I was kind of surprised to see that I haven’t made a post since before Christmas. Of course the holiday takes a bit of a toll on my available time. But what has been eating up all my free bandwidth is that my work at Fabbioli Cellars is starting to take me in new and exciting directions. You see,  Doug (as in Doug Fabbioli the owner of Fabbioli Cellars) is attempting to put together a school of sorts focusing on helping people start small businesses of an agricultural nature and I’m being tasked to develop some of the course material for this school.

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I know, a) I said that I would continue talking about food and wine pairings and I’ll get back to that and b) this isn’t exactly a topical Christmas dish. However, this is something that came up this week and I thought II‘d pass it along. You see, I keep trying to come up with stuff for Ms Cocktail. That’s why you’ll notice that most of my dishes do not have beef or pork in them. Ms Cocktail doesn’t eat them. She’s not a true vegetarian but it does kind of limit what I can make her for dinner. It also doesn’t help that like many people, we are often faced with a time crunch and can’t make really complicated, time consuming meals.

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A couple of weeks back Giants Fan #1, the assistant winemaker at the winery I work at, mentioned that a mutual acquaintance of ours, Alan who writes for CellarBlog, was looking for holiday recipes that pair with local wines. We bandied it about and thought that it would be nice to showcase our Bordeaux blend which we call Tre Sorelle. The idea was to pair it with a nice Beef Wellington. After digging through my recipes and notes, I decided that while a Beef Wellington is nice, this would be a better way to showcase our beautiful wine.

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I mentioned that different people will have different sensitivity to tastes based on the number of taste buds that they have. In order to help us make sense of this, we will assign people to one of four groups but because we are dealing with humans, it won’t be a perfect logical ordering. The four groups are sensitive, hypersensitive, tolerant and sweet.

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My last post was concerning the mouth and how it is put together. The next thing we want to look at is what does that particular configuration does. The taste buds themselves send information about what they are interacting with to the brain which then interprets the signal. Here’s the funky part, there are really only five different tastes that humans can perceive.

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In order to understand the interaction between food and wine, we need to begin at the beginning. For the purposes of this discussion, the beginning is your mouth. Aside from being a big gaping hole in our head through which we shovel energy into the system via food and liquids and an exit point for most of the thoughts and facts that our friends told us to keep secret but we just can’t help ourselves from uttering, it is also a place filled with tactile sensations. The large muscle in the middle of the hole, otherwise known as the tongue, is covered with nerve endings commonly known as taste buds. These taste buds can also be found on the inside of our mouths to a lesser degree.

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Up until this point, I’ve been happily chatting away about food and my journey in learning to cook or wines I’ve found and what I think about them. Personally, I think there’s a lot of really good information in those posts, especially if one takes the time to read all the stuff, not just the recipes or reviews. Today though, we’re going to make a bit of a change and begin talking about food and wine together.

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For those that are counting, the trip to Chamonix was Day Trip 3, I just forgot to include that in the title.  This really is Day Trip 4 and it was the longest journey by car that we took the entire time we were in France. However, since Chateauneuf du Pape is the heart of the Southern Rhone wine region, we felt that we owed it to ourselves to make the journey there. After all, who knows when were going to get a chance to do this again?

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Nestled into a valley in the Alps Mountains near where the borders of Switzerland and Italy are, there lies a jewel of a a village called Chamonix. It is at the base of Mont Blanc and it has all the charm one would expect from an Alpine skiing village. With fantastic vistas spread out no matter which direction you look, this is a postcard perfect place for capturing those moments you would like to last forever.

It was here that I got savor two treasures of the French culinary tradition, crepes and fondue.

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After our trip to the Northern Rhone, we decided that we needed to take a day to just chill around the chateau and catch up on some of the wine we had purchased. However, we had noticed a little shop down the road called “La Grotte Aux Fromages” or “The Cheese Cave” in English. Considering that we had a love affair with the local cheeses that rivaled our passion for wine (well, maybe not quite so much) I felt that we were honor bound to pay this place a visit.

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