AnuvaBlog

Pork bellies are not the most commonly eaten food in America. Mostly because we are not used to eating such a large quantity of fat–obvious fat–on our cuts of meat. We are trained to cut off the fat.

The luscious and aggressive tannins in the Cavagnaro Malbec, though, make it the perfect wine to go with such a fatty meat. The grease of the pork belly, coating your mouth with a succulent swine flavor, washes completely away with the tannin of this Malbec leaving  a slightly smokey aftertaste.

I personally had never been a fat of such fatty cuts of meat before trying this, but it certainly worked for me. I hope that you are all out there experimenting with new food and wine combinations and get lucky like I did. Learn by doing!

We had cracked open a bottle of Don Juan Reserve for ourselves on Monday night, as we had some friends in from out of town and wanted to show off some of our best stuff to them. After opening the 3rd bottle (because they loved it of course), we realized that we weren’t going to finish it as we had to work the next day.

Routinely, as I’m sure is the case for many of you, we open wines especially on weeknights to have a glass or so with dinner and we are left with 1/3 or 1/2 of a bottle. Que pena! We don’t want to throw this wine away. The best strategy for preserving opened wine is the shove the cork back into the bottle as far as it will go and then lye it down in the refrigerator. This will help to slow the oxidation of the wine and make it last longer.

We have experimented with our classic wines (like Mayol Bonarda and Cavagnaro Malbec) and have found that these wines are still very drinkable up to 48 hours after opening. With our reserves (like Don Juan and Cavagnaro Reserve), this number goes up to 96 hours.

Once you pass these points, though, you are better off cooking with the wine. More on what to do with very leftover wine in future posts.