Making Dinner Fit the Wine
Sometimes the food you’re planning to eat doesn’t fit the wine you want to drink. So you can tweak the ingredients a bit to fit. That’s what happened when I had scallops the other night. I’d planned to have them cooked in garlic butter. But I wasn’t feeling a buttery white at the time, so I changed the sauce. Wanting to have a rustic red, I made a sauce of fresh tomatoes cooked in chicken stock and truffle oil with a splash of cream.
The wine came from a trip to Livermore last summer: the 2002 Murrieta’s Well Zarzuela. I seem to recall that winery being my first and favorite visit of the day. Zarzuela means ‘operatta’ in Spanish, or a romantic musical. Just as a musical makes use of different voices and sounds, this wine is comprised of different grapes, each aged separately in oak for about 20 months before being blended. Listed at $30 at the winery, it’s made from 65% Tempranillo, 26% Touriga Nacional, and 9% Souzao (which I was not familiar with but just read is a “black grape variety planted in Portugal’s Douro valley, where it is regarded as a useful, if slightly rustic, ingredient in Port for its color and obvious fruit character in youth” source:Oxford Companion to Wine).
This wine smelled of nutmeg, blackberry, and earth. When I tasted it, I found red peppercorns, chocolate, and cherry. It was nice pairing for the scallops in their hearty sauce, and the slight hints at sweetness highlighted that in the roasted corn. Definitely a wine I’d buy again, though it might mean making another trip over to Livermore.
2002 Murrieta’s Well Zarzuela, Livermore, wine pairing for scallops, Murrieta’s Well
….Farley Walker
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