Food and Wine

I like to have a glass of wine every now and then. It relaxes my mind, and it is an enjoyable experience from almost all perspectives. Over the past couple of years, I have started buying more and better wine. This is a problem sometimes. Why? Well, one thing is that in Houston, it is hard to keep your house at the ideal “Cellar Temperature” all year round. That is 55 degrees F. If your house is much warmer than that, the wine ages poorly, or can even go bad. Not overnight, of course, but over the course of a year or two.

So I bought a wine cooler. No, not a Bartles and James, but a EuroCave. Which meant, of course, that I had to get better wine to justify that expense. Then it was hard to keep track of the wines I bought, so I had to find some way to record my wines. So I found Cellar Tracker. That way I could record my wines, my impressions of my wines, and read about other people and their wines. Now this sound suspiciously as if it becoming a hobby. I don’t do hobbies.

So what does this all mean? I tend to couple it with my enjoyment of cooking and eating. In my opinion, it is impossible to enjoy a great meal without a wonderful bottle of wine to accompany it. When I cook, I try to cook around the wine that I want to have that night. When I eat out at restaurants, I tend to select the wine before the food.

When we travel, our best time is when we find a little out of the way place to eat with a nice local wine. I am not a snob when it comes to food or to wine. What I object to is a homogenized or dumbed down cuisine. For example: The food on the Plaza in Vera Cruz is great. The same in San Miguel de Allende is overpriced and sad. The difference is this: In Vera Cruz, they are catering to their friends. In SMdA, they are catering to tourists or gringos.

Not that you can’t get good food that when you are being catered to. But when I think of great meals I have had, I can think of places like Lima, Peru. Milan, Italy. Beijing, China. Not tourist Meccas (of course, give me a great meal in Paris (scroll to the bottom) and I will die happy) but cities with a genuine population of people who love to eat. Mexico City. Singapore.

So I eat. I drink. And I write.