7x Sommelier Secrets, Part 3
What’s really delicious with a cheese board? How can you polish your glasses most effectively? Where should you go abroad as a winegeek? Sommeliers know this better than anyone. We asked them about their personal secrets, hidden gems and guilty pleasures.
Special cheese board
Port with cheese is delicious, but try a Madeira, the fortified wine from the Portuguese island of the same name. For around fifteen euros, you can bring home one amazing matchmaker. Such as Barbeito Madeira Boal 5 years Old: it goes with soft, hard, aged and spiced cheeses! Another plus: you can keep Madeira for a very long time.
Super cloth
You use it to clean mirrors and windows, but Silky is also an ideal and very affordable microfibre cloth for polishing glasses.
Red wine with ice
How do you treat yourself at the end of a busy, hot workday? With a glass of Chilean red—with ice cubes! Go for a fruity and fresh blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Carménère, and don’t let disapproving onlookers distract you. Ice in it?! Yes, you absolutely can.
Unknown grapes from southwest France
A hidden gem: the unusual patchwork wine region below Bordeaux and above the Pyrenees, known collectively as Sud-Ouest. The hypermarchés there are packed with wines from often-forgotten appellations featuring grape varieties that have been cultivated for centuries. Pick something from the shelf when you’re nearby and let yourself be surprised.
Crazy cocktail
Take Moscato d’Asti (no one drinks this anymore), but make sure it’s a good one (Luigi Einaudi), pour it into a glass with ice cubes (double wrong), add some lemon zest and a few drops of aged rum (Don Papa, for example). The result is astonishingly delicious, refreshing and invigorating!
At America’s oldest
At America’s oldest winery, Wente Vineyards, you can play fantastic golf and eat at the award-winning restaurant. Everything is organic, and much of it even comes from their own garden. Definitely try the roasted beet salad, an unbelievably beautiful palette of colours made up of roasted beet varieties with pistachios. The meat is sublime too: ask for the lamb chops. (wentevineyards.com)
Tree trunk as a corkscrew
Just when you want to pour wine during a picnic, you realise you’ve forgotten the corkscrew . Find a sturdy tree trunk, take off your jumper or shirt and wrap it around the bottle. Remove the capsule from the bottle and strike the bottom of the bottle, held horizontally, against the tree trunk until the cork is almost out. You can pull out the last bit yourself, using your teeth if necessary…
