The rise of my deep interest in wine coincides with the timing of my full-time assignment a year and a half ago as a junior lawyer to a monstrously large, multi-party, out-of-town file. There is something about toiling in obscurity and giving birth to legal arguments that never live to see the light of day that makes one dream of simpler pleasures. It’s no wonder then that around this time last year, I laid down some bottles of wine to age and dreamed that by the time they were ready for drinking, I might once again be able to breathe the air of a free man.
That time has flown, and the end is not in sight, but I must say that autumn is a good time for a lover of wine. The falling leaves and nippier weather calls for heartier food and rich, interesting wines to match. So it’s time to crack into the Short Cellar.
Upon my return from the airport last Friday, my girlfriend and I decided to try a meal from a new recipe book by Evan and Joyce Goldstein, Perfect Pairings. At the heart of this excellent book is the simple truism that a love of wine is really a love of food plus wine. The wine critic Billy Munnely likes to say that “wine pleasure has as much to do with what’s in your head as what’s in your glass.” Too true – but as the second U.S. president observed, a well-pleasured belly is the best way to ensure a happy state of mind. To speak from personal experience, I have found that a mouthful of duck confit or roast lamb is pretty much consciousness expanding, and gives me more than an open mind to consider the unique merits of any wine from the homeliest drinkbox to the finest bottle on offer.
The Goldstein’s recipe for salmon baked in caramelized onions and brandy-soaked currants with cinnamon is much simpler to make than it sounds, and amounts to about as tasty a meal as I was capable of on two hours notice. The Goldsteins recommend a Gewürztraminer from Alsace, France, but I dug out a Fielding Estate 2005 Gewurztraminer (Beamsville, Ontario) that I had purchased about a year ago on a trip to this new winery. Fielding did not disappoint. The generous acidity and spicy fruit in their Gewurtz cut right through the fatty salmon and the sugar in the onions, leaving me pretty much at peace with the world for a good ten minutes or so.
What’s going into the cellar this week? I recently picked up a couple bottles of Vina Maipo 2006 Carmenere Reserva (Rapel Valley, Chile, LCBO #663047 [Ed. note: No longer available]). Carmenere is an old French grape enjoying a recrudescence in Chile, where it is made into a robust red with a lot of quality for a low price. The Vina Maipo is a splendidly decked out wine for under $14.00. It has gobs of lip-smacking yet complex tannins, and a nose that reminded me of rabbit meat in rosemary. I think I’ll cellar this one for about a year to see if the juicy and acidic high notes can find a better harmony with the smokier and earthier notes at the low end of the register. Maybe by the time this wine is ready, I will be free.
Matthew Sullivan is a lawyer with the Department of Justice in Toronto. He writes a weekly blog entry here on lawandstyle.ca. The Short Cellar column appears in the print edition of Precedent. Matthew can be reached at matthew@lawandstyle.beta-site.ca.