About Bill St. John

Marczyk Fine Wines has Bill St John and other wine lovers to thank for our blog. Wine and food facts and falsehoods, delicious recipes, Denver liquor history, and "the best wines you never heard of" explained, all in one nifty place. This is the Denver wine store you're looking for. Bill is a Denver native and for 40 years, a teacher and writer on food and food & wine, including The Denver Post; Rocky Mountain News; Chicago Tribune; Wine & Spirits magazine; KCNC-TV Channel 4; and others. Check out Bill's food blog, with recipes, historical food knowledge and tips on eating and food shopping in Denver. Great guy and a bottomless well of food and drink knowledge. GET COOKING WITH BILL ST JOHN

Broiled Salmon with Bacon

Bacon makes everything with which it’s eaten, from eggs to ice cream, just taste better. One reason is its salt, of course, but another is its high glutamate content, a pronounced factor in any cured meat. Pair bacon with another food, such as salmon, also high in glutamate, and the savory quotient ratchets up —and then up again. All that juicy deliciousness suggests certain wines over others, those also multilayered in taste and savor. No monotonic fruit bombs here, but a crisp zesty white and two reds all with nuance, built-up flavors, and long, beckoning aftertastes. Perhaps most crucial, however, [...]

By | 2020-09-28T21:34:25+00:00 October 1st, 2019|

Tuna and Peach Poke

Simplify pairing wine with food by attending less to the texture, flavor, or weight of each and more to elements such as salt, sweet, acid, and fat. For instance, foods with salt (as the tamari soy sauce here) really appreciate wine that is high in acidity. Acidity enlivens, cleanses and balances. Poke is pronounced "poh-kay," rhymes with "okay," and means "chunk" in Hawaiian. Its recipe always carries salt and always benefits from wines high in acidity.  HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED:• 3/4 pound #1 ahi tuna, sliced into 1/2-inch cubes (on special at Marczyk Fine Foods this week for $27.99/lb (reg $29.99/lb))• 2 Ela [...]

By | 2020-09-28T21:35:28+00:00 August 28th, 2019|

Sweet-Savory Scallops and Camembert

A spoonful of sugar makes more than the medicine go down; it makes everything taste better. But sweetness can be a bugaboo to tasty wine pairings. When a dish is sweet — as here with the peach chutney or the milk of the cheese — but the wine is dry, in the way most wines are, then it's the wine that will taste like medicine. The best partners to sweetness in a food are a bit of sweetness in the wine or a marked fruitiness (as is the case with all three wines this week) wrapped tightly with acidity. [...]

By | 2021-09-20T19:17:51+00:00 August 24th, 2019|

Italian Wine Labels by the Alphabet

DOC and DOCG Italy’s law of Denominazione di Origine Controllata (DOC) regulates the production and labeling of a significant share of Italian wine. The law intends to give purchasers of a DOC wine a reasonable expectation that a wine labeled as, say, Barbera d’Alba will be both a Barbera d’Alba in fact and in style. That is, it will look, smell, taste, feel and age like a Barbera d’Alba—because it is. The words Denominazione di Origine Controllata roughly translate as “the name [of a wine] is governed [or set] by its place of origin.” The underlying idea of DOC is [...]

By | 2020-09-28T21:47:09+00:00 May 14th, 2019|

Margaux

Margaux has the distinction, among the Médoc’s six winemaking communes, of being both the largest in area and diverse in style. It alone sports estates at all five levels of the 1855 classification of Bordeaux wines. Too, the soil is the poorest of the Médoc; the amount of gravel, the highest; the climate, the warmest; and the yield per acre, the lowest. The 4th century Latin poet, Ausonius, while in residence across the Gironde from this area, wrote of the Gallo-Roman thermal baths here, the termes mauojaliques, also known as “Marojallia.” Hence, over time, the name “Margaux.” While unquestionably a [...]

By | 2020-09-28T21:48:51+00:00 May 14th, 2019|

Pinot Noir

La bête noire As a wine grape, Pinot Noir is the bête noire of its family, Les Pinots—Blanc, Meunier, Gris and Noir. Pinot Blanc makes respectable wines from Alsace and Northern Italy; Pinot Gris, from the same places. Pinot Meunier is a mainstay in Champagne. But while Pinot Noir grows more widely, it does so much more unsteadily. In a sense, it is the Mae West of the famille Pinot. When it's good, it's very, very good. But when it's bad, it's as bad as bad gets. Pinot Noir mutates capriciously (over 230 strains exist, some polar opposites). It benefits [...]

By | 2020-09-28T21:48:36+00:00 February 4th, 2019|

Wine & Cheese Pairings (Mad About Ewe – and Cow and Nanny, too)

Perhaps the ultimate match of food with beverage is wine and cheese. They’re nearly twins. Both date to ancient times. Both are fermented. Both are governed, all over the world, by appellation and quality standards. And, most important, each reflects the place where it is born, its terroir. One translates its terroir via a vine. The udder, by an udder. Matching cheese with wine is the same as matching any food with wine. Matches work – or don’t – because of what’s in the wine and in the cheese, things such as acidity or fat. Region Many people follow the [...]

By | 2020-09-28T21:49:39+00:00 February 4th, 2019|

Riesling

Every wine professional, always and everywhere, adores Riesling. (It is possible to make such a claim because it is true.) So why doesn’t everyone else? In fact, so why do so few others? The World’s Greatest White Wine Winemakers, wine writers, cooks high and low, serious amateurs—people in the know about what makes a grape great—cannot slurp enough of Riesling’s purity of delivery, its juicy flavors or super-taut acidity, the latter quality its best feature at table. Dry, sweet, German, Australian, Austrian, it does not matter—many call Riesling the world’s greatest white wine. But certainly not the world’s most popular—that [...]

By | 2020-09-28T21:53:11+00:00 January 27th, 2019|

Merlot

In this country, the role that Chardonnay plays for white wine, Merlot plays for red. That is, it’s what’s asked for first. And it isn’t merely because Merlot is easier to pronounce than Cabernet Sauvignon—the wine not so long ago unseated by Merlot as America’s most commonly requested red. It’s because Merlot is just so appealing—plush, round, low in tannin, loaded with juicy tastes of black cherry, chocolate, ripe plums and licorice (or, if from Bordeaux, even an acceptable turn on the flavors of fruitcake). Merlot is the “wine without tears,” while, contrariwise, it often may seem that Cabernet Sauvignon [...]

By | 2020-09-28T21:52:26+00:00 January 27th, 2019|

Nebbiolo

Not only do Italian grape varieties frequently make for some of the world’s tastiest wines, but they also have some of the coolest names. Sangiovese, for example, comes from the Latin words sanguis Jovis, “the blood of Jove (Zeus).” Not at all a bad name for a red grape. The name Nebbiolo is thought to derive from the Italian word nebbia or “fog.” In the Langhe, a hilly area in Italy’s Piedmont, milk-white mists and vapors settle into the valleys during harvest time—hence, the name (made even more endearing because the diminutive suffix “-olo” makes Nebbiolo mean “little fog.”) Not [...]

By | 2020-09-28T21:53:44+00:00 January 27th, 2019|

How to Read a Wine Label

Trumping whatever esthetic value that a wine label may have, its main function is to impart information to the consumer. As such, both the bottler (or producer, winery or winemaker), as well as the legal authority where the wine is sold, have an interest in shaping that information. For their part, the people who put the wine in the bottle want the consumer to buy it. Consequently, wine labels may contain visually attractive or eye-catching graphics or art; descriptions of how the wine tastes, how it was made, or what foods it best accompanies; technical information (pH or acidity level, [...]

By | 2020-09-28T21:56:01+00:00 January 27th, 2019|

Chenin Blanc

We’ve all sipped some Chenin Blanc in our day— fine Chenin Blanc such as dry Vouvray, if we were smart, or all that California “chablis” that we may have swilled in the ‘70s and ‘80s, if we weren’t. No other white wine grape exists that, simultaneously grown in separate parts of the world, can make a ravishingly electric wine like the Loire’s Savennières, as well as the blandest, most lifeless South African Steen, in flavor only one wee step beyond water. Because it is a true workaday grape and, with even a modicum of skill in the winery, makes an [...]

By | 2020-09-28T21:57:08+00:00 January 26th, 2019|