Food For Thought

Nation's Restaurant News, May 28, 2001 by Bret Thorn

When pairing food and wine, try starting with the beverage

Bret Thorn

More and more often when talk to chefs these days, they bring up the subject of wine. As our love affair with this most food-friendly of beverages continues to blossom, many chefs are becoming more focused on how their food goes with wine.

So Arctic char wins praise for going well with wines ranging from hearty Merlot to sprightly Sauvignon Blanc. Squab is favored because it stands up so well to the popular, mightily flavored California Cabemets.

Generally food and wine are paired by tasting the food and then deciding what kind of wine goes best with it. But once wine is in the bottle, that's it. The types and ripeness of the grapes, the characteristics of the soil, the way the wine was aged, "those things you cannot change," points out Craig Schauffel, cochef and co-owner of Pairs, a restaurant in Napa Valley, Calif., which grew out of Schauffel's business of catering for Napa wineries.

Food, on the other hand, can be flavored, seasoned and tweaked up to the moment you put it in your mouth.

So Schauffel, his partner and brother Keith Schauffel and various other chefs across the country are starting with wine and putting together food to go with it.

Craig Schauffel says he looks for flavors in food that either highlight the flavors of the wine and bring them out or else mimic the wine's dominant flavors, thus neutralizing them so that the wine's more subtle characteristics can come through.

So for a Zinfandel that tastes of raspberry and pepper he might serve duck with black pepper and raspberry chutney. With the dominant flavors out of the way, the wine might reveal black cherry flavor from the grapes, Schauffel suggests, or vanilla from the oak in which the wine was aged, or maybe chocolate undertones.

Or maybe a Gewurztraminer or Riesling with pineapple overtones would be paired with lightly grilled prawns in curry with coconut basmati rice -- can you say Pina Colada?

Jeff Heineman is working under a similar premise at Grapeseed, a restaurant he opened in Bethesda, Md., in April 2000. He alters his menu according to what wines he has, and many guests take him up on his suggested pairings.

He has found that a spicy German Riesling from Louis Guntrum has "a richness and a lingering sweetness" that goes well with the sort of Asian black bean sauce often served with clams. He serves it with escargots instead.

Certain California Pinot Noirs, especially those from Santa Barbara, go well with tuna seared in olive oil and served with crispy capers, he says. "'The Pinot Noir matches up with the tuna really well, and the capers give a little bit of salinity and a vinegar edge that cut through the edge of the wine," Heineman says. A French Pinot Noir, on the other hand, would have been lost in such a flavorful dish, he says.

Schauffel points out that in Burgundy or Bordeaux, people eat the food that comes from the region and drink the wine made from grapes that grow there, so the marriage with wine happens naturally. "The style of the wine dictates the style of the cuisine," he says. "There's a reason why they serve what they serve."

Here in America, With all the foodstuffs that flood our shores and the world full of wines that we have access to, we have a lot more choice, and that allows us to make some counterintuitive or downright freaky choices when it comes to wine-and-food pairings.

Daisuke Utagawa, chef-owner of Sushi-Ko in Washington, D.C., has created his own terminology when it comes to pairing wine and food. He describes tastes as having shape, color, sound and weight -- in that order of importance. So when he tastes wines he doesn't write adjectives; he uses colored pens, indicating the color of the taste of the wine, not the color of the wine itself and draws the shape of the taste. He pairs that wine with food whose taste has a similar shape and color.

Hey, whatever works. He does come up with some awfully interesting stuff.

He found a red Provencal wine "that had a very fine quality," but whose taste was "louder" than most Burgundies and had a very interesting shape. To complement it he found oysters from Aix-enProvence, and, to tie the flavors together topped it with ponzu jelly and mint.

Utagawa's favorite wine to serve with "pretty much all sushi" is a red Burgundy: 1988 Chambolle-Musigny Premiere Cru Les Amoureuses from Domaine Jacques-Frederic Mugnier, which he says is not as "loud" as most other Burgundies.

"If these tastes are complementary to each other, no matter how unusual it sounds it doesn't really matter," says Utagawa. "I'm approaching it in the more honest way of how it tastes."