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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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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How cooking improves your wine tasting abilities

Posted on August 18, 2013 by Steve Shipley

Through tasting more and learning more about tasting wine, I have continued to improve my wine tasting abilities and experiences. Yet, I was always surprised how many of my chef friends seemed to have a better palate than mine. I assumed it was because they were super tasters (people with significantly more taste buds and lower sensitivity to certain tastes) than me. I attributed their skills to their in-born capabilities. My wife was taking cooking lessons several years ago and I was highly supportive because I was benefiting from eating better at home. We ate better, more healthily and far less expensively now at home than when eating out (except for a few known restaurants that are among our favorites).

I decided to follow my wife’s lead and took about 10 cooking lessons myself, including a 6-part beginners course for ‘blokes,’ a knife skills lesson, a pasta making lesson, and a Christmas dinner banquet lesson (including ham and turkey). But it was really practicing making meals from beginning to end at home that opened my nose and palate to being able to smell and taste many more flavors and with greater sensitivity. What became apparent to me was importance of sauces, spices, and all the ingredients necessary to alter or enhance the flavors of the primary ingredients be they meat, fish or vegetables. Noticing what a teaspoon of paprika (or smoked paprika), saffron, chili flakes (or freshly cut chilies) or nutmeg could do to enhance flavors became noticeable. Understanding why chopped basil worked better than mint or parsley (or Spanish onions better than spring onions) in certain circumstances also became apparent.

By learning to understand and appreciate various flavors, I was able to more immediately determine when to drink a softer, more versatile wine such as a Verdelho over a Pinot Gris (or vice versus) with the meal, or a sharper, edgier wine such as a Riesling or Sauvignon Blanc worked better. What I really noticed though was that instead of being able to match up broad categories of wines with food, I was now able to much more easily ‘micro-match’ a wine style with a particular meal. I was able to determine which sub-category (young or aged Semillon, for example) and sub-style (Hunter Valley versus Barossa Valley Shiraz) and determine which wine more uniquely was a better match with food, even to the level of individual wine makers (a young Andrew Thomas Semillon versus a Tyrrell’s Johnno Semillon) and vintages.

Most people believe they are limited in their ability to taste and appreciate good wine (and often as a result, buy wine based on price, thinking a higher price is better quality), but this is simply not true. There are rare exceptions of people who were born or through a severe illness, have lost the ability to smell. However, for the most part and within usable tolerances, almost every one of us is able to with a high degree of accuracy be able to smell and taste wine. Through practice and learning, any one of us can influence our abilities to taste and enjoy wine more so than through our natural abilities. And by learning some basics of cooking and what ingredients are used to make meals, you can learn much more quickly.

“Learning to cook has improved my ability to taste wine more than any other activity over the last several years!”

My book Wine Sense helps you understand how to train and use all of your senses to improve your wine tasting experiences. But on its own, learning to cook (even a little as in my case) has greatly improved my ability to smell and taste. I am able to much more quickly identify flavors and nuances and determine why I like one wine over another with a particular meal, whereas before I would have thought they tasted pretty much the same. Do not limit your ability to enjoy wine far more than you currently do, and make learning to cook an important part of that training.

A perfect food and wine match

Posted on July 28, 2013 by Steve Shipley

My wife, DAZ in the Kitchen, is making a magnificent slow cooked beef with mushrooms and barley for this evening! I have been smelling it cook for the last two hours and getting ravenous! We will have a serve of Quinoa and a light salad as sides. With such a combinations of flavors going on, we thought a nice Bordeaux style blend would go really well with this meal. I have had one bottle left of the 1992 Lindeman’s Pyrus which I have been saving to enjoy with some friends, but we just have not been able to arrange a meal together (well, we did, but had a bottle of the 2001 Henscke Hill of Grace with that meal). Fortunately for them, we still have two bottles of the 1992 Lindeman’s Limestone Ridge which I am sure we will drink together.

The ’92 Pyrus is a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Malbec and Cabernet Franc. I love this blend as each flavor comes through. I have written about this wine previously, when I pulled a bottle out and we had it with soup! You can refer to that post to get a review of the wine. As with that bottle, the cork was perfect on and the sample of wine I had while decanting indicates that this is a slightly fresher and fruitier bottle than the last one we tried. It should be a perfect match for the dinner. We once again will be serving this wine in the Riedel Vimun XL Grand Cru Bordeaux glass to get maximum enjoyment from the wine. The only thing that beats a perfect food and wine match is the same thing, but serving the wine in a Riedel glass! I discuss the benefits of using proper glassware and taste in my upcoming wine book at some length. For a synopsis on why proper glassware is important, review my previous post on Riedel glassware.

This meal and wine will be special. I am sorry we could no longer save our last bottle for dear friends, but we have more than enough ‘last’ bottles to share with them – more than we can find time to drink them all. So it was with some regret, but more excitement that we opened our last bottle of the 1992 Lindeman’s Pyrus to match our wonderful beef dinner this evening.

Now that Daz in the Kitchen has rebuilt her computer and is catching up from helping me with a number of technical and publishing issues, she should be able to get a post with the recipe out soon. In fact, she just wrote the post with the recipe, and I am sharing with you here.

While you are unlikely to find a bottle of the 1992 Lindeman’s Pyrus to go with this meal, any good Bordeaux blend or a blend such as the Rosemount Traditional should work just fine. Just make sure it is a Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot blend and optionally either Malbec or Cabernet Franc. A Shiraz blend or a GSM (Grenache, Shiraz, Mouvedre) is likely to be too heavy.

What Wine with Truffle?

Posted on July 24, 2013 by Steve Shipley

We have been on a bit of a truffle kick the last few weeks, even posting a vlog on making scrambled eggs with truffle. And last night, my loved one, DAZ in the Kitchen, made a great pasta dish with chicken, cream, and a mushroom and truffle paste. It was delicious and will be posted in Daz in the Kitchen soon.

Truffles

Both mushroom and truffle have strong umami mouth taste and feel. Jeannie Choo Lee, Master of Wine (MW), and expert in Asian haute cuisine (and everyday Asian food fare!) in her book Asian Palate: Savoring Asian Cuisine and Wine, explains umami as follows:

“Umami is a Japanese term that is widely acknowledged to be the fifth taste, the others being salty, sour, bitter and sweet. It was identified by Professor Kikunae Ikeda at Tokyo Imperial University over 100 years ago. as amino acid glutamate (aka glutamic acid) and later confirmed by research as a type of amino acid that is detectable by tongue receptors. Rather than having its own recognizable flavor, umami is subtle and expands, creates depth and rounds out other flavors. It occurs naturally in foods such as seaweed, mushrooms, soy sauce and aged cheese.”

She also recommends a full body, aged white wine such as Chardonnay or Semillon to compliment and enhance umami flavors. We had a 2006 Penfolds Yatarnna in the fridge, pulled it out, matched it up against the pasta and it was a perfect combination! I love a big, aged Chardonnay with cream sauce and mushrooms and the heightened and enhanced flavors derived from the truffle only added to the flavor (to the point of satiation!). The meal was magic.

We have used truffle to enhance scrambled eggs as shown in the video and also in quiche. (If using 100% real truffle, you only need a very small amount which is good because it is expensive!) With the eggs and possibly some cheese in an omelet or quiche, I would recommend an aged Semillon instead of a Chardonnay.

If you have not tried real truffle, you should! If you cannot bring yourself to pay the price for real truffle, you can use a truffle flavored oil instead, but there is a drop-off in taste. With half a teaspoon of truffle added to our scrambled eggs, the finish on the truffle lasted hours on our palate. It is an amazing ingredient to add to many meals. And if you are looking for a wine to go with truffle, a big, aged white Chardonnay or Semillon is the way to go.

1998 Tyrrell’s Vat 9 Shiraz – will it work with pork?!

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Steve Shipley

I am experimenting this evening by opening a Shiraz to go with pork fillet, mash, vegetables and gravy. Usually I would play it safe and go with a good Pinot Noir for this meal. It is difficult to find a much better food / wine matching combination than a Pinot Noir with pork!

But I really wanted to try another bottle of the 1998 Tyrrell’s Vat 9 as it is a superb wine and at 15 years of age, I needed to check it out to make sure (that’s my excuse and I am sticking to it!) it will cellar for a while yet as I have about a ten bottles left. I don’t want to wait too long, but I do want to pace drinking this wine over the next several years or longer if I can. I would hate to wait too long and have it go off, as it is drinking very well now, but I am hoping to make it last as long as I can.

I have a great deal of respect for James Halliday and subscribe to his wine service. But he missed the mark when evaluating this wine as he gave it an 86/100 and said to drink it by 2008. This wine is still very big, yet elegant, with lively fruit, tasting of blackberry with light overtones of spice and leather. It is well integrated, and nicely balanced with strong tannins. The finish is moderate to long, and you can feel the accumulated tannins on the inside of your cheeks for a long time. This is an excellent wine, regardless of how Halliday and others scored it.

I had this wine as one of my three red wines at my 58th birthday party over two years ago. This was the first red, followed by the 2001 Yalumba Octavius Shiraz and the 1981 Penfolds Grange. All three red wines were spectacular, but the 1998 Tyrrell’s Vat 9 got the consensus vote for the best red wine of the evening. It could be that it was the sequencing and by the time we drank the 1981 Penfolds Grange, we were over-satiated. Or it could be that the 1998 Tyrrell’s Vat 9 is just that good!

So why is having a Shiraz a risk with pork? It is because a Hunter Valley (and many other) Shiraz’ are heavier and spicier than most Pinot Noirs and could overwhelm the pork and side dishes. But the 1998 Tyrrell’s Vat 9 is an elegant, more refined Shiraz than many others. I know it will be fine with the pork dinner and wanted to see if it works to provide some variety from always using a Pinot Noir with pork. If not, I will go back to Pinot Noir! But if you don’t try, you will never know!

I have also had this wine with spaghetti and it worked very well. My wife, DAZ in the Kitchen, makes a very fine and spicy spaghetti and the 1998 Tyrrell’s Vat 9 matched up extremely well with it. This is a versatile Shiraz! Andrew Thomas made this wine while still at Tyrrell’s and I remember talking to Andrew about it several years ago and the fond memories he had for this particular vintage.

On its own, this is a great wine (I know as I am on my second glass while writing this) and it should be fine with the meal. I will let you know in a follow-up blog post how it works with the pork. And once I finish off the last of my 1998 Tyrrell’s Vat 9, I will move onto the 2007 Tyrrells’ Vat 9. In fact, I will probably try my first bottle this weekend or next to see how it goes. Halliday rated the 2007 Vat 9 at 95/100 and drinkable until 2025. Campbell Mattinson rated it 96/100 and as one of the best reds released in 2010/11. This must be an amazing wine! But for now, I am drinking the 1998 and greatly enjoying it.

1999 Penfolds St Henri – wow, what a red!

Posted on May 31, 2013 by Steve Shipley

This is one of my all-time favorite red wines. I started drinking it almost a decade ago and it was great then, and is even better now. This wine has a few more years before it starts to fade, but I only have two more bottles left, so not a worry. But if you have some of it in your cellar, you should drink it soon, at least in the next three years.

I had a funny introduction to this wine the first time. I was in Dallas in 2004 on a business trip with some very senior banking executives and trying to a very large IT contract extension. There were eight of us eating at a fancy steak house as you can only find in Dallas! One of my team was a Frenchman, so the client asked him to order some fine wine. Well this particular Frenchman did not do a very good job ordering the first bottle, and I looked at the one of the key client’s face when he took a sip and could tell he was not happy with the wine. I took the wine list and while not familiar with the Penfolds St Henri of any vintage at the time, I figured a Penfolds red in this price range would be a pretty good wine without me spending several times as much for a Penfolds Magill Estate or RWT. I ordered a bottle, could tell the client thought I had made a great choice (the smile and thumbs up were evidence enough!), and subtly pushed the bottle the Frenchman ordered down to the other end of the table to be consumed. And six bottles of 1999 Penfolds St Henri later, we left the restaurant very happy!

I then introduced my wife, DAZ in the Kitchen, to this particular wine about a year later when I found it on the wine list at a restaurant in Sydney. She loved it and it continued to be a favorite choice for a few years when eating out during the mid-2000s. And upon returning from Qatar in 2009, we bought some to keep in the cellar as you could no longer find it in restaurants. This weekend is our 12th wedding anniversary, so we are celebrating by opening one of our last bottles and enjoying tonight and tomorrow night (if there is any left!).

This is not the best vintage, but still an excellent vintage. The 1996 vintage would have been slightly better and also will last another decade longer, so if you read this review and want to secure some St Henri, either buy the 1999 and drink it soon, or buy some of the 1996 or 1998 which you can drink now and lay some down for later.

The1999 Penfolds St Henri is a lively, fruity wine with blackberry, boysenberry and tart plum flavors. It also has a lot of spice and goes extremely well with chili infused dark chocolate. I know that from previous wine / chocolate matching events, but more importantly I know that as my mouth is currently filled with this wine after eating a square of the Lindt Chili dark chocolate! Wow – what a combination!

The wine also has big tannins and is moderately heavy on the palate. It is 14% alcohol, but certainly not over the top. It is a complex wine with a lot of nuance. It has the mouth feel and slight odor of wet leather. The finish lasts a long, long time.

We will be making a rice with seared beef dish tonight to have with the wine, but frankly, we will probably finish off the bottle before dinner. We are two-thirds the way through it already. It just goes down so easily!

James Halliday has mentioned that compared to the Penfolds Grange, that the St Henri is certainly under-valued given what a great wine it is. This is a perfect example of wine economics. I would always take eight or nine bottles of the current vintage St Henri over one Penfolds Grange and that is the current exchange rate between the two wines. Frankly, it’s a no-brainer to go with many bottles of St Henri over Grange.

I will finish this post the same way I started it: wow, what a red!

Vavasour Pinot Gris with Zucchini Soup

Posted on May 12, 2013 by Steve Shipley

As we move into the winter months Down Under (yes, mate, Australia is where I am writing this from!), my wife, DAZ in the Kitchen, and I enjoy making more soups for dinner. We try a variety of soup recipes and have had some spectacular soups from Sibel Hodge’s A Gluten Free Soup Opera which provides gluten-free soup recipes which are easy to make, flavorful and healthy. Sibel’s soup recipes are powerful and flavorful with chick peas, lentils and a lot of different spices.

We also like to make creamy vegetable soups such as pumpkin, broccoli, cauliflower and others. Recently, we were the benefactors of a 2.5 Kg zucchini and had to figure out what to do with it! We made a lot of zucchini bread muffins (see recipe in last DAZ in the Kitchen post) and a lot of zucchini soup (recipe has not yet, but will be, published soon in DAZ in the Kitchen). In fact, we had so much zucchini soup, we ended up freezing several servings. And tonight we are taking two servings out of the freezer for dinner.

I have tried Riesling with creamy vegetable soups and I have also tried Verdelho. Both work. However, many Verdelhos are too soft and tepid and many Rieslings are too acidic. I have found for my taste, I like a Pinot Gris with a creamy vegetable soup (other than tomato). A young Pinot Gris still has a bit of acid and slight metallic diesel and mild citrus edge to match up well with the vegetables, but also a soft mouth feel to go with the creaminess. The 2010 Vavasour Pinot Gris is such a wine.

This is a great wine for the money. We paid $15 per bottle for this. It is a New Zealand Pinot Gris from the Marlborough region. It has pear, apple and grapefruit flavors. The wine is surprisingly well balanced and integrated for such a young wine. I love the mouth feel and tannins that provide a puckering on the inside of my cheeks. I would call it off-dry or juicy dry.

This wine is great value for the money and it goes beautifully with creamy vegetables soups. It has consistently been rate 93/100 or 94/100. This wine will not cellar for more than a couple of years. It is drinkable immediately and drinking very well now. The 2011 is also rated very high and much more available than the 2010.

Some of the Italian Pinot Gris I have tried are a bit more elegant, but also much more expensive. They go well with a variety of food choices. But if you are making a simple creamy vegetable soup and possibly having a bread roll to go with it, a New Zealand Pinot Gris like the 2010 Vavasour will do the trick nicely.

Wine lifestyle – by choice

Posted on March 9, 2013 by Steve Shipley

This has been a great Saturday. With minor commitments and a relatively free reign, I could choose to do what I wanted, and much of that involved wine. I finished Roger Scruton’s great book on wine and philosophy entitled I drink, Therefore I am: A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine, and in the reading, generated a lot of different ideas, including a dozen different topics on which to blog over the next few weeks.

And then, looking for another book to add to my pile of books to read (I am currently reading about six), I elected another wine and philosophy book!

I also took the time to respond to four different people who sought me out for advice on different wine topics, including choice of decanters, good wine books to read, my thoughts on some selected Penfold’s wines, and to help review a wine list for the opening of a new restaurant. I spent several hours doing so that could have been used elsewhere, but it was a pleasure to be asked and provide advice on wine topics.

I then made a visit to my wine cellar to select a nice Burgundy (the 2007 La Belle Voisine Nuits St George Grand Cru) to go with a meal of pork belly and mash this evening. My wonderful wife, DAZ in the Kitchen, does a great pork belly and it deserves a great Pinot Noir to go with it.

I also picked out several bottles of wine for my bride’s birthday coming up next weekend. I always take the day off, and this year, we decided to take off two days from work to spend a four-day weekend at our place in The Hunter Valley. We will be eating at one of our favorite restaurants, Bistro Molines, and I have selected a 2007 Bouchard Pere & Fils Montrachet and a 1999 Penfolds St Henri (these are of course, two of my wife’s favorite wines) to bring along and enjoy with our 2.5 – 3 hour lunch this Friday! I also selected a few more bottles to bring along for the four-day Easter weekend coming up in three weeks.

There were plenty of choices of things to do today, including exercise, reading other material, going shopping, getting a massage, etc., but I spent most of it reading, thinking about, selecting and drinking wine.

Work has taken a lot of energy recently, and we have also had to focus on other life events of importance. I was great to have an unencumbered day and to spend most of it in the presence of wine-related activities. I believe that the virtuous drinking of wine provides a continuous form of redemption – it makes you feel great and makes you appreciative of what you have. (More on this interesting topic in an upcoming post!)

Drink safely, drink well, and enjoy the wine lifestyle – by choice!

Steve Shipley, author Wine Sense, out early 2014. Published by InkIT Publishing
© 2014. Steve Shipley
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What wine with salad?

Posted on January 13, 2013 by Steve Shipley

It is summer time here in Sydney and that requires cooler food. We have been making a lot of salads recently to address that. We have also been watching our weight and trying to eat better, so a good salad helps with that also.

But what type of wine to match with salads? I have books and experience matching wines with different types of meats, cheeses, and chocolates, but not with salads. With the number of salads we have had over the last few weeks, I have been considering this more and wanted to share some initial thoughts with you. My single most important rule is that any good wine and any good salad will do! Matching salads and vegetables with other foods is pretty easy and it is not often that you have a major conflict. I think the same can be said for wine and salads.

However, to improve on the “any good salad, any good wine will do” approach, I would try to determine if there is a main or over-riding ingredient or dominant taste in the salad. If a particular taste or flavor is going to be dominant in the food, that would be a good starting point for selecting the wine.

Another concept I go for is that salads are most often made with fresh produce and therefore I go for a wine with some freshness and crispness to it. A wine that works well with meaty / gamey foods would not – as a general rule – be good with a salad unless the salad had large slices of grilled lamb or something similar meat. In general and if you have no other guidance, then go with a white wine, preferably a crisp one.

For example, tonight we are are having a bean and feta salad. The beans are slightly cooked, but still quite crisp. The feta has a touch of sharpness to it. It also contained tomatoes, Spanish onion, and some spices. Therefore, I have pulled out a medium aged Riesling (a 2007 Annies Lane from Clare Valley) to go with it as I expect a bit of the remaining acid in the wine to stand up well with the crispness of many of the ingredients in the salad. In general, I would consider three types of white wines which should go well with salads:

Riesling: for a salad with crisp ingredients, sharper cheeses, apple chunks, spices
Pinot Gris: with walnuts or figs as part of the salad, or more citrus fruit bits
Semillon or Sauvignon Blanc (or blend): should work well with almost any salad, especially if it has chunks of smoked salmon, seared tuna, scallops, lobster, or other fish or crustaceans

Chardonnay: will not work as well as the other three whites mentioned above unless the salad contains large chunks of chicken and is fairly bland overall. And if salad is the only thing I am going to eat as a meal, then I usually am going to have one with some stronger flavors and spices.

If you plan on putting some grilled or stir-fried red meat into the salad, you can start to think about a red wine. In general, salads should be ‘light,’ so something like a Pinot Noir or a Zinfandel could work. If the meat is heavier and spicier, then a Shiraz should work also.

If you plan on making the salad the main or only course like we have been doing this summer, then it is also a cause for more celebration and a Sparkling Shiraz or a Frizante could work well also. Both the salad and the wine are full of crispness and freshness then!

This is still an area I am finding out more about and hope to have a more complete and rigorous set of salad / wine matchings in the future. We just got a couple of great salad cookbooks and will be trying a number of new salads over the coming weeks, experimenting with different wines, and coming back with more suggestions for you in the near future! And if you have any good ideas or experiences where you have had a good pairing of a wine with a salad, please let me know.

BTW, my friend Blake Stevens posted an article today on home-made fresh summer foods and the concept of a ‘fridge’ salad. Read the post and let me know what wine, if any, you would consider matching with the ‘fridge’ salad!