How Cold Today Is

I planned to make a wine sauce / reduction for my Without Himself Non-Pasta Saturday Dinner to go on my steak (other parts are baked potato and broccoli -- on broccoli kick -- it's so nice and green in this winter landscape). Red wine, naturally. One doesn't generally chill red wine, except in some circumstances and those are usually summer circumstances and particular red wines, which the bottles I have here are not.

I opened the wine to start the reduction and the wine is chilled! I mean, chilled, as in cold! from sitting where the unopened bottles of wine sit in this apartment. So I have set the bottle within close range of the oven, in which the potato is baking. Cold red wine is without bouquet and thus without flavor and destroys the wine's legs* -- by that last bit we mean the wine's capacity to cling to the sides of the glass after being swirled to release the bouquet or just when tipped to the mouth to drink. Generally if your wine isn't doing that, it's not the best wine in the world -- though it would be OK probably to cook with. But then all wine is good to cook with, no matter how good or how bad, unless really spoiled with mold or turned to vinegar -- and even the vinegar can have its uses in the kitchen.

I am pleased to report that the warming of the wine -- not really warm, of course, but not cold, has been a success.

Himself, in the meantime, has just texted that they are coming down the mountains and the Bay of Jakmel is in view. Whew. It was a bit of a hairy drive, shall we say?

Snow in the offing here.

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* Not that I'm anything, not even the most reaching stretch of the words, a wine expert, much less a sommelier. I am, though, an oenophile, which means nothing but a person who drinks enjoys wine.