American meal with a Portuguese wine
Boston Wine Examiner | Examiner.com | 17-11-2008 | General, Other Subjects
What can be more American than chicken wings? Even without a football game, this tasty protein is easy to cook, fun to eat, and pairs easily with a variety of wines.
Try this. Get some wings at Whole Foods (I advise getting only the wing parts, not the drumsticks), throw on them salt, pepper, and turmeric, and stick them in the oven at 450F for about 40 minutes. They will come out crispy, spiced, and perfectly cooked. Serve with any side you desire. Ideal for a Sunday night meal while you watch a movie or your favorite show.Usually, I like pairing Grenache-based wines with chicken wings, like Domaine Roger Perrin from the Southern Rhone Valley, France, or El Chaparral, a Grenache from Navarra, Spain. But this time, I wanted to try something different and unexpected. So I went hunting to one of my favorite wine stores, Bin Ends, to check for deals.
The purchase of honor was a Portuguese wine called Calcos do Tanha from the Douro region, the world-famous producer of port. One of my reasons for buying it was curiosity—it was made from 100% Touriga Franca, a native Portuguese grape that makes up one of the five most frequently blended grapes in port. Finding a single grape variety wine from Portugal is not a usual occurrence.
Portugal stays loyal to its roots. Most of the country’s wines are blends from the variety of native grapes that are hard to pronounce and even harder to remember for the uninitiated. And therefore not marketed as aggressively as the region demands.
Touriga Franca to Portugal is like Cabernet Franc to Bordeaux—a strong red grape mostly used as a blend, but very capable of standing its own ground.
This wine was from a 2000 vintage and definitely showed some, as wine geeks call it, fatigue in the glass. It was a little murky in appearance (nothing wrong, probably due to age or the fact that it was unfiltered), and had prominent acidic, vegetal characteristics, such as green pepper and wet earth, which can be a welcome sign in a young Cabernet Sauvignon, but not as pleasant-tasting in an older native Portuguese grape. It was, overall, well made, but slightly unbalanced with more upfront acidity than I would wish for.
The wine washed down easy with chicken wings. The acidity helped counteract the spiciness of turmeric, while the flavor left a long, fruity finish in the mouth.
From the edge of Europe to the edge of Boston, the market for and awareness of Portuguese wines are expanding. They are mostly blends of a variety of native grapes, and more often than not, they are quite good. And usually inexpensive.
Next time you are in the European section in a liquor store, see if there are any Portuguese wines. They are worth an experiment, and won’t break the bank for doing so.
