Wine conversations with Father

[marmota_b]

Disclaimer: This duo has a fairly cavalier approach to wines. Which is definitely not the same as a connoisseur approach to wines.

* * *

I made pasta with bacon and tomatoes for lunch / dinner / you-know-the-main-meal-of-the-day-that-Czechs-have-at-noon.

Father (considering): There's a Müller opened... and a Neuburger unopened, but I'm saving that. Two Neuburgers.
Me: I think I'll really have the Müller.
(= Müller Thurgau, a dry white)
Father: It's Hungarian.
Me: It's Hungarian, but bottled in Velké Pavlovice. (...) You stopped it with a stopper from port!
Father: I couldn't push the cork back in, and the stopper from the port was just lying at hand.
Me: It doesn't even bother to say what it goes with...
Father (with conviction): Müller goes with everything.

* * *

Earlier this month:
Father (speaking of a Wikipedia article he'd already come across much earlier): Neuburger is... (blah, blah), the vine was fished out of the Danube in the 1860s. The centre of growing is in Austria, area of 652 ha. It is also grown in (blah, blah) and the Czech Republic, area of 795 ha...
Me (bursting out laughing): The centre of growing is the Czech Republic!

* * *

The lowdown: The varieties / types of wine most likely to be bought by Father are Riesling, Tokaji Furmint, Neuburger, and Müller Thurgau, probably in that order (except that Neuburger would be, without a shadow of doubt, bought much more often if it could much more often be stumbled upon). And port. With the exception of the latter and the very occasional South African red, it's all whites from Central Europe, leaning heavily towards the dry end of the spectrum.
I pretty much agree with that choice, although I also share my mother's taste for Sauvignon.
Basically, give me a dry or semi-dry white, please, and by all means, make it Central European.

Comments

[heliopausa]

That sounds like a very pleasant Sunday dinner. (For my family, as I was growing up, the midday meal was "lunch" all through the week, but "dinner" on Sundays. "Dinner" was a distinctly more significant meal. :) )

[marmota_b]

The distinction between the words is somewhat simpler in Czech, as it always goes hand in hand with the time of the day. The noon meal ("oběd") tends to be the biggest meal of the day, with the exception of "večeře" in a restaurant probably approaching dinner proportions. But at home, it would often be just bread with something, or smaller portions of a dinner-type meal. Whereas "oběd" will often include both soup and the main course - although not in this household these days. Hm, I think I've just managed to make it more complicated than it is.

Pasta with bacon and tomatoes: recipe shared on Facebook by Jana Florentýna Zatloukalová, a great cookbook-writer I happen to know personally. Sort of; I haven't seen her in years, my sister knows her better.
Cut 100 g bacon, put it on heat in a pan with a spoon of water, let it loose the grease, add cubed onion and fry a bit. Then 2 tomatoes cut up but without the runny inside, and some fresh parsley, just heat it up. Serve on pasta, with grated parmesan on top. - Well, that's the recipe; I had to alter it a bit, because I didn't have enough bacon OR tomatoes - they were going bad, which was exactly why I needed to use them up - so I didn't remove the insides, added some sausege in the beginning, and also more grease instead of the water, because there wasn't enough grease from the bacon... and we didn't have parmesan. Also, curly Czech parsley instead of the flat Italian variety. But the parsley is great in it either way. As father commented, the missing parmesan was probably the greatest difference.

[marmota_b]

Also, I completely forgot about Rkatsiteli, the Georgian oldest wine variety in the world.

[heliopausa]

Do tell! When does it date to, and how do you know - and is it a dry or semi-dry white, to go with the rest?

[marmota_b]

I've never had it myself, but yes, a white. He brought a bottle once from Latvia, and then found out on Wikipedia that it was several thousand years old, as a variety. And then he took it out somewhere special where I wasn't visiting, as far as I remember. But he's been occasionally mentioning it ever since, which makes me think it's entered the rank of wines that would be bought much more often if they could be stumbled upon more often. The description on Wikipedia does make it sound rather like a dry one, but then I really am not a connoisseur.

[heliopausa]

Nor am I! But the idea of ancient wine-making comes with all sorts of fascinating associations - the beginnings of farming, of conviviality and craft-mysteries, wine-merchants and travellers...