Marionette Picnic 02

Steak and Stout Pie With the 2015 Pulcinella Reserve

My latest foray into the downtown Salmon Arm food experience matched with our wines involved the iconic Shuswap Pie Company on Alexander Street.  It’s sort of a Center point for the Salmon Arm food experience.  I perused their chalkboard of options and saw in my mind the perfect combination – the Steak and Stout pie with our 2015 Pulcinella Reserve. 

The Reserve is the only red we ferment with oak.  We use French oak staves as we don’t have barrels in our winery and we only use the staves for fermentation. After fermentation the Reserve is aged in oxygen permeable tanks that allow it the air it needs to become a much bigger, rounder and spicier version of the Pulcinella.

Which is why it is the perfect wine to have with something like the Shuswap Pie Company’s Steak and Stout pie.  The filling of that pie is basically a delicious stew which is rich, thick and full of slow-cooked meat and vegetable flavours. The crust (as any fan of the Pie Company will affirm) is a perfectly flaked, luxurious pleasure to consume. 

You need quite a hefty red to match a culinary powerhouse like that and the Reserve is perfect because it can cut through the richness of everything that’s going on with that pie  and the chemistry between the steak, stew, crust and the smoothed-out well developed structure of the Reserve is like fireworks. Boom.

Have a bite of that pie and take a sip of the Reserve at the same time and you will experience that exponential synapse of flavours like fingers of lightning – an electrical storm of food and wine coming together as they should. The perfect match.  Try it – get your steak and stout pie, bring it up to Marionette and have it with a glass of the Reserve and you will see what I mean.

It’s amazing.