Gather Round the Table: Wine Resolutions

It is an unusual custom we’ve developed here at the end of the Gregorian calendar: we decide we’re going to change something, usually about ourselves, because the planet is a particular place relative to the sun.  A Calabrian doctor named Aloysius Lilius looked at the stars and figured out that it takes the earth 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes and 12 seconds to travel around the sun (or was it the sun around there earth back then?), therefore I resolve to lose weight starting now.  Logical?  Maybe not, but an appealing and popular custom nonetheless.

And so it is with full dedication and no end of enthusiasm that I make the following resolutions and invite you all to join me:

1. I resolve to find a way to enjoy Retsina.

This Greek method of winemaking has a history that dates back four times longer than the Gregorian calendar.  It’s origins rest in the tradition of the time to seal up wine amphorae (big ceramic jugs) with Aleppo pine resin.  This kept out the oxygen, so the wine lasted longer, but it also imparted a particular peculiar flavor, to me one of the ultimate “acquired tastes.”  This year I vow to acquire it, having failed many times in the past.

2. I will stop poking fun at White Zinfandel.

For many years I have ridiculed this simple little wine from my snobby-wine-writer’s perch, calling it things like “flat strawberry wine cooler” and “pink Kool-Aid.”  But no more.  White Zin is – by far – the most popular wine in America, accounting for 10% of all the wine consumed here.  But I’ve come to see it as a kind of a gateway wine.  People who think they don’t like wine will usually enjoy quaffing a Beringer White Zin on the rocks, and having done so it might be easier to introduce them to, say, a late-harvest Riesling.  From there maybe a Viognier, and then you have them hooked on Bordeaux inside a year.  Probably still won’t drink it though.

3.  I will write a new introduction to my wine tastings.

We host these monthly wine tastings at my restaurant, and the people who have been coming to them regularly for 12 years now are, no doubt, tired of hearing me say the same things over and over about how they are not formal occasions, and that to enjoy wine you need only “an opposable thumb and the ability to bend your elbow, though we do have straws.”  So I will no longer tell them that wine and food affect each others flavor by offering up the example of orange juice after brushing teeth, and I will find a new way to tell them that there are no wrong answers and if you taste blueberry in your Cabernet then you taste blueberry and don’t let anyone tell you different.  There’s another way to say all this, and I have a couple weeks to come up with it.

4.  I will stop reminding you that sparkling wine is not solely for celebrations.

If you are one of the three or four people who read this regularly, then you know this is one of my bailiwicks – it drives me crazy that people think Champagne, Cava, and the world’s other great sparklers are meant only for New Year’s Eve and weddings since these are perfectly delightful wines to enjoy with a meal, such as poached sole or roasted chicken, and I have said so in this space many times. This is the last time, though.

And so in honor of my Clansman Bobby Burns, whose birth was 250 years ago this New Year, a toast to wish you all the best:

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere !
And gie's a hand o’ thine !
And we’ll tak a right gude-willy waught,
For auld lang syne.

		Kurt Michael Friese, Gather Food Correspondent
	Gather ‘Round the Table is a regular feature of Gather Essentials: Food. Chef Kurt Michael Friese is a freelance food & wine writer & photographer. He is also the co-owner - with his wife Kim - of Devotay, a restaurant in Iowa City, serves on the Slow Food USA Board of Directors, and is Editor-in-Chief of the local food magazine Edible Iowa River Valley. His book, A Cook's Journey: Slow Food in the Heartland has just been released. He lives in rural Johnson County, Iowa. Keep up with Kurt Michael's food series by joining his network, or subscribing to his content.

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