"south america" news and stories

The distinctive smell of barbecued provolone topped with chili and oregano will forever remind me of a barbecue I went to in Buenos Aires. Before being served a series of different meats in a typical Argentinian asado, grilled provolone is often eaten with a savory chimichurri sauce that's made with parsley, cilantro, garlic, salt, pepper, onion, and paprika with olive oil, lemon juice and vinegar.

In supermarkets thoughout Buenos Aires, you can find frozen provoleta that you can simply heat up in the oven or microwave. Sometimes you can even find it stuffed with ham, bacon, red peppers, and tomatoes. This incredibly rich and crispy treat makes me think of the salty Greek appetizer Saganaki - fried Greek cheese. I'm wondering if one can find these frozen provoletas in supermarkets in the United States. Although it's easy to make, the frozen ones I purchased in Argentina were absolutely delicious!

Below are a couple of Provoleta recipes:

1. Grilled Provoleta
2. Provoleta with Crushed Red Pepper

While both recipes seem identical, the first one also offers an excellent recipe for chimichurri sauce. When entertaining, I highly suggest you make this dish as an appetizer. It's sure to be a crowd pleaser.

April may be the cruelest month, but January is surely the coldest. It's the perfect time to break out big, robust red wines that warm your body and soul. And what better to eat with a big red wine than a big steaming bowl of chili?

This weekend we had about a dozen people over for a blind tasting of six Carmeneres, all from Chile (the country--don't get Chile and chili confused!). Carmenere is Chile's signature grape, brought over from Bordeaux in the late 19th century. The wine is deeply dark and full-bodied, and in Chile can have a somewhat vegetal flavor, though it can also be quite fruity and spicy.

The six we tried ranged in price from $10 to $47. Chile is known around the world for its value wine, and it definitely delivered in our tasting. When the bags were pulled off, it turned out that several of us put the $10 wine in our top favorites. Surprisingly, everyone from the least- to the most-experienced tasters felt that all of the wines were good, and comparable in their quality, even though the prices were not.

More tasting notes and my "Chili for a Crowd" recipe after the jump.

One of my favorite stores to wander into when I'm downtown is the Ten Thousand Villages Fair Trade Store. The merchandise is always high quality and a remarkably good value despite the fact that the people who craft the items are assured timely and fair payment for their work, plus ongoing contracts to guarantee future income.

Now Fair Trade has come to the wine world with the first nationwide introduction of Fair Trade Certified wine. So what does "Fair Trade" really mean? In the wine world, many family vineyards in developing countries have a tough time meeting market demand for quality grapes AND paying their workers enough, ensuring safe working conditions, and getting a good enough price for the crop to eke out their own living.

Fair Trade Certified means a producer is guaranteed a minimum price for the grapes, their workers earn a living wage, and wine-producing communities receive community development funding. At Stellar Organics Fair Trade Certified vineyard in South Africa, for example, workers have established a commercial community organic vegetable garden with its own educational garden used to train children in organic farming. Income from the garden and vineyard go into a university education fund for children of the workers.

Continue reading "Wine of the Week: Fair Trade wine" after the jump.

The other shoe has dropped: it turns out wine doesn't solve every health problem from A to Z. Researchers in England have found that red and white wines from most European nations carry potentially dangerous levels of at least seven different heavy metals.

To put the danger in context, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has a measure called THQ (Target Hazard Quotients) that establishes safe levels of frequent, long-term exposure to various chemicals. A THQ over 1 indicates a health risk, and in the recent news, seafood THQs between 1 and 5 have raised serious concerns.
The wines studied from Europe, the Middle East, and South America, have THQs ranging from 50 to 200 per glass, with some going as high as 300.

The top offenders were Hungary, Slovakia, France, Austria, Spain, Germany, Portugal, and Greece. Safe wines came from Argentina, Brazil, and Italy. But don't lead the cry for "buy American" just yet: U.S. wines weren't studied because there's no source for data on heavy metals in U.S. wines.

Source

While grape growers in the northern hemisphere are just winding down harvest, the southern hemisphere is six months ahead of us. It seems we should still be drinking our 2005's, 06's, and 07,s, but I've just opened a bottle of the 2008 Veramonte Sauvignon Blanc Reserva, a gorgeously fresh and lively wine from Chile's Casablanca Valley.

Ordinarily I think of Sauvignon Blanc as a summer wine because its bone-dry acidity and grapefruit flavors zing through your palate and refresh a thirsty mouth like no other wine can. But dry, unoaked varietal Sauv Blancs are mostly meant to be drunk young in order to stay fresh--so the younger, the better, and when the southern hemisphere 2008s roll out in the fall, it's best to catch them while you can.

Many producers in New Zealand and Chile use a new harvesting method of picking grapes over a longer period of time at different levels of ripeness, which gives the wine a heady combination of raciness and curves. Pick too soon, and Sauvignon Blanc, already a vegetal varietal, is too green, too grassy. Pick to late, and the wine is flabby and flat instead of full and round. The combination picking results in a multi-dimensional wine that has the best of both worlds: flinty minerality and ripe body.