Culinarian’s Day

“Wine is the most healthful and most hygienic of beverages,”  Louis Pasteur
Hello, hope you had a decent Monday, enjoyed your weekend and ready to kick butt this week. So yesterday I had a great time at a wine pairing event, Le Vin. It’s an event that takes place monthly at the Privee in Westlands. The first month was wine & chocolates, second month wine& cheese and the third one which was yesterday was wine & barbeque. I’m really anticipating for the next one because every month is a different pairing and you get to learn a lot about cuisine and wine.
Been that today is an unofficial holiday, culinarian day, I saw it would be fun to understand a little about the world of food and wine pairing. Since yesterday was a barbeque and I will focus on that pairing. First off, pair your meats and wine with the basic principal white wine for white meats and red wine for red meats. A tip for white wine, once you open consume it before a year ends or else just use it for cooking because it will have become quite acidic.  Having a Salad? Your wine should be higher in acidity. Match earthy wines with earthy foods.  Neutralize high tannin wines with rich meaty foods and for dessert, the wine should be sweeter. A “perfect pairing” occurs when both food and wine components make an even better flavor together in your mouth. Though, perfect pairings are rare.
If you have the notion that bottled wine with screw caps are of cheaper quality than those with a corkscrew you would be dead wrong. In fact in Australia almost 95% of the wines available are screw caps. A chemical containment known as TCA (Trichloroanisole) ruins wine and is present in non-synthetic corks. One last tip, he most common coding system for dating wine is the “L” system printed on the back label along with a 4 digit number. The first digit after the “L” indicates the year followed by the day of the year the wine was bottled. So if the bottle had “L7137” code it translates to the 137th day of 2007, which would be May 17, 2007.
Remember every palate is unique thus different preferences, for example I prefer red sweet wine over most white wines. I am no wine snob by a mile but enjoy such events that help me to explore unique experiences, I even did a wine tasting competition at the event and won complimentary ticket, haha, talk about luck. Hope you feel more wine savvy now 🙂 .
Keep Smiling 🙂
Simply Siro
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IMG_20160724_170148 (1)Wine critic Wanjira Kelvin

IMG_20160724_171420 (1)Culinarian Steve Maingi

IMG_20160724_160701(Right) Melissa event organizer

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