{"id":1048,"date":"2010-08-22T10:06:24","date_gmt":"2010-08-21T22:06:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=1048"},"modified":"2010-08-22T10:07:47","modified_gmt":"2010-08-21T22:07:47","slug":"of-cp-lin-food-wine-matches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2010\/08\/22\/of-cp-lin-food-wine-matches\/","title":{"rendered":"Of CP Lin, Food & Wine Matches"},"content":{"rendered":"

As well as being into books, poetry and story, one of my enduring interests is cooking—all cooking really, but most particularly baking—and also food and wine matches.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>There is a wonderful area just north of Christchurch, called Waipara<\/a>, which has many fine vineyards and one of my favourites is Mountford<\/a>, a small, boutique winery with—in my humble opinion—outstanding wines. Although in my case there is also a personal connection to Mountford, which is that the winemaker, CP Lin<\/a>, is an old friend. We first met when I was a very new shodan (first level) black belt and he was trying his arm—as he likes to do—at aikido<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As you will see from CP’s story (when you click on his name) he is blind, which turned out to be a little too<\/em> challenging for aikido, but which he has never let impede his career as a world-class winemaker. Not surprisingly, CP has strong and particular opinions about wine. He is also a gourmand and bon vivant<\/em>, so as you may imagine, an invitation to dine with friends at CP’s home and to bring the dessert and wine to match is a matter to give even a keen cook and amateur wine lover a moment’s pause.<\/p>\n

Pause I did, but I knew CP had some home-crafted Spanish chorizo—from the proprietor, Javier Garcia, at Christchurch’s The Curator’s House<\/a> <\/em>restaurant—<\/em>for the entree and intended making a beef bourguignon, in the traditional style learned while working grape harvests in Burgundy, as the main course, so that helped narrow the dessert choice. In the end I opted to make a Date and Walnut Torte<\/strong> (from an Australian Vogue Entertaining & Travel<\/em><\/strong> from Autumn 2001), which had the added advantage of being both dairy free and very low on gluten (one guest was lactose, another gluten, intolerant.)<\/p>\n

But what to match with the torte? I already knew that this cake just doesn’t work with the usual “sticky” dessert wines, and sparkling wines are also touch and go—but that the mix of dates and walnuts should<\/em> work well with a fortified wine. The trouble was, I just couldn’t find the one I had in mind—and then I saw the Lustau ‘San Emilio’ Pedro Ximenez Sherry<\/a> <\/strong>at Hemingways Fine Wines<\/a><\/strong>, and although I had never actually tasted it, my instinct—and its reputation—persuaded me to ‘give it a go’.<\/p>\n

Fortunately for me, it turned out to be the perfect choice—despite the excellence of both the entree and the main preceding (and believe me, they really were excellent!) both torte and sherry disappeared in very short order. A relief, especially when your host has as exacting standards for both food and wine as CP.<\/p>\n

But you know, despite the great food and many excellent wines, the flavour highlight of the evening for me may just have been the rose-infused white tea, bought from a specialist tea house in Paris, that CP served ‘to finish’. Normally I would have said that nothing but coffee would do to round off such an evening, but that rose-infused white tea was something “extra special”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As well as being into books, poetry and story, one of my enduring interests is cooking—all cooking really, but most particularly baking—and also food and wine matches. There is a wonderful area just north of Christchurch, called Waipara, which has many fine vineyards and one of my favourites is Mountford, a small, boutique winery with—in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-friends","category-funstuff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1048"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1048\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1060,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1048\/revisions\/1060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}