An Old Friend

In which I am instructed to create recipes using red wine. A lot of red wine. New: Plus audio!

• 

  (Adapted slightly from The Relaxed Kitchen: How to Entertain with Casual Elegance and Never Lose Your Mind, Incinerate the Souffle, or Murder the Guests, St Martin’s Press ’07)

My ex-husband and his best friend, another oenophile named Jeremy, decided to open a little wine shop on the approach to the train station in Purley, Surrey, a bedroom community south of London. Business was building and the two friends were bringing in some interesting wines from France. They decided that Jeremy should combine an upcoming insurance business trip (his day job) with a visit to several wine-producing towns in the Languedoc, southwest of Montpellier and home to such wines as St. Chinian and Minervois.

When he approached the local chamber of commerce in the 12^th century village of Faugéres to find some local winemakers, the mayor promptly invited him to a banquet, propitiously being held on the very night Jeremy planned to spend in the town. It was a long, many-layered banquet at which a great deal of the local wine was poured and drunk. As these things tend to go, Jeremy and the mayor of Faugéres became fast friends—virtual blood brothers, from the sound of it. And by the time the banquet was over, Jeremy had bought four hundred cases of the mayor’s own wine, “a blend of grenache, syrah, carignan, cinsault, and mourvedre, with terroir characteristic of the schist soil and ocean influence.” Gotcha.

When he returned to London in triumph, the friends cracked the first post-banquet bottle to celebrate their stealth find and future fortune. The wine was found to be rather, well, rustic.

Another bottle was opened.  It too was rustic.

Jeremy’s judgment was gently questioned, and the proposed price-point for the wine was downgraded by several pounds. But the wine would, they felt certain, eventually sell.

Then came a rail strike. Each and every train in England ceased to run for a period of several months. Since there were no trains, there was no reason to go to the train station, i.e. no reason to walk past the lovely little wine shop, now full to the brim with bottles of Faugéres. Sadly, the business went under, and in the process of liquidating their stock, they were unable to convince the savvy buyer to take the Faugéres off their hands. The two friends were left with slightly over 350 cases of tannic, raw-ther forward red wine. They rented a temperature-controlled storage space in Dover and packed it all in. I was put to work using my costly cooking-school expertise to find and/or create recipes that called for an entire bottle of red wine.

“I can do that.” I said.

We ate Coq-au-Vin, ruby red poached pears, Beef Braised in Faugéres (rather than the usual Barolo), endless seared duck breasts with gelatinous red wine reductions, and risotto stirred with a bottle of red wine instead of chicken broth. I simmered my own wine-dark veal stock and reduced it to jelly, then stored the cubes in the fridge for future wine reductions. In the summer, I marinated butterflied leg of lamb in Faugéres and extra-virgin olive oil for 24 hours, then grilled and served it with Cucumber-Yogurt Sauce, for a cool note. I made Faugéres and red-grape sauce for grilled pigeons, and copied a red wine sauce for salmon tasted in a suburban Paris restaurant. I poached more pears in red wine, then nestled them in almond paste inside a tart crust, and cooked pasta in red wine rather than water twenty years before I would do so again because of a dish tasted in Tuscany. Whenever I served a conspicuously wine-dark dish to Jeremy and his girlfriend Diana, one of them would sing out “Ahhhh—an old friend!”

Some of the wine was sold, much of it was drunk—but only after a more estimable wine started off the evening. A great deal of it was used for cooking. We moved to Spain, and began creating some of those favorite dishes with Rioja. Suddenly nine years—and a marriage—had passed.

I moved to California and made Zinfandel my red cooking wine of choice. By this time many of the dishes were lovingly lodged in my blood.

Some years later I spoke with my ex, and he told me that for old times’ sake he and Jeremy had recently cracked one of the final remaining bottles of Faugéres.

“It was damned good!” he ruminated sagely. “We should have just bloody well kept the bleeding wine.”

We were left quietly wondering across the transatlantic line if something naïve--a blithe and untamed new spirit that simply needed time to mature—had been squandered by similarly unfinished, and impatient, people who thought they knew everything about wine.

I’m not sure we were just thinking about the Faugéres.

---

And here’s my recipe for Scallop, Smoky Bacon, and Red Wine Risotto on Roadfoodie.

Four Tidbits For The Week of Month Dates, 202#

Brigit’s What I’m

CURRENTLY LOVING ➡️ Just knowing that there is a pistachio pesto and mortadella lasagna lurking somewhere in Sicily. 
THINKING ABOUT ➡️ My next project: Definitely fiction, but very closely tied to actual facts. There will be boats, blue water, intrigue and betrayal, and possibly a bit of dismemberment.
LISTENING TO ➡️ Lowell George/Little Feat