Pomegranate fizz and cheesy wafers
IN FROM THE COLD: WARMING UP AFTER WALKS ACROSS FROZEN FIELDS
A SIP OF SOMETHING BY THE FIRE
How rough do you like your vodka
Making your own cranberry vodka
Scandinavian inspiration: aquavit
Food to eat with neat vodkas and aquavit
GLAMOROUS WINE-AND-FOOD COMBINATIONS FOR DARK DAYS
Atlantic whites with seafood: albariño and muscadet
There are two sides to winter. First there is the festive build-up to Christmas and the season itself, all the way through to the New Year, when cold is a novelty, and warming casseroles with red wine, as well as rich food and drink with a tang of celebration to them, all seem entirely at home. This is when cognac, Armagnac, champagne, and cocktails are thrown about. Then there are the dismal months that follow, with still-dark days, an endless trudge of grey, when anything that reeks of seasonal merrymaking feels tired and drab, like half-empty bottles the morning after a party. This is the time of year when it is hardest to find food and drink for which you can work up an appetite. Some give up altogether and detox. Alternatively, a famous chef once told me that in January he gets around this by filling his menu with everyone’s favorite comfort food; I find that a complete change of pace in January, into clean-tasting vodkas and sake matched with food from the frozen North (blinis and pickled herring) and Asian-inspired noodle rice paper wraps do the trick. There are also certain wines, such as albariño from Spain or rosé, that don’t at first seem to belong in winter, but provide a welcome respite from heaviness and, rather than being disgruntled by the damp, dark cold are almost lit up by it. Then, when all else fails, you can just retreat to the armchair by the fire and pour a large tot of your favorite whiskey.
From the gleam of pomegranate seeds to the luxurious opulence of brandy and champagne combined in the classic champagne cocktail, there is a distinctly festive quality to all these drinks.
1 brown sugar cube
7 or 8 drops angostura bitters
cognac
champagne
1 strip of orange zest
If you are going to mix champagne with anything, there ought to be a rule: the finished drink must be better than the unadulterated champagne. This might seem obvious, but you only need think of a weak mimosa—insipid, apologetic, limp—to realize the rule is seldom followed and actually, unless you have such a bad champagne that disguising the taste entirely is the only way to get it down, almost nothing will improve it.
The champagne cocktail is a glorious exception. The patrician scent of the cognac conspires with the luxury of the champagne and the tang of the orange peel to make a drink that is heady, celebratory, delicious, and totally and utterly lethal. Even so, I wouldn’t waste anything special on this—certainly not vintage and not even a special nonvintage. They’re easy enough to make:
Soak the sugar cube with the angostura bitters and place in the bottom of a champagne flute. Pour just enough cognac into the glass to cover the sugar, then top with champagne (be careful; the champagne will froth like fury the moment it hits the sugar) and add the orange zest. Drink at once.
1 brown sugar cube
7 or 8 drops angostura bitters
cognac
champagne
1 strip of orange zest
Where cognac is refined and urbane, and smells almost softly soapy, like continental men’s aftershave, Armagnac has throat and rustic fire. Mixed with fizz, it makes a more feral, jagged version of a classic champagne cocktail. This drink is a take on one they make in Gascony using Pousse Rapière (literally, “rapier thrust”), a liqueur made from Armagnac macerated with oranges, and champagne. The ridiculous yet irresistibly pleasing name “Gasconomic Orange,” was dreamed up by my friend Sally when she handled the public relations account for Armagnac in this country. They are so good that when we drank them together we got a little carried away; by the end of the evening, when we remembered to be sensible, we sagely decided to dilute the drink by adding more champagne.
Pour the first two ingredients into a champagne flute, top with champagne, and garnish with the orange zest.
Jewel-bright, translucent pomegranate seeds look stunning mixed in with ice cubes in a tumbler and then topped with vodka (straight from the freezer, of course). I use a couple of teaspoons of seeds per person and supply cocktail picks so you can pick at them when the vodka has gone. Beware, though. Pomegranates have become a very fashionable ingredient, but no one tells you they are also very messy. The first time I tried this, digging into the halved pomegranate to excavate the seeds, I spattered indelible crimson juice in a 360-degree sweep around my friend’s immaculate kitchen. She emailed the next day to say the pristine spines of her cookbooks had been “improved by the Pollocking,” but I am not sure she meant it.
1 bottle sparkling white wine
3 cups fresh pomegranate juice
8 ounces vodka
This isn’t too potent, which makes it useful for larger parties. You need to use real pomegranate juice, not a pomegranate “beverage” or “made from concentrate,” because as well as the deep fruitiness, the taste depends on there being a touch of astringency that you find only in the fresh stuff. The liquid equivalent of a red party frock, it’s not sophisticated, but it’s fun and has a sense of festivity. You can use the cheapest sparkling wine—its taste will more or less be drowned out by the pomegranate. This makes enough for about ten glassfuls.
Mix all the ingredients in a jug, pouring the sparkling wine in first because it will go crazy when it hits the sugar of the pomegranate juice. Then serve in either large wineglasses or tumblers filled with ice.
1½ tablespoons unsalted butter, cold from the fridge
⅓ cup self-rising flour
2½ ounces Gruyère or Cheddar, grated (a generous ½ cup)
1¾ ounces fresh Parmesan, grated (about ¼ cup)
½ teaspoon hot red pepper flakes
2 teaspoons fresh thyme leaves
1 to 2 teaspoons cold water, if you need it
Everyone has his or her own variation on the classic cheese-straws recipe. This is mine, adapted from Nigella Lawson’s recipe for cheese stars, which uses red Leicester in place of the Gruyère or Cheddar. I have also added hot red pepper flakes, because I like the sudden burst of heat when you hit one, and thyme. It goes so heavy on the cheese it almost feels as if the flour is there just for propriety’s sake, but you get away with it by using self-rising, which helps to puff the wafers out. How many it makes obviously depends on the size of the cutter you use, but it’s about right for four to six people. If you like, you can make the dough the day before and leave, tightly wrapped, in the fridge overnight.
Preheat the oven to 400°F. Cut the butter into cubes with a knife and rub into the flour and grated cheese with your fingers, as you would to make pastry, until the mixture resembles fine bread crumbs. Sprinkle the hot pepper flakes and thyme over the mixture and stir. Once they are thoroughly distributed, use your hands to squeeze and then knead the ingredients into a dough. If necessary, you can add a tiny amount of water, but you shouldn’t need it. When you’ve got it pressed into a ball, wrap the dough tightly in a plastic bag or plastic wrap and leave to rest for 15 minutes in the fridge. Roll the dough out on a floured surface until about ⅛ inch thick. Cut out the wafers and spread on greased baking sheets lined with wax or parchment paper. Cook for 10 minutes or so, until golden, transfer to cooling racks, and serve just as soon as you can touch them—they are delicious hot.
1 part cognac
3 parts ginger ale
There is something very Christmasy about the combined smell of brandy and ginger. The other beauty of this drink is that it’s long, so you can take slightly more thirsty sips than you ordinarily might from another brandy cocktail.
Pour both ingredients into an ice-filled tumbler, stir, and serve.
In deepest winter the sight—and smell—of a large saucepan full of fumy alcohol simmering gently on the stove, waiting for someone to ladle a drink out of it, makes a house feel like a home. Hot punches and wassail cups aren’t just good for pre-Christmas parties. They are comforting to come back to on cold January weekends when you’ve been freezing on the sidelines of a sports match or tramping across icy fields and want to mill around the kitchen feeling your cold fingers come back to life. Like turkey hash, they can also be a useful way of turning leftover dribs and drabs into something that’s more than the sum of its parts.
1 bottle red wine
1 glass brandy or port
5 cloves
1 orange, sliced
1 cinnamon stick
1 pinch apple pie spice
sugar to taste (optional)
There seems to be a snooty anti—mulled wine movement gathering pace, which is a shame because this is a drink that says to me the holiday season has arrived. I never deviate from the recipe my mother has been using for decades, which is repeated here. There’s no point in using anything other than cheap wine, but it should still be something you would be happy to drink cold. Tempranillo from Spain is one good option, and Chilean merlot works well too, because it’s sturdy and fruity but not so distinctive that it can’t make a good canvas for the spices. Don’t just open the wine and pour it directly into the pan. Check that it’s not corked first (see p. 24) or you will ruin the entire drink. Serves six.
In a saucepan, gently heat the wine and spirit. Stick the cloves into the orange slices. Add the cinnamon, clove-spiked orange slices, mixed spice, and sugar. Simmer for 15 minutes, and then serve.
6 teaspoons brown sugar
6 eating apples, cored
⅜ cup water
1 cup sherry, or more to taste
8½ cups hard cider
1 orange studded with cloves at approximately ¾-inch intervals
a 1-inch cinnamon stick, no more
5 or 6 allspice berries
¼ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg, no more
1, or even 2, wineglasses cooking brandy
I first drank this one grey, rain-soaked evening between Christmas and New Year. Essentially a sort of mulled cider, it’s a refreshing and perhaps more sophisticated alternative to mulled wine. The recipe was put together by my friend Robbie by the simple process of looking several up on the Internet, taking all the bits that seemed essential to a wassail cup, leaving out the ones he didn’t like the sound of, and adding a few extras that he did.
The word wassail comes from the Old Norse ves heill, “to be in good health,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and has a variety of interrelated meanings, all of them full of goodwill. It may be a “toast or salutation,” a “festivity when much drinking takes place,” a drinking song, a drink, or the practice of going from house to house singing carols.
Wassail cup used to be made in celebration of the apple harvest and thus contains cider and baked apples. It smells very good—a noseful of wintry spices that somehow avoid the nasty tendency some of these drinks have to reek of potpourri. It tastes great, too—hot and appley, with a pleasing nip in the throat. Fino is the best sort of sherry, but no need for fancy stuff. Again, with the cider, the general rule is that if you’d drink it cold it will be fine hot. As with most recipes of this type, there’s no need to be too precise about ingredient quantities—keep tasting and adjust to your own palate. What you must be careful about, though, is the spice element—too much and you will overpower the drink. Makes ten glassfuls.
Heat the oven to 340°F. Put a spoonful of sugar in each apple, then place them in a roasting pan with the water and bake for 20 to 30 minutes, until soft but not too collapsed or mushy—you don’t want them to disintegrate into the wassail. Meanwhile, place all the other ingredients except the brandy in a large saucepan. Bring to a boil, then turn down the heat and simmer gently (with just a few bubbles coming to the surface every so often; if it’s too hot, the alcohol will boil off) for about 20 minutes. When ready to drink—taste it to check that the spices have infused into the cider—add the apples and cook for 5 more minutes. The idea is that the apples should add flavor to the drink, much as a bay leaf does in stock, but not fall into it. Finally, just before serving, add the brandy and continue heating until the mixture is piping hot again. Use a ladle to fill glass cups or generous wineglasses. This is good with hard cheeses, and the hot apple taste goes well with mince pies too.
Look at the small print on the bottles of cough syrup on the drugstore shelf and you’ll find many contain little more than glucose, sucrose, honey, and alcohol. So why bother when you can take the fresh ingredients and make a cheaper, more delicious, longer drink at home?
juice of ½ to 1 lemon
1 teaspoon honey
Just mix the freshly squeezed lemon juice and honey in a glass or mug, then top with water that’s recently boiled but just cooled a little. My taste is generally quite sour, so you may need to double or even triple the quantity of honey. The result feels throat-repairing (even if only temporarily) and easily does instead of tea at breakfast time.
Of course, lemon, honey, and hot water is even more “medicinal” if finished off with a tot of whiskey. The vitamin C for health, the honey to soothe, the alcohol to numb …
1 thin slice of butter
1 teaspoon brown sugar
1 generous tot of dark rum
1 cinnamon stick
freshly grated nutmeg (optional)
This has a real security-blanket feel to it. Mix the butter in a glass with the brown sugar and add the rum, then top with hot water and drop in the cinnamon. Add a tiny grating of nutmeg to finish if you like.
1 egg, separated
scant ¼ cup superfine sugar
scant ¾ cup milk
3 tablespoons heavy cream
1 ounce brandy or rum
freshly grated nutmeg or ground cinnamon (optional)
It was snuffling round the leftovers on Boxing Day that got me into this. I’d eaten a few cold sausages and a couple of potato croquettes, but what I really had my eye on was the brandy sauce left over from the pudding. Would it be acceptable to drink it straight from the jug? Well, no one was looking … That’s when it crossed my mind that eggnog—at its simplest a combination of raw eggs, brandy, milk, and perhaps some cream—is nothing more than raw custard spiked with alcohol. Why had I always been so put off by the idea? It is particularly suited to cosseting you through the sort of sniffly, dark weekend afternoons when you’re in a robe pretending to be far more under the weather than you actually feel, not eating very much, and not intending to leave the house again until Monday. It is also good when there is present wrapping to be done.
Americans are big on eggnog and have dozens of variations on the theme. I like mine with brandy best and prefer to beat the yolk and white separately, as it gives a better texture. They have a comforting nursery feel, probably because they’re reminiscent of the mug of hot milk with sugar and an egg stirred in that parents used to feed children before they went to bed, and, perhaps because they feel nourishing, they are dangerously easy to gulp back.
This recipe makes two restrained or one very greedy portion, so serve either in a pair of small tumblers or wineglasses or in a tall Collins glass. Beat the egg yolk with half the sugar until pale. Beat the egg white until stiff, add the remaining sugar, and beat to glossy soft peaks. Combine the milk, cream, spirit, and egg yolk mixture. Fold in the egg white, pour into glasses, and top with nutmeg or cinnamon if you feel like it (I never do).
1 part brandy
1 part crème de cacao
1 part heavy cream
Cream cocktails are not everyone’s bag, but sometimes, after a cold-turkey sandwich supper, say, the sweetness is just what you need. The only bad thing about this classic is that it calls for crème de cacao, cocoa bean liqueur, which all too easily becomes one of those nuisance bottles that fills your cupboard and is taken out only once or twice a year, so make sure you really like it if you make the investment.
Shake all the ingredients with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.
No one likes Baileys. That’s what they all say, anyway. Yet oddly when I had a bottle at home once, a former flatmate admitted: “I hope you don’t mind, but we drank a bit of your Baileys last night. And the other week too …” A bit? They had finished it. And I hadn’t had so much as a glassful. I also notice that Baileys—creamy, sweet, and unctuous, and poured over lots of ice to give it some edge—is what women begin to buy toward last call in the bar when they think no one is looking. I don’t know why everyone should be so embarrassed about it. Baileys is like a whiskey version of the brandy Alexander cocktail—it’s made with cream, Irish whiskey, cocoa nibs, vanilla, and caramel—and though it feels as if it has been around forever, was only actually launched in 1975. As well as being a great end-of-evening drink, it is also delicious in ice cream. If you have an ice-cream maker, just make a white-chocolate or vanilla ice cream and chuck in a few good slugs of it.
Chile aside, and disregarding temperature, ginger is one of the most warming things you can eat or drink. If you are the riding, shooting, or fishing type, a ginger wine or a whiskey mac—the British counterpart of the American bourbon and ginger—would be the best thing you could put in your hip flask. And even if you are not, it is probably worth taking yourself off on a long, lonely walk across some frozen, frosty fields to enjoy the vigorous spread of ginger’s heat either while you’re out or as a reward once back home.
Ginger wine is made by fermenting currants or raisins, then adding various spices such as cloves and saffron and, of course, the eponymous ginger. People often talk about “green ginger wine,” which has nothing to do with its color (though it is usually sold in green bottles) and everything to do with the old culinary habit of referring to fresh ginger as “green ginger.” The name has stuck, even though ground ginger is often used to make it today. The two biggest and best-known brands in Britain are Crabbie’s, which has some of the sharpness of biting into crystallized stem ginger, and Stone’s (which uses ground ginger), which by comparison tastes more like baked gingerbread.
This traditional British drink is lovely neat, but it is also famously used in a whiskey mac.
2 parts blended whiskey
1 part ginger wine
This is one of those cocktails that, by virtue of a cosy name and warm demeanor, somehow have honorary cup-of-tea status and are considered harmless enough to drink before the sun is quite over the yardarm.
Just mix the whisky and ginger wine and pour over ice into a small tumbler.
Whiskey is a spirit to which I always come with a sense of reverence. This is not just because of the taste, in which you find hints of the icy sea spume and peat bogs of the wild landscape in which it is made. It’s also because, of all drinks, this is the one I associate either with hard drinking and hard men or with serious conversation and contemplation. No doctor I have spoken to has ever been able to confirm the suspicion many of us hold that different drinks affect our brain in different ways, so perhaps the reverse is true: we turn to certain drinks according to our mood. If you were hoping to set the world to rights over a late-night drink, a decent scotch might well be something you would pour. It certainly feels appropriately intellectual: a drink you can wrestle with, linger over, and appreciate with all its nooks and crannies.
There is a historical association between whiskey and thinkers and writers, many of whom drank to excess. Dylan Thomas’s last words are said, apocryphally perhaps, to have been “I’ve just had eighteen straight whiskeys, I think that’s the record.” Winston Churchill and Graham Greene were also keen whiskey drinkers. Greene wasn’t always persnickety about flavor, though. In his novel The Human Factor he has the double agent Maurice Castle drink J&B whiskey, the better to be secretive about the level of his alcohol consumption. “He always bought J&B because of its color,” writes Greene. “A large whiskey and soda looked no stronger than a weak one of another brand.”
Whiskey drinkers are usually more precise in their likes and dislikes. They know exactly what mood will suit a blend (which is composed from both barley and grain whiskeys, are precise about when they will have a vatted malt (made only from malted barley but a blend from several distilleries), or when only a single malt (a whiskey made from malted barley in a single distillery) will do.
They will also have run their palates across the heather-covered hills, the glens, and the craggy coastlines of the Scottish landscape and worked out which area makes malts that please them the most. They will be aware that Islay, the southernmost island of the Inner Hebrides, is famed for the pungent, iodinelike, smoky peat smell of its whiskeys; that the Lowlands produce some of the most delicate and floral; that Speyside in the east of the mainland is said to produce some of the most complex. And they will know about the imprint that the oak, whether it is an old sherry cask or a bourbon barrel, will leave on the spirit.
For the whiskey drinker, there is very much to consider—it is a subject that requires an entire volume of its own. Suffice to say that when you are drinking whiskey, one of the choices you will have to make is how: straight up, on the rocks, or with a little cold water. I usually go with water, which I serve on the side in a small milk pitcher so that people can pour their own, because woe betide you if you get it wrong in someone else’s glass. The reason is that water, not being as cold as ice, allows you to taste the spirit better, and diluting it slightly does seem to make the flavor bloom and express itself more eloquently.
A handful of my favorite whiskeys, a list that grows longer every time I taste more, would include the following: Highland Park 12 years old, a heathery, sophisticated, beautifully defined Orkney single malt; Ardbeg 10 years old, an Islay with a smoky, marine tingle and satisfying sense of completeness; and the Macallan Sherry Oak 10 years old, for the spicy, panforte-like, Christmasy feel the sherry casks bring to the spirit.
Brandy is a spirit distilled from fermented grape juice (though the word is often applied to spirits made from other fruits, such as apples). It can be made anywhere in the world—I have had some pretty decent stuff from Spain—but the finest comes from France, from two neighboring regions.
Cognac and Armagnac are like the town mouse and the country mouse of the brandy world. Cognac has sophistication and finesse, as suave as a man in a Savile Row suit, all neatly pressed and ironed into shape. Its smell is smooth and sweetly woody, like continental aftershave, and it seems burnished, like a finely polished piece of old mahogany. Armagnac, the country mouse, is not such an elegant fellow, but he has a lot of character. If he were a piece of furniture, he’d be a solid oak kitchen table, sturdy and beautifully carved, that has been in the family for years, seen a lot of spillages and a lot of raucous dinners, and come out of them intact but not unmarked. Armagnac is not just more rustic; it is throaty. You can feel its guts, the hot fire, almost hear the stories that would be told over a glass of it. You can probably tell that’s where my heart is, but the consensus is that cognac is the finer, leaving Armagnac looking just a little too yokel to compete.
The reasons for the differing taste are several. Cognac is mostly made from the ugni blanc grape, which is known in Italy as trebbiano and makes quite undistinguished wine (its distillate is clearly a different matter). The cognac vineyards are in western France, north of Bordeaux, in the Charente and Charente-Maritime, and spill into the Dordogne and Deux-Sèvres. And the spirit is double distilled, a batch at a time, in a copper-pot still, before being matured in oak, which soaks through the spirit, filling out its flavor.
Armagnac is made among the narrow lanes and quiet hills of Gascony, to the south of Bordeaux, very often in tiny quantities by small family producers. It is also made from ugni blanc, but significant amounts of two other grapes, colombard and folle blanche, are also used. It is distilled just once, in a number of different ways, sometimes like cognac, sometimes in continuous or semicontinuous stills, through which the wine can keep running before it goes into barrels. Armagnac needs years before it gives and softens enough to show its true pedigree, but when you do sip an old one, with its distant flavors of prunes and forests, the extraordinary thing is that it never tastes its age.
Finally, forget about those ostentatious and cumbersome balloon-shaped glasses: brandy likes to be drunk out of a glass that allows some, but not too much, of the drink to evaporate. As ever, you can buy the ideal shape from a specialist, but a good wineglass that curves in at the top will do.
Regarding labels, here are a few pointers. Cognac must have been aged in oak for two years before it’s released and, in ascending order of quality, it may be marked three star or VS (Very Special, meaning its youngest spirit is at least two years old); VSOP (Very Special Old Pale, meaning the youngest element must be at least four years old); Napoleon, XO or Hors d’Âge (youngest element at least six years old). For Armagnac, three star must be more than two years old, VSOP over five, and XO over six, but you will frequently come across much older spirits than that.
After the gluttonous feasting of Christmas and New Year, Thai, Chinese, and Japanese food provide a change of pace and a fillip of interest, and they aren’t stodgy or rich. The drinks that go with them are similarly refreshing.
In his Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson tells us that in China in the first century A.D., “a special courier service with swift horses was set up to bring fresh lychees from Canton north to the Imperial Court.” Later, during the Ming dynasty, special lychee clubs met in temples to gorge themselves silly on the fruit so prized that it has moved countless Chinese poets to rhapsodic verse. We don’t quite seem to appreciate the lychee in the same way. It is an odd creature: pocked brittle skin that seems to belong to a prehistoric reptile, and slippery, pale flesh that looks a bit like an eyeball torn from its socket. It’s the smell that gets you—haunting and fragile, like a nightingale’s song. Or at least that’s how you start to think after a few lychee “martinis.” (Strictly speaking it isn’t correct to use the term martini for fruit vodka drinks, but it’s become common practice to do so, and I’ve stuck with it because it sounds more appealing.) The concept here is simple: take the fruit, peel, stone, blend, strain to remove bits of shell and lumps, add about the same amount or slightly more vodka from the freezer, shake with ice, and strain into cocktail glasses. You could use canned lychees, but though they give a more robust drink, there is no refinement. Fresh ones (available in Asian markets) have much more fragrance and produce a more ethereal, “homemade” taste. I like to drink this before eating a bowl of noodles or a fresh stir-fry—or the Thai wraps detailed opposite.
Vodka infusions are easy to make, and this is no exception. Take one stalk of lemongrass (the size you buy in the supermarket, not the longer ones you find at Thai grocers) for every quarter bottle of vodka, bash it a couple of times with a rolling pin to break the skin, and drop into the vodka. Leave to steep for about three days at room temperature, then pop the vodka into the freezer. You can either pour it into a tumbler over ice or shake with ice and serve martini-style in cocktail glasses. I sometimes make this if I’m eating chicken marinated in nam pla, lime juice and chile, or a Thai salad.
1 package Thai rice paper wraps
For the Thai dressing:
2 tablesoons nam pla
juice of 2 limes
1 stalk lemongrass, finely chopped
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 small red chile, finely chopped
These are the perfect thing to eat after lychee “martinis” or lemongrass vodka. I like communal food that can be eaten with your fingers, and as most of this can be prepped in advance and the wrapping up is done at the table as people eat, it leaves plenty of time for making drinks and chatting. Before cooking the meat, you should mix the dressing and chop up all the accompaniments, then you can put the hot ingredients on the table as soon as they are done and let people get on with it. Two different animal proteins will usually be enough, but if you’re cooking for larger numbers, you could introduce more variety. The quantities here will feed four hungry people—I usually bank on each person eating three or so wraps. When rolling my wraps, I never put all the fillings in each one—I love to have chicken with basil and mango, for example, and beef tenderloin with spring onions and cucumber.
Thai rice paper wraps are made, as you’d imagine, from rice, water, and salt. They come in hard, round sheets that become pliable and sticky when soaked briefly in water and can be found at many Asian markets.
For the marinade:
1 red chile, seeded and finely chopped
2 stalks lemongrass (or 1 long one if bought at a Thai supermarket), finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, pressed or finely chopped
juice of 1 lime
1 tablespoon nam pla
10 ounces beef tenderloin, left whole, or 2 skinless, boneless chicken breasts, cut into strips
Combine the marinade ingredients, mix with the meat, making sure that all surfaces are well coated, and then cover and let stand for 3 hours. When ready to eat, heat a small amount of vegetable oil in a frying pan. The chicken should stir-fry in 5 minutes or so. Let the steak have a couple of minutes on each side, less if it’s not very thick, then let stand for 5 minutes before cutting into slices.
1 tablespoon dark sesame oil
2 skinless, boneless chicken breasts, or 10 ounces pork fillet, cut into strips
2 tablespoons sesame seeds
3 thin slices fresh ginger, peeled and finely chopped
Heat the oil in frying pan or wok. Throw in the chicken or pork. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes. Add the sesame seeds and ginger and continue stirring until the seeds turn golden and the meat is cooked. Turn into a warmed dish and serve.
20 raw shrimp, peeled
2 garlic cloves, pressed olive oil
Stir-fry the shrimp and garlic in olive oil until the shrimp turn solidly pink. Turn into a hot dish and serve.
½ cucumber, washed but not peeled, cut into 2-inch-long batons
2 large carrots, cut into slim batons
1 bunch spring onions, coarsely chopped
1 bunch Thai basil leaves
1 bunch Thai mint leaves
1 bunch cilantro
1 package rice vermicelli, soaked in hot water for 20 minutes, then drained
1 handful kumquats, halved (optional)
2 large handfuls baby spinach leaves, washed and cut into shreds (optional)
1 unripe mango, peeled, sliced, and cut into pieces (optional)
Put all the vegetable ingredients in separate bowls and lay out on the table, together with the rice paper wraps and a bowl of warm water. Let the guests make their own packages. It’s easy once you get going: just dip the wraps in the water for about 30 minutes, shake dry, put on a plate, fill the center with a selection of protein and vegetables, and spoon on a little Thai dressing. Fold over the bottom of the wrap, then roll up and eat with your fingers.
Never ask anyone how sake used to be made if you are just about to sip it. I made this mistake. “They didn’t know about yeast in Japan two thousands years ago,” sake expert Wakana Omija told me. “But they did know that if you chew rice and spit it out, then leave it for a while, it becomes a drink.”
Two things, Wakana: Why would anyone chew rice and spit it out? And if they did, why in the name of ten thousand wave paintings would anyone come along and think, my, that saliva-filled basin of semi-masticated grain looks tasty—I think I’ll have a glassful? Wakana looks taken aback. “I don’t know, but according to all the ancient literature that is how it was made. It was considered a very special drink that was offered to the gods and drunk by royals and emperors.”
It certainly puts squeamishness about people with corns, warts, and cheesy-smelling feet treading grapes to make wine into perspective. This information could cause a serious sake setback, particularly for those whose first or perhaps only experience of the drink has been in Chinese restaurants where they feed you small, unwelcome cups of something warm and brown that is curiously redolent of lamp oil. So I had better say right now that quality sake is an altogether different and quite delicious thing, which you would be more likely to compare to bitter almonds, lychees, cypress, or, because both have that strange character known either romantically as umami or censoriously as MSG, a glass of sherry.
Sake varies enormously in style, as Wakana points out. She was born in Japan but now lives in California, where she works for a (very good) sake brand called Akashi-Tai. “Back in San Francisco they can handle the traditional hardcore sakes like honjozo genshu, which is rich and ricey and also popular in Japan. In Europe people tend to prefer the lighter, more floral ones that are best drunk chilled, like white wine. Daiginjo is a good place to begin.”
Sake terminology can seem impenetrable when you first encounter it but is not that difficult to come to grips with. Premium sake is graded according to how much the rice has been “polished,” a word that conjures up a Grimm Brothers-go-to-the-Orient vision of tens of thousands of enslaved geishas rubbing painstakingly away at individual grains of rice until they acquire a satisfactory sheen. Actually, polished in this case really means “milled.” In the strains of rice used in sake production, the starch tends to be concentrated at the heart of the grain, while the fats and proteins are toward the periphery. The more the rice is polished, the more fat is shed and the purer the starch content becomes. Sake made from highly polished rice may taste intense, but its character will also be more delicate, floral, fragrant, and refined.
To make honjozo, the rice must be milled so that no more than 70 percent of the grain remains. In ginjo there must be no more than 60 percent and in daiginjo—the style recommended by Wakana for sake beginners—no more than 50 percent, although sometimes the rice will be milled so that as little as 35 percent remains. Some of these daiginjo sakes are so soft and peachy they remind me of creamy silk lingerie. There is often also a refreshing hint of lemon.
I once tasted a sake that claimed to have broken polishing records: gently, gently, for fear of its collapsing into dust (for truly good sake it is important that the grain not break, though it’s rumored that some commercially minded producers mill the rice down to earn the classification and then throw in the bits they have ground off to save money), the rice had been reduced to a mere 19 percent of its original size. The resulting sake, called Isake 19, was butterfly-wings delicate but had detailing worthy of a grand master and a taste that lingered for ages after you had swallowed. It was mind-blowingly expensive, though—the equivalent of hundreds of dollars a bottle. The price, its producers explained, was the result not only of the high waste of rice but also of the intricate milling process. “It takes five days to reduce rice to 50 percent of its initial size. But to get it to 19 percent, you need not eight days, as you might presume, but ten, because it must be done so carefully.”
Once it has been milled, the rice is washed, soaked, and steamed, and then two things happen at once. Rice harboring a microbe called koji-kin, apparently similar to that used when making blue cheese, is added, which releases enzymes that convert the rice starch to sugars that can be fermented. And sake yeast is added, along with water, so that fermentation can happen at the same time.
Finished sake will generally have an alcohol content of around 20 percent abv. If it is bottled neat, it is termed genshu. I prefer those that are diluted with water to take them down to about 16 percent abv. Just to make things even more complicated, some sake has extra alcohol added—this is called honjozo. A sake that has no added alcohol and is made only from rice, koji, and water is known as junmai, while a “regular” sake, one that does not fall into any of the special designations, is known as futushu.
The temperature at which a sake is served is not an indication of quality or lack of it, but a matter of style and to some extent preference. I like to have a lighter, daiginjo straight from the fridge, much as you would a white wine, while a heavier, fuller, richer sake can taste better either at room temperature or slightly warmed. The label on the bottle will usually offer some advice. You could drink sake out of small wineglasses—the light, chilled styles work particularly well this way—or invest in shallow clay cups similar to those you might see in a Japanese restaurant. The cup is usually placed inside a lacquered wooden box and filled so that it overflows—traditionally a sign of the host’s generosity. You then drink the sake from the cup, before tackling the liquid in the lacquered box.
Sake is becoming better known in the West thanks to the popularity of sushi bars and the ever more fashionable Japanese restaurants. I forced myself to try the more refined incarnations of sake, despite the scalding experience of those early lamp-oil forays, after a friend with a knack for alighting on the latest genuinely good thing said that when he goes to Manhattan on business the first thing he does after getting out of his taxi from JFK is to get some sushi and a glass of sake.
It is important to drink sake in context, though this need not always mean having it with Asian food. One London department store added a sake (Isake Classic, specially designed for learner palates) to the menu in their oyster and champagne bar, and the combination works well as long as you steer clear of lemon juice or vinaigrette, whose acidity throws the whole thing awry. It’s nice to see the drink stepping beyond the ethnic ghetto. But sake is never going to taste good with shepherd’s pie, or boeuf bourguignon. This makes it a tricky thing to have at home, so I asked Wakana for some easy food suggestions to eat with sake.
She said that she often makes a bowl of ricey soup. “It’s very simple: you just take three parts of water and two of ponzu, a kind of citrusy sauce, heat them, and pour them over a bowl of sushi rice. It’s a great hangover cure.” For lazy Saturday afternoons she suggested a stir-fry made with anything that’s leftover in the fridge and throwing in some raw spinach or bok choy, onions, and perhaps some chicken or thinly sliced beef. Or, she added, “I might grill some salmon and instead of hollandaise serve it with a wasabi vinaigrette.” (Her recipe follows.)
Chicken marinated overnight in a teriyaki sauce, grilled and served with edamame, is a delicious combination with a peachy glass of sake as well. And, oysters aside, there are some Western foods that sit beautifully next to it, in particular cured hams—hardly surprising when you think how nice a plate of serrano is with a glass of sherry, which shares the same salty umami quality. Tuna tartare, or carpaccio of tuna with olive oil and spring onions, is also good.
Wakana had one final word on Japanese table etiquette. “We never pass food directly chopstick to chopstick,” she says, observing me passing someone a piece of food to try. “That’s because after a cremation it’s customary to take a piece of bone out of the ashes and pass it around the table, stick to stick.” I won’t be doing that again.
For the rice salad:
1 small red onion, thinly sliced
5 ounces sushi rice
1 handful fresh cilantro, chopped
3 handfuls baby spinach leaves, shredded
2 pieces salmon fillet or red snapper
For the vinaigrette:
1 teaspoon wasabi
1 tablespoon rice vinegar
1 tablespoon light soy sauce
2 tablespoons olive oil
The vinaigrette is best made with Japanese soy sauce, rather than the stronger Chinese version. Serves two.
Cook the rice according to the instructions on the package, allow to cool, and mix it with the other salad ingredients. Broil the salmon for 10 minutes or until cooked, turning halfway through. Shake the vinaigrette ingredients together and serve on the side. Eat with a glass of chilled daiginjo.
1 part Tanqueray Ten, from the freezer
2 parts daiginjo or ginjo sake, chilled
This is one of those magical drinks that is just so much more than the sum of its parts. Aromatic, herbaceous, and with a real edge where the gin and the sake meet and spark off each other, it’s strangely hard, unless you know, to tell what you are drinking. When I order it in Zuma in Knightsbridge, I always ask for salt chile squid to go with it. It’s a great combination, but it’s also one I can’t be bothered to make myself, so at home I settle for store-bought spring rolls.
Shake both ingredients with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.
In November 2006 the BBC’s Russian affairs analyst reported that Osman Paragulgov, head of Russia’s union of wine and spirit producers, was lobbying for the introduction of something he called “social vodka,” a regulated spirit to feed the appetites of those too poor to buy the real thing.
If this sounds like a dipsomaniac’s approach to welfare provision, behind it lay a brutal reality. The previous month a clutch of Siberian towns had announced a state of emergency after nearly 900 people were hospitalized with liver failure after drinking counterfeit vodka. The annual death rate across the country for those poisoned by industrial solvents passed off as vodka was estimated at around 42,000. The question you might ask is why the pungent smell of window cleaner or antirust solution as a glass is raised to the lips does not give the game away. Part of the answer is that often it is not drunk for pleasure but to facilitate obliteration.
The writer Vitali Vitaliev once spent an evening showing me how to drink vodka “the Russian way,” as he put it, a procedure that involved exhaling, gulping back a shot, and downing a mouthful of gherkin or pickled cabbage before inhaling again. This was, he said, the best method of getting the spirit, all too often ferociously harsh, down without tasting it. I couldn’t quite decide if he was putting me on when he said that if no pickles were available, it would be acceptable to pick up a scraggy alley cat and bury your nose in its matted fur instead. He also became quite passionate when it was suggested that some of us drink because we actually like the flavor of the stuff we are swallowing. “Your taste buds have been perverted by the Western drinking culture!” he cried.
No doubt Vitaliev would have got on splendidly with Prince Harry, who was once photographed by the tabloids snorting vodka up his nostril, a method of ingestion that ingeniously bypasses the taste buds, thus dispensing with the need for an old tabby. I take the old-fashioned view that if you’re going to have a drink, you may as well enjoy it.
Even real vodka can be pretty rough, though. Vodka is a white spirit that is distilled, in some places, from the by-products of oil refining or wood-pulp processing, neither of which sounds delicious. Fortunately EU regulations require it to be made from “alcohol of agricultural origin.” Complaining that they did not think the drink ought to be an “alcoholic wastebucket,” three countries—Finland, Sweden, and Poland—from the so-called “vodka belt” recently attempted to have this definition restricted to the traditional but not traditionally desperate ingredients of grain and potato. They were unsuccessful: today you can buy vodka made from all sorts of ingredients, from grapes (for example, the French brand, Cîroc, which many argue ought to be a brandy or grappa) to molasses or soybeans.
I think you can sometimes taste what a vodka has been made from: rye, for example, gives a particularly savory, caraway-like taste, while the molasses used in many cheap store brands gives a more throaty spirit with little nuance or precision. But unless the vodka is flavored, what makes arguably the biggest difference is its purity, achieved by redistilling (and sometimes redistilling again) and filtering. Precisely what it is filtered through has a big impact; it is commonly passed through activated charcoal (activated here means chemically treated so it is more absorbent). This is why vodka people make the most enormous fuss about purity. The word vodka is suggestive of cleansing—it comes from the diminutive of the Russian word for water. And with expensive vodka the emphasis is never on taste, always on lack of taste. You hear a lot of “Distilled three times, then washed in spring water,” “Made using water from an ancient sandstone aquifer,” “Filtered through quartz sand,” and so on. I expect if you had a mind to drink vodka made using liquid from a freshwater spring in the crater of a subaquatic volcano five miles beneath the waves of the Atlantic, distilled seven times and then further purified by passing it through the Dalai Lama’s small intestine, you would probably find someone prepared to sell you it somewhere. At a price.
Up to a point it is a good idea to create vodkas so refined that they don’t attack your palate like a pitbull with a man’s arm between its teeth, or taste so horrible they are, literally, indistinguishable from industrial solvents. But unless you’re going to be drinking the spirit neat, either as a shot or in a martini, very pure vodka is not only an expensive way of doing things; it’s not even always the best.
Vodka began its fashionable ascent in the West only after the Russian Revolution of 1917, when distilleries were confiscated by the Bolsheviks and many vodka distillers fled, with the intention of carrying on their trade in the West. One of these was Vladimir Smirnov, who, on arrival in France, changed the spelling of his name to Smirnoff. The first Smirnoff-branded distillery was setup in America in 1934. but it was not until after the Second World War, when the colorless, clean-smelling drink began to be seen as something attractively modern, that it really caught on. Vodka’s lack of flavor made it an ideal mixer in cocktails of all kinds.
In some ways, our method of drinking vodka is not so different from that described by Vitaliev: we merely substitute cranberry juice for cat fur to mask the taste of the alcohol. But vodka brands have become a fashion statement for which some are willing to pay extortionate prices. Some bars exploit this, topping up their expensive, branded bottles with cheap spirit, safe in the knowledge that none of their customers will be able to tell.
When making cocktails at home, I use brands such as Smirnoff, which might not be exciting neat but are more than good enough for the cocktail job, because they don’t have off-flavors that might spoil the balance of the drink and aren’t ludicrously expensive.
If drinking it with tonic (which I rarely do), I go even further and say, almost heretically, the cheaper the better. With tonic water—and I will accept only the best tonic water—I will actually drink the cheapest vodka you can find. Vaguely reminiscent of petroleum? No problem. A slight hint of old potatoes? Perfectly fine. A scraping, fiery texture with a good old burn on the back of the throat? Bring it on. Unless you have something you can taste through the quinine and sweetener in the tonic, what on earth would be the point?
Tasting vodka is a little like tasting bottled mineral water: it’s all about texture and nuance, and it’s surprising how much your palate can discern when you are drinking it neat. Some vodka feels very precise and hard-edged, like a diamond; others feel more splurgy and fluent. Some are silkily soft; others rasp. Some taste like the alcoholic equivalent of tap water that’s not obviously chlorinated. That is, you think, “Yes, it just tastes like vodka; there’s no other tasting note.”
The two unflavored vodkas I keep in my freezer for drinking neat or as martinis are Russian Standard, which is made from wheat grain and “pure glacial water from the frozen north” (this stuff is unavoidable). It has a smooth texture but a pleasing viscosity—fat and oily, in a good way—and some breadth. It is extremely good with raw or smoked fish and, because of the mouthfeel, works well with fatty fish such as tuna belly. If in the mood for something lighter, sharper, and fresher, I also have Belvedere. This is distilled and bottled in Poland, made from 100 percent rye grain, which gives it a sharp, caraway breeziness, and it has the softness of finest angora.
A new era for flavored vodka was ushered in by the Swedish firm Absolut back in the 1980s, when it launched Absolut Peppar (a spicy flavored vodka that tastes of chile, herbs, and green tomatoes), which they followed with Absolut Citron, a lemon-flavored vodka that became instantly fashionable. But flavoring vodka is not new. It will come as no surprise to hear that, to mask the clumsiness of early distilled spirits, the Russians and Poles have been doing it for centuries, using a range of natural ingredients that included acorns, horseradish, and watermelon. I sometimes add my own flavorings to vodka (the method follows if you would like to make cranberry or lemongrass vodka). The one commercial flavored vodka that stands out from the rest and that I usually have in my freezer is Zubròwka, from Poland. Made from rye, it is infused with bisongrass, otherwise known as sweetgrass because of its intense perfume, and as Holy Grass by the American Indians. The stuff used to flavor Zubròwka is harvested by hand from the Bialowieza Primeval Forest, a stretch of ancient woodland still relatively undisturbed by humans, and it gives the vodka a sweet, meadow scent, as if freshly cut grass and dried grass have been mixed together.
3 parts fresh apple juice
1 part Zubròwka
When herbal Zubròwka meets apple juice, an extraordinary fusion happens: it’s almost as if you can smell cinnamon, or an apple crisp baking in the oven.
Pour the apple juice and Zubròwka over plenty of ice. You can also make a longer drink, by mixing 1 part Zubròwka with 1½ parts apple juice, then topping with sparkling water. This time a more herbaceous character comes through—all tarragon and apples—which is lovely with smoked fish if you’re looking for a nibble.
Fresh cranberries are always around in the supermarkets just before the holidays, and nothing is simpler than making your own cranberry vodka. Just use the butt of a rolling pin to lightly crush a large handful of berries (they should be split but still hold their shape), slip them into a bottle of vodka, leave them to steep for a few days at room temperature, then put the bottle in the freezer. This makes a surprisingly strong-flavored, pleasingly astringent drink that is delicious drunk icy cold in shot-sized portions.
Aquavit, the Scandinavian spirit, is like an herbal vodka: strong, colorless, imbued usually with caraway and sometimes with other herbs such as dill and cumin. With its lethal alcohol and herbaceous bite, it tastes as if it were made for fortifying the soul on serious expeditions, across plains of ice, through landscapes where the only noise is the howling of the wind and the creaking of the snow. Look for Aalborg Akvavit from Denmark and keep it in the freezer.
With a glass of vodka kept at subzero temperatures so that it is not only cold but also viscous, a smorgasbord is delicious. There would have to be blinis—with wild smoked salmon, cod’s roe, and caviar if you have a wealthy Russian for a friend. There would be herring, crispbread, sliced egg and gherkins, and perhaps other kinds of smoked fish and meat. If you are drinking aquavit, the gamy, savory taste of bresaola marinated in juniper and dill goes brilliantly—ditch everything else and simply make a bresaola, lemon, and arugula salad as a starter in the ordinary way. If you are going to move on to a main course, then look at recipes that use allspice (a Finnish favorite)—say, meatballs flavored with allspice and served in a creamy sauce.
There are certain wines to which we always turn when the days shorten—reds that seem hearty and full of fire, the liquid equivalent of pulling on a sweater against the cold. But here are another couple that are not quite so obvious and that I find leaven the long gap before spring.
The Bibendum Oyster bar lies at a very expensive set of crossroads in South Kensington. Every day for the first eight months of my working life, I walked through it, en route to the upstairs offices of the publishing company where I worked, quite disastrously, as a publicity assistant. I used to love the way the vegetal smell of the cut stalks and pristine blooms at the flower van just outside mixed with the scent of cold seawater from the pink lobsters and fresh oysters at the entrance. Crossing the mosaictiled floor of the lobby, headed for my place beside the photocopier, I longed to sit down at a table there, especially in the winter, when the gleam of light off the cutlery, the marble, and the crushed ice piled with fruits de mer seemed to make a virtue of the greyness outside. Though many associate seafood and white wine with summer holidays, they have seemed to me a glamorous thing to eat and drink in the gloom ever since.
Besides champagne and Chablis, which everyone knows, there are two whites that seem made to be drunk with a plate of crustaceans. Atlantic wines, you might call them, and they have an equanimity—a quiet sense of calm with no attention-seeking gusts of shrill flavor—that suits dark, cold months.
Albariño has an affinity for gloom. The grape thrives in Rias Baixas (pronounced “ree-ass by-shass”) in Galicia, in the northwest corner of Spain, where storm clouds come scudding in from the grey ocean to drop their heavy load of rain. Known as alvarinho over the border in Portugal, where it is used to make vinho verde, it is veined with refreshing acidity but doesn’t screech. It has a fragrance of peach and almond blossom, but instead of reeking, as viognier sometimes does, it has the subtle smell of a garden or hedgerow after rainfall at the beginning of June. It is crisp, but rounded and gloriously aromatic, and sometimes it carries just a vestige of stony minerality and a little bit of quince to ground it.
Albariño has become highly fashionable in the past few years, but it’s not until you put it with food that you see how good it can be to drink. Its white fruit character and fragrance go beautifully well with pink prawns and crab claws. The seafood, whether a rich crab tart or hot creamy pots of crab containing the odd little accidental shard of shell, or griddled shrimp with a simple squeeze of juice, benefits from the delicately invigorating wine and in turn blots out any of its sherbet-like edges, making it seem more profound.
With muscadet, it’s the yeasty taste, bracing salinity, and texture that marry so well with shellfish. Made from a grape called melon de Bourgogne (though muscadet, the name of the wine, has become the grape’s synonym) and grown around the mouth of the Loire several hundred miles to the north in France, where the Atlantic also exerts its choppy influence, muscadet is much more of an everyday drink than albariño. Cheap, and with a forthright plainness, it is also a remarkably good value, and much ignored, perhaps because of its prevalence during the 1970s; even at the very bottom end of the price range, it remains a true wine, rather than a manipulated, tweaked piece of commerce. The better (and scarcely any more costly) examples are labeled sur lie, indicating that the wine has been bottled directly from its lees, the sediment of dead yeast cells, which gives it more depth, body, and a yeasty flavor. Muscadet can seem very ordinary, but when drunk with a dish of seafood something happens: it carves out a space for itself and you begin to see its focus, minerals, and salt. Just like albariño, against seafood it acquires more stature. In both cases, the result is a simple feast that lights up a dark evening.
When it comes to rosé wine, most people drink with their eyes. Or don’t drink, in the case of the late Scottish newspaper editor John Junor, who, famously, once had conniptions when he noticed this item on the expense report of one of his correspondents. The issue was not that he felt it improper for a reporter to use expenses to satisfy his thirst—au contraire, he was first of all furious that the journalist in question had ordered a mere half carafe, then livid when he noticed the pinkness. “Only pooves drink rosé,” shrieked Junor, at the summit of his rage.
Junor’s behavior may have been bizarre, but the idea that rosé might not be very manly was widespread, and it persisted. Among oenophiles, rosé had other difficulties too: it was not—indeed, is still not—considered serious, the ultimate putdown in this snobbish world. In fact, to be seen twirling a glass of salmon-colored liquid by its stem was for a long time considered the height of poor taste.
The long, hot summer of 2003 scorched those cares into oblivion. Suddenly, all anyone wanted to do after a day of sun was sit around slaking their thirst with summery, feel-good glasses of rosé. To general amazement, rosé didn’t just catch on for a season; it became more popular every year, even in darkest December.
The first thing most look at is the color, which might be any hue from the very palest vin gris of France, whose ghostly pink is so light as to be, as the name suggests, almost grey, to peachy salmon, lucent red currant, or a strident fuchsia deeper and darker than some wines officially classified as red. Of course not everyone sees it quite so poetically. A colleague who writes for the Yorkshire Post describes shades of rosé variously as “ballet shoes, faded ballet shoes, old greying granny underwear …,” though for some reason these descriptors never seem to make it out of her personal notebook and into print.
In Provence, where rosé accounts for almost 80 percent of the region’s vinous output, at the Centre de Recherche et d’Expérimentation sur le Vin Rosé, color is studied intently, with special kits produced so that winemakers can match up their rosé shade for shade, like interior decorators do with paint and Pantone charts.
Rosé wine takes its color from the skins of the red grapes from which it is made. Virtually all grapes, whether red or white, have clear juice, so the depth and shade of color depends principally on two things: the pigmentation of the particular grape variety and the amount of time the winemaker lets the grape skins macerate. There are still mysteries about how exactly one wine ends up the color of a squashed raspberry, another more like a cherry stain. As Nathalie Pouzalgues, a technician at the Provençal research center, explains, “We’ve made the same process of vinification with the same type of grapes—but you end up with different colors of wine. We know there’s a link between color and acidity. We also think that soil must make a difference. But we can’t explain all the things we observe.”
So much for the practical side of it. John Junor aside, the psychology of wine color is even more peculiar. I would hardly believe this unless I had tried it, but if you drink the same rosé out of two glasses, one transparent, the other opaque black (such glasses are made to sharpen the palates of blind tasters by removing the clues offered by color), the rosé that you can see tastes … I can only describe it as pinker. It seems more fruity, and the red currant, strawberry, or wild cherry notes appear more emphatic. It’s all in the mind, of course, but the effect is there nonetheless.
But it is not only the grapes that are affected by terroir. So are humans. Some winemakers know their customers so well that they deliberately make different colors of rosé for different markets, and the worse the weather, the darker people seem to like their wine. “We’ve certainly found that in the north of France they seem to prefer deeper colors of rosés,” Nathalie says. Well, that figures. In the summer sunshine I love nothing better than a rosé from Provence that’s so pale it is barely there and has a gentle smell of sandalwood and damp hay. Actually, in terms of taste those are my favorite rosés anyway. But in the cold, grey drizzle of most English seasons I am drawn to a color that is more cheery and robust—something with a bit more red in its cheeks. The most appealing winter rosés are the deepest-colored—geranium hues that stand out against bleak, icy weather. It’s not all about color either: the flavor tends to be more strident, too, with a little more tannin and grip, thanks to the longer skin contact. When it’s cold and damp outside, this chunky slice of chilled wine is a real pick-me-up. Look to the Languedoc for midcolored, fragranced rosés made from negrette and caladoc. For real verve, the New World has all the answers: malbec rosé from Argentina, or the leap of a pinot noir rosé from the antipodes, for example, though I also like the sour-cherry, savory tang of rosé blends from Italy.
