Wine and Food: The Concept of Balance

 

 Wine and Food: The Concept of Balance  

 

     Wine and Food, or rather Wine with Food: it’s a puzzle whose pieces I rearrange daily. Although I’ve thought about it, fought about it, taught about it (at Boston University, Cambridge School of the Culinary Arts, at wholesale companies and restaurants and conferences and seminars throughout the country, and for almost four years now at Legal Sea Foods), written about it and learned about it from chefs, colleagues, students and friends, the essence of whatever wisdom I’ve managed to acquire boils down to one magic principle: Balance.

 

     There’s a romance and mystery to the process of matching wine to a dish that never fails to absorb all my attention. It’s mostly art, with a little dash of science. First, by nature, the interactions are not entirely predictable. Two elements, both constructed to be whole and complete in themselves, merge on your palate and together they either taste “right” to you or they don’t. It’s a thing of beauty when it happens. Our mission at Legal Sea Foods is to help you customize that heightened flavor experience, to share what we know and thrill your taste buds so that you keep coming back for more. The challenge, of course, is that what tastes exciting to one person doesn’t necessarily to another. If you don’t enjoy one of the elements (wine, or oysters, or oak-aged Chardonnay, or Kung Pao sauce), all of our flowery recommendations aren’t going to matter. Some of my worst early experiences with wine and food involved arrogant waiters or sommeliers lecturing me while I was at their tables about “what went with what” I ordered, and then resentfully having to endure meals whose elements did not taste balanced to me in the least. The fact, as Chef Richard Vellante says, that “we all live in different flavor worlds,” complicates Wine and Food matching and presents us with a multi-dimensional puzzle, but also makes the search for solutions endlessly fascinating.

 

Understanding Balance      

 

     Let me illustrate the idea of Balance with reference to tea, a subject less emotionally charged perhaps than Wine and Food matching. Some of us don’t like drinking tea at all, in any form. If you’re one of those people, what difference does it make to hear about all of the nuances and variations in tea? Perhaps you’re open to experiencing a new tea you’ve never had that might possibly change your mind, but odds are that you stop paying close attention when people start discussing the subject. The same with wine. Some of our guests don’t enjoy it and there’s no reason they should. What’s the right wine for them? Beer. Or water. There are other people who could take it or leave it but they don’t have a particular interest in tea one way or the other. You might find them casually sipping once in a while if the circumstances warrant (perhaps in an Asian restaurant), but it’s not a subject they care to devote much thought to. That’s fine as well: give me something mild and easy and leave me alone. Among those who regularly drink tea though, some prefer it weaker and some will savor it only when the leaves are steeped long enough for the brew to have strong, even slightly bitter flavors. Why? Again, everyone’s different. A dark, smoky, highly saturated tea that you might find intriguing could overpower someone else’s taste buds to the point that it may actually taste painful to them, in the same way that a delicate, lightly brewed tea might not pack sufficient flavor to interest you Lapsang Soochong drinkers at all. Substitute wine for tea and you understand that some people gravitate to bold, dramatic flavors while others naturally prize more understated styles. Some of us only drink chilled tea, others prefer it iced just during heat spells, while some would never consider drinking tea at a cold temperature because this would dilute and dull its aromatic and flavor subtleties. So again, if we substitute wine for tea, we understand that culture, habit, and genetic predisposition give rise to a diverse range of preferences and that one choice is not better than any of the others. It’s all very personal.

 

       If we’re discussing Balance as the determinant of your enjoyment, and tea represents wine, what stands in for the food side of the equation? Let’s take our weakly brewed hot tea. Do we add lemon, or sugar, or both, and in what proportions? The same amount of lemon juice that tastes balanced to me could strike you as unpleasantly sour. You might need to take the edge off it with sugar. On the other hand, stirring even a little sugar into the cup, nowhere near enough to satisfy your preferences, might well strike me as sickeningly sweet. How about using honey? That would not only alter the flavor balance but also affect the viscosity, or body, of the tea. We can do the same mental exercise with strongly brewed teas, imagining how varying levels of sweet and sour (not to mention other possible flavor additions, such as milk or cream) will influence your enjoyment, and the same with the iced teas of varying colors and strengths. There may be some tea snobbery out there I’m not aware of, in fact I’m certain there is, but putting the question of Balance into this personal context, outside of value judgments about what is supposedly “right” or “wrong,” is exactly what we strive to do at Legal Sea Foods. We want to understand what type of wine drinker you are, if at all. Cold or room temperature, light or heavy, tart or sweet? We want to understand if you’re not really interested or only casually so, if you have very well defined tastes, and, above all, if you’re looking for adventure.

 

 

     Despite the fact that everyone’s different, my research shows that preferences are not random. Your palate might be unique, but because Wine and Food affect one another in what are often predictable ways, we can recommend one to complement the other with some degree of confidence. It’s not all a total mystery. Going back to the tea example, you already know whether you like it light or heavy, sweet or tart, with cream or without, don’t you? It’s our job to know what’s most likely to constitute a pleasurable Balance of flavor and texture between the dishes and wines we offer and then to communicate whatever it is you’re apt to experience so that you can decide how appealing these flavor combinations sound.

 

     Here’s how this works in practice. Usually some flavor or texture component of the Wine and the Food stands out as a signature. The most active ingredient of each element, its strongest characteristic, is the determining factor. For instance, the tart grapefruit-like tanginess of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc tends to be its dominant attribute, just as a crunchy texture defines what’s distinctive about a Fish Fry. The overall picture is that some pairings actually accentuate one another’s key characteristics, others exert a neutralizing influence, and still others impact one another minimally if at all. Put differently, there are matches where the flavors taste stronger in combination, those that taste milder and those that change very little. Whether any potential Wine and Food pairing appeals to you, or is Balanced, depends on what you choose to either heighten or modify. If we’re considering a spicy dish, such as Blackened Cajun Mahi, do we want a wine that tones it down a bit or one that increases our perception of heat? Most, though not all, people would opt to mellow the spice and therefore choose a fruity wine with minimal oak influence and moderate alcohol. The minority though is not incorrect; their tolerance for stronger flavors might lead to just the opposite style wine selection, one that reacts to make the fish actually taste more potent. It’s all a question of what represents Balance to you. In some instances though, we may be designing a Wine and Food match one of whose elements plays a lead role while the other recedes into the background and has only an insignificant effect. Old rare red wines in themselves tend to be precariously poised among an interplay of delicate flavors to the point that serving them with any strongly flavored dish will throw them out of Balance. Bold, aggressively flavored wines, on the other hand, can mask the subtlety of a mild, understated dish. In most cases, however, we’re looking for a match where neither Wine nor Food dominates the other, where there is a true interaction and mingling of flavors and textures. As significant as flavor interactions are, most of us are pleased if there is proportionality between the weight, or richness, of a dish and that of the wine we’re drinking. This is how many of us define Balance.

 

 

     In order to find a satisfying match you have to know a little bit, not a lot, about the Wine and the Food, and you have to understand which flavor combinations or contrasts appeal most to you. Interestingly enough knowing the main ingredient, or protein, of the dish you’re interested in pairing is not generally the most relevant information. More important is how cooking techniques transform this ingredient as well as the flavors of the sauces or relishes accompanying it. This is why we never say that White Wine “goes with” Fish. Which wine and which fish, prepared how? If we look at Sea Scallops as an example, we’ll note that they actually have a very mild, sometimes sweet flavor, but that they assume a completely different identity depending on whether we poach, steam, broil, sauté, deep fry, smoke or grill them. Scallops are also chameleons that will take on the coloration and absorb whatever sauces we serve them in. Therefore any recommendation about which wine to drink with Scallops is absurd unless we are discussing a specific preparation.

 

     Regarding wine we look at how it’s put together: it’s acidity level, whether it’s sweet or not, how fruity and ripe it tastes, its alcohol content, whether it’s aged in oak, how much tannin it has, and how old it is. These are the most important “active ingredients” affecting how a wine tastes to determine if it will Balance a particular dish. If you think about this every day it becomes second nature and you can take it to the next level where you might consider a mineral accented Sancerre, rather than a Sauvignon Blanc from elsewhere, to Balance the subtle flavor undertones of a broiled Arctic Char in a Lemon Chive Butter Sauce. Or, conversely, you might choose a dry but very fruity ripe Alsace Riesling to balance the assertive Garlic influence in a Mediterranean inspired Shrimp and Linguine preparation.

 

     This is the process we train our chefs and managers to go through every day in coming up with the wine recommendations to complement their daily specials. The choices are not random and they’re not based on our needing to “push” certain wines. They’re based on educated guesses as to what will appeal to the majority of our guests. We then train our wait staff to describe the wines in an appealing but accurate way so that you can see if their characteristics will actually appeal to your palate. This is one the most exciting creative aspects of running our restaurants: coming up with matches that we feel are delicious and that will engage a majority of our guests. We also formalize this process, creating a series of pre-selected matches at the various wine dinners that I myself, as well as invited guest speakers, conduct at our restaurants on a regular basis. Here is a list of the ones that are being held in the immediate future, with details as to how you can reserve a table and experience what I’ve been writing about in person. We hope to see you at one or more of these special events and we welcome your feedback about how you felt the Food and Wine balanced one another.