CTV News anchor Natalie Piero an I chat about wines for Easter brunch, Passover and other holiday weekend wines.
Also check out The Essential Hip-Hop Guide to Easter Wines, which includes pairing ham and wine, lamb and wine, vegetables and wine, and chocolate and wine.
Wines for Easter Brunch and Passover Dinner
Natalie Piero: Passover starts tonight and of course Easter is coming up this weekend. So Natalie MacLean is here to talk about the best wines to pair with whatever meal you might be serving or having for the holidays.
Natalie MacLean: Absolutely, we have a variety of traditions of course we have Easter ham, lamb and chocolate bunnies, of course. We have Kosher wines for Seder Supper today … Passover, so we have a wide variety here. Where would you like to start Natalie?
Natalie Piero: Let’s start over here on the left.
13th Street Winery Cuvée Brut Sparkling Rosé
Niagara Peninsula, Ontario V.Q.A., Canada
Natalie MacLean: The Sparkling wines. I’ve got 2 from Ontario, one from Niagara the other from Prince Edward County, both excellent values. You pay about a third of the price of Champagne. These are great with egg dishes, not the chocolate kind, but the real egg dishes including quiches, scrambled eggs and omelettes and things that we like to have during Easter brunches. Eggs are tough on wine.
Natalie Piero: Yes, it doesn’t seem like a yummy combination to me.
Natalie MacLean: It’s possible if you’re determined, really determined. So eggs will coat the mouth. They have sulphur compounds and the yolks have iron. What you want is the effervescence, that swarm of bubbles to wash away those kinds of compounds and cut right through. Sparkling wines will work.
Natalie Piero: Stay away from reds, I would imagine.
Natalie MacLean: Yes, unless you really want to be mean to someone in the morning.
Natalie Piero: Or I’m thinking more of an egg type dinner maybe or a lunch of quiches or something.
Natalie MacLean: That’s true but usually it doesn’t work.
Natalie Piero: Wine for breakfast.
Oyster Bay Cuvée Brut Chardonnay
New Zealand, New Zealand
Natalie MacLean: Exactly, and we have a couple of other Sparkling wines. This one’s from Australia and this is New Zealand. Again, you’re paying a fraction of the cost. But here we have a great Champagne from France so you have lots of choices … anywhere from $25 to $30 right up to about $60.
Natalie Piero: Okay, and what about these?
Simi Sonoma County Chardonnay
Sonoma County, California, United States
Natalie MacLean: Well these 3 wines are kosher wines. What’s really interesting ,of course, they’re the wines that are served at Seder Suppers on Passover … They’ve been supervised, the whole winemaking process is supervised by a Rabbi but these wines are no longer the wines of affliction when it comes to your taste buds.
Natalie Piero: They used to have a bad rap.
Natalie MacLean: They were the cough syrup of the wine world but these days kosher wines have really grown in popularity because the quality is there. There’s no hard and fast statistics but they estimate that more than a third of consumers are keeping kosher. They drinking these wines because of the quality alone and you look for the little “k” symbol on the back label, that’s how you know they’re kosher.
Natalie Piero: Okay, that’s good to know.
Natalie MacLean: Absolutely.
Natalie Piero: And moving along, what’s this wine?
Montevina Winery Pinot Grigio
California, United States
Natalie MacLean: Well we have a Pinot Grigio. This is a zippy, fresh white wine. Right beside it is a Riesling. This one is from Italy and this one’s from Niagara. These will all work with your egg dishes.
Natalie Piero: Okay.
Natalie MacLean: But then if you want to get into glazed ham with a touch of sweetness or cloves or spices. You really need something with a floral lift to it.
Natalie Piero: Okay.
Ravenswood Old Vine Vintners Blend Zinfandel
California, United States
Natalie MacLean: In the reds, you’ll be looking at a Zinfandel or a Shiraz that has that cherry-berry richness.
Natalie Piero: Okay.
Natalie MacLean: Because lamb can be a fatty kind of luscious meaty dish, you want something equally voluptuous in your glass.
Natalie Piero: Right. So you stick with the red?
Natalie MacLean: I do tend to although, again, if you’re really determined and you love your white wines go with the buttery Chardonnay. You’re looking for luscious and round and full-bodied like the California Chardonnay right here.
Natalie Piero: This, I will imagine also would be very good with chocolate.
Natalie MacLean: Yes, absolutely.
Natalie Piero: This is where you are going to talk about the dessert wine as well.
Lindemans Bin 50 Shiraz
South East Australia, Australia
Natalie MacLean: You can get a full-bodied red wine to go with chocolate, especially dark chocolate, which is the easiest to pair with wine. That is because it has the least sugar and it has the most cocoa solids so it doesn’t clash as much with chocolate. You could also go for a big red wine like Amarone and you have your sweet dessert wines. This one’s from California, it’s a lovely sort of orange Muscat flavour. Think about if you would do a chocolate and orange swirl cake. The swirl comes from the orange in the glass and then the chocolate … you could go with port, vintage, tawny ports also worked beautifully with chocolate.
Natalie Piero: That’s sound so delicious. We’re going to talk about some spring wines in general not just holiday but all through spring, coming up in just a little bit. If you can’t remember all of these wines, there’s going to be a link on our website at Ottawa.ctvnews.ca to Natalie’s website.
You’ll find another video about Easter wines here.
Posted with permission of CTV.
