What a week! We've added not one, but three new authors to the mix. Please join me in welcoming both Suzie Linville and Lisa Comento to the authors here at At Least I’m Enjoying the Ride! Both ladies have a wide range of interests not the least of which are food and wine. Lisa spends time with me one the weekends pouring wine for Fabbioli Cellars and will be talking about stuff here in the DC area. Suzie is currently residing in Scottsdale, Arizona and will be bringing news from the American Southwest.

Let’s make them feel at home!

I’d like to welcome a new addition to the writers here at At Least I’m Enjoying the Ride, Meg Parisi. Meg joins us from the thriving metropolis of New York City where she will be commenting on her journeys into the culinary jungle that resides there. We are super stoked to have Meg writing for us and I hope you are too!

Meg Parisi has always had a passion for food, cuisine, culture and writing. She loves exploring new restaurants both in and around Manhattan as often as possible. From fancy finds to the best food truck spots, she is always venturing up and out of her foodie comfort zone. Its safe to say Meg will tempt her taste buds with anything at least once. You can email Meg at meghan.parisi@gmail.com.

Please help we welcome Meg to our little family!

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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