First, Catch by Thom Eagle

Author:Thom Eagle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Quadrille Publishing Ltd
Published: 2018-03-12T04:00:00+00:00

13

ON COOKING WITH WINE AND VINEGAR

Everyone knows that blood is thicker than water, but there is some disagreement about the precise nature of wine. Something old and rich, which reluctantly slides its way down the edges of a swirled glass, can quite easily stain your teeth, your lips, your table and indeed your shirt a dense red, as if you had in fact been feasting on that life-giving forbidden fluid. On the other hand, the wine at the last meal of Jesus of Nazareth, commemorated in the ritual during which, apparently, the drink is turned literally into divine blood, is likely to have been young, weak and further diluted with water. In any case, far from the tannin and jam we are now expected to enjoy with bloody meat, it would likely have been of a sourness most modern drinkers would find distinctly unpalatable. Sourness, of course, we find attractive in lemonade, pickles, ketchups, chutneys and the like, but the particular vinegared sourness that emerges in some wines, ciders, unusually fermented beers, and indeed in vinegar can be off-putting, precisely because it is proximate to decay – but this is only another way of saying that it is alive.

Most of the wine we drink, in common with much of the food we consume, is a dead product, with deterioration and rot its only possibilities for the future. The process of pasteurization, the brief super-heating which, destroying all microbial life, allows for longer storage of fruit juices, milk products, honey and the like, is a part also of the long interference that crushed grapes undergo on their journey into bottles. This includes the addition of farmed yeasts to replace the now-dead natural population, artificial preservatives and, in many cases, a forcible deconstruction of the wine into its constituent parts of alcohol, sugars, water, tannins and the like, in order to be reconstructed in a precisely calibrated fashion, which ensures a consistent and commercially viable end product. Now, there is nothing wrong with safety and consistency. Having access to more-or-less fresh milk without having to acquire it directly from the farm is something we all take for granted, as is the fact that we can go and buy a bottle of wine from the supermarket or the cornershop and know that it will taste exactly the same as it did yesterday, or last week, or probably will next year – which is the problem. For all that winemakers like to talk about the particular terroir of their vineyards and the effect of the vagaries of weather on each year’s particular vintage, the fact is that most of the artificial wines they sell, made with non-native yeasts, their edges blunted with preservatives, are made not as an expression of a particular grape or year but rather in a spirit of industrious commercialism.

If you taste a wine from one of the newer generation of makers, who uses older, indigenous varieties of grape, who ferments, as we did with our pickles, using the bacteria and

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