Dr Vino's wine blog

OK people. It’s Saturday morning. If you’re thinking about wine at all, it’s probably for tonight’s blowout dinner with friends. But before that, there’s brunch to consider.

And what better than the new breakfast burrito bomb from Hardee’s! Let’s cut to the AP for the description:

…two egg omelets filled with bacon, sausage, diced ham, cheddar cheese, hash browns and sausage gravy, all wrapped inside a flour tortilla. The burrito contains 920 calories and 60 grams of fat.

Now is that an IMPOSSIBLE wine pairing or what?!? Talk about a power breakfast. Don’t get faked out by the sheer quantity–just keep your eye on the components. Comments are open for your suggestions.

Hardee’s item via The Consumerist.

We’re back with our “impossible” pairings of food we eat here in America with wines we drink! The latest installment is…

chili con carne

Comments are open!

See previous food and wine postings. (Image: istockphoto)

Our “impossible food-wine pairings” continues! In this series, we look at foods we enjoy in America that present an impossible wine challenge! We have previously digested chips and salsa, nori, and the falafel sandwich. And now, for all the meat-a-tarians who were getting cranky, we present our first meat dish…

Chicken tikka masala!

Comments are open.

(image)

What follows below is an actual reader mail that crossed the transom last evening. Laver, similar to nori, is an edible seaweed high in sodium and iron found on rocks off the coast of Scotland and Wales. Mmm, it really is an impossible food-wine pairing! But her relationship is apparently at stake! Roll the tape:

Dear DR. Vino:
I’m a korean girl, and I have a boyfriend from france. Everything was fine until recently,we fought several times–upon my favorite
sneak — laver (dried & seasoned seaweed). Each time i eat it,he thinks i’m eating a piece of paper. And when i asked him to try some,he just stuck his nose up in the air and replied,” French people never eat anything that couldn’t pair with wine!”So i tried and tried,but no matter it’s a red or a white,it seems to just bring the “fishiness” or “sea stink”out of laver instead of its deliciousness. Is it really an impossible food to pair with wine? Or is our relationship unable to overcome our cultural differences?
-A frustrated girl that desperately needs your help

Help out this reader with your comments below!

(image)

Jack Nicholson, wine critic? [Gawker, via TR]

Up the Nile, with a paddle?
Mark Vadon, CEO of the successful gemstone retailer, BlueNile, joins the board of wine.com. But can he help the retailer, which has undergone many revisions of their business plan over the years? [CNN]

Wine and capitalism
“The laws of capitalism are, he argued, ‘not adapted to wine because behind wine there is history and tradition,’ and because vines take years to develop, have a life span of decades and do not provide the quick returns required by the market.” Roger Torreilles, president of the wine producer Cave des Vignerons in Baixas, near Perpignan, quoted in the NYT.

Harvest heats up
In Italy, harvests have begun. Global warming anyone? On NPR, some St. Emilion growers say they don’t mind.

Drunken chicken?
Yes, this NYT recipe is drunken, but Shaoxing wine is not grape wine.

A friend called me from supermarket the other day. No, it wasn’t a “Help, which wine!”-style emergency.

Instead, he said that the shelf talker gave the number of a global wine company to text to resolve your own wine-food pairing emergency. Just for the sport of it, I sent an SMS to the number with our own “impossible food wine pairing” of chips and salsa! And what did the computer reply suggest?

Two of their own-brand sauvignons blancs, one from NZ and one from California. A third suggestion was a zinfandel.

So how did this stack up to our collective genius? The most popular choice was to go for a slightly sweet; bubbles were also a popular option. Four people suggested SB; one person suggested zin and as one choice among six wines he liked.

So I shot them another SMS about falafel sandwiches. The reply: two California chardonnays or a California merlot. Only one suggestion in our discussion of this pairing yielded a chardonnay (unoaked, unlike the ones suggested) and no merlots came up. Ha–California merlot under $20! One last, related query: hummus. Result: two under $10 Australian pinots noirs. Ack!

Net-net: while a neat idea with virtually instantaneous delivery, this service appears more intent on making suggestions from the existing portfolio of their wines rather than ones that consumers might otherwise suggest. We’d better keep churning out our own suggestions! (for your in-store browsing on your iPhone.)

I have been meaning to write up a few Paris odds ‘n ends from our recent family trip. They’re a few wine related, and a few that aren’t.

Great carafe: Le Comptoir du Relais. We enjoyed a great lunch (excellent salads all around) at Yves Camdeborde’s hot spot right by the Odeon. The wine highlight was a one liter carafe of “KO” Puzelat cabernet franc for 15 euros! (find this wine) Amazing. It’s pretty much gone from NYC where the wine was available for $23 a bottle in a store, making that carafe all the tastier. If only US restaurants could have this quality of wine this cheap. Sigh. (6th arr; 33 1 44 27 07 97)

Great lunch: Chez Michel. Thierry Breton cooks the food of his home region, Brittany, in this homey place in the shadow of a church near the Gare du Nord. We had excellent white asparagus, mouthwatering clams and mussels cooked in a rich, herbed broth, and the largest–and very tasty–rice pudding I’ve ever seen. Solid wine list. Prix fixe: 30 euros. (10, Rue Belzunce, Paris 10e – +33 1 44 53 06 20)

Great wine shop: Caves Augé Manager Marc Sibard stocks some great bottles in this cramped shop (now actually owned by the same owners as Lavinia). The emphasis is on natural wines and it is a treasure trove for wine geeks. Be sure to ask for things if you don’t see them since there is also a large storage area in the basement. Great spirits selection, particularly Armagnac. Read more from my visit last year. And be sure to check out their blowout tastings with producers in the spring and fall. 116, Boulevard Hausmann, Paris 75008

Another great wine shop: La Derniere Goutte. American owner Juan Sanchez presides over a small but well-chosen selection of wines from the growers themselves, including Champagnes. He has weekly tastings with visiting producers on Saturday afternoons. And being a good American, he opens the shop on Sundays. English spoken by everyone in the store. 6, rue de Bourbon le Chateau, 75006 Paris

Best falafel sandwich: l’As du falafel (rue des Rosiers, Le Marais). Great street food, which made me want to sit down and pair it with wine. 4 E 50. I tried come of the competition on the street and the lines in front of l’As are there for a reason.

Best ice cream: Berthillon. Though the now ubiquitous “Amorio” chain does a nice job, their floral presentation of the gelato seems to have slipped since last year as the number of outlets have increased. We tried a chocolate and a mint from Amorio and Berthillon on the Ile Saint Louis and Berthillon won each category. Deep dark chocolate! Fresh mint! A no-brainer. Although the original Berthillon store is closed most of the summer (!), the ice creams are sold throughout the city through various resellers.

Best mille feuille pastry in Paris: Pierre Hermé. Mrs. Vino and I were lamenting the downgrading of the mille feuille pastry as it no longer appeared to have quite the “thousand” layers of its billing. Thanks to a tip from our friend Mike, who is a Pierre Hermé junkie, we discovered their deux mille feuille–inflation! Swallow your pride about not wanting to look like a touron (tourist-moron) and ask for a fork. See if you can make it past the square in front of the church St. Sulpice before you tuck into this absolutely delicious treat. 72, rue Bonaparte 75006

More of my wine odds ‘n ends from Paris and France.
Some of these places may be closed in August.

Billionaires are the new millionaires. Take Steve Schwarzman, head of the recently IPO’d Blackstone from his profile in NY mag last week:

Steve Schwarzman is a perfect poster boy for this age of greed, sharklike, perpetually grinning, a tiny Gordon Gekko without the hair product. In Palm Beach (where he bought a historic landmark house for $20.5 million and tore it down), he eats his three-course lunches (including $400 stone crabs) in less than fifteen minutes and complains about the squeaky rubber soles of a servant’s shoes. Once, in the presence of a Times reporter, he buzzed a man to bring coffee, then stalked off to dress down the servant—“I called you six times.”

What was more urgently missing for us in these lunch details–more urgent than the missing staffer–is any info on the wine involved. Steve Schwarzman may not even be a fan of the fruits of the vine for all I know, but this raised an interesting question to me: if price were no object, would you ever have a wine under $30?

Life could get tiresome pulling yourself out of your pool in the Hamptons only to find a Eurocave stocked with Haut Brion blanc, Puligny, and Krug. OK, maybe not.

But even if a billion dollars were to fall from a helicopter out of the clear blue sky on to my private Caribbean island, there are still some wines under $30 I wouldn’t do without. They tend to be light summer wines, since I believe in pairing the mood and the moment, and cabernet and the beach make for a terrible pairing. So air-drop me some of the humble rosé. As I have mentioned previously, I enjoy rosé in the summer and get grumpy paying much over $15 for it. In warm weather, on the deck overlooking the infinity pool, it’s an A+ wine and context pairing.

Cru Beaujolais? Love it. Wouldn’t want to do without some Fleurie or Morgon on my island either.

What what about the wonderful diversity of lesser-known, “indigenous” varieties? Mencia? Mourvedre? Aglianico? Ribolla Gialla? Maratheftiko? Or distinctive regional styles, such as Muscadet, Moscato d’Asti, Txacoli, or fiano di Avellino? I’d toss some of these into my climate-controlled wine vault to mix things up between bottles of Cornas and Cabernet.

After Frank Bruni’s tales of wine-fueled excess in NYC’s top restaurants, I’m sure that if there’s one time frugality (and restraint) should kick in, it’s on the fifth bottle.

Certainly billionaires come in as many stripes as there are shades of wine and there’s no doubt even a frugal billionaire or two out there. And, of course, everyone’s entitled to drink whichever wine floats their proverbial yacht–my own private island would definitely have plenty of magnums of Montrachet as well as some value vino. Which wines under $30 would you not throw under the bus, er, Ferrari?

(image)