I like to buy a whole Angus fillet and cook it first before cutting it into fillet steaks, this way you can keep the juices and really preserve a lot of the flavour. It also presents a perfect opportunity to do what any male wine millennial, or any male for that matter – likes most… marinade. Like making hot-sauce, there is perhaps no time more satisfying to a man than when given the chances to marinade something. There’s a certain feeling of alchemy in preparing the meat that really doesn’t come with other pre-preparation chores like peeling potatoes or rolling pastry flat.

The ingredients for getting a steak ready are quite simple: rock salt, English mustard, lemons, pepper, red wine, olive oil, chopped garlic and mixed spices. Adding lemon juice helps seal the steak and within minutes the pinkish colour will disappear and the fillet will start to gain a more cooked sort of colour. At this point I roll the fillet in a bed of rock-salt before smothering it in a healthy dose of English mustard mixed with spice and crushed garlic. Once done, leave it to soak in a pool of red wine on top of a bed of diced onions allowing the blood and fermented juice to comingle.

At this point it’s time to pour yourself a glass of wine and get down to preparing a simple salad (feta, tomato, cucumber, rocket, red lettuce and sesame seeds with a balsamic glaze always goes down well) together with some baked vegetables (onions, courgettes, egg-plant and butternut are perfect.)

After about 3 hours of marinating or so – once the guests arrive; you can chat and get the barbecue going for about half an hour. The veg will take about an hour to cook and the meat will take 15 minutes (if you like it burnt and bloody); 20 minutes if you want it medium rare… so stick the veg in in a pocket of tin-foil – and half an hour later gather people around as it’s always a bit of excitement to watch the meat go on.

Generally if the steak is sealed – leaving it on one side should do fine; and at a medium temperature it should cook through. At this stage you can heat the marinade up, add a lamb stock cube and a cup of water along with some diced mushrooms and pepper and you have a great red wine and mushroom gravy.

The perfect wine for steak on a summer’s day is a Shiraz Viognier – especially if you’ve used mustard, and garlic as they really complement and bring out the spice flavour. Some people would argue cab – but I think that that would more be for an evening event if there’s a chill in the air.

For our Angus Fillet I chose the Graham Beck Joshua 2003 – which turned out to be a perfect accompaniment. It may not have been March 14th, but any chance for steak and red wine is something to smile about.

Cheerz!

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Red Wine is a perfect libation for festivals – primarily because it doesn’t need to be kept cold; it doesn’t lose its fizz and if you’re drinking wine locally produced its dirt cheap and super-good. Within minutes of popping the cork however I’d managed to spill the Rioja on my new pants and was questioning the merits of wine in a situation where a shower is hard to find… when suddenly, with a splash of from my water bottle – the wine was gone. Brilliant! Wine proof pants – what more could a young millennial wine-lover at a music festival wish for? I reckon marketing the pants specifically as wine-proof and selling it at Bonnaroo could be a good gig.

Festivals have become huge in the UK – and I guess the States is now picking up. Winemakers have a huge opportunity to sponsor music festivals – because the combination of music, nature, art and alcohol are what festivals are all about. Festivals have re-invented themselves since the days of Woodstock and are a perfect platform for not only entertaining people, but many organisations use them to spread awareness and raise money.

The Green Man Festival coming up next week is one of the most prominent indie festivals – where, much like the Big Chill – and both less commercially than Glastonbury, it promotes organic food, green living, sustainability etc. There’s a huge oppotunity in this concept and I’d really like to see some of the Oregon wineries putting on some music festivals and promoting their wines together with bands from Washington State and around. Many vineyards have acres of land and there’s plenty scope to host festivals on the vineyard grounds themselves. Once millennials cotton onto the benefits of wine and the contribution of viticulturalists to the environment and to local communities – it’ll certainly be the final push needed.

Now that I’ve found a pair of wine-proof pants; and have finally sprung for a decent festival tent whilst having fallen in love with festivals on the first night of Benicassim in a monent of sitting with my wife and two close friends, Will and Anin, drinking Rioja as a pre-game at the campsite with Sigur Ros about to play… I think it’ll be hard to go back to taking normal holidays.

Hopefully next year the Grapethinking team can bring some of the fabulous Tastevine collection to Bonnaroo and some of the other festivals in the US, and one day to the UK – we’ll provide a tent, picnic blankets and a selection of some of the best and most affordable wines from around the world… we’ll leave the music to the musicians though. Don’t forget to bring wine-proof pants…

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This is no new idea, in fact it was a great American who said it best:

• Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don’t know each other; they don’t know each other because they can not communicate; they can not communicate because they are separated.
  • Martin Luther King (1958)

What brings people closer together than wine, food and music? Most men would rather share a meal with their neighbour than spend all night wishing him dead. I’ve done a bit of travelling in the Israel, Lebanon and Egypt – and I’ll tell you this: all that crap you see on Fox about people wishing American’s dead is claptrap. Representing the middle-east as Al Qaeda is like representing the USA as the Klu Klux Klan. I think a shared appreciation of culture, poetry, music, literature and food could do a lot for US foreign policy. Who would have thought 30 years ago that some of the most successful contemporary Asian cuisine in the USA would be Vietnamese or Japanese? Mind you, Korean food is pretty good nowadays too. George Bush wants America to believe that terrorists target the USA because they hate their freedom… but if terrorists hate freedom: then why have there been no bombs in Sweden?

And also, lets not forget that terrorism is in no way peculiar to the middle-east. Americans have committed acts of terrorism in America: the Unabomber, Columbine, Virginia Tech, Timothy McVeigh, Gacey, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Darma etc. Also, terrorism is not peculiar to Islam, as we’ve seen in Northern Ireland (thus it is ironic to see how Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity promote Guantanamo on Fox, hell, I would love to have seen O’Reilly’s reaction if the British had started throwing innocent Irish people into their own Guantanamo during the IRA bombings.)

In the words of Dr. King again:

• The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it… In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction…. The chain reaction of evil — hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars — must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.
  • Martin Luther King (1963)

American soldiers are simply making the world a more dangerous place. Of course, they have the best intentions, but what they’re doing is fruitless. We’d be better off investing in poets and filmmakers in Iraq. Giving people guns will just give other people reason to pick up guns. Training Sunni militias is a mistake, rather educate Sunni children. Training Americans to be killers is another grave error, rather make our soldiers teachers and engineers. What can a Marine do when they return to normal life besides obsess over atrocities committed in the State’s name? On the contrary, if you train a young American to be constructive rather than destructive, that is state-resources well spent. Rather set up feeding tents in Shi’ite neighbourhoods, giving local people Iowa corn on the cob, corn-bread, coca-cola and organizing soft-ball games. Yes, there will be bombings: but people will be more willing to harbour terrorists in their homes if there are uniformed men with guns in the streets. If Americans are to die on foreign soil rather let them die trying to feed other people than die whilst exchanging gun fire with them.

What can we do at home on American soil to contribute to the world situation? I think being open to other cultures and participating in world events in a positive and engaged way will do lot for world security. I think America makes awesome wines; some my favourite novelists are American; American cuisine is awesome, some of the world’s greatest luminaries are American and of course, half my family is American. Having spent a fair bit of time in the South and the middle-East I can honestly say that I see more cultural similarity than anyone would think. Southerners are middle-Easterners all love richy, hearty meals: Brunswick stew in the South and Lamb Kofta in Morcocco; iced tea in the South and Bedouin tea in the middle-East. We’re more similar than Cheney wants us to know.

• Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
  • Martin Luther King

Let us not continue to destroy the world, but rather lets enjoy it and enjoy the cultural differences and the fruits thereof.

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