Chicken with Yoghurt and aji amarillo

La Finca Mendoza, Argentina Chardonnay 2009; 12.5%; Whole Foods, $3.99; September, 2009.

Out of the just opened bottle, this chardonnay was tasty and fruity, definitely tasted like a real chardonnay. I do not think that I would want to drink much of it by itself, but then I didn’t buy it for that, and I wouldn’t then probably want it for food. It had only gone through the normal fermentation.

Chicken thighs and legs marinated all day in a mix of yoghurt, aji amarillo, rosemary, thyme. Salt, and pepper, then roasted over charcoal. The drippings from the chicken added a slight smokiness as the charcoal blazed. When it came off the grill it was very flavorful and juicy. The fruitiness of the wine combined well with the chicken, cutting through the chicken fat, and underscoring the flavors in the chicken.

The green beans were grilled with the chicken in olive oil, garlic, thyme, salt, and pepper, and also picked up some of the smokiness from the chicken drippings on the charcoal. The wine was a little sharper with the green beans, picking up on their beaniness. The contrasts and changes in the wine were a pleasure, especially in such an inexpensive wine.
While the wine was fruity and a little lighter than other chards, it had body of its own and stood up well to the demands of a meal with strong, open flavors. I would like this chard again.

Tavel and Chicken, A wonderful Meal!

Chateau de Trinquevedel Tavel 2008; 13.5%; Cowgirl Creamery, F St., Washington, D.C., $15.95

The nicely chilled Tavel was very tasty out of the bottle. It can stand up to heavier dishes than we had this evening. It can also stand up to being sipped by itself, especially in the hot days of August. It is refreshing and tastes of lovely fruit, slightly tangy on the tongue. This wine was a little more expensive than I normally have, but it is a Tavel, and I am making an exception. It is still fairly cheap.

Our chicken was marinating in miso, soy sauce, and orange juice. Amazingly, NO GARLIC! I don’t think that we have had a chicken, and much else, ever, with no garlic (once, we actually had too much garlic! We were astounded!). It was grilled over charcoal, and became slightly blackened. But, it was wonderfully tender and flavorful. Really, how chicken should taste. This half chicken was from Lotte Plaza and the second half of a whole. We had frozen it. It thawed in its marinade.

We had potatoes, cut in half and grilled/baked. They were a nice compliment to the chicken.

This meal was just yummy. We sat down and just ate. There was no chatter, in fact we didn’t even think to talk about the wine until dinner was nearly consumed. But, the wine by then was mostly gone. It just was an excellent component to a wonderful meal. The chicken tasted more chickeny with the wine and the wine refreshed us in every sip/gulp.
This wine is a must in the warm summer. It will give you a smile.

A Wonderful Spanish Rose

Don Salvador Rosado 2007, Monsatrell, Alicante, Spain, 12%; Whole Foods, $5.99.

I am not following my usual procedure and ideological leanings this time by discussing this wine by itself, rather than with the meal we had with it. Truthfully, neither Brigette nor I can remember what meal we ate, meaning I did not make my usual notes. Normally I would just not then talk about the wine, but this time I am making an exception. This wine is good.

Roses as good, well-made wines began in the South of France. The French have been enjoying these wonderful wines as summer fare for decades, at least. The wines are dry, crisp, fruity, and served chilled. Other than the wines from Tavel, dry, French roses were found only in France. You see, the French drank it all. There was not enough to export. But the word leaked, and demand for these tasty wines grew enough that the French could no longer horde them. Tavel wines were always hard to find. They still are. But you can find other French roses everywhere, notably ones from Provence. Once they started shipping roses regularly, the demand continued to grow and other people noticed. Now many countries are shipping Roses. Personally, I think the best outside of France come from Spain and Portugal. The French wines are typically the most consistently good. But you can find good ones from the Iberian Penitsula, too. Most of these wines are inexpensive.

The Don Salvador is a very good rose. It is dry and fruity. It is a darker pink than some. I have found that the darker color does tend to translate into more flavor, and it is true for this wine. It is light enough to be good with delicate summer fish dishes. It also has enough flavor to stand up to salmon or most any chicken concoction. Or, if you just want to sit and enjoy the day, put it in an ice bucket and sip away. It will refresh you and give winey pleasure with every sip or gulp.

Cheap Wine is for Many Occasions

Brigette and I have a nice schedule set up, as far as domestic wonder-eating is concerned. She works late during the middle of the week, and we each fend for ourselves (enough said about that!). Friday (sometimes), Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, however, often offer several straight days of great food. Sometimes we find that we will have a nice, light lunch in the late afternoon, as well as the dinner. On those days, if the meal is nice enough, and the shrimp we can get (fresh and very cheap) will make the afternoon special. We find that water, cokes, or whatever (she does not like beer) just won’t do. Our inclination, year round, is a nice sparkling wine, a light one like the Albero or a Prosecco. Well. Three dinners and a lunch with wine. Four bottles in three days on a normal week. (We will not discuss human livers at this juncture.)

I don’t know about you, but 4 bottles a week can get pricy, even if we were making great money. Say an average of $30 each, $120 a week, say 42 weeks a year, is….. over $5,000 a year. Can’t happen.

So, what to do? Give up wine, or at least reduce it to one bottle a week? That means the other great meals we (meaning Brigette) makes have drinks that do not add to the experience? Our meals are really not expensive, for all of the taste and pleasure. Rarely do we spend more than $10 for our food.
Of course the answer is easy. There is a lot of really decent, even good, wine available for less than $10 a bottle. Maybe the percentage of failures increases at that price level, but only a little. There are several good wines for between $5 and $10. People who make good wines, say from a country with a long history in wine like Italy, Spain, even France, do not forget how to make a wine with basic soundness. The wine may not have the complexity and finesse of more expensive wines. They are solidly made, and will work well with well-made, tasty food. The after tasting these wines, perhaps you will be more demanding of the $20 to $40 wines you buy.

A Cotes-du-Rhone to enjoy

Delas Saint-Esprit Cotes-du-Rhone, 2007
75% Syrah, 25% Granche; 13.5%; Costco, $8.99; July, 2009.

Delas is a Northern Rhone house, making a Southern standard.
This is a popular style, very tasty
Usually more Granche, but this one is mostly Syrah. (Sorry for the label. The center didn't want to come free.)

Fresh out of the just opened bottle the wine was a little closed, but you could tell that there was very nice fruit and that it would open up. It had nice mouth feel. I was looking forward to more.

The meal was a flank steak, marinated for a full day in miso, beer, which just happened to be Japanesse beer, Kirin Ichiban, which is good, garlic, and ginger. This array provided a very rich, creamy topping to the flank steak. Brigette cooks flank steak to perfection. Unfortunately, I did not get a good fire, and the steak did not cook fast enough, was consequently left on too long, and was a little tough. It was still flavorful. It would have been much better a little rarer.

The wine complimented the steak very well. The basic steak flavor, which this meat had was emphasized by the Delas, and supported Brigette’s marinade. A Cotes-du-Rhone is not the driest wine, in that it has plenty of fruit. The wine was of course very nice with the potatoes and bread.

One nice thing about a Cote-du-Rhone is that even though it is probably the least of the Rhone Valley wine types, it still has the depth of a good wine. It tends to be cheaper, too, by a lot. There are many good shippers. Delas seems to be one of them. In my reference books, Delas used to be called Delas Freres. I have probably drunk 20 different Cotes-du-Rhones and have found one or two that I would not buy again. They can be very good, which means, whenever I come across one that I do not know, I will buy it.

This wine would benefit from a couple years of aging. It would be a little more complex and a little less fruity. It is certainly good now.

Great, Cheap Rose from Spain

Don Salvador Rosado 2007, Monsatrell, Alicante, Spain, 12%; Whole Foods, $5.99.

I am not following my usual procedure and ideological leanings this time by discussing this wine by itself, rather than with the meal we had with it. Truthfully, neither Brigette nor I can remember what meal we ate, meaning I did not make my usual notes. Normally I would just not then talk about the wine, but this time I am making an exception. This wine is good.

Roses as good, well-made wines began in the South of France. The French have been enjoying these wonderful wines as summer fare for decades, at least. The wines are dry, crisp, fruity, and served chilled. Other than the wines from Tavel, dry, French roses were found only in France. You see, the French drank it all. There was not enough to export. But the word leaked, and demand for these tasty wines grew enough that the French could no longer horde them. Tavel wines were always hard to find. They still are. But you can find other French roses everywhere, notably ones from Provence. Once they started shipping roses regularly, the demand continued to grow and other people noticed. Now many countries are shipping Roses. Personally, I think the best outside of France come from Spain and Portugal. The French wines are typically the most consistently good. But you can find good ones from the Iberian Penitsula, too. Most of these wines are inexpensive.
The Don Salvador is a very good rose. It is dry and fruity. It is a darker pink than some. I have found that the darker color does tend to translate into more flavor, and it is true for this wine. It is light enough to be good with delicate summer fish dishes. It also has enough flavor to stand up to salmon or most any chicken concoction. Or, if you just want to sit and enjoy the day, put it in an ice bucket and sip away. It will refresh you and give winey pleasure with every sip or gulp.

Okay. I stopped, for a while. Actually, I had a lot of notes, covering months, but I stopped publishing. I had a conceptual problem.

I ran up against my own concern that I my tasting apparatus was not good enough to be a wine blogger. I mean, I was thinking that I needed to be able to sprout “I taste hints of chocolate and tobacco.” I have rarely tasted anything of the kind. I don’t think many people have.

I did recall that I read one woman wine writer talk about her own struggles with tasting descriptions. She advised that anyone wanting to describe wines needed to arrive at their own language. She also noted that a wine taster need to taste many wines to realize the differences. I must admit that I am not tasting that many wines. I also wondered if having your own “language” really made it possible to communicate your experience to other people. Do you, I mean you, the reader sitting there now, know what tasting hints of tobacco means. My experiences with tobacco were moderately negative.

Another function of a good palate is taste memory. I seem to have a taste memory for wines, but I do not have a lot of confidence in it. I should. It does work. But, again, I do notget a lot of exposure in a short period of time.

On the other hand, I taste to drink (hence, in a limited way, the title of my blog). I am recording my experiences of the inexpensive, cheep, wines I find, as they work with food. I am drinking the stuff with food and noting the experience. That is the context of the blog. It does not matter how the wine tastes by itself. The first sip might have all kinds of nice things going on, but conflict with the meal, any meal, and thus it really fails as a wine. Wine is food.

So that is the bottom line. I am talking about wine as food, not some snack item. I am not going to try to discuss a wine by itself.

I think that this is what most people really want. Probably many people may think that the sip and spit tasters have some great insight into wine that is greater than their own, and then they may wonder why they are having trouble when it comes to enjoying wine with their meals. I suggest that your paragon of wine knowledge become the good restaurant sommelier, who will talk about a wine and how it works with your selected entree. Wine is food. Anyone who is not talking about wine in that context does not seem to get it, as far as I am concerned.

Yet, hopefully without shooting myself in the foot, I do have some wine idols of my own, who are not discussing wine as I am suggesting. And, they use numbers, you know, “this wine is an 87”! I guess my excuse is that their breath of knowledge across the ocean of wine in our world (a very good thing), gives me some idea of what to avoid. I look to these writers to shield me from wines that are poorly made and uninteresting. I do not get too excited by the “90” points divide. I am primarily concerned in avoiding the bad ones.

I also throw out any relation between price and quality, especially in the $5 to $50 range, and especially wines from California. There are a lot of wonderful wines below $10. My suggestion, get to know those wines, and then, as you buy higher priced wines, compare them to your $5 wines. If the higher priced wine is not that much better, don’t buy it again, and tell the world. You can start here.

So my conclusion is that my original purpose is solid and I was worrying about something that is inconsequential. Anyone who thinks that wine is only the first couple sips is anyone who is in the same world as I am, or better, is just out of touch with what wine really is.

With that off my chest and resolved, I shall go back to making entries here.