The Match Game
Posted on April 16th, 2008 – 12:12 PMBy Bill Ward
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.
2 Responses to "The Match Game"
Hello Bill,
Amazing that you would have this posting today pertaining to food/wine pairing. I came to your blog this afternoon to ask this question, are you able to recommend a guide book that deals with just this topic?
My wife and I would like to be able to say, we’re having grilled Mackeral or pasta with basil and chicken, etc. what wine should we purchase? We would like a guide book that we could turn to in a situation like this, and then make a run to the wine shop armed with that information.
Thank you!
Chris
Chris:
Probably the best two books i know of are:
*What to Drink with What You Eat” by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page — just really comprehensive about pairings (including with tea and otherbeverages
*Andrea Immer’s “Everyday Wine with Food” — It doesn’t have all the answers but is packed with good info and recipes and written in a way hat helps the reader learn how to THINK about wine-food pairings, how to become instinctual, rather than just trying to memorize a list of good pairings.
