Food and Wine : Salivations, or... when how well you eat is more important than how much you eat

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Salivations, or...
when how well you eat is more important than how much you eat

Eat to live or live to eat? Some of life's necessities are attended to with great pleasure, some not. Enduring the twice yearly Nordstrom's Men's Sale to clothe myself is not my idea of fun, although I grant it's a different story for those better equipped for sartorial splendor than me. However, the Table is where many of us go to recreate and stimulate. Even Disney World and Las Vegas, our fingers on the American purse, recognize a selection of fine restaurants are the adventure rides and floorshows for an increasingly large cut of the American pie. With the possible exception of our responsibility to the species to procreate, food gives the greatest pleasure we can get -- so we pay homage to it and pay lots of money for it. Chefs have gained superstar status. Maybe the chef is the second-oldest profession.

Wine is a food in our philosophy. Chehalem makes wines to serve at the table, not really for anything else. Their acidity and balance, their range of flavors and textures, their ability to team-up synergistically rather than demanding control make them perfect with food. Having grown-up in the land of 'sweet tea', it took me years to discover how rich a complement wine or beer is to meals, how much greater the pleasure combined than they are individually. It is a pity that the minor fact that wine contains alcohol keeps many from enjoying the complement. As a food, with nutrients and beneficial components, it is encouraging to see those states that permit wine sales in food stores and depressing to see how many still lock it up with Gilbey's gin in liquor stores. Repeat after me, wine is a food!

Robert Mondavi, long-time promoter of food, wine & art Wine helps food in several ways. David Rosengarten and Josh Wesson, in their provocative book Red Wine With Fish suggest the three main areas of food and wine interaction are Flavors, Textures and Components, with interesting food and wine experiences coming when either similarities or contrasts exist. They disagree with ascribing hard-and-fast rules to food and wine matches, suggesting instead that unusual combinations work amazingly well if you analyze what's happening between the wine, your dish and, importantly, its preparation method. The wine characteristics of acidity, residual sweetness, weight, fruit flavor intensity, oak, tannin, and bitterness give ways to either foil wine and food or integrate them seamlessly, even before you consider aroma and flavor. In no way are they saying proper pairings are unimportant, just that simple rules can't suffice anymore, with cuisines and wine styles as varied as they are today. These guys challenge us to redevelop our pairing rules as our cuisine and wines develop.

Which is not to propose that great matches have been found for artichokes, vinegar and oil salad dressings, chocolate desserts or stinky cheeses, or that quintessential matches like Chablis and oysters, or foie gras and Sauternes, or sausages and dry riesling, or salmon and pinot noir can be improved upon. However, sometimes enough's enough. A friend, after doing the Napa Valley Wine Auction earlier this year, breathed a "thank you, God" when he attended his first red wine dinner NOT featuring lamb. It seems he had gone to 6 meals in a row where lamb was paired with the prize red wine. I sometimes recoil from the perfect match too, like ten days ago when out to dinner with friends we decided to continue with quintessential cool climate whites, ten year old Alsace Pinot gris and German Riesling, despite moving on to a sirloin tips main course. Perfect! Not red, but big, rich and complex. Often I think most of us insist on red, when what we want is complex.

What is argued for is openness and a sense of experimentation. And who is the arbiter of such openmouthed taste? Each person, individually, loaded with infinite differences in points of reference, physical and chemical uniqueness in nose and mouth, and motivation. We've all had or been children who as youths could not taste "yucky" food, only to find as adults that the same food got better, even great! Evidence today points to legitimate changes in mouth chemistry as the cause. Emile Peynaud, the famous academic French enologist points to different taste regions on the tongue: sweet at the tip, salty and acidic on the middle sides and bitter on the side rear of the tongue. Acuity differs between people, giving differing thresholds for detection of certain flavors. That is why Cheryl and I complement each other in tasting wines in cellar, each having a sensitivity to certain flaws or characteristics greater than the other. Because we are different, food and wine is subjective.

Oregon's cool climate makes food wines naturally. The warm days and yet cool nights during ripening retain acidity lost in hotter regions. The acid backbone aids wine balance, serves to cut the heaviness of oils and fats in foods, and lifts the palate with brightness. With full ripeness, proper tannin and oak for specific varietals, and restrained fruit flavors and aromas, the balance and structure of our wines assure a food friendliness and ageability. A full spectrum of matching is accomodated at Chehalem by different styles in varietals such as Pinot gris and Pinot noir.

The objective according to Peynaud is to "look for a certain harmony between the tastes of what we are eating and of what we are drinking. These alternating and overlapping taste impressions should neither clash with nor dominate each other; they should go well together, match, and, if possible, set each other off."