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Food and wine pairing does matter

intastebudswetrust 5 Comments

I always thought of food and wine pairing as something that’s fun. I enjoy thinking about how to combine both. If you hit the nail on the head, you can transcend the individual level of the wine and the dish and reach something that’s more than the sum of the parts. On my blog I have a category that’s called “one and one is three”, where I talk about food and wine pairings that make me especially happy. Because the combination of the flavors create something special, or because one really pushes the other to a higher level, or just simply because they create that kind of feeling where I think : life is good.

American wine writer Alder Yarrow doesn’t think much of food and wine pairing. On his website Vinography he published a blog post calling food and wine pairing “junk science”. Or “the source of panic attacks and the fodder for hundreds of books and scores of useless smartphone apps”. I won’t disagree with the fact that there are many books that are not particularly useful. Many just give very specific combinations of a particular dish with a particular wine. What if you tweak your recipe with a few additional ingredients, or change the sauce? Or more likely, what if that particular wine is not available in your local shop? Not so helpful indeed. But as Mr Yarrow explicitly states that one plus one does not equal three, I felt compelled to write down my own opinion on food and wine pairing.

According to Mr Yarrow the rules of food and wine pairing are “bullshit” and you’re better off forgetting about food and wine pairing altogether as “it only leads to disappointment”. I hear much frustration there. In more than 25 years of eating in top restaurants he can count the experiences  where the sum was greater than the parts on one hand. The good thing I read in that is that at least he had such experiences after all. But apparently very few.

The issue at hand here might be expectation management. If you expect a sommelier to always come with a wine that “will make the choir sing”, then you need to think twice of how restaurants work. Especially the ones who want to be innovative, who experiment with dishes and flavor combinations, and on the top of that change their menu very regularly in order to constantly offer something new to the demanding customer. For a sommelier to find a wine that will fit with a new dish on the menu, there are many things to consider : what is the defining flavor? There might be more than one. And they can interact in a way that does not allow for an extra component, the wine, to interfere. What is the texture of the dish? Does the wine have to support this or contrast with it? Do you want to go for complementarity or make a bold move and aim for contrast? Not to forget a very practical question : what does the sommelier have on the wine list? He/she has to work with what is available and what is ready to drink. If you have a thousand of references to work with, that might ease the job, but such restaurants are exceptions. On top of that, the time and possibilities the sommelier will be given to experiment with the food and wine pairing will be limited. So there are a lot of “ifs” here. That is why I don’t necessarily expect the choir to sing in terms of food and wine pairing when I go to a top restaurant. I know this may sound strange to some, but I don’t. If one plus one equals two, then I will be happy. If the dish is a winner, and so is the wine, without either negatively influencing the other, then also that is a successful food and wine pairing!

Alder Yarrow also talks about the rules of food and wine pairing. As if there was a bible of what to drink with what. Food and wine pairing is not a science. If I were to regard it as such, I would probably also come to the conclusion that food and wine pairing rules are bullshit. But it’s not. Again, if you take top gastronomy as a starting point, there simply are no rules. That is the definition of innovation and experimentation : you do something new. So the wine pairing will inevitably be a trial, and yes, sometimes also be an error.

Bad experiences in such settings is not a reason to conclude that food and wine pairing is bound to be disappointing. Mr Yarrow suggests that wine should be something “universally simple and essential”. So why not look at established combinations that have been tried millions of times and that work. A sauvignon blanc will work wonders with a simple goat cheese. Just as a Muscadet or a Chablis will be a great marriage with fresh oysters. Or a lamb shank from the oven with a spicy, herby Languedoc. These are classic, straightforward dishes that do not need top wines to still be a great match with their liquid partner. There is a much bigger potential for the food and wine to lift each other up if you start with simple things than vice versa. That’s where I see the biggest added value ànd chances of success in food and wine pairings.

Mr Yarrow seems to realise that : “Our expectations need to be re-set. The bar needs to be lowered. We should absolutely be choosing wine to go with our meals, but our goals should center on enjoyment of both and the idea of “mistakes” should be banished.” I can’t think of a better way of saying it actually. So why conclude then that we should forget about food and wine pairings? There will be times that the food and wine pairing does not give the effect we wanted or hoped for, but we can also have great experiences and discover unexpected pairings. You can only do that if you’re open for it, if you see it as fun to experiment, ànd if your state of mind is rather to welcome anything good that comes out of it rather than to be disappointed if the result is anything less than stunning.

Let me give one example of a great discovery I did myself recently. One of our favorite dishes to prepare when we want comfort food is keema matar, an Indian/Pakistani curry with ground meat and green peas, topped with coriander leaves. As you can imagine, it is a very rich and relatively spicy dish. In Mr Yarrow’s opinion you should drink what you like with your food. I quite like red Burgundy, but I wouldn’t dream of drinking that with keema matar. It’d be an absolute waste of the wine. In the past I had already paired this dish with a very rich and opulent Negroamaro, an Italian wine with very ripe black fruit. The reason why that worked very well was because there was a certain sweetness from the ripe fruit that worked with the spiciness of the curry. Recently, however, I decided to take it up a notch with an Amarone, the Campo Inferi 2013 of Brunelli.

This is, for my standards, the embodiment of a “big” wine. Very rich, bold and smooth at the same time, and with a whopping 16,5% alcohol. This is a wine that is defined by ripe black cherries, milk chocolate, butter scotch and cinnamon. Big and ripe tannins, and a supporting acidity that keeps the alcohol in check. Again there is a sense of sweetness here that works very well to counterbalance the spiciness, and the smoothness and ripeness of the wine complement the structure of the curry. A good food and wine pairing, without any doubt. But what really made me tick in this combination was the combination of the ripe cherries, chocolate and cinnamon with the coriander leaves. A match made in heaven! Yes, this was definitely where I felt that one plus one equals three, where everything blended in so well together that the choir sang a little hallelujah.

The effect of the coriander with the Amarone is an example of how food and wine pairing is not a science, but something that you can discover and that will give great satisfaction once you do. Maybe not everyone will appreciate this combination the same way as I did, but others might. And by the looks of the numbers of people who post their food and wine pairings on social media, there seem to be many people who enjoy looking for that combination that adds an extra dimension. These are people who do not think in terms of potential disappointment, but in terms of discovery.

 

Wine education during lockdown

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While the world is evolving towards a complete lockdown due to the Covid-19 virus, people are looking for ways to continue working and having social contacts. Online tools for webinars and videocalls are flourishing and some people are very creative in finding solutions to reach out to other people. But how do you do that in the case of wine classes? Wine education is still very much based on tasting wine together and discussing it. Is it possible to learn about wine without actually tasting it?  Can you imagine how a wine smells and tastes just from the description of it?

Those questions became very real to me after I had accepted to do a temporary replacement at a school for adults, teaching about wine. The timing hardly could have been worse : after my first week, during which I taught two wine classes, the government decided to close down schools as part of the measures to fight the spread of Covid-19. Right! Very unfortunate, I thought, but not much that could be done about that. Until I started seeing how people were organising themselves to do webinars, have online discussions, do video calls and what not. Adam Knoerzer of Burghundy.com is one of those fast movers to have started with online wine classes. Being a certified sommelier based in Pittsburgh, USA, he already gave traditional wine classes. With plans to give online classes already in the back of his mind, however, things sped up considerably with the break out of the corona virus.

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Seeing how many others were getting to grips fast in a very different reality, I decided to give it a try myself and get prepared to give an online class. The perfect way for me to see how things work out for people at the other end was to participate in a class myself, so I enrolled for a class by Adam on Pinotage. The online tool he uses is BlueJeans, which allows you to do video calls, but also share your screen. The latter is a very useful feature for teaching as it allows you to give a slide presentation, just as you probably would in normal circumstances. Since learning about wine still involves a theoretical part, it’s really difficult not to use a visual support, so the screen sharing feature was very useful to visualize maps, but also show pictures of landscapes, vineyards, and wineries.

Joining the session did not work out immediately. There are different ways to join a session : through the app, via the browser or via phone. My attempt to join via the app failed, but I was able to join using the browser. I was pretty impressed by the quality of the sound and the video was more than sharp enough to be able to see everything clearly on the maps that Adam showed. The presentation was really smooth, and especially, not too long. While a traditional wine class can easily take several hours, Adam chose to limit his session to one hour, questions included. I thought that was a wise decision, as it forces the wine educator to focus on essentials, while not keeping people in front of their screens for too long. Listening to someone online for several hours would indeed be overkill, especially without having the actual wines in front on you. What also helped to keep things dynamic was the chat function that allowed people to type in their questions or to comment on something. There is also the option to allow people to comment using their microphone, but since there were 20 participants, things would have been pretty chaotic if everyone came in whenever they felt like it, so Adam put everyone on mute, asking people to use the chat function. And that was fine. So all in all this was a very smooth experience.

Since Adam had made things look very easy, I decided to use BlueJeans as well for my class on Champagne. I am happy, however, that I took ample time to prepare and get familiar with the tool, because things were not as easy as they looked. I tested the tool several times and ran into problems more than once with getting participants to connect.  A question I asked via the online help desk never got answered, and the help desk guy I chatted with after that came back to me with a solution more than a day after the chat. So take that into account if you spontaneously decide to set up a videocall, as you might run into issues you didn’t expect. Luckily Adam was so kind to provide me with a couple of hacks. In fact the organizer cannot see the chat when sharing the slides with the participants. You have to exit the screen sharing mode to see the chat, which is of course very annoying. One way of dealing with this is to join the session with a second device (tablet of smart phone) to monitor the chat ànd to connect headphones to that device. If you don’t do the latter, you will have terrible resonance. It seems that Zoom, a similar tool, does allow you to see the chat function while presenting slides, so you might want to experiment with different tools.

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So how did the class work out? Interestingly, of the two groups to whom I proposed doing an online class, only one was enthusiastic enough to go along with it. The other was the beginners’ class, where it is important to really sample wines together to find out about aromas and tastes. So it wasn’t a complete surprise that people preferred waiting until the normal classes resumed. Other important feedback I got was that many people already spend a whole day in front of a computer at home during lockdown, and that more of that was just not how they wanted to finish the day. And that’s completely understandable of course.

The group that decided to try it out had a class on Champagne. To make things a bit more fun and to stimulate interaction, I invited people to open a bottle of Champagne at home, either during the weekend in the run-up to the class or during the class itself. Several people happily had a glass of Champagne while I presented a short slide show. They also received a few questions in advance with things they could focus on : is it a blend? is it a non-vintage or a vintage? what’s the sweetness level? After the theoretical part I invited people who were having a glass to discuss their Champagne and to talk about the things I asked to focus on. These are of course not very dynamic discussions as it’s difficult to interact without having online chaos, but at least people could come in and share their experience. Several people also posted questions on the chat.

In general I felt people were happy with the alternative that was offered. And probably just as important : it allows to connect with other people during difficult times of confinement and social distancing. Or as Adam put it : “it’s also about creating a sense of community right now”.

So based on my experience, here’s a few tips if you plan something similar :

  • Get to know your tool! Modern technology is supposed to be easy and user-friendly, but you’re better off not taking that too much for granted. You will need time to choose your tool, get familiar with it, test it, and troubleshoot issues. In the worst case you may have to decide that the tool you chose does not deliver, and move to something else.
  • Learn from people with experience. If you’re not familiar with new technologies, you will have to invest time to get to know new tools. Companies do a good job nowadays to post videos and all kinds of manuals, guidance, FAQ, etc. But you will notice that the one thing you absolutely need to know… is not in there. So connect with people who know. Thank you, Adam, for helping me out!
  • Adapt your content to the format. In a normal wine class you can get all geeky and elaborate about all the details you can imagine. But if you’re online, you need to focus on just a few messages. No one wants to spend three hours in front of their screen listening to wine theory. Make it concise and keep it simple.
  • Create opportunities for interaction. Despite the inevitable limitations of online solutions, it is important to leave room for interaction. In a small group you can open up the floor for discussion, even though you will want to moderate the discussion (meaning unmuting people one per one) if you don’t want things to derail. In larger groups the chat function is a perfect way for people to ask questions or post comments.
  • Plan your session in function of your audience. With the technology there for you to connect with almost everyone in the world, you may get excited about all the opportunities that loom on the horizon. Just don’t forget that people on the other side of the world sleep when you’re awake (under normal circumstances). So if you want to reach another audience than the one in your own time zone, you will have to schedule carefully, or plan several sessions at different times catering for people in different places of the world.

The remaining question to all this is : will these online formats continue to exist once the dust has settled (hoping that it will, sooner rather than later) ? Adam definitely plans to continue the online classes and will expand his offer, adding new sessions for people in other time zones (Europe and Africa). Personally, I’m also convinced that there is a future for online wine education. I do think, however, that subjects that target a more “advanced” audience will be more successful as beginner classes require more interaction and of course more tasting together. But I might be wrong. The least that can be said is that despite the human tragedy of Covid-19, the circumstances oblige us to change our ways. It will be very interesting to see how much of all this will stay with us in the future.