Food & Wine Pairing
I don’t know how it got started, but around the time that I began working with wine professionally about twenty years ago, there seemed to be an explosion of interest in the subject of pairing wine with food. Sommeliers were being asked by local newspapers and national magazines to name the specific wine that people should drink with their chef’s signature dish. “Your chef is famous for her turnip terrine with seaweed and morel mushrooms,” the question went. “What is the perfect wine to drink with that?”
It seemed, even then, like a sad line of inquiry to me, another example of one of life’s greatest simple pleasures being hijacked by the content industry. I know that saying something was “hijacked” is a strong way of putting it, but I do wonder: do people remember that good wine from Burgundy tastes great with simple roasted chicken and potatoes? Or that classically-made Tuscan sangiovese is a lot of fun at a table full of spaghetti and meatballs? I’m not sure. The thought of Chianti bottles in straw baskets on checkered tablecloths with bowls of pasta in red sauce has endured; but mostly in the cliché of what Italian restaurants in the United States used to be. I don’t get the feeling that a lot of people are on the lookout for really good Chianti (which need not be very expensive) to enjoy with rustic pasta parties at home.
There is a magical approach to address the suddenly confounding question of which wines to drink with which foods, which is to conduct a quick exploration of the foods people eat where they have been making wine for decades, if not centuries. Look no further than a Google search of classic German food to learn that sausage and braised cabbage, or the breaded cutlets known as schnitzel, might be delightful with that fancy bottle of German riesling in your basement. Cassoulet, the famous bean and meat casserole of southwestern France, evolved over generations for different reasons, having to do with what local people were growing and raising. It’s as sure as the sunrise that traditional wines from Bordeaux, the beating heart of the region where cassoulet is famous, are going to be lovely to drink with beans and slow-cooked meats. (Hopefully with a big spoonful of Dijon mustard.)
Of course it’s never an accident that wines from particular old-world regions taste so good when paired with foods from those regions. Studying those connections, if only for an evening, can greatly enhance one’s understanding of the wines. The grapes cabernet sauvignon and merlot, which are the workhorse grape varieties of most red wine from Bordeaux, have enough tannin (the “drying” component in red wine) in their skin that they surely improve when enjoyed with food which is sufficiently high in fat. Still, when wines from Bordeaux aren’t too ripe and heavy, and when their cabernet sauvignon and merlot are allowed to retain their freshness and nuance, it’s amazing how even the mildly-flavored flageolet beans seem to stand out and taste even more delicious with wine from one of the villages in Bordeaux.
It’s easy to run the gauntlet of all the great old wine-growing regions of the world and to set your mouth watering just thinking about the possibilities. In the great nebbiolo-based wines of Barolo, Carema and Gattinara, in the Italian region of Piemonte, you can often smell the mushrooms and truffles for which the region is also known. Muscadet, which is made on the Atlantic coast of France, is positively sublime with the oysters for which that region is also famous. On the other side of France, in the mountains of the Jura or the Savoie, people will try to serve you some gooey iteration of melted cheese, which arrives in the form of fondue, raclette, tartiflette, and other delectables. If they offer you a glass of local wine to go with it — a curiously-pale but very fragrant red glass of trousseau, or an oxidative savagnin that hits a ten out of ten on the funk meter, you would be well-advised to accept.
