The Return of the Wednesday Night Sausage Wine by Nick

We have good news; the return of the Wednesday Night Sausage Wine. So just a quick refresher on the ethos of the “sausage wine”.

Broadly speaking, were we to eat just so called “fine dining” all the time, I suspect that most of us would soon tire of it eventually. We would probably be yearning for a bacon sandwich or sausage and mash or something more appropriate to time, place and mood.

The “Wednesday Night Sausage Wine” is a wine that is not meant to be fawned over and critically examined but a wine that is just meant to fulfil what I feel to be the first law of wine and that is to be drunk and enjoyed. It 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.

Most of us would probably quite like a Ferrari but it’s not much cop if you need to move a wardrobe, is it?  and a Domaine Romanee Conti would be a bit of a mismatch with the sausage and mash.

So, each month we’ll be suggesting a “Wednesday Night Sausage Wine” for you. You don’t have to be drinking it on a Wednesday or even having sausages but just a good value wine that is enjoyable and good in its own modest way rather than some “blingtastic” trophy wine that costs a fortune to accompany some gastro pretension. After all, as Andrew Jefford wrote in Decanter magazine, you don’t have to be stood in the Grand Canyon in order to appreciate nature!

Our wine this month is a rosé, that most quintessential of summer wines and, as I’m sat here in the pouring rain, summer just seems to be a distant pipedream to be honest. It was with this in mind though that I began thinking about the old Kevin Costner film “Field of Dreams” where the Costner character hears a mysterious voice saying “if you build it, he will come”. He naturally took this as a directive to build a baseball field on his farm (as you would of course). So, allow me to be your mysterious voice in order to exhort summer along. Our sausage wine is the brilliant value Coquille de Fleur Rosé and this mysterious voice is telling you “If you drink it, summer will come”. It worked for Kevin Costner and it can work for us and instead of Shoeless Joe Jackson and his long dead mates arriving we’ll get beautiful sunshine and clear blue skies!

The Coquille de Fleur, from the south of France, has you as soon as you look at it. It has that wonderful, easy on the eye, pale, light salmon pink tone which just glistens in the glass. It’s vibrant and fruit forward with notes of red fruits such as raspberry and strawberry but it’s also clean and crisp with mineral undertones balancing the fruit perfectly.

We had it with a tuna niçoise, that iconic south of France combination and, although it was still raining outside (of course), in my heart I was in Cap Ferrat. So, listen to that mysterious voice: “if you drink it, summer will come”.

 At just £9.99 it’s a bargain in itself but add in the arrival of summer and it’s a complete snip! Available in store & online.

Santé,

Nick