Sometimes, I get one-upped by my boyfriend (okay, kinda more than sometimes but let’s leave that alone so his ego doesn’t inflate too much). He’s not a wino to the extent than I am but he enjoys the wines that I open and has a great palate (better than mine any day of the week) so I enjoy drinking wine with him for the fact that I usually learn something. Case in point, this story I’m about to tell you.
I had opened a bottle of 2007 Piazzo Barbera from Piemonte (about $10-12 retail) on Friday night to have with the pizza I had for dinner and that pairing was fantastic. I finished the rather small pizza and wished I had more because my mouth was so happy with the flavor combination.
The following evening, we got home from dinner and he suggested pouring a glass of something. Since the Piazza was open, I poured some of that to sip while we watched a little TV. We both liked the wine but I said it tasted better with food because of the high acid in it. It was then that he suggested the pairing I was doubtful about. He said “This would probably go really well with that ice cream we have.” … What?! A red wine with ice cream? I was a skeptic. I’ve never really experimented with wine and desserts beyond what’s been given to me but I always thought that the wine had to be sweeter than the dessert.
Then, I tried the pairing. Cookies and cream and Barbera. It was magnificent. It was creamy but the wine stood up nicely to it without any weird flavors. He was right (and I may or may not have sworn under my breath).
Why did this work? It went against everything I had thought I knew about pairing wine with dessert.
Turns out, it worked as a pairing the same way that it worked with pizza the night before. Barbera is a light colored red with a lot of acidity and low tannins, built to stand up to fat and blend well with said fat. The pizza had cheese and meat on top and that’s where that fat came from in the pizza to balance the flavors. The ice cream obviously had plenty of fat, but apparently not enough to overpower the wine.
It proved to me that sometimes I may feel like I know something about wine, but I’ll never know everything. There will always be things that I’m discovering as I go. I’m just glad that these imaginary pairing rules weren’t in my boyfriend’s head because then I never would have discovered that these things actually work pretty well together.
Back in January, before most of you were even reading this thing, I wondered about hockey and wine and whether or not they go together. Do hockey fans like wine? Do wine fans like hockey? These were important questions to me as I was enjoying glasses of wine with my hockey fights and wondered if I was the only lone person in the universe enjoying such a combination. Since then, I’ve realized that yes, people enjoy both. Actually, a lot of people enjoy both.
With that in mind, this past weekend I held a wine tasting for some of the Twitter folk I have met through Bruins tweetups. I can, indeed, confirm that hockey fans are into wine (at least on Saturday they were). The sense that I got from the crowd was that they wanted to know more but often felt silly asking questions and finding out or didn’t really know who to ask. I’m no expert, but I know a few things and I hope that I wasn’t snobby and they learned a little bit in the process of tasting through six wines (okay, we drank more than six bottles but there were only six in the formal tasting portion of the night).
It’s less than two months until October (the month that marks the start of that sport I love), and was the perfect time to get everyone together, talk about the trades that have gone down this summer, and get pumped up for the season ahead of us. As far as I can tell, it worked. I’m now more pumped up about the season than I was before. Quite honestly, though, that’s because all these people that I hadn’t seen in months kinda rule and with the start of the season, I’ll be seeing them more. Yeah, and them giving a crap about wine absolutely doesn’t hurt the situation. We might even do more of these tastings during the season.
And with that, I’ll leave you with this Bruins video montage set to the music from Inception.
Note: I’ve been a bit reflective this week because I was fighting a little cold but also because I’m on a mission to lose some weight. That mission has been totally set back by said cold, but I guess that’s how these things go, right? Right. Both are reasons why I’ve been writing a little less recently but I do have a lot of topics still to cover. Don’t you worry, they’ll get written. It’s just taking some time to get everything to sync the way I want it to. Anyway, back to my original topic of this post. Birthday wine.
Sad. True. Disappointing. Yeah, it’s kind of all of those, but not really. I put up that original post shortly after the renaming and redesign of this blog, and at that point, could never have imagined the doors that this writing would open for me. Since then, I’ve gone to two wine regions, met a ton of amazing people, and yes, I’ve even tried two wines from my birth year.
Even though it might be slightly disappointing to realize that 1985 wine on my actual birthday won’t happen, it’s still okay. I have a birthday every year and no matter how old I turn, a birth year wine will still be special.
