Dr Vino's wine blog

Howard Goldberg tweets: “I wonder what wines @drvino, the Combo King, would recommend for Claes Oldenburg’s fake food on display at MoMA.”

Aha! Good question. Which wine to pair with fake food–perhaps some fake wine? Maybe Bill Koch still has one of those ’21 Pétrus magnums…

A Carnival cruise ship headed on a seven-day tour of Mexico’s Pacific coast had a fire and was adrift for two days. Mexican tugboats and American Coast Guard and Navy ships have come to the aid of the 4,500 people on board Carnival Splendor. No one was hurt, but the AP reports that they were without air conditioning, cell phone service, and internet access! Here’s more from the story:

U.S. Navy Seahawk helicopters were ferrying supplies, including Spam, crab meat, croissants and Pop Tarts to the ship from the USS Ronald Reagan, an aircraft carrier that reached the Splendor after it was diverted from training maneuvers to help.

My goodness, are they trying to rescue these people or kill them? Pairing those with wine sound…impossible! (Crab meat is the easiest by far, though.) So in this emergency edition of our impossible pairings, consider which wine you would send these marooned vacationers to pair with their emergency rations and plight. Which wines would you send along if you were the Coast Guard sommelier?

reduced size crop of AP/Gregory Bull image.

SPIT: Tina Fey?
The Wine & Spirits Wholesalers Association selects Sarah Palin as their convention speaker in Las Vegas. Her talk is likely to be entitled “Going Rouge” and expound on her secret love of Nebbiolo. Oh wait, the WSWA says that she is a great supporter of free enterprise–so maybe she will talk about the market liberalizing effects of dismantling the three-tier system?

SPIT: impossible food-wine pairings!
Eric Asimov, chief wine critic at The New York Times, dismisses our impossible food-wine pairings as “sad” and irritating–eegad!! Too bad since the popular series brings many new commenters out of the woodwork. (And, no, we weren’t being serious when talking about which wine to pair with dog food.) Take a look for yourself at the previous entries in the series and decide if it is funny, interactive, thought-provoking, unpretentious, mouth-watering and sometimes useful–or whatever he said.

SIPPED: Physics!
Does this funky wine glass defy physics? Apparently not! (via @wine_markfisher)

SIPPED: imitation as flattery?
A Loire Sauvignon Blanc called “Kiwi Cuvee” gets a thumbs down from Australian regulatory authorities after objections from their Antipodean neighbor. [Telegraph]

In a piece entitled “Mayor Doesn’t Always Live by His Health Rules,” the Times reported yesterday on Mayor Bloomberg’s diet. To the tape:

HE dumps salt on almost everything, even saltine crackers. He devours burnt bacon and peanut butter sandwiches. He has a weakness for hot dogs, cheeseburgers, and fried chicken, washing them down with a glass of merlot.

Whoa–talk about impossible food-wine pairings!! Surely we can do better for Mayor Mike than merlot? Which wine with you pair with burnt bacon and peanut butter sandwiches? Or are they…impossible?!? Answer well and it could lead to Senior Pairings Expert in a possible future Bloomberg administration?!

Related: Elvis’ version of the peanut butter, bacon, banana (!) and butter (!!) sandwich

Yesterday we posted on a “terrifying” web site that broke the news that wine has calories! Oh wait, that wasn’t the scary part. The food equivalents of those 335 calories were scary since it translated two “large” glasses of wine into a piece of pizza (I thought one slice was more than 300 calories on its own–details!), an onion bhaji and a jaffa cake! Thanks to reader comments I now know what onion bhajis are–a sort of Indian onion rings that actually sound quite spectacular–and remain terrified of jaffa cakes, which sound like the sweet of black and and tart orange zest in marmalade form. Ack! Site reader Richard Smith threw down the gauntlet and wanted us to put our minds to the task of pairing!

Mr. Scary Web Site, we will see you calorie for calorie! Tell him in the comments which two large glasses of wine would you pour to match with this “meal.” Or is it…impossible?!?!

We just finished up another session of my wine class at NYU this week. As part of an assignment, one student decided to present an “impossible” food to pair with wine to a wine shop. She made some homemade peanut brittle, went to Chambers Street Wines, presented the challenge to the staff there who–lo and behold–had never been hit with this precise challenge before. But they rose to it! A few ideas came up but the student had budgetary and practical considerations (had to be cold right then and there if it needed to be). So the suggestion was…a Felsina Vin Santo with 14 years of age on it! Although it wouldn’t occur to me to even pair peanut brittle with wine, the nuttiness of the mature wine and it’s richness worked well. And the brittle was darned good.

So, if some peanut brittle is in your near future, how would you pair it with wine if you had to? Or is it…impossible??

Anchovies are polarizing: a recent poll found them to be among the three foods the are most disliked by Brits (along with oysters and liver). But then there are people like Jeremy Seysses of Domaine Dujac who recently tweeted a photo with this caption: “Christmas came early: just received over 2kg of my very favorite Sicilian anchovies. Umami for dayyyssss.” He later elaborated that he likes them on caesar salad, salsa verde, pasta, and everything, including eating “anchovies and avocados for breakfast.”

It’s not as if Jeremy needs any wine advice, but maybe there are other anchovy lovers out there who do. Which wine would you pair with them? Or are they…impossible?!? (Maybe you just eat them for breakfast, sans wine.)

The world of processed meats has been on a wild ride lately: the starting bell rang in mid-January when burgers in the UK labeled as beef were found to contain horse meat. This prompted more inspections and the labeling scandal went from a trot to a gallop when Irish processors were found to have 80% horse meat and some UK grocery store meals contained 100% horse meat.

But the scandal got fresh legs yesterday when Czech inspectors found traces of horse meat in IKEA meatballs, the furniture store’s signature food item. To riff off a tweet from Daniel Gross, if you have some meatballs before starting to shop at IKEA, are you putting the horse before the cart?

While some may find this hard to swallow, eating horse meat (or not) follows cultural norms. In France and parts of Asia, eating horsemeat is not taboo and the recent scandals have stimulated an appetite for it in Quebec. So what say you: which wine to pair with IKEA meatballs? A little Cheval Blanc? Or is it…impossible?!?