Temperatures Rising

Those of you who are Summer people will be relishing the rising temperatures while those of us who become grease-spots on the footpath in hot weather watch the temperatures moving upward with a dread similar to that evoked by the dentists drill. All I can say is thank goodness I don't have to go outside in the heat to love food 'n wine. This week heralds the return of our popular feature, the History of Wine as well as another entry in the Wine Log. Hope you enjoy both and please feel free to make comments and suggestions for things you would like covered in future posts. Just a heads up! I will be commencing our series where I visit wineries and meet the viticulturists and wine-makers and come up with three special deals for you. So keep returning and I'll keep on writing. Added in this post is the ability to become a follower of the Blog. Please participate in this as I will be using the numbers to leverage better wine deals for you.

THE HISTORY OF WINE 4
While it was the Greeks who initially drove the development of wine as a trading commodity and lauded its qualities as a drink for this life and any that might follow, it was the Romans who developed the fledgling industry into one that was innovative and progressive.
Horace, a Roman writer of some fame wrote "No poem was ever written by a drinker of water." I am not going to test the literal truth of that, but suffice to say that the population explosion in the Roman Empire from about 300BC until the beginning of the Christian era fueled a huge increase in wine consumption, which required increases in production achieved by efficiency gains as well as crop expansion.

The Romans loved their wine, drinking it at least three times a day. Like many a modern wine drinker they consumed large amounts of water when imbibing, but their water was mixed with the wine at rates of 5:1. They preferred sweet wine and their most prized wine was a white from what they considered the best wine growing area called Falernian

Unusual flavors were often added to the wine. The Romans liked to mix honey with this drink to make an aperitif called mulsum. Click here for an authentic recipe. They often added herbs and spices, but were also known to mix wine with salt water which must have given it an extremely bitter taste. Even chalk was sometimes mixed with wine to reduce acidity!

The Romans also strung together improvements in technology such as lifting the grapes off the soil by using props and trellises, improving on the Greek presses used for extracting juice, classifying which grapes grew best in which climate, all these increased yields from the vine and yields from the grapes.

In addition they improved the way in which wine was stored and thus its longevity through the use of barrels and latterly glass bottles which they filled with wine and topped off with olive oil thus reducing oxidization tremendously. This was a pretty important advance as at the same time they were also discovering the value of aging their wines for more complexity of flavour.

In fact here is the story of the "World's Oldest Wine Bottle."

Unearthed during excavation for building a house in a vineyard near the town of Speyer, Germany, it was inside one of two Roman stone sarcophaguses that were dug up. The bottle dates from approximately 325 A.D. and was found in 1867.

The greenish-yellow glass amphora has handles formed in the shape of dolphins. One of several bottles discovered, it is the only one with the contents still preserved.

The ancient liquid has much silty sediment. About two-thirds of the contents are a thicker, hazy mixture. This is most probably olive oil, which the Romans commonly used to "float" atop wine to preserve it from oxidation. Cork closures, although known to exist at the time, were quite uncommon. Their oil method of preservation was apparently effective enough to keep the wine from evaporation up to modern day.

The bottle is on permanent display, along with other wine antiquities, at the Historisches Museum der Pfalz, which is worth a virtual visit or an actual one, if travelling near the area of Speyer, Germany.

MY WINE LOG

Monday night we had pan fried Basa Fillets with home grown Silver Beet and chunky cut oven baked chips. Perhaps a nice Semillon or a floral Sauvignon Blanc, but not us. We had some young friends around to discuss some business and they are fans of red wine, so I broke open a bottle of recently purchased Rymill "The Yearling" Cabernet Sauvignon 2006. The Yearling is just a very young red made for immediate drinking therefore if was a much lighter wine than the Cabernet Sauvignon's that I normally drink, however this wine had intense floral and fruity aromas on the nose and was mouth filling, with a vibrant fruit and tanning blend. I have cellared 6 bottles to see if it has the acid and tannin to last in the bottle and will let you know if you stick around.

The meal comprised imported Basa fillets a freshwater fish that is surrounded with controversy due to it being farmed in Vietnam, on the Mekong River, which is known as a dirty waterway. Click here to read more about this. Suffice it to say that Jocelyn and I have been eating Basa for many years without any ill effects. We believe that the white fleshed fish is one of the most beautiful eating we have had and compares with the likes of Orange Roughy and John Dory.

Coupled with torn leaves of home grown Silverbeet which came from a number of green, red and yellow cultivars. The tearing of the leaves is said to increase the reduction of the bitter taste that can be associated with Silverbeet if it is very mature. The different colour ribbing adds colour breaks in the wide expanses of green leaves. I prefer to blanch as this allows the leaves to retain some crunch, but others prefer to boil to the point where the leaves are totally soft. Please remember that vegetables continue to cook while they are hot, so allow for that when estimating cooking times.

This evening I tossed the Silverbeet in a dressing of olive oil, garlic and crushed pepper.

The chunky cut chips were out of the supermarket freezer and baked in the oven until crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. As they were served I sprinkled Parmesan and poppy seeds over them for extra interest.