Steak In Red Wine Sauce Recipe
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Steak In Red Wine Sauce Recipe
One of the best drink pairings for a delicious steak is a nice glass of red wine. The wine helps to draw even more flavor out of the meat with every sip, making the two a wonderful complement for each other, providing great balance.
While pouring a glass of wine with your steak dinner is certainly a great option on its own, food photographer Petar Marshall has taken things one step further in creating a red wine sauce. “The flavors of the sauce complement the steak beautifully, while adding a richness to the dish,” he says. And with such an impressive appearance, it would be the ideal dish to make for your sweetheart on Valentine’s Day, or any other day for that matter.
But don’t let the name intimidate you. If you can cook a steak, you can certainly pull off this recipe. And better yet, you’ll only need to take 30 minutes out of your day to do it.
MASCOTA VINEYARDS-Their Unánime Mabec and Unánime Chardonnay
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Excellent wine and great company are a wonderful way in bringing out the best in all of us. With Valentine’s Day just weeks away, we’d like to share with our readers some news about wines that are bound to bring out the best in you, your partner, friends and family. These two wines that we recommend from Mascota Vineyards are not only delicious, elevated wines, but they are easily accessible without ever sacrificing the quality you desire.
Both Unánime Mabec and Unánime Chardonnay have an SRP of $24.99 so choosing between red or white is easy. You can enjoy both wines for under $50. They are two beautiful expressions of Argentina that pair well with a homemade meal and great company.
Get to know these two wines better!
Unánime Malbec is for the lovers of red, tannic wines. This Malbec will satisfy all your Valentine’s Day wishes. Deeply red, this wine harmonizes concentrated aromas of plums and cherries with notes of toasted coconut. Unánime Malbec captures the essence of truly ripe fruit flavors, offering a sweetness balanced by smooth yet robust tannins. Rich texture, complex layers, and a lengthy finish. Pair this wine with flank steak, a rich cream of mushroom soup, charcuterie platter or an eggplant dish.
Unánime Chardonnay is the bottle for you if you like hints of cooked apple, citrus, and tropical fruits in your Chardonnay. The wine straddles the line between fresh and rich with notes of ripe pineapple, apple, lemon, marzipan and toasted marshmallow. It is very well balanced and intense wine with a long finish. Enjoy this wine with vegetable soup, grilled salmon, lemon chicken, and shellfish dishes.
Mascota Vineyards is expanding their winemaking in Argentina while continuing to be known for quality. The brand has exciting news with the recent release of their first ever sparkling wine.
Mascota’s winemaker, Opi belongs to a third generation of wine producers, since his father and grandfather were also dedicated to the process of winemaking. For this reason, Opi has been passionate about wine since childhood. He watched as his grandfather made wines and kept the most precious in a cellar in the basement of his house. The most vivid memory that Opi has of those times is the sensation that her experienced when entering the wine cellar. For him it was an adventure, something exciting, but also familiar, where he felt safe and at peace.
Find out more about Mascota Vineyards and their wines by visiting http://www.mascotavineyards.com/en/home/.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Mascota Vineyards
Fresh Vine Wine rallies following some wine sector M&A activity
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High-Altitude Brunello: A Mother and Her Nest at Le Potazzine
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More than a bit of pretense and swagger swirl around elite wines like Brunello di Montalcino, the Tuscan red made by a competing who’s who of Italian families important in the worlds of wine and industry.
Then there are the interesting outliers: the newcomers, little guys and hardworking locals who find their niches in their patches of earth.
Lately, I’ve been drawn to the wines of one of those exceptions—Tenuta Le Potazzine, a winery run by hands-on, local women that has grown up from nothing over three decades to become an outstanding producer of Brunello.
Now 28 years old, Le Potazzine is the fruit of the work of Montalcino native Gigliola Giannetti, her ex-husband enologist (now out of the picture) and their two daughters, who have stepped up to help run this 12-acre estate a couple of miles southwest of town.
Here, Giannetti, 55, stands out as a story of grit and determination—one that I’d like to believe you can taste in the wines.
“These are the potazzine,” Giannetti says as she introduces daughters Viola, 28, the enologist, who also works with her mother in the vineyards, and Sofia, 25, who works in the office and does a bit of everything as necessity dictates.
Potazzine, a local name for small songbirds that populate the Tuscan countryside, was the nickname given to Giannetti’s girls by their maternal grandmother. So it was a natural name for the estate when it launched in the early 2000s with its first Brunello, from the 1997 vintage.
On a bright September day before harvest, I am standing in the Le Potazzine vineyards with all three of the women as they randomly sample what seem to be ripe Sangiovese Grosso berries.
“If we had just looked at the chemical analysis, we would have harvested last week,” says Giannetti. “Everything was correct: sugar, pH, alcohol.”
“But,” she adds, “we wait.”
Giannetti then mashes a pair of grapes between her thumb and fingers, testing the tackiness of the juice.
“We are waiting for the grapes to become a little sticky,” she says. “Then it will be better. That means we will have tannins like lace.”
“If we harvested now, we could make an excellent wine,” she adds, “but we want to make a grande vino.”
Giannetti knows about “grande vino.” In the last decade, Le Potazzine has released 10 Brunellos or Brunello Riservas scoring 90 points or higher in Wine Spectator blind tastings, culminating in the current 2016 vintage (95 points. $107).
Brunello and its sibling—lighter, fresher, easy-drinking-when-young Rosso di Montalcino—are Le Potazzine’s two main wines. They are distinguished during harvest by selection on the sorting tables outside the winery by Giannetti, her daughters and cellar manager Roberta Tiberi.
“We are four women who select the grapes,” Giannetti says. “Sensitivity and patience, we have.”
The quality of the harvest determines how much Brunello will be made. After that, she says, “we do almost nothing in the winery.”
Their minimalistic winemaking starts with fermentation with ambient yeasts, conducted without temperature controls in steel tanks and conical wood fermenters housed in a small spick-and-span winery. After long fermentations that last over a month, the wines are aged in large Slavonian oak barrels.
Le Potazzine Brunello is released after five years of aging and could be classified as a Riserva on that basis. In four exceptional vintages (2004, 2006, 2011 and 2015), Le Potazzine saved one cask for an additional year of aging and released exactly 3,000 bottles and 500 magnums as Riserva.
“Because our Brunello is already a Riserva, when we make a Riserva it must be super-wow,” Giannetti says.
Giannetti has Brunello in her blood. And on her extraordinary career path, from office worker to Brunello producer, she has seen more of Montalcino than most anyone.
She was born on Montalcino’s historic Argiano estate, where her parents worked in the cellar and vineyards. Out of school, at 19 years old in 1985, she worked as an office assistant for the legendary Franco Biondi Santi of Biondi-Santi. Two years later, after saving and borrowing money, she decided to quit her job to launch her own business—a wine shop on the central square in Montalcino.
Her parents tried to dissuade her from throwing away her steady job at a great winery. “My father told me, ‘You don’t understand anything,’” she recalls now with a laugh.
In 1993, the year Viola was born, Giannetti and her then-husband, consulting enologist Giuseppe Gorelli, decided to buy a country house and surrounding vineyards on a high plateau at an altitude of more than 1,600 feet. The vineyards were poorly planted, she recalls, and the area was not seen as the best for ripening Sangiovese.
“Thirty years ago, nobody wanted to invest in this altitude of Montalcino,” she says. “The contadini [local small farmers] said you can’t make a wine of 13.5 [percent alcohol] up here. Thirty years ago, we didn’t think the climate would change.”
Read High-Altitude Brunello, Part 1: A Man at Montalcino’s Summit
At Le Ragnaie, Riccardo Campinoti demonstrated the merits of high-altitude Brunello. Now more producers are moving up
After they spent four years replanting vineyards, in 1997, Le Potazzine produced its first vintage—about 300 cases of Brunello (93 points, $60) that established its reputation and runway for success.
As tastes moved away from bigger Brunellos to fresher versions, and local growing seasons grew hotter and drier, Le Potazzine accumulated more critical successes.
Meanwhile, Giannetti’s life continued to take more twists and turns.
In 2001, she jumped at the chance to buy the small restaurant next to her wine shop and opened Le Potazzine Vineria.
For a while, it all worked. Her daughters grew up into smart, young women, and the couple was able to juggle it all—a retail shop, restaurant and winery.
Then four years ago, Giannetti’s marriage fell apart, and Gorelli left to start his own label. That seems to have pulled mother and daughters closer together as they have taken on the work formerly done by Gorelli.
In 2021, when Italy reopened after a year of on-and-off, COVID-related closures, Giannetti and her daughters even had to wait tables in the restaurant due to staff shortages, fitting shifts in between their work at Le Potazzine.
They seem, remarkably, to take it all in stride.
“It’s not easy being a woman: You need to demonstrate that you can do 30 percent more than men,” Giannetti says over lunch with her daughters. “For this reason, we can’t delegate anything. We can’t pay anyone else to do this work.”
Her daughters nod in wholehearted agreement, which helps explain Le Potazzine’s continued success.
10 of Our Favorite Bottles of French Red Wine for $35 or Less
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The Rhône Valley in southern France is widely known for producing sought-after red wine that can cost a pretty penny. But, beyond the sea of premium-priced lie some excellent value pours.
Red wines from the Côtes du Rhône appellation often fit this bill. Typically made from grapes grown throughout the Rhône, these wines are usually made from a blend of Syrah, Grenache, Mourvèdre and Carignan. A mix of other regional grapes can also be blended in.
These are easy-drinking, ready-to-pop-open reds that are perfect at the dinner table—perhaps alongside chicken cacciatore or even pizza.
With that in mind, check out these 10 value-driven Côtes du Rhône red wines.
Brotte 2019 Esprit Barville Red (Côtes du Rhône); $15, Wine-Searcher.com. Notes of summer-sweet blueberries and black-cherry preserves abound in this fresh-fruited… SEE SCORE AND FULL REVIEW
Château Gigognan 2019 Red (Côtes du Rhône); $19, Vivino. In this wine, luscious blackberry and plum flavors are juxtaposed by notes of iron and crushed earth… SEE SCORE AND FULL REVIEW
Cellier des Dauphins 2019 Réserve Grenache-Syrah (Côtes du Rhône); $15, Vivino. This 60/40 blend of Grenache and Syrah is a consistent crowd pleaser for its juicy, sun-drenched blackberry… SEE SCORE AND FULL REVIEW
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Domaine de l’Espigouette 2019 Vieilles Vignes (Côtes du Rhône); $35, Vivino. Rich in concentration yet delightfully piercing in fruit quality, this Grenache-dominant red… SEE SCORE AND FULL REVIEW
Domaine Santa Duc 2019 Les Quatres Terres Red (Côtes du Rhône); $20, Wine-Searcher.com. This wine incorporates grapes from the elite Cru appellations of Vacqueyras and Rasteau as well as Côtes-du-Rhône Villages sites in Roaix and Séguret… SEE SCORE AND FULL REVIEW
Domaine Vallot 2019 Le Coriançon Red (Côtes du Rhône); $22, Wine.com. Sourced from high elevations in Vinsobres, this delightfully fresh, red-cherry scented red offers… SEE SCORE AND FULL REVIEW
Gabriel Meffre 2020 Saint Vincent (Côtes du Rhône); $15, Vivino. Vinified entirely in stainless steel, this sun-drenched Grenache-Syrah blend highlights ripe… SEE SCORE AND FULL REVIEW
Jean-Luc Colombo 2019 Les Abeilles Red (Côtes du Rhône); $15, Wine-Searcher.com. This luminous, unoaked blend of 60% Grenache, 30% Syrah and 10% Mourvèdre is a consistent bang-for-your-buck… SEE SCORE AND FULL REVIEW
M. Chapoutier 2019 Belleruche Red (Côtes du Rhône); $17, Vivino. Shards of graphite etch peppery freshness into this fruity blend of mainly Grenache and Syrah… SEE SCORE AND FULL REVIEW
Tardieu-Laurent 2020 Les Becs Fins (Côtes du Rhône); $25, Wine-Searcher.com. Edged by fiery notes of charred anise and fine-grained, penetrating tannins, this powerful… SEE SCORE AND FULL REVIEW