this year I’ve done the logical thing and decided to stick with booze.  I may not know if my office-mates read Malcolm Gladwell fan or listen to Johnny Cash or could get any use out of tree ornaments or candle holders or plants or winter gloves, but I do know that if they’re remotely sane and not prohibited by religious or medical reasons, they will enjoy a good bottle of wine, so I’m going to get them one.  Or two.  And since you might be in the same situation I am (hell, you might even work in my office; there’s 2,000 of us in there), I thought it might be useful to run down a few can’t-miss bottles that will have everyone hoping you pull their name out of the hat next year.  Without further ado, here are PnP’s Top Secret Santa Wines for 2011 in the $15-and-under, $20-and-under and $25-and-under categories:

Read the rest of this entry »


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Tips & Tricks: Pairing Wine With Chocolate, Part 3

14 10 2011

In case you have scrupulously avoided this blog for the past couple weeks and missed it, Part 1 of this mammoth super-post talked about the general principles applicable to pairing wine with chocolate and made some guesses as to which wines might make winning choco-combos; Part 2 put three dry red wines to a taste test only to see all of them fail more or less miserably; and tonight’s Part 3 moves away from dinner wines and reveals whether dessert wines (and a beer, for good measure) fared any better with dark chocolate at the tasting night I held with wine friends Brian, Tyler and Farrell earlier this week.  In parallel with this PnP saga, Victoria Kaye, the chocolate distributor who put the wheels in motion on this train of thought by sending me a care package of free Xocai brand chocolates with instructions to wine-match as I saw fit, has been providing the chocolate’s perspective on this whole thing on her blog XoXoXocai — click here for her reaction on the first part of the Pop & Pour taste test, which includes some tasting notes on the various chocolates that gave themselves up for a good gastronomic cause.

Cork Ratings, Wines #1-5 (in order): 0.5/10, 2/10, 7/10, 4/10, 3/10. Not such a stellar lineup.

To refresh your memory, by the end of Part 2 of this post, Wines 1 through 3 were wishing that they had been passed over as candidates in this study:  the 2008 Alias Cabernet Sauvignon (Calfornia) was the worst of the bunch, netting a chocolate Compatibility Score of 25%; the 2005 Modern Wine Project Malbec (Washington) had fared (literally) twice as well but still barely scraped a passing grade at 51%; and the 2008 Colaneri Cabernet Franc (Niagara) proved to be the most polarizing wine of the night, attracting my fiery hatred and tasting like tomato soup but still (somehow) pulling out 50%.  Starting with Wine #4, we ditched the dry wines and moved to those sweeter reds that were initially predicted to be the best chocolate matchups.  It may have been that we were in a better mood after downing the three bottles of wine that preceded them, but the dessert wines did not disappoint. Read the rest of this entry »


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Tips & Tricks: Pairing Wine With Chocolate, Part 2

12 10 2011

5 bottles of wine, 5 pounds of chocolate: let the extravagance begin!

In Part 1 of PnP’s review of potentially stellar wine and chocolate matches (click here to read it if you missed it), we went through the boring stuff:  general wine/food pairing rules, hand-wringing about how chocolate was going to be a difficult match for most wines, and intellectual guesstimating about what bottles actually might stand a chance at being a good pairing.  If you want to save yourself 1500 words or so, I thought a sweet intense red dessert wine seemed like the best choco-match but committed myself to testing out some dry reds too in the name of exploration; given the hypothesis that fruity, intense, not overly tannic reds would win the day, I decided to give Europe the cold shoulder and stick to the New World for dinner wines.  With all the hard academic stuff out of the way, last night I got to the fun part:  sitting down with some good friends, opening an insane amount of high-end chocolate, cracking 5 bottles of wine (and a bottle of beer for good measure) and doing 4+ hours of taste testing, just for you.  Huge thanks to the noses, palates, knowledge and intuition of my trusted friends Brian, Tyler and Farrell, whose impressions and conclusions are all over this post and without whom this exercise would have seemed much more lonely and pathetic.

Our official choco-pairing tasting lineup featured a California Cabernet Sauvignon, a Washington State Malbec, a Niagara Cabernet Franc, a dessert wine from Banyuls in Southern France, a vintage Port and a dark craft beer.  I’m going to write up our experiences with the 3 dry reds tonight and leave you in suspense about the dessert reds and the beer for a couple more days…like every moderately good movie idea, I’m stringing this out for at least two sequels.  The only unfortunate part about this approach is that you may be too depressed after reading the below to want to come back for Part 3, so I will foreshadow a bit and promise that the wine/chocolate matchups DO get better.  Just not tonight. Read the rest of this entry »


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Tips & Tricks: Pairing Wine With Chocolate, Part 1

2 10 2011

How you know you’ve made it as an amateur blogger:  when somebody sends you free chocolate.  Me, as of this week?  Made it.

The (few) perks of writing a free blog.

One of this site’s dozens (OK, dozen) of loyal subscribers is Victoria Kaye, an Ontario-based marketing guru, freelance writer and distributor of the Xocai lineup of chocolate products.  Victoria is a blogger in her own right, regularly churning out insightful posts about her unique choco-wares at her site XoXoXocai.  I took particular notice of this site not only because it shares a platform affiliation with PnP (holla WordPress!) but also because it so happens that Victoria and I started up our respective blogs within a week of each other at the start of March 2011…as I’m continually reminded, it’s a small world full of strange coincidences.  Victoria actually first stumbled across Xocai chocolates as a guest at a wine tasting, and since then has been wanting to delve further into the intricacies of pairing wine with chocolate; the chocolate package I received was conditional on my attempting to respond to this very issue.  Well, chocolate received and mission accepted!

Wine and chocolate is a pairing that seems to have been universally sold as a match made in heaven (if Hallmark cards, romantic getaway packages and any Valentine’s Day episode of any TV show in history are effective barometers of these kinds of things).  In reality, however, I have a hard time envisioning there will be even a handful of wine styles that will truly form a mutually-enhancing match with most types of chocolate.  Even before I started looking into this in detail, I thought that chocolate had two key characteristics that would severely restrict the number of wines that would taste good with it:  it’s sweet and it’s distinctive.  Dry wines generally don’t match up well with sweeter foods, and foods with individual and assertive flavours automatically narrow their pairing options because they’re incapable of simply being a blank canvas that can be fleshed out by multiple different wine choices.  There are assuredly some truly symbiotic wine matches for chocolate out there, but my guess is that they’re few and far between.  Of course, that’s not going to stop me from trying to find them.  The goal of this post is to narrow down what to look for in a potential chocolate pairing, after which I’ll go buy a few likely candidates, recruit some willing volunteers, then take a bullet for all of my dear readers by eating a lot of chocolate and drinking a lot of wine to find out what tastes good with what.  The results of my strictly-for-science tasting night will be posted shortly after its completion (i.e. as soon as I come out of the sugar coma). Read the rest of this entry »


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Tips & Tricks: How To Come Up With Wine Flavour Descriptions

15 08 2011

If only it were that easy...

Believe me, I used to be at the front of the line making fun of wine folk for picking guava, pomegranate, shoe leather, pencil shavings and innumerable other bizarre tastes and aromas out of a glass of boozy grape juice.  The whole process seemed overwrought and fanciful at best and horribly pretentious at worst — not the kind of thing I’d ever sign off on.  But as I started getting more and more into wine, and then as I started WRITING about being into wine, I began to see the method to the madness (or I drank the Kool-Aid and joined the legions of uptight overanalyzers, depending on your point of view) and understanding the necessity behind the efforts people put into sorting out what’s in their glass.  By far the coolest and most interesting thing about wine is that, unlike almost any other alcoholic beverage that starts out from a piece of fruit, it ends up smelling and tasting like so many other things apart from, or in addition to, its source material.  Apple cider tastes like apples; dark rum tastes like molasses; wine tastes like everything, and the more different wine you try, the more words and comparison references you need to describe it.  This, I’ve learned, is doubly important if you ever want to put this description in writing and give a reader who may have never heard of your wine a flavour impression that sets it apart…suddenly descriptions like “plum” and “cranberry”, and its weirder, more memorable cousins like “Band-Aids” and “pickles”, become totally invaluable. Read the rest of this entry »


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Tips & Tricks: When Cork Attacks

13 06 2011

My Andrew Will, and the biggest piece of cork that refused to be separated from it.

I fully intended to write a wine review last night.  I had the wine all selected, and was even going upscale:  the 2005 Andrew Will Ciel du Cheval Vineyard red from Highlander Wine & Spirits, a $55-$65 predominantly Merlot/Cab Franc blend from one of the best producers and top vineyards in Washington State.  I had my notepad in front of me and my iPhone camera armed and ready; I popped the cork and out came…half of it.  The other half didn’t even budge from the bottom of the bottle neck.  I gently tried pulling out the stuck half with the corkscrew, but to no avail:  all I ended up doing was puncturing a good sized hole in the middle of the half-cork and causing a bunch of cork debris to fall into the wine.  Awesome.  I eventually ended up having to push the stuck cork back down into the wine, which would have been a great idea if the cork hadn’t disintegrated on its departure from the bottle neck and showered Andrew Will’s labour of love with a fine layer of wood powder.  After some salvage efforts I was able to get the wine back to a quasi-drinkable state, but decided against putting it up on PnP in case somebody questioned my tasting notes of sawdust, tree bark and firewood.

As a mournful tribute to the waste of a bottle that good (and the corresponding portion of my wine budget that went with it), I thought that tonight I’d quickly touch on what to do if you’re faced with this exact situation where your cork breaks as you’re pulling it out of the bottle.  Step one:  swear.  Even if you manage to save the day with the maneuvers described below, it’s still a giant pain that will require most of the contents of the bottle you’re trying to rescue to de-stress from. Read the rest of this entry »


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Tips & Tricks: Red Wine with Fish?

23 05 2011

The very first “ironclad” wine and food pairing rule that I was ever told is so ubiquitous that I’m sure you’ve all heard it too:  red wine with meat, white wine with fish.  But is this prohibition on mixing red wines and fish fact or fiction?  As with any good urban legend, it’s a bit of both.

There really is no caption that can improve on this picture.

First the fact:  it is a good idea to avoid pairing particularly oily foods with wines that are high in tannin (for a longer explanation on what tannin is, click here) because the two combine to produce unpleasant metallic or tinny flavours on the palate.  Generally speaking, fish is quite oily as compared to other cuts of meat, and red wines are the most likely candidates to be high in tannin, as white wines usually have little to no detectable tannins; as a result, it is certainly true that some red wines and some fish will not be a happy mix.  The iodine present in fish can also have a similar negative reaction with tannin (and, at least according to this article, the traces of iron in certain red wines will clash with fish), so following the basic “no red wine with fish” rule can help you avoid disastrous gastronomic consequences.

However, it is fiction to say that red wine and fish can never be successfully paired together. Read the rest of this entry »


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Tips & Tricks: Wine’s Building Blocks and How To Detect Them

22 04 2011

For those loyal PnP readers (if such a thing exists), some of this will cover ground trekked out before in previous posts, but I thought it would be useful to get all of this info in one place.  Describing the smells and flavours of wine is inevitably a subjective experience, since we all process aromas and tastes differently, but that doesn’t mean that every description about wine is solely in the eye of the beholder.  Every wine has a number of objectively-discernable components that form the architecture of the overall wine; even if reasonable minds can differ about a wine’s flavour profile, they should generally come to common ground when discussing these vinicultural building blocks.  Here are the key components of a wine and how to pick them out of your glass: Read the rest of this entry »


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Wine Review: 2008 Enzo B–…Er, How to Tell Your Wine is Corked

18 04 2011

This was totally not Enzo's fault.

I had what I’m sure would have been a great wine to share with you tonight:  the 2008 Enzo Boglietti Dolcetto d’Alba from the Piedmont wine region in northwest Italy.  Boglietti is a renowned producer, and Dolcetto (literally, “little sweet one” in Italian) is a grape varietal that probably gets less attention than it should, one that routinely churns out fruity, rustic, soft, food-friendly, value-driven comfort wines.  I had the kind of day that cried out for that kind of armchair-by-the-fireplace wine, and when I poured the first glass, the juicy, vibrant purple colour of the Dolcetto instantly reaffirmed my selection.  I swirled the glass, took a few deep sniffs, and smelled…

Garbage?

It was flat out bad.  Rotting meat, sulphur, a mildewy, musty odour like a full can of garbage that’s been sitting in your garage for a week.  Rest assured, the wine was not supposed to smell like that; it had definitely gone off somehow.  In the interests of science and blog journalism, I had a taste (though it took some internal convincing to drink something that smelled that horrible) and found much less compost-esque flavours but no life at all in the wine.  It was flat, thin and bitter, with faded fruit and significant levels of acid.  For an ultra-fruity varetial like Dolcetto from a vintage as recent as 2008, the wine doesn’t taste like that unless something went wrong.  So what did? Read the rest of this entry »


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Tips & Tricks: How To Preserve Opened Wine

12 04 2011

I am the only wine drinker in my household.  My wife is tragically allergic to wine, and my infant son is, well, an infant, so I’m on my own in terms of wine consumption.  Since I’m not falling down drunk at the end of every night, this inevitably means that I deal with a lot of half-full opened wine bottles which I have to try and preserve somehow…after all, there’s no point spending $30 on a bottle of wine to drink half of it when it’s showing well and the other half when it’s stale and faded.  Here are a few things to think about to make your wine last a little longer once you pop and pour. Read the rest of this entry »


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Tips & Tricks: What Wine Pairs With Spicy Food?

31 03 2011

There are a million and a half rules about food and wine pairing.  Some of them are good, common sense (i.e. match the body of the wine with the heaviness of the food); others are simply worn out dogma from times gone by (i.e. red with meat, white with fish).  I think there is a ton of flexibility built into putting the right bottle of wine with the right meal — there are a few clearly wrong choices in most situations (no Pinot Grigio with steak, unless you want the taste experience of drinking $23/bottle water with your T-bone) but multiple different routes to a successful food/wine match…in most cases, anyway.  When it comes to spicy foods, your options get a lot more limited. Read the rest of this entry »


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Tips & Tricks: Don’t Drink Your Reds Too Warm!

27 03 2011

This fridge wants to see your reds for a few minutes.

One of the most insidious falsehoods about wine that still gets passed around like fortune-cookie wisdom is that red wines should be served and drunk at room temperature.  If your “room temperature” is the thermostat reading inside a one-room stone cottage in the 1600s, you may be on to something, but otherwise you are doing your reds more harm than good if you follow this “standard” rule.  In my opinion (and that of every wine author whose book I’ve read), there is no dinner wine that shows best when served at 20-21 degrees Celsius (70-72 Fahrenheit)…and yet every time I go to a restaurant or a wine tasting and am presented with a glass of red, it tastes like it’s been stored in the furnace room or directly above the kitchen range (in a couple of places in town, it literally is!).  This, if you haven’t gathered already, is a huge pet peeve of mine. Read the rest of this entry »


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Tips & Tricks: How to Decipher a German Wine Label

18 03 2011

In preparation for a special celebratory edition of PnP tomorrow, I thought that tonight I would run over the finer points of wrestling with German wine labels.  German wine is often a struggle for people, either because they often think that every German white on the shelves will be sickly sweet (totally untrue) or because they don’t feel like wending their way through 16-letter words with two vowels on the label (go figure).  I’m actually a huge fan of German wine labels because they provide what so few other Old World labels do:  information.  Once you learn how to decode them, you can tell a lot about your Teutonic wine before you even open it. Read the rest of this entry »


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