Pairing: Chicken Fricasse with Dumplings and Homemade Baldwin Apple Wine

Food: One year we asked my wife’s mother what food she would like to eat on her birthday.  “Chicken and Dumplings” was her prompt reply.  What a good choice.  While it is a fine way to use up a fowl or old hen, the recipe can be prepared with a young hen, too.  Cut up a 4-5 pound chicken, including the back, and sauté in butter until well browned. Add water to cover, sliced onion, carrot, celery, 4 pepper corns, and simmer for 45 minutes. If the chicken is old, cook for 45 minutes more. Either way, add 2 tsp of salt at this point.  Cool the chicken and strain the broth. Remove the meat from the bones.  Thicken 2 cups of the broth with flour made into a roux with butter. Put the chicken into a stove-top pan (cast iron if you have it) with enough of the thickened broth to come up 3/4 of the way on the meat. Stir in the vegetables from previous cooking and bring to a simmer.  Make dumplings from flour, milk, celery seed, and baking powder.  Dollop the dumplings on the meat and heat uncovered for 10 minutes. Cover and continue to cook for 10 minutes more. Oh my … is that delicious!!

Wine:  Apple wine was the first wine we ever tried to make ourselves. We used apples from an ancient Baldwin apple tree that we preserved when we cleared the land for our house site. It’s impossible to know how the tree is still alive and standing given all the holes in it’s gnarled old trunk. And it still produces the finest of apples about every third year. The apple wine is made from the apples that are particularly ripe (almost rotten!) that have fallen to the ground. We have found that those deadfall apples make the most delicious of wines, with almost a sherry-like quality to it. For those of you who are not yet ready to make your own wine, good commercially-produced apple wine (please … not Boone’s Farm!) is available in many retail liquor stores and apple orchards.

Tasting: Apple Wine is most frequently a light to dark golden color. As you can see in the photo above, our Apple Wine has a beautiful, deep blush. The fragrance of the wine is noticeably red apple (not green). No surprise there. The palate is a wonderful combination of apple jelly, red currant jelly, sherry, and honeysuckle. There’s also a touch of spiciness to it. However, this is not a sweet wine. Rather it is more of a semi-dry wine, very much like a Gewürztraminer.

Other Food That Goes Well with This Wine:  Roast Chicken, Pork, Indian Cuisine, Curries, Ham, a Variety of Soft or Aged Cheeses.

Other Wine That Pairs Well with This Food:  LaBelle Apple Wine, Chardonnay, Riesling, Gewürztraminer

A Source:  NH State Liquor Stores