I’ve enjoyed and studied wine for many years and even went into the wine business for a while. I have bought to drink and bought to invest, to lay down stock, but I mostly confine myself now to buying-to-drink. Poseidon is a relatively large boat but we don’t have room for a dedicated wine cellar and, anyway, the movement and temperature variations of life aboard don’t make for ideal storage. We do, however keep about 150 bottles on board & replenish it as needed.
When I began to write for the POSEIDON COOKS! wine page, selecting wines to pair with Linda’s recipes, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the scope of the subject. There are thousands, tens of thousands of choices from dozens of credible wine-producing countries. Throw in the question of value for money and the parameters are almost infinite. I certainly didn’t want to fall back on generalizations: “This dish calls for a hearty Burgundy.” Nothing wrong with this approach, I suppose, but it doesn’t work for me or for our aficionados. POSEIDON COOKS! is a very personal experience and I wanted to similarly personalize the wine pairings.
Our home port is Ventura Harbor. Within a comfortable three hour drive there are at least a couple of hundred highly thought of wineries. So I thought that, in keeping with our desire to buy fresh and local, why not confine our first choice wine pairings to wines that could be considered local, too – Paso Robles at the furthest point, Santa Barbara and Ventura County at the nearest.
But, of course, not all our readers and site-visitors will be familiar with these ‘local’ wines and so I’ve decided that when I make a local selection I’ll put it in a wider, even global, context. For example, Linda has a Santa Barbara Prawn dish that calls for a real Trimbach, a wine we can’t replicate by going local. Instead, I found a Claiborn and Churchill gewurtztrameiner – an excellent wine and less expensive than the Trimbach. So, that’s the juxtaposition of a local choice with a global choice (which in most cases will be substantially more expensive). Taking another example, what happens if a dish calls for the sweet tones of a Beaume de Venise – a fortified muscat? How on earth do we replicate this locally? Not a bad question – and, if you have an opinion or a suggestion, I’ll be happy to hear it.
Understanding this focus, this approach to the wine pairings on POSEIDON COOKS!, I hope you enjoy my choices and I welcome your input.
John Andreotti
MV Poseidon
Ventura Harbor, California
