FoodPairing Friday: Prosecco ROCKS! (in both senses..)

Well, I know I promised you some tasting notes, and some food-pairing ideas, for the “Best Red” wines from last week’s San Francisco International Wine Competition.

Sometimes the best-laid plans… well, you know. OK with you if we put that on the back burner for a (very short) while? ‘Cause I went to a stop-the-presses Prosecco tasting yesterday, and the Italian winemakers/winery owners and I talked food-and-wine-pairing the whole time. Then they filled the ‘vertible with lotsa bottles, and…

In case you’re worrying, I aced the sobriety test. The winemakers/winery owners (let’s just call them “vintners”) and I decided that if you can say “Il Prosecco di Conegliano e Valdobbiadene” without a hitch, you’re OK to drive home. (BTW, it’s “eel proh-SEHC-coh dee coh-neh-LYAh-noh eh vahl-doh-BYAH-deh-neh.”) www.prosecco.it

If I hadn’t already been in love with Prosecco, I would have fallen head over heels at this tasting. First of all, it was held in the Crown Room, high atop the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill, with postcards-on-steroids views out the many windows. (Here’s one of Coit Tower.) You could do a water tasting here and feel intoxicated.

At any rate, the vintners and I agreed that neither the view nor the Prosecco *needed* any improvement, but each of them really did (at least seem to) enhance the other, the way a wine can enhance an already-delicious food, and vice-versa.

Which leads me to… today’s FoodPairing Friday musings. As I spoke with the vintners about their favorite food pairings with their own bottlings, I reminisced about the first time I ever tasted Prosecco, in the early ‘90s, on a very romantic evening in Venice. The wine was barely a blip on the American-export-market radar at that point, and it took several years for me to be able to find any decent examples of Prosecco here at home.

Today there are dozens of them, in beautiful, classy packages, and at amazingly reasonable prices. Between Italian Prosecco and Spanish cava, which I also love, I have my value-priced-bubbly needs covered. Virtually all of them cost less than $20.00 a bottle, and I often find excellent ones for $10 or less.

On that night in Venice, at a friend’s “piccolo palazzo” (tiny palace), we were welcomed with some nuggets of local cheese and some tangy cured olives to go with the never-empty flutes of Prosecco. Great start. Prosecco is fruity enough to handle salt (the “peanut butter and jelly effect”!), and its crisp acids plus lively bubbles cut right through fat. We stayed with Prosecco through a lovely main dish of pasta with asparagus and turkey breast, lightly seasoned with olive oil and fresh local herbs. Both the wine and the pasta dish were at the same level of intensity: neither overpowered the other, and each one let the other’s flavors show through.

Yesterday in San Francisco, the Italian vintners regaled me with the culinary specialties of the Veneto region where Prosecco is produced, including seafood from the Adriatic coast, light pastas, creamy risotto, salumi (cured meats), vegetables such as zucchini and eggplant, and local fruits and cheeses. My palate memory, meanwhile, had hopped a flight right back to Italy.

Then one of the vintners, Daniele D'Anna of Cantine Umberto Bortolotti, www.bortolotti.com mentioned Thai food. And sushi. And we started to riff on things like dim sum, Vietnamese spring rolls, and East/West fusion food. At home, I generally drink bubbles (or beer) with that category of salty/sweet/tangy/spicy ethnic specialties, so we were definitely on the same page. What my new friend didn’t realize was that I had already planned to stop for take-out Thai on my way home. And when he generously gave me a six-pack of his Prosecco, that sealed the deal for me. (That's tall Daniele in the pic, squatting down to bottle level, with a quaffable quartet of Bortolotti Prosecco. More on Daniele tomorrow!)

So as not to develop chronic blogorrhea, I’m going to sign off in a moment, and then pick up next Friday with my Prosecco-with-Thai-food dinner. (BTW, since there was a sushi place around the corner from the Thai restaurant, and they had some great stuff on their “specials” list…) For now, I’ll finish up by telling you how I chilled down my Prosecco when I got home, starved and thirsty.

Putting a bottle in the freezer helps, but it still takes about 15 minutes. And I didn’t have any of those little plastic ice-ball-thingies at the ready. (They got moved out to make room for food. Priorities, you know.)

What I *did* have in the freezer was some grapes. Table grapes, frozen solid. So I improvised, filled my glass with the impromptu little edible “rocks,” and poured in the Prosecco. The icy grapes chilled down the vino before you could say “Prosecco Rocks!” (And later, after they thawed, the wine-soaked grapes made a dandy dessert.)

May your weekend rock too. Lots more about Prosecco In my next few posts. Meanwhile, you can learn more in yesterday's Culinary Roundtable #15 podcast on Prosecco.

Cheers (Salute)—
Rosina
gilded fork, wine, wine writing, Welcome to Wine Country, Rosina Tinari Wilson