Ten or fifteen more minutes on this seemingly hackneyed subject, anyone? Let’s abstract from the obsessiveness, snobbery and self-delusion that infect the ranks of professional sommeliers or wine writers and address some basics that apply to anybody who enjoys eating and drinking in whatever venue.
In a stimulating 2020 discussion with Terry Theise, Alder Yarrow would have us believe that we should “throw away the map because honestly people can’t get that lost” when it comes to pairing wine with the rest of one’s cuisine. Maybe they won’t get lost. But they might miss out on a lot. I know veteran professionals in wine and food who seem never to have experienced how each can enhance the pleasure and intrigue of the other, not to speak of epiphanies. Choose a wine whose taste appeals to you in isolation and a dish whose description appeals to you and one will wash down the other. This explains how often – even in establishments employing wine professionals – I perceive disconnect between a restaurant’s menu and its wine list and find myself considering beer or tea instead. During my retail career, I experienced countless consumers similarly unaware that there can be “aha!” experiences when bringing together wine and food – but that deprivation frequently ended once they were exposed to a wider range of wines. And things have certainly improved as the 21st century has progressed.
When it comes to “matching” wine and food, the notion of “rules” is too strong. But we can – and should – exercise our memories and harness our experiences to come up with plausible hunches. These can be based on Terry’s or similar “principles.” I’d say: “rules of thumb.” But the most that anyone including a professional somm can boast of is having honed his or her memory and experienced a wider range of permutations and combinations. To be sure, as Terry writes (paraphrasing Alder) “every element of the situation is mutable.” But if I have experienced an especially delectable match-up between a certain wine, consumed on a certain occasion with a certain preparation of ingredients, then it’s a good bet not just that a repeat of precisely this wine and dish on a subsequent occasion will be similarly successful, but that another vintage of the same wine, or some wine that I suspect is similar in the relevant respects, will please and intrigue me equally.
And what respects are relevant? Well, that’s where one should humbly emphasize that what one’s operating with are only hunches, which one ought not always to follow. What it is about the preparation of a dish that serves for perceived synergy or conflict with a wine is often not immediately evident. That’s why unless we’re talking about a simple juxtaposition of literally raw materials on the plate it’s of limited use (albeit far from useless) to associate particular genres of wine with particular genres of comestible (types of meat; types of vegetable; types of dish). To do so leaves too many variables unaddressed: seasonings; method of cooking, if any; and synergy, masking or other reactions that take place between ingredients. Seasonings and methods of cooking can on their own, though, form the basis for useful hunches. (In the matter of cooking methods, for instance, think of those that generate carbon, fattiness, caramelization, or enhanced umami.)
Whether the elements in a wine and accompanying dishes complement one another via similarity or contrast is neither here nor there. Generally, we want the interaction of wine and food to tend toward amplification or synergy, but sometimes there are aspects of a wine or raw ingredient that we wish to restrain. And apropos keeping things in check, surely it cannot fail to have registered with any sensitive taster that certain sorts of wine tend to get in the way of enjoying the rest of what’s at table, just as there are certain foodstuffs – such as ones that, with acknowledged hyperbole, I call “wine-lethal vegetables” (weintödliche Gemüse: artichoke, beetroot, garlic, okra, eggplant, fresh tomato) – that are especially challenging; which, however, makes us all the more pleased with ourselves when we discover “solutions,” such as when, decades ago, Terry put me onto the compatibility of dry Muscat with fresh tomato acids, something I have delighted in conveying to others ever since.
I might never have accidentally discovered that tomato-Muscat synergy. And conjuring up in my imagination the taste of tomatoes and that of a dry Muscat might not have encouraged me to put the two together. This highlights the role and nature of chemistry, which is, after all, decisive in determining our sensory experience whenever food and beverage are literally combined in the mouth, no less than when foodstuffs are cooked. The claims made on behalf of their imaginations by many professional sommeliers and wine writers fly in the face of chemistry’s inscrutability to even a chemist’s imagination. If imagination sufficed to tell us how ingredients would react when combined, then the experimental science of chemistry as we have known it since Priestly and Lavoisier would be out the window.
The Muscat example and that of “difficult” foodstuffs return us to the virtues of wide-ranging exploration. Wines that are outliers chemically- and statistically-speaking may prove indispensable to enhancing an enormous range of dishes, especially dishes involving ingredients that are themselves chemically extreme. A dish might encourage the fruity, vegetal and herbal flavor concentrations found in red wine, but turn tanninity and low acidity bitter and dull. Reds with low tannin and high acidity are not exactly legion; but there are, among others, Barbera and Zinfandel (provided those don’t succumb to their unfortunate weakness for jamminess and high alcohol). There are instances where pairing will thrive not on fruity flavors but on a dominance of mineral impressions combined with levity and refreshment, yet where high acidity would come off as inharmoniously sharp. For such situations, try Muscadet or (if you can find them) the Chasselas-based wines of Switzerland and Southwest Germany. Notwithstanding widespread consumer neglect of Sherry or the rarity of relevant Jura wines, there are delightful synergies, including in otherwise difficult circumstances, thanks to the influence of flor (a special class of yeasts that form a scum-like oxygen barrier over the wine in cask). Not to forget wines of “hidden sweetness” – balanced thanks to high acidity – whose usefulness at table Terry and I love to advertise, but which one scarcely experiences except with Riesling and Chenin as grown in limited locations. One would be lucky to discover these options by accident let alone exercise of imagination, without resort to plausible hypotheses or an experienced taster’s “map.”
In the final analysis, as Terry points out, wine is simply a genre of comestible; and to suggest that there are no useful hunches or accumulated wisdom to follow in wine and food pairing is tantamount to suggesting the same about cuisine generally, as if the only way to generate a tasty dish were to fly blind, and start over each time with a blank slate. Indeed, informed hunches apply at table outside the immediate range of cuisine and comestible ingredients. As a great deal of recent work in sensory science has demonstrated, the cross-modal nature of taste insures that it will be systematically influenced by such elements as ambient lighting or sound, influences whose patterns a creative host may wish to exploit.
While one could deliberately randomize one’s choice of dinner guests and how they are seated, most of us are guided by useful intuitions about our potential guests’ personalities and backgrounds, whether with the aim of bringing together ones whom we suspect will be simpatico or ones between whom we anticipate productive tension arising. It is with perfectly good reason that we believe so-doing will generate greater collective enjoyment. Certainly, whether in the matter of one’s guests or one’s cuisine it’s fun to occasionally shuffle the deck. Indeed, that’s essential, lest “knowing” what one likes become a bar to further discovery. But avid cooks particularly delight in fine-tuning combinations already known to give pleasure and engender fascination, wonder and gratitude, and that applies as much to guest lists as to menus. Combinations involving beverages are no exception.