Wednesday, January 27, 2010

#30 - Chicken Piccata & '06 Stift Goettweig Grüner Veltliner



It was No Jury Duty Wednesday in the Ney house!

Food: Chicken Piccata with potatoes and radishes with arugula

Chicken piccata dredged in flour, fried lightly in oil and topped with a sautéed mixture of shallots, garlic, capers, tarragon (modified recipe) and lemon finished off with butter.

It's been awhile for chicken piccata, a previous Thursday night staple. One of our easy-ish, homey dishes (well...easy-ish for Mrs. Ney).

Pan-roasted potatoes and roasted radishes. The radishes didn't work. They were an experiment that was supposed to pair with typical grüner veltliner flavors. They didn't.

Good, solid meal.

Wine: 2006 Stift Goettweig Gottschelle Grüner Veltliner (high teens - WDC - Amy Rec.)

Stift Goettweig is an old Benedictine monastery on the east side of the Wachau region in Austria. They've been making wine for 1000 years. Gottschelle is the vineyard site.

Never tried or even heard of this winery before having it recommended to us by a nice person at Wine Discount Center.

Unique is a tired word for describing a wine and does nothing to actually do some describing. It fits here because I still don't know what the heck was going on with this one.

Very alive, well-integrated acidity, exotic background fruits, ones I couldn't for the life of me identify. Certainly white peach up front and beautiful at that. Drinking alone, I thought some kiwi juice showed up. Mrs. Ney found a vegetal note with the food.

I think we'll be following this grüner veltliner. It's just so perplexing. Some of the reviews said it has plenty of life and should age well. We'll see.

Pairing: Good Stuff

Stayed in that basic, general, proper range of a food and wine pairing, but specific pleasures popped up.

Those strange, exotic fruits showed up in a great way with the piccata and different ones peeked around the corner with the arugula. Just a gosh darn interesting wine with a "unique," bright acidity that let the fruits become complex. White peach was the consistent strand throughout with maybe a little white pepper showing up when hit with salt.

A better meal than if we went the traditional (and boring) way and drank something with pronounced lemon notes.

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