#240 - Linguiça, Potato-Kale Hash & Manchego With '07 Vallado Tinto

In July of 2010, we paired this wine with duck leg stew and a tapa spread.

Delicious wine by itself then, but not delicious with the food.

I remember the flavors and pairing of that meal pretty well.  Reading that post now after seeing how this wine showed last night, it's pretty obvious that it wasn't ready to go a year and a half ago.  Tannins were just opening and becoming accommodating enough then but everything else hadn't come out of its shell quite yet.  Throw on a gravy-like duck leg entrée and the fact that Portuguese reds typically scream for food less subtle and stewish, I don't think the wine had much of a chance.

Portuguese reds want simple, bold flavors with less complete integration.  They want a little char, a little bitter, a little starch.  They want rustic to match their rustic guts and then use that as a launching pad to expand out from there.

Last night's meal was that and the wine was true to form.  Textbook, really.  Mrs. Ney nailed it.  The wine tasted like War by itself.  All iron and blood with churned up earth.  With a bite of potato-kale hash and linguiça, an expanding balloon of dark but sparkly and round plum completed the delicious frame and turned this wine into one of the best showings of a $20 wine we've ever had.

I thought this wine was worth every bit of the $20 price tag a year and a half ago but probably not much more.  I was wrong.  This one's plays well above its price and has plenty of drinking life ahead.

Food:  Linguiça, potato-kale hash, marinated manchego, fig-almond cake and baguette

#239 - TWIB Notes: This Week In Bottles

Family.

That's all I gotta say 'bout that.

So Merry Christmas-Happy Holidays to everyone out there looking for a wine pairing and stumbling across our humble little website.  Or if you've somehow been redirected from a dental implant (?) site as it says in my statistics page.  The mind is awhirl with ideas how THAT happened.

Wooly bubbles, an out-of-this-world bargain Eiswein, a disappointing Heredia and Hema's Kitchen made at home highlight this week's roundup.

Let's get started.

Meal #1 - Pork liver pâté, Chaource cheese and baguette with Anselmann blanc de noir Eiswein & Ayala Zero Dosage Champagne

#238 - Short Ribs in Ancho-Pumpkin Mole & Potato Far With An '08 Quinta Cruz Touriga Nacional

Ever had an ancho-pumpkin mole, a starch that tastes like crêpe batter and shredded potatoes had a baby and then washed it down with blackberry licorice juice?

We have.  Last night.

Tasted like we tried a restaurant in some niche neighborhood in west Chicago where French-Hungarians settled decades ago but heavy influence from Mexico seeped in and someone decided to open a place that catered to both.

And it was delicious.

Food:  Short ribs in ancho-pumpkin mole, salty-sweet potato far and arugula with pomegranate seeds

#237 - Thomas Keller Buttermilk Fried Chicken & Onion Biscuits With NV Pierre Péters Blancs de Blancs

Continuing the jones theme.

More bubbles, this time with fried chicken, a pairing that fits like a glove in many eyes.

Last November, a first run at TK fried chicken achieved that with a Királyudvar sparkling.  That sparkler brought some great acid with dominant peach pit and grapefruit notes, supporting the chicken, wedge salad and buttermilk biscuits, keeping everything lifted, 3-D and surprisingly light. Good food memory there.

Here we had a more fancy, idiosyncratic bubbly offering flavors we didn't expect from a 100% chardonnay.  Cherry pit followed by white raspberry describes the evolution with more traditional citrus, yeast and toasted baguette serving as the backbone down deep.  Less friendly mix and mingle with the food as last November's success but nothing that clashed in the least.

Food:  Thomas Keller buttermilk fried chicken, onion biscuits and mâche with pomegranate seeds

#236 - Hanger, Latkes & Rapini With '08 Owen Roe Yakima Red + Anteprima

Champagne and Washington expect to get a lot of play in our house over the next few months.  They're our current jones, it seems.

Washington wines, in our limited experience of 10-15 bottles or so over the last few years, seem to be less about the winemaker, like so many California wines (and even Oregon wines to an extent), and more about the land.  An Old World sensibility really does come through with an inevitable New World freshness merely outlining the body.

More restraint and hands-off construction and less chasing of that one-note, unibody flavor so loved by so many.  Less easily identifiable flavors and more mystery brought on by not screwing with it so much.

Our nascent exposure to Washington wines has been a good one, something that seems to have opened a floodgate of sorts.  We're on board.

I've sort of jumped off the Bordeaux train lately due to expense, its food limitations and, on a certain level, boredom.  It's such a niche wine not exactly lined up with the food we typically eat.  But Washington, a wine region that pays homage left and right to Bordeaux blends and tradition, seems to be broadening that a bit with wines offering a wider food basket its wines can match up with.  They're less...rigid.

#235 - Still Alive!

Geesh!  It's been a month (?).

An annoyingly lingering month-long cold and the lack of greenbacks in the wallet lately has led to the absence of good food and wine in our house.  No point spending money on stuff we can't taste.

But things seem to be back to normal for the most part so two easy favorites were right and proper to jump back on the tasting horse.

Lunch:  Marinated mozzarella, tomatoes and basil with baguette and two sparklers

I extolled the virtues of Trader Joe's pre-packaged marinated mozzarella in olive oil and herbs a few weeks ago as a near-perfect quick and easy lunch option.  Marinating your own seemed to be an exercise in willingly wasting your time when something that good came so easy and fresh.  Mrs. Ney gave it a shot anyway...just to know.  The result was something just as good, but work.  Better mozzarella but not by much.  Better olive oil but not by much.  She gussied up the TJ's version with fresh tomatoes/kumatoes in the past so a freshness was still present and wanted, even needed.  In the end, part of the joy in this type of meal is the spontaneity.  No thinking about it the day before and prepping.  It's probably the best buy and eat lunch in our world right now.  Grab a baguette and bubbles and there's little that creates a break from a workweek quicker than this.