Pairing wine with food heightens the experience
Once, a few years ago, I was drinking a glass of full bodied Australian Shiraz while preparing an evening meal with friends. I had all but drained my wine when we sat down to perfectly grilled steaks, caramelized onions and other such fare. I cut off a fork-full of steak, topped it with some onions and popped it into my mouth – it was fantastic. I followed this with the last bit of wine left in my glass. The taste blew me away. The wine, good before the meal, was transformed into a deep, chocolatey, spicy nectar that was spectacular. I eagerly stabbed a second bite of steak and silently savoured its freshly enhanced flavour. It was at that point that I reached for the bottle only to find that it was empty. Misery of miseries, I was alone with my epiphany as everybody else was well into a second, different, bottle.
I hastily inquired of the label – how much money would I have to fork out (no pun intended) to have a bottle of this wine with every steak I would eat from that point on? Only a plane ticket to Australia – our friends had brought it back with them after a recent trip and it wasn’t (still isn’t) distributed in B.C. But the connection had been made. A little gold light bulb had turned on in my head; food and wine can make each other taste better.
This week, Whistler is hosting its seventh annual food and wine celebration, Cornucopia. It is a great opportunity for both devoted oenophiles (connoisseurs of wines) and neophytes to come together and learn about wines while sampling great food. In addition to the many seminars dedicated to wine and food pairings, several local restaurants are pairing up with wineries to provide multi-course feasts to highlight the wines. This is a great way to get your taste buds primed for flavour matches. I spoke with several chefs about how they approach the art of pairing wines with foods.
Learning any new skill, be it mathematics or carpentry, is best achieved by using different sense modalities at the same time. Seeing, hearing, doing, smelling and tasting all contribute important, yet different, messages to the brain that reinforce connections and make them stronger so that they are easier to access and recall. Learning to pair wine and food together is a perfect example of the wisdom gained from the interplays between tastes, smells and textures. Perhaps, because we rely so much on our sense of sight as a primary sensory cue, learning to fit food and wine together seems more abstract, after all red wine looks red and white wine, white.
Bear Foot Bistro’s executive chef, Brock Windsor, also highlighted a second difficulty for many people; that of matching vocabulary to describe wine with the wines themselves. He pointed out that it is hard for many people to find the words that they want to describe what they are tasting and he expressed the need for people to establish their own vocabulary, and above all, not to be afraid to do so. Flavours, after all, are dependent on personal interpretation. Like all good lessons, especially the ones that stick, learning through trial and error is best.
North Americans, generally, do not imbibe wine with their meals regularly. By regularly I mean with dinners and most lunches. In contrast, wine regularly accompanies European meals, and is as at home on the table as the salt shaker is on ours. In Europe, good, inexpensive wine is readily available from the many local vineyards, whereas in Canada, our two main wine producing areas, the Okanagan and the Niagara region, are 5,000 kilometres apart. In France you can walk to the local cave co-operative and fill up your choice of container with as much of the local stuff as you can carry.
Recently, say the last 50 years, North Americans have been undergoing a renaissance of wine appreciation. This has been paired with the growing availability and variety of different foods that have been introduced to this country by the myriad of cultures that make North America their home. It is an exciting time in North American gastronomy.
However, many of us look to our European neighbours with sidelong, downcast glances of envy and gastronomic awe. How can we ever learn the art of food and wine pairing? Fortunately, the best judge of taste, smell and textures that you like is yourself. You just have to step out and start trying different combinations. As noted previously, you will learn quickly from your mistakes – ever had a glass of orange juice after brushing your teeth? Then you know what I mean.
Oh but who wants to waste an expensive bottle of wine with a carefully planned, albeit incompatible meal? Well there are remedies to such culinary disasters. Hans Stierli, executive chef at the Westin Resort & Spa, insists that "if you put your mind behind it you could make any pairing work." The important thing is that you are learning and food is pretty changeable, you can add salt, sugar or acidic foods to a dish to help complement a wine’s flavour.
Wine and food pairing is really a skill of balancing flavours. Learning the general rules of how different wines taste is a matter of practice. Wine can be recognized in the same way that we choose fruit in the produce section at the grocery store; we recognize an apple by its shape and name and we are able to accurately recall its taste, even flavour differences between varieties like a red delicious and a granny smith. Similarly, with repeated tasting of Chardonnays, Cabernet Sauvignons, Merlots and other wines, a taste representation will form in your mind.
To make matches with food, you need to balance the basic flavours in the wines and the food. Basic flavours are salty, sweet, sour and savory (sometimes referred to as umami). If you have a wine that tastes acidic on its own pair it with a dish that is sweet and rich, something with honey or butter for example. Buttered scallops, accented with truffles and paired with a Pinot Grigio is Araxi’s (and the Blue Water Café in Vancouver) executive chef, James Walt’s, favourite wine/food combination. Particular flavour enhancers in food can help to complement wine tastes. Chef Walt likes to bring out the floral notes in a wine using sour flavours that offer a citrus taste without a lot of acidity; kaffir lime leaves or lemongrass as opposed to strong vinegars or lemon juice.
Hailing from France, Alain Fortier, executive chef at La Bocca, is used to pairing food and wine together. For a winemaker’s dinner he insists that there should not be a lot of complicated sauces or rich ingredients but, instead, a focus on simple, pure flavours. He also stresses the importance of avoiding similar tastes between courses.
"You want to switch (the food) to have a real palate difference for each course." Chef Windsor, when describing the construction of a wine tasting menu, gesticulates with his hands, "you want a staircase of flavour," moving from light and crisp to rich and heavy.
All four chefs emphasized the importance of using seasonal, fresh foods as the key to a good dish. In the end, a well balanced dish will be delicious with most wines. Some trouble foods exist, namely asparagus and ginger. Chef Walt notes that it is particularly difficult to pair the delicate, subtle, clean flavours of Japanese dishes with wines. He often adjusts Japanese-influenced dishes by adding additional miso for a stronger, salty, earthy flavour. For an unmistakeable match, Chef Stierli and Chef Windsor advocate foie gras with a sweet wine such as Sauternes or Tokay, "your mouth just explodes," says Brock.
"I don’t care if it’s very old fashioned, my favourite is Beaujolais. It is perfect," Chef Fortier exclaims.
Even among the culinary elite, there are distinct taste preferences. There are no right or wrong ways to put these flavours together but instead to continue to taste and to garner knowledge from your own palate. Chef Stierli eloquently remarks that "wine and food is a living thing; it changes from year to year." The important thing is, they go together to enhance each other.
For more information on winemakers dinners during the upcoming Cornucopia festival call 1-888-999-4566 or visit www.myWHISTLER.com/cornucopia. There is also a local wine tasting fundraiser for the Whistler Skating Club featuring Hester Creek Wines on Nov. 1st. For tickets call 932-2396 or e-mail: ivg@telus.net
