Perfect Pairings. Evan Goldstein

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       CREATING PAIRINGS THAT WORK

      The practice of pairing wine and food has been around for a long time. For many Europeans, for people who have grown up in households where wine is a part of daily life, and for folks who have spent time eating their way across France, Italy, Spain, and other gastronomically rich corners of the world, the notion of pairing wine and food is a happy and familiar one.

      But for wine and food lovers in the United States, learning what goes with what has often been a roller-coaster ride. Knowing little about pairing wine and food, we first explored (and were handcuffed by) the European and classically grounded “old rules” of color coding: red wine with red meat, and white wines with fish and poultry. While there's some inherent value to those time-honored rules, they leave little to the imagination and discourage the freedom of mixing and matching. Once this became apparent, many Americans embraced culinary anarchy, with people deciding they could serve whatever wine with whatever food they wanted. This extreme encouraged an experimental spirit but led to more misses than hits. And when a memorable match occurred, the diner didn't know why it worked. I favor a middle course between those diametrically opposed approaches, because, as with most things in life, the truth seems to lie somewhere in between. I am both a firm advocate of the classics and a devout believer in shaking things up (and violating taboos) for the right reasons!

      First and foremost, wine and food appreciation and enjoyment are personal. No two mouths react the same way to tastes. If somebody were to ask, “What's your most memorable wine and food experience?” at a dinner party (which, by the way, is fun to do), the responses would be all over the place. Most would be simple, formed more by memorable events and settings and good company than by the intricacies of the pairings themselves. Indeed, most people do not, thank goodness, spend their time overanalyzing wine and food and trying to pair, for example, the lemongrass and light green-olive flavors of XYZ Sauvignon Blanc with the tossed spring greens dressed with a lemongrass, citrus, and cold-pressed olive oil vinaigrette flecked with pieces of…green olive! This connect-the-dots approach to flavor, espoused by many epicurean magazines, even more winemakers, and a few too many chefs, is unnecessary and intimidating.

      So what's really happening when you serve a particular wine with a particular food? Once the emotion and the heart are removed from our thinking, the more objective rationale lies in our intrinsic ability to ascertain characteristics that are “measured” in the mouth. Most of these quantifiable characteristics are referred to as primary tastes. But to understand taste, it is crucial to grasp the significant difference between taste and flavor. Though I get into this in more detail below, tastes are, simply stated, quantifiable—the sourness of a lemon, the sweetness of honey, the bitterness of dark chocolate, or the saltiness of a fresh oyster. All these tastes can be measured on a scale from low to high. On the other hand, the countless flavors—strawberry, butterscotch, steak—are personal, subjective, and impossible to measure.

      If you move in circles that include wine aficionados, you are likely familiar with those who wax poetic about the pear and apple qualities of a Chardonnay, the apricot and nectarine flavors of a Riesling, or the black pepper and smoked-meat character in a glass of Syrah. We know there are not, in fact, essences of the above or any flavors added to wines. However, many people can, with experience, detect these suggestions of flavor, which are essentially reinforced aromas of the wine that is being enjoyed. Smell and taste are inextricably linked, as colds and allergies so frequently remind us. The ability to smell is essential to sensual appreciation of both wine and food. Without smell, your ability to appreciate the difference between pork and veal is significantly diminished, just as the ability to identify blackberry versus blueberry in a Merlot is moot. As we will see later in the discussions of individual varietal wines, the lexicon of flavors creates an exciting vocabulary for talking about all grapes. But although the glossary of adjectives for wine and food is full of flavors, these terms have very little to do with determining what will make a great pairing. Yes, it's true that a wine that displays a minty personality can pair well with mint as an ingredient in a dish. However, the echo factor doesn't ensure a perfect match.

      Only one of the two stars, either the wine or the dish, can effectively take center stage. If you want to show off a special bottle of wine, the food selection should play a supporting role. If you want to showcase a spectacular recipe, it's best to choose a lower-key wine. Much like two people in a conversation, in the wine and food partnership one must listen while the other speaks, or the result is a muddle.

      Finally, wines change when served with food. Whatever your perception of a wine's flavor and personality when you taste it on its own, the wine won't be the same when tasted with a meal. Oddly, the most critically acclaimed wines are typically rated and scored alongside other wines of a similar genre but rarely actually tasted with food. Critics may say that sensational XYZ wine “goes well with pasta,” but in all likelihood this is no more than an educated guess. These wines may show gorgeously as solo performers, but when served with dinner they can seem different, or even downright unpleasant.

      Armed with a context for our thinking and with the traditional epicurean paradigms questioned, let's agree that there are other quantifiable factors and rationales that bring wine and food together. The common wisdom is that wines and foods, like people, pair well with those that resemble them. Some successful wine and food pairings are grounded in shared characteristics. An off-dry Riesling served alongside a pork tenderloin with an apricot chutney illustrates this type of pairing: the sweetness of the chutney complements the slight sweetness of the wine. Other matches succeed through the truism that opposites attract. As with people, wines and foods can harmonize successfully despite seeming disparate at first glance. Ever wonder why a crisp glass of Sauvignon Blanc goes sublimely with a plate of raw oysters? Think of what a squeeze of lemon would do—cut through the oystery taste of the oyster. The wine acts the same way by countering the saline character of the oyster and refreshing the palate.

      This “opposites attract” theory was cutting-edge, even radical, in the 1980s. Today, it's accepted and taught by many wine and food experts. At the root of this thinking is the principle that wines and foods share certain basic tastes. Tastes are not flavors. Tastes are simple, the core ones being sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. All are present to some degree in food, and different dishes reveal various combinations of them. For example, some cuisines are founded on plays of salt and sweet, such as a Thai chicken satay with peanut sauce, or salt-brined or dry-rubbed pork shoulder smoked slowly and served with a sweet, tangy barbecue sauce. Wine is also a play of basic tastes, of which three (sweet, sour, and bitter) are the building blocks that define a wine's profile and reveal how (and with what) it would be best served. This combination of tastes holds what I call the keys to wine and food matching. There are six of them for wine and three for food.

       THE KEYS TO UNDERSTANDING WINE

       KEY 1. ACIDITY

      If you're betting on one horse, choose this one. It's the most important factor in pairing wine with food. There are several ways in which acidity, the sourness or tartness factor, figures in wine.

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