Nick’s Wednesday Night Sausage Wine for the Cricket

Welcome back to the Wednesday Night Sausage Wine Club! The “Wednesday Night Sausage Wine” is a wine that doesn’t cost the earth and is the perfect accompaniment to sausage and mash and culinary equivalents of this. It’s about horses for courses. For those of you who might have missed last month’s Sausage Wine you can check out the blog here.

I have had a love and fascination with wine from an early age, probably since watching Sean Connery’s James Bond dispatch a Smersh agent through the train window with the words “red wine with fish. Well, that should have told me something”. It makes an impression on a young mind. I have, however, a love that pre-dates even wine and that love is cricket.

Now I don’t mean the garish, gaudy, hit and giggle slog fest cricket such as “The Hundred” but the proper thoughtful more cerebral longer form of the game such as test cricket. I do get that “The Hundred” may possibly be a gateway into people coming to appreciate “proper” cricket eventually, in the same way, I suppose, that alcopops are a good introduction to a future love of Chateau Latour and other such fine wines. My love therefore clearly lies with thoughtful cricket or indeed clever cricket which, as if by coincidence, happens to be the broad translation of “Locusta petulant” being the Latin name of the Hungarian cricket which adorns the label of this week’s Wednesday night sausage wine; Little Cricket Gruner Veltliner priced at just £8.99. Available in store and online. 

The Hungarian cricket’s favourite food is the leaves of a vine tendril. Research has shown though that the clever little Cricket will not touch the leaves of the Gruner Veltliner variety for some reason which is good news for us.

Gruner Veltliner is an attractive white grape which grows primarily in Austria and is also successful in neighbouring Hungary where our sausage wine comes from.  It is a refreshing wine with green apple, slightly spicy white pepper notes, a citrus freshness and is a real food friendly wine.

It will comfortably handle richer foods but is great with sea food and fish. We paired it with garlic and chilli prawns and it went wonderfully well. The Little Cricket has a clean freshness and a slight spiciness to it which balanced nicely with the dish.

So, when you do have this delightful wine don’t just glug it back in one to the accompaniment of a loud teenage disco soundtrack as if you were at “The Hundred”. Settle back, relax, take your time, enjoy the little cricket, contemplate the wonders of the world, the splendour in the grass and enjoy your seafood dish safe in the knowledge that you’d meet with James Bond’s approval and, should you be on a train, you would at least leave the train in a conventional manner.

Cheers,

Nick