EasyFood September Out Now Kevin Ecock recommends

This month I make the point that when you buy wine you really should ask yourself what the occasion is. There's no point in wasting money and effort buying a fine wine for a simple barbecue and vice versa. For Vice Versa we can imagine bringing a light pink to an important dinner function when the Chairman of th Board had asked you to bring something to go with his personal selection of rich game!!

When someone asks you to recommend wine ask yourself - 'What's the occasion?'

This month I open with an amazing wine from Rueda made from the impressive Verdejo grape - Ermita Veracruz. This is followed by Penfolds Thomas Hyland Chardonnay from the Adelaide Hills and a very fine (and rich!) Tagus Creek Rose from the Alentejo in Portugal.

The Spanish theme continues with a great new addition to the Dunnes Stores portfolio - Artiga Old Vines Garnacha from the Campo de Borja region of Northern Spain. This is followed by a majestic sparkling from Italy in the form of Frescobaldi's Vintage Spumante. Finally, I finish off with Oddbins' tremendous Organic Pear Cider from Westons in the UK. Now there's a selection worthy of bringing to the dinner party - something for everyone, even the Chairman's game!

Double Digit Vino - It's Even Got a Cork In It..

I'm hooked on The Wire. With the aid of BBC2 and SkyBox I've spent the last five or six weeks watching the whole thing from Series One at leisure, in my own time. I'm hooked.

Recently (in series4) McNulty receives his ex partner 'Bunk' Moreland to his house for a meal. Bunk arrives with a foolish grin and a bottle of red Cotes du Rhone. He's smiling becuse he's got a bottle of wine - and that's classy. McNulty brings the bottle over to the kitchenette and shouts back to Bunk, "Hey, you want ice in it." "No," replies Bunk, " That's a double digit vino right there - it's even got a cork in it." Brilliant. Presumably if it had a screw cap it wouldn't have mattered if it was a red Rhone and he may well have put ice into it!

Movies and television are courted by wine companies and generic marketing bodies. Product placement and endorsement is big bucks. Hopefully The Wire won't prejudice anyone against a bottle of wine without a cork in it.

I often attribute the success of Pinot Grigio to mentions in 'Sex and the City' and Chardonnay to Sue Ellen in 'Dallas'. How many remember, or noticed in the first place, such obvious placements as a large ad for a wine beside the down town basketball court in 'White Men Can't Jump'? Have a look. Noone would dream of putting an ad for a branded wine beside a rundown neighbourhood basketball court! They do in the movies. How about the scene in Arachnaphobia where our hero is being attacked by a giant spider in the basement cum wine cellar. He throws bottles of wine at the eight legged wonder to keep it at bay. The bottles are from clearly branded boxes. Nothing against the wine but more than one box in any well stocked cellar would be enough for quite a while. Stacks of them?

Bond and Bollinger, (mind you, while there was a run of eight Bond movies that featured Bollinger our James also managed to bring Dom Perignon, Taittinger, Hennessy, Finlandia and even Stolichnaya along for the ride!), The Sopranos and Grey Goose (Tony S just asks for a Goose, again and again..), Clos du Val it seems has managed to buy its way into at last three movies including 'Bewitched' and a score of TV shows such as 'Sex and the City' and 'Prison Break'.

The list is endless and it's reckoned that placements are costing the drinks trade at least a billion a year now.

My favourite mention, though probably not a placement, of all time is from 'Casablanca'. Bogart, referring to the cafe owner, says to Sam (who's playing 'As Time Goes By' on the piano), "says to finish this bottle and then three more. He says he'll water his garden with Champagne before he'll let the Germans drink it." Sam replies, "This ought to take the sting out of being occupied," and then Bogart toasts Bergman: "Here's looking at you, kid."

Ah the best line of all.

Is There a 'Perfect' Wine?

I even surprised myself with this title. I just read it back and it not only sounds pretentious but it looks it as well! So I Googled 'Perfect Wine' just to see if it might look more sober and interesting on someone else's site. Mixed bag of results.

http://www.theperfectwine.co.uk/ is a selling site with a French feel. Perfect here very much means matching wine and food to get the 'perfect' wine. Nothing wrong with that at all. Many believe that wine on its own can never be considered perfect or at least that it will always be better if its well matched with a food. I've never been convinced of this. I'm more of the mind that a very good food and wine match will bring out the best in both and that the sum total will be better than the individual parts. But that's as a food and wine match. As an an individual entity I still believe that wine can be considered on it's own merit. Food and wine then is a different, if equal, ball game.

The perfectfoodie blogspot has a piece of fiction where our wealthy hero searches out the Perfect Wine as a kind of obsession. He finds it in Greece and shells out seventeen million dollars for a single bottle! It does actually turn out to be perfection itself and then our hero doesn't do what everyone before him who has found this wine - namely commit suicide- but goes on to search out the Perfect Food. Tune in next week folks; same Bat Channel.... The fiction wasn't to my taste but it does ask the question, is Price an indication of Wine Perfection? Well, yes if the perfect wine is in short supply and in great demand. But as these are both time dependent there is no guarantee that they will always be true indicators of perfect quality. In times gone by Hermitage and Essencia were both craved and lauded by Emperors. Say that to today's Prince of Business who nurtures with a fanaticism his horde of Petrus!

Amazing video on the Boston Area News http://tiny.cc/G7Cc6 shows a few thieves recently stealing the 'Perfect Bottle' of wine. As it turns out its a 1945 Mouton Rothschild. While I'd question his idea of security I have to go along with the store owners assessment of the wine as being perfect with regards to obtaining a perfect wine score. " The Mouton Rothschild wine had recently been tasted by experts who gave it a perfect rating. They said it probably has another 50 years of life left in it." Does a rating make a wine perfect? Well, NO is the answer! I remember once having a ding dong with a well known wholesaler from the South of Ireland at the inaugural (and ill fated) Irish Wine Show a few years back. One of the guru rating mags such as Spectator or the Wine Advocate had just given this fellows Romanian import a very high score. I think it was a 95. The same mag had recently awarded a new release from Latour the same point tally. Our wholesaler colleague was proudly announcing the logical result which was that his Romanian was as good as Latour at a fraction of the price - and he believed this. Ratings require context to make any sense. It is possible that every wine that achieves a 100 rating out of 100 can be considered a perfect wine. But it does not follow that an 83 point Medoc is as good as an 83 point Macon. This actually makes no sense whatsoever - some context is required. The wine that achieves a 100, however, must repeat that result elsewhere if it wants to be considered The Perfect Wine!

Obviously the word Perfect is thrown around a bit like the word genius. When the (excellent) Curious Wines gang down in Bandon announced in April the Perfect Wine for the Perfect Steak http://tiny.cc/cfoFO no-one expected this to be the definitive perfect wine. Within the context of the column though the word was indeed sic perfect. It's the same with The Perfect Wine Collection, The Perfect Corkscrew or the Perfect Wine Glass. Each concept is debatable.

la Fraicheur wine coolers are diamond encrusted, sell for between €10,000 and €100,000 and marketed as the perfect wine cooler. As I say, debatable perfection.

There is of course no Perfect Wine. How can there be? Think about it. If we decide that a wine is perfect we are also saying it cannot ever be made better. Within any context of reasoning this must be invalid. How are we to know? A Roman Consul may have proclaimed his Falernian the Perfect Wine. In context he was probably right. How was he to know that Australia would attempt to clean up the world of wine and make even a fine vintage in Bordeaux such as 1982 look a bit dated in terms of tannins and approachability as early as the millennium?

Euclid proved the existence of four perfect numbers: 6, 28, 496 and 8128. Today there are 47 known perfect numbers. The search continues for more.

We should always lookout for the wine maker who is attempting to achieve perfection. Every vintage wine makers are presented with a set of tools. At their most basic these are - fruit, knowledge, equipment, finance and time. More often this combination will give us poorly made product than it will produce the perfect wine. I do applaud the wine maker who makes the best wine possible within the resources available to him as I will the wine maker who makes the best tasting/awarded wine of the year. The latter is not always the easier wine to make.

Perfection, therefore, is not necessarily the most expensive, most awarded and most sought after. It can be found anywhere and at any time. It's effect will be transitory and may not stand the test of time. Unlike the visual arts it cannot be experienced ad finitum. Wine perfection is a performance art, freely and widely available. Look for it and you will find it. Try to hold onto it and you will be disappointed.

The Perfect Wine can only be a memory with a promise.