Wine and food. They go together like brides and white dresses. Except when they don’t.

There are very few perpetually perfect matches. Usually, we just try to get close — which, surprisingly enough, was the goal of a group that gathered Wednesday to prepare for a swank upcoming dinner.

The quandry: put together a meal that both warrants the Wine Fest’s $250-per-plate tariff and matches up as well as possible with the wines being supplied by the Australian sponsors. The wines were quite good but rarely a perfect match for the proposed dishes, which were uniformly excellent.

First up was pairing the wines with the appropriate courses — the sauvignon blanc, we agreed, was much more suited for the goat cheese with the beet carpaccio than was the riesling — and even changing the order of the courses as a result. (The sequence of the wines, it was agreed, was more important than that of the earlier courses).

Then came the really fascinating part, as two participating chefs — Jack Riebel of the Dakota and Roger James of the host Depot Minneapolis Hotel – talked at length about tweaking the dishes to make them more suitable for the assigned wines. Maybe, Jack suggested, add a little sweet corn to the crab chowder for a better marriage with the riesling? Perhaps a bit more pepper in the chili-rubbed strip steak to mesh more with the shiraz and cabernet? Would switching from green beans to cabbage torpedo the main-course wines?

It was a window into a cool way to look at pairing when you already know the main ingredients and the wine: finesse the dish for a better marriage with the juice at hand. Can’t wait to try it.

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By the way, the Wine Fest diner is sold out, but there are still tickets for two events on the previous night (May 9), a symposium and a separate tasting in the eye-popping Depot rink. I’ve never encountered anyone who’s atttended this annual event and had anything but great things to say about it. And since it’s a fundraiser for the U of M’s Pediatrics department, there’s a nice tax break to boot. For more info, go here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.