The Endless Search for Summer Reds
Given our location in the more-or-less Deep North it should come as no surprise that the climate has some impact on our drinking habits.
Living where winter days are usually accompanied by clear blue skies and temperatures in the mid-twenties (Celsius) a full bodied red wine is more likely to accompany steak or pasta rather than a roast or a big warming bowl of stew. It’s not that we don’t like roasts and stews, the climate predisposes us to travel in other culinary directions.
In summer the bowl of pasta or the steak and salad don’t really work that well in conjunction with a hearty red. The steaks don’t go that well with whites either, so we’ve got a problem unless we can unearth some red wines in a lighter style that can handle a spell in the fridge.
There are, of course, many options and over the years we’ve explored quite a few of them. This article gives me a chance to note what we’ve discovered and make a few recommendations. Anyone reading this could have a few of their own so feel free to contact me if you’ve got any suggestions as to wines we might like to try.
As time passes, Hughesy’s wine purchases tend to take place on line and at the Lolly Shop rather than the bottle shop. If we were in the habit of dropping into the liquor store and having a browse we might be looking at a wider variety of wines (hence the request for recommendations in the paragraph above).
The obvious option is to choose a Rosé. Unfortunately there’s no stylistic consistency and the name covers a multitude of possibilities, some of which also coincide with styles that I’ll be mentioning a little later on.
So I could head to Portugal and go for Mateus or Lancers. I’ve tried both in the past. While they’ve been acceptable, they’re nothing to write home about either. There are probably other Portuguese labels that would turn up in city bottle shops, but we’re not in a city and the price tag would probably be a little out of my preferred price range as well.
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