Curry & wine? YES, PLEASE
FOOD Toronto sommelier Beverly Crandon wants us to rethink wine pairings
Toronto-based sommelier Beverly Crandon is on a mission.
For the past decade, she’s been looking to find a wine to go with every cuisine in the city — from Trinbagonian to Thai — making the case that existing rules on food and wine pairings aren’t reflective of the people who eat, drink and cook in a city like Toronto.
To prove her point, Crandon is organizing Spring Into Spice, an outdoor food and drink festival on May 28 at the Stackt Market that combines winemakers with dishes from around the world.
Over plates of curry crab dumplings, lobster tacos and fried jerkspiced chicken tacos at Chandon Beni (936 Queen St. W.), Crandon walks us through pairing suggestions and talks about her pairing process, redefining flavours and why having diverse sommeliers is good for the bottom line.
What was it like starting out in wine?
I came from a (marketing) job where I had to sell things and solve problems. When you’re getting into a new career and space, you have to sell yourself and tell others that you deserve to be here. I had those skills, but I can’t hide my skin colour or the big hair so there are things in the space you still have to battle. And the space is still run by predominately white people.
In five to 10 years that will change and we will have more people of colour at the table, but trying to break in this field is pretty difficult.
What got you interested in exploring these pairings?
When I fell in love with the art of pairing wine with food, I never thought I could take this home and mix it with Caribbean food. In my head, I felt the two didn’t go together, but we know it’s from years of conditioning and what you see on TV.
When you’re new in wine, you just go back to your food memories. When I was using words from my upbringing and it wasn’t accepted, I knew something was wrong. You and I have different backgrounds and experiences. What smells like quince to you might smell like monkey apple from Guyana to me. That’s perfectly fine.
Have you seen any improvements in diversity in the wine industry?
I volunteer with a group called Vinequity and it’s about giving people mentorships or funds to go to wine school. I feel in five, seven, maybe 10 years you’ll see more of that.
Instructors will say they see a lot of people of colour in their classes, but there’s something that’s blocking them from going to the next level, or when they have the credentials to get a job, there’s something stopping them. That’s another therapy session, because it’s like you’re going into this world where you’ll never see (someone like) yourself. That’s scary. Who’s my ally going to be?
A large reason why I do this is that if someone isn’t trying to pair the beauty of wine with all of these foods, or “ethnic” foods even though I really don’t like using the term, what happens to the industry and the market share?
Obviously, I want people to enjoy wine and I think my pairings work, but there’s also the economics of it.
That’s a lot of lost wine sales when you say it’s difficult to pair it with whole swaths of cuisines.
Totally.
So, let’s talk pairings. We have a plate of fried lobster tacos in front of us. What goes with this?
(Crandon opens a bottle of 2020 Folklore, a sparkling wine from Niagara’s Nyarai Cellars run by Steve Byfield.)
I want to pair it with Steve’s wine.
He’s the only Black winemaker we have in Canada. I grew up in Kitchener, and so did he. He knew my older brother and our moms worked together and were really good friends. We do a lot of work together and it’s wonderful where we can talk about the same things without feeling weird, like how to pair ackee and salt fish.
I call Steve the master blender. This vintage has a bit more Sauvignon Blanc (grapes) in it, and it has a reputation for being a wonderful food pairing wine. What do you think?
It’s sweet so it counterbalances the heat of the spicy mayo in the tacos. The high acidity cuts through the lobster, like squeezing lemon onto something fried.
Exactly. Sparkling helps lighten the weight of being fried, and there’s 11 grams of residual sugar in here. All sparkling wines generally have a high volume of residual sugar because it’s naturally very acidic and most table white wines will have two or three grams. The acidity cleanses the palate and the bubbles help to balance out the frying.
Speaking of heat, you wrote that spice is often confused for heat, which creates a hesitation when pairing wine with foods that use a lot of spice, even though nutmeg, cloves and allspice are words used to describe wine.
I spent some time with a fellow who teaches the art of wine and food pairing at Durham College and we were talking about why certain palates can handle spice and how it comes from years of conditioning. The people who make the rules about wine pairing make assumptions of what your food tastes like. If you use black pepper and they’re not accustomed to that in their cooking, they paint spice and heat as the same.
When I Googled that spice is synonymous with heat, there were millions of results. We need to change that — it’s making an assumption about something you don’t know. Your food is OK with wine, but mine isn’t, and wine is associated with being elite and prestigious, so what does that make me?
OK, let’s do a spice-heavy food: fried jerk-spiced chicken tacos.
(Crandon opens a bottle of Cozzarolo Sauvignon Blanc from the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region in Italy.)
It’s a very cool climate in Friuli, and the grapes are on the hillside so you’re going to have great acidity in there. These guys they do a lot of lees aging, which is where the grapes sits on dead yeast, so you’re going to get a creamy, velvety texture. This also goes well with peppery notes because it coats the tongue. Depending on where it grows on the hillside and how ripe it gets, sometimes it picks up tropical fruit flavours so I thought to try this with the jerk.
Riesling is also a safe bet. I try to be general if someone wants a wine they can find at the LCBO, unless someone wants to nerd out and get really specific.
I prefer the sparkling more, but I think if you have these tacos with the pickled onions served on the side, then the Sauvignon Blanc would be better because the onions are really acidic and it’ll be too much with the bubbles.
Look at you nerding out!
Now for the curry crab dumplings. I want to try it with the reds. I poured this Pinotage (a 2019 variety from South African winemaker Spioenkop) ahead of time because the tannins can be pretty big and I don’t want that to lead the show. There’s some wonderful red, black and blue fruits in there as well. The pinotage has seen 11 months in oak, so there should be some congruent feeling when you eat the curry.
The wine has a really deep oak flavour, which holds up well against the strong curry flavour.
There’s also coconut in the curry. I once paired a Cabernet Sauvignon with the curry goat. That wine had oak, along with vanilla. So it made a wonderful vanilla-coconut pairing.
So what keeps you going, even if the industry still has a ways to go?
What fuels me is when people reach out to me. They weren’t wine drinkers before but they’re asking what should they drink with oxtail. It might just be that one person, but having those conversations really moves me and encourages me to do the next event. The conversations around why we think wine only works with these foods and changing opinions — that’s what fuels me to keep doing this.