Wine And Food Pairings

NAPA ROSE

Andrew Sutton, chef at Disney’s Napa Rose, notes that as American cookery employs less butter and cream, wine pairings are turning away from the usual fruit-forward matches.

BEVERAGE STRATEGIES

NEW Parameters for

PAIRING

BY JACK ROBERTIELLO

s the American palate for wine and food, separately and together, continues to evolve, smart chefs and sommeliers are making sure that pairings are broad, deep and coherent. They’re searching out more Old World wines to match today’s lighter, fresher fare, hosting wine dinners developed through kitchen-cellar collaboration, participating in special events and promotions showcasing vintages beyond award-winning powerhouse wines and staying attuned to what customers really want.

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DEFLECTING FRUIT BOMBS Chefs and sommeliers are putting less emphasis on oldfashioned wine dinners, especially those where a celebrated vintner might appear before a handful of guests to unleash massive, potent Cabernets and Chardonnays; the rich vanilla oakiness of these wines often forces chefs to reach for the butter to help dishes stand up to a wine’s fruit-bomb intensity. “The biggest change in the past 10 years has been the palate of the average guest,” says Andrew Sutton, executive chef of Napa Rose at Disney’s Grand Californian Hotel & Spa at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, Calif. American cookery is now far less reliant on cream and butter; Sutton estimates that his sauces use 70 percent stock and only 30 percent butter these days, much less

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Chefs, sommeliers and winemakers look beyond color-coding to create worldly, taste-driven matches for food and wine

than when he trained, more than two decades ago. As a result, intense, concentrated and fruit-forward New World vintages, while still attracting lots of praise, are taking a back seat to wines that make more harmonious matches. Michael Jordan, master sommelier and general manager of Napa Rose, recalls the not-too-distant past, when “you couldn’t give away the great European wines in Southern California. All [customers] wanted was oaked Chard and Cab; that was the limit of their taste and experience.” But now that Americans are better traveled and more aware of the world of international flavors, they expect their restaurants to reflect a worldview, in terms of both cuisine and wines, Jordan says. Meanwhile, sommeliers are turning away from classic, rote matches that actually may not have worked. EXPLORING NEW REGIONS For some restaurants, building a pairing program with special dinners works to keep the kitchen and servers fresh and to build guest loyalty and traffic. Every Thursday, Castagna, a Mediterranean restaurant in Portland, Ore., explores lesser-known wine areas of the globe and wines from smaller organic and biodynamic producers, both domestic and international, who work with traditional grape varieties. Each wine is accompanied by a dish from the same region, offered as a four-course menu or a la carte. Flights are priced at $15 for three 2-ounce pours.

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Sommelier Derek George expanded weekly tasting dinners at The Lodge in Vail, Colo., to include sake, beers and other spirits, based on each course’s distinct flavors.

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The menu for a recent dinner that focused on Austria included bouillon with nettle dumplings, paired with a pale, crisp Grüner Veltliner; a chanterelle and mâche salad with Zweigelt, a red with a bit of bite; and a Rouladen with red cabbage and spaetzle, partnered by a spicy Blaufränkisch. Castagna’s Monique Siu, in charge of the front of the house, says the pairings evolve naturally due to the restaurant’s culinary concept. “We feature traditional European dishes on our menu, and often they seem to go with the wines that they grew up with,” she says. “It’s a regional focus more than, say, trying to taste the wine and figure out the perfect dish and sauce to go with it. It’s more about matching regional dishes and wines and serving them together.” Siu also uses the dinners to showcase wines on the list and to try different items from vintners the restaurant already features. Looking for a more creative promotion than the winemaker dinner, Jeff Groh of The Heathman Restaurant & Bar, also in Portland, Ore., came up with the Dueling Sommelier Dinner Series.

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“This gives us the opportunity to present a wide array of wines that people have never tried and may never have wanted to try,” he says. Since the wines are served “blind,” customers judge strictly on how well they go with each course, without knowing the maker or even the varietals. Broadening their wine horizon serves a selfish purpose, says Groh: “The last thing a sommelier wants to do is sell the same wine over and over again; that will just make us obsolete.” SEASONAL GUIDES While some restaurants depend on a culinary core to guide wine pairings, for others, that’s not an option. “Food-and-wine pairing is an interesting challenge at Aquavit, because Scandinavia has no wine culture to speak of and no traditional wine cuisine,” says Sean Kerby, beverage director at Aquavit restaurant in New York City. “This creates the opportunity to look at sundry appellations to find wines that complement our distinctive cuisine.” Kerby’s overall approach at the occasional wine dinners Aquavit hosts is to work with the restaurant’s seasonal menus. “Just as I cannot go to a winemaker and ask for a specially made wine for a particular dish,

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BEVERAGE STRATEGIES

“Michael and I have a healthy debate and then sit down together and try to make it work to share that experience with the guest,” explains Sutton. This process always produces surprises: Recently, Jordan was convinced a Sancerre would go best with a goat cheese sourced especially for the restaurant; instead, a Sauvignon Blanc from Austria hit the mark. “Food-friendly” is a general term to describe wines with high acidity, mild tannins, bright fruit and low alcohol content, important qualities when looking for an allround pairing wine. But beyond the basic rules — dry wines taste thin and acidic when served with sweets, red-meat dishes welcome assertive reds — the concept of foodfriendliness can create problems if applied too rigorously.

THE HEATHMAN

GUIDED BY DINERS

Jeff Groh of The Heathman in Portland, Ore., created Dueling Sommelier Dinners to present a wider array of wine pairings than a traditional winemaker’s dinner allows.

I cannot expect the chef to change his menu to accommodate a wine. My challenge is to take these two static elements — a list of wines and a list of dishes — and find what works together.” FLEXIBILITY PREVAILS There’s greater flexibility at operations where wine dinners are built into the basic concept. At Napa Rose, Sutton and Jordan work on pairings all year for a tasting menu; called The Vintners Table, it changes weekly. Each of four courses is matched with a different wine. For each pairing, the two sit down and hash out preferences based on market availability, new ideas, current trends and lots of tasting. With more than 1,000 wines inhouse, and more than 80 available by the glass, the search is intense.

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When sommeliers create wine dinners, preconceived notions often run up against reality. Erica Landon, sommelier at Ten 01 in Portland, Ore., and a Dueling Sommelier participant, says she learned as much as her customers did during the competition. “I didn’t really understand how subjective it was,” she reflects. “People have an idea of the wines they love, but there were so many times that we [the sommeliers] liked the pairings, yet the customer vote was split.” Wines that sommeliers liked repeatedly scored poorly with guests, which changed the way Landon approaches customers; now she seeks to satisfy their personal tastes rather than achieve a “perfect match.” But, says Sutton, customers are responding well to less-familiar varietals popular with sommeliers, like Albariño (a rich, fruity white), Fiano di Avellino (a dry white) and Negroamaro (an earthy, deep red), allowing him to stretch as a chef. It also lets him build menus more around fresh vegetables, say, instead of relying on “fins, feathers and fur.” One of Jordan’s favorite pairings is a salad of heirloom tomatoes (both chef and sommelier grow their own for the restaurant) with a Sangiovese rosé. Wines with residual sugar have become more acceptable, as salty and spicy Asian flavors influence American cooking, says Kerby.

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CHINA GRILL MANAGEMENT

BEVERAGE STRATEGIES

“Wines from [unknown] areas and grapes that are unfamiliar to adventuresome palates are really welcomed as people consider wine pairings an educational as well as a gustatory experience,” Kerby adds. “When people are surprised, then skeptical, then wowed, it heightens the experience more than if you say, ‘Here is a Chablis with your oysters.’” NEW WINE EXPERIENCES It’s these new experiences that led Master of Wine Tim Hanni of Napa, Calif., to research how the brain processes and interprets sensory information. Hanni has advised the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based P.F. Chang’s China Bistro chain on its wine list and worked with Jeffrey Chodorow’s international China Grill Management chefs on flavor balancing, which Hanni describes as “the art of getting the key taste components in a balance.” He says that while sweetness and umami flavors make food delicious, those characteristics also make most wines seem thinner, less fruity and more bitter. Increasing

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the salt and acidity in the dishes automatically renders them more wine friendly. “Look at the cuisines of Alsace, Tuscany, Burgundy and Bordeaux, and you will see this is what they intuitively do in all these classic cuisines,” Hanni points out. The success of regularly repeated pairings, whether for formal dinners or a la carte, has spurred a wider-ranging search for the right match. At The Lodge at Vail in Vail, Colo., certified sake sommelier Derek George expanded the pairings for weekly tasting dinners by introducing a sake menu. He recently paired seared diver scallops with Rihaku “Wandering Poet” Junmai Ginjo sake, onion soup with Tentaka Kuni “Hawk in the Heavens” Junmai sake and pan-roasted Alaska halibut with Rihaku “Dreamy Clouds” Tokubetsu Junmai Nigori sake. “Sake’s flavors range from really earthy and mushroomy to floral and tropical fruit, so there’s a wide range of pairings possible,” George says. He also offered mixed beverage-

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With Asian ingredients influencing American cuisine, and dishes like China Grill’s Tuna Tempura with Wasabi entering the mainstream, wines with residual sugar gain greater acceptance.

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COMPARE AND CONTRAST

NAPA ROSE

While standard food-and-wine-pairing practices — e.g., using acidity to cut fatty foods and higher tannins to stand up to highprotein dishes — hold true, sometimes a dish’s flavor profile calls for more than one wine, notes Aquavit’s Kerby. At a recent dinner featuring Italian wines, Kerby found that the rich, fleshy quality of an aged, dry and crisp Ribolla Gialla and a rare, aged, sweet Malvasia, two unusual white wines, made for an ideal “compare and contrast” pairing with Smoked Char in Apple-Horseradish Broth. In some cases, the idea of providing wineand-food pairings for customers so permeates a restaurant’s approach that special pairing events lose their appeal, and some restaurateurs have eliminated the formal wine dinner. At Bina Osteria in Boston, for instance, new dishes and wines entering the menu are selected because they go together, and every part of the program makes it easy for people to order safe matches, says Babak Bina, coowner of Bina Osteria, Bin 26 and Lala Rokh. That’s impressive, considering that the wines listed by the glass are mostly lesser-known varietals like a citrusy Garganega, a crisp, acidic Trebbiano and a rich, earthy Teroldego. “We have a list that lends itself to our food,” asserts Bina. “We’re not just throwing wines on there to satisfy quotas or the fad of the month as pronounced by the wine magazines. They’re chosen specifically to complement dishes on our menu. They are all food wines; it makes the job of pairing a lot easier.” One of the key goals for a wine-and-food pairing is to give customers the chance to discover a wine they like — not because it’s gotten good reviews or because a sommelier thinks it’s the greatest, but because it tastes great with what they’re eating. &

Master Sommelier Michael Jordan often pairs fine European wines with the contemporary American cuisine served at Napa Rose.

and-food tasting menus last winter; one paired Chimay ale with a short-rib Napoleon, followed by sake with oyster tempura, mixedgrill lamb with a vin de pays d’Oc and braised monkfish with an Italian white.

TAK E -AWAY

T I P S

HOST A DUEL: Invite two sommeliers to present blind tastings for a special wine dinner and let customers be the judge LET’S GO EURO: After years of

focusing on California wines, chefs and sommeliers are returning to European regions for pairing inspirations MIX IT UP: Recommend wine for one course, beer for another and sake or spirits for others SIMPLE ADDITION: Add a few

JACK ROBERTIELLO writes about spirits, cocktails, wine, beer and food from Brooklyn, N.Y.; he can be e-mailed at [email protected].

Austrian, Spanish or regional Italians to a list heavy in Cabernets and Chardonnays

BINA

LIGHT FLIGHTS: Offer mini-flights to introduce diners to wines from lesser-known regions

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