What I did with my 2005 Bordeaux

Posted 03/07/2008 at 12:30 PM by Carolyn

    I bought a case of wine a few months ago, back when I had money. The only bottle from that case left in my little wine fridge is a 2005 Bordeaux from Chateau Marot. I had tried it at a tasting, and found it to be a very agreeable and affordable “beginner Bordeaux.”

    Last night, it was Mr. Chicken’s turn to make dinner.  He called me in the afternoon to ask me if we had any dry red wine around the house, so I knew I had something interesting to look forward to. 

    As it turned out, he was making me Risotto al Barolo, a Mario Batali recipe he found on one of my favorite cooking blogs.  Mr. Chicken likes to take advantage of his night to prepare dinner to make Italian food, which I hardly ever cook myself.  Perhaps not coincidentally, I also don’t drink a lot of Italian wine.  But, if Barolo is the king of reds in Italy, Bordeaux is certainly king in France.  So, we had Risotto al Barolo, but it was Risotto al Bordeaux, or perhaps Riz de Bordeaux.  No matter in what language you say it, we had some creamy rice with wine.  Yum.
 
    The recipe only called for half a cup of wine, so we drank most of the rest of it with our meal.  A beginner Bordeaux, indeed.  It was quite acidic and fairly tannic, with some good black fruit flavors coming through.  It could probably stand to age for two or three years, but its mediocre quality wouldn’t justify keeping it around for any longer than that.  A perfectly passable wine. 

    We didn’t finish the entire bottle, and my boss was out of town, so I decided to bring it in to work today for a little on the job happy hour.  No, not really.  I took it in to work to make red wine truffles.  It’s always been one of my favorite combinations, but it can be very difficult to find just the right balance of flavors between wine and chocolate.  So, I took advantage of the slow pace of business (nobody buys chocolate in between Valentine’s Day and Easter, apparently) to experiment. 

Trying to choose from our wide variety of chocolates, I kept my mind on the most basic principal of dessert and wine pairing: always make sure your wine is sweeter than your dessert, or you’ll never be able to taste it.  The wine had a lot of acid and some fruit, but not a ton of sweetness.  So, I figured dark chocolate would be the way to go.  After a little tasting and tippling, I decided on combining the wine with two different chocolates: one a very acidic, raspberry-tasting 64% bittersweet, and one an extra bitter 85%.

I began with just 50 grams of wine (we pastry people are all metric, all the time) with 525 grams of chocolate.  But, I could barely taste it, so eventually upped it all the way to 85 grams.  That’s about as far as I could go before it would begin to affect the consistency of the finished truffles, so I just hoped that would be enough.  In retrospect, it was probably a mistake to assume that darker would be better.  The bitterness of the 85% really blocks the flavor of the wine.  But, instant regret never did anybody any good.  Now I have to wait overnight for my ganache to set, so I’ll just have to stay in suspense over whether I made the right decisions!

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