Food & Wine Pros
What kind of food should you serve with fine wine?
Most of the time we’re pairing wine and food it’s the food that comes first but for people in the trade it’s more often about what food will flatter the wine. But how do you ensure a successful match?
I went to two top end wine dinners last week which took different approaches to the task. The first a tasting and dinner hosted simultaneously in Brussels, Hamburg and London by the Bureau Interprofessionel des Vins de Bourgogne showcased premier crus, especially Chablis, Meursault and Gevrey-Chambertin.
They decided on a four course menu with effectively two main courses - roast breast of chicken with pearl barley and vegetable risotto to showcase Maison Albert Bichot’s Domaine du Pavillon 2010 Meursault les Charmes and seared rump of lamb with borlotti bean, marrow and confit tomato cassoulet to go with a 2013 Gevrey-Chambertin Clos Prieur from Maison Louis Max.
The first course, which was paired with Nathalie and Gilles Fèvre’s 2010 Chablis Vaulorent was a a dish of very lightly cooked smoked fish with chive and lemon creme fraiche and ‘young leaves and shoots’
Picking out the flavours of the wines
Clearly the thinking had been to come up with pairings based on the flavours that could be found in or which complemented the wines. A trace of smokiness in the Chablis, for example, mirrored that in the fish, the cream offset it and the citrus picked up on the still fresh acidity of the wine. Chicken is invariably a safe bet with chardonnay so they were on solid ground with the Meursault, though the glazed shallot was an imaginative touch which particularly flattered the wine.
Interestingly a similar ingredient appeared in the other dinner, a very glamourous affair hosted in the Berry Bros & Rudd directors’ dining room. Here the caramelized note was provided by the glazed endive that was served in the first course with duck pastrami and crisp little gorgonzola fritters which picked up the rich golden character of the two 2004 burgundies they served, a La Sève du Clos Meursault from Arnaud Ente and a Le Montrachet Grand Cru from Domaine des Comtes Lafon. A particularly bold pairing that could only have come from road-testing the match with the wine or one very similar to it.
Should you save the best wine for the cheese?
Given they had both red burgundy and bordeaux to show off they went for the classic French solution of serving the burgundies - a 1999 Jacques-Frederic Mugnier Chambolle Musigny and a 1999 Gevrey-Chambertin Clos St Jacques from Domaine Armand Rousseau - with the main course (roast saddle of lamb with anchovy, parsley and mint) and the bordeaux with the cheese which I seem to recall, though things were slightly hazy by this stage, were a Rollright, a washed rind cheese made in the style of a Reblochon, a punchy Lincolnshire Poacher and a Shropshire Blue. Personally I found they didn’t really do the wines - a fragile 1945 (NO, that’s not a misprint - 1945!) Clos Fourtet St Emilion and an utterly glorious 1990 Chateau Margaux (for me the wine of the evening) many favours but what do you do? The sort of people who dine at Berry’s (mainly chaps of a certain age, I imagine) no doubt both expect cheese and to drink the best reds in the house with it. Personally I’d rather go with beef or lamb and if I had to serve cheese pick just one but again guests expect a proper cheeseboard, regardless of whether its contents detract from the wine or not. It’s a dilemma.
The burgundies did work beautifully with the lamb however.
Should you serve a sweet wine?
Desserts were also handled differently. Given that burgundy doesn’t produce sweet wine the BIVB didn’t serve anything with the refreshing lemon and honeycomb mousse they picked, which was accompanied by poached fruit, brown sugar meringue and almond brittle. It worked fine - you didn’t really need one - but an alternative might have been to serve a liqueur from the region from someone like Gabriel Boudier.
At Berry Brothers they decided to use the dessert course as a platform to show off a very special port - the Graham’s 90 Very Old Tawny Port that had been specially bottled to celebrate the Queen’s 90th birthday that happened to be that day (what a treat!). They boldly paired it with a chocolate delice with passion fruit curd and ginger ice cream which worked surprisingly well - it was still extraordinarily vibrant - though the cheese - especially the Shropshire Blue - would have worked too.
Apart from the use of caramelisation, one of the other interesting things I noted was the use of bitter ingredients, particularly in the main course lamb dish at the burgundy dinner which included olives, capers and preserved lemon - all of which tend to heighten the fruit in older wines. Other dishes employed anchovy, cavolo nero and rosemary to similar effect. Care was taken though not to overwhelm any of the dishes with over-flavourful vegetables or intense jus which could have knocked the stuffing out of these spectacular vintages.
Ideally you would have a run-through before a dinner of this kind but with old, rare and possibly priceless wines that might well not be possible. The key thing I think is to make sure the chef and front of house team both try the wines being poured with the food so they can consign it to their palate memories for a future occasion.
(Incidentally a neat trick from Berry Bros. They marked both the menu and the glasses with coloured dots so you could remember, in your befuddled state, which glass was which!)
I attended the dinners as a guest of the BIVB and Berry Bros & Rudd respectively.
Main image credit: Kerstin Riemer from Pixabay
Red wine and red meat - what could possibly go wrong?
Wine writer Stuart Walton casts a sceptical eye over accepted wisdom:
Can there any more dependable rule of thumb when it comes to gastronomic partnering than red wines with red meats? It’s as though it’s the one piece of advice that hardly needs any qualifying. The big, muscular structures of most red wines are what the sinewy, densely textured or highly flavoured qualities of red meat need.
Like many another guideline, though, it turns out to have its range of exceptions. And if there is one basic principle behind the mismatches, it is that the wine is too heavy for the food.
I was reminded of this point at a recent press lunch, where the wines of highly regarded Chilean producer Aurelio Montes (who has interests in Argentina and the Napa too) were paired with some fairly straightforward dishes. A three-year-old Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon that has benefited from a judicious oaking regime – some of the wine barrel-aged, some not, some of the oak new, some not, all of it French – with roast rack of lamb? Sounds a no-brainer.
In fact, it missed by a country mile, principally because the tannic edge on the wine was still quite keen, and there was an unfashionable, distinctly mdocain astringency to it. Alongside the pink-cooked lamb, which was served in one piece and was on the distinctly fatty side, the wine wasn’t having any of it. The softness of the meat and the only lightly rendered fat needed something correspondingly softer to accompany it.
We often assume that fattiness in food needs something in the wine to cut through it. In the case of red wines with fatty red meats (duck would be another good example), that cutting-edge comes much more digestibly in the form of ripe acidity than greenish tannin. Of the two supposedly safe bets with lamb – Bordeaux and Rioja – the latter wins out for me far more often, just because the textures of a Rioja Reserva are more sympathetic to the meat than most claret, at least when the wine is anything less than a decade old.
Too much alcohol, the bane of many southern-hemisphere and even some European wines these days, is a besetting problem. Anything north of 13.5% leaves a burn in the back of the throat that can detract from the flavour of meat, as well as even the most assertive saucing and seasoning.
The relative weight issue is best demonstrated by partnering red meats with red wines that should on paper be too gentle. One of the best-kept secrets of an often unjustly derided wine region, Beaujolais, is that its most illustrious wines are great with red meats. Try a Morgon with a couple of years’ bottle-age with your next joint of beef, and you may well find yourself pleasantly astonished at the balance. It can be pitch-perfect.
But what about the spiciest treatments, you may well wonder? Can a midweight red really stand up to, say, peppered steak, lamb rogan josh, or Mexican-spiced dishes? Wouldn’t they be better off with a big, belting Zinfandel or the burliest Australian Shiraz? Not so, in my experience. Again, massive alcohol just gets in the way. It can painfully accentuate the smoulder of chilli or black pepper on the palate in a wholly unappealing way.
What’s needed instead with spicy dishes is an opulent layer of flesh in the wine, big fruit, supple tannins, and perhaps a little intrinsic spice of its own, though that last isn’t mandatory. A youngish, gingery-peppery Crozes-Hermitage can go great guns with highly spiced dishes, but the svelte tones of an oak-burnished Merlot, from Chile, California or New Zealand, can be even better.
All of this begs the question as to what those great strapping bully-boys of the red wine world are really for, since they aren’t much fun to drink on their own. They do have the necessary brawn to stand up well sometimes to very mature, hard cow’s-milk cheeses. Otherwise, I’m increasingly finding that I don’t know the answer to that question.
Stuart Walton is a long-serving food and wine writer, a contributor to the Good Food Guide, and author of The Right Food with the Right Wine.
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