Difficult Wine Pairing Foods

White Asparagus salad with Salmon Gravlax from Topping Rose House April 20, 2016

Just saw this article from the NY Times about recipes for Asparagus and thought of the issues some foods create for pairing with wine. Asparagus is notorious for such. The asparagusic acidity in the vegetable is what creates that problem in pairing. This acidity along with the intensity of chlorophyl can make wines taste metallic and astringent. Wine is full of it’s own types of acidity and these can either pair or clash with certain styles of cuisine. Shellfish and Cabernet Sauvignon is notorious as is almost any wine with artichokes.

I happen to love asparagus and almost always drink a glass of wine with dinner, so creating a manner to make that paring more acceptable was a priority. One of the times that I was forced to consider how to pair asparagus and wine was for a wine dinner I did with Freemark Abbey when my friend Joseph Carr was working with them.

The key to creating a great pairing is balancing out the flavors and as acidity is one of the most prevalent flavor components in both wine and food, that is where to focus the efforts. Oak and alcohol can be stumbling blocks, so careful with wines heavy in those two areas. If you need to drink a wine with higher alcohol or heavy in oak or both then the dish must be adjusted somehow to allow such a pairing. How I did this with Freemark Abbey Chardonnay and Asparagus was to grill the vegetable after drizzling with olive oil, then dress with diced grilled pancetta and shaved Parmigiano-Reggiano. All of these little tweaks balance the acidic flavors of Asparagus so wine won’t clash. The same technique and theories can be applied to any food that has problems with high acidity and pairing with wine.

Artichokes, Chocolate, Hummus, Mexican Cuisine, Salad Dressing, Tomatoes and Blue Cheese are some of the tougher pairings. Some you adjust the dish or cooking process others, you make interesting wine selections and others you look to the country or region that the cuisine comes from and pair how the locals do.

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Terroir = scary, very scary

Terroir has been a controversial subject for wino’s as long as I can remember and likely for more than a century, possibly several. I don’t think the subject should be controversial, but like all complex theories and concepts, terroir needs to be explained in a simple manner. I find the best way to do this is comparing the concepts of terroir in terms of items that the newest of wine drinkers can understand.

A couple of weeks ago Steve Heimoff reposted a controversial comment by a reader about the subject and it’s purity in Europe versus it being a marketing ploy in the “new world”. That was after an original post by Steve that also featured that nasty word terroir. Tom Wark also published a post about the controversy of Terroir which doesn’t seem to have gotten as much intense debate as Steve’s. I wonder if that is a function of the difference in the size and type of their blog audiences or the difference in the tone of the posts.

The term terroir is just awkward, it doesn’t have a clean and exact translation and therefore is interpreted in many different ways. Yet it is important, the concept keeps wine from becoming a commodity like milk or coca-cola. Coke or Pepsi, Cab or Merlot. My guess is that 80% of the wine drinkers in the US who order a wine by the glass, order by grape without much regard as to where that Chardonnay or Pinot Grigio comes from.

I’d rather leave the term Terroir to wine geeks and think about wine like we do people. When I look at a glass or bottle of wine, I try to remember to ask it: who are you and where are you from. If I can’t get straight answers then I question the wines value. I give more value the more answers a wine gives me. Does it taste good, does it taste like the grape or style it claims to be, does it taste like it comes from somewhere in particular (not some wine factory), does tell me I won’t be  disappointed when I find forgotten bottles lurking in my cellar years after I first taste and buy the wine and will it go with the types of cuisine that I enjoy (and eat regularly). I am not taking a shot at ‘wine factories’, they are important for introducing people to wine and varietal wines and when all the other stuff just doesn’t matter (like when I’ve had too many glasses and my palate is impaired or when finances are tight). But I don’t want to pay more than a certain amount for a wine that is (only) tasty and does indeed taste like a Cabernet or Chardonnay or whatever it says on the label. If I pay more I want more answers.

Wine ought to say something of importance to me, not just get me drunk. But I think Randall Grahm really says it succinctly with this quote I found on Vinography:

“The only wines that matter are the wines of place. Everything else is dispensable and not necessary,”…

“But wines of place enrich the world. They make our world more interesting….”

Obviously from what I’ve written, I don’t agree that everything else is not necessary. There is a place for simple Cabernet Sauvignon or Pinot Noir. I just don’t want to pay too much for such. I gladly poured a Fred Franzia Pinot Noir by the glass at The Maidstone in East Hampton this summer because it tasted like a decent Sonoma Pinot Noir (and was priced right). Granted I would have pinned it as a cheap Carneros Pinot even though it was labelled as Russian River. But as both Tom and Steve have mentioned most wine consumer’s palates aren’t refined enough to tell the difference between Pinot Noir from those two neighbors.

From VineClub.org

As for the comment that started the debate on Steve Heimoff’s site that terroir only is relevent in ‘Old World’ wines and that Californian wines don’t offer expressions of terroir, I disagree entirely. If terroir isn’t relevent in California then why were the Chardonnay vines of Château Woltner on Howell Mountain grafted over to Cabernet Sauvignon? Isn’t that a pure example of terroir (& mother nature) telling a very famous wine family that they made a mistake? And that is only one example of terroir telling humans to plant something else.

Gaming the system

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Abreu, Enologix, Forman, McCloskey, parker, randall grahm, ratings, reviews, Vineyard, Wine, wine business, Wine Reviews, wine spectator, Winemaking

Am I ever going to catch-up with the system? Do I want to? I started this wine adventure when the winedom was fairly small. There were the big brands like Mondavi Woodbridge, Cavit, Kendall-Jackson and Gallo and the like and “serious” wine and wine buyers & wine professionals were hardly in the same field or industry. This was in the late 1980’s and it remained that way for at least another 5-8 years. Then something happened. I am not sure why or how, but the giant volume wine producers started getting into the boutique part of the wine industry. A part that had generally been left alone.

My research in the last several years (in preparation for a start-up) all point to how small that boutique part of the industry still is. And yet big commercial wine companies have fought hard to put that passionate part of the industry in their stranglehold. As I look at the wine industry today, I still don’t understand why, but the fallout has been severe on the tiny slice of the wine industry that I and many of my colleagues came to love. That slice is equivalent of 10-15% of the total industry. Where do I get these numbers from? There are about 77 million wine buyers in the US of that only about 9 million spend more than $20 a bottle…ever. That plus the recent published research that found 150 wine brands represent 85% of all wine sales in the US. That’s wine brands folks. Gallo probably owns between 10-15 of those themselves, then add in The Wine Group’s, Diageo’s and Constellations of the wine world and you probably can get those 150 brands under a dozen or two of actual wine companies. Find a list of the wine labels owned by the Goliaths here.

Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon was a speaker at the recent wine bloggers conference and his speech (I read it, wasn’t there) hit on if not all the problems in the wine industry then at least most. In the speech he mentions that gaming the system contributed heavily to the changes and downward spiral of “my little slice” of the wine industry. My opinion is that he is referring to the ability of wine companies to use technology and data diving to figure out what the most important wine critics look for in a very highly rated wine. Rumor has it that Caymus analyzed the wines that The Wine Spectator and Wine Advocate rated 90 points and above and determined what  attributes were common and began working to farm, ferment and age their wine in a manner that would result in wines the critics were rating the highest. There is another culprit out there as well, a math genius who figured out how to charge wineries for the results of algorithms done on the two most influential wine critics The Wine Spectaor & The Wine Advocate. Thank you to Leo McCloskey and Enologix for helping game the wine industry and letting all those megabrands take over the charming part of the wine industry. My apologies to Leo, he is a smart wine person with some fine ideas it’s just like anything great. In the right hands it is good, in the wrong ones well…

It is the same as my view of Robert Parker 100 points and Wine Spectators. They did not create the problem of points, the wine marketing and sales teams did. The wine sales part of the industry began flogging the numbers to make numbers (cases). The retailers fell in line and then so did the wine consumers. I even did it for a short-time, I started selling wines on the street in 1994 and for a (short) bit sold on Parker ratings. But when a new vintage of a highly rated wine got a lower rating, I lost my faith. It was confirmed when a friends wine kept getting 88’s, 89’s and 90’s on first Parker rating, then getting higher ratings in Parkers 10 years later issues. After I had “retired” from the street, Ric (Forman) started making wine for his friend (& vineyard manager) David Abreu. David’s wine became a darling of The Advocate (a string of 100’s) while Ric’s own wine continued to wallow in the high 80’s and low 90’s. And I continue to prefer an aged bottle of Forman Cabernet to anything from Abreu with the same age.

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