a few of the Portuguese wines and foods we enjoyed for September’s #WinePW ‘s focus on Portugal
There is so much more to PORTUGAL than PORT Wine!
Discover our stories about Portugal this Saturday, September 9th when, by 8am PST, the Wine Pairing Weekend crew will publish posts about Portuguese wine and then head to twitter to share our choices and tell the stories behind them (hashtag = #WinePW).
Food and travel are always a part of the chat, so join us for all the doors that Portuguese wine can open. And we’d love to have participation from people who live in Portugal too!
This month, the Wine Pairing Weekend crew includes:
With the current wild proliferation and profusion of rose wine on today’s market, many people have discovered that the rose you find today is not at all like the sweet characterless wine you found in grandma’s glass a few years ago.
Even Brangelina and Drew Barrymore are on the rose train. In the video below, Drew explains how to taste wine and then…
But it’s not white zin that’s caught our fancy because white zin’s market share is dropping rapidly: instead we are in the pink with ones more similar to the rosé wines of Provence: while more expensive, these pink wines are sophisticated, dry, and crisp, they cut the heat to leave us refreshed, and they pair well with food.
To help you sort through the proliferation, we’ve tasted four from the Central Coast and paired them with SHRIMP CORN FRITTERS (OMG so good!) and have some ideas for you when this month the #WinePW crew once again say HOORAY for Rose with our theme for August Wine Pairing Weekend Chat is Rosé and… because there are so many ways to pair food with a Rosé. And because there is so much to say on the subject, we have two from Chile that I will be publishing about on Monday which is International Rose Day! (Not to be confused with NATIONAL Rose Day which is in June and we wrote about here and more about rose from France and Lodi here.)
Let’s Do Brunch! So said Sue and I in suggesting this month’s Wine Pairing Weekend prompt. We had no idea that this is actually #BrunchWeek for food bloggers who are also writing about Brunch this week!
But how many bloggers are writing about BRUNCH and WINE? Well, I’ll bet quite a few because for many a defining feature and interest in brunch is that they probably invented brunch so we could have wine with breakfast!
And for many, wine at brunch means BUBBLES! And while this was indeed true for many of us participating in Wine Pairing Weekend (scroll down and you’ll see!), Sue and I fell in love with a special Brunch Negroni! Continue reading →
Instead of England’s early Sunday dinner, a postchurch ordeal of heavy meats and savory pies, why not a new meal, served around noon, that starts with tea or coffee, marmalade and other breakfast fixtures before moving along to the heavier fare?
By eliminating the need to get up early on Sunday, brunch would make life brighter for Saturday-night carousers. It would promote human happiness in other ways as well.
“Brunch is cheerful, sociable and inciting.” Beringer wrote. “It is talk-compelling. It puts you in a good temper, it makes you satisfied with yourself and your fellow beings, it sweeps away the worries and cobwebs of the week.”
— William Grimes, “At Brunch, The More Bizarre The Better” New York Times, 1998[7](from Wikipedia’s Brunch entry)
— Gwendolyn Alley, Art and Wine Predator (@ArtPredator) May 1, 2017
Whether you stay up late carousing or you’re trying to figure out what to do for Mother’s Day, let’s do brunch this month for Wine Pairing Weekend!Continue reading →
— Gwendolyn Alley, Art and Wine Predator (@ArtPredator) April 6, 2017
For me, that’s when I call my spouse, or he calls me, and says, “Put the pasta water on!” and we pick up either fresh pesto from Trader Joe’s or meat sauce from our favorite local Italian restaurant, Ferraros, and sometimes both! The person at home throws together either a caesar salad (do a three minute boil on the eggs in the pasta water! surprisingly easy!) or a green salad with Sue’s Simple Gorgonzola Dressing, and we have a delicious, inexpensive dinner in less time than it would take to go out and with only a very few dishes.
The key of course, is to have good quality sauce and pasta plus the right wine! And for us, another standard is to eat and drink as sustainably and organically as possible, something that we care about every day, but we will be pointing out this month because
Ginger is annoyed that we have yet to OPEN THAT BOTTLE
When I purchased this bottle of Bollinger NV back in 2011 to celebrate Ima Zinner’s birthday, I didn’t realize it would take us six years to open it.
But I wasn’t worried. You’re supposed to cellar wine, right?
WRONG. And somehow I didn’t know until May of 2016 that you don’t cellar Champagne.When Champagne is disgorged and ready for sale, it is ready to be enjoyed. That doesn’t mean you have to drink it that night that you buy it! But you should drink it within a year or two, maybe three.
You’re not supposed to wait SIX YEARS to open a bottle of Champagne!
But somehow that happened. It wasn’t a special enough occasion. Or it we were having red wine to go with red meat or some such. Or it wasn’t cold. One reason or another, it just didn’t happen.
So when Ima Zinner aka Kathy came over the other night, it was Open That Bottle Night, because we knew it was time. Way past time. But was it too late?
wine predator.............. gwendolyn alley 