Wine Fictions

As I have moved to Hamburg about thirteen years ago, I started being invaded with a strong feeling of reliving some of the dishes that have marked my growing up in Portugal. Some are easier than others to recreate, being strongly dependent on the ingredients that you can find. One that has been persistently buzzing in my head is Cabidela .  Original from the north of Portugal with different varietals in almost all the former portuguese colonies, this has been one of my all time favourite dishes. But hard do it in Hamburg. I have asked several butchers for blood but I have been invariously looked with a mix of suspicion and fear.  But while having a look at the possibility of buying a piglet at an asian supermarket, I have came across duck blood.  Without hesitation I bought it and immediately invited a group of friends to come over and try the cabidela.  Being the first time that I have tried to cook it, it was not as good as I wanted it, but I was still satisfied wi...

While reading Nigel Slater 's fascinating A Thousand Feasts I came across a text that, for me, stood out from all the others. Unlike what often happens with me, in this case, it was not a particular bombastic text, but one which has something of a Japanese simplicity and beauty. In a sensitive way Slater describes the joy of eating alone, in an intensity spiral growing throughout the text to some sort of a final climax when he refers to a book where someone has stated that people who have a glass of wine on its own can already be considered an alcoholic. His reaction to it appears as a request "to get out and find yourself a life"*. He ends up concluding that a glass of wine on your own can be as good as one shared with friends.  I can only but agree. Even though I really love to share a glass of wine with people I love, I also deeply enjoy opening a bottle of wine on my own and enjoy the first sip of wine without any distraction. Just me and a glass of wine in a sort of...

 When you come across the selection a wine shop has to offer you also come across a whole market philosophy and how the owners/managers position themselves towards the wine world. This can be a political statement, a specific way of interpreting what is relevant in the wine world, an attempt to understand and perceive what a certain kind of customers want and to attract them, or to simply try to follow the latest trends.  I am sure there are many other approaches on how to create a portfolium that can fit in a shop, but that is not the main subject I want to write about. Recently, I have been looking more attentively to what kind of wine people in Germany are selling on Ebay and I have to confess that I find it tremendously fascinating to dive into personal collections or, as it often happens, the personal collection of someone who has recently died.  By going through it, I have the feeling of immersing in very personal stories as well as reliving a piece of history. Cert...

 As I start writing this post two of my work colleagues are writing the WSET 3 exam.  I have also tried  to write it twice but failed both times, only managing to approve the practical part, meaning that the only thing I can really do is drinking. But with distinction. If on my first attempt I was basically not prepared at all and it was only obvious that I would fail, on the second one I was almost sure I would pass. But I did not.  Sometimes I wonder whether it was a mistake to write it in German or whether the reason of it all was just my general incompetence.  What I know is that two weeks before the exam I was already dreaming about maps of South Africa and its different wine regions or the specificities of Australia's weather. And what about Chile? Which subregion is it most adequate to produce a premium Carmenère?   Talking to one of my colleagues he was complaining about the importance of some of the contents we have to learn. One of ...

 "She also knew that she herself probably read more than was healthy for her, set too much store by reading, had a kind of neurotic obsession with literature and its supposed moral benefits."  When I have reached page 52 of Jonathan Coe 's Middle England I was confronted with a cruel reality that may affect me as well. Unsure about my rather obsessive behaviour and how it seems to get even more obsessive as I am getting older I have run to my girlfriend and asked whether I was, by any chance, close to such a state. She coldly said I was already stranded there. For a long time. And with wine as well. I am not going to pretend that I got shocked with the answer as I was already suspecting that something similar would be coming.   It is, somehow, true, I have to recognize. The diversity of offers in what respects the book and the wine market are, to a certain extent, very similar. You have an almost non-ending offer of styles, different quality levels (in this case boo...

 Sometimes I feel like going back to the classics.  This feeling was probably awoken by my current reading of Gospodinov 's brilliant Time Shelter .   But what are the classics? And who has defined them? This is, in fact, a question that I find too hard to answer as I believe that every person has its own references with which has grown and that end up being a personal classic.  Even though it is terribly hard for me to get rid of books that I have really enjoyed reading as I dream to go back to sometime in my life, there is only one book that I have truly gone back to: Os Lusíadas by the renaissance Portuguese poet Luís de Camoes.  Music wise, I would define Ten by Pearl Jam , Kind of Blue by Miles Davis or O monstro precisa de amigos by Ornatos Violeta  as absolute classics to which I often go back to tank some sort of vital energy. And wine wise? What is a classic wine for me? Even though I tend to do with wines what I do with books (there are s...