Wine as a Marinate

Wine makes a great marinate. There is no finer way of installing a wine’s flavour into a dish. Perhaps more importantly, the acid in wine helps tenderize meat. This is especially beneficial for less expensive cuts. It also helps improve texture. The longer the meat marinates, the more tender it will become and more wine flavour it will possess. Utilize only glass or glazed ceramic to marinate in. Never ever use metal as it contains lead and may leach. After use, don’t save the marinate for another time either. Dispose of it immediately. If you want to baste with the same marinate while cooking, mix up a fresh batch. Alternately, you could simply reserve some for this purpose when you make the first batch.

Wine and Memory

Good memory is a real plus in wine appreciation. Remembering and recognizing certain sensory characteristics is crucial to judging wine. Of course making tasting notes helps, but what good is building up a “wine library” of characteristic smells and tastes in the brain if you can’t recall them when desired? A good memory saves time, promotes better results and allows the taster to sample and compare more products. To increase your memory in general, and especially for wine, try shaking your brain cells up a bit. For example, if you’re right-handed, try brushing your teeth with your left hand. Instead of smelling coffee first thing in the morning, take a whiff of vanilla extract. Simple exercises like this should help.

Cork Update

TCA or trichloroanisole is a defect that infects wine corks making the wine under it smell musty/mouldy. It’s the main reason so many producers have switched to other enclosures like plastic/polymer corks and screw caps for wine. Portugal, the largest creator of wine corks, has spent meg-bucks in their production process to rectify this problem. Because of this, less wines today are affected by TCA and as a result, many producers are starting to go back to cork enclosures for their wines. A good thing, if you ask me! Because corks are porous, they provide micro-oxygenation helping a wine better evolve with age. More aesthetic and romantic, there’s nothing quite like the pop of a cork being extracted from a bottle.  

Balance

Balance is the most important aspect of a wine and is key as to whether it works in the mouth or not and detrimental to its aging ability, especially for reds. When one speaks of balance, it is usually the fruit (sweetness) and acid (sourness) that is of concern. If too much acid, the wine will taste sharp and astringent. If not enough, it will come across as cloying or flabby. This fruit/acid balance must exist in a wine upon creation and, if absent, no amount of aging will provide it. Other elements like too much oak, excessive alcohol and even hard, unripe, aggressive tannins can also render a wine unbalanced on another level. When it comes to balance in a wine, it’s all about harmony of components. This is crucial.

The “Nose” of a Wine

Wine appreciation is about 85% “nose”. Why? As humans, our sense of taste is actually quite poor. We don’t realize how poor our sense of taste really is until the nose is eliminated from the experience. For example, when one has a cold or allergies and the nose is stuffed up, food and drink seem tasteless. Sure we can pick up texture and experience sourness or sweetness, but beyond that, any flavour, pizzazz or nuance is lost. Try this. Peel a delicious apple and raw potato and cut them into quarters. Cover your eyes and have someone feed you one or the other. If you can’t see it, or more importantly smell it, I’ll bet you’ll have a hard time telling which is which. The nose is that important when it comes to taste. 

Undervalued Chenin Blanc

One white, grape variety that doesn’t seem to get much justice outside of France’s Loire Valley, South Africa and certain parts of California is Chenin Blanc. It’s resistant to many diseases and grows in climates often too warm for many other Vinfera types. It’s extremely versatile making great dry, medium-dry, medium, and spectacular sweet wines. Noble Rot or Botrytis loves it and it creates fabulous Icewine. It even produces wonderful sparkling selections. It can take oak, if desired, has good body and, at times, possesses reasonable aging potential. Full of floral, honeyed, melon, quince, honeydew, flint and zesty acidity, it’s extremely food-friendly. It’s too darn bad more producers don’t choose to work with it!

Two Faces of Sauvignon Blanc

Sauvignon Blanc, the great white grape of France’s central Loire Valley and Bordeaux has two distinct faces. One is straight up with its crisp, gooseberry, grassy, green tree fruit character shining through as in Sancerre or with more tropicality like New Zealand versions. The other, mellowed with some oak treatment, exemplified in French Pouilly-Fumé or California Fume Blanc. Both are great aperitifs and extremely food-friendly, but which is better? It’s strictly a matter of taste, but personally I feel that this variety shows much better unoaked. In my mind, oak masks and detracts from the varietals distinct soul of freshness, liveliness and pizzazz making it somewhat fatter. If I want fat, then I’ll sip an oaked Chardonnay.