A few days ago I wrote about a cheese and wine paring website I had discovered on the web which was both well presented and reasonably informative. Today it is the turn of a book I bought from Amazon that covers the concept of pairing different foods and discusses how various flavour combinations may or may not work together.

It is obviously true to say that there is a very close relationship between food and wine that probably goes a long way towards explaining why nearly every person that I know in the wine trade is also a quite serious ‘foodie’. Indeed, if I look at my own collection of books it is probably split 50/50 between wine and food.

This new book is quite simply named The Flavour Thesaurus (by Niki Segnit), and attempts, quite successfully, to do exactly what is says on the cover, providing an extensive reference of foods and their flavours.

By way of a first step to simplify and organise, the book starts by grouping flavours together under headings such as citrus, woodland, meaty, earthy, marine etc., (and you might not always agree with them as taste is always so subjective). One of the things that I still find the most difficult despite my many years in the wine business is trying to express different flavours and taste sensations in words, using vocabulary that people will understand. Fortunately, I was rarely writing my tasting notes for the literary masses, but usually only for my own personal reference, so if I decided to use an obscure turn of phrase I would always know exactly what it meant. For example, I would sometimes write ‘spangled fruit’ in my notes, which is a reference to the fruit spangle sweets that I used to eat as a child – it is a particular type of slightly tart, piercing, boiled sweet fruit, the important thing being that it was a description that I always understood…… sorry, I digress.

Under each food heading comes the actual pairing, where for example, black pudding might be paired with bacon or chocolate – sounds bizarre? Well, perhaps, but the thing that this book really attempts to do is to stimulate and open your mind to new and untried possibilities. Throw away the old culinary crutches of Delia Smith and Robert Carrier and enter the new and exciting world of endless flavour combinations. For instance, we have all been dazzled in recent years by the audacious food pairings of contemporary chefs such as Ferran Adrià and Heston Blumenthal, so why not buy this book and use it as your inspiration to go a bit wild in the confines of your own kitchen?!

By the way this is strictly a reference book, and so if you only like food books with lots of glossy pictures then forget it, this book is not for you!

Firstly, a very Happy New Year to all our customers, followers, readers and even casual or accidental vistors to our blog!

The turn of a new year is often used by governments around the world as the time to introduce new legislation/taxes etc., perhaps in the hope that it might be forgotten or overlooked admist all the celebration and goodwill. Of course this depends on the type of change to be introduced, as some are simply too big, or too important to be suppressed. In the UK for example, it must be the 2.5% increase in the Value Added Tax, although I’m not entirely convinced that consumers really believe that it really does “add to the value” of their purchases! Here in Spain the new law is, once again, smoking….

I say again, simply because January 2nd sees the second phase of Spain’s no smoking law coming into effect. Until now, it has been only a partial ban which had so many loopholes and grey areas that it was mostly ineffective, and seemingly rarely enforced. To be honest it was more or less a complete waste of time, and the vast majority of people treated it, quite deservedly, with almost complete contempt.

The second phase which started two days ago is a complete ban on smoking in enclosed public places (which of course includes bars and restaurants, and can therefore have a knock-on effect on our own trade). It is argued of course, that the ban will have a devastating effect on businesses, as the possible penalties are fairly hefty (on paper at least).

Minor infringement will incur fines from 30 Euros up to 600 Euros, while very serious breaches may cost up to €600,000. How many will actually receive and/or pay these fines is another matter. Only time will tell.

I ‘stumbled’ across an entertaining new website the other day, strangely named Wisconsin cheese cupid – the name alone is enough to make you curious, or perhaps that’s the idea.

Obviously you can take a look yourself, but the site is all about matching cheese and wine. Unfortunately they don’t list albariño, but they do have riesling, which is similar when it comes to paring with cheese. They recommend a dozen cheeses to go with that particular wine, including many with very strong flavours which sounds about right, but interestingly they do not include the strong goat’s cheese that many people think goes perfectly.

This actually reminds me of an amusing story from my wine buying days. I was once visiting the famous village of Chavignol in the Loire Valley of France, looking for some decent Sancerre to buy for my company – it was lunch time. Crottin de Chavignol is a well known goat’s cheese with its very own AOC, and as the name implies, can only be made in that very place. It was therefore not difficult to find a restaurant with cheese on the menu, and indeed, I actually selected one which had a special Crottin menu….

To cut a long story short, I think the only thing that didn’t include cheese were the salt and pepper pots on the table (although they may have been tainted). To be very frank it was a slight case of ‘overkill’, and in the end I was actually glad to leave and get back to some normal, non-cheese food! If it’s possible to have a goat’s cheese nightmare, then that was probably it.

Having said all that, try it with your albariño some time!

Very few people that do not play, understand the rules of cricket, and even fewer will understand why England and Australia get so excited every couple of years when they compete for a trophy no bigger than an egg cup.

The ‘Ashes’ series dates back to 1882 and is named after a satirical obituary published in the Sporting Times newspaper after a match in which Australia beat England on English soil for the very first time. The obituary suggested that English cricket had died, the body cremated, and the ashes would be taken to Australia. The English media dubbed the next English tour to Australia as ‘the quest to regain the ashes’.

On that following tour a small terracotta urn was presented to the England captain by a group of Melbourne women. The contents of the urn are reputed to be the ashes of an item of cricket equipment, a bail (the top part of the stumps).

Of course no one outside the two participating countries could possibly be expected to understand the intense rivalry of this series, especially when we consider that cricket is usually regarded as a game for gentlemen.

The reason that I write about this now is that England have today retained the ashes in Australia (the first time they have won over there for some 24 years), and it is making headline news in the UK.

In view of its perceived importance perhaps we should call it ‘the ashes world series’, despite the matches being played between only two countries (but still one more than participates in the baseball world series in the USA)!

I often comment about the number of public holidays that Spain enjoys during the course of a year. Indeed, it was only a week or two ago that we had a working week of only two days owing to local and national breaks.

Today is, however, pretty much the contrary……. as Christmas day fell on a Saturday this year, many Spanish businesses were already closed and enjoying their normal weekend break – meaning that the national holiday was simply lost. In many other countries (such as the UK for example), when a public holiday falls during the weekend, a lieu day is added to the calendar by way of compensation.

And so today we find ourselves at our desks whilst many of our European neighbours enjoy additonal time off to recover from their Christmas excesses.

P.S. My apologies for the very feeble joke about loos, obviously too much brandy in my Christmas pudding!

Now here’s a very curious phenomenon, or should I say, question. (This can be my Christmas quiz question for 2010)……. Do birds get cold feet??

The reason I mention this is that in the cold weather I have noticed huge numbers of birds congregating on the electricity cables, and always seemingly adjacent to the pylons. Now, I am not 100% certain but I think I am correct in saying that these high tension cables do actually generate some heat as the current passes through them – so the question remains, is it just a coincidence that our feathered friends appear to use them when the temperature falls?

More riveting conundrums tomorrow!

Now here’s a picture with a bit more ‘Christmas sparkle’ to it, and there should be a prize for guessing what it is. There is no real explanation behind the idea except to say that someone has decided to view different alcoholic drinks under a microscope, the results of which form an impressive and highly colourful piece of art.

Each image is created by taking a pipette of the selected drink and squeezing a single drop of it onto a slide. The alcohol droplets are then allowed to dry out completely, which can take up to four weeks in an airtight container (the whole process can take up to three months). Simply using a standard microscope with a camera attached, the light source is polarized and passed through the crystal, and the photo is taken.

All I need now is a microscope for Christmas!

It seems like only yesterday that I was commenting about the lack of festive spirit in this year’s Christmas advertising campaign for our D.O. (Oh, just a minute, it was yesterday!) Little did I imagine when I was writing that post, that it could be superceded the very same day by something even less seasonal!

Each year we receive a greetings card from our local community office – very kind of them to take the time and trouble (not to mention the money in these times of austerity). Well, all I can say is that this year’s card left me cold, and I don’t mean in the weather sense of the word – judge for yourself from the picture above. Can someone please explain to me how a tinted photograph of a granite staircase and balustrade should remind us of the birth of Christ…. I feel almost compelled to go and ask them.

Now I don’t want to appear ungrateful as we really do appreciate the gesture of their card, but the picture did leave me asking the question, is this some sort of political correctness gone mad? Certainly in the UK it would appear that we are slowly starting to erase the ‘Christ’ from Christmas for fear of offending somebody. Could Spain be heading down the same road? I sincerely hope not…..

We recently received an e-mail from our local D.O. office highlighting the marketing campaign for our denomination this Christmas. The only comment that I can make is that it isn’t very Christmassy!

Now, I’m not saying that we should have pictures of Santa Claus sliding down a chimney clutching a bottle of Albariño, but the posters that they are using (see above) don’t appear to carry any Christmas message whatsoever. Indeed, the only message that they carry is written in Galician “Pídeo polo seu nome”, which I believe translates as “Order only by name”. I have to say that this slogan has a very familiar ring to it, and is not particularly original – it somehow feels like it must have been used in at least 1001 other advertising campaigns in the past, but then that’s only my personal opinion.

I am 100% certain (although this is not actually clarified in the message), that they are really trying to encourage consumers to use the name Rias Baixas, rather than the name of the grape variety – Albariño. I get the feeling that the D.O. office are unfortunately losing an uphill battle in this respect. I think it’s going to be difficult, if not impossible, to establish the Rias Baixas name in favour of Albariño. Sad but true.