Forget just about everything you've ever read about wine and food pairing. It's useless if you eat like most people in the western world today.
This doesn't mean you should forget about trying to pair the right wine with food. But you have to think less narrowly than ever before, even though many recipe writers still give overly specific wine-pairing descriptions ("try this with a juicy Santa Lucia Highlands Pinot Noir").
We just don't eat like Tolstoy anymore. Instead, we eat more like Marie Antoinette.
Here's a little history lesson: dining in successive courses is called "Russian service", and was brought to France by the Russian ambassador in the early 1800s. Before that, the dominant service was "French style", in which everything was brought out at once, and the nobles would send their squires down to the other end of the table to spear a taste of some attractive dish they couldn't reach.
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Russian service dominated European and American fine dining for 200 years: think a nine-course French Laundry tasting menu, with nine different wines. But now, the more modern the restaurant the more likely you are to be served in a Game of Thrones throwback style, with everything except your secret plans for world domination on the table for all to see.
Recently in Sebastopol, California, the West of West festival brought together chefs from three of my favorite San Francisco restaurants: Bar Tartine, Rich Table and State Bird Provisions. All three are of the modern style, with mix-and-match menus and courses brought out when they're ready. In fact, at State Bird Provisions the food is wheeled by your table dim-sum style, so you don't know what you're going to be eating until you see it.
There's a reason this panel was held in western Sonoma County, source of some of the best cool-climate Pinot Noirs, Chardonnays and Syrahs in America. The area produces many individualistic expressions of terroir and winemaking. You could write notes all day on how different they taste.
"Not only would you have several dishes on the table, you have different people drinking different things by the glass, so you might have red wine, white wine, maybe even cider on the table," Bar Tartine chef Cortney Burns said.
While those white wines, red wines and cider taste very, very different – I can say that from eating at these restaurants – there are certain characteristics they share.
These characteristics are often found in the wines of western Sonoma County.The area produces many individualistic expressions of terroir and winemaking. You could write notes all day on how different they taste.
Where they're similar is in mouthfeel. They're not plush or overly tannic. They have acidity: they taste fresh. That makes them versatile, and versatility is now key.
Five years ago, if you had a bay shrimp dish, a kale dish, and a duck dish, you might have had three different wines with them. We had all three at the same time; that's how many Americans eat now. So you've got to find one versatile wine to go with all of them.
There's another key to versatility: restraint. Wines that do well in blind tastings tend to be wines that make you go "wow". My favorite chefs don't really want "wow" wines in their restaurants.
"We don't want anything on the table that's so dominant that it takes your attention away from everything else," Burns said.
It's a cliche for fans of restraint to pick on full-bodied, bold Cabernets. But the opposite direction – strongly earthy "natural" wines – are too extreme also. Any wine where one characteristic stands out – herbaceous Sauvignon Blancs, very sweet Moscatos or red blends, super tannic young French and Italian reds – is going to overpower your food.
But, you say, that's the kind of wine I like to drink. Its true — that previous paragraph included many of the most popular wines in the world.
Let's go back to the full-bodied Cabs for a moment. The strategy with those wines for years, maybe generations, has been to order a steak. That used to work with any red wine. Personally I like Pinot Noir best with steak, but I'll quite happily drink Zinfandel or Merlot or Syrah.
Unless I order that steak from one of my favorite restaurants, because they just don't cook steak like they did in the '70s.
"The classic way of pairing red wine is to take a fatty cut of meat," said State Bird Provisions chef/owner Stuart Brioza. "I'm going to grill that cut of meat with spicy curry and serve it with something fermented [a vegetable, not a beer] on the side. It [the dish] pairs with itself."
That was a striking point of listening to all my favorite chefs speaking: they were talking about food, but they sounded like sommeliers. They talked about balance. They talked about restraint. They talked a lot about ingredient sources, which is basically terroir.
"Right now winemakers and chefs are starting to see eye to eye," Rich Table chef/owner Evan Rich said. "Winemakers are starting to understand what we do, and maybe changing their palates."
Those winemakers who think about chefs, will make wines to be versatile. You never see that word "versatile" used as praise of the most highly rated wines. But in a great restaurant these days, it might be the highest praise of all.
To start thinking that way is to start reconsidering the entire way we evaluate wine. That could be the beginning of a long wine column, but it's the end of this one.
