If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

The selection of appropriate food and wine pairings was at one point an art practiced only by the gourmand, the Maitre d’ or the sommelier at your favorite expensive restaurant. Today the choices of wine in the grocery and wine stores across the world are incredible. It is in fact possible to make food and wine pairings using almost any good quality wine and well prepared food. However, many folks still regard it as important to only combine appropriate wines with certain foods.

Food Selections With Red Wine

Red Fruit Wines is said to enhance the flavors of the food and in most cases provide a set of supporting not overpowering tastes to your meal. Red wines are described in terms of body, depth of color, smoothness and mix of tastes and tannins. Cabernets and merlots are red wines that should not bite when they go down and should be soothing to the palette. It is for these reasons that the traditionalists favored food and wine pairings that combined these red wines with red meats such as beef, and exotics such as ostrich and emus. Other red wines that are usually paired in this way are varietals from Spain, such as the Rioja and the red Bordeaux’s from France and some of the Tignanellos from the Tuscany region in Italy. Of course not all red wines should be thought of in this way.

There are many red wines today that are more sweet or lighter in nature. Food and wine pairings for Texas red, Beaujolais Nouveau or a Valpolicella can be extended to almost anything you eat. These wines are often drunk a little chilled and can add to any meal. Roses can also be included in this category and outstanding food and wine pairings with a good Rose are easy.

The other most frequently drunk red Fruit Wine in Italy is the Chianti. It has been said that the right Chianti can be paired with almost any food and it is truly hard to argue that there is food and wine pairing that is wrong for good Chianti. However, there should be a warning on the label, bad Chianti ranks among the worst things anyone can imbibe. If you are serving up a grand meal make sure that you choose a good Chianti or the occasion will be a real disaster.

Food Selections With White Wine

Food and wine pairings for white wines and Liqueurs are traditionally very broad. Often lighter and crisper in taste many white wines can be used at all stages of a meal, depending on your palette and taste. Common main course food and wine pairings for white wine include Chardonnays with fish, poultry and roast pork. As deserts are offered sweeter desert wines such as a Sauterne may be offered. In fact, as with red wines there are perhaps no food and wine pairings that are bad if good choices are made. Wines such as Fume Blanc, or Cabernet Blanc or even a good Chablis or German wine can be served with any food. Who is to say what is right and wrong, as long as the particular food and wine pairing provides a pleasant eating experience.

Perhaps the most well known of all Italian wines is the Chianti. A wine tour in Tuscany will typically focus on that kind of wine. Therefore, in Tuscany most tours center on Florence with the result being a typical day or evening long wine tour in Tuscany. When selecting your particular tour there are two primary considerations, the first is cost and logistics, the second are the vineyards that you will be visiting.

A Tuscany wine tour typically starts around nine in the morning and ends around six in the evening. Also, the preferred ones include lunch in a unique setting as well. The prices of these tours can start at two hundred Euros and go up from there, and this price is simply for the mini-van and guide. The primary form of transportation for tours in Europe is the European styled mini-van. The more folks in the van the less expensive the tour will be on a per person basis. Some of the even better tours may actually include lunch and the wine as part of the fee. There are also evening Citrus Wine tours in Tuscany. The events of wine tasting and dinner are spectacularly merged with dinner facing the vineyard. These occasions are extremely memorable for the guests attending the dinner. Of course there are all forms of wine tours in Tuscany available and may include chauffeured limousines and individualized service. The choice is, of course, all dependent on your needs and budget. The second component of the decision is the vineyard and the wine.

The Perfect Chianti

The resulting Fruit Wines from the fermented grapes of the sangiovese vines in the region between Florence and Siena in central Italy are known as Chiantis. These are the primary target of the wine tour in Tuscany, though other wines might be thrown into the mix. Cabernet Sauvignon may be added to the base wine to provide additional robustness and body to the Chianti. Regardless of the form of grape, the color of the grape in Tuscany should be red, with but one or two white exceptional wines only. When selecting your tour check out the vineyard, consider its age and the size and the forms of wine being produced. The last thought on selecting your wine tour in Tuscany is the area. Depending on the time of year you arrive the scenery will vary from exciting to breathtaking as the combination of rolling hills, verdant green and purple colors dazzle your mind.

Preparing To Take The Tour

A Fruit Wine tour in Tuscany should be fun, so prepare appropriately, and don’t let the occasion get you. If it is a day tour make sure you are prepared for a little hiking. If the tour is in the evening make sure you are dressed as the brochure indicates and make sure that you heed the drivers timelines or you may end up in the Tuscany hills all alone.

Box wine is Fruit Wine that is packaged in a bag, which is typically made of aluminum, and which is protected by a box, which is usually made of standard corrugated cardboard. There are many advantages to box wine, such as the fact that it the packaging method itself is arguably superior to other methods.

Therefore not only is the box wine easier and safer to transport around, but as well it preserves the wine better and thus allows it to age to perfection, without any unnecessary oxygen being able to seep in and tamper with the flavor of the wine.

As well there is the fact that box wine is not subject to cork taint or spoilage, even after you have actually opened the wine. There is also a much greater efficiency of storage and in particular an elimination of the risk of breakage incurred by transporting wine in bottles.

Just as there are advantages to the box Citrus Wine however there are disadvantages as well, such as the fact that the bag used in this method is not hermetically sealed, and so because of this it has an unopened shelf life that is much shorter than most other types of wines. The box wines are also labeled by many wine connoisseurs as being ‘cheap’ wines, as they claim that the wine simply does not have the authentically aged taste and depth that other wines do.

Where to buy

If you are interested in purchasing box Fruit Wines, you can generally find at least a remote selection at any wine or liquor store near you, however if you have no luck here then you are going to want to locate a specialty wine store in your localized area. There are also various companies available online that you can order from, and because the box wines are easy to transport, you are really able to order wine from anywhere in the world.

The best idea is to have a selection of both box and bottle wines, so that you can have more of a variety, but you do have to remember that because box wines have a shorter life span they are going to need to be opened and drank before the others. As long as you do not drink these wines after the due date specified then you will be fine.

You also want to remember that your options are much more limited when it comes to the boxed wines, because they are fermented and stored differently than bottled wines and so there is not as much variety to choose from.

In the technologically advanced world of today, there is basically nothing that you can’t do online, and this includes buying wine and Low Alcohol Wine. The option to buy wine online is actually one that has become incredibly popular over the years, as it is much more convenient and less time consuming than actually going out to the liquor store to make the purchase.

When you buy wine online you are able to get a review and detailed list of information regarding each type of wine, thus allowing you to make the most informed and knowledgeable decision that you possibly can. When you buy wine online you also have much more selection and even often times a better price.

Where to Shop

If you are interested in this and want to buy wine online, then there are a few sites in particular you should know about. Wine Web is one great option in particular, being an electronic marketplace for wine which provides information on wineries and wine to their customers so that they can research and buy their wine online.

They also maintain the largest and most varied directory of wineries from all over the world, which currently falls in at over 34,000 wineries. They also provide several different methods of searching for wines and wineries, in order to make it as easy and convenient for you as possible.

Another great site where you can go to buy wine and Liqueurs online is the Wine Chateau. They are a wine company that offers a half century of experience, and whose mission is to be able to provide their customers with a high level of excellence and low prices on all of their offered products.

They are constantly striving to enhance their customers’ wine drinking experiences, and they do this by offering one of the largest and most vast selections of wines from around the world. They have more than 12,000 domestic and imported premium wines for you to choose from, and if there is a particular wine that you are looking for but cannot find, then you can contact them and they will typically be able to order it in for you.

The most important thing is to realize that you have plenty of choice, and when you buy your Fruit Wines online you are able to get the information and selection that you want, all at a great price and with that added bit of convenience because you do not even have to leave the comfort of your own home.

Alright … so the cherries are clean and have been stoned/pitted therefore it is now time to press the fruit so that we can separate the juice from the pulp.

Now, I can tell you that for my first few batches of fruit wine I wanted to go a bit on the “cheap” so I used a potato masher to press the fruit. While this certainly works I can tell you that it really sucks doing it as you have to put a lot of muscle into it and you are left thinking that there must be a better way of doing this … and there is!

For our batch of cherry wine I decided to rent a ratchet grape/fruit press from one of our local wine making shops and it cost us $10 a day.

You might be able to find something similar on eBay or at a garage sale for under $100 but if you’re planning on buying a new press expect to spend over $250. Here’s a website I found that carries this model and several others www.homebrewit.com/aisle/1150.

Note that the press is a heavy bugger so we decided to press our grapes outside. This also made it easy for us to hose it down before and after we used it.

Here are the steps we followed to press our cherries:

Step 1 - Put the cherries in the press & place a clean bowl by the spout

Step 2 - Add the pressing blocks

Step 3 - Add the ratchet arm and press away until no more juice comes out

Step 4 - Transfer your juice to a clean stainless steel pot

Step 5 - Transfer cherry pulp to a straining bag (tie a knot at the top)

Step 6 - Bring your cherry juice to a boil but remove immediately from heat. This will help kill any bacteria or bugs that might be in the press.

Et voila! You now have the main ingredient for your cherry wine!

You will of course want to rinse your fruit press at this point and return it to your local wine supply store (if you rented it).

Fruit Pressing Tips:

1. Rent The Right Tools: Using a fruit press made this part of the process so much easier. If you are going to be a casual wine maker and have access to a grape/fruit press at your local wine supply store then rent it - don’t buy it (unless you have a hole burning in your pocket). The store we rented it from also wasn’t in a hurry to get it back so gave us a few extra days before we had to return it.
2. Have Help: I was happy to have my wife Michelle help me with this as there was a lot going on here, whether it be taking turns ratcheting the press, having someone ready to dump the juice if the bowl got too full to helping move the equipment around (note that the press was very heavy). She also seemed to be happy to get her hands in there and fill the straining bag with the cherry pulp.
3. Keeping Your Juice Clean: Your fruit press will undoubtedly be something that sits in the corner gathering dust between uses. This part of the process won’t exactly be clean so all you have to do is hose the press down before you use it knowing that your juice will most likely have some bugs in it. This is why we heated the juice to a boil then immediately took it off the heat. We didn’t want to burn the juice or reduce the amount of liquid in it - just enough heat to kill as much of bugs in it that should be in there. Adding a Camden tablet in our next step will also help kill any bacteria or bugs as well.

Up Next:

Stay tuned as next week we look at the recipe itself. Time to get fermenting and turning the juice into wine!

Enjoy and if you haven’t already please join in the discussion by becoming a member of our Cherry Wine Project community by going to http://thecherrywineproject.ning.com/

- Scott “The Wine Making Guy”

P.S. I recently met a fellow Canadian by the name of Dominic Rivard who has been in the wine industry for over 15 years. His main passion is fruit wine and is in fact a founding director of the Fruit Wines of Canada Association.

He has written an excellent fruit wine book called “The Ultimate Fruit Wine Guide” that you might consider having a look at.

He has also recently joined The Cherry Wine Project Community and I’m sure would love to hear from you!

For a lot of people summertime means grilling. However, just because you are grilling does not mean that you have to forgo some great wine. This is especially important since grapes are able to trigger almost all 150 of our flavor sensations.

Matching Summer Wine With The Food You Grill

It is an art to be able to match Fruit Wine with food. Thankfully there are some reliable guidelines that you can use to make things go better for you. For instance if you have strong tasting, hard chewing foods, you will want to have a full bodied wine such as Malvasia or California Chardonnay. On the other hand you will want a sweet wine for a sweet desert. Fatty foods go well with Rieslings, Sauvignon Blancs and most sparkling wine. Protein-rich dishes go well with Cabernets and Syrah.

In the summer we tend to grill some special foods though and special foods require special summer wine.

For instance if you are making shrimp skewers you will want to serve Pinot Grigio, which is light, crisp and fruity. This summer wine has mild flavors of citrus and peaches.

If you are making chicken you will want to use Shiraz because it is soft, rich and has red berry flavors that go well regardless of how you spice your chicken. On the other hand, if you are grilling turkey breast you should serve Chardonnay to really bring out the grilling flavors.

Barbecued ribs are also great in the summertime. The best summer wine to serve here is Syrah because it is rich and spicy due to it having been made with black plums.

For grilled pork chops you will want to serve Riesling. This is a soft and lightly sweet Citrus Wine that has golden apple and peach flavors with just a hint of citrus.

New York strip steaks are very popular on the grill in the summer. A nice summer wine to go with these steaks is Cabernet Sauvignon. This is a black cherry fruit wine.

If you are going to cook salmon, then you should serve a fruity summer wine. Some good choices would be Grenache, Mourvdre, Syrah or Zinfandel.

For those of you who want to get really fancy and grill up some peaches, pears, pineapples or bananas brushed with oil and then caramelization on your grill, you will be serving up a very memorable treat of Liqueurs.

One of the things I love about helping people with their wine making is hearing about all of the crazy things people make wine out of! I guess I’m a “traditionalist” though as I typically make wine from wine kits and fresh fruit.

For example, I currently have the following wine kits from Winexperts on the go:

1. Piesporter (Vintner’s Reserve)
2. Pinot Noir (Vintner’s Reserve)
3. Napa Valley Stag’s Leap District Merlot (Estate Series)(my wife and I are big fans of Stag’s Leap Artemis, which is a Cabernet Sauvignon so we thought this kit would be interesting to try - cost us $150 though so BETTER be good … ).You can view the PDF for this one by clicking here.
4. Chocolate Raspberry Port (Limited Edition)(one of my readers has made this kit as well and said it was a big hit at Christmas)

On the fruit side I currently have on the go:

1. Blueberry Wine
2. Crabapple Wine

I have also completed a batch of Canadian Wheat Ale, which is quite tasty (need to tone down the carbonation though) and have a Mexican style beer waiting for it’s turn as well.

So needless to say, our house has been a perpetual “fermentation zone” for quite some time now.

In any event, I figured the wines that I make are pretty much what everyone else makes and man was I wrong!

In fact, it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I discovered that people actually make wine out of “non-grape” fruit as well. My ski patrol friend Brian, for example, loves making wine from rhubarb, choke cherries and raspberries and this is mainly because he both loves the wine he can produce and he gets his fruit for free (not a bad deal).

Then there were the wines made from fruits I’ve never heard of including:

1. Pomerac
2. Otaheite Apple (Pomarosa, Malacca Apple, Plum Rose)
3. Samarangense

Next, there was Rob who emailed me today and mentioned that he was making wine from Ribena. Well … I guess all you need is sugar right?

There’s Peter from the UK who loves to make wine from Beetroot (claims it went over quite nicely).

>> By the way, he sent me the recipe if you’d like it. You can contact me by going to www.AllWineMaking.com/Contactus.html

Then there’s Ian (also from the UK) who I think gets the award for pushing the wine making limits with his wine made from:

1. Tomatoes
2. Coconuts (ok … this one doesn’t sound toooo bad)
3. Sycamore (maple)
4. Prawns (yes … that’s right … prawns … as in … shrimp)

Don’t believe me that you can make wine from prawns? Here’s Ian’s recipe and I double dare ya to try it!

“You have to cook and blend 1lb of prawns in with flour, I found that half a banana helped with them . Get it to room temperature, add 2 lbs of sugar, leave them for a few days and then add the yeast. ” -> He did admit though that it took him a few tries to “get it just right”

I could go on with a bunch more entertaining wine recipes that I’ve heard but I’ll spare you the details.

It goes to show you though that once you feel you have your wine making skills honed and under control that you shouldn’t just limit yourself to just one style of wine as you never know what new and exciting flavours are waiting for you just around the corner.

It’s just a matter of getting out of your comfort zone and trying something completely different.

Now get out there and make some wine damn it!

To your wine making,

Scott
www.AllWineMaking.com