En Vino Veritas

en-vino-veritas

Over the past few years I’ve been drinking more wine. Over the past few months, I’ve been learning to enjoy it. Here’s the story of my wine education.

I grew up in a home where alcoholic beverages were not a part of daily life. My mother and father may have drank when they were young, but by the time I came along they had joined a church that frowned on it, and it wasn’t kept around our house, except for a single bottle of whiskey to help with my father’s heart congestion from time to time. I can’t recall ever seeing him take a drink of it.

When I was a teenager, I remember my mother taking an occasional short glass of Mogen David mixed with 7-Up, and when we would get together with her siblings, some of them would have a beer or two – but opening a bottle of wine to go with a meal wasn’t something anyone in my family did.

One of my sisters kept a small rack of wine in her home. She was also a fairly serious “foodie” in the 1960s, decades before anybody used that word. Where my mother’s cooking (though delicious) was fairly typical Midwestern meat-and-potatoes fare, my sister would serve interesting dishes she learned about on ski trips, or on travels to other places that seemed exotic and distant to me. The first time I ever tasted ripe olives, it was in her kitchen.

I don’t remember her serving the wine, but the presence of that wine rack over in the corner seemed a mark of sophistication and worldliness.

In my twenties, I joined a wine club. For about $30 each month, they would send me two bottles of the same variety of wine from different wineries, along with a sheet of information about the wine and some recipes for dishes that were supposed to be good pairings. This was my first introduction to the idea that certain foods and certain wines went together, beyond the old saw of “white wine with fish, red wine with steak.”

Wine still didn’t become a habit with me. I considered it too expensive, but also felt that I didn’t know enough about it to truly appreciate it. It was too much bother. Much easier to grab a six pack of Budweiser to drink with the pizza or burgers that were staples of my diet at the time.

Thirty years later, as I gradually became a more serious cook, I became more curious about wine as well. My wife bought me a wine guide book as a gift, and I started learning, but still only opened a bottle once in a great while, with special meals or on special occasions.

When we moved into our home a few years ago, I discovered a wine cellar that had been built in the basement by the previous owners. It had little wooden plaques for each row of bottles, labeled “Burgundy” and “Bordeaux” and “Côtes du Rhône.” I still knew next to nothing about wine, so I removed the plaques. I didn’t want to feel intimidated in my own basement. But I did set about filling the cellar with wine.

I bought mixed cases from an online wine club to get a wider variety than I might choose in a shop. Picking a wine for Sunday Dinner each week (when my wife’s parents join us) became the foundation of my wine education. Through research on the Web combined with trial and error, I began to get a sense of which wines paired best with various dishes, and also started to note which wines we most enjoy. The process of trying to please others with a choice of wine pushed me to try ideas and suggestions that I wouldn’t as likely have picked for myself, and this has been significant. For instance, there are more white wines in the cellar now than there were in the past, and lo and behold, I like them.

My wine education continues, and I do spend (probably too much) time reading about it, watching video courses and such. That knowledge has certainly helped me to better appreciate and enjoy wine. Learning how to actually “taste” wine rather than just drink it, learning how to describe what I taste, learning how to compare one wine to another – all of these skills are useful. The more I learn, the more enjoyment and fun there is. The most important lesson, however, is that “good wine” is whatever tastes good to me and to the people with whom I share it. Although this should have been obvious all along, I wasted years thinking that people couldn’t truly enjoy wine unless they knew enough to pass some sort of wine exam. How silly.

From time to time, you may find more posts here about wines that we like, good pairings we find, links to cool wine resources and the like. I’d also love to hear what you’re drinking and to learn from you. Let’s take the compulsion and muddlement out of wine and simply enjoy it, shall we?

Cheers!

My Father’s Barbecue

Barbecue Ideas

In the backyard of the house my father built there was a brick barbecue grill. As I remember it, it sat on a concrete slab just back of the breezeway, and to my toddler eyes it looked like a huge red throne. There were concrete caps on each side of the hearth, with grill grates fashioned of rebar stretching between them. The grates were at eye level to me, and the chimney on the back was about as tall as my dad.

I’m certain that he built it with his own hands, perhaps with some help from one of his union brothers or a neighbor, but I don’t remember him ever cooking on it. After his passing, it was just another interesting thing for us to climb on, like the orchard trees he had planted, the tall iron swing set and the big metal septic tank.

Like so many other things about my father that I don’t remember and therefore had to conjure, the image of him tending the fire and food is all the more vivid to me.

That’s probably the main reason I so love to cook outdoors. Whether or not my father actually made much use of his fine brick barbecue grill, my ideal American backyard or patio wouldn’t be complete without a spot for flames, and a guy cooking there.

While I was growing up (after my father passed away), my family didn’t grill out much. I do remember occasional weenie roasts or cookouts at the homes of uncles and aunts, and my mother used a hibachi for cooking hamburgers once in awhile. My first recollection of truly awesome grilled or smoked food would be from the county fair, or the local apple and pork festival in a neighboring town.

My own outdoor cooking pursuits began in my early twenties with one of those cheap metal tripod grills you could buy at the hardware store for $3.99. It was essentially a round metal tray with legs and a small grill grate that fit on top. We would climb out the window of a friend’s apartment on to a flat section of roof with the grill, a bag of match light and some burgers or hot dogs, and half an hour later we’d be living the dream.

I soon graduated to a Weber Smokey Joe when the cheapo model fell apart, and I began to learn how to cook things other than burgers and dogs. My first full-sized Weber Kettle came not long after.

Thirty years later and my patio is still home to a vintage Weber Kettle, along with a Genesis gas grill we added this Summer and a portable fireplace for roasting marshmallows and such. Either a Komado style smoker or a Weber Smokey Mountain water smoker is yet to come, but every now and then I still dream of building my own custom brick grill and oven one of these days. My ideal would be something similar to the one pictured at the top of this post. The image was created for the cover of a book from Sunset titled Ideas for Building Barbecues which was first published in 1962. Yes, I do have a copy.

Or maybe my barbecue would be like the Chinese oven Trader Vic used to create all of those amazing Polynesian-inspired dishes for his restaurants. Or perhaps just a simple red brick and concrete hearth like my father’s.

I may never build it, but it’s nice to imagine.

For now, I’ll be tending my fires, be they fueled by gas, charcoal or wood. Each time I take tongs or spatula in hand, I’m a man from Kentucky with a toddler on his shoulders – in a backyard in Oreana, Illinois on a fine Summer day – a long, long time ago.