Tag Archives: Prosecco

Drinking Your Way Through Philly Wine Week

NAVIGATOR
If you have in mind a bunch of snobbish dinners, you’re in for an abrupt, and probably life-altering, awakening.

By Scott Edwards

 

When Philly Wine Week debuted back in 2014, the goal was elemental: to throw some attention on the city’s budding, but small, wine community—the shops, the bars, the makers. But as the industry itself has evolved over the last three years—winemakers growing younger, their products more unconventional—we, the audience, have become the target. Trend-happy as we are, a lot of us are still harboring a grudge against wine for being too uptight. We’ll drink it at dinner with the in-laws, but it’s rare that we’ll tote a Spanish sparkler to the beach, or even into the backyard. If we even know what a Spanish sparkler is.

Philly Wine Week

Much like your OS, wine has become much more user-friendly in recent years. This is the opportunity to fast-track your re-education. Pictured, from above: PWW hosts Panorama and The Good King Tavern’s Chloe Grigri.

“All of us at Philly Wine Week (PWW) are looking to change the perception of wine as something complicated, stuffy and only to be enjoyed on special occasions. And what better place to show how unfussy something is than our very own city, where keeping things casual and unpretentious is the way of life,” says Kate Moroney Miller, a PWW co-founder.

How that’ll be accomplished is through a wide range of tastings—more than 70 participants, the largest pool yet, are collaborating on over 100 events—that’ll be offering something, in most cases, a few degrees from what you’re familiar with. The hope is that you’ll get drunk along the way (unofficially) and discover a few new go-tos that go down easy with every occasion, including the complete lack thereof.

This year’s installment opens next Sunday, March 19, with the signature kickoff party, Opening Corks, at the Academy of Natural Sciences. (General admission tickets are $65.) In keeping with the aforementioned intent, the party’s designed to conjure a rather abrupt awakening by way of a sensory overload—a hundred-plus varieties flowing through halls populated by a T-rex and butterflies.

If you haven’t broken through your two-glasses-of-Malbec-then-off-to-bed regimen by the end of the night, there will be plenty of other opportunities to wear down your resolve over the coming days. (Still, ease up a bit on the reins.)

The next night, head over to Kensington Quarters for the pay-as-you-go Lambrusco Festival, at which bartenders will be pouring various kinds of the Italian sparkler and an impressive roster of guest chefs—Jesse Ito (Royal Sushi and Izakaya), Sam Jacobson (Stargazy), Steve Forte (Town Hall Provisions), among a slew of others—will be pairing dishes with them all night long.

Tuesday night brings perspective. Vintage will be hosting Think Inside the Box, a blind tasting to test your ability to decipher boxed and bottled wines. Think all boxed wines taste the same (cheap)? You’re a varietal-ist. And you clearly haven’t drunk from one since your sorority mixer. It’s time to cast your ignorance aside and have your mind blown. (After this, it’s on to cans. Yes, cans.)

Come Thursday, you may be confused, but it’s only the fast-track to awareness. Time to step in for an at-bat in the big leagues. Osteria is offering the chance to experience one of the great perks in a day in the life of a sommelier: the trade testing. You’ll be sampling wines from Italy, schmoozed by distributors and brand ambassadors as you go. Your goal for the night: Figure out how to decipher Prosecco from Lambrusco. (More on that in a moment.)

To ensure the last of your preconceptions are kicked to the curb, hit Afternoon Delights, a pastry-and-wine pairing at Jet Wine Bar Saturday afternoon. The wines have been selected because they’re especially conducive to day-drinking. That’s right; you can drink the stuff in broad daylight too. And not out of a paper bag. Then, Sunday, Barbuzzo’s hosting a brunch, its first, featuring wine-based cocktails, Calabrian and Sicilian wines and Italian sparkling wines (which you should be on intimate terms with by now) paired with Italian-inspired dishes.

Two serious bouts of day-drinking seem a fitting way to close out the week.

(*For a complete list of the tens and tens of events not mentioned here, including access to tickets, go here.)

Photos courtesy (from the top) Philly Wine Week, Panorama, The Good King Tavern

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The New Rules of Cooking with Wine

DIY

They’re really more of an update than a total departure, but they’re still going to turn up the flavor on your favorite dishes.

By Kendra Lee Thatcher

Rules provide us with fundamental foundations. But that doesn’t mean they’re untouchable. Everything’s worth a second look. It’s part of evolution. I especially love heading into my kitchen and challenging the establishment. It’s less about how I can do it better and more about how I can do it differently, because cooking is a study in nuance. The same recipe altered by a degree or two will yield completely different flavors.

Here in the heart of braising and stew season, I got to thinking about cooking with wine. Winemaking is progressing by great leaps and bounds. Yet, we’re still cooking with wine in a lot of the same ways that Julia Child taught us (use the cheap stuff, apply liberally). I decided to experiment with coq au vin, and what I found is that some small changes yield big flavor.

What follows are a couple of the more critical lessons I learned that afternoon. I’ve since applied them to scampi, risotto, even baking, all with crowd-pleasing results.

Cook like you drink
We’re finally catching up to the fact that freshness matters. Veggies from the farmers market taste better than veggies plucked from the produce aisle. So why, then, would you dump a $7-bottle of Yellow Tail into the pot? The point of the wine is to coax even more complexity from those delicate flavors. But a cheap wine is only going to drown them.

A better-quality wine usually means less sugar and artificial tampering, which translates to more pronounced flavors and textures. And all of that will come through in the cooking. Basically, stop thinking in terms of wine that you drink and wine that you cook with. You’ve honed your standards with the former. It’s time now to do it with the latter.

And drink what you cook with
In that vein, serve the rest of that bottle with dinner. And have more of it waiting in the wings. The pairing will add a whole new dimension to the wine. Waves of cassis and tobacco were suddenly coming through the burgundy I used in the coq au vin. As prominent and pleasant as they were, they spilled down my throat unnoticed before.

Be bold, not reckless
Once you get a couple of successful meals beneath you, resist the urge to take bigger risks. The idea here is to update a few rules, not rewrite them entirely. Think changes by degrees, not by miles. I swapped the traditional Chianti in my grandmother’s Sunday gravy with Lambrusco. I made scallops and scampi with Prosecco. And I marinated pork in sake. Treat the wine as you would any other ingredient in the dish. Consider its flavor profile and the dish’s before cooking anything. If they seem like they’d marry well, go for it. If it requires too much blind faith, move on.

Respect the one hard and fast rule
Unless you’re making a crockpot meal where everything goes in together, take the time to layer your flavors. When you let the wine mingle with the other ingredients before you start introducing stocks and the like, you’re giving the alcohol a chance to cook off. And that’s a good thing because the wine’s flavor profile will then meld with the dish. Rush it, and no matter how good the wine, all you’re really going to get is the alcohol.

There’s nothing new here, but it’s worth mentioning because it’s a technique that too many of us gloss over. I wouldn’t want you to try this on your own, only to rush the wine and think that’s nothing’s changed.

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