Author: Alex

Wine in Supermarkets?

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wine selection
wine in a supermarket in Paris, photo by christine592

The idea of wine in supermarkets is hardly novel. Indeed, many people reading this outside South Australia will be puzzled why this is a question at all.

Currently, South Australian supermarkets do not sell wine (or beer, or spirits). This doesn’t mean that we South Australians are going crook for a drink. There are plenty of bottle shops: many of them are owned by one of the big two supermarkets but there are also excellent examples of independent retailers. In addition, many pubs have bottle shops attached, and these tend to be drive-throughs (yes, you drive into the bottle shop and you can either get out and browse, of, if you’re in a hurry you stay in the car and someone will bring you your carton of cold beer). Drive-throughs have pretty generous opening hours so there aren’t that many hours in the day when you can’t buy an alcoholic drink retail.

But recently, some of the smaller supermarkets have decided they’d like to be able to sell wine, South Australian wine in particular. They say it will help the wine industry. Independent wine merchants say it will add to their woes as they struggle even more against behemoth retailers. The wine industry itself seems to be split.

On Wednesday night this was one of the issues I discussed with Peter Godfrey on 5AA. You can listen to the audio:

As a consumer I can see how compelling the idea of wine in supermarkets is. Yes, it would be fabulous to be able to nip into the supermarket, stock up on some lamb chops and loo roll and pop a bottle of some interesting, quirky, boutique, local red into the trolley.

But is that what is going to happen?

My gut feeling is … er, no. According to the Attorney-General’s discussion paper at the end of November 2012, Woolworths and Coles held (approximately) 53% of liquor licences in South Australia. Over HALF.

I’d be very interested to know how that translates to spend, because I’d bet my bottom dollar that much more than 53 cents in every dollar spent goes to the duopoly*.

The discussion paper says:

Small to medium sized wine producers currently face difficulty in getting their wine on the shelves of retail liquor stores, which has a direct impact on their ability to access the retail liquor market.

So, if liquor licences go to supermarkets (and only those with a floor size greater than 400m2) how is this going to support small to medium sized producers? I have no idea. Coles and Woolworths are unlikely to support South Australian only producers, which the independents** claim they will. Coles and Woolworths are unlikely to support small producers who can’t supply enough wine for all (or at least a great many) of their stores.

And this means we are likely to head the same way as the UK. The wine buyers in the big supermarkets in the UK exert amazing buying pressure over producers around the world. I’ve heard stories about wine arriving in the UK for a big supermarket and being rejected outright. Producers are squeezed on price (have we heard that one before?). The supermarkets allegedly sell wines at inflated prices for a period of time so they can sell them at a big advertised markdown. The consumer, picking up that bottle of quirky, interesting red to go with his or her lamb chop is over paying for a bottle of something that has been mass produced.

If you feel upset about the squeeze on dairy farmers, on fresh food producers then you need to be prepared the same thing happen to our wine industry.

Is that what you want?

* For non Australians, that’s a common way of referring to Coles and Woolworths and the grip they hold on the supermarket scene.

** Your local independent may be sporting posters about an epetition. This campaign is a little disingenuous on two levels. Firstly, the poster I saw suggested that the idea had been floated by the State Government. The discussion paper notes that this has come about “following an approach from independent supermarket chains”. Secondly, epetitions are not recognised by the South Australian parliament: it’s always disappointing when people don’t do their research.

Lucky Lupitas Extravaganza

- Alex 2 Comments

ll extravaganza

date of extravaganza: Saturday 16 Feb 2013

I’ve written about Lucky Lupitas before. It’s the tiny Mexican restaurant which sits next to Flinders Medical Centre. It takes no reservations and, on a Saturday, you can expect to start queuing for a table at 5pm (doors open at 5:30pm).

With one toddler, queuing doesn’t really work and while we’ve eaten in just the once, we’ve had take away a few times. That’s because we’re lucky and live nearby. However, we have friends, many of whom also have toddlers, who don’t live so close … so about a year ago (I kid you not!) we hatched the plan for a Lucky Lupitas extravaganza.

The guys at Lucky Lupitas were happy to help out: we could place our order a week in advance and collect before queuing started. This worked perfectly for us, because toddlers eat their dinner early!

As always, the tricky part was not ordering the food but corralling the troops. As soon as you get numbers, work out an order and a per head price, someone always has a change of heart. So there was a bit of last minute stuffing around with the order and I’d really like to thank Lucky Lupitas for bearing with me on that one.

And then the day arrived!

It was a (very) hot day so the lads had to use their muscles to shift the outdoor furniture under the tree (our patio has an old Alsynite roof and, while it’s great for keeping the rain off, my goodness it can’t half get hot and sticky under there in summer!). To maximise the amount of protein in our order (read – beef ribs) everyone brought along something to share, so we had plenty of salads, extra rice, corn chips, salsa and guacamole. One friend, who is Argentinian, brought along Brazilian pão de queijo (cheese bread) to share too. A couple of us headed off to collect the order while those left at home rustled up cutlery and paper plates. When we came back everything was spread over the table and everyone dived in. Our order was mostly Lucky Lupitas famous slow cooked smoked beef ribs (they are amazing – the meat just falls off the bone and they are huge), along with quesadillas, tacos and empanadas. Lucky Lupitas threw in a pile of their own corn chips (apparently excellent but I missed out on those somehow!). Quite a few sides came along with our order so there was extra rice, coleslaw, guacamole and salsa! Everyone raved about the ribs and given the hot day and the extras everyone brought along we probably could have just eaten ribs alone. However, I really like Lucky Lupitas quesadillas and the beef tacos were excellent, with a good spicy hit.

Naturally, we had way too much food but it did mean that everyone who wanted to got leftovers to take home and we still had some very generous leftovers in our fridge!

While the food at Lucky Lupitas is fantastic, this experience is also a lesson in customer service. There is no way that twelve adults and five children could have rocked up to Lucky Lupitas expecting to be fed. If you’ve been there, you’ll be able to imagine what kind of chaos would ensue! But thanks to the team’s flexibility (and hard work) we were able to have a fantastic, and very kid friendly, early dinner.

¡Provecho!

Passionfruit Curd

- Alex 1 Comment

Untitled

As you might have noticed, Eating Adelaide is not a blog filled with amazing pictures of food. But I think with my attempt at a photo of my passionfruit curd, I’ve sunk to a new low in photographic rubbishness!

I’d already put the curd in jars: labels still on and narrow necks. On my piece of bread the curd looked flat and kind of uniformly yellow. I tried tilting a jar over, I tried photographing it so you couldn’t tell what had been in the jar before the curd, I tried using the flash, no flash, my phone’s camera, I even got the tripod out.

And it still looks terrible.

All the while, my tummy rumbled and it didn’t take too much to give up on the photography and eat the piece of bread.

I don’t get these people who have the patience to mess around styling and photographing their food. I make it and then I want to eat it. And that’s why you get to enjoy such dodgy photos!

A friend has a mature, and huge, passionfruit vine which occupies a good chunk of his back garden. Which means I was lucky enough to have a big bag of passionfruit delivered to me.

At the time it was quite hot, so turning on the oven didn’t appeal. That – and I would have had to have made a ton of cakes, slices and biscuits in order to make a dent in the pile of passionfruit.

Fortunately, passionfruit curd requires no oven and needs lots of the little beggars.

I read a selection of recipes online and they were all vaguely similar. There was slight variation in the ratio of whole eggs to egg yolks, some used a double boiler, some didn’t, one even used the microwave.

One thing they all had in common was I thought they contained far too much sugar. So I made up my own recipe and figured that really, it would all work out in the end.

I do love being right!

Begin by beating two eggs, two egg yolks and 100g of caster sugar. Beat until reasonably light and fluffy. I didn’t this by hand and I’d describe the mixture as combined but not approaching that thick, pale ribbon stage you aim for if you’re making a proper custard.

On the stove, melt 125g of unsalted butter. When the butter is melted, whisk 160mL of passionfruit pulp (this is probably around 8-10 fruit although they vary in size so it’s a bit tough to give you a number) through the eggs and pour it into the pan with the butter. HAVE THE HEAT VERY LOW. I cannot stress that enough. LOW. REALLY LOW!

Now you have to stand and stir. You don’t have to stir vigorously, but you do have to keep stirring. Have someone make you a cup of tea or pour you a glass of wine. Whatever you do, don’t crank the heat up to hurry things along. That way certain failure lies.

So you stand there stirring, stirring, stirring. And basically you keep on doing that until the mix turns to the consistency of custard (that is, you draw a line with your finger through the curd on the back of a spoon and the curd does not close back on itself). You don’t need for it to be super thick because it will thicken further as it chills.

I think all up this took about 20 minutes for me. It was a hot evening, and even though the stove was only on low, I got very hot standing there and it felt like it was about three hours!

Sterilise a couple of jars (make sure they’re well washed and then pour boiling water into them). Pour the hot curd into the jars, pop the lids on but don’t do them up.

Once the curd has cooled in the jars, tighten the lids and refrigerate.

I ended up with 2 190mL jars of curd.

If you want, you can loosen the seeds from the pulp by giving it a very quick blast in a food processor and then sieving them out. I couldn’t be bothered.

Eat on bread or toast. Use as part of a pavlova topping. Sandwich meringues together with it. Fill macarons with it. Or just go back to eating it on bread.

Delicious and not too sweet.  Very easy to make but patience is required!