Fried Smelts Meet This Bold Niagara Wine

Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.  Song of Solomon 2:15

Far from robbing us of our joy, like Solomon's little foxes, last year's "foxy" Niagara is a perfect match in a cage fight for flavor with corn meal fried smelts.  Fried smelts, as fish flavors go, kind of flop around, high on top of a heap of the more "oily" runners up like mackerel, catfish, herring.  


Like these other high Omega 3 oily gang busters, smelts have all the flavors that the food scientists at McDonald keep out of the fish filet's buns.  So like everything off their menu, fish like smelts and herring are probably not the most popular sensations to the American palate.  I've had fresh, raw herring form street vendors in Amsterdam, and for my taste, while delicious and unoffensive on its own, its vastly improved by a little souring from pickles and onions they chop up and spread inside them.  

Maybe even more than herring, smelts are a extremely funky fish, and not for everyone.  Typically, they become orders of magnitudes more enticing by bathing them in vinegar, a nice Korean hot sauce, generous lemon juice, or pickles, onions, garlic, horseradish our krauts to knock down that funk.  

So if you're riding without these other elements to contain smelts funk, what they need are an equally robust wine, like this Niagara I've been talking up in a few postings. Niagara has dry, but almost citric quality that lingers long enough to overtake anything in its path, including the off putting flavors smelts bring to the fish fry.  If you're frying them without breading, I'd go with a rye "Finn Crisp" cracker, which also does a magnificent job of redirecting those funky flavors too. 

This 2011 Niagara was made with EC-1118 yeast, at the recommendation of one of Cornell's experts, and it turned out just as we hoped, bright, clear, dry and strong with thick mouth feel.  

Critics call it a "foxy" flavor, which I've joked around about before, referring to Jimi Hendrix's classic Foxy Lady.  While I'm sure I can pick out of a lineup a "foxy lady" from the 60's and 70's (with or without the feathered hair, tight designer jeans and those mini fur coats at the disco), I'm not all too sure what a "foxy" flavor means when used to describe this NY, PA, OH, MI grown vitis lambrusca.  Reviewers and wine critics lament excessive muskiness, lemon and/or jasmine flavors as elements in wine American wines such as Niagara.  And while a certain amount of diesel flavors are desirable in wine, these wines tend to exhibit elevated diesel flavor profiles.  

So both when making Niagara, and drinking it, blending it and pairing it with other wines and foods, be sure to pick things with flavors that balance and complement these strong flavors.  Sharp cheese, oily fish, liver, sour pickles, and raw onions come to mind.