When pairing wine, food, trust experience
Pairing wine with food has come to symbolize much of the intimidation, apprehension and pretension that, for many people, intrude on the elemental enjoyment of a good bottle.
Why? Because the notion that you require books, apps and arcane charts and graphs to determine which sort of wine will mesh with the characteristics of a particular dish suggests that without a method, you can make a mistake. You might be wrong. You could be embarrassed.
We all know how that goes: Doubt. Anxiety. Shame. Why even risk it?
One major reason for such anxiety is the feeling among many people that in order to enjoy wine, one must understand everything about it first. That requires long-term study.
This sense that wine must be pored over like a calculus textbook is disheartening. Some people give up immediately. Others approach with a sense of obligation.
We don’t propose intensive studying. Our curriculum requires only two things: drinking wine and remembering how it made you feel. The best foundation for learning about wine, we believe, is experience — that is, pulling corks and drinking.
Consuming a wide variety of wines, and considering your own reaction to them, is the best way to become more comfortable with your own taste.
If wine happens to excite you enough to want to open a book, that’s great. The academic study of wine may greatly enhance your pleasure. But only if you are motivated from within to do so.
The truth is, you can pick unsatisfying combinations of wine and food. Such experiences might be discouraging, but they are nonetheless essential. It’s hard to understand what you like if you can’t figure out what you don’t like. That is among the virtues of experience.
While reliable combinations satisfy endlessly, individual taste is subjective. And almost never is there only one correct wine to serve with any dish.
Roast chicken is a perfect example. Last month, I asked everybody to roast a chicken (or cook a vegetarian recipe) and pick wines that they thought would pare well with the dish. I was thrilled by the broad array of wines that readers loved with the chicken dishes they prepared.
Tried-and-true combos abounded — roast chicken with Burgundy, with Beaujolais, with Oregon pinot noir, with Côtes-duRhônes, with Northern Rhône syrah and with chenin blanc wines from the Loire Valley.
Other ideas bubbled up. Loire reds, cabernet francs from the Finger Lakes, nebbiolo wines from the Langhe region of northern Italy, trousseaus from the Jura, rieslings from Alsace, Chiantis, grüner veltliners, Champagnes, orange wines, Rhône whites, even the great, idiosyncratic white from Chateau Musar in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon.
“What is fascinating here is the sheer variety of wines and wine styles that everyone is enjoying,” wrote one reader, Larry of Boston, who believes in the Burgundy pairing above all others. “It’s an inspiration to branch out.”
Yet, were people to rely only on an app such as Pocket Wine, which purports to take the uncertainty out of pairing food and wine, many of these happy combinations would never have occurred.
I tried four wines — one white, three reds — with a chicken. I did not want to try combinations that were familiar or comfortable for me, although I did pick wines that I already knew I loved. They were:
Dreissigacker Rheinhessen riesling Organic Trocken 2018 (Schatzi Wines, Milan, New York), $19.99
Cirelli Montepulciano d’Abruzzo La Collina Biologica 2018 (Zev Rovine
Selections, Brooklyn, New York), $17.99
Alessandro e Gian Natale Fantino Rosso dei Dardi Vina Rossi 2016 (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, Berkeley, California), $19.99
Porter Creek Mendocino County Carignane Old Vine 2015, $27.99
I was pretty sure that these would all be satisfying combinations with the chicken, and they were. The expressive, pure, rich and energetic riesling was perhaps my favorite pairing, which surprised me because I gravitate toward reds with roast chicken.
Yet, I loved the soulful, earthy, delightful Montepulciano — it’s a wine I want to keep drinking. The Rosso dei Dardi, made mostly of nebbiolo blended with small amounts of dolcetto and freisa, was a lovely, gorgeous wine, and the Porter Creek, which you might remember from our examination of California carignan, is an old favorite, a little richer and more structured than the other two reds, with floral, licorice flavors.
As much as I loved the combination of the riesling and the chicken, would I choose it the next time? Probably not, because, with roast chicken, I simply want a red. That’s my preference, for whatever strange reason.
Not everybody agrees. Bill of Carmel, California, took issue with my experiential approach and recommended instead an article on the Wine Folly website that offered nine tips for pairing wine and food, along with various graphs and charts.
Not to pick on Wine Folly, but the article epitomizes the issues that I am citing. Wine Folly’s first rule: “The wine should be more acidic than the food.”
No argument, but most people have no idea of the relative acidity of wine and food. Reading that will get you nowhere unless you already have enough experience for it to make sense.
The article also asserts: “sauvignon blanc is lightbodied, but it has higher acidity. Chardonnay has more body, but it’s usually not too acidic.”
Again, these are the sort of simple, general statements that are confusing and useless. A sauvignon blanc from Quincy in the Loire may well be more acidic than a buttery, fruity chardonnay from California, but chances are a white Burgundy — chardonnay — will seem more acidic than a slightly sweet, fruity New Zealand sauvignon blanc.
The old writing axiom of “show, don’t tell,” applies especially to wine. You can memorize all sorts of helpful hints, but until you drink many different wines with a variety of foods, you will be stuck.
Even small, odd epiphanies that you discover yourself — I happen to love aligoté with spaghetti alle vongole — are evidence of the pleasures to be had. I would love that same dish with any number of Italian whites, although experience has taught me not to try it with an oaky chardonnay.
It is possible to take it all too seriously. One regular reader, Dan Barron of New York, has gone above and beyond in his pairing experiments. With roast chicken, he reports, he has tried over the years 52 red varieties, six rosés and 29 whites.
“I feel it’s easy to go way wrong: too heavy, too delicate, too tannic,” he said. His favorite has been a trousseau from the Jura. “Other bests, besides trousseaus, include nerello mascaleses and some pinot noirs. But both of those have also on occasion disappointed.”
I get his point. Sometimes you make magic. Sometimes you just have food and wine. In the end, is anything wrong with that?