Tuesday, October 24, 2023

PepperBox Shiraz Will Spice Up Your Home Cooking

PepperBox Shiraz Will Spice Up Your Home Cooking 

PepperBox Shiraz SE Australia 2019, 14% ABV

€13.50 in Supervalu and Dunnes Stores; also available in Carry Out stores





“Bring your food to life with the spicy aromas and blackcurrant and cherry flavours of Pepperbox Shiraz. The wine's sublime intensity is hard to resist, especially if you are slow cooking, searing or grilling.” That’s the encouraging call from producers Casella to try their Australian Shiraz.

So let us try! The colour is a deep ruby. Aromas are rich, and peppery. And these aromas accompany superb flavours, ripe fruit character (blackcurrant and cherry) and smooth tannins, all the way to a spicy finalé, a peppery punch which is a trademark of Shiraz, especially Australian Shiraz. As the label says, “It’s what makes the PepperBox the perfect partner if you are eating chargrilled, seared, roasted or slow cooked…..”

Might be no harm to put a few bottles aside for the Christmas as it pairs well with most meats right the way through to chocolate desserts. Naturally intense, it is the perfect partner for great food and the ideal choice for get-togethers and special occasions with friends and family.


Specific parcels of fruit were selected across a variety of regions in South Australia. These parcels had a full, rich flavour profile and contained certain characteristics the winemaking team wanted to showcase. The fermentation of the fruit was across a span of 5-7 days at mild to warmer temperatures. Wines then spent up to 9 months in contact with a mixture of new and second-year oak prior to bottling.

PepperBox comes from sunny South Eastern Australia. It's a part of Casella Family Brands, the largest family-owned wine brand in Australia. Started in 1969 by Filippo and Maria Casella and is now run by their son John Casella.

While Casella had a long experience of wine in Italy, it wasn’t exactly an overnight success in Oz. But their turn-of-the-century partnership with a leading American distributor changed all that. Their spectacular rise to prominence in the US led renowned Australian wine writer AD Halliwell to call Cassella “A modern-day fairytale success story”. 

So there are good reasons to keep an eye on this relatively recently launched PepperBox which is aimed at “the more adventurous shopper who has a keen interest in cooking at home, and who is prepared to pay a little more for their wine to match this food and impress their hosts, or indeed for the guests to choose a wine to take round to their hosts and impress.”

I reckon they are pretty much on the bullseye with this Shiraz. Highly Recommended

Monday, October 23, 2023

Ballymaloe Foods add a grown-up twist to delicious cranberry sauce! i-Stil 38 Premium Irish Vodka in a limited-edition for Christmas

Ballymaloe Foods add a grown-up twist to a delicious cranberry sauce!

iStil Ballymaloe Foods Royale


i-Stil 38 Premium Irish Vodka in a limited-edition for Christmas. 


As part of their ongoing commitment to engage with the best local Irish producers, Ballymaloe Foods is proud to announce details of their latest partnership, a cranberry sauce made with i-Stil 38 Premium Irish Vodka.

Since the brand was established in 1990, Ballymaloe Foods has always prioritized working with the best producers and suppliers to ensure their products are of the highest quality and always taste great. Their collaboration with i-Stil 38 Premium Irish Vodka is a prime example.

One of the three vodkas in the i-Stil 38 portfolio, is a pink berry made naturally with distilled Irish grains and Irish berries. It is rich with a fresh, fruity flavour and was chosen by the Ballymaloe team to infuse with their cranberry sauce. The end result is a grown-up twist on a delicious cranberry sauce that works wonderfully with roast turkey, nut loaf, brie cheese or even mixed into a festive cocktail.

General Manager of Ballymaloe Foods and daughter of the company’s founder, Maxine Hyde adds,

“With the holiday season nearly upon us, no dinner table is complete without a jar of cranberry sauce - whether it's destined for the plate or lovingly dressed onto a sandwich, it is the perfect accompaniment to so many Christmas meals. I have also taken great pleasure in mixing our Ballymaloe & i-Stil 38 Vodka cranberry sauce into some very tasty cocktails, an ideal way to celebrate some Christmas cheer!”

Oisin Davis* of Great Irish Beverages consulted on a cocktail creation for the cranberry sauce, a simple drink to mix up either at home or in a bar.

CRANBERRY CHRISTMAS ROYALE

INGREDIENTS:
35 ml i-Stil 38 pink berries vodka, 1 teaspoon Ballymaloe & i-Stil 38  vodka cranberry sauce, 1 teaspoon of lemon juice, 100 ml of dry prosecco and a lemon twist to garnish.

METHOD:
Place the cranberry sauce into an iced shaker and pour in the vodka and lemon juice. Seal the shaker and shake hard for ten seconds. Fine strain the cocktail into a chilled champagne glass before topping up with the prosecco and garnishing with a lemon twist.

* Fancy more cocktails with great Irish ingredients? Try Oisin's debut book,"Irish Kitchen Cocktails", published earlier this October (2023).

Valley of the Spiders. Sunday at Glen River Park

Valley of the Spiders. Sunday at Glen River Park

22.10.2023


















Friday, October 20, 2023

CorkBillyBeers #50. Quite a quartet of craft with Kinnegar, Third Barrell, O'Hara's and Rodenbach.

CorkBillyBeers #50

Craft with Kinnegar, Thired Barrell, O'Hara's and Rodenbach.


Four beauties for you in #50


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Kinnegar has a festival beer for you. 


Kinnegar Leaf Kicker 2023 Marzen, 5.9% ABV, 440 ml can Bradleys


Gorgeous golden/amber colour on this one, a repeat of last year's Leaf Kicker Märzen, one that I enjoyed immensely. And it's the same again in 2023. “You enjoyed it so much in 2022 (and we did too) that we’re giving it another whirl before departing this particular chapter of German lager tradition”, say Kinnegar, meaning that they’ll more than likely move on to another German lager style (festival related no doubt) for 2024.



There’s a lovely bubbly white head atop the gold/amber. It has an almost creamy mouthfeel.  This supple beer leads with its rich malts, along with a sweetish bagel flavour and a touch of caramel. It finishes clean and a little hoppy.


It is deeply refreshing and also well suited to food including BBQ, pizzas and tacos plus a chicken from the rotisserie. A deeply satisfying lager and  Very Highly Recommended.


Geek Bits

LEAF KICKER 5.9% ABV

STYLE Märzen

COLOUR Dark amber

HOPS German noble

TASTE A deeply satisfying lager.

KNOWN AS Märzen was the original Oktoberfest beer

AVAILABILITY Autumn seasonal

440ML can and keg

BB: 04.05.24 (bouight 25.09.23)


Most of us who have hosted and or attended weddings will no doubt have enjoyed a beer or two. Very few weddings have started a beer trend. But that’s what happened when a royal wedding between Ludwig (the future king) and Therese took place in Bavaria in October 1810. That party was so good and the couple so popular that another party was held the following year and so Octoberfest was established.


By 1819, the festival had become a 2-week event (beer was just one strand), now organised by the city of Munich, and kicked off, as it does now, in mid-September. Marzen was the main style of beer for the festival and its name came from the fact that it was brewed in March to be at its best in Autumn.



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Third Barrel Vulture Culture Cold IPA, 6.0% ABV, 440 ml can Bradleys


Third Barrel: “Clean, crisp and bursting with flavours of ripe tangerine, peach and papaya from a healthy dose of Idaho 7 Cryo and Luminosa hops.”


Rice is also included in the ingredients. The beer is fermented with lager yeast, add in those hops and you get, as promised, a clean refreshing and fruit-forward cold IPA.


From Idaho 7, comes pungent tropical fruit and citrus (think apricot, orange, red grapefruit, papaya) with big notes of resiny pine and hints of black tea.  Here though, we are talking Idaho7 Cryo and that, designed to be aromatic and flavour enhancing,  means you get an even more potent aroma and flavour and also good bitterness.

Add in the contribution from Luminosa and the whole beer is brighter, the tropical side enhanced and you know you’ve got a good thing going.

At least, you've got a good thing going if you know your stuff as well as Third Barrel does! Very Highly Recommended.

Most of us are familiar with the hop cone, used by brewers for centuries. Then along came hop pellets and now we have Cryo, which is so concentrated that they’ve become an essential in a brewer’s toolbox. 

The word Cryo (or similar) pops up a lot these days and you may be familiar with it through medicine (especially sports) where certain injuries can benefit from Cryotherapy Treatments, a kind of ultra-cold immersion. Cryo comes from the old Greek word for cold. 

On to the hops then which, using liquid nitrogen (which your doctor might use to make a wart vanish), the raw hops are quickly chilled to sub-zero temperatures — after that, the producers shatter it. More on the process here .

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O’Hara’s Irish Red Ale, 4.3% ABV, 500 ml bottle Dunnes Stores 


The Carlow Brewing crew is quite proud of their red ale: “This Red stands out in this beer style category. The malt body is as impressive as a bock, albeit in a uniquely Irish way. With an incredibly smooth malt body complimented by caramel tones and perfectly balanced in bitterness, this Irish Red is much more complex than its mainstream rivals.”


O’Hara’s has a very dark red robe but that “dense lasting white head” fails to materialise, though I have to add subsequent top-ups did shape up with a coffee-coloured crown. Roasted caramel stands out in the aromatics. And you get that caramel and toffee flavour on the palate as well, thanks to the addition of a “pinch of roast barley during the brewing process”. The sweetness of the malt and traditional hop flavour combine well. A terrific example of the style gets a major thumbs up from this quarter.


Excellent balance and Very Highly Recommended


 

They say: Visually the red colour is intensified by the finest roast barley, while subtle hop additions in the kettle give just the right bitterness and aroma to craft this distinctive Irish Red Ale. The traditional red ale style is sweet malt based, dominated by caramel malts which give a sweet malt base complimented by nutty flavours in complete contrast to the Belgian Red ale style which has a distinctly sour character attributed to lactic acid.


For the Geek

Style: Traditional Red Ale

ABV: 4.3%

Plato °: 10.75°

IBU: 34 

Fermentation: Top fermentation 

Availability: Keg (carbonated), Bottle 50cl and 33cl (occasional 41L cask)

Serving Temperature: 6-8°C

Food Pairing: Pairs well with baked and roasted main courses from the oven such as beef hotpot. Also excellent with winter soups. A delicious accompaniment to mature cheddar or soft goat cheeses.

Glass: O’Hara’s tulip glass or O’Hara’s conical glass. 

BB: 28.08.24 (bought 20.09.24)

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Rodenbach Grand Cru Flanders Red Ale, 6% ABV, 330 ml bottle Bradleys


Brownish red is the colour of our Rodenback Grand Cru Red ale. With a short-lived coffee-coloured head. Aromas are certainly on the sour side. There’s also quite a tang on the palate but also the sweet contribution of delicious fruit flavour. Complex and amazing and a totally different animal to the O’Hara’s Red Ale. 


The sourness in the aromas is repeated on the palate and, if you’re not prepared for it, you might as well throw your hat at it at this stage. Someone here has joked that a citron pressé would be a better drink. But remember, it is “probably the most award-winning beer in the world”. So pay a little heed and a little respect!


Soon, at least for me, that complex fruitiness begins to assert itself, both on the palate and all the way through to the finish and you realise there is much more to this than the obvious sour character. Sour comes up quite often but I’m pretty sure the word doesn’t appear on the label (lots of tiny print though!)


The Rodenbach Grand Cru sour red/brown at 6%, is a blend of 1/3rd young beer and 2/3 of beer aged two years in large oak vats, giving fruity taste, complexity and intensity. It even has its own AOC. It takes over two years to make (even the angel’s share happens here and they know the good things) and the young beer is added to restart fermentation. 


I throw in the odd non-Irish beer, not to be rated, but just for variety and as an example of what can be done by our much more experienced Belgian and German brewers. Perhaps a few of these could be enticed over here for collaborations.


The Rodenbach Grand Cru is the archetypal Flanders red-brown beer. Each of these beers is a unique blend, but they all share a brewing process characteristic of the area surrounding Roeselare and Kortrijk.

The typical sweet and sour taste of a Rodenbach Grand Cru is produced by a two-stage fermentation process called mixed fermentation, involving top-fermentation and bacterial fermentation using lactic acid bacteria. The Rodenbach Grand Cru matures in oak foeders, or barrels, over a period of two years, giving the beer a unique, complex fruitiness that is reminiscent of wine.

Rodenbach, the mother beer, is usually one-quarter mature beer to three-quarters young beer. When it comes to Rodenbach Grand Cru, the blend is two-thirds mature beer with one-third of a young brew added.

By the way, there is a series of these Rodenbachs and do watch out for the Rodenbach Caractère Rouge. It is billed as a red/brown sour and it is sour but also packs amazing fruitiness. The beer is macerated with fresh cherries, raspberries and cranberries and, after that, is matured in oak barrels.

BB: 15.12.25 (bought 25.09.23)

Thursday, October 19, 2023

Another super Azul y Garanza Suelovivo, a Tinto from the "living soil"

Another super Azul y Garanza Suelovivo, a Tinto from the "living soil"

Azul y Garanza Suelovivo Tinto Wine of Spain 2022, 13% ABV



(Like its white "cousin", this Suelovivo is also available at Sonas of Newcastlewest)

Another wine, this time a red one (Tinto), from the living soil (suelo vivo) cared for by Azul y Garanza. The vineyards are located in the Bardenas Reales Natural Park in Navarra. A huge commitment to biodiversity leads to wines of pronounced purity and this blend, of Garnacha, Tempranillo and Garnacha Blanca, is another excellent example.


The colour is a light ruby, of the Gamay kind. Aromas are fresh and inviting, think strawberry and floral. The palate is full of uncomplicated fruit, light and lively, and very natural. If the weather is warm, you may even chill it (a little). Certified organic and easy to drink, it is well worth a try. Pairings recommended include tapas, casseroles, grilled meat and grilled veg. But first for me would be as an aperitif and then try one of the others, if you have any Suelovivo left!

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Check my growing list of top wines for 2023

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Check out my Good Value Wine List here

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Another Highly Recommended gem from Azul v Garanza. Importer Mary Pawle knows this winery well and visited there this month. The harvest was in full swing still and there's quite a gathering for that.

 The winery, in Carcastillo, had been built in the 1940s but was closed down in the eighties. Azul y Garanza (Maria, Dani, and Fernando, a dynamic trio) bought it in 1999 and slowly converted the abandoned cooperative building into a fully operational winery.

“It has long, narrow cement tanks with small dimensions, ideal for gentle and delicate fermentations, like infusions, which translate into friendlier and more elegant wines. And having a great many small tanks instead of a few large ones allowed them to separate the grapes by variety and origin in that way preserves the highest quality must.”

That cricket on the label? In the vineyard, you can’t see the cricket, but you hear it.

You can’t see the soul of a living soil (Suelo Vivo), but you can feel it.


We enjoyed the white version a few weeks back. To save you clicking around, I've copied it below:

original post 09.10.2023

Beautiful organic wine from the living soil of the Azul y Garanza vineyards.

Colourful cricket!


Azul y Garanza Suelo Vivo blanco (Wine of Spain) 2022, 13% ABV.

RRP: c. €20.00. Stockists: Sonas NewcastlewestMary Pawle Wines


In the vineyard, you can’t see the cricket, but you hear it.

You can’t see the soul of a living soil (Suelo Vivo), but you can feel it.


That’s the line on the label of this delicious organic wine from Azul y Garanza. Colour is a light straw, quite hazy in the bottle and glass. Aromas are delicate, of the citrus kind, with hints of fennel in the background. Quite a complex palate, with peach, apricot, yellow plum and citrus in the mix, a very refreshing melange indeed.


Highly Recommended



A new wine, certified organic, but already getting praise: “fun summertime wine”, “perfect everyday wine”, “the fruit shines”, “a refreshing beast”, “soft yet generous”, and the beer accolade of “crushable”. You can't see the soul but you sure can taste the body!


It is a blend with 90% Garancha Blanca and 10% Moscatel. The vast majority of Garnacha Blanca (or Grenache Blanc) is grown in Spain (Herencia Altes a top choice) and France (look for Ferraton and Chapoutier). It can produce full-bodied wines that go well with bigger fish such as tuna.


The Azul y Garanza vineyards are located in the Bardenas Reales Natural Park in Navarra. A huge commitment to biodiversity in the vineyards leads to wines of pronounced purity. This particular example is a pure wine from a living soil (Suelo Vivo) that is in harmony with nature.

Wednesday, October 18, 2023

WINE EVENING AT FORBES STREET BY GARETH MULLINS AT ANANTARA THE MARKER DUBLIN HOTEL

 



FAMOUS WINE FAMILIES

WINE EVENING AT FORBES STREET BY GARETH MULLINS


AT ANANTARA THE MARKER DUBLIN HOTEL


Anantara The Marker Dublin Hotel has announced the details of its next wine dinner, which will take place at its destination restaurant, Forbes Street by Gareth Mullins, on Thursday 2nd of November. The latest wine dinner theme is ‘Famous Wine Families’, which will feature dinner and wine pairings with some of the most well-known wine families from around the world including Champagne Bollinger, Hugel, Familia Torres, MASI and Grahams.

The evening will commence on the famous rooftop terrace at 6.30pm with canapés accompanied by a Champagne Bollinger aperitif, followed by a 5-course tasting menu in Forbes Street by Gareth Mullins.

Executive Head Chef Gareth Mullins has hand-selected an elite group of food producers to supply his kitchen with premium ingredients to offer diners an extraordinary culinary experience. The restaurant features an open kitchen where diners can experience all of the theatre and atmosphere of the kitchen while the intimate booths, low-level lighting and extensive wine cave all add to the dining experience.

This special 5-course wine dinner is priced at €100pp.To book call +353 (0) 1 687 5104. For enquiries and bookings please contact bookyourtable.themarker@anantara-hotels.com

press release