Pictured: Rebellious youth. His mother is ashamed.
Recently, I was feeling particularly rebellious after listening to a somewhat inaccurate lecture on wine and food pairing. In the wine world, there are a lot of traditions that just aren’t based on actual facts. Most of them center around pairing wine with food and most of them attempt to tell you whether you’ll enjoy the experience or not. This is like someone telling you that if you go to a NASCAR race you will enjoy it without checking to see if that is your particular cup of tea or not. And if a tea metaphor is being used, NASCAR probably isn’t your thing, but I digress.
Now, as I’ve mentioned before, when I’m feeling particularly rebellious, I do what anyone would do: Sit down and set about proving whomever it is wrong, preferably while listening to some particularly loud music while wearing particularly unruly clothing and using a particularly #@!$ing uncouth vocabulary. In other words, I sat down and paired a blended (Zin and Cab Sauv) red wine from Sonoma with a bunch of things that the “experts” tell you not to, just to see what really happens. Admittedly, I’ve tried each of these combinations before which is why I was feeling rebellious, but never at the same time and never with writing utensil in hand.
The pairings were chosen based on the amount of times I’ve been told to never pair a red wine with them. Citrus fruit (I only had a lime, but a lemon works too), Soy Sauce, Vinegar, and Salt. For the vinegar and salt, I even selected two different types of each, just to cover all the bases. Then I compared six aspects of wine between the control (just tasting the wine by its lonesome) and each pairing. In this case, I’m using the terms “Fruit” to describe, well, the fruity flavors of a wine and “Bouquet” to describe the earthy, meaty, and generally not fruity characteristics. And yes, of course I put it into a table:
Conclusions:
Each one of these lowers the perception of tannin or astringency (that cotton ball feeling in your mouth). This is the main reason why the wine world rejects the pairing of red wine with any of these components. If you don’t mind the reduction in tannin though, or perhaps if you didn’t want it there in the first place, this practice makes perfect sense! However, the trade-off with most of these is that they also reduce the perception of the fruit characteristics. The two notable exceptions to this are the lime and the Kosher salt, which do a fine job of maintaining the fruit.
Other observations:
- Soy sauce is the only pairing that will enhance the non-fruit characteristics, mainly due to umami (savoriness) matching with the umami in the wine.
- Vinegar will increase the acid, no matter what kind it is.
- Iodized table salt sucks. It blows. It’s the pits.
Side Rant:
Salt should take bitterness out of things; that is its role in food. In this case though, it actually increased my perception of bitterness. Now, it didn’t increase the amount of bitter compounds, but it didn’t mitigate bitterness in the amounts that I had it (finger-tip’s worth) while slightly reducing everything else, thus increasing the perception of bitterness. I see why people feel the need to douse all of their meals with this stuff. It doesn’t work in small quantities. Hypertensive Americans should revolt against iodized salt…or just use Kosher salt instead.
P.S. The science world has actually proven that pairing a big Cabernet Sauvignon with a steak works because of the salt the seasons the steak and not because the tannins are latching on to the fat. Read Molecular Gastronomy if you’re into geeky food science happenings.
Aaron Berdofe's Wine and Food Experience 