A special food and wine moment

This is a picture taken during a wine dinner I organized for the Kowloon Cricket Club Wine Society in April 2005. The chef is pouring the sauce from the bottle which had been filled with the wine we were matching with the dish. The wine was La Spinetta Pin IGT, a Nebbiolo Barbera blend. The dish was oxtail braised in wine. They had obtained fresh oxtails (skin on) and braised it in some red wine. When I gave them an extra bottle of the wine we were drinking, he finished off the cooking with it. He took some of the sauce, poured it back into the bottle and came round the table serving us.

Now I don't know about you, but my normal encounters with ox skin is usually more utilitarian, as leather in belts, shoes, ... etc. Indeed, I had not even thought that ox skin can be eaten. The braising made the oxtail skin wonderfully tender and gelatinous, not unlike the ox tendon we find in Cantonese cuisine. Of course, the special wine in the sauce lifted the dish from the brilliant to the sublime.

Now this was such a hit that people requested that I repeat it again, on other occasions. Well, I did ask the Chef for a reprise, but not until a 2009, when we had it in a wine dinner I organized for the doctors association of my hospital. We used an entry level Barolo for both pot and glass, but the results were still as superb.