Wine is for chickens
I’m usually not enticed by the reading material strategically placed at checkout counters. Cooking magazines tend to be the exception. I picked a copy of Sabores off of the shelf the other day, which describes itself as the “highest selling cooking magazine in Costa Rica.” I’m not sure how many other cooking magazines are in circulation. The bright cover displaying stuffed squash and potatoes and wallet-pleasing recipes caught my eye.
Flipping through, I was momentarily enthralled by the article: “7 recipes with just one chicken.” It can be done — from soup to shish kabob. A few pages later, I stopped at another interesting story about one of my favorite topics, wine. (Read previous whining about wine posts one, two, and three.) Some of the questions answered were: What should I consider when buying a good, but inexpensive wine? What makes a wine cheap or expensive? What’s up with boxed wines? Are any of them good?
In a country where even boxed wine costs at the cheapest 2,100 colones, $4.00, one might expect a bit of a thumbs up for the cartoned vintage. The response: “Of course,” and then a tapering of enthusiasm, “depending on what you expect from the wine.” The article continues to explain that boxed wines are for “people who are not used to drinking wine.”
The astronomical price of wine in Costa Rica is a deterrent from buying decent bottles. After spending half of my day whipping up seven different recipes from just one chicken, I might need a few glasses of wine before I even set the table. Somehow, if I were to indulge, I feel I’d be defeating the purpose of the provident poultry preparation. Then again, it might also justify the purchase.
