What Becomes A Savory Most?
What to drink with savories? In the menus that appear at the end of Professor George Saintsbury’s 1920 Notes on a Cellar-Book, cheese-based, egg and preserved fish, and often anchovy-flavored savories are served with a wide range of wines (an 1872 Port, an 1862 Château Lafite, and a Golden Sherry, for example). Most of the wines served were old to very old even then, and relatively light-tasting. Saintsbury was giving us information about what he had served to guests some 20 years before.
Today, there is naturally an even wider range of wines to accompany a savory course, especially a cooked-cheese dish: vintage Port; full-bodied, high-alcohol Zinfandel; highly extracted Cabernets; rich Amarone; and the more intense Syrah/ Shiraz wines (but not Barolo or Barbaresco). Full-bodied rich ales and barley wine ales are also a good choice, especially aged, bottle-conditioned styles.
The notion of serving a full-bodied dry red wine rather than vintage Port is not novel. Toward the end of the 19th century, particular vintages of certain Bordeaux wines were offered on wine merchants’ lists as “after-dinner clarets.” These wines must have been a lot like what passes for Cabernet Sauvignon in California today.
Sweet wines—rich Muscats like Australian Liqueur Muscat, French Beaumes-de-Venise or Frontignan, Portuguese Setúbal, or any botrytized wine—do not make good wines for savories. However, if you have a very old sweet wine, say an old Pedro Ximénez, that, through great bottle age, has become more dry-tasting, it would serve your purpose admirably. Sherry (a Sandeman Royal Esmeralda, perhaps, or Osborne Royal Ambrosante or Amontillado AOS) and old Madeira can be put to good use so long as the wine is not piercingly dry or overly sweet. Any vintage Madeira or an Henriques & Henriques 15-year-old Bual or Verdelho goes particularly well with anchovy-flavored puff pastry savories. Nicely flavored olives make good company for Madeira, genuine old solera Palo Cortado or unsweetened Oloroso Sherry, and some of the drier styles of 20- and 30-year-old Tawny Port from Ramos Pinto; Taylor, Fladgate; Graham’s; Fonseca; or Ferreira Duque de Braganza.
California Zinfandel makers have gone back to producing wines with more than 14 percent alcohol. Rather than stick these wines with a meat course in the middle of a meal, use them as “after-dinner claret” with savories. Late harvest Zinfandels may work even better, lending fruit and fragrance to the sharpish, piquant character of, say, a well-prepared Welsh rarebit.
A cooked-cheese course with some smoked fish added or pointed up with Espelette pepper shows off remarkable reds like 1953 Pétrus, old St.-Nicolas-de-Bourgeuil from the Loire, and even certain older vintages of California Cabernet, such as Beaulieu Private Reserve, Inglenook Cask Cabernet, and some years of Louis Martini Special Selection.
For oenophiles, savories may serve a higher purpose. Gastronome and prolific wine writer André Simon defined them as “highly seasoned, small but ‘savoury’ dishes served as the last course, long after anybody was expected to be hungry, but just to help one enjoy a last or another glass of wine.” —Darrell Corti
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