The bottom of the barrel

So I’d had a steak defrosting in my fridge for a couple of days, and it wanted eating, and I thought it would be nice to prepare a marinade for it of some sort. Most of my experiments in marinades have been alcohol-based — beer or wine — and I saw no particularly good reason to deviate from that pattern. The problem with this plan was that my beer supplies are dangerously low (in fact, currently empty), and my wines… well, at this particular moment most of my wine stocks are of sufficient quality that I was loath to use a significant fraction of a bottle on a steak. But sacrifices must be made, and so I cast my eyes over my wine racks…

…and saw the Two-Dollar Riesling. Perfect, I thought.

A few weeks prior I’d been making a grocery run, and the store had a big cart of wine bottles in the middle of the main aisle with Sale! stickers on them. Naturally I stopped to investigate; the first bottle I picked up was a German Riesling in brown glass, and bore the label:

Special Savings
50% OFF!
You Pay $1.84

…which isn’t even $2 with taxes. The vintner or distributor had supplied tasting notes, which described the flavour as grapey, and upon reading that I knew, I knew that this would be a wretched bottle of wine. If the best description that you can come up with for your wine is it tastes like grapes, then there’s something seriously wrong somewhere.

Of course I bought it. Dude, $2.

And my impulse purchase was shown to be prescient a scant few weeks later, when a cheap bottle of wine was exactly what I was looking for. Rieslings — particularly bad ones — are all about sugar and acidity; the one would help to carbonize the surface of the steak, I reasoned, while the other would tenderize it.

The wine, incidentally, was just as awful as the price and tasting notes promised: it was sort of like drinking sweetened white grape juice, a little like drinking grape jelly. No subtlety, and — more’s the pity — almost no acidity. This meant that my Carefully-Considered Weevil Plan about tenderizing the meat came to naught. (It was still edible, but it was rather chewier than a good steak should be.

I don’t know that there’s a lesson here, which means that, if there is, I didn’t learn it. Désolé.

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