A Hundred Years of Wine

Picture this: you’re in a dark, musty, dirt-floored wine cellar, surrounded by bottles of all shapes and sizes, covered in dust and cobwebs. You light the candle in your rat de cave and scrape away the dust to begin examining the labels. Your heart beats faster and faster as you discover Château Pétrus 1896; Laffitte Rothschild 1932; Dom Pérignon 1767…

Scrrrrrrrrrratch! Think again! This is real life and welcome back to the real world 🙂

However, my husband recently did dig out some old sweet white wines from the back of the wine cupboard and we decided we ought to drink them before they got too old. By too old I really mean before they go off; our wine budget does not stretch far enough for wines that will keep for centuries! We’re talking ten, maybe twenty years here, which isn’t that bad by a long shot. But as John kept finding more bottles of older and older wines – several going back to the last century – we realised we would need some help to drink them. (Life’s rough, isn’t it?) We’d just have to have some friends to the house to enjoy them with us over dinner. As I said John mostly found old bottles of sweet white wines so to balance out the offering we asked our friends to bring along a different bottle of wine from the 20^th century, and thus the dinner became The Last Century Wines Dinner.

Our request resulted in a stellar wine list, for which we then put on our thinking caps, got out our books and did some internet searching and came up with these pairings:

John and I did all the cooking with the help of course of my trusty Thermomix, which I used for around 20 different processes, including:

1. Grating Parmesan for the sablés (shortbread)
2. Making the savoury pepper and parmesan shortbread
3. Gently shredding slow-cooked duck meat (on reverse blade direction; this works incredibly well and is so much easier than doing it with two forks or with your hands!)
4. Making orange jelly by heating orange juice and dissolving gelatine into it
5. Chopping shallots
6. Chopping garlic
7. Reducing red wine and port with thyme and shallots
8. Cooking chicken livers
9. Melting butter
10. Blending the chicken liver pâté
11. Grinding curry spices
12. Grinding almonds
13. Beating egg whites
14. Blending the gazpacho
15. Chopping lemon grass, herbs and spices
16. Chopping, cooking and puréeing parsnips
17. Reducing stock, cherry syrup and red wine for sauce
18. Making bread
19. Making sorbet
20. Whipping cream
21. Melting white chocolate
22. Making shortbread
23. Making chocolate ganache
24. Grating white chocolate

I should mention that some of the cooking had been done a couple of days earlier by Chef James Knight Pacheco of The Restaurant and Out of the Frying Pan fame during a cookoff at UK Thermomix headquarters. James is responsible for the starter of “Duck Food à l’orange” which he originally created for the UK Thermomix Demonstrators’ Conference in May. That meal and our starter are surely a portend of good things to come at James’ new venture, Assemblage Restaurant, opening in November 2011 in the Shoreditch section of East London.

The highlight of our meal was the slow-cooked filet mignon of venison with its superb Visciole a mollo cherry sauce. Absolutely smashing! Visciole a mollo cherries are small, tart cherries from the Le Marche region of Italy, and I had a jar of them in syrup. [Note to Supercherry UK: get the boys in Italy to remove the stones!] To make my sauce I reduced some chicken stock in the Thermomix on Varoma setting, added shallot, garlic and the Visciole a mollo cherries with their syrup. A good dash of red wine later and a knob of butter and voilà ! A fantastic taste to enhance the venison.

Bon appétit !

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