Dr Vino's wine blog

I recently had the excellent fish and chips at Doyle’s in Sydney. Unfortunately, I wolfed it down before snapping a pic but I found another similar one on flickr.

We haven’t done one of these “impossible” pairings for a while. What with such nontraditional calorie bombs as the bacon explosion and the oreo tower under our proverbial belts already, perhaps we should ease back into this theme with something a little, er, lighter (albeit not by much) or at least more conventional.

So have at it: which wine would you pair with fish and chips? Or is it…impossible?!?

According to a study, it’s hard to distinguish pâté from dog food when served blind.

Robin Goldstein, author of The Wine Trials and chef/owner of a fake, Wine Spectator award-winning restaurant, is the lead author on the working paper from the American Association of Wine Economists.

The researchers served pureed Newman’s Own dog food alongside duck-liver mousse, pork-liver pâté, puréed liverwurst, and Spam. Of the 18 volunteers (who are these people?), only three could correctly identify the dog food.

So the question on the minds of wine lovers–and dogs–everywhere is: which wine pairs with dog food? A Sauternes? Late-harvest Gewurztraminer? Or is it…impossible?

Over the weekend we celebrated the first birthday of the youngest member of our family. We had a few friends over and one of them brought the Layer Cake shiraz from Australia as a birthday wine (find Layer Cake). Appropriately enough, it was from his birth-year vintage of 2008! (I’ll have to remember that trick for parents of young children at their kids’ birthdays.)

I didn’t get a chance to try the inky black, 14.9% alcohol shiraz before the bottle was drained by other guests. But I did ponder for a moment the name, Layer Cake, which is the absolute antithesis of what I would think the wine is all about or what I would pair it with. Apparently, there’s also a wine called “Cupcake” that makes cabernet and chardonnay among other dry wines. Frankly, I think these names are headed down the wrong track since cakes may be fun, but they aren’t really amenable to wine pairings.

Or wait: are they? Which wine would you pair with cupcakes? Or are they…impossible?

Last Friday, there was a sleepy little site called This is why you’re fat that welcomed eight visitors. Today, the site will have over one million visitors!!

But that vertiginous traffic spike is not the only thing that will leave you feeling woozy; such dishes as the Turbaconducken (a chicken and a duck cooked inside a turkey, which is, in turn, covered in bacon), the 60-pound Rice Krispie treat, the seven pound breakfast burrito, or the meat ship (made from bacon, sausages, pastry, franks and pork mince) ought to do it as well.

There are so many things on there that are impossible to pair with wine we should really have it as the sister site to our impossible food-wine pairings! But in the spirit of Valentine’s Day, let’s just tackle a chocolate one: the mega double stuff Oreo, photographed at right. So just which wine would you pair with that blend of hydrogenated soybean oil, high fructose corn syrup, soy lecithin, and chocolate? Or is it…impossible? Or feel free to weigh in (ahem) on any of the other delicacies on the site that strikes your fancy.

The number one most emailed article right now over at the Times is entitled, “Take Bacon. Add Sausage. Blog.” It describes the improbable but wildly popular dish known as the “bacon explosion,” which consists of two pounds of bacon swaddling a “torpedo” of two pounds of Italian sausage, which wraps around a bacon core. Meat-tastic!

So what say: is this an impossible food to digest pair with wine?

Unlike our impossible food-wine pairings, pizza is one of those very possible wine pairings. But not in one country: Italy.

Jeremy Parzen pointed out this shocking claim in the comments of a recent post on his blog : “…no one pairs wine with pizza in Italy! I’m sorry, they just don’t…” He added later via email, “like Italians’ aversion to dairy and fish, or coffee and savory, the pizza/beer pairing is relatively sacred… they never pair pizza with wine… wine lists in Italian pizzerie are for tourists.” (Let’s hope they’re not pairing the lackluster Peroni with that pizza.)

Forbidden as it may be in Italy, prove the Italians wrong and tell us what is your preferred pairing for a pizza margherita? Are you in the white, light red (Barbera, Chianti), or the full-bodied (Nero d’Avola, Shiraz, Zinfandel) camp? I prefer reds with higher acidity to cut through the protein and fat of the cheese and stand up to acidity in the the tomato.

I suppose if we really wanted an impossible food-wine pairing, there’s always deep dish pizza…

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?!?!

The excellent blog The Consumerist posted yesterday about a BBC web site that converts drinks into calories and then into their food equivalents. Meg Marco, the post author, called the results “terrifying.”

I plugged two “large glasses of wine” into the calculator, which suggested 335 calories, and this is what it generated as food equivalents: a slice of pizza, an onion bhaji, and two jaffa cakes. Well, yes, I suppose that could be terrifying if I knew what two of those things were! So I ran it again and it said that it was the equivalent of a hamburger and a jaffa cake! Wow, the jaffistas really control that widget!

Clearly, there are many variations of a slice of pizza, some more caloric than others; ditto for hamburgers (sliders?). And we’ve previously discussed how the calories in a glass of wine can change too. But the basic point remains true: wine has calories and those calories can be converted into potentially terrifying food equivalents! Or they could be translated into non-terrifying food equivalents: 335 calories of granola is not going to really scare anyone.

Now that you’ve worked out of your calorie overload torpor from yesterday, it’s on to the mall! Oh wait, we’ll leave that part for you. We’re concerned about your lunch here and with it being a quasi-holiday and all, wine with lunch sounds like a great idea. So just which wine would you pair with a leftover turkey sandwich? Or is it…impossible?!?