Wine and Food pairing

[fresco]

Provocative piece by Mike Steinberger, who argues that the likes of big oakey shirazes from Australia, extreme experiments on restaurant menus and price gouging are helping to drive food and wine apart:

http://slate.msn.com/id/2092511/

[Craig Camp]

What exactly do you pair with Adria's coconut ravioli in soy sauce or his Parmesan cheese ice cream sandwich?

I, for one, am willing to give this problem a shot - again and again until I get it right.

[LOS]

I've got to agree with Steinberger that there are certain trends that are leaning that way. But no one, other than trendoids, is forced to follow the trends. You can still find good restaurants with wine-friendly foods and good wine lists, and you can still find plenty of food-friendly wines. This is really only a problem for the small-market consumer, whose choices are extremely limited. But most small-market restaurants are not exactly avante garde. The only real problem I see is with the small-market wine selection. Because the hip wines are all homogenous, I think the small-market wine selection suffers from real lack of diversity in addition to having few food-friendly choices. OTOH, a real dedication to food-friendly wines on the part of the owner/staff can make for some very interesting small wine shops.

Steinberger has a point, but he doth protest too much.

[Suzanne F]

Well, even oil and water can form TEMPORARY emulsions.

[Jinmyo]

Well, even oil and water can form TEMPORARY emulsions.

Bouillabaise.

[Lady T]

What exactly do you pair with Adria's coconut ravioli in soy sauce or his Parmesan cheese ice cream sandwich?

I can think of brut champagnes that will work with those flavors, just for one possibility.

(...if that question was anything but rhetorical, that is)

[tammylc]

Having just recently eaten at Trio, I can say that it is possible to do good pairings with radical kitchen experiments. I was very pleased with the combinations.

They used to serve a parmesan cheese and olive oil ice cream sandwich. The pairing was a dry amontilado sherry, which I got to sample and believe would have been a lovely pairing...

[Mark Sommelier]

A provocative recent article from Slate lamenting how wine and food now have irreconcilable differences.

You say provocative, I say intentionally snide plus sophomorically written. The best gaff: "Baroloses".

[wnissen]

Snide it may be, bemoaning the "good old days," but in the main I agree with him. Making wines more dramatic on their own necessarily reduces the ability to pair with food. I don't think that's really controversial. Restaurant reviewers rarely give even a thumbs up / thumbs down on the list or its pricing. I don't think anyone disagrees with that either. Unbelievable markups on wine and low quality at the low end discourage people from buying wine in restaurants. Also not a bit controversial. We can argue about tone and writing quality (actually, we probably wouldn't argue about that) but he makes his point.

Walt

[bleachboy]

You say provocative, I say intentionally snide plus sophomorically written. The best gaff: "Baroloses".

Oops! You lost the bourgeoisie there. What's "Baroloses"? Why's it a gaff?

IANAS

[Mark Sommelier]

You say provocative, I say intentionally snide plus sophomorically written. The best gaff: "Baroloses".

Oops! You lost the bourgeoisie there. What's "Baroloses"? Why's it a gaff?

IANAS

"bleachboy",

What do you think the plural of Barolo is???

[Mark Sommelier]

Snide it may be, bemoaning the "good old days," but in the main I agree with him. Making wines more dramatic on their own necessarily reduces the ability to pair with food. I don't think that's really controversial. Restaurant reviewers rarely give even a thumbs up / thumbs down on the list or its pricing. I don't think anyone disagrees with that either. Unbelievable markups on wine and low quality at the low end discourage people from buying wine in restaurants. Also not a bit controversial. We can argue about tone and writing quality (actually, we probably wouldn't argue about that) but he makes his point.

Walt

Dear Walt,

The writer of this article impressed me personally as someone ( I have stronger descriptors that I am not using on purpose) who has just learned enough about wine and wine writing to do this article. The veiled reference to Bob Parker was cheap ("tasting 70-90 wines after lunch"). Yes, the wines he wrote about are popular. Do they go with food? I don't think so, but, I sell tons of them. The focus of this article should have been that people don't really care about wine pairings, not that they are dead. I have plenty of customers asking me to pair specific dishes with wines. I also have plenty of customers asking me to recommend a single bottle that will "go with" diverse dishes. Pinot Noir is the answer, not Shiraz, Zinfandel, Petit Sirah. I hated this article. The guy was more than snide. "Smirking Sommelier"??? Where is that happening? The old creepy sommeliers that I knew 25 years ago when I started doing this are mostly dead already. I drink these big wines, whether they are chardonnay or big shiraz, alone. Are classic pairings of wine and food dead?? NOT IN MY RESTAURANT!!

[Andre]

If you want to match food and wine it is very simple, address a professional [that's whre Mark comes in ].

This is not a professional article but while at it here it goes:

The very new Australian wine industry used to be based on sweet wine demands from England. After the big changes of 1950-1970, there were other customers in foreign markets. The locals prefered the almost sweet syrupie beaujolais style reigning the super-markets such as Orlando's Jacob's Creek, Penfold's second label Dalwood.

The booming pacific Rim in the 80's provided a huge potential for neighboring Australia.

The wines exported were mostly designed to suit the spicy Asian food their customers were drinking it with. Longer fermentations that allowed the tannins to soften were becoming a norm for the big Australian wines and later on to the simpler ones.

Indeed the sometimes stupid competition between chefs and kitchens may drive the customer crazy with an often too complex dish but I guess this is due to marketing and demand.

[Cusina]

Not to pander, but when I have dined with a Sommelier present, they were genuinely interested in our dining experience and happy to share their knowledge. I don't think I remember one with a smirk.

I do like big wines, on their own, but even my uneducated taste buds learned after about 3 minutes at the table that they overpower even reasonably simple cooking and are best saved for later on in the evening. This article seems overly dramatic to me. It is hard to believe that a trend toward showy wines in the wide spectrum of wine production could possibly overturn a two thousand year old (more, actually) habit of drinking wine with dinner. I think it was written to entertain the in-flight crowd.

Edited December 18, 2003 by Cusina (log)

[rshorens]

Very good article. Problem is, these high alcohol fruity wines are very seductive- I went on a wine tasting trip to Healdsburg, CA last September. We stopped at a small new winery and tasted lots of their single vineyard zinfandels with alcohol contents of up to 15%. We usually buy a bottle or 2 at each vineyard, but ended up buying nearly 2 cases at this winery- I think we were very intoxicated! So far I haven't figured out when to drink this wine- maybe I'll have to learn how to cook hot Indian food.

Roz