Oct 08
9
I have a strong preference for dry wines but there are occasions when a sweet table wine goes down well; such an occasion is a hot, sunny October afternoon in southern Portugal.
My cousin Cindy’s husband Alex is not a big drinker but he does like the berry wines produced near his hometown of Ladner. Two years ago, when Alex and Cindy visited Portugal, they brought with them, as a gift, a bottle of cranberry wine from Wellbrook, a 55-acre heritage winery in Delta. Maggie and I had forgotten about it (the bottle not the winery) until last week when we came across it while cleaning a back cupboard.
Wellbrook recommends the cranberry wine with duck, pork or chicken. We chose to have it with chicken piri-piri, a famous dish in the Algarve region of Portugal where we are on holiday at the moment.
A chicken piri-piri dinner consists of pieces of chicken – breast, wings, legs and thighs – basted with spicy piri-piri sauce, slow-cooked on an open grill and accompanied by hand-cut fries and a salad of tomato, onion and lettuce. Piri-piri can be ‘hotted up’ to suit, but in most Algarve restaurants it entices the taste buds with no more pain than a tingle to the lips.
The Wellbrook Cranberry wine turned out to be the perfect accompaniment for chicken piri-piri with the sweetness (but not too sweet) mingling nicely with the piri-piri. It went even better with the traditional almond tart that followed. I love the taste of cranberry and can understand how this particular Wellbrook Cranberry won the 2006 Gold Medal at the All Canadian Wine Championships.
Wellbrook Cranberry – alcohol content 11 %, sweetness rating 2, price $12.90. Serve chilled.
TASTERS – Martin Toseland has compiled hundreds of misprints for a new book Steroid Hit the Earth A: The Catastrophic World of Misprints and I liked this one excerpted in the Daily Mail:
Winners in the home-made claret section were – Mrs. Davis (fruity, well-rounded); Mrs. Rayner (fine colour, full-bodied); Miss Ogle-Smith (slightly acid, but should improve if laid down).