Great Tastes Made Simple: Extraordinary Food and Wine Pairing for Every Palate

Book by Immer Andrea

Introduction

“What wine should I drink with ...?” remains the eternal question of consumers and wine professionals alike, about every food and at every level—from wary novice to wine pro. Why? After all, it’s pretty unlikely anyone ever ruined a meal with the “wrong” wine choice, isn’t it? I think the answer is as simple as this: most everybody loves to eat. (Many of us admit we live to eat!) And we spend a great deal of time thinking about enjoying food—not only in the here and now, but often long before and after the cooking (or ordering) and eating. In fact, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the taste and feeling of food have the power to inspire some of our most vivid memories, our wildest fantasies, and our noblest feats of creativity and collaboration. For example, H-O-M-E and all its comforts are captured in a single bite of Mom’s meatloaf. That glinting, inaugural plate of oysters, or first heady whiff of the cheese cart on your Paris getaway, consummates months of pre-trip escapist longings. And from the Barbecue Rendezvous in Memphis, to the Gilroy, California, garlic festival, thousands of far-flung strangers regularly manage, with masterful precision, the complex logistics of gathering to share a giant fix of a favorite food. Pretty impressive, really.

And it’s no wonder we’re so food-obsessed, because our first mind-blowing mouthful usually happens early on—perhaps a milk-dunked donut or a particularly well-constructed PB&J. When those flavor stars align, eating is no longer simply fueling. In terms of taste, you’ve blasted off. And thus begins a lifelong pursuit of that same ecstasy just about anytime the food and the time at hand permit more than simply a fill-up. We also happily discover that high-flying flavor potential isn’t limited to a luxury restaurant. It can be anything, from Mom’s macaroni and cheese to a celebrity chef’s signature lobster bisque. Good food, plain or fancy, can be a died-and-gone-to-heaven experience.

Then comes wine. Like food, it tastes good and feels good. For most of us, it’s new, vast, ancient, and mysterious. It offers us a taste of exotic places and flavors (though sometimes at exotic prices, too!). It also brings uncertainty. But still, we’re very intrigued because we’ve had those out-of-body food experiences. So we wonder, “Can wine make food even better?” It stands to reason, because we know that the Europeans, justly famous for their eating and drinking lifestyle, have been enjoying wine with their meals—daily, not just on special occasions—for millennia. And we’re talking lunch and dinner. I think every food lover and wine drinker yearns for a shot at those frequent flavor and pleasure possibilities. I also think that most of us feel stymied by one or more of these obvious hurdles: wine confusion, cost concerns, and, most frustrating of all, the rules.

The first snag, wine confusion, affects all of us, even Master Sommeliers, to one degree or another. While it is true that the typical wine label is chock-full of information, quite often the only bits with clear meaning are “alcohol by volume” and the price tag—hardly enough to clue you in to what the wine will taste like, or guide you to a potential food partner. And sometimes it’s just enough to prejudice you against it, too. I think it’s fair to say that few of us like to gamble a lot on whether we’ll like something we’re about to eat or drink.

Even fewer of us are willing to do so when the money stakes are high, and the fact is that for the average person, drinking wine with dinner represents a conscious choice to spend more than we’d have to for the typical alternative beverages—beer, milk, soda, iced tea, you name it. Of course it takes only one or two nice wine and food experiences to convince most people that the extra expense is well worth it! But still, the cost consideration is a real incentive for anyone to want to increase his or her odds of pairing success, and I’ve found that is true regardless of budget. Working in luxury hotels and restaurants, I’ve waited on my share of moneyed moguls, tycoons, and trust-fund types. They want good deals, too, especially if they’re trying something new to them, as is so often the case with wine. It’s universal: everyone wants to feel he or she is getting his or her money’s worth.

Finally, there’s just plain old rookie rule-phobia. We’ve all heard the “red wine with red meat, white wine with fish” rule. And the wine trade trumpets the so-called classic matches—luxurious partners like foie gras and Sauternes, prime steak and Cabernet Sauvignon, beluga and Champagne, oysters and Chablis. While these guidelines are certainly solid, their context is quite rarefied, when you really think about it: how many of the people you know define “dinner,” day in and day out, in terms of steak-house splurges and caviar? It doesn’t even sound appealing for every day, does it? But it probably explains why wine remains on the “special occasion” shelf for so many Americans. And for more down-to-earth dinners like pasta with pesto sauce (where’s the beef?), or an omelet (filled with eggplant caviar, if you’re an industrious cook), the rules leave us high and (literally) dry for a wine match.

What is needed when it comes to wine, food, and the daily dinner routine is a bridge, between the seeming necessity to “know what we’re doing” and just doing it; between the promise of frequent wine and food pleasure, and the actuality of pulling it off; between the rules of wine and food matching, and the reality of what normal people cook, eat, and spend. You can build that bridge easily within the context of your regular shopping and eating (in or out) routine, regardless of whether you are a casual consumer or a devoted foodie or wine lover. This book will be your blueprint.

How? In my first book, Great Wine Made Simple, we used easy, pace-yourself wine-tasting lessons to define in taste terms most anything you might find printed on a wine label, from “barrel fermented” to Zinfandel. In this book, we’ll take a similar approach using tasting lessons, or really pairing experiments, that let you explore wine styles, food flavors, and how they interact.

You might be worrying: what am I getting into here? If at first it sounds as if your relaxing dinnertime is about to be destroyed by drills and doctrine, fear not. These tastings are neither overloaded with tedious theory and analysis to be studied, nor fraught with execution challenges like expensive bottles, overwrought recipes, or marathon restaurant sessions. Rather, they are designed for utmost convenience, so that you can:

· Start enjoying wine and food more right now by turning the mystery of pairing
the two into an everyday, useful activity; and

· Increase your pleasure in well-priced, accessible wines with easily accomplished
meals. As you’ll see, the best “tuna helper” comes in a bottle labeled Pinot
Grigio. And my idea of Cheez Whiz operates under an alias: Chianti.

Simple, Simpler, Simplest:
How to Use This Book to Pair Great (-Tasting) Wine and Food

Think of it this way: you have to eat anyway. Now it can pay off in greater pleasure and gains in your wine-and-food-pairing confidence. Tasting, rather than “studying,” has enormous advantages, too. It’s both enjoyable, and keenly memorable. Principles read from a page can fly right out of your head (if they don’t put you to sleep first!), but smelling, nibbling, noshing, dipping, chewing, scooping, slathering, savoring, and—hopefully—sharing, each weaves sensory threads into the fabric of memory, providing the recall that you need to put wine and food together confidently the next time, and the next.

There are several different ways to use this book, depending on both the particular circumstances and your interest level, from just scrounging some weeknight chow to planning a “big meal,” from hungry and thirsty human to impassioned cook or collector—and all points in between. They are:

· Look up quick matches using the book’s Wine and Food Pairing Index, which
will quickly point you to lots of specific food-and-wine-pairing
recommendations that you’re highly likely to enjoy.

· Train your taste to develop your own pairing intuition and tap into what’s
already there. As I’ll show you, it is much easier than you think, it’s a lot of fun,
and though you may not yet realize it, you are already well up the learning
curve.

· Learn how to use the wine label to predict the style of a wine and its food
affinity easily. That’s the insight you need to choose a wine especially suited to
a particular dish, or to plan your menu to complement a specific wine.

You might employ just one or all of them at some point or another. Here is how they work:

Making Quick Matches Using the Wine and Food Pairing Index

What wines could you pair with a particular food? Or what foods especially complement a specific wine type? I developed this index because, as a sommelier, I get asked these types of matching questions constantly, not just by customers but by trade colleagues, fellow shoppers at the supermarket checkout, airplane seat-mates, you name it. The index is basically the book’s “search engine,” allowing you to look up pairing suggestions, by either food or wine. With food, you can look up key ingredients (like lobster or mushrooms), cuisines (Thai, for example), or dishes (gumbo, quesadillas), and find specific wine suggestions for them. Or, putting the wine first, you can look up...