Dinner Blog Round 2!

This week's dinner I prepared for myself.  Whereas my first dinner blog included friends and their favorite foods, I choose to do this by myself to try to pair wines with my favorite foods.  My first course was grapes, crackers, and havarti cheese with a Melbec.  The main course was a garlic lemon tilipia with brown rice and steamed broccoli, carrots, and peppers paired with a Pinot Grigio.  My final course of the night was my favorite dessert, chocolate brownies, paired with a Merlot.  Overall, I think I did a decent job with the pairings and enjoyed the meal.

I choose to do cheese and grapes, because I usually have cheese before dinner.  It seemed like the natural way to start this dinner.  I choose the Melbec, because I've never had it before.  

The Melbec by itself was okay.  It was only $5, so I'd like to try a nicer one in the future.  The nose was peppery and spicy.  By itself all I could taste was pepper, which is not what I like in a wine.

The Melbec with the havarti cheese was a decent combination.  The cheese helped cut the spicy flavor so I could taste some of the fruit.  It was a good combination.  I also tasted the wine with the grapes, and the taste did not change at all.  

I usually eat fish 3 times a week, so I cooked tilapia for this meal.  I paired it with brown rice and steamed veggies.  Overall, the meal was delicious.

I paired this wine with a Pinot Grigio.  The reason I choose this wine was I had a similar wine with tilapia a few weeks ago, and the Pinot Grigio was bland so it didn't do much for me.  I decided to try again.  This Pinot Grigio had good flavor by itself.  I could smell the pear on the nose.  The taste was good but very acidic, a good sign that it would taste good with food.

The fish cut down on the acidic taste to balance the wine.  It was a very good combination that I would do again.  The brown rice did nothing for the wine, as brown rice is very bland.  The veggies were also not a great combination.  The made the wine taste worse.  So I would choose the wine for tilapia again, but I would definitely change the sides.  

As mentioned in some of my previous blogs, Merlot is one of my go to wines.  I choose this specific Merlot, because I thought the bottle was cool. Well I learned my lesson.  You should not by a wine based on the bottle, because this is one of the worse Merlots I have ever tasted.  The taste was just too watered down.

Surprisingly, however, the wine tasted very good with my brownies.  It lessoned out the spice and water to bring out more flavors in the wine.  I would definitely recommend this strange combination to everyone.




Overall, even though I did not research wines to go with my meals and just winged it, I think the combinations all worked.  Even the surprise.  I look forward to expanding my wine palette through the years as I try more wines and pair them with more foods!