Posts Tagged ‘champagne flutes’

How To Wine Which Will Complement Your Food

Written on January 19th, 2010 by blogno shouts

Choosing a decent wine can be a real nightmare, especially when you’ve got someone to impress. You’re having a dinner party – you’ve planned the menu thoroughly, dusted off your best tableware and crystal glass, and got everything prepared – except for the wine selection. There’s just so much to consider, and it always seems like everyone else knows so much more than you do about it. You stand there for ages looking at the endless shelves of bottles, and the more you wonder about it the harder it gets. That’s why we’ve put together a few tips for what to watch out for and how to choose the perfect winethat will compliment your meal.

Firstly, you should match the wine to the meal you have chosen. Everyone has different opinions of which wines will taste good with different foods, but there are a few basic guidelines that you can follow if you’re not sure. The easiest way is to match the colour of the wine to the food. So if you’re eating red meat select a dark red like Cabernet or Syrah. For lamb or pork a medium bodied red like a Merlot will be less heavy whilst still having a rich flavour. Chicken and fish dishes can often be overpowered by reds so it’s best to go for a white instead, perhaps a Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc. If it’s a special occasion or celebration, you might be better off with a sparkling wine, served in fancy Champagne flutes.

Once you’ve worked out what kind of wine you want, check where it has come from. Wines from different regions will vary hugely in quality, so it pays to do a bit of research into the best regions. If you’re not sure, France is always a safe choice and has been producing fine wines for hundreds of years. Italy is another one, and Chilean wines are also very popular at the moment, particularly reds.

Another thing it’s worth checking is the vintage of the wine, or the year it was bottled. A real wine buff will know which were the good years for each region, and will buy only vintages which they know came from a particularly good crop. For the rest of us less knowledgable people, it can seem like a lot of guesswork, but if you know the basics you’ll at least be on the right track. That all wines get better the older they are is a common misconception. It’s true that most red wines improve with a little aging, but most wineries won’t distribute these reds for a couple of years after bottling, which gives them time to mature. This means they are ready to drink and will taste good as soon as they become available. Most white or sparkling wines don’t need any aging, and taste good if drunk straight away.

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Is Expensive Wine Party Wine?

Written on December 4th, 2009 by blogno shouts

How many of us can say we really know anything about wine? Most people are probably familiar with that feeling you get when you’re standing there in front of the endless rows of bottles, with no idea what it is you’re actually supposed to be looking for. We assume that expensive wines are expensive for a reason and cheap wines should therefore probably be avoided, but is there really any truth to this? I have tried both cheap wines that have tasted fine, and expensive ones that have been horrible – not all of them by any means, but they do exist and how are we supposed to know which ones to choose?

It’s like the theory that drinking from crystal glass makes wine taste better than regular glasses. It’s true that it is nicer to drink out of a crystal glass, they feel nice to hold and they make that lovely sound when you tap them, but I’ve yet to see any evidence that it has any effect on the flavour of the drink. A nasty wine will taste nasty whatever you drink it from – just think of the familiar grimace on people’s faces when they take a sip from their posh celebratory Champagne flutes, only to be reminded that they’ve always hated Champagne and are only drinking it because it’s what you’re supposed to do. So maybe think about presenting it in posh decanters and wine glasses.

A real wine buff would tell you they can tell the vintage of a good wine and the region where it was bottled purely from tasting it. However in the opening episode of BBC4’s recent mini documentary series entitled simply (and rather inventively, I thought!) Wine, an interesting scenario happened. A group of professional wine experts were offered a taste from an unknown bottle and asked to guess the vintage. Most of the party guessed at somewhere around the 1980s, with the exception of one French expert who said 1928. It turned out to be from 1870, proving that they really didn’t have a clue.

So do factors like the age and vintage of a wine really mean anything in terms of a wine’s quality? If even these knowledgable experts can’t tell the difference then it would seem that no, probably not. Older wines are likely to be rarer, which might go some way to explaining why they cost more, but I bet those experts could have got a whole crate of good 1980s wines for the same price as that one bottle would have cost. And in these credit crunch times do people really want to be paying over the odds for fancy wines when it’s possible they could get one just as good – or maybe even nicer – in Threshers for under a tenner?

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