Pairing Food and Wine Interview – Summit Estate Wines

Pairing Food and Wine with Weird Food

After I’d finished checking out Stanthorpe with Queensland Holidays, including staying inside a 5 star tent and being attacked by a German Shepherd, I felt like something refreshing and decided to check out Summit Estate Wines before driving on home. Well, not too many wines that would cause me to wrap my car around a tree! But I had a really silly idea for an interview for Pairing Food and Wine!

Summit Estate is a small, boutique winery that produces low volume, high quality wines, judging by the number of awards this joint has won. That’s right, this wine doesn’t come in a silver bladder that you can blow up later and sleep on after you’ve drunk four litres of stuff that would make me want to drink razor blade.

I didn’t mind road testing a few of them to ensure authenticity! I chatted to Eugene who invited me to learn more about Summit Estate and what he does there.

As an example of being a smaller winery, this is the wine filling and bottling machine.

Note, the capacity is 6 bottles at a time, and Summit Estate produces 35,000 bottles of wine per year. I’m glad I’m not doing that as work experience! Summit Estate specialises in varieties that differ from the stock standard chardonnays and shiraz – many of the varieties are obscure ones come from Spain and Italy.

Summit Estate also has an aroma room, which is a bit different to other wineries I’ve been to where I’ve gone straight to the bar. The Aroma Room has a number of smells and scents that represent the flavours that end up in the wine. Sure, it may look a bit strange to sniff a wine glass, but it is a good learning curve to know how to identify what flavours or aromas are in your wine. In fact, you might start to understand the complicated descriptions that some wine writers use!

One of the unusual things Eugene has inside is something that rivals the Beer Chandelier – and that’s the vine that’s made out of wine bottles. I’m sure ‘a lot of work’ went into emptying the bottles!

Anyway I mentioned before I had a Pairing Food and Wine idea! I issued Eugene a challenge to try and match some of his wines to some of the unusual foods I’ve tried in my travels, mainly Guinea Pig from Peru, and Cow’s Nose in Satay Sauce.

Wine and Food Matching Interview

Here is my interview with Eugene – he’s a relaxed charcater who is very passionate about wine, and also educating the rest of us boozeheads in the ins and outs of winemaking.

Check it out!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDXTzzMTUfM[/youtube]

More Pairing Food and Wine Stuff

See more at Summit Estate Wines, Queensland Holidays and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Wine and Food Pairing!