Ice freakery: is an ice pick essential to cocktail making?
How to make ice cubes in a hurry: why hot water freezes faster than cold
How to shake (when making cocktails)
Drinking with confidence: recognizing wine faults
How to choose wine to go with your food
The shape of a wineglass and its effect on taste
A drinks cupboard is just like the food section of your kitchen, in that with a good stock of basics and old favorites you should be able to add the simplest of fresh ingredients—a slice of lemon, perhaps, or an egg white, some milk or half a glass of freshly squeezed lime—and bring everything else alive. In the same way that you might keep two (or even three) olive oils—a cheap one for cooking and a superior extra virgin oil for dressing raw greens or drizzling on bruschetta—it’s sometimes worth duplicating an ingredient on different quality levels, especially if you are a keen martini drinker or an addict of single malts. Here are some suggestions to give you the bones of a good liquid larder. Also, do remember that a drink can only ever be as good as the quality of its ingredients.
Vodka
Useful for vodka and tonics, martinis, and mixing with pureed or muddled fruit (and vegetables), from raspberries to cucumbers, in summer, or drinking icy cold in small tots with a spread of blinis and pickled herring in winter. I like to keep a couple of different kinds of vodka in the house. There may be something very cheap and fiery, the vodka equivalent of lighter fuel (see p. 259, “How rough do you like your vodka?”), generally a store’s own brand, for mixing with tonic and fruit purees. A step up from this is required for cocktails. Smirnoff is a very decent standby and a good blank canvas for mixing with other ingredients. For sipping neat in shot glasses I like something with both smoothness and flavor, such as Russian Standard, a wheat vodka with its roots in St. Petersburg. It’s a great all-arounder that works in tonic, martinis, or cocktails too.
Only gin-and-tonic or martini aficionados need to worry about keeping a wardrobe of different gins (see p. 300 for tasting notes on different gin brands). Tanqueray (the 47.3 percent Export Strength) is probably my favorite all-rounder, though throughout this book I’ve occasionally specified cases where one gin may work better than another.
Rum
In my household this gets heavy use in summer, when it is called on to make endless daiquiris, mojitos, and Cuba libres. I find a bottle of golden rum, ideally Havana Club—Anejo 3 Años answers most needs. See p. 145 for more information on rum.
Brandy
A bottle of cooking brandy is essential—go as cheap as you dare. And then a cognac is useful for sidecars and mixing with ginger beer to warm you up in winter. It ought to be good enough quality to sip on its own after dinner too. I have H by Hine.
Whiskey
It’s useful to have just one bottle of this gravest of drinks around for serious conversations on late nights, medicinal purposes, and of course mixing with lemon juice and honey as a compensation for winter colds. But this is a spirit almost as personal as a perfume or aftershave, and I would not presume to suggest what you should buy, except that as it is most often sipped either neat or mixed only with water or ice, quality is important, whether your taste runs to the whiff of peat and smoke from an Islay single malt or the trenchant no-fuss of a blend.
The American whiskey is useful if you like to drink old-fashioneds, Manhattans, and mint juleps. See p. 305 for more details.
Vermouth
This fortified wine takes its name from the German wermut, wormwood, one of the herbs and roots with which it is flavored. It may be dry, medium, or sweet, and is used (sometimes in homoeopathically small quantities) in the likes of martinis, slings, and negronis, and older generations often like to mix it with a lemon-lime soda. The best-known brands are Noilly Prat (from southern France, the most complex of all the dry white vermouths and the one I prefer), Martini & Rossi (Italian, and comes in four styles—sweet and white, dry and white, sweet and pink, and sweet and red), and Cinzano (Italian again, and comes in the same range of styles as Martini). If you are going to buy only one bottle, go for a dry white; if you are a keen cocktail addict, you will also need sweet red (for negroni, and it’s good mixed with tonic) as well as the sweeter white version.
Cointreau
This may not sound like a staple, but the colorless liqueur, invented in 1849 and flavored with the peel of bitter and sweet oranges, is used in a great number of classic cocktails, from margaritas to sidecars to white ladies. It’s a vivid drink—the vigorous smell makes you think of freshly squeezed orange juice combined with candied orange peel—and you can also drink it neat on the rocks.
Bitters
Strictly speaking, the term covers all those alcoholic drinks flavored with herbs, roots, peels, and flowers, at least one of which lends bitterness and which were traditionally made by monks allegedly for their medicinal virtues. The bitter ingredient may be artichoke (as in the case of Cynar, an Italian aperitif), quinine, rhubarb root, or angelica. Famous bitters include Campari, Aperol, and Fernet-Branca. However, the term bitters is more often used as a shorthand for the highly concentrated angostura bitters and Peychaud’s bitters, both of which are flavored with gentian. Just a few drops of either of these potent liquid seasonings will add kick and bite to a homemade lime soda, made with sparkling water and the juice of one lime. A dash of bitters gives pink gin its rosy hue and is an essential base-note in several other classic drinks, from a champagne cocktail to a Manhattan. A bottle is as crucial to a liquor cabinet as a supply of black peppercorns is to the larder. I also like to have a bottle of blood-orange bitters in stock—they give a warmer, fruitier note to any drink.
Wine
Whether through parsimony, habit, or perhaps lack of faith in our ability to choose the right thing, British people aren’t very good at keeping a stock of wine in the house. I once read that over 90 percent of all bottles bought in England are intended to be drunk within twenty-four hours.
Ideally, however, you’d always have one bottle of red in the cupboard and one rosé and one white in the fridge. I’m not sure who first said that the three most depressing words in the English language are “Red or white?” Though I couldn’t agree more, this isn’t the place to be specific about what your red or white should be, save to say that the liquor-cabinet bottle of wine has to be something you almost always feel like drinking, rather than something you love when the mood and food are right. In other words, you need to have found that most elusive of bottles: one that suits your taste, is inexpensive and delicious too—that season’s star bottle of wine. Last summer my white was a Saumur Blanc that cost £5.99 from the supermarket Waitrose, the rosé was a pale Provence thing picked up cheaply in Calais, and the red was an easygoing modern Rioja bought on sale.
Simple syrup
There are few obscure ingredients in this book (rose water and watermelon syrup spring to mind, but I think that’s about all)—no ouzo, no crème de menthe, no Galliano, nor a battalion of odd liqueurs that taste disgusting on their own but are required for finicky cocktails and will do nothing more than gather dust and take up cupboard space. But the one thing I do use liberally, and which might seem specialist, is simple (sugar) syrup. You can make this yourself, by stirring equal volumes of sugar and water together and leaving until the sugar dissolves, which takes 5 to 10 minutes. But then you have the hassle of storing or throwing away the sticky syrup that’s not used. That’s why I prefer to buy it, ready-mixed. A friend of mine even packs a bottle of this (plus cocktail shaker) when she goes on holiday so as to be ready to make daiquiris at any moment.
Cordial
At least one good cordial is essential as a nonalcoholic drinking option. British supermarkets are full of old-fashioned British brands and you maybe able to find some of these nonalcoholic mixes online. Bottlegreen makes some of the best, among which my favorites are aromatic lime and elderflower.
Tonic water
Buy cans of Schweppes and keep them in the fridge. See p. 293 for more information on tonic.
There’s no need to pay for club soda or seltzer, which is more expensive, if mixing drinks such as Campari and soda or mojitos that call for it. The cheapest fizzy bottled water will do just as well—only take care to find a neutral one with larger bubbles. Badoit, for example, with its fine mousse and distinctive taste of bicarbonates would be an odd choice as a general mixer, though Badoit and cognac makes a delicious long drink—the teeny bubbles suit the finesse of the cognac, and the underlying minerality dovetails with the richness of the spirit.
Tea and coffee
Try not to buy coffee too far in advance: even when kept under a vacuum seal it will still go stale. Once opened, a pack of ready-ground coffee begins to lose its freshness in a matter of days and should not be kept for more than two weeks. Keep opened coffee in an airtight container in the fridge to prolong its life span, or in the freezer, where it will last up to around two months after opening. Tea keeps for about a year, provided you have it somewhere dry and cool. See p. 45 for more information on tea and coffee.
Cooking alcohol
Marsala, sherry, brandy, and Calvados are all useful in the kitchen. See Chapter 5, Autumn, for more details.
Lemons and limes
A house is not a home without a constant supply of fresh lemons and limes, both of which should feel heavy and yield to pressure for the greatest amount of juice.
Everyone seems to drink mint tisane these days, and as it’s a healthy alternative to (yet) another glass of wine at the end of dinner, I try always to have a bunch of fresh mint, or a windowsill mint plant, available.
Campari
Campari is actually a staple for me. During spring and summer I eat even more of it than I drink. I make a sorbet (see p. 97) so delicious friends invite themselves around just for a fix. But Campari is the alcoholic equivalent of marmite in England—people seem to hate or love it, so it won’t be on everyone’s list.
Sipping spirits
I count among these all the more expensive, finessed versions of whiskey, rum, and brandy: the single malts, the rare American bourbons, the ancient Armagnacs, fine cognacs, premium vodkas, and dark aged rums—all the spirits you might like to savor and for the most part would consider too good to mix with anything else. So, for example, I usually have a bottle of Belvedere, a silkily soft Polish vodka, in my freezer that I use for the occasional vodka martini; Gosling Black Seal, a treacly dark rum from Bermuda; and a selection of Islay whiskey, among them Ardbeg Ten Years Old.
Tequila
Distilled from blue agave in Mexico, this is an essential if you are a margarita addict. See p. 137.
You could go crazy buying the perfect glasses—one for this, one for that—and end up with cupboards bursting with different shapes and never having enough of the same one to go around when friends come over. So I have tried to consolidate.
Wineglasses
Once you have seen how different wine can taste out of different glasses (see p. 33 for more on this), a kind of madness sets in and it is hard ever to be satisfied—you are constantly wondering whether it might not be better to drink a wine out of this or that. Would a bigger glass elicit more perfume? Would a taller one reduce the sensation of oak? But budgets and common sense suggest it may be wise to impose some limits. Choose one set of glasses that curve in, even if almost imperceptibly, toward the rim and use them for everything. If you want to splash out, then buy a set of smaller ones for whites, larger for reds. Supplement the basic wineglass wardrobe with a few specialties according to what type of wine you drink most.
Glasses for sparkling wine and champagne
There are two traditional models, the coupe and the flute. The coupe has three drawbacks: its large surface area means that bubbles disappear fast, the center of gravity is unnervingly high for anyone on a second top-up (or is that just me?), and someone is always guaranteed to mention that the shape resembles a woman’s breast.
I prefer small flutes because the wine doesn’t get tepid and clammy before you are halfway down the first glass, and you get a lot of pours out of one bottle—it’s always better to be in a position to issue top-ups than to have to reduce portions partway through a round.
However, I use flutes only for cocktails or cheap sparkling wine, such as cava or prosecco. Good champagne I now drink out of ordinary wineglasses, after the Bollinger incident (see p. 34).
Tumblers and highballs
As a G&T addict, I can’t help buying glasses that strike me as being perfect for the drink—a set of tumblers tinted palest blue and so thick they seem to have been hewn out of a glass mountain was my last extravagance. In theory some cocktails call for a short, squat tumbler and others for a tall, narrow Collins glass; breakfast orange juice seems to demand small beakers, water and milkshakes large. In practice two shapes and sizes will easily see you through.
First, a set of small, heavy-bottomed tumblers for the serious stuff—spirits served neat or on the rocks. Second, a hybrid that is neither tall and thin nor short and squat. I use the Aino Aalto tumbler made by the Scandinavian design company Iittala. It’s attractively ridged and capacious enough to take a lot of ice.
Though in the recipes that follow I have sometimes specified that the ideal glass might be a long, tall Collins, say, in case that’s what you have in your cupboard, you can be sure that whether drinking water, mint juleps, or smoothies I am using my Aino Aaltos instead.
Martinis and other short cocktails
Instead of the traditional martini glass shaped like an inverted cone, which is angular and annoying to hold, I have a set of cocktail glasses that are halfway between that and a champagne coupe. I also use them to serve sorbet. They are made by Alessi, are exceptionally fine, and objects of beauty in themselves.
Inevitably there are other things kicking around in my cupboard—some cognac bulbs I never use, a set of shot glasses that have spent most of their lives serving me boiled eggs, and so on. The only thing I feel I lack is a small Campari-and-soda glass. But I know that as soon as I have found the perfect one, there will be something else.
As someone who lives in a tiny flat with virtually no cupboard space, I have worked on the basis that you should be able to make these drinks with pretty basic kitchen hardware. Of course, for good tea you need a teapot, ideally made of china rather than metal, as well as a tea strainer for loose-leaf tea, and a cafetière or a moka for coffee (see p. 56 for a discussion of different coffee-making methods).
For cocktails you will need a cocktail shaker. The most common version is the three-piece stainless-steel sort that comprises a cup, a lid with a built-in strainer, and a cap that fits over the strainer and often doubles as a measure. I also like the glamour of Boston shakers, which consist of two tall cups, one made of glass and one of stainless steel. The idea is that you put the ingredients in the glass cup, so you can see what you are doing, put the two things together to shake (be warned: they are more unwieldy than a standard shaker), then pour the cocktail out of the stainless-steel cup so that it arrives as a surprise in the glass of whomever you are making a drink for. As there is no built-in strainer with a Boston shaker, you need to buy this separately. You could make do with a tea strainer or small sieve, but the thing to get is a Hawthorn strainer, a flat metal plate with holes that sits over the mouth of the cup and has a spring around the edge to help you hold it in place. As the holes in both a Hawthorn strainer and a shaker are quite large, you may sometimes need to double-strain a cocktail—that is, use a small sieve as a secondary strainer balanced on the top of the glass. This is particularly useful if you are trying to remove small debris, say raspberry pips, from the drink, or if you like it to be completely smooth with none of the tiny shards of ice that sometimes form as the cubes smash against each other when they are shaken.
What else? A hand blender often comes in, well, handy when pureeing fruit and is easier to store than a bulky countertop model. Aside from that, it’s almost always possible to do without specialist tools. For example, professional bartenders use a muddler—a sort of miniature wooden baseball bat—to squish fruit gently in drinks such as caipirinhas and strawberry daiquiris. As long as you are careful, you can use a pestle, or even the back of a spoon instead, though of course if you are planning on making a lot of cocktails, it might be nice to own a muddler. You don’t need one for anything in this book, but if you become really obsessed you might also invest in an ice crusher, which is useful for frozen margaritas and daiquiris as well as mint juleps. But crushed or not, the one thing that is really important in any cold drink is the ice.
Until I met a bartender called Kevin Armstrong, it had never occurred to me that anyone living outside the Arctic Circle—and certainly not someone in the metropolis of London—might feel a piece of climbing gear was a necessary part of their drink-making kit. I still find I can get by without one, but Kevin was adamant that if you are entertaining, “You need an ice pick.”
His explanation made a degree of sense. “Look,” he said, “making a cocktail requires a phenomenal quantity of ice. People don’t always realize that. Sometimes I watch people’s faces when I’m making them a drink in the bar. The first thing I do is to fill their glass up with ice, and I can see they think I’m trying to short-change them on the spirits. I’m not. They get just the same measure, but the drink is better if it has a lot of ice in it as well. If you’re having a party, you’re going to get through a lot of ice. You’re not going to have enough ice-cube trays, so the easiest way to make it is to freeze water in big roasting trays, then crack it with a baby ice pick. That’s what I do at home.”
It would certainly be interesting to see if this explanation washed if you were apprehended by the police on a dark street with an ice pick tucked inside your jacket: “I am merely on my way to a party where I intend to make gin and tonic for several good friends, officer.”
I didn’t actually meet Kevin, who is the head bartender of Match bars and also oversees Milk & Honey and the Player in London, to talk about ice. I asked to see him so we could chat about cocktail fashions. The ice conversation started when I confessed that I really can’t drink a caipirinha unless I’ve done my best to fit the ice cubes closely together in the glass when making it. Before long, we had discovered we were united in our loathing of those bags of ice you can buy at supermarkets and liquor stores.
“The cubes have holes in them,” spat Kevin. “Holes. So they have a huge surface area, melt really quickly, and if you use them in a shaker, they smash to bits and dilute the drink horribly.”
Needless to say, there was more. Kevin prefers ice made with mineral water: “It gives you an amazing purity and clarity.” And if ice-cube trays are to be used, he favors spherical molds, “because that gives you the smallest possible surface area so the melt-speed is lower.” It’s because it deters the ice from melting that it’s best to cram plenty into the glass. More ice cools the drink to a lower temperature, so although there are more cubes, each one melts more slowly, the drink stays both cold and relatively undiluted, and you don’t find yourself in that half‐panicky, half-miserable state of trying to slurp a cocktail down faster than you really want to in order to enjoy it before it gets tepid and loses its edge.
Kevin was also very specific about the temperature, -18°F, at which he freezes his ice. Ice stored at a lower temperature will keep your drink colder for longer, because as well as absorbing latent heat in the process of transforming from solid to liquid, ice also requires energy—specific heat—to raise its temperature to the melting point. In other words, the colder the ice, the colder it will make your drink before even beginning to melt.
The temperature at which ice is frozen also has an aesthetic impact. Peter Barham, a professor of physics at Bristol University, freezes his in the laboratory, using liquid nitrogen, at -321°F. An ice cube made in a domestic freezer would probably have four or five ice crystals in it. “What happens at much lower temperatures is that you get very, very small crystals and lots of them,” says Barham. “The effect of this is to make the ice opaque. It’s a bit like having a transparent pane of glass and then grinding it down into a dust that will appear white, even though each individual speck if viewed in isolation would be transparent.”
Ice cubes can appear cloudy for other reasons too. If the freezer door or the freezer compartment in an old-fashioned fridge-freezer is opened a lot, water vapor will condense on top of the ice-cube tray to form a fine frost. And if the water is oxygenated (as it will be if run into the trays from a spraying tap), it will also form ice that looks milky rather than as clear as Britain’s ice-cube-shaped Fox’s glacier mints.
You are desperate for a vodka martini but have just discovered there is an ice-cube crisis. Should you fill the empty ice-cube tray from (a) the just-boiled kettle or (b) the cold tap, which you have just run to get the water as chilly as possible?
This is clearly a trick question: the answer is (a) because, in most cases, hot water freezes faster than cold. This is wonderfully counterintuitive, but, according to Peter Barham, “It is a well-established and accepted scientific fact.” In his book The Science of Cooking he explains how the mind-twisting phenomenon was first revealed to twentieth-century scientists by an African schoolboy called Erasto B. Mpemba. Erasto had conducted experiments using identically sized containers filled with precisely the same amount of hot and cold liquid, but every time he nagged his physics teacher to explain why the hot water kept freezing more quickly than the cold, he was told flat out he must have made a mistake and got it wrong.
You can hardly blame Erasto’s teacher, because the basic thermal laws of physics suggest that the cold water will most definitely freeze first. It seems logical that the hot water ought to take a certain amount of time to reach the temperature of the cold water when it was first put into the freezer and after that require the same amount of time as the cold to freeze. In other words, it should always be playing catch-up. This is why Erasto’s findings were taken seriously only when a British physicist, Professor Osborne, visited the school and Erasto once again put his question to him. Professor Osborne’s initial response was the same as that of the African physics teacher: impossible. But once back home he repeated the experiment and was astonished to find that Erasto was right.
The conundrum was discussed for years in the reader Q&A section of the New Scientist, and scores of physicists have since tried to explain why hot water freezes faster than cold. Says Peter Barham: “Every year I get my undergraduates to chip and hammer away at the problem, and every year we uncover another small detail. One of them recently found that the phenomenon was first observed in ancient Greece—Aristotle wrote about it.” He breaks off and adds glumly, “At the moment I’ve got half the physics department working on it.”
Barham explains that one key part of the solution to the puzzle seems to be connected to “supercooling”—the process by which liquids can be reduced to a temperature below their normal freezing point without changing state. “One thing we do now know is that when you put cold water in a freezer it will normally supercool more than hot water—that’s to say, it will actually reach a lower temperature before it starts to freeze—and that’s how the hot water manages to win the race, by freezing at a higher temperature. It has also been proposed that boiling water might precipitate impurities that act as nucleating sites for ice crystals. But while lots of different bits of the problem have been solved, we still haven’t got all of it.”
It seems incredible that in the twenty-first century we can’t crack a problem as elementary as this. Meanwhile, if you have two identical ice-cube trays, you can conduct the hot/cold water experiment for yourself.
There are many wonderful drink moments in the 1934 film version of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, in which William Powell and Myrna Loy play a couple, Nick and Nora Charles, who hardly have time for sleuthing in between hoisting cocktail glasses, issuing rapid-fire one-liners, and flouncing around dressed for the boudoir (and sometimes all three at once).
At one point Nora, impeccably glamorous but lying flat-out on the bed, removes an eye mask to ask, “What hit me?” “The last martini,” retorts her husband.
But my favorite is when Nick decides to teach the bartender how to shake a cocktail. “The important thing is the rhythm,” he says with a mannered flourish. “Always have rhythm in your shaking. A Manhattan you shake to fox trot. A Bronx, to two-step time; a dry martini you always shake to waltz.”
Certainly it’s a nice idea. But as with so many apparently delicate pastimes, such as baking a cake, what is actually important is the amount of brute force put in. Cocktails need to be shaken with vigor. The point is to make the drink as cold as possible, and to get a little dilution, which will help release some of the flavors in the spirits. So, put your back into it and don’t stop until the metal is so well chilled your skin feels raw and almost as if it might peel off when you put the shaker down.
Where possible in this book I have written recipes in terms of “parts,” giving the proportions you need for a drink but not necessarily the quantities required per person. This way you can use whatever you like, from a bottle cap to a shot glass or a wineglass, as your measure. As a rough guide, when making cocktails consider that a standard measure of spirits is 1 ounce and that a cocktail for one person will usually contain up to three measures. All recipes serve one unless otherwise stated.
For accuracy, I’ve often listed ingredients such as lemon or lime juice in terms of parts too. When shopping it might help to know that an average lime yields about 2 tablespoons or 1 ounce of juice, a lemon closer to 1½ ounces, but some limes and lemons are much bigger and juicier than others.
Some people are so determined to drink exactly what they want that they will go to extreme lengths. Out with a friend one night, and failing to make our request for a sidecar understood, I was amazed to see her primly produce a piece of paper from her wallet, explaining that the recipe had been written out for her by the head barman at the Ritz in Paris and that she carried it with her everywhere she went, rather like a driving license or organ donor card, in case of emergency. “I’m thinking of having it laminated,” she said, and I don’t think she was joking.
One of the most pleasing sounds is the pop of a cork being plucked slowly from a bottleneck, followed by the unsteady gurgle as it is poured into a glass. But what wine to drink? And when? Wine is a vast, chameleon subject, the very nature of which—vintage changes, small production, availability—means it is impossible to make particular recommendations here. In each of the seasonal chapters I suggest generic wine and food combinations that are particularly worth trying as well as suiting the time of year. And there are a few important things to say about how to choose wine generally and how best to enjoy it.
When opening a bottle of wine, you should always taste before going on to pour a drink or before mixing it with other ingredients. The most common fault to find is that the wine is “corked.” This doesn’t mean that the wine has little bits of cork floating around in it; it means that it has been tainted by a chemical called 2, 4, 6-trichloroanisole (TCA). The effect may be very mild, damping down the flavor, making the wine taste “less” of everything than it usually would. This is almost the worst possible scenario, because you might not notice that anything is wrong unless you have just opened a bottle of something you know well, but you probably won’t enjoy the wine very much. Severely corked wine is much easier to spot. First of all, when you are sniffing it, look for a muted quality and an absence of attractive smells. A lack of fruit and a general flatness is the first giveaway. If you then notice that it smells of soggy cardboard, walking through a damp old cellar, or the sort of mustiness you find in a bag of slimy old mushrooms, you can be certain. If unsure, leave the wine in the glass for ten minutes and then retaste—by now any musty odors will have flourished and be much easier to discern.
If drinking at a friend’s house, I hate to see the host opening a bottle of good wine and then immediately making his way around, generously filling up the glasses of a dozen or more people. If the wine is corked, he may as well be giving them a cabbage-water top-up. Not only is everyone then stuck with a glassful of alcohol they’re not going to enjoy, but the perfectly nice wine already in the glasses is now polluted too. I can never quite bring myself to say anything, and because it seems pointless to gulp a glass of wine I will actively dislike, and then find myself drunk (my alcohol tolerance levels are hopelessly low), I end up looking for ways to make a sneaky deposit down a sink. Absentmindedly taking your glass with you on a bathroom trip is the most discreet way.
If you think you’ve never had a corked bottle of wine, consider that 4 to 10 percent of bottles sealed under cork are thought to be affected. The strange paradox is that people are much better tasters than they think. I’ve watched countless friends knock back countless bottles of corked wine without complaint, but if quizzed they usually admit to not enjoying it very much and say they had assumed the wine wasn’t a very good one that they won’t buy again.
There is no shame in a bit of uncertainty—it happens even among wine tasters, particularly with wines that are not badly corked and which no one has tried before.
As for sending bottles back in restaurants, this can be traumatic even when you have the backing of professional expertise. A colleague tells how she once summoned the waiter in a pizza restaurant and, not wishing to be rude or intimidating, gently asked him to replace the wine because she thought it might be corked. Unfortunately the waiter also felt on top of his game. He tasted the wine himself and reassured her that it was perfectly fine. My colleague demurred. The waiter refused to capitulate. In the increasingly heated debate that followed my colleague, now abandoning charm and goodwill, found herself yelling that she was the head buyer of a national wine chain, she knew a corked wine when she tasted one, and even if they had to pay for the damn bottle could he please take it away and bring them a new one because neither she nor her guests were prepared to drink it.
“Well,” said the waiter triumphantly, “I’ve done a wine course too.”
So forget the hovering waiter, the clueless bartender, the bullying maître d’, or the sommelier who has just ceremoniously pronounced the wine fit to drink (even he sometimes makes mistakes). The best person to listen to is yourself: trust your instincts and your subconscious. Sometimes I notice a wine is corked only when I realize that I keep picking up the glass and putting it down again without taking a sip or I keep taking sips in the hope of finding something that’s not there—pleasure. If you are not enjoying a wine, do not drink it.
Do not assume, either, that a wine under screw cap is going to be trouble-free. It may suffer from a phenomenon known as “reduction,” the word that, confusingly, tasters use to describe a wine in which undesirable sulfur compounds have developed in the absence of oxygen. This is a complex problem on which it is hard to find consensus, but telltale signs include the smell of a just-struck match or burnt rubber.
Sometimes the wine will sort itself out if poured into a decanter (never be afraid to decant white wines and don’t worry if you don’t have a decanter either—I usually use a flower vase) or given a bit of air in the glass—you could always try the old sommelier trick of pouring the wine from one glass to another. You could also try throwing a handful of loose change (perhaps wash it first) into the glass. This might sound bonkers, but the result is that tarnished coins begin to shine, and the wine stops smelling and tasting dirty and springs into expressive focus.
Wines can also be dulled or even ruined by poor storage. And just occasionally you will find a wine that’s oxidized—it smells of sherry when it shouldn’t and will taste dead and be darker in color.
Most important of all, don’t be in awe of the wine: you’re the one who’s paid for it, and you’re the one who’s going to be drinking it. Trust your responses.
So much fuss is made about the art of choosing a wine to go with your food that it has acquired at best a mystique, at worst a reputation as a prissy pastime on a par with making matchstick sculptures or hunting rabbits with beagles. There is nothing strange or particularly specialized about taking what you drink into consideration when planning a dinner. Deciding on the wine is no different from working out what other ingredients will be on the plate. And just as there may be certain foods you would not usually put together—cauliflower with cheese with pasta amatriciana, ratatouille with boeuf bourguignonne, avocado with roast lamb, or bread sauce with lobster, all of which would be cases of two delicious things spoiled—some wines and foods don’t sit comfortably alongside each other.
The biggest problem for most people is that they don’t have enough experience with enough wines to be able to imagine what one will taste like before it has been poured from the bottle. There is a way around this, and that’s to choose a wine from the same area as the food you are eating. So, for example, a pale, dry rosé from Provence is one of the best things you can drink with the pungent aïoli and salty olive tapenade eaten along France’s Mediterranean coast. The protein in a Florentine-style T-bone steak cooked with olive oil and salt will soften the perception of tannins in a Chianti and make a delicious savory pairing. Pesto alla genovese is good with the herbaceous white wine made from vermentino in Liguria. Gewürztraminer from Alsace goes with the local smelly Münster cheese. If eating the rich magret de canard or cassoulet of Gascony, you could go with one of the two contrasting local wines: Marcillac, an acidic, light red grown in iron-rich soil that seems to quiver with the metallic taste of blood and offers relief from the thick food, or Cahors, a red as sturdy and unyielding (particularly in its youth) as a Cathar fortress, which acts as a kind of stoic balance to the weighty meat and goose fat.
I could go on.
The theory behind why this works is that in places where the gastronomic culture has had time to simmer slowly, the wines and food have developed in tandem to please the same palates at the same tables. This certainly explains why a humble wine like dry Frascati is consumed with such relish in Lazio, where it is made—with what else would you want to wash down a rich, eggy pasta carbonara? It’s a process equivalent to the daily accommodations made between married couples who by the time they reach retirement have a partnership that operates like a complex and subtle dance.
You can see this dance taking shape in places like New Zealand and Australia, where the eating and drinking cultures are in rapid motion (people are always surprised to learn that the first sauvignon blanc grapes were planted in Marlborough only in the 1970s). Already, for example, antipodean whites—from New Zealand sauvignons with their characteristic pungency to aromatic pinot gris with a touch of off-dryness that complements spice—are proving good mates for the vibrant, exotic flavors of the fusion food of the region.
Sometimes it can also be useful to think laterally. The other day, stuck for something to eat with a handful of clarets (red Bordeaux) I needed to taste, and cooking for someone who didn’t want to eat red meat, I thought back to the sort of food popular during Britain’s claret-drinking era, roasted a loin of veal, and served it with egg and anchovy cream sauce, and it worked perfectly.
This rule of thumb is intended only as a guide; I don’t wish to suggest that you should restrict yourself to drinking wine from the same country as the food you are eating. So what can you do if you’re not cooking a classical dish? Or want to branch out?
Broadly speaking, there are two directions you can take. You can choose a wine that melds with the food. So, for instance, if you were eating roast pork with sweet, mellow roasted root vegetables, you might pick a mellow, aged Rioja with autumn-leaf flavors and a kind of strawberry-softness to echo the caramelized woodiness of cooked parsnips and carrots. Or, to take a more unusual example, you might try smoked eel with an off-dry pinot gris. It might sound odd, but there’s a textural correspondence between the fleshiness of the wine and the oiliness of the fish, and both have a smoky quality.
Alternatively you can pick a wine that acts as a contrast, cutting across the food, like fruity chutney with cold meat or a squeeze of lemon over fish. A good example of this is drinking Beaujolais, with its bright, cheery fruitiness, with Christmas dinner; in a similar vein, Beaujolais is also lovely with duck rillettes.
Watch out for herbs and spices, because they have a huge impact on the taste of a dish. Acidity is another thing that can wreck a well-planned glass of wine. If you’re going to be eating a lot of vinegar (in vinaigrette, say), tomatoes, or lemons, try to find a wine with enough acidity to stand up to it; otherwise the acidity in the food will make the wine taste dull and empty. Roast chicken with buttery gravy will be delicious with a rich, buttery oaked white Burgundy or South African chardonnay. Marinate chicken breasts in lemon juice and lemongrass and grill them fast, and the crisp vim of a sauvignon blanc or lemony-tasting Gavi from northern Italy will be better.
It’s mainly instinctive, but weight and intensity should also be taken into consideration.
The most critical food and wine matching exercise of my life occurred when a newspaper for which I was working as a features writer asked me to go and have dinner with a man who lived off roadkill. On the phone with Mr. Boyt, it became clear that we were not talking about the odd pheasant or grouse.
“There are some dead foxes on the verges at the moment,” he said, rather too cheerily. “They’re a bit old and stinky, and fox is the only thing I don’t really like eating because it tastes of petrol, but if you like we could take a steak off one anyway. And don’t worry. Just in case we don’t find anything, I’ll get a badger stew out of the freezer and have it bubbling on the stove, ready for when you arrive.”
Lovely. I gave a lot of thought to what wine I would take to drink with that badger stew. Would it be South African pinotage, for the reek of rubber and smoke, the better to go with the tire marks? Or maybe industrial vodka, for the anesthetic effect? In the end I settled on the biggest, burliest Australian shiraz I could find, in the hope that it would obliterate the taste of anything else I put in my mouth.
Unless you are trying to drown out the taste of badger with a roar of shiraz, or cut through a heavy meal with an acidic wine, it’s a good idea to look for a reasonable parity of intensity. This is why bold, oaked, high-alcohol reds from Argentina, Chile, South Africa, and Australia are so often teamed with barbecue food: they have a volume similar to that of pungent marinades and charred red meat.
Two other things play havoc with wine: chile and bitterness. The best way to counteract chile is to put it with a wine that has some sweetness. Try drinking a bone-dry wine with a hot marinade and the wine will seem stripped of all flavor, like water. With an off-dry rosé, or pinot gris, however, you might just succeed in being able to taste both wine and food. As for bitterness, which you find in chicory and artichokes, this is something wine drinkers learn to dread, and it is not easily resolved, though a glass of fino sherry is one answer.
Finally, there is the do-as-you-please school of wine and food matching for those who prefer to eat what they like best and drink what they like best without making any link between the two. This reminds me of the uncle who used to put tomato ketchup on his breakfast cornflakes on the grounds that they were his two favorite things and that he could. Not everyone shared his taste, but it made him very happy.
Few of us have the luxury of a cellar, but we can follow a few basic rules. Wine should be stored in the dark, ideally at a temperature of 50°F. Keeping the temperature steady is more important than getting it exactly right, so don’t put the wine rack near any radiators or outside walls, where the heat fluctuates.
What to do with leftover wine
Rather than throwing wine away, or allowing it to linger for a third day, freeze it for culinary use. I freeze small quantities of wine in ice-cube trays, to be popped into gravy, and larger amounts in plastic cups to make stews and casseroles.
My face must have inadvertently scrunched up as I took a sip of the expensive champagne. “What’s the matter?” asked the friend whose new job we were supposed to be celebrating. “Corked?” It wasn’t corked. It was just … horribly unsatisfying.
This was a wine I had drunk in France only three months earlier, on a December afternoon so cold our hands had turned first blue and then as deathly white as the frost on the Bollinger vineyards we had toured before being rewarded with a glass of their 1999 vintage. I had loved it then, so what was the matter now? Did the wine refuse to express itself away from its homeland? Did it taste that good only if you almost caught pneumonia before trying it? For five more minutes I sipped from my flute, tasting only disappointment, drinking too quickly because I was hoping to find in the next mouthful what I had missed in the one before. This wasn’t something for which I’d willingly fork out £60 again. More like half that.
Then it came to me. In the kitchen I tipped the champagne out of the flutes and into two large white-wine glasses. This time, given space to breathe and a stage to occupy, the wine was as gorgeous as I’d remembered it, like “tasting stars,” to quote the monk Dom Perignon on one of his own brews.
I think we all intuitively realize that the type and shape of glass we drink out of affects our drinking experience to some extent. After all, doesn’t everything, from what you’ve just had in your mouth, to your mood, the temperature, its age … the list of variables is almost endless. So what we should be asking is how much? And in what way?
To take two extremes, I suspect only the very perverse would argue that it’s more pleasurable to drink wine out of a polystyrene cup than fine lead crystal. But what about all the things that fall in between?
The word glass derives from an Old Teutonic form of the word meaning “to shine.” Pliny tells us that in his time it was preferred over gold as a drinking vessel, and there is a lot to be said for the way a clean glass sparkles on the table and how your eyes enjoy running over its curves. But change the taste of the wine in a way an ordinary person might actually notice? For a long time I thought the idea was nonsense, but a lot of tasting and a lot of drinking have changed my mind. Now I realize glasses can make such a difference that they are as big a part of the equation as deciding how much money you’re going to spend on a bottle. And tipping vintage champagne out of a narrow flute to give it a bit more space is only the beginning.
My education began when I was invited to a fancy dinner hosted by Georg Riedel, the head of the Austrian glass company that bears his family name. Riedel is like the Armani of wineglasses. Its drinking vessels come in dozens of different shapes. But they are not just designed to look and feel good when you pick them up; each one is made with a specific wine style, say Chablis or zinfandel, in mind, and is supposed, by some mysterious process, to hone its best points, like a fun house mirror that makes you appear taller and emphasizes your waist.
In the event we didn’t really put the Riedel range through its paces that night. We tried wines in pairs of glasses—the one designed specifically for it and a second glass that splayed out toward the top, more martini than tulip. Each time the wine smelled significantly less intense in the glass that splayed out. The effect was a bit like shouting into a gale that’s howling past your ears—you have to make more effort to make yourself heard, and even when you do, words and inflections simply disappear. Lesson one learned: a glass that doesn’t curve in, at least slightly, around the wine lets it down in the same way, and included in this category are many of the thick-stemmed, goblet-shaped glasses you are sometimes given in restaurants and that I have found waiters change only with irritation.
The other, very basic thing that makes a big difference is space. Pour wine one-third of the way up a decent-sized glass (this will often mean that the meniscus is at the widest point of the bowl, giving the greatest surface area contact with the air), give it a swirl, and it’s going to smell much better than if you poured a student-sized portion right up to the rim, giving the nose no room at all for maneuver. For red wines, a glass is effectively a personal decanter, and the bowl should generally be larger than it is for a white.
Then something even more disconcerting happened. I invited my friend Joe over for dinner. Joe Wadsack is a food and drink nut. He had just finished helping to design a range for Dartington Crystal and, rather than turning up with wine or flowers, he offered to bring a few of them, eager to show them off. Buying a set of good tasting glasses, which revealed wines in brighter, sharper detail—in much the same way that the hazy green mass of a tree suddenly resolves itself into individual leaves the first time you put on a pair of contact lenses—had already persuaded me that good glasses could make a difference, but I was still skeptical about all this different-shapes-for-different-wines business.
Joe called ahead with instructions that made him sound like a stage magician and almost made me wish I hadn’t agreed to the whole performance. “You’ll need a pinot noir,” he said. “Any pinot noir—it doesn’t matter which; you can choose. And a sauvignon blanc, any sauvignon blanc.” Yes, all right, I said, I get the idea.
According to Joe, when designing glasses intended to flatter certain types of wine, you have to look first not at the wine but at what people expect of it—what they want it to taste like—and work backward from there. “For example,” he said, “from sauvignon blanc people expect lively, grassy scents, citrus, vigor. It’s a wine you’d have sitting outside, watching cricket. Wallop. And it should be refreshing.”
When Joe starts talking, it’s sometimes hard to get him to stop. I tuned out, stuck my nose in several glasses, and began sniffing like a hound of the Baskervilles. I had to admit that something seemed to be going right. In the Burgundy glass the sauvignon smelled weak and diffuse. In my cheapie Habitat number, and in our control “taster” glass, it was doing OK. In Joe’s wine glass for unoaked white something was happening: on the nose it felt more sculpted, pointy, and firm, much more like sticking your head out of a car window and catching a gasp of crisp mountain air, which is exactly what I want from a sauvignon blanc.
“Exactly,” said Joe. “Now taste. You’re going to have to do this as if you’re drinking rather than spitting, and tell me which one seems more thirst-quenching.”
Again, Joe’s unoaked—white wine glass outperformed the Burgundy one. He explained why: “The bigger brim of the Burgundy glass directs the wine under your tongue. The others send it straight on to the sides of the tongue where your mouth waters when you drink something acidic, so it seems leaner. Also, when a glass is narrower at the top, you can’t get your nose into it, so you have to tip your head farther back to take a sip. The wine then hits your mouth with a higher velocity—whoosh—which creates a different sensation and alters the flow across your taste buds.”
There were more revelations. A bottle of young Meursault, an oaked white from Burgundy, tasted creamier, richer, and more opulent in a glass with a short, shallow bowl.
“That’s because most of the volatile components from the oak hover just above the wine,” explained Joe. “Because this glass is wide, you stick your nose right in—and you catch them.”
This wasn’t always a good thing, I discovered after experimenting with a few more whites. I preferred some of the more flagrantly oaked, sumptuous New World whites from the control taster glass—but that’s because I liked them better if those qualities were restrained and they were “Frenched up,” as Joe put it. “Again, it’s about looking at what you want from the wine, as well as at the wine itself.”
Perhaps most interesting, from the point of view of anyone who drops this sort of money on a wine but doesn’t invest in glassware, were the changes wrought on the more expensive reds. In the right glass (a wide bulb) an expensive pinot noir fanned out like a peacock spreading its tail, so much more expressive than in our control that I was forced to conclude you’d be wasting your money spending so much on a bottle of wine unless you had something halfway decent out of which to drink it. It would be like buying a state-of-the-art sound system and fitting it to cheap speakers—or a Ferrari and sitting in it in traffic.
It’s hard to buy, unless you’ve seen it in action, that anyone whose nostrils weren’t trained to the nth degree might be able to pick up such a change. But not only have I experienced it enough times now to believe there really is something in it; I’ve even sat down at my kitchen table with my mum, who knows nothing about wine except that she likes to drink it, and got her to sniff and slurp the same wine from different glasses. Every single time she told me that she preferred the wine from the one designed specifically for it—and she didn’t know which the “right” answer was.
There is one small scrap of good news, though: a one-size-fits-all wineglass, such as my Habitat specials (perhaps a smaller one for whites and a bigger one for reds), can do a pretty good job with most wines, provided it tapers slightly at the top.
Nonetheless I reserve great respect for sticklers like the head waiter at the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai, who refused to let standards slip during the terrorist siege in November 2008. As one guest-hostage who had been holed up in the restaurant while explosions shook the building later reported, “Come 5 A.M. we were fairly confident the police were going to get us out, so I marched over to the bar and found a bottle of vintage Cristal, opened it, and began pouring. Then the head waiter came rushing across and said, “No, no, you can’t do that!” And I said, “Well, we’re going to!” and he said, “No, sir, those are the wrong type of glasses.”’ Quite so.
