A Little Wine with Dinner

As many of you readers know, last week I celebrated my 25th birthday. On Monday night I went to Picholine with my parents, on Thursday I went to Momofuku an split a Bo Ssam with some friends, on Saturday a couple of friends hosted a party for me (thanks!) and on Friday I did a little cooking so that I might have some food to eat while me and some friends drank wines from 1983.

Instead of experimenting, I cooked a couple of rather simple tried and true favorites to go with a bevy of delicious wine. This is one of the few times that I have paired food with wine and not the other way around, and I have to say I find the practice interesting and quite enjoyable.

The idea behind the meal was to start off with some seared foie gras and cherries to pair with an ’83 Chateau Guiraud Sauternes. This was followed by some fennel crusted halibut with walnut parsely pesto over pan roasted mushrooms paired with an ’05 Cakebread Chardonnay that I picked up in California this past summer. The third and final savory course was a very large braised short rib over hash with roasted beets and carrots that went with an ’83 Langoa Barton from Pessac-Leognan. Along the way we also had a ’95 Chateau Sociando-Mallet from Haut Medoc, a Marques de Rescal Riserva Rioja and some Chateau Carmes de Rieussec Sauternes. In all a very fun night with a few friends and a lot of years worth of wine. I should celebrate my birthday like this every year.

It’s now time to get back to real life and a little experimentation…

Wine Dinner

My interest in wine has been constantly growing over the last year or so. At first I was completely clueless. I knew a couple of wines that I liked but other than that I was completely in the dark. Then, as my interest and knowledge of food began to grow, so did my understanding of wine. I started to better understand regions and vintages, and even a little of the winemaking process. All of this new found knowledge was incredibly helpful when it came to ordering a bottle in a restaurant or pairing drinks with my own food. However, until recently, I never really had much to do with wine unless food was involved as well (except for my summer excursion to Napa and Sonoma, but that was vacation.)

This past Sunday was the first time I ever cooked something to pair with wine and not the other way around. A friend of mine who works in a wine shop recently decided to purchase a bottle of 1998 Chateau Margaux Margaux (Cost=Much more than I can afford.) and asked me if I could make an appropriate dish to eat with it. I was truly honored and decided to make a dinner of it by bringing one of the harder to find bottles from my cellar, (the closest in my room) a 1981 Kartauserhofsberg Riesling.

I wanted to pick a somewhat elegant red meat to go with the Margaux and also find a suitably luxurious appetizer to come before the Margaux and pair with Riesling.

I thought foie gras was a logical choice as an appetizer and a great pairing with an acidic , barely sweet (Riesling loses a lot of its sweetness as it ages) wine. While lamb chops would be a logical choice for the Margaux.

The end results ended up being seared foie gras over brioche with grapes, hazelnuts and Bartlett pears and lamb chops and lamb meatballs over Israeli couscous with swiss chard, pine nuts, dried cherries, crispy mint and a cherry port wine sauce. (I actually meant to buy rib chops because they look nicer but was given shoulder chops. Either way, the taste was good.)

We also ended up having a delicious dessert blend made in the
port style from California to go with chocolates from around the world and some Non Vintage Perrier Jouet Champagne to go with some cheeses.

In the end both of the main wines we had were delicious and worked really well with the food. The Riesling was a nice foil to the rich foie gras but also complimented the grape and pear flavors. It was also light and a relatively low alcohol content so as not to spoil us for the next bottle. I thought the Margaux was really high quality wine, very full and with nice structure that gave the wine a powerful mouth feel while lacking the harshness of strong tannins. (That’s the best I can do.)

Was it worth the price? Not at my income level. But I do know that creating a meal around a bottle of wine certainly makes it memorable and I was more than happy to have my first delicious sip of a Chateau Margaux.