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February 2009 - Wine Labels

A Wine Labels Artilce for Your Viewing

A Guide to Cooking with Wine

Don't just sip it, eat it!

Want to enhance and improve the taste of your favorite dish? Think that adding wine to your recipe will make it more scrumptious and mouth watering? Well then, you're absolutely right!

Wines are widely used in the cooking world because they intensify taste and zest. They are also capable of releasing flavors from food that are not possible by regular means of cooking.

The main question you must have now is this: What type of wine goes with what type of food?

You have red wines, white wine, sparkly champagne, sherry etc. You have grape vine types like merlot, Sauvignon Blanc, zinfandel, syrah, and Riesling. With the wide variety of them available, picking a wine is pretty tricky. The secret here is to know what combinations are used by professionals.

1. Red Wine

There used to be a rule in cooking that "red wine goes with red meat, white wine with white meat". Although it's not really true anymore, most chefs still go with that.

- For red meat, young and full bodied red wines are recommended. Try going for Zinfandel Red or Merlot.
- For red sauces, robust, full bodied wines are best. Make pasta, pizza or other tomato-sauce based dishes with it.
- Using root veggies with beef stock? You might want to look for an earth red, full bodied wine. The color it imparts to the meat makes it all the more wonderful.

2. White Wine

Cream based sauces, butter and herbs. Yum. White wine is usually used with white meat and best for light colored dishes.

- If you fancy a zesty dish, add some sparkling champagne.
- For chicken, pork or veal, try cooking with white wine. Spice up your grilled chicken by mixing dry, white wine with butter as the sauce.
- Crisp, dry white wines are ideal for seafood soup and shellfish dishes. Bouillabaisse, anyone?
- Leftover sweet white wine in your fridge? Why make delicious, delectable desserts? Whip up some Bavarian cream.

3. Fortified wine

Fortified wines are what they are: fortified. Additional neutral alcohol is added to them. Then they are aged for a long time. Examples are sherry, port and vermouth.

- Sherry is great for poultry meat and vegetables soups.
- For sweet, fruity dishes or desserts, splash some port or vermouth. Your dry vermouth can also be a good substitute for white wine.

4. Cooking wine

Cooking wines are relatively less pricey wines that use salt as a preservative. They can be found in supermarkets and groceries. Most professional chefs disdain the use of cooking wines because the salt content is hard to work with. You may need to adjust your recipe to work with the saltiness.

5. Exotic wines

Cooking is an experiment. If you're feeling bold and daring, you could try cooking with exotic wines. Asian wines are popular choices for an all together different meal. There is the sake, bekseju and seol joong mae.

- Sake is a rice based wine from Japan. Although it's mainly a beverage, it is popular as an additive to many Japanese dishes.

- Beksuju is a Korean wine made from raw rice and herbs. It can be used in vegetable dishes to increase the 'herbal' feel. Seol Joong Mae, a fruit wine made from plum, can be used for desserts and fruity dishes.

I hope that clears up some of your confusion. With that said, here are some few reminders for the novice cook:

- Cook only with wine that you would drink. There is no sense in cooking something that you wouldn't want to taste.
- There are a lot of good, quality yet inexpensive wines out there. Don't get too carried away and buy something that's way off your budget.
- Don't cook using aluminum or cast iron cookware. Alcohol is reactive with these materials and could cause harm to your dish.
- After adding your wine, try to wait for 5-10 minutes before tasting it. Wine needs to simmer for a while before it can impart flavor to your food.
- Got some left over wine? Put them in your ice cube tray and freeze them. This makes them good for future use.

Get your favorite recipe, pick a wine and start cooking!

About the Author

Lee Dobbins, an avid wine drinker, writes for http://wine.leisure-webzone.com where you can learn more about wine and when to use it properly.

Short Review on Wine Labels

A Guide to Cooking with Wine

Don't just sip it, eat it!
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Posted by Patrick Ramsey | 0 comments

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Communication is needed in all walks of life. This is the reason for us to write this article on Beginner Wine ; to communicate it's meaning to everyone.

A Beginner Wine Artilce for Your Viewing

Buying French Wine

The French wine industry, as well as the rest of Europe is in a bit of a spin. Over production, together with a drop in consumption, has lead to millions of litres of French wine and others, being turned into alcohol or vinegar and vines being grubbed up

Not only that, but we are being flooded by wine from the USA, South America, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand plus the stuff from the new EU members from the Eastern Bloc. If that is not enough, India is starting to expand it?s small but long established wineries.

It has been said that the French wine producers have, to some extent, brought this problem on themselves as they were resistant to change when it came to marketing their wine, preferring to remain with their traditional labels on the bottles which featured the appellation and vineyard, rather than promoting the grapes used.

This new method has been used to great effect by the rest of the world, aided and abetted by the supermarket chains, where the knowledge of the products they are selling is pretty sketchy on the shop floor.

Although the new producers are making some very good vintage type wine, so good that they are beating the French at their own game, their first concern is for a product that is consistent from year to year and so there are vast swathes of vines being used. That is the problem, the whole magic and mystery of wine making and drinking is being sanitised for supermarket profits by the big multinational companies.

Just as the artisan butchers, bakers and the rest have been marginalised by the stack?em up and sell?em cheap, so the winemakers are going, some might say have already gone, the same way. Just look along any supermarket shelf and you will see rows of Cabinet Sauvignon, Cabernet Merlot, Chardonay etc., coming from the USA, Australia, Chile, Roumania, et al., and a couple of the most well known areas such as Bordeaux, Rioja, Frascati, Chianti, Etc..

Even the large off-licence chains are playing the same game because they are staffed by low paid workers whose knowledge of wine is woefully thin.

The only place to go is to specialist wine shops but the trouble there is that they will be concentrating on the pricier end of the market, that said, they may have some interesting wine that won?t break the bank, although it probably won?t be as cheap as the supermarket. What you loose in the financial swings you more than make up on the knowledge roundabout. In the main, these people are passionate about wine and will be able to give you expert advice. If you become a regular customer, you should get invited to wine tasting sessions, which is the best way to understand the differences in the wide variety of grapes and winemaking.

There is always the internet where buying wine is a click away and there are many different wines available often with tasting notes and personal revues. The latter is the key to buying on line although somewhat time consuming. Check through the reviews and see who is posting reviews and if they are good or bad. You will need a degree of faith as you cannot be sure that it is not the proprietors? brother or wife writing the review.

Start with the cheapest wine and get a selection covering a few people, then when the wine arrives do a tasting and see how much you agree or disagree with the review. Don?t forget to make notes as you will need to refer back at a later date. Don?t just take one wine as a comparison, but rather use a selection so that you can build a profile of those reviewers that you can trust and whose taste in wine matches yours. Then you will be able to buy on line with a reasonable certainty that if you buy the same wines, you will not be disappointed.

The absolutely best way to buy French wine, or indeed any wine, is to get in a car and drive around the countryside looking at the little vineyards and tasting here and there. Take some large flagons, at least 5 or 10 litre capacity because some of those smaller places sell only to the locals who bring there own containers.

The joy of finding a great little French wine from a farm house tucked away out of sight, talking to ?Le Patron? about how it was made, what the year had been like etc is one of the best you can get.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ian Richards webmaster of yourpower2be.com the on line women?s? resource centre that is the first place to visit, you will find beauty tips, health information, shopping to die for, make up, holidays and travel, recipes, information on pets and gardening, weddings, and a whole lot more. http://www.yourpower2be.com http://www.foodwizard.yourpower2be.com

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