What dessert wine with chocolate mousse?

Posted on January 19, 2014 by Steve Shipley

Several weeks ago, we had a great dinner with two other couples. We started with salmon mousse tarts and a choice of a Hunter Valley Semillon or a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. Even though we knew it was going to be a scorcher of a day, everyone wanted DAZ in the Kitchen’s famous beef stroganoff which we paired with a 2009 Bouchard Pere & Fils Pulingy-Montrachet. We wanted to have creme brulee for dessert, but did not have a torch available, so decided to go with chocolate mousse instead. (The recipe for all courses is provided in the obvious links.)

I had a number of good sticky dessert wines, including some very nice Sauternes to go with creme brulee, but was uncertain as to what dessert wine would work well with chocolate mousse. After some internal debate including considering Port or Muscat, I felt a peppery Hunter Valley Shiraz could work, so put aside a 2007 Tyrrell’s Stevens Shiraz. This is a typical high-end Hunter Valley Shiraz from a great vintage. However, through the generosity of our guests and them offering to help determine what dessert wine to drink with chocolate mousse, we had a bottle of Ivanhoe Madeira and Audrey Wilkinson Muscat to choose from. I also had a bottle of 1993 Lindeman’s Porphyry leftover from the evening before (notice the small cork bits in the bottle from the shattered 20-year-old cork). So we decided to try all three dessert wines and the main lesson learned is that sweet wine and sweet food match quite well, regardless of other characteristics involved! All three wines provided unique, but pleasurable drinking experiences while eating chocolate mousse.

The Porphyry was sweet, almost too sugary due to its age and worked better as a dessert wine with the apple tart we had the night before. Yet, it provided a viscous mouthfeel that felt good with chocolate mousse and set off well the strawberries adorning the chocolate mousse. The Madeira was sweeter yet, but sharper in taste and complimented, almost competed with the chocolate mousse. The Muscat (which was one of my original alternatives to consider as the dessert wine) probably worked the best as it less sweet, containing caramelized orange flavors to compliment the chocolate flavors of the mousse.

But the key lesson learned was that almost any dessert wine worked! Looking back, I wish I would have also pulled out a few different Ports wines as I think they could have worked as well as the Muscat or even better.

What wines have you served with chocolate mousse? Let me know if you have any good suggestions.

Steve Shipley, author Wine Sense, out early 2014. Published by InkIT Publishing
© 2014. Steve Shipley. All rights reserved.
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Save all wine sales receipts – this week’s #SAZTIP

Posted on January 16, 2014 by Steve Shipley

Most of us buy wine with the intent of consuming it. We do not expect to sell wine off in the future. I certainly did not plan on it, but then I found myself in a position where it made sense to sell off a lot of my wine. There are many plausible reasons you may elect to sell off wine, including:

Your taste has changed and you like different styles now
Your health has changed
You find you have wine coming to end of life and will not be able to drink it in time
You may just want to free up cash and realize that wine sales is a good way to raise funds

And if you do plan to sell wine, you will be glad that you saved all your wine sales receipts! There are several good auction and exchange firms to handle your selling needs (one of the best is Wickman’s Fine Wine Auctions), but most of them (and the ones you want to be doing business with) require provenance. Provenance is proof that the wine has been stored under optimal conditions throughout its life and has the very best chance of being cared for as well as any bottle can be. And the best source of provenance is your wine sales receipts along with journal entries and time-stamped photos of you taken delivery of the wine and immediately putting the wine in proper storage. But the most important thing is your wine sales receipts. It proves you bought the wine directly from the winery or a major wine retailer with some certainty the wine has been looked after properly up to the time you took possession of it. To further strengthen provenance, you should have records of when you build or secured your cellar, have photographs of it and the wine in the cellar and records of having placed the wine in the cellar. But none of this matters if you have not saved your wine sales receipts!

And even if you are certain you will never sell off wine in the future, your wine sales receipts provide a record of what you paid for wine which is useful in terms of understanding wine values and how much to pay for wine in the future. It does not take a lot of effort to save your wine sales receipts. If you are uncertain if you will need them, throw them into a box and store them for potential future use. At least you will have them if you require them later.

Presenting Wine Sense Table of Contents

Posted on January 14, 2014 by Steve Shipley

I have basically finished Wine Sense and in the next few weeks Wine Sense will be in the hands of approximately ten reviewers to critique it and provide ways to make it better. I finished the content of the book two months ago, but (1) wanted to let it rest for a while to be able to read it as a typical reader (to the best of the ability of any author to read the material they wrote!), and (2) there is a lot of work in terms of providing proper citation to other references, adding 40 images and inclusion of Top Tips and Fun Facts insets for most chapters. Then it is onto final layout and publication.

But the content of Wine Sense is close to complete, so I wanted to provide a deeper sense of what the book is about and why Wine Sense may be of interest to you. Over the next few months, I will be presenting excerpts and helpful tips from the book. First I wanted to share the Table of Contents (TOC) with you. Just reading the TOC should provide a good overview and sense of what is in the book.

Foreword
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction

Part One: Wine and the Senses

Chapter 1: Wine Enjoyment
Chapter 2: Role of Our Senses for Wine Enjoyment
Chapter 3: Philosophy of Primary and Secondary Senses
Chapter 4: Wine as an Aesthetic Experience
Chapter 5: Role of Language in Wine Appreciation

Part Two: How Wine Interacts with the Senses

Chapter 6: Overview of Wine and Sense Interaction
Chapter 7: Wine and Sight
Chapter 8: Wine and Smell
Chapter 9: Wine and Taste
Chapter 10: Wine and Feel
Chapter 11: Wine and Sound

Part Three: Enhancing Your Wine Drinking Experiences

Chapter 12: Improving Smell and Taste Sensations
Chapter 13: Improving Sight Sensations
Chapter 14: Improving Feel Sensations
Chapter 15: Improving Sound Sensations
Chapter 16: Other Ideas for Improving Your Wine Drinking Experience
Chapter 17: Buying and Storing Wine
Chapter 18: Wine Drinking Practice and Experience

Part Four: Where to Next?

Chapter 19: Tools and Systems for Managing Your Wine Inventory
Chapter 20: Further Wine Education
Chapter 21: Other References
Chapter 22: Final Thoughts

Appendices

Appendix A: Castro’s Ten Descriptors of Odors
Appendix B: Robinson’s Wine Color Chart
Appendix C: Wine Database Format and Field Listing

Bibliography
Endnotes

I originally was going to write a blog post last year on why our senses were so important in appreciating wine, how they work, and how to improve using our senses to enjoy wine more. Once the post got to 2,500 words, I decided I was going to make it a multi-part post, but by the time I got to 12,000 words, I knew it had to be a book! The book is currently 112,000 words so it was probably a good idea to go the book route! I am very excited to tell you more over the next few months and to get the book into your hands as soon as possible. More posts to follow.

Please let me know what you think about the content and structure. Any feedback is appreciated.

2014 grape picking underway in Hunter Valley

Posted on January 12, 2014 by Steve Shipley

This should be a spectacular vintage in The Hunter Valley. Weather has been perfect and hopefully will hold for a while longer. The 2013 vintage was hit by torrential late-season rains that made grape picking at the optimal time difficult and yields of great grapes low. Based on the region and grape varietal, grape picking in Australia occurs from January to April each year. Growing seasons are obviously dictated by the annual weather patterns and type of grape involved. We were one of the first to start picking Chardonnay at Kelman Vineyards last week. Tyrrell’s was also picking their Chardonnay grapes for their iconic Vat 47.

My wife, DAZ in the Kitchen, and I have noticed since we started cooking, how much more we have have enjoyed our food, regardless if we make it ourselves or are eating out. We are more attuned to the entire process of food preparation and better understand what seasonings, flavors and processes (steaming versus boiling, or if the meat is seared first or not for example) are involved and how to get the most enjoyment while eating. It is similar with wine.

In my upcoming book, Wine Sense, I discuss a number of ways to learn more about wine and have fun doing so. Grape picking and other volunteer work around the vineyards and winery is a great way of learning while having fun! I have always enjoyed drinking wine, but I now enjoy it more by appreciating how each step from growing and processing the grapes to bottling has influenced the quality of the final product. Grape picking and having the grape juice on your hands and smelling the juice in its rawest form builds anticipation for what the wine will taste like. In one sense, my bodily senses are experiencing the wine well in advance of actually drinking it. Talk about prolonging the experience and getting maximum value from a bottle of wine!

You also learn a great deal in a very short period of time. You learn to identify ‘ready-to-pick’ grapes versus ‘still-growing’ grapes. You learn to identify if a bunch or a few grapes in the bunch have become ruinous and should be discarded. You learned how stems and leaves are introduced when grape picking and some can be all right in terms of flavor and improving tannins, but you also learn not to be too picky or your grape picking productivity slows significantly! There are processes later on to remove the stems anyway. And you learn to start very early, 6 am in our case, before the heat overwhelms you!

Getting involved in any aspect of vineyard management or wine making is a great way to learn and appreciate wine more! Other ideas on getting involved are presented in Wine Sense.

Kelman Vineyards is a beautiful spot in The Hunter Valley which has about 85 home owners. It is a cooperative vineyard with grapes, olives and lemons grown under the management of a body corporate. There are plenty of opportunities for the owners to volunteer their time from serving at the cellar door (requires an RSA), netting the vines, picking grapes, bottling olive oil and so forth and includes picking snails off the vines if you are so inclined! I was one of many volunteer owners who helped out with the season’s first grape picking last week. You realize what a manual process it can be, and you learn very quickly how to cut and collect bunches of grapes without snipping yourself or wasting grapes in the process. Grape picking is also great exercise and community involvement.

The annual grape picking and harvesting for a vintage is an annual festivity in many regions of the world with the whole community involved. Willian Younger in his great book, Gods Men and Wine, starts out by describing the Vintage on the Douro and how year after year, the community comes together for grape picking and harvesting. It is a festival of celebration shared by the entire community. Kelman has recreated a localized version of that for us as owners which I find exhilarating and an educational experience. If you want to learn more on how to appreciate wine, get involved in grape picking and other activities in the vineyard and winery. And may sure to look for my upcoming book, Wine Sense to learn even more!

Buying fine wine on the cheap is this week’s #SAZTIP!

Posted on January 9, 2014 by Steve Shipley

We kicked off #SAZTIP (SAZ in the Cellar Tip of the Week) last Thursday by showing people how to get wine out of a bottle when the cork is stuck inside. This happens rarely, but is useful to know. This week’s tip is useful every time you buy wine, and it is about buying fine wine inexpensively! In my upcoming book, Wine Sense, I admit to having overpaid for wine by 25% – 35% until recently. I get far better wine values now than I did previously, and doing so while buying better quality wine. Wine Sense spends an entire chapter discussing how to buy and store wine and highlights a number of things to ensure you are buying fine wine inexpensively. Key tips to help you achieve buying fine wine on the cheap, include:

Don’t buy wine retail, or if you do, only do so when they have at least a 20% off sale and you are getting one or two bottles free for every half-dozen you buy. These type of sales are always on.
Buy at auction. There are a number of fine auction houses and you can get some great wines for a fraction of the cost you otherwise would have to pay. Just make sure to check the wine provenance before buying.
Buy 10 – 15 year old fine wines instead of new vintages. They are drinkable sooner and someone else has paid the price for cellaring. Vintage wines are usually no more expensive than current vintages and you are more certain as to how they have matured.
Use Wine-Searcher for free or Wine-Searcher Pro for $39 per year to get the prices of all wines globally to compare. I have found 400% – 500% variances in prices for fine wines.

There is an abundance, dare I say ‘glut’ of fine wine on the market. Look to secondary markets to get the best buys and use Wine Searcher to find the best values.

Steve Shipley, author Wine Sense, out early 2014. Published by InkIT Publishing
© 2014. Steve Shipley
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Twitter: Steve Shipley @shipleyaust; InkIT Publishing @inkitpub

Origin of SAZ in the Cellar moniker

Posted on January 7, 2014 by Steve Shipley

It has been almost two years and 170 blog posts since starting SAZ in the Cellar! Thank you for your great support and interest in my opinions on the subject of wine.

I am often asked what does SAZ in the Cellar stand for and what was the meaning behind it? I think the ‘in the Cellar’ part is pretty obvious and relates to spending time in a wine cellar. I am a big believer that the best and best-valued wines you will drink are from your own cellar and are aged over time. I buy wine to put in the cellar; rarely do I buy a bottle of wine for immediate consumption. Most wine is drunk far too early and does not have the ability to reach its potential. Therefore, I spend a lot of time in my cellar: putting wine in, selecting wine to go with an upcoming meal and monitoring my wine inventory to make sure I have the right drops aging for the next decade. My wife calls my cellar my ‘man cave!’ Hence I thought it appropriate to think about wine from the perspective of the cellar. My upcoming book Wine Sense present a lot of information regarding how to calculate the size of your cellar, what to put in it and how to store wine in your cellar to make sure you get the most out of it.

SAZ in the Cellar

So why ‘SAZ?’ My wife had inspired me by writing her cooking and food blog DAZ in the Kitchen. Since she was in the Kitchen and I was in the Cellar, I thought I would play off her DAZ theme and become SAZ. I assumed DAZ meant ‘Deanna from A – Z,’ and I liked the idea of SAZ for Steve from A – Z. Therefore I became SAZ in the Cellar and proud of my moniker!

Much later I found out that it was a common Australian country town convention to provide a nickname which used your first initial and added ‘azza’ to it. My wife was looking for a nickname for her blog, but did not like Dazza, so shortened it to DAZ which she thought sounded better. I still like the idea of the AZ representing the body of knowledge from A – Z, but am really glad my wife decided to ignore convention and go with DAZ instead of Dazza. Otherwise, today I might have been Sazza in the Cellar instead of SAZ in the Cellar!

Steve Shipley, author Wine Sense, out early 2014. Published by InkIT Publishing
© 2013. Steve Shipley
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Twitter: Steve Shipley @shipleyaust; InkIT Publishing @inkitpub

Paymasters Cafe provides great food and great wine

Posted on January 5, 2014 by Steve Shipley

I have been anxious to return and have a meal to order at Paymasters Cafe in Newcastle, NSW. We had a specially prepared Christmas in July meal there about six months ago which was outstanding and the wines provided by McLeish Estate winery. But I wanted to explore a broader set of options from the menu and wine list. And I am glad we did; I am not sure I have had a better meal anywhere! The entire experience was done to perfection. First of all, we were in a refurbished historic building overlooking the waterfront, the front windows opened wide, and we had a table with a magnificent view and perfect weather. This was all a real plus and set the scene, but we came for the food and wine and were not to be disappointed.

We always look for things we would not be cooking at home and there were a few entrees and mains to choose from which satisfied that requirement. We started with the best bruschetta I have ever had and DAZ in the Kitchen had Baked Camembert Cheese for an entree and a robust Spanish Style Paella for the main. I had the Beef Carpaccio for an entree and Garlic Prawns in pastry for the main. We shared a most magnificent Golden Rough Lindt Chocolate Pudding for dessert. Everything was cooked to perfection and served at just the right time and temperature.

But this is a wine blog, so let’s talk about the wine! Let me start by say this: “This is the best-valued wine list I have seen seen that fits on one page!” Paymasters Cafe wine list has been extremely well thought out and reflects the effort Executive Chef Rodney Scales puts into ensuring the dining experience is without peer. Most wines were priced between $30 – $45 per bottle, with a few exceptional wines being just under $100 per bottle. Having bought some of those wines direct from the wineries, I also know that the markup on the wines is very reasonable. There are many easier ways to build a wine list, but you can discern the effort Rodney has put in to create such an outstanding wine list. You can easily have a larger list to cover your basis, but that comes with a high capital and operating cost and lower turnover of inventory. You can buy more iconic brand name wines but are paying more and then have to pass the cost onto the customer. Rodney has worked hard to find a great variety of Australian wines from NSW, VIC, and SA plus some outstanding wines from New Zealand.

Rodney has worked to perfection a wine list that matches the food he prepares and the taste of the Australian customer. He knows and can describe every wine on the list and every food dish it pairs with well. And his food menu has a recommended wine for each dish if you do not want to try to decide which wine goes best with any dish. And most wines can be bought by the glass. I had to drive an hour home so did not want to commit to an entire bottle. Yet, I had ample choice of excellent wines by the glass to match the food we were eating. I have been to restaurants with 100’s of bottles of wine on the list that only offer less than ten wines by the glass. Paymasters Cafe offered 33 out of the 52 wines on the wine list by the glass!

I noticed in July and again last night that Rodney is a chef who works the front room as well as any chef I have met. He ensures each customer’s satisfaction and is there to watch over their experience. This compares to many good chefs I know who cannot seem to leave the kitchen, either because they have not built a good team behind them or they believe it is more important to pay attention to the food (and be their own judge of if the food is OK) than how their customers are reacting to it. I have had some great chef friends who will never make it big because they cannot escape the kitchen. Rodney spends far more time in the front room than in the back and it shows in the dining experience.

And the best part came at the end when I went to pay for dinner. The price of the meal was only 50% – 60% of what I expected to pay and have paid at other comparable restaurants. Great food and great wine at a great price point! Paymasters Cafe – without peer!

Using chopstick for pouring wine when cork stuck in bottle – #SAZTIP

Posted on January 2, 2014 by Steve Shipley

What do you do when you have a cork stuck in a bottle? I have had the privilege recently to be drinking a number of bottles of wine that have been more than 25 years old. The only problem is that 25-year or older corks tend to be very soggy and are extremely difficult to remove from the bottle. The only way to be in with a chance with such an old cork is to use the Ah So corkscrew which has two prongs on the outside of the cork to provide enough friction to squeeze the cork, pulling it from the bottle’s neck. Using a center-drilling corkscrew would almost certainly destroy the cork splitting it into little bits. This is a concern in that the cork pieces are small and difficult to clean up and more importantly, you have likely introduced small cork pieces into the wine itself. While you can filter the cork bits out, it is not recommended, as the wine likely has a weak structure and could be damaged by filtering.

I had two bottles recently where the cork slid into the bottle intact, no matter how I tried to remove it. While the cork floats, if the bottle is full, the cork does not have enough air space to get out of the way when the bottle is turned over to pour. The cork wedges into the bottle neck making it impossible, or at least extremely slow and difficult to pour the wine. However, there is an easy way to deal with this – just use a chopstick! The chopstick, stuck into the bottle, easily clears enough room, getting the cork out of the way. You can then easily pour the wine into a glass or decanter and the problem is solved.

If this happens though, you should immediately empty the bottle into a decanter and then refill in another bottle (without the cork) to ensure any possibility of cork taint (not already introduced through the wine touching the bottom of the cork while cellaring) is not worsened.

A cork stuck in the bottle has happened to me about seven times now, but fortunately I have always had a chopstick on hand to help me out!

Introducing #SAZTIP wine tip of the week

Posted on January 2, 2014 by Steve Shipley

SAZ in the Cellar is now publishing three times weekly:

Sundays (Australia Sydney time) will feature reviews of wine, wineries, wine-related products, events and food / wine pairings
Tuesdays (Australia Sydney time) will be used to re-publish all-time favorite posts (from almost 200 posts over the last two years!) or posts associated with the wine lifestyle
Thursdays (Australia Sydney time) will feature #SAZTIP – a weekly tip to improve your wine drinking

#SAZTIP posts will focus on how to improve wine tasting, storage, purchasing and anything that make wine drinking a better experience! Even if you miss a post, you can just enter the #SAZTIP hashtag to find all posts and what others are saying about the posts. Finally, if you have a wine tip you want SAZ in the Cellar to share, just place the hashtag #SAZTIP in your tweet or post and we will pick it up. If judged to be worthy of sharing with others, we will do so and source it as your idea and contribution!

I am not sure if this will take off or not, but I want to use #SAZTIP to generate a community of wine related tips for everyone to use and learn. There are many wine-related hashtags including #wine, #winelover, etc. so it is a crowded and noisy space. But as SAZ in the Cellar grows and Wine Sense is released early in 2014, hopefully there will exist a body of wine drinking tips you can count on to improve your wine drinking.

#SAZTIP #1 will be released in a few hours and show you how to use a chopstick to pour wine from a bottle when the cork is stuck inside.

SAZ in the Cellar

Wine appreciation and enjoyment

Monthly Archives: January 2014

What dessert wine with chocolate mousse?

Save all wine sales receipts – this week’s #SAZTIP

Presenting Wine Sense Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Part One: Wine and the Senses

Part Two: How Wine Interacts with the Senses

Part Three: Enhancing Your Wine Drinking Experiences

Part Four: Where to Next?

Appendices

2014 grape picking underway in Hunter Valley

Buying fine wine on the cheap is this week’s #SAZTIP!

Paymasters Cafe provides great food and great wine

Using chopstick for pouring wine when cork stuck in bottle – #SAZTIP

Introducing #SAZTIP wine tip of the week