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Patrick Corsi, Q4 al CentroThe perfect wine for a hearty dish has personality without overpowering.
A wine for a hearty Italian meal, ?a smokin’ butter dish, and a coffee ?that’s ready to go when you are. Ask an Oenophile The Expert: Patrick Corsi, ?managing partner at Vancouver’s Q4 al Centro? The Dish: Penne con salsicce di anatra with duck sausage and sun-dried tomatoes, $21? The Pairing: Villa Antinori Toscana, 2006, $55?
The Expert: Patrick Corsi, managing partner at Vancouver’s Q4 al Centro The Dish: Penne con salsicce di anatra with duck sausage and sun-dried tomatoes, $21 The Pairing: Villa Antinori Toscana, 2006, $55
This pairing is all about simplicity with an emphasis on the flavour of the food. There is a lot going on in this dish. But we wanted to create a very hearty dish, and you don’t do hearty without ingredients. There are all sorts of different flavours coming together: caramelized fennel, sun-dried tomatoes, toasted pine nuts, aged Asiago and Fraser Valley-sourced duck sausage stuffed with fennel, nutmeg and pear.
It’s a Tuscan-style dish, so it was important for me to choose a wine from the same region. But I also wanted to choose a wine that wasn’t going to overpower the dish. The Villa Antinori is a well-priced wine and something that you would find in most homes throughout Tuscany and the rest of central Italy. It’s a simple sangiovese, and the beauty about sangiovese is that it’s designed to go with food. This wine is also classified as a vino da tavola or a table wine rather than a Chianti due to its blend of varietals – predominantly sangiovese with Cabernet, Merlot and Syrah. It’s not an intrusive wine.
Like of lot things in life, there’s a partnership when it comes to wine. We want our food to showcase itself the way it’s supposed to, and wine should be the partner to that.
When it comes to American architect and designer Michael Graves’s product designs, it seems that look and function are one and the same. And we’d have to agree; something looks good when it functions beautifully as well. Take this 1989-designed Alessi butter dish, for example. The striking combination of polished steel mirror tray, crystal lid and polyamide black knob means serving butter in style couldn’t be more simple – forget all that whipped nonsense. $199, eq3.com
Coffee roasters and coffee shops are tapping into the trend of consumers using their smart phones to shop. Last summer Vancouver’s Ethical Bean Coffee Co. Ltd. launched an iPhone app providing consumers with source and product information about their beans. And this month, Port Moody’s Caffé Divano launches its Caffé Divano app, which aims to save us all from the dreaded commuter coffee lineup. The free app allows you to purchase your morning cuppa and choose a desired pickup time in advance, allowing you to walk in and right back out with your freshly made brew. (But while you’re there, maybe you should check out the raspberry white chocolate cheesecake? Just a thought.) caffedivano.ca