Dr Vino's wine blog

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

One dish that we have been making and enjoying this summer is chilled cucumber soup. We’ve used the recipe from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything (buy on amazon), which calls for stock, sauteed shallots and heavy cream to enliven the cucumbers. We replaced the suggested dill with mint, which works well. (Even though we didn’t grow our own cucumbers, we did grow our own mint–long live container gardening!)

So before the summer weather escapes us and our dining is driven indoors, which wine would you pair with cucumber soup? Or is it…impossible?!?

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It’s that time of year when millions of Americans gather around campfires, saying “I hate white rabbits” as they try to get out of the smoke. Of course, once positioned upwind, thoughts inevitably turn to…S’mores! Yes, what would summer be like without a booster shot of high fructose corn syrup in the form of graham crackers sandwiching molten marshmallows with a slab of Hershey’s chocolate?

And a wine lover’s thoughts might also drift to an inevitable pairing with wine! Which wine goes with smores? Or are they…impossible?!?

(As an aside, above you can see my s’mores technique of trying to melt the chocolate on a rock close to the fire. Didn’t work so well. Hit the comments with your preferred technique and/or ingredients.)

Soon enough, and barring a worsening of the blight, ripe local tomatoes will be flooding greenmarkets around the country–if they aren’t already. Which always puts me in the mood for gazpacho!

So easy to make and so fresh: Some tomatoes, a cucumber, a little red onion, a garlic clove, some vinegar…Mmm!

But tomatoes have high acidity and vinegar is wine gone bad, which is always hard to pair with good wine.

Which wine would you pair with a bowl of gazpacho? Or is it…impossible?!?

We love our impossible food-wine pairings around here. While we don’t always agree on what works, we do know what works individually, almost intuitively.

Now a sommelier is trying to break food-wine pairing down to a molecular level. According to a story in yesterday’s Globe and Mail, François Chartier is making the “corkscrew counterpart of molecular gastronomy.” His new book, Papilles et molécules (Tastebuds and Molecules) is apparently selling like hotcakes that have been reduced to a mere powder and then reconstituted as foam.

Many of the pairings reaffirm the classics such as oysters with muscadet and sauternes with foie gras, so score one for intuition.

But others defy conventional wisdom. To the tape:

Perhaps Mr. Chartier’s most controversial recommendation is high-alcohol wines with spicy foods. Conventional thinking in wine-nerd circles has long been that alcohol fuels the fire. But Mr. Chartier says it’s simply not true. For what it’s worth, I think he’s right; try spicy Thai dishes with high-alcohol gewurztraminer from Alsace or red zinfandel from California and be amazed by the synergy.

What do you think, a little ripasso with your Thai red curry? Zinfandel and chicken jalfrezi? Personally, I’m inclined toward a Mosel Riesling. But I’ll try anything once!

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?