Wine Experience of the Week – Pork in Portugal
I have got a new place in Portugal! Yes the home of Porto… The home of Mateus… The home of Cristiano Ronaldo… Ok the last 2 can’t really be taken seriously, but you get where I am going with this. The lesser known wines of Portugal are what brought me here and I would like to share as many of these with people as I can. To celebrate this move in my life, I decided to make myself a nice meal and have a local Portuguese wine. This experience is what I would like to share with you.
I have tried Pork Alentejano before in restaurants. I decided that now I am in Portugal I would try and make it for myself. From tasting it a few times, I figured the concept is pretty simple; lots of garlic, lots of paprika, good pork, potatoes, some clams and coriander to finish it off. Yes there is some stock to make and some cooking time, but what makes this different from your everyday pork stew is the quality of what you can put in it when you are in Portugal. The pork for one isn’t your everyday chunks in a plastic case, it is Porço Negro, or black pig, and your clams are fresh from the morning harvest. Then you need to consider the paprika is the size of a rugby/American football/Australian rules football and full of juice. And the potatoes in Portugal are just amazing. You take these great ingredients and add a bit of patience then you get one fantastic meal!
So… What to drink with this meal. I have had white wine, a big red wine and rose when I have eaten this meal at restaurants. Each of these wines compliments the dish well in some way, but I felt I needed a medium bodied red wine for my own dish. For this I turned to the sub-region of the Alentejo, Estremoz.
This week’s Wine Experience of the Week is more centered on the food than the wine. I decided to go for the João Portugal Ramos 2007 Vila Santa. This wine is named after the house of where João Portugal Ramos has decided to make his wine. If he feels it is worth such a prestigious name, then it is good enough for me! It is a good value wine at around €10 and it went very well with the big flavors of the meal.
This is one of the many times I have selected a wine for a meal I wanted, rather than thinking of a meal to match the wine I wanted. It worked out very well. There are probably many other wines to match this meal; a good Pinot Noir, or a complicated white Bordeaux would also work, but why spend that kind of money if you have a €10 local alternative? If you are drinking a wine just to drink a wine, then there are probably better wines out there, but to match with Pork Alentejano, I can’t think of too many better wines to match the dish.
This brings me to one of my thinking points and I would like to know what you think. Should wine be only considered worth drinking if you can only drink it alone? Or should a wine’s value/quality be rated by its ability to match with the meal you wish to eat? There are probably 1000’s of examples of wines – some with a price tag to make you shudder and others which make you think they are just cheap plonk – which do not agree with my pallet by themselves; but with the food of the local region are just amazing. I hope you have some good examples of this, as I would like try them, and have a go at making the food to go with it too!
