Palisades Dinner Pairing (Italy)

Last Wednesday, my friend Janna and I made the trek out to Eggleston, VA (aka the middle of nowhere.) to have a nice Italian wine and dinner pairing. Or so we thought. To put it bluntly: the night was a total disaster. We arrived at 7:20, were not seated until 8:30, and at that point they had run out of their two originally paired side dishes. Awesome. Oh, it also took 45 minutes to get our TINY little plates of food. We tried to make the most out of the night, and here's the recap of what we came up with:

The wines: La Carraia Orvieto Classico 2013, Tiamo Chianti (2013), Bonaventura Rosso Toscano (2009)

The Original Menu: The Potato Gnocci was swapped for a Spicy Shrimp Dip with pita slices, and the Braised Chicken was swapped for a Winter Bruschetta. Yippee...

This is me, waiting for my food for 45 minutes while maintaining enough discipline to not crush the glasses of wine in front of me sheerly for some sort of sustenance. 

Hooray, the food finally came! Wait, where's the rest of it? At this point we were cranky and hungry and were hoping for much bigger portions.

La Carraia Orvieto Classico (2013)

This wine was originally supposed to be paired with the Potato Gnocci, and I think that would have been absolutely delicious. The wine was light and crisp with hints of apple. However, it was instead paired with a spicy shrimp dip, which didn't work at all. I guess the logic was that white wines go well with seafood, so it would've gone well? The spices in the dip clashed with this wine, but went very well with the Chianti. 

Tiamo Chianti (2013)

I think this might have been the first Chianti I'd ever had, but I was pleased with it. It wasn't in your face in any way, it was very balanced with strong fruit and berry flavors. This was supposed to go with the Braised Chicken over Polenta, which I imagine would have been great, but instead it was paired with a Winter Bruschetta. For those of you as confused as we were, a winter bruschetta alla Palisades is a sweet potato crostini topped with mascarpone and chopped rutabaga, carrot, and other seasonal vegetables. It wasn't as gross as I thought it would be (I HATE sweet potatoes), but it didn't pair well with the Chianti either. I think if it had been a traditional Chianti, that would have been fabulous (and now I know this for a fact because I paired them in my own dinner party!). The bruschetta actually worked better with the Orvieto Classico, which I credit to the sweet mascarpone. This Chianti went exceptionally well with the shrimp dip (which I actually really liked), and I believe it's due to the honey and garlic in the sauce.

Bonaventura Rosso Toscano (2009)

I'm just going to be upfront about this wine -- I absolutely hated it. So did Janna. It was bitter and overly earthy and just gross. It was paired with the "Taste of Italy Pizza", which was basically a cheese pizza with olives and pepperoni on top. Sounds awesome right? It would have been but they burnt it, taking out most of the flavor. A burnt pizza with an overly bitter and earthy wine doesn't work. So we tried the wine with the other dishes, and it turns out that it clashed even harder with them. GREAT. Because I already hated the flavor of the wine and there was a bunch of sediment at the bottom of my glass, I didn't even finish my tasting of the wine. 

This is the saving grace of the evening: Sticky toffee pudding. We got it because we were both still hungry and because we thought it might work with the Toscano. We were wrong. That wine is impossible to pair, but at least we got dessert out of it.

Even thought the dinner was a complete mess, I think we actually learned a lot. Dinner was terrible, but we spent the entire time talking about what could have saved it. It forced us to really think about flavor profiles of different foods and wines, so maybe it was a good experience in the long run!