Summer’cue and Chilled Summer Reds
Despite the weekend’s unrelenting sogginess, I must have detected at least five or six different varieties of grill-sizzled protein wafting through the Northside Brooklyn air Saturday and Sunday. Folks are ready for summer, even if summer is playing coy this year.
[Last night's summer solstice skies, however, were quite lovely, with low-lying clouds shuffling with great urgency southward across a dark blue, superbly clear sky, adding a sense of momentousnes to the air. Perhaps that's what inspired the close-to-middle-age couple making out with abandon in front of Pure Food and Wine last night, she with a lit cigarette in her hand.]
Anyway, back to my point: summertime and barbecue. [As my friend Rachel Jensen would say when a joke I was telling strayed or bombed, "Editing, Adrian, editing...."] One of the joys of summertime ‘cues is the busting out of the right type of reds. There’s no one type, but accessibility and easy-drinkability are very key. Jammy/full/alcoholic is OK so long as you carry a canteen of water across your chest like a WWII-era American GI fighting against Rommel, the Desert Fox, in the North African theater; only, your enemy here is not an opposing army but rather your own drunkeness.
Better to choose lighter reds, with relatively lower alcohol: Old World, moderate-to-cool climate stuff —Beaujolais, Austrain Zweigelt, more classically-oriented Riojas. And for reasons I don’t fully understand from a scientific point of view, these light reds like a little chill, especially on a warm day.
In a very cool article written last week by Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher in the Wall Street Journal [and another sign that the WSJ's wine coverage and online presence keeps getting better and better], the couple argues in favor of drinking chilled reds over whites in summertime, as they “can be soothing, relaxing and juicy in their redness—and they happen to go well with many traditional summer foods.”
They continue:
…widely available inexpensive Riojas, such as Marqués de Cáceres (around $13), are a special summertime treat. We tried these on a particularly hot day in Orlando and simply loved them. They tasted roasted and crisp, which reminded us of barbecues and picnics. They were festive and fun, with dry, spicy, focused tastes. They were easy, relaxed and really tasted like summer to us. Because these wines have some oomph, they go well with barbecued spare ribs and with some of the more complexly seasoned dishes of summer, such as curried chicken salad, curried vegetables and herbed meat sandwiches.
The sky outside the Rabbit Hole cafe is still a smudgy gray. I don’t care, though. It’s time to grill. Tonight. And the handful of red wine samples Lily’s collected over the past week, while we were doing a detox cleanse (mercifully now officially over)?Going into the fridge.