Savvy about your Sauvi
From the unfashionable and sometimes controversial Riesling to the height of fashion and consumer tastes in the last ten years, this week we turn our attention to perhaps a more contemporary great ‘food wine’, Sauvignon Blanc.
Curious Wine Blog
Golden Ticket: Curious Wines Fundraising Offer
Sadly, no, we're not offering you the opportunity to invest in Curious Wines. What we are doing, however, is offering you a great raffle prize for your next fundraiser. What's In It For You: Free prize! For your raffle! What's not to love? Wine or vouchers, whichever works best for you.
Beef Wellington
I always talk a lot about certain dishes being ones that I love or could not live without but if you had to ask me for one last meal before I died this would have to be it.
Steamed Salmon with soy dipping sauce
This salmon dish is about as healthy as it gets as it is steamed along with the vegetables and served with a super simple soy dipping sauce.
The Curious Case of Montepulciano d'Abruzzo
OK, after me. Mon - tuh - pull - cha - noh. (Hold the ‘a’ in ‘cha’ for effect, and to convince everyone you’ve a true grasp of the lingo.
Pasta With Spinach, Red Onion and Blue Cheese
Posted by NiallThis is one of the recipes I have designed for busy professionals for when they get home and just want to throw something together super fast. It is made with the one complaint that I hear from people all the time in mind: "I don't have enough time to cook".
If I could only drink one wine ever again…
This line is the provocative lead-in on the cover of April's Decanter magazine, and before I'd even got to page 46 it had my mind racing.
Why you should always fly 'first class'
For me, dessert wines remain the wine world’s best kept secret. For many people however, I suspect sweet wine brings back bad memories of Concorde and Blue Nun.
Wine-matching with carrot and coriander soup?
Posted by NiallI love food and I love wine but even though I know a lot about food I have never really been an expert on the wine front. My biggest problem, and this is a problem that a lot of people suffer from in my opinion, is that I know what I like and I tend to stick to it.
Look and Taste joins the Curious Wine Blog
Those keeping an eye on us in the last couple of weeks will have seen my contributions to the new wine blog on Look and Taste.
Pancakes: not just for Pancake Day
Ok, so we're jumping on the Great Pancake Bandwagon today. One day of pancake-mania where you'd swear you couldn't get a pancake the rest of the year.
Look-and-good-taste: A sensory feast
In our second contribution to the Look and Taste wine blog this week, we took a step back from our five wine tips to enhance your dining forever to assess the fundamental taste components of both food and wine.
Lookandtaste.com and Matching Food & Wine
We were absolutely thrilled to follow the launch of Look and Taste this week, surely one of the most exciting, innovative and universally-appealing websites to come out of Ireland.
Half-price wine: too good to be true?
What is it with supermarkets and half price wine? Every time you walk into a Dunnes or a Tesco there's some obscure wine piled in a floor display the size of a small semi-D, plastered with half a rainforest of brightly coloured "HALF-PRICE!" signs.
Winter Comfort Carlow Potato Bake
One of the things I love about Irish winters is the justification to close the curtains at 5pm, build a roaring open fire, open a big bottle of red wine, and tuck into some winter comfort food.
Incredibly simple but bowl-lickingly tasty Tagliatelle Carbonara
I've gone all Italian of late. Not in the belligerent, brooding, erratic-driving kind of way (that's me normally), rather in my love of the wines and cuisine of my favourite holiday destination.
The best Spaghetti Bolognese in the world, ever!
Ah, Spaghetti Bolognese. The quintessential student staple, and probably the dish most debated as to who’s got the best recipe. I know, because I’ve argued passionately myself.
Book Review: The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce
"Do take what I owe from these notes. And do remunerate yourselves for the trouble and inconvenience I may be causing you. Please convey my sincere apologies to my fellow guests for any disturbance.
How much are you really paying for your wine?
A cutting editorial this month from Decanter Editor Guy Woodward has prompted me to write a long overdue post on the real price of wine in Ireland.
What’s the big swizz? Top 10 did-you-knows on Champagne
Along the lines that 73% of all statistics are made up, I’m going to make a brash guess that there’ll be as much Champagne drunk tonight around the world as the other 364 days of the year put together.
Time to stop accepting bad wine
I was in two Cork hotels over the Christmas period for parties – the sit-down meals with crackers and hats varieties. In both, we indulged in some of the respective House Wines – you know, the stuff that smells of turps and takes the paint off skirting boards.
Do you love, I mean really love, your corkscrew?
About ten years ago my wife was given a Pulltap’s waiter’s friend corkscrew by an old college friend who’d just started with one of the big drinks companies in Dublin.