The most visible part of a somm’s job, however, consists of making tableside recommendations for choosing wine to accompany their establishment’s various dishes. Pairing, as this process is typically called, is either an art or a science, depending on your point of view, but in either case is considered to be a very serious thing indeed. It hasn’t always been this way, or, at least hasn’t always been quite the life and death issue it has become.
Not so long ago, aligning food and wine was a considerably simpler enterprise, its boundaries clearly marked by tradition, custom and habit. There were firm rules about what was properly served with what; a little memorization being all that was required. Madeira or Sherry was your apéritif, Champagne went down with the oysters, Burgundy with a roasted bird, Bordeaux with the tenderloin, Port with the Stilton. Game, set, match. I like to refer to this period — obsessed as it was by hierarchy, standardization and a kind of universality — as wine’s neo-classical era.
What put an end to it would be a long story, involving strong postwar dollars, cheap airfares and the increased mobility that put more American tourists into Europe’s provincial cities and countryside where they thrilled to regional cuisines and indigenous wines never before encountered. A generation of ambitious entrepreneurs began sussing out the best examples of these, and making them available. Berkeley’s Kermit Lynch was a pioneer in this effort, among others.
Quite suddenly, the world of wine choice was expanded exponentially. With it came a heightened awareness and appreciation of what we might call territoriality: the idea that each of the many thousands of plots that give rise to wine is somehow special, conveying a unique set of features to the wine that is sourced from it.
This focus on the minutiae of soils and sites isn’t exactly new, and while it has undeniably positive aspects, its net effect has been to fracture the world of wine into innumerable distinct, isolatable bits — enough to make you dizzy. I call this, our current era, wine’s romantic period, because of its fascination with diversity, particularity and exoticism.
One result of this expansive choice has been to make pairing seem so complex and specialized that only a sommelier can manage it. It shouldn’t be this way. It doesn’t need to be. My sense is that a significant part of the problem is a too-fussy approach to the topic in general. To help get our thinking right side up, consider the following four observations.
One, your home (where most wine and food pairing happens) is not a restaurant and the restaurant model for this kind of activity doesn’t really apply in the domestic environment. While it’s sensible to try to make good choices, attempting to accomplish what a sommelier and a chef can do together in a professional dining room with a bigger budget and more resources can only be an exercise in frustration.
Two, it’s worth remembering that in those places where wine is made, people have historically gotten along just fine by cracking open the local product with whatever’s on the table. Think about this: If you lived in Beaune, chances are you’ll be drinking basic red and white Burgundy (Chardonnay and Pinot Noir), routinely, with pretty much everything. Part of this is habit, for sure, but part is availability and loyalty to the regional economy and culture. It helps that in these places, the cuisine has grown up together with the wine culture.
Three, the idea that compatibility between wine and food can be reduced to a series of one-to-one correspondences is nonsensical. For any given dish there are scores of wine choices that will be equally agreeable. That’s because a happy pairing depends on broad character traits, not on some pinpoint consonance between what’s on the plate and what’s in the glass. To convince yourself of the truth of this, think about how pleased you were that night in a Barcelona back street tapas bar, where you chose a few glasses of wine from a hastily chalked blackboard and sipped them with a succession of small plates, all different. There were some surprises, for sure, and here and there an intriguing dissonance. But it was all fun and, in its own way, the experience served as a mini master class in the subject.
Four, pairing should never get in the way of drinking what you know (or have reason to believe) you like and avoiding what you don’t. Could anything be more obvious? Nobody’s enjoyment is enhanced when wrangled into consuming something they just don’t fancy, because it’s deemed to be “correct.” It’s good to be a little adventurous, certainly. But adventure loses its charm when it ranges into the uncomfortable or downright disagreeable.Sometime soon, we’ll look at some simple practical approaches to thinking about what works with what. ’Till then, lighten up, a little, eh Cap’n?