Let me
explain. Master of Ceremonies at this Alice Through the Looking
Glass version of food and wine matching was Mark de Vere MW, a Brit
now based in Napa at the Constellation Academy of Wine. For the past
15 years he has been preaching what he calls “the liberated
enjoyment of wine”, which sounds very 1970s California. Much
influenced by the pioneering work on wine and food of Tim Hanni MW,
his thesis is that, as long as there is a balance between sweetness
and/or umami flavours with salty and sour/acidic flavours in any
food, then the wine that you drink along with it will always taste
the same.
Umami
is a fifth flavour element, in addition to sweet, salty, bitter and
sour that we can taste. It is sometimes referred to as savoury, can
be hard to define, but you know it when you find it. Ripe tomatoes,
Parmesan cheese and soy sauce are all rich sources of umami.
To
illustrate his thesis, Mark made us taste a range of perfectly
cooked, but unseasoned, foods. Without seasoning, they have a high
level of umami, but with no balancing salt or acidity. None of us
could argue that unseasoned fish and a Sauvignon Blanc made a very
delicious wine when tried on its own, into something really quite
unpleasant. Mark had made his point.
We
then proceeded to add salt and lemon juice to the fish, chicken and
steak on our plates and tried the wines again. As Mark knew they
would, the wines with these seasoned dishes tasted much better – as
in, they tasted as they did before we tried any food with them.
But
Mark wasn't going to stop there. The thing that makes this theory of
food and wine matching so shocking is that, as long as the dish you
are eating has that sweet/umami-salty/acidity balance, then ANY wine
will taste as it should alongside it. So, on we went to taste the
Sauvignon Blanc with steak. Whether your personal taste or
prejudices stop you enjoying a crisp white wine with red meat, it was
undeniable that the steak did not “spoil” the wine; nor did the
wine make the steak taste funny.
As
some kind of sick horror movie finale, we all dutifully tried Ice
Wine with our steaks and, I'm not ashamed to say that Mark was right
– it really doesn't matter which wine you have with what food.
Which
makes a complete nonsense of what I and other wine writers are
talking about when we recommend wines to go with particular foods,
doesn't it?
There
are still some unanswered questions, such as: what about chilli and
spice in general? Mark views the heat of chilli as more of a
sensation than a taste per se. However, I would argue that it plays
just as important a role and certainly can dictate whether a
particular wine will be enjoyable with the food.
Do we
all have to carry round our own salt and lemon juice supply to make
this work? Well, yes. Because, as Mark demonstrated, getting that
balance of sweet-umami vs salt and acid right is important if the
wine is going to taste right. Not always practical.
Many
of us who take our wine drinking seriously have experienced a wine
and food match that seemed to make both the food and the wine taste
better. Have we just been imagining it? Mark's view is that, in
order for a wine to improve when drunk with food, it must have had
some kind of imbalance in the first place. My hunch is that he might
be right, technically – but sometimes those imbalances are what
makes a wine more fascinating to drink. They can be the wrinkle on
the face of Catherine Deneuve or George Clooney.
Which
leads me to my final quibble with Mark's thesis: humans are not
robots and sometimes we seek out and even enjoy experiences which are
far from optimal. Any woman who has given birth once knows that, if
she had any sense, she would never dream of repeating it – and yet
so many of us do. I can't refute the evidence of my own experiences
testing out Mark's new world of food and wine – but something
within me is programmed to seek out certain wines with certain foods.
But,
in the final analysis, what Mark is telling us is that we can all
enjoy whatever wine with whatever food we like – there are no
rules. No-one can tell you that you can't have red wine with fish or
white with steak. And that can only be a good thing.
This
week's wine tips – sans food recommendations!
If you
like a sense of wild, untamed nature in your reds, this could be for
you. Full-on herbs and fruit combined with savoury flavours and fine
tannins make this an intense yet lively mouthful. It picked up a
Gold Medal at last year's Decanter Awards.
I'd
love to know how this odd couple of grape varieties came to be in the
same bottle. Nerello Mascalese is a rugged native Sicilian red
variety grown mostly on the slopes of Mount Etna. Garganega,
meanwhile, is the white grape of Soave, in the northern Italian
region near Lake Garda. Someone has had the temerity to mix them up
and make them into a pink wine and, not content with that sacrilege,
they have made it fizzy too. Well done them, as this is a gorgeously
pretty pink with lively cherry fruit. Do not think about keeping it!
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