Liquid Assets

Picnic Wines

With spring just around the corner and a few delightful days already in sight, it's time to start thinking about picnics. Nothing beats a beautiful spread of food with a bottle of wine shared with a lover or some friends on a sunny Hill Country afternoon. A perfect picnic wine should be something easy to drink and painless on the wallet. It should also be something you can love without having to be too fussy.

The French figured out a couple of centuries ago how to have the perfect picnic wine, one that doesn't even take a corkscrew. Champagne trounces every other wine when it comes to ease of use and numbers of foods it pairs with. Simply keep it cold, pop it open, and serve it with anything you can think of. Ham, cold fried chicken, shrimp, quiche, fruit, barbecue, hamburgers, and hot dogs all go perfectly with a bottle of bubbly. Many of the wine shops in town have good, obscure Champagnes on sale right now, and it's always worth asking your favorite shop person. One of my favorite sparkling wines for picnics is Domaine Chandon Riche ($15), one of the few wines I've found that marries nicely with cilantro and chiles, making it a natural for chips and salsa. For those of you who like to turn convention on its ear, buy a four-pack of film director Sofia Coppola's new Blanc de Blancs. The oddball part is it comes in a can! Each can is half of a regular bottle, and the four-pack costs $16. The wine is made mostly from Pinot Blanc and is delicious. The ideal match for Sofia's wine is a lightly grilled portobello mushroom, cut in strips and dabbed with fresh Pure Luck goat cheese.

The other boon for those of us who like to leave our corkscrews at home is the Stelvin screw top, a closure that is the best way to store any wine you intend to drink in under one or two years. Don't let anyone stick their nose up in the air when you proffer a screw-top bottle. What matters is what's in the bottle, not what's on it. The pioneering hero in the United States for this innovation is California's reigning radical nonconformist, Randall Graham, owner of Bonny Doon. He is converting his entire line of wines to the screw top, and I say we should support him and show the rest of the world we're tired of wet cardboard stink from bad corks in one out of every 10 bottles of wine. Bonny Doon's best picnic wines are the Big House White and Big House Red, both great wines, jammed with flavor and ridiculously low priced at under $9. My favorite Bonny Doon bargain will require a little looking, but consider it a quest worth your time. Domaine des Blagueurs Syrah-Sirrah ($9) is a wine Graham imports from France, and it is a perfect food-friendly red wine for picnics. It's highest calling is sitting next to a cold roast beef sandwich on crusty French bread.