Food and Wine Follies

Last night, I moderated a panel I had put together for the San Francisco Professional Food Society on the “Pleasures and Pitfalls of Food and Wine Pairing.” I’d been working on this for several months, trying to get my dream team panel in one place the same night, and so, on April Fool’s Day (a good date to take up such a topic), we descended on the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco.

Speakers included, alphabetically, Jon Bonné, editor of the SF Chronicle Wine section; Tim Hanni, one of the first American Masters of Wine and now a renegade who pokes well-researched fun at the wine education establishment; Dr. Hildegarde Heymann, the sensory analyst in the UC Davis Department of Viticulture and Enology and a leading researcher on this pairing business; and Burke Owens, formerly of COPIA and now doing marketing for Bonny Doon. The setting—Victor’s Palace on the 32^nd floor of the St. Francis, overlooking the city as night descended—was spectacular; the food and wine for the hands-on pairing part was excellent stuff; and the panel was in fine form.

I will confess that in my opening, I editorialized a bit. More than a bit. I emphasized the perils of crossing the line from recounting a personal experience—“I really like wine X with food Y”—to offering prescriptive advice—“You should drink wine X with food Y.” Among the anecdotes I offered to express my fear that this pairing stuff could get out of control was my recent experience in March down at the World of Pinot Noir conference and drink-in down in Shell beach on the Southern California coast. The food and wine pairing session featured four top-flight sommeliers from up and down the state, four tasty  from excellent kitchen at the Lido restaurant, and ten glasses of Pinot Noir, six still wines and four sparkling Blanc de Noirs.

The sommeliers, first of all, mis-identified two of the dishes, which means they were pairing with phantom foods not on the table; in one case, the “saffron—infused” fish dish turned out to owe its yellow hue to a Thai curry. For all the possible combinations, the experts were all over the map, full of divergent opinions about what worked and didn’t—not exactly offering guidance to the rest of us. But there was one point of agreement: two of the dishes wouldn’t pair well with any Pinot Noir on earth.

As I told the crowd last night, I decided to go out for a beer.

Hildegarde kicked the program off with a PowerPoint survey of what there is for rigorous scientific research into pairing—as opposed to the torrent of anecdotal opinion—and pointed out there was almost zip. Her own researches have focused on how food and wine combinations affect the perception of various qualities in wine—not whether the wine or food tastes better or worse, just how it’s different. Her basic finding is that just about any food will slightly reduce the perception of the qualities of any wine—the wine will be scored as a little less fruity after the food, a little less acidic, a little less tannic, and so on. So her hunch was that what makes us sometimes think the combinations are life-changing has to do with what’s in our heads already—personal history, cultural inheritance, the context in which we’re doing the tasting—and that those things can override the meager facts of the food/wine interactions.

After this little foray into science, we broke for a free-for-all tasting portion, circulating the 90 attendees past a number of tasting stations offering various good, bad, and indifferent combinations, plus some random appetizers, desserts, and additional wines. Got everybody loosened up.

Tim Hanni did his usual stand-up madness; if you’ve never seen and heard his shtick, you should. In a dozen different ways, Hanni argued that the belief that any two people experience wine and food the same way is insane, and he made and re-made the point with a dazzling string of 20-second forays into everything from wine history to neuroscience to optical illusions to autobiographical moments. The thread running through all this was that while the shoe industry offers a wide range of sizes, the wine industry and its educational evangelists pretend that one size fits all—which makes people either drink wine they don’t like or give up trying.

Jon Bonné tried to mount a defense of popular press efforts to offer some guidance through the immense thicket of wines out there. And he is surely right that there is a huge audience of people out there looking for guidance, buying books, reading the Chronicle Wine section, taking classes, and so on. But even Jon had to admit that from time to time, the experts get it entirely wrong—he thinks, for example, that Gewürztraminer is not half the match for Indian food it is cracked up to be—and sommeliers can get so full of themselves that they insist, despite the evidence, that some horrid combination is what their diners simply must have.

Burke Owens ended the presentations with a very sensible middle-ground position. He acknowledged all the complications and contra-indications that Hildegarde and Tim had laid out, but still said that it was useful to have a kind of template for approaching a pairing—factors like the sweetness level of a wine, its alcohol percentage, or its age. He’s right that all of us who go deep into this matching madness develop our own road maps; the problem, of course, is how transferable they are. Maybe Burke’s most important point is that the whole point here is fun, enjoyment of a whole culture of food, wine, friends, celebration—not working of a checklist.

What was delightful about the questions and comments that came from the floor, and from the people who came up to the speakers’ table afterwards, was the current of the-light-bulb-going-on: “You mean, it’s OK to just drink wine I like, with food I like?” You could almost hear the collective sigh of relief.

We hadn’t quite slain the monster of wine anxiety, but we had won one round.

Comments

[Jim G]

Hey Tim: Sounds like an eye-opening event. I agree that much of what is said about wine-food pairings is just one person's viewpoint. E.g,, I find that rich, fruity red wines like young Merlots or Zins are best with spicy Asian food, not crisp whites as many sommeliers would say, or sweet Gewurz as the average wine list suggests.