Wednesday Wine and Food Pairing

After creating a couple of dishes to go with thesamples of  wine that I received from Jacob’s Creek (You can find the recipes here and here), I thought that it would be fun to do a weekly Wine Wednesday wine and food pairing post. I actually had two more bottles of Jacob’s Creek and since I did not have time to use them for the Superbowl as intended, I wanted to kick off this new series with one of the bottles. I chose the 2007 Pinot Noir to pair with a dish that I created while grocery shopping this weekend: Pan fried golden potatoes topped with eggplant pisto, goat cheese, and olives. It turned out to be one of the best dishes I have made in awhile, so simple, so healthy, comforting, and filling. And absolutely delicious!

The ingredients for the pisto:

1 large eggplant, chopped, salted, and rinsed

1 can chopped tomatoes

1 whole yellow onion

‘1 TSP garlic powder

3 TSP olive oil

Splash balsamic vinegar

I slowly cooked all of the ingredients mixed together for about 45 minutes until everything pretty much fell apart and melted together. The smell was amazing! Once the eggplant was soft enough,( and this took awhile!) I started slicing the potatoes verrrrrry thinly so that they would brown in just a little bit of oil in a pan, just thicker and a little bit softer than potato chips. As soon as they were done, I topped them with the pisto mixture, goat cheese, and Spanish green olives with pimientos.

I was excited to open the Jacob’s Creek Pinot Noir because I had never tried this wine before and because I have been pleasantly surprised by the other wines sent to me on their behalf. The verdict? The Jacob’s Creek Pinot Noir is very easy to drink. There is an obvious ripe strawberry flavor, and it has a smooth, clean finish. I would say that as far as pairing it with this dish, I could go either way. The wine didn’t overpower the dish, but it didn’t seem like they were perfect partners either as it did when I paired the Riesling and fish cakes in Part I of my Superbowl pairing posts. Still, we enjoyed the meal, we enjoyed the wine, and it was all good.

I hope you enjoy my adventures in food and wine pairing each week. As always I am open to suggestions and guest posts on this (or any topic!) I love to hear from all of you about what you are eating and drinking!