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September 16, 2009

Vinegar Valhalla

I have a Womble in my hallway, namely Bungo. A long story so don't ask. Anyway he made a timely appearance. My mother in law was clearing out her cupboard under the stairs, liberating space and therefore about 30 unwanted old bottles of wine, mainly gifts. My limited knowledge was asked for to help with spotting wine salvage. They ended up in my hall to sort and give to the local Church Fete, drink or get rid of.

Bungo's button eyes lit up, and I could see the wine was already earmarked in his fabric head for some kind of ingenious recycling, but before the bottles were presumed dead on arrival I needed to look for any gems, or failing that, embers of drinkable life.

Lots of white and rose wine, some way over three years old, mostly drink young supermarket stuff. A few unknowns that needed a bit of Internet research.

There was very little of note. I salvaged a few bottles for the village tombola that were teetering on the edge of the vinegar Valhalla, but were passable. They may indeed be in the brief window of their prime, a sweet spot, transforming an ordinary bottle into greatness.

So I am left with an undrinkable wine lake.

Normally I rarely get through a whole bottle of wine before oxygen kills it during the working week. I end up with a collection of sorry looking quarter full bottles by the gas hob, waiting to splash into most of the quirky creations I call cooking. I am a compulsive wine cook. An inescapable itch to plop in any old plonk, leaving the job for 'reduced wine' to add that je ne sais quoi to my average cuisine.

Why add wine to cooking? Why not? Seems to taste better. A good use of old wine.

Unfortunately my hallway wine catacomb was just too much to cook with. I ended up donating it to the local sewerage processing plant (hopefully cleaning out my waste pipes in the process). Bungo dealt with the bottles.

Wine and heat are both friends and arch enemies. Outside of a pan, 'cooked' is the term for wine that has been subjected to a range of large temperature movements, leaving it not as intended, and can be fairly unpleasant. It is very common, and is well worth looking out for to save buying a substandard product.

As an example, on one of the hotter spells of the year I went into a local reputable independent wine merchant and noted that there was no aircon. All the beautiful bottles (neatly arranged with personalised tasting notes) were subject to the heat of the summer's day, amplified by the greenhouse effect of the glass windows (don't get me onto UV damage). One to avoid, as if it was regular practice the wine in the shop would surely be 'cooked'.

Heat fluctuations can make the contents of a bottle expand and contract, so much so that the cork moves like a piston, letting in too much oxygen, ruining the wine, bringing it rapidly nearer to vinegar. Sometimes wine will even leak out. Look for corks that are not flush with the top of bottle, and wine staining.

Ignoring the oxygen attack, the wrong level of heat itself can also accelerate the subtle ageing process. Literally cooking the wine.

So why can't you decant a young Bordeaux, shove it into a microwave and end up with a beautifully aged wine, equivalent to 10 years in a cellar? Just think, your microwave could turn into a time machine. A second for every year....sadly ageing wine is not that simple. You would end up with more of a grotesque metamorphosis than time travel, much like 'The Fly'. Cooking wine, whilst accelerating the ageing process, weakens the structure. It also promotes unwanted reactions, ones that can leave a horrible taste in your mouth. Years in a cellar at a constant 55 F will gracefully age say a Bordeaux, without promoting the bad stuff. Excess heat on the other hand pushes the energy barrier so much that these evil processes can take place.

How do you detect a 'cooked' wine to taste, the two pronged offensive of oxygen and heat damage? Some say the fruit flavours are dulled and stewed. There can be a Sherry overtone and more than a hint of caramel. Colours can also be less vibrant.

The only way to know for sure is to simply buy two identical bottles and treat one bottle with disdain, while caressing the other in your wine cellar. Drink and compare. Although this test is only good on the premise that you have money to burn (literally) and that the wines are not already cooked.

Deglazing a pan with wine to make gravy is my kind of extreme wine abuse. What happens here is that the alcohol evaporates (sometimes with an eyebrow singeing flame) and the subtle flavours of the wine condense (all those weird esters that wine buffs hark on about when tasting wine...it may be bubblegum, bark, clove, butter and so on), almost a meal within a meal. The wine ages in a rapid structure wrenching way, much like Dracula being staked just after a good feed. You are left with 'the essence of Dracula' (almost a new Hammer film) in the pan.

So it does matter somewhat which wine you use in your dish, the flavour concentration you end up helps if it is complementary. The works of intense heat on wine are in truth little understood, and some might say a rule of thumb is to cook with a wine that you are going to drink with the meal. A good starting point, but I am loathed to chuck half a bottle of quality wine into a pan, not really knowing if roughly the same effect could have been achieved with a £2.99 plonk, or my stale leftovers.

The only real way to know how wine affects your food is to heat some up, reduce it down, then sample the results and work out any food matches....yeah right...life is way too short. I would rather live 'on the edge' and carry on splashing in random bottles before Bungo gives them to Uncle Bulgaria.

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