Cuban Sandwich

This doesn't really have much to do with wine (except for the splash of white wine I used in the black beans), but I enjoy linking my photoessays here. As a native of Memphis, Tennessee, the smoking of lots of pork products is in my blood... and my arteries, I suppose. If you watch the stores well, you can almost always find some part of the pig on sale. In this I smoked a picnic roast (lower half of the front leg of the pig)--I got it for 99¢ a pound, and slow smoked it for about six hours. I know it's not genteel to discuss such matters among the wineblogosphere, but in past years I've stayed up all night tending the coals of a whole hog roasting in a pit dug out of the ground:



A week later I used some of the frozen leftover pork to make dense, delicious Cuban sandwiches. Obviously here I drank the great Red Stripe beer, but if I had to pick a wine to go with this, I'd go with an inexpensive California sparkling wine or a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. You need something cold and crisp to cut through the grease, and anything with good citrus notes would enhance the flavors of the sandwich and side dishes (hence the lime in the Red Stripe).

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