Andrew Sutton, chef at Disney’s Napa Rose,

notes that as American cookery employs less

butter and cream, wine pairings are turning
NAPA ROSE

away from the usual fruit-forward matches.


NEW Parameters
for PAIRING
BY JACK ROBERTIELLO
s the American palate for wine and food,
A separately and together, continues to evolve,
smart chefs and sommeliers are making sure that
pairings are broad, deep and coherent.
They’re searching out more Old World wines to match
today’s lighter, fresher fare, hosting wine dinners
developed through kitchen-cellar collaboration,
participating in special events and promotions showcasing
vintages beyond award-winning powerhouse wines and
staying attuned to what customers really want.
DEFLECTING FRUIT BOMBS
Chefs and sommeliers are putting less emphasis on old-
fashioned wine dinners, especially those where a
celebrated vintner might appear before a handful of guests
to unleash massive, potent Cabernets and Chardonnays;
the rich vanilla oakiness of these wines often forces chefs
to reach for the butter to help dishes stand up to a wine’s
fruit-bomb intensity.
“The biggest change in the past 10 years has been the
palate of the average guest,” says Andrew Sutton,
executive chef of Napa Rose at Disney’s Grand
Californian Hotel & Spa at the Disneyland Resort in
Anaheim, Calif.
American cookery is now far less reliant on cream and
butter; Sutton estimates that his sauces use 70 percent
stock and only 30 percent butter these days, much less
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BEVERAGE STRATEGIES
Chefs, sommeliers and winemakers look beyond
color-coding to create worldly, taste-driven
matches for food and wine
than when he trained, more than two decades ago. As a
result, intense, concentrated and fruit-forward New World
vintages, while still attracting lots of praise, are taking a
back seat to wines that make more harmonious matches.
Michael Jordan, master sommelier and general manager
of Napa Rose, recalls the not-too-distant past, when “you
couldn’t give away the great European wines in Southern
California. All [customers] wanted was oaked Chard and
Cab; that was the limit of their taste and experience.”
But now that Americans are better traveled and more
aware of the world of international flavors, they expect
their restaurants to reflect a worldview, in terms of both
cuisine and wines, Jordan says. Meanwhile, sommeliers are
turning away from classic, rote matches that actually may
not have worked.
EXPLORING NEW REGIONS
For some restaurants, building a pairing program with
special dinners works to keep the kitchen and servers fresh
and to build guest loyalty and traffic. Every Thursday,
Castagna, a Mediterranean restaurant in Portland, Ore.,
explores lesser-known wine areas of the globe and wines
from smaller organic and biodynamic producers, both
domestic and international, who work with traditional
grape varieties. Each wine is accompanied by a dish from
the same region, offered as a four-course menu or a la
carte. Flights are priced at $15 for three 2-ounce pours.
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BEVERAGE STRATEGIES
The menu for a recent dinner
that focused on Austria included
bouillon with nettle dumplings,
paired with a pale, crisp Grüner
Veltliner; a chanterelle and mâche
salad with Zweigelt, a red with a
bit of bite; and a Rouladen with
red cabbage and spaetzle,
partnered by a spicy Blaufränkisch.
Castagna’s Monique Siu, in
charge of the front of the house,
Sommelier Derek George says the pairings evolve naturally due to the
expanded weekly tasting restaurant’s culinary concept.
dinners at The Lodge in
“We feature traditional European dishes on
Vail, Colo., to include
sake, beers and other our menu, and often they seem to go with the
spirits, based on each wines that they grew up with,” she says. “It’s a
course’s distinct flavors. regional focus more than, say, trying to taste
the wine and figure out the perfect dish and
sauce to go with it. It’s more about matching
regional dishes and wines and serving them
together.”
Siu also uses the dinners to showcase wines
on the list and to try different items from
vintners the restaurant already features.
Looking for a more creative promotion
than the winemaker dinner, Jeff Groh of The
Heathman Restaurant & Bar, also in
Portland, Ore., came up with the Dueling
Sommelier Dinner Series.
100 FLAVOR & THE MENU Spring 2009
ROCK RESORTS
“This gives us the opportunity to present a
wide array of wines that people have never tried
and may never have wanted to try,” he says.
Since the wines are served “blind,”
customers judge strictly on how well they go
with each course, without knowing the maker
or even the varietals. Broadening their wine
horizon serves a selfish purpose, says Groh:
“The last thing a sommelier wants to do is sell
the same wine over and over again; that will
just make us obsolete.”
SEASONAL GUIDES
While some restaurants depend on a culinary
core to guide wine pairings, for others, that’s
not an option.
“Food-and-wine pairing is an interesting
challenge at Aquavit, because Scandinavia
has no wine culture to speak of and no
traditional wine cuisine,” says Sean Kerby,
beverage director at Aquavit restaurant in
New York City. “This creates the opportunity
to look at sundry appellations to find wines
that complement our distinctive cuisine.”
Kerby’s overall approach at the occasional
wine dinners Aquavit hosts is to work with
the restaurant’s seasonal menus.
“Just as I cannot go to a winemaker and ask
for a specially made wine for a particular dish,
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 BEVERAGE STRATEGIES
THE HEATHMAN
Jeff Groh of The I cannot expect the chef to change his menu
Heathman in Portland, to accommodate a wine. My challenge is to
Ore., created Dueling
take these two static elements — a list of
Sommelier Dinners to
present a wider array of wines and a list of dishes — and find what
wine pairings than a works together.”
traditional winemaker’s
dinner allows. FLEXIBILITY PREVAILS
There’s greater flexibility at operations where
wine dinners are built into the basic concept.
At Napa Rose, Sutton and Jordan work on
pairings all year for a tasting menu; called The
Vintners Table, it changes weekly. Each of
four courses is matched with a different wine.
For each pairing, the two sit down and
hash out preferences based on market
availability, new ideas, current trends and lots
of tasting. With more than 1,000 wines in-
house, and more than 80 available by the
glass, the search is intense.
102 FLAVOR & THE MENU Spring 2009
“Michael and I have a healthy debate and
then sit down together and try to make it
work to share that experience with the guest,”
explains Sutton.
This process always produces surprises:
Recently, Jordan was convinced a Sancerre
would go best with a goat cheese sourced
especially for the restaurant; instead, a
Sauvignon Blanc from Austria hit the mark.
“Food-friendly” is a general term to
describe wines with high acidity, mild
tannins, bright fruit and low alcohol content,
important qualities when looking for an all-
round pairing wine. But beyond the basic
rules — dry wines taste thin and acidic when
served with sweets, red-meat dishes welcome
assertive reds — the concept of food-
friendliness can create problems if applied too
rigorously.
GUIDED BY DINERS
When sommeliers create wine dinners, pre-
conceived notions often run up against
reality. Erica Landon, sommelier at Ten 01 in
Portland, Ore., and a Dueling Sommelier
participant, says she learned as much as her
customers did during the competition.
“I didn’t really understand how subjective
it was,” she reflects. “People have an idea of
the wines they love, but there were so many
times that we [the sommeliers] liked the
pairings, yet the customer vote was split.”
Wines that sommeliers liked repeatedly
scored poorly with guests, which changed the
way Landon approaches customers; now she
seeks to satisfy their personal tastes rather
than achieve a “perfect match.”
But, says Sutton, customers are responding
well to less-familiar varietals popular with
sommeliers, like Albariño (a rich, fruity
white), Fiano di Avellino (a dry white) and
Negroamaro (an earthy, deep red), allowing
him to stretch as a chef. It also lets him build
menus more around fresh vegetables, say,
instead of relying on “fins, feathers and fur.”
One of Jordan’s favorite pairings is a salad of
heirloom tomatoes (both chef and sommelier
grow their own for the restaurant) with a
Sangiovese rosé.
Wines with residual sugar have become more
acceptable, as salty and spicy Asian flavors
influence American cooking, says Kerby.
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“Wines from [unknown] areas and grapes
that are unfamiliar to adventuresome palates
are really welcomed as people consider wine
pairings an educational as well as a gustatory
experience,” Kerby adds. “When people are
surprised, then skeptical, then wowed, it
heightens the experience more than if you say,
‘Here is a Chablis with your oysters.’”
NEW WINE EXPERIENCES
It’s these new experiences that led Master of
Wine Tim Hanni of Napa, Calif., to research
how the brain processes and interprets
sensory information. Hanni has advised the
Scottsdale, Ariz.-based P.F. Chang’s China
Bistro chain on its wine list and worked with
Jeffrey Chodorow’s international China Grill
Management chefs on flavor balancing,
which Hanni describes as “the art of getting
the key taste components in a balance.”
He says that while sweetness and umami
flavors make food delicious, those
characteristics also make most wines seem
thinner, less fruity and more bitter. Increasing
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BEVERAGE STRATEGIES
CHINA GRILL MANAGEMENT
the salt and acidity in the dishes With Asian ingredients
automatically renders them more wine influencing American
cuisine, and dishes like
friendly.
China Grill’s Tuna Tempura
“Look at the cuisines of Alsace, Tuscany, with Wasabi entering the
Burgundy and Bordeaux, and you will see this mainstream, wines with
is what they intuitively do in all these classic residual sugar gain greater
acceptance.
cuisines,” Hanni points out.
The success of regularly repeated pairings,
whether for formal dinners or a la carte, has
spurred a wider-ranging search for the right
match. At The Lodge at Vail in Vail, Colo.,
certified sake sommelier Derek George
expanded the pairings for weekly tasting
dinners by introducing a sake menu. He
recently paired seared diver scallops with
Rihaku “Wandering Poet” Junmai Ginjo sake,
onion soup with Tentaka Kuni “Hawk in the
Heavens” Junmai sake and pan-roasted
Alaska halibut with Rihaku “Dreamy Clouds”
Tokubetsu Junmai Nigori sake.
“Sake’s flavors range from really earthy and
mushroomy to floral and tropical fruit, so
there’s a wide range of pairings possible,”
George says. He also offered mixed beverage-
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 BEVERAGE STRATEGIES

COMPARE AND CONTRAST

While standard food-and-wine-pairing
practices — e.g., using acidity to cut fatty
foods and higher tannins to stand up to high-
protein dishes — hold true, sometimes a dish’s
flavor profile calls for more than one wine,
notes Aquavit’s Kerby.
At a recent dinner featuring Italian wines,
Kerby found that the rich, fleshy quality of an
aged, dry and crisp Ribolla Gialla and a rare,
aged, sweet Malvasia, two unusual white
wines, made for an ideal “compare and
contrast” pairing with Smoked Char in
Apple-Horseradish Broth.
In some cases, the idea of providing wine-
and-food pairings for customers so permeates
a restaurant’s approach that special pairing
events lose their appeal, and some
restaurateurs have eliminated the formal wine
dinner.
At Bina Osteria in Boston, for instance,
new dishes and wines entering the menu are
selected because they go together, and every
part of the program makes it easy for people to
NAPA ROSE

order safe matches, says Babak Bina, co-

owner of Bina Osteria, Bin 26 and Lala Rokh.
That’s impressive, considering that the wines
Master Sommelier Michael and-food tasting menus last winter; one listed by the glass are mostly lesser-known
Jordan often pairs fine paired Chimay ale with a short-rib Napoleon, varietals like a citrusy Garganega, a crisp,
European wines with the
followed by sake with oyster tempura, mixed- acidic Trebbiano and a rich, earthy Teroldego.
contemporary American
cuisine served at Napa grill lamb with a vin de pays d’Oc and braised “We have a list that lends itself to our
Rose. monkfish with an Italian white. food,” asserts Bina. “We’re not just throwing
wines on there to satisfy quotas or the fad of
the month as pronounced by the wine
TAK E -AWAY T I P S magazines. They’re chosen specifically to
complement dishes on our menu. They are all
HOST A DUEL: Invite two sommeliers food wines; it makes the job of pairing a lot
to present blind tastings for a special wine easier.”
dinner and let customers be the judge One of the key goals for a wine-and-food
LET’S GO EURO: After years of pairing is to give customers the chance to
focusing on California wines, chefs discover a wine they like — not because it’s
and sommeliers are returning to gotten good reviews or because a sommelier
European regions for pairing
inspirations thinks it’s the greatest, but because it tastes
great with what they’re eating. &
MIX IT UP: Recommend wine
for one course, beer for another
and sake or spirits for others
SIMPLE ADDITION: Add a few
Austrian, Spanish or regional JACK ROBERTIELLO writes about
Italians to a list heavy in spirits, cocktails, wine, beer and food from
Cabernets and Chardonnays Brooklyn, N.Y.; he can be e-mailed at
LIGHT FLIGHTS: Offer mini-flights to applejak@earthlink.net.
introduce diners to wines from lesser-known regions
BINA

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