>Brenda at Culinary Fool is the host for the December WBW. And what a topic it is!
Festive Sparkling Wines must be the very best topic for a pre-Christmas excuse for a drinking – sorry, tasting – session.
Who’s with me?
If you’re in Melbourne let me know if you are up for a Sparkling Night Out, and if you are elsewhere in the world why not stock up on an interesting bottle of bubbly or two amongst mates, taste and test and send in your report!
>I was on vacation for the first opportunity to get involved with this, so my sister Mena obliged.
As I prefer white wine and as there was no chance of even sampling something nice from Long Island (I’m in Australia), I decided to go with an Italian white.
There were a total of TWO Italian wines at my local bottle shop !! That is to say that they actually came from Italy – we’re very lax in our descriptions over here and there were quite a number of “Italian” wines. They were both around the same price – the same price I paid for a box of six bottles of locally grown cleanskin chardonnay by the way – and didn’t seem noticeably different, so I picked the one in the prettiest bottle.
The wine I selected was :
CANEI
Vino Prizzante
Mellow White Wine
8.5% Alc./Vol.
The description on the bottle said : “The semi sweet white wine generously rich and full with a delightful clean aftertaste : the ideal companion for good food and every happy occasion”.
By the time Wednesday came around I was looking forward to enjoying my nicely chilled bottle of choice with some Garlic Chilli Prawns and a Greek salad.
Boy was I disappointed !!! First thing I noticed was how light the colour was (think water) and that it seemed to be slightly effervescent. “Okaaay – refreshing” I thought and took an initial swig. Let me describe the taste like this …… you know the really cheap sickly sweet Asti Spumante that you swigged by the neck in secret before High School dances (or was that just me) ? … think sweeter, sicklier !! Think molasses mixed with water in a bottle !!
I had to leave it alone that night … it was ruining the taste of my prawns … but I tried it again the next day with the same result. Then not wanting to give up, I left it to try again as an afternoon drink with lunch on Saturday, which somehow didn’t seem so bad.
I can’t say what else it tasted of because the treacle/molasses/sugar taste overrode every other taste.
If this wine were a tree it would be a sugar plum.
As far as I am concerned this wine would only be nice if used as an addition to trifle.
Sorry for the gap folks – I’ve been globetrotting as you know. Ireland for twelve days, London for a couple of nights, then a glorious five nights on Hamilton Islands in the Whitsundays on the Queensland coast.
It was a double celebration – my mum’s 80th birthday and my 40th a week later.
Don’t we look good?
More later once I have settled back in: I have many tales of dinners eaten including the wonderful Italian Mum and I had in Don Giovanni’s in Dalkey (above).
Now, look carefully at the sell-by date on this packet of supermarket garlic bread. Use by 16 October 3037?
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For once I got up early enough to get to Victoria Market at a reasonable hour. Still suffering from my cold, I didn’t delay, but headed straight for my favourite local winery stall to stock up on shiraz. Davd from Candlebark Hill winery chatted about famous people (he traded his story about Tim Spall for mine about Sir Ian McKellen). Six bottles better off, I wandered back through the throngs to my own local market in Footscray.
There I bought some beautiful pork belly from the Vietnamese butcher, and some diced beef. At the fishmongers I chose a nice slab of fresh tuna (which I froze when I got home for later in the week) and threw in a kilo of fresh sardines as they looked so lovely.
Back at home, I realised that the sardines would need gutting before we could eat them. Orlando vaguely remembered how, from his aunt Gloria, and after a brief instruction session I set to. Fifteen minutes later I had a big bowl of fish guts and 22 tiny butterfly fillets.
I remembered my chilli chutney from the Taste of Slow market, and combined it with garlic and lime for the marinade. I grilled the sardines lightly and we polished them off for lunch with some fresh bread.
It didn’t take long to prepare the spices for my favourite Rick Stein recipe for crispy pork belly. You have to leave the meat resting in the spices for a day or so before cooking so I got that organised after the washing up.
While I was at it, I cleaned out and re-filled my trusty masala dhaba. From the top, we have lemon pepper, black mustard seeds, cloves and cardamoms, garam masala, turmeric, chilli powder, and finally szechuan peppercorns in the centre. Pretty, isn’t it?
Then I took a nap.
Next day, I spent the afternoon on the sofa watching a remake of South Pacific, with a proper old-fashioned box of Milk Tray chocolates on my lap and a blanket over me. It took almost five hours to cook the pork belly to perfection and less than twenty minutes to devour it.
Now, that’s what I call a slow food weekend.
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Early spring is the perfect time to catch cold. I was smothering, and a little brain-dead, at the beginning of the weekend as I braved gale-force winds to drive across town for a family dinner. We owed Lee a posh dinner and she had chosen Donovan’s as her treat.
We sat by the window as the wind howled and the waves crashed on the shore just feet from our table. Donovan’s feels as if you are visiting somebody’s cosy home: bookcases line the walls, the tables and chairs are mismatched, and the russet colours are a far cry from the minimalist decor so many trendy places go for.
Wines by the glass were limited but well-chosen. Lee and Orlando selected sparkling wines whilst I went for a local red, Amherst ‘Dunn’s Paddock’ Shiraz 2004, from the Goldfield region about 100 miles from our house. I still love the fact that I live in a country which has local wine.
Every morsel was divine. My seafood chowder was augmented by slivers of prosciutto, giving it an amazing saltiness. The heavy sour-dough bread was served with olive oil infused with parmesan and basil. My seafood linguine was simply the very best I have ever had.
How I found space for dessert I will never know. Three Sweet Things served with my coffee were a tiny a square of passionfruit cheesecake, a home-made jammy dodger biscuit and a minute chocolate brownie. Sounds like comfort food, but again, all the best I have ever tasted.
40 Jacka Boulevard St Kilda www.donovanshouse.com.au
fill up on bread 